Scholars have largely overlooked the significance of race and socioeconomic status in determining which men traverse gender boundaries into female-dominated, typically devalued, work. Examining the gender composition of the jobs that racial minority men occupy provides critical insights into mechanisms of broader racial disparities in the labor market—in addition to stalled occupational desegregation trends between men and women. Using nationally representative data from the three-year American Community Survey (2010–2012), we examine racial/ethnic and educational differences in which men occupy gender-typed jobs. We find that racial minority men are more likely than white men to occupy female-dominated jobs at all levels of education—except highly educated Asian/Pacific Islander men—and that these patterns are more pronounced at lower levels of education. These findings have implications for broader occupational inequality patterns among men as well as between men and women.

From 1980 to 2000, the rise in the US college/high school graduate wage gap coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. This paper estimates a structural spatial equilibrium model to determine causes and welfare consequences of this increased skill sorting. While local labor demand changes fundamentally caused the increased skill sorting, it was further fueled by endogenous increases in amenities within higher skill cities. Changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased inequality between high school and college graduates by more than suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.

Many governments set up large public preschool programs in order to expand ac- cess to early education (crowd-in). Public preschools, however, tend to crowd-out private preschool enrollment. This makes such programs less cost-effective because public finances are used to pay for preschool for children that would have been in (private) preschool oth- erwise. Making fees for public preschools increase with family income is a way to address this trade-off. Yet this creates adverse incentives for parental labor supply. Using methods of optimal nonlinear taxation, we derive a theory of income-contingent public preschool fees that optimally trade-off crowd-in, crowd-out and parental labor supply. The optimal shape of such a fee schedule depends on labor supply elasticities, crowd-in and crowd-out elasticities as well as on the progressivity of the pre-existing income tax schedule. The more progressive the income tax schedule is, the stronger are the adverse effects of a steep preschool fee schedule on labor supply. We calibrate our model to the U.S. and use in- formation on existing public preschool programs, enrollment rates and quasi-experimental evidence. We find that the government could increase overall preschool enrolment by 11 percentage points (19 percent) solely by targeting current subsidies more efficiently and without spending one single more dollar.

Young adults are moving back into their family homes and are now living with their parents. Common terms for the adult children include previously launched adult and incompletely launched adult. According to data from the 2000 U.S. Census, in 1970 12.5 million 1834 year olds lived at home, whereas in 2000 17.8 million 1834 year olds lived at home (Furman, Boomerang nation: How to survive living with your parents The second time around. Fireside, New York, 2005). A recent profi le of the U.S. based on 2000 census data described our country as having about 67 million young adults aged 1834. If 17.8 million of these young adults are living back at home, this is not an insignifi cant percentage. This chapter introduces the reader to the social phenomenon of the previously launched adult and provides an in depth description of these young adults. This chapter also details why these young adults are sociologically signifi cant while providing information about young and emerging adulthood.

Federal anti-discrimination policies implemented in the 1960s helped improve the position of African Americans in the US labor market, but these policies did not eliminate persistent occupational segregation based on race. Because the problem of discrimination in the US labor market is complex, effective solutions must be multifaceted. The policy avenues outlined in this chapter are national and local in scope and include approaches that have the potential to mitigate the disparate effects of economic downturns on African American men. I begin this chapter by providing a snapshot of where African American men stand in the US labor market today with regard to occupational representation and unemployment, and then discuss potential policy solutions.

Addressing climate change requires transitioning away from coal-based energy. Recent structural change models demonstrate that temporary interventions could induce permanent fuel switching when transitional dynamics exhibit strong path dependence. Exploiting changes in local coal supply driven by subsurface coal accessibility, I find that transitory shocks have strengthening effects on the fuel composition of two subsequent generations of U.S. electricity capital. To facilitate a structural interpretation, I develop a model which informs: tests that find scale effects as the relevant mechanism; recovery of the elasticity of substitution between coal and non-coal electricity; and simulations of future carbon emissions following temporary interventions.

Despite debate regarding the magnitude of the impact, immigrant inflows are generally understood to depress wages and increase employment in immigrant-intensive sectors. In light of the overrepresentation of the foreign-born in the childcare industry, this article examines whether college-educated native women respond to immigrant-induced lower cost and potentially more convenient childcare options with increased fertility. An analysis of U.S. Census data between 1980 and 2000 suggests that immigrant inflows are indeed associated with native women’s increased likelihoods of having a baby, and responses are strongest among women who are most likely to consider childcare costs when making fertility decisions—namely, married women and women with a graduate degree. Given that native women also respond to immigrant inflows by working long hours, this article concludes with an analysis of the types of women who have stronger fertility responses versus labor supply responses to immigration.

