My dissertation aims at understanding how firms' adoption of labor-saving production technologies affects their investment and employment decisions; and, ultimately, their stock returns. Chapter 1 theoretically studies a firm's decision to replace its routine-task labor with machines over the business cycle, and explores the asset pricing implications of this decision. The model extends the classical investment-based asset pricing models in which a firm's investment decisions are modeled as exercising real options. I extend the set of firm's real options to include both growth options, which increase the firm's output, and technology switching options, which increase the firm's efficiency, and focus on the latter options. A key assumption in my model is that switching from using routine-task labor to using machines interrupts firm production. Hence, the firm optimally chooses to make this switch when its profitability is low in order to minimize opportunity cost. As a result, if the economy experiences a negative shock, firms with routine-task labor can improve their value through exercising these switching options, making their value less sensitive to aggregate shocks. In the cross-section, firms with a higher share of routine-task labor should have lower expected rates of return for their stocks. Chapter 2 constructs an empirical measure of firms' share of routine-task labor, namely, RShare, and presents tests of the model's predictions on the investment, employment, and asset prices of firms with high and low RShares. I classify occupations into routine- and non-routine-task labor, following the labor economics literature, and I use the establishment-level occupational data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to construct RShare at the firm level. Consistent with my model's predictions, I find that within an industry, firms with a higher share of routine-task labor (i) invest more in machines and reduce disproportionately more of their routine-task labor during economic downturns, and (ii) have lower equity betas and returns.

In this paper, we examine polarization and partisan divergence in the American public on economic issues over the past 70 years. We bring to bear a new dataset that contains over half a million respondents from hundreds of individual polls. This dataset contains the responses to over 150 question series about economic issues. We combine this dataset with a dynamic group-level item response model to measure the ideology of the American public at both the state and national levels between 1946 and 2012. We find that the American public has only become modestly more polarized on economic issues over the past 70 years. However, the two parties are much more clearly sorted on economic issues today than in earlier decades. Moreover, members of the two parties are now further apart than ever before at both the state and federal levels. Our results speak to debates about polarization. They also suggest that partisan divergence in the mass public may have contributed more to elite polarization than scholars have previously thought.

We assess the concentration and duration of zero tax liabilities and of transfer receipts, using data for households with ten to forty years of observations from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. We find that neither is strongly concentrated. Nearly 68% owe no federal tax in at least one year, approximately 78% receive some type of transfer in at least one year, and more than 58% receive transfers other than Social Security in at least one year. Of those who do not owe federal tax in any given year, 18% pay tax the following year, and 39% contribute within five years. Of those who receive transfers other than Social Security within a given year, nearly 44% stop receiving such transfers the next year, and more than 90% stop within ten years.

The American labor market is increasingly unequal, characterized by extraordinary returns to work at the top of the market but rising precarity and instability at the bottom of the market. In addition to low wages, short tenure, few benefits, and non-standard hours, many jobs in the retail and food service industries are characterized by a great deal of instability and unpredictability in work schedules. Such workplace practices may have detrimental effects on workers. However, the lack of existing suitable data has precluded empirical investigation of how such scheduling practices affect the health and wellbeing of workers and their families. We describe an innovative approach to survey data collection from targeted samples of service-sector workers that allows us to collect previously unavailable data on scheduling practices and on health and wellbeing. We then use these data to show that exposure to unstable and unpredictable schedules is negatively associated with household financial security, worker health, and parenting practices.

I estimate the premium for speaking English and the rate of language acquisition in the early 20th century US using new linked data on over half a million migrants. Compared with todays migrants, early 20th century migrants arrived with much lower levels of proficiency, yet many acquired language skills rapidly after arrival. Learning to speak English was correlated with a small upgrade in occupational-based earnings (2 to 6%); the premium has at least doubled between 1900 and 2010, revealing that English fluency has become an increasingly large barrier to migration over time.

