Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey to understand emotions in mothering experiences and how these vary by key demographic factors: employment and partnership status. Assessing mothers emotions in a broad set of parenting activities while controlling for a rich set of person and activity-level factors, we find that mothering experiences are generally associated with high levels of emotional well-being, although single parenthood is associated with differences in the emotional valence. Single mothers report less happiness and more sadness, stress, and fatigue in parenting than partnered mothers, and these reports are concentrated among those single mothers who are not employed. Employed single mothers are happier and less sad and stressed when parenting than single mothers who are not employed. Contrary to common assumptions about maternal employment, we find overall few negative associations between employment and mothers feelings regarding time with children, with the exception that employed mothers report more fatigue in parenting than those who are not employed.

Recent research has stressed the importance of long-run place effects on income and economic mobility, but the literature has struggled to isolate the causal impact of location. This paper provides new evidence on these effects using administrative data on over 100,000 JapaneseAmericans who were interned during World War II. Internees were conditionally randomly assigned to camps in seven different states and held for several years. Restitution payments paid in the early 1990s to the universe of surviving internees allow us to measure their locations and outcomes nearly half a century after the camp assignments. Using this unique natural experiment we find, first, that camp assignment had a lasting effect on individuals’ long-term locations. Next, using this variation, we find large place effects on individual economic outcomes like income, education, socioeconomic status, house prices, and housing quality. People assigned to richer locations do better on all measures. Random location assignment affected intergenerational economic outcomes as well, with families assigned to more socially mobile areas (as designated by Chetty et al., 2014) displaying lower cross-generational correlation in outcomes. Finally, we provide evidence that assignment to richer places impacted people’s values and political views, a new and intriguing mechanism through which place effects operate. Together, this new causal evidence on location effects has broad implications for urban economics, as well as potential policy implications for policymakers struggling to resettle and integrate large refugee or immigrant populations.

The welfare reform bill that emerged in 1996, after a back-and-forth struggle between President Bill Clinton and the Congress (both houses of which were controlled by Republicans), imposed a two-year continuous term limit, and a five-year lifetime limit, on poor cash welfare recipients. It ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), an entitlement program, and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a state block-grant program. The policymakers who engineered this change took advantage of a growing popular expectation that mothers should be in the labor force. There was widespread resentment against those (perceived to be mostly Black) who used welfare payments to shirk the obligation to work, choosing dependence on the state rather than getting married or refraining from childbearing. This policy reform, motivated and supported at least in part by racist ideas and stereotypes, set out to fundamentally alter the relationship between work, parenthood, and marital status for U.S. women. Instead, despite some increase in employment rates, it mostly increased the hardship – and reduced the support – for poor families and their children, who are disproportionately people of color. Reflecting on this anniversary, it now appears this was a tragic misdirection, and we lost an important opportunity to change work family policy for the benefit of all women and poor families.

Excessive attention to territorialized taste – linked to terroir – has elided over the fact that tastes travel. They travel quite well, obviously in terms of produce as the history of potatoes, chilies, and tomatoes show, or as stimulants such as coffee, tea and chocolate illuminate, but also via immigrant-designed food businesses in global cities. Urban Americans have been fed by the foreign-born since we have historical records. Based on census data, newspaper records, and interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs and native consumers, this article takes the case of South Asian restaurateurs in New York City, to argue that transactions around literal tastes can provide an instructive window into power and urban cultures.

Research has shown that historical levels of slavery have an adverse impact on con- temporary economic development in the U.S., including income inequality and education. This paper assesses the relationship between slavery and intergenerational mobility, both in the past and at present. We first use the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples be- tween 1860-1910 to show two things: 1) intergenerational mobility is lower in slave states versus free states and 2) the black-white difference in mobility is higher in slave states versus free states. We then merge historical data on slave density (slaves/population) with the contemporary intergenerational mobility data from Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez (2014) to show that the two results still hold, even after controlling for income inequal- ity, education, and a battery of other controls. Our results suggest the legacy of slavery continues to be felt in the U.S. today.

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recessionlower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of workmost especially among Americas men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while unemployment has gone down, Americas work rate is also lower today than a generation agoand that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-fouror men of prime working agewas actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression.Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at alland nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of men without work, argues Eberstadt, is Americas invisible crisis. So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society?