Women’s participation in education today is unparalleled in history. Part of this is explained by general educational expansion in both richer and poorer countries since the 1950s. At present, some countries even experience a reverse gender gap in higher education.1 Yet, in the majority of the world, the share of women’s educational attainment systematically lags behind that of men, especially in South Asia, the Middle East, and in sub-Saharan Africa (Barro and Lee 2013). Some countries, such as Taiwan, have made incredible progress in the gender equalization of education, while other entire areas, such as West Africa, continue to lag behind in educational participation of women (UNICEF 2005). Why do some countries seem to be well poised to follow educational leaders in closing gender gaps in education, whereas others lag behind in this catch-up? This dissertation sets out to improve our understanding of factors that are relevant for explaining divergences in female education. Gaps in female education are always relative to male education and hence a wider understanding of the basic drivers of education is needed. As such, this research explores how gender equality in education fits within overall educational participation.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three intertwined ambitions drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll call votes over the past century with a Random Utility Model (Manski, 1977) and conclude that economics mattered. So did ideology, but not uniformly. After World War II, the pro-environment vote which had been conservative shifted to being liberal. All these votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset’s physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long-term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socioeconomic and geophysical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community’s resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users’ current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

In June 2009, the United States became the first country in the world to make all of its government data “open by default,” except for personal information and information related to national security. To date, nearly 190,000 datasets have been posted on the Data.gov website (Figure 1). Over 50 other nations around the world—such as Tunisia and Ukraine—have followed the example of Data.gov and made a wide variety of their government data openly accessible to its citizens and businesses (U.S. General Services Administration 2015). The list of open-access datasets goes on and on. Take, for instance, the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. It holds the world’s largest civilian archive of images of the Earth’s surface (Figure 2). The archive spans from 1937 to present-day satellite images of the Earth (U.S. Geological . . .

This chapter is the anchor of this research and covers original quantitative analyses I have conducted on occupational shifts that occurred among African American men during the recession. The importance of a groups occupational distribution lies in the distributions influence on the groups average wages. Occupational distribution by race can therefore influence inter-group wage disparities. This chapter shows that while African American male representation in high-, mid- and low-wage jobs declined over the course of the recession, the opposite occurred for white non-Hispanic men; the latter group was able to maintain its occupational representation during the recession. Based on the quantitative evidence presented in this as well as the preceding chapter, my conclusion is that African American men were further and disparately marginalized in the workforce during the Great Recession.

We examine the medium-term effects on private labor markets for males in 1939-40 of the earlier Great Contraction of 1929-1933, and the Second-Dip Recession of 1937-38, as well as the concurrent and medium run effects of New Deal grants between 1933 and 1939. The analysis combines county level data on New Deal spending on the relief, public works, and Agricultural Adjustment Administration farm programs from 1933 to 1939 with IPUMS information on individuals from the U.S. Census in 1940. The results show that workers in counties hit harder by the earlier contractions still had fewer work opportunities and lower earnings in 1939/40 and were less likely to move to more skilled jobs between 1930 and 1940. Workers in counties with more public works grants per capita had higher weekly and annual earnings and worked more hours in private jobs and were more likely to move to higher skilled jobs during the 1930s, but there was no difference in their hourly earnings or in their probability of private employment. In counties with more relief grants and AAA grants, workers had less access to private jobs and were paid lower annual, weekly, and hourly earnings. The probability of moving into more skilled jobs was also lower.

This article explores variation in the economic integration of immigrants across U.S. metropolitan areas and tests a basic hypothesis that greater economic integration promotes regional resilience. Here we construct two quantitative indexes of occupational diversity as primary indicators of economic integration and develop a conceptual framework of social, economic, and spatial factors that are likely to shape occupational diversity at the regional scale. We conduct an exploratory quantitative analysis in two steps. First, we model labor market diversity in 2000 with metro level data drawn primarily from the Building Resilient Regions (BRR) database. Next, we use the occupational diversity indexes as dependent variables and assess whether greater occupational diversity among immigrants led to greater economic resilience between 2000 and 2010, as measured by changes in unemployment rate and real wage growth. We find some evidence that immigrants in regions that have more broadly integrated immigrants (across occupations) were relatively more resilient in the face of the economic shocks of the Great Recession.