The I-69 Thumb Region, comprised of Genesee, Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac, Shiawassee, St. Clair, and Tuscola counties, collaboratively developed a shared and unified economic vision for its region as part of the state of Michigans Regional Prosperity Initiative. The plan, titled Accelerate: A Plan for Regional Prosperity, details six agreed-upon goals through which the I-69 Thumb Region Steering Committee will guide strategies to address education, infrastructure, regional collaboration, economic development, tourism, and quality of life opportunities and concerns. The education goal to develop and retain a talented workforce so regional businesses can compete on a global basis was ranked as the second highest priority in the region. In an effort to begin to meet the objectives outlined in the education goal, the I-69 Thumb Region Steering Committee first needed to get a sense of what education and workforce programs and initiatives exist in the I-69 Thumb Region. The Steering Committee decided that this could be best accomplished through developing an asset map of the regions work-based programs. Once identified, an asset map demonstrating the availability and relationship of these programs would prove useful in (a) determining the effectiveness of these work-based programs, (b) acknowledging opportunities for replication and/or expansion across the region, (c) assessing any obstacles and/or gaps, and (d) developing a strategy to further integrate employer participation to resolve workforce issues across the I-69 Thumb Region. The I-69 Thumb Region Steering Committee contracted with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research (Upjohn Team) to create an inventory of work-based programs and conduct an analysis of the programs in the I-69 Thumb Region. Although the original scope of work for this project called for an evaluation of the regions work-based programs, through its research, the Upjohn Team found that the majority of the programs in the region lack significant individuality; a lack of local program individuality is a function uniform state standards. Thus, a traditional evaluation of many programs would have few practical implications; it is difficult to measure success relative to other programs when the programs are similar. Therefore the work-based programs were assessed based on their ability to meet the needs of the residents and businesses in the I-69 Thumb Region. The assessment consisted of a review of the number of recent graduates from work-based programs in the region and a comparison with the labor supply projections in several industries in the region. The outcomes of the assessment are noted, in detail, in the industry-by

The boll weevil infestation of 1892-1922 had a clear and lasting impact on the US Souths economy. In this paper, we show that it also affected the regions demography. When the boll weevil hit the cotton South, it encountered a region populated by families of tenant farmers. Tenant farming created both economic opportunities and economic incentives for prospective tenants to marry at young ages. The boll weevil infestation undermined this family-based organization of agricultural labor. Using data from historical US Department of Agriculture maps, complete-count Census of Population data from 1900-1930, and Census of Agriculture data from 1889-1929, we show that the boll weevils arrival reduced both the share of farms worked by tenants and the share of African Americans who married at young ages. We also document that increases in tenancy over time increased the prevalence of marriage among young people, particularly young African Americans. Our results provide new evidence about the effect of economic institutions on demographic transformations.

In a democracy, government policies should not just be correlated with citizens preferences, but also respond dynamically to them. Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future changes in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government mediates only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsiveness occurs mainly through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.

Income inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the mid 1970s. This remarkable change in the distribution of household income has spurred a great deal of research on the social and economic consequences of exposure to high inequality. However, the empirical record on the effects of income inequality is mixed. In this paper, we suggest that previous research has generally overlooked a simple but important pathway through which inequality might manifest in daily life: inequality allows women of high socio-economic status (SES) to hire lower SES women to perform domestic labor. One important venue where such dynamics might then manifest is in time spent on housework and in particular in the time divide in housework between high and low SES women. We combine micro-data from the 2003-2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) with area-level data on income inequality to show that women with a college degree and from high earning households spend increasingly less time than other women on housework in more unequal places. We further assess whether this gap can be explained by domestic outsourcing by combining micro-data from 2003- 2013 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) with area-level inequality and show that the gap in spending for household services between high and low SES households also increases in contexts of higher inequality.

In large northern and midwestern metropolitan areas, levels of black-white racial segregation have remained very high. Racial segregation limits the choices available to African American homebuyers while making their investments in homes riskier and less rewarding. Under these circumstances, middle-income African Americans face a unique set of challenges when pursuing homeownership. How do middle-income African Americans make decisions about homeownership and what are the implications of that process for the persistence of racial segregation and inequality? This dissertation seeks to illuminate the subjective experience of middle-income African American homebuyers as they navigate the home-buying process in a racially hypersegregated metropolitan area. I interviewed sixty-eight aspiring homebuyers after they decided to buy a home and then followed them throughout their home-buying process. These middle-income African Americans are on the cusp of solidifying their middle-class status, but the landscape of racial segregation presents particular challenges for achieving this goal. While the dynamics of racial segregation are enduring, the geography is frequently shifting, adding to the challenges facing this group. Middle-income African American homebuyers used folk theories to explain the neighborhood change that they saw frequently. The most prevalent of these theories, the theory of voucher-induced neighborhood decline, obscures the role of racial dynamics in neighborhood change. These homebuyers were motivated to pursue homeownership because it was seen as a marker of success under the terms of the American Dream and a signal of racial progress. Furthermore, becoming a homeowner was associated with adult status, moral worth, and respectability. While the homebuyers were highly motivated in their pursuit, they often experienced long delays in the home-buying process. As a result, the needs of households changed during the period when they were considering purchasing a home, and they were often unable to purchase at critical moments. Hyper-racial segregation makes it difficult for middle-income African Americans to find affordable homes that will appreciate well and meet the needs of their households. At the same time, a race-blind turn in housing policy leads to policies that may exacerbate these problems.