In the second half of the nineteenth century, many American cities built water systems using lead or iron service pipes. Municipal water systems generated significant public health improvements, but these improvements may have been partially offset by the damaging effects of lead exposure through lead water pipes. We study the effect of cities' use of lead pipes on homicide between 1921 and 1936. Lead water pipes exposed entire city populations to much higher doses of lead than have previously been studied in relation to crime. Our estimates suggest that cities' use of lead service pipes considerably increased city-level homicide rates.

Background: Research on immigrant dispersion to new U.S. destinations has not addressed the question of how place and individual characteristics influence pioneer settlement. While origin-group social networks influence immigrants’ settlement choices upon U.S. arrival and secondary destination decisions within the USA, other factors must be important when immigrants move to places where they have no compatriots. Objective: By examining national origin differences in pioneer migration for ten Asian and Latin American national origin groups, our goal was to determine whether and how they differed in their pioneer settlement responses to economic, demographic, social, and pan-ethnic labor markets conditions. Methods: We used 1990 and 2000 confidential decennial census data because they have sufficient sample cases and geographic detail to study national origin differences. We estimated two types of model for each origin group: a zero-inflated Poisson model that identifies the place characteristics associated with higher pioneer settlement counts in the 1990s and a logistic regression model that identifies the individual characteristics of immigrants who settled pioneer places. Results: The major context correlates of pioneer settlement were 1990 population size, the pan-ethnic presence of foreign-born from each group’s origin region (Asia or Latin America), and the lack of a significant agricultural presence in the labor force. The logistic models indicated that pioneers were likely to be internal migrants rather than recent immigrants, fluent English speakers, and residents of relatively dispersed places prior to moving to pioneer labor markets. Conclusions: The analyses showed the importance of secondary migration and prior dispersion from gateways for pioneer settlement. They also revealed considerable national origin heterogeneity in pioneer settlement dynamics and indicated that national origin differences merit further attention.

This paper examines the long-term impact of exposure to Medicaid in early childhood on adult health and economic status. The staggered timing of Medicaid's adoption across the states created meaningful variation in cumulative exposure to Medicaid for birth cohorts that are now in adulthood. Analyses of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggest exposure to Medicaid in early childhood (age 0–5) is associated with statistically significant and meaningful improvements in adult health (age 25–54), and this effect is only seen in subgroups targeted by the program. Results for economic outcomes are imprecise and we are unable to come to definitive conclusions. Using separate data we find evidence of two mechanisms that could plausibly link Medicaid's introduction to long-term outcomes: contemporaneous increases in health services utilization for children and reductions in family medical debt.

In this paper, we first document a clear, downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend began in the early 1980s, if not somewhat earlier. Next, we present evidence for a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend, which is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, this decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker–firm matching or by mounting regulatory strictness in the labor or housing markets. Plausible avenues for further exploration include changes in the worker–firm relationship, particularly with regard to compensation adjust- ment; changes in firm characteristics, such as firm size and age; and a decline in social trust, which may have increased the cost of job searches or made both parties in the hiring process more risk averse.

This paper finds that US employment changed differently relative to output in the Great Recession and recovery than in most other advanced countries or in the US in earlier recessions. Instead of hoarding labor, US firms reduced employment proportionately more than output in the Great Recession, with establishments that survived the downturn contracting jobs massively. Diverging from the aggregate pattern, US manufacturers reduced employment less than output while the elasticity of employment to gross output varied widely among establishments. In the recovery, growth of employment was dominated by job creation in new establishments. The variegated responses of employment to output challenges extant models of how enterprises adjust employment over the business cycle.

This paper studies how technology-driven changes in occupational composition of the labor force contributed to the recent decline of the U.S. labor share of income. Estimating an aggregate production function for the U.S. economy consistent with job and wage polarization trends, I show that changes in the occupational composition of the total wage bill have been the single driver of the trend decline in the labor share since 1967. This direct link between the labor share and the composition of the wage bill results from the combination of unitary elasticity between equipment capital and non-routine tasks, and high substitutability between equipment capital and routine tasks. Embedding the estimated production technology within a general equilibrium model with occupational choice, I document that the fall in relative equipment-capital prices alone can explain 72 percent of the decline of the labor share for the 1967-2013 period. The model also demonstrates that the effect of permanent technology shocks on the labor share shrinks as the fraction of routine task labor declines. As a result, the labor share is predicted to stabilize at around 55 percent in the long run, even if technological progress continues at its current pace. In addition, I find that differences in labor share trends across sectors can be accounted for by varying sensitivities of cost of production to the price of equipment capital. Finally, repeating the estimation analysis using an education-based classification of skill reveals that the theory based on capital-task interactions substantially improves on the traditional capital-skill complementarity theory in understanding the decline of the labor share.