The economic implications of demographic change depend on steadfast investments in research and development; replenishment of the human capital stock diminished by retiring Baby Boomers; and raising college attainment rates. This way the United States can leverage its diverse, fast-growing population to harness a demographic dividend—the productivity boost enabled by declining fertility—while also fueling economic growth, restocking the Social Security system, and bolstering global competitiveness.

Introduction Little current research examines associations between infant mortality and US states funding for family planning services and for abortion, despite growing efforts to restrict reproductive rights and services and documented associations between unintended pregnancy and infant mortality. Material and methods We obtained publicly available data on state-only public funding for family planning and abortion services (years available: 1980, 1987, 1994, 2001, 2006, and 2010) and corresponding annual data on US county infant death rates. We modeled the funding as both fraction of state expenditures and per capita spending (per woman, age 1544). State-level covariates comprised: Title X and Medicaid per capita funding, fertility rate, and percent of counties with no abortion services; county-level covariates were: median family income, and percent: black infants, adults without a high school education, urban, and female labor force participation. We used Possion log-linear models for: (1) repeat cross-sectional analyses, with random state and county effects; and (2) panel analysis, with fixed state effects. Results Four findings were robust to analytic approach. First, since 2000, the rate ratio for infant death comparing states in the top funding quartile vs. no funding for abortion services ranged (in models including all covariates) between 0.94 and 0.98 (95% confidence intervals excluding 1, except for the 2001 cross-sectional analysis, whose upper bound equaled 1), yielding an average 15% reduction in risk (range: 822%). Second, a similar risk reduction for state per capita funding for family planning services occurred in 1994. Third, the excess risk associated with lower county income increased over time, and fourth, remained persistently high for counties with a high percent of black infants. Conclusions Insofar as reducing infant mortality is a government priority, our data underscore the need, despite heightened contention, for adequate public funding for abortion services and for redressing health inequities.

The Brown, Kowalski, Lurie (BKL) Medicaid Calculator (“medicaidcalc_bkl.dta”), computes monthly Medicaid eligibility through age 18 for birth-month cohorts born from January 1981 — December 1984. The calculator consists of the federal poverty level (FPL) eligibility thresholds that each state and Washington, D.C., used to means-test Medicaid over this period. In conjunction with this calculator, the following data are sufficient to determine if a child was eligible for Medicaid: birth month and birth year, state of residence, and income as a percentage of the FPL (a statutory function of family income, state of residence, and household size)

Invasive alien species may have indirect impacts on human behavior through disruption of ecosystem services. Individuals in infested areas may optimally reallocate how they spend their time in response to degradations in environmental quality, for example, by altering their outdoor interactions with nature or levels of community engagement. Limited qualitative evidence is suggestive that indirect impacts of invasive species on behavior and time use may be substantial, though causally-consistent empirical evidence on the sign and magnitude of such impacts is lacking. To address this gap, this study exploits a natural experiment provided by exogenous variation in ash tree (Fraxinus spp.) coverage produced by the invasive emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) to investigate changes in time use patterns across infested US counties over 20032013. Focusing on the laborleisure decision, results indicate a negative and persistent relationship between emerald ash borer detection and daily outdoor leisure time as well as a positive and persistent relationship between detection and daily time spent on labor market activities. Results highlight a previously unexplored dimension of impacts created by invasive species induced ecological shocks.

This paper analyzes the role of establishments in the upward trend in dispersion of earnings that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of log earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within establishments. The main finding is that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. Our results direct attention to the role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

In this work I present three essays related to the rising number of female college graduates relative to men, intergenerational mobility in education, and the prevalence of overeducated workers during the great recession. In the first chapter co-authored with Associate Professor Aashish Mehta (UC Santa Barbara), we ask whether shifting male and female employment patterns can help to explain why the US college boom between 1981 and 2005 was dominated by women. We make three contributions. First, we show that while a massive feminization of high-wage, high-skill occupations plausibly contributed to the female college boom, general, structural movements of labor (undifferentiated by gender) from industrial work into education-intensive services should have encouraged male rather than female college attendance. Previous work has suggested that both types of employment shifts would have contributed to the female college boom. Second, we show that women’s occupational upgrading was too large and ubiquitous to be explained by their growing educational advantage. This is consistent with a causal connection running from gendered employment trends to a female college boom. Third, we show that gender specializations in many occupations deepened, with college educated women gravitating towards jobs offering institutionally protected wages. In the second chapter, I estimate the intergenerational transmission of education in the United States between 1980 and 2013. I find that intergenerational persistence in education has increased substantially among blacks in recent years while remaining stable among whites and Hispanics. I observe this trend when using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics as well as the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. I demonstrate that much of the increase in educational persistence among blacks is due to decreases in upward mobility. The increase in black educational persistence is found in both two-parent and single-parent households, and I do not find similar trends and differences when estimating intergenerational income persistence. In the third and final chapter, I use the method introduced by Gottschalk and Hansen (2003) to analyze the rate of overeducation among workers with exactly a college degree between 2006 and 2013. To my knowledge, this is the first study to use this method to analyze trends in overeducation during the great recession in the U.S. I find that the proportion of workers with exactly a college degree working in occupations offering low college premiums increased during great recession and fell afterwards. An increase in the rate in overeducation could be due to more college-educated workers working in noncollege occupations that were noncollege in the past or because there was an increase in the number of noncollege occupations. I show that changes in the rate of overeducation are mostly due mostly to the latter. When shutting the down the flexibility for occupations to change from college to noncollege (and vice versa), the rate of overeducation increases only slightly between 2006 and 2013. Regardless, these findings run contrary to the secular decline of the rate of overeducation during the end of 20th century documented by previous research.

Political information becoming cheaper and more readily accessible has been heralded as a boon for democracy. Many have hoped that these changes will lead to higher political knowledge and, in turn, more participation in the political process. However, changes in the information environment have also increased the amount of entertainment options available, reducing the amount of political information actually consumed. Estimating the effect of a changing information environment is difficult due to the bias in individual selfreports of media usage related to over-reporting by those who are better educated and have higher political interest. I circumvent these problems by focusing instead on access to information, using within-county variation in the roll-out of broadband in the early 2000s. This conditionally exogenous variation in broadband indicates that increases in the availability of information has an average negative effect on turnout measured at both the aggregate and individual levels. This average effect hides substantial heterogeneity, where more motivated individuals receive substantially more positive effects from increases in the availability of information.

Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly 50-year follow-up of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgia's Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in the state took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealth-a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants' underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children's human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than did nonwinners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of nonwinners, and winners' grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than nonwinners' grandchildren. We can reject effects implied by the cross-sectional gradient of child outcomes by paternal wealth. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

It is well established that mothers are paid less than childless women and that fathers tend to earn higher wages relative to childless men, but we do not know whether these findings apply to workers in all occupations. Using IPUMS and ACS data from 1980 and 2010, we examine the family wage gap for highly educated professionals, the most advantaged sector of the occupational distribution. Results indicate that the size of the negative wage differential for motherhood has declined over time in all professions. Moreover, in the traditionally male-dominated professions of STEM, medicine, and law, women with children experience a positive wage differential, whereas their counterparts in female-dominated professions continue to experience a negative one. The positive differential for fatherhood has remained stable over time. These findings underscore the growing heterogeneity of women's experiences in combining work and family and raise important questions for further research.

This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of the aging US population in a lifecycle model with endogenous labor supply. I input to the model the trends in mortality and fertility observed between 1940 and 2015, and projected to 2070. The model accounts well for the decline in the real interest rate from 1980, slower output and productivity growth after 2009, and the fall in the employment-population ratio from 2000. I show that the aggregate consequences of demographic changes in the lifecycle model are well approximated by a representative agent RBC model with trends in productivity, the marginal utility of consumption, and the labor wedge. I incorporate pricing frictions and the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates into this framework and study the models business cycle implications. I find that when demographic mechanisms are taken into account, the zero lower bound is significantly more likely to bind between 2010 and 2025.