WWII mobilization led to a permanent increase in female employment. Using Census micro data we study the effects of this increase on the occupations women held after the war. Almost three decades after its end, WWII had lasting effects on the occupational landscape. For women of working age in the early 1940s, the war caused a permanent shift towards blue-collar occupations – particularly in manufacturing and service jobs – and a decline in employment in white-collar jobs. A reduction in educational attainment due to the draft, accumulation of occupation-specific experience and relatively high wages in blue-collar sectors can largely account for these patterns. WWII mobilization also influenced the occupational outcomes of the next generation of women who were too young to be working at the time of the war. This cohort shifted away from lower-skill jobs and towards clerical occupations.

Low-wage work is a central concept in considerable research, yet it lacks an agreed-upon definition. Using data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, the analysis presented in this article suggests that defining low-wage work on the basis of alternative hourly wage cutoffs changes the size of the low-wage population, but does not noticeably alter time trends in the rate of change. The analysis also indicates that different definitions capture groups of workers with substantively different demographic, social, and economic characteristics. Although the individuals in any of the categories examined might reasonably be considered lowwage workers, a single definition obscures these distinctions.

El modelo propuesto por Mincer (1974) permite generar una medición del beneficio o premio en el ingreso relacionado con la acumulación de capital humano, siendo el principal referente para la mayoría de los artículos del tema. A pesar de su gran aceptación, dicha representación tiene algunos problemas en su estimación por la relación que existe entre el salario y la educación, conocida como endogeneidad, así como otros sesgos, tales como: autoselección, errores de medición en el salario, educación y experiencia. Este trabajo se enfoca en la medición de la experiencia. La medida comúnmente utilizada es la experiencia potencial propuesta por Mincer. Debido a que generalmente no se conoce la historia laboral del trabajador, se infiere que su experiencia es la edad menos los años de educación aprobados y sustrayendo los años antes de iniciar la educación prescolar, regularmente seis años. Este supuesto implica sesgos en la medición, especialmente si el trabajador tuvo salidas y entradas del mercado laboral, por lo que, al ignorar estos movimientos laborales se le estarían atribuyendo un mayor número de años de experiencia que los que realmente tiene. Por tanto, el uso de una medida potencial incorpora un sesgo de medición que afectaría el coeficiente estimado de la educación y de la misma experiencia.

In the growing literature exploring the links between immigrant diversity and worker productivity, recent evidence strongly suggests that diversity generates productivity improvements. However, even the most careful extant empirical work remains at some remove from the mechanisms that theory says underlie this relationship: interpersonal interaction in the service of complex problem solving. This paper aims to "stress-test" these theoretical foundations, by observing how the relationship between diversity and productivity varies across workers differently engaged in complex problem solving and interaction. Using a uniquely comprehensive matched employer-employee dataset for the United States between 1991 and 2008, this paper shows that growing immigrant diversity inside cities and workplaces offers much stronger benefits for workers intensively engaged in various forms of complex problem solving, including tasks involving high levels of innovation, creativity, and STEM. Moreover, such effects are considerably stronger for those whose work requires high levels of both problem solving and interaction.

We provide evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development. To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, i.e. the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as the large immigration shock, the first wave of which comprised refugees exogenously allocated across the US, occurred over a twenty-year period during which time the US imposed a complete trade embargo on Vietnam. Following the lifting of trade restrictions in 1994, US exports to Vietnam grew most in US States with larger Vietnamese populations, themselves the result of larger refugee inflows 20 years earlier.

Between 1948 and 2000, hours worked per man in the United States fell by twenty percent. Using a life cycle model of labor supply with intensive and extensive margins, we assess how much of this decline can be accounted for by changes in tax and transfer policies. We use policy measures from the generational accounting literature, capturing the lifetime fiscal burdens faced by each birth-year cohort. Changes in age demographics and fiscal policy together account for roughly half of the decline in hours worked. Policy alone explains approximately thirty percent, both in the aggregate and for different age groups.