Integrating behavioral health and primary care services is key to accomplishing the overall goals of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 to increase access to health care and improve patient outcomes. Integration also supports the “Triple Aim” of achieving better health, better care experiences, and lower health care costs. This descriptive study provides information that can be used by policymakers, practitioners, educators and other health workforce planning stakeholders to develop plans and policies to increase access to behavioral health care services through primary care settings.

We derive a sufficient statistics optimal tax formula in a general model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages, to study the shape of the tax and transfer system at the bottom of the distribution. The sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation and the micro and macro participation responses. We estimate these statistics using policy variation from the U.S. tax and transfer system. Our results suggest that the optimal tax more closely resembles a Negative Income Tax than an Earned Income Tax Credit relative to the case where unemployment and wage responses. . .

The first chapter examines consumer choices of health insurance contracts. An important innovation in health insurance design is a high-deductible health plan paired with a health savings account (HSA). These contracts aim to control costs by linking insurance coverage with tax incentives for saving, but their rules are highly complex. How consumers perceive the features of these contracts may dampen any cost reduction and produce unintended welfare effects by distorting plan choices. Using a novel administrative dataset linking health insurance choices, medical claims, and saving in HSAs and 401(k)s from a large U.S. health insurer, I develop and estimate a model that integrates HSA saving with deductible choices. I estimate over two-thirds of the marginal HSA dollar is allocated to reduce the deductible, which counteracts the contract's cost-control incentives and leads consumers to choose different insurance plans than they would without an HSA. In this setting, using HSA contributions to offset higher deductibles produced no reduction in health care costs. Several counterfactual analyses quantify the welfare implications of using the HSA to finance current costs on moral hazard, plan enrollment and premiums, and the consumption smoothing benefits from insurance. Health insurance contracts that require sophisticated consumer decision-making may work well in theory, but may be less effective and lead to . . .

Millennials constitute the largest population segment in the United States. Compared to previous generations, they travel less, own fewer cars, have lower drivers licensure rates, and use alternative modes more. But to what extent will these differences persist as millennials move through various phases of the lifecycle? To address this question, we analyze repeated crosssections of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data. We find that, as they age, older millennials (born 1979-1985) are becoming increasingly similar to their prior generation counterparts in terms of their activity-time use patterns, although some differences particularly in time spent as a car driver persist. Trends are less clear for the younger millennials born 1988-1994. Overall, findings suggest that time-use differences between millennials and the prior generation are likely to fade with age. Millennials may exhibit a lag in adopting the patterns of predecessor generations due to delayed lifecycle milestones (e.g., completing their education, getting jobs, moving out of their parents homes, marrying, and having children); in the meantime, substantial sustainability benefits may accrue because of this lag. Transport policies and plans that leverage the behavioral differences exhibited by millennials during their younger years would help sustain such benefits over longer periods of time.

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze firms joint decisions on production offshoring and clean technology adoptions when facing different labor productivities and environmental regulations between home country and offshoring host country. During their decision processes, both workers wages and emission levels of related countries are endogenously determined. Later this model is calibrated to match the data on manufacturing workers wages in the U.S. and Chinas foreign invested enterprises and both countries PM2.5 emissions over 1999-2013. This paper quantifies the offshoring levels which is measured by the share of total low-skilled labor-intensive manufacturing production processes shifted from U.S. to China. My paper also gives the long-run predictions on future offshoring level and environmental qualities in both countries. Besides, different counterfactual policy experiments are conducted and pollution haven effects on offshoring is estimated in this paper.

Mounting urban pressures and increasing vulnerability to disasters highlight the need for urban sustainability and ecological wisdom especially in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. In the 1960s, Ian McHarg examined land use suitability for Staten Island with attention to ecological planning by analyzing physical and cultural characteristics of land features and biophysical vulnerabilities such as tidal inundation and coastal flooding. In this paper, we examine the impact of Hurricane Sandy focusing on land use due to unsustainable planning on Staten Island. We utilize McHarg's Staten Island land use suitability study as a comparative example of a sustainable planning. We address the questions (1) whether or not McHarg's study would have prevented damage to homes and other urban structures using empirical analysis and (2) whether McHarg's recommendations were a realistic possibility. We quantify these differences using geospatial methods and statistical analysis. Our results show that (1) a significantly lower percentage of urban damage would have occurred if land use development followed McHarg's guidelines and (2) how conflicting economic and social ideals of development and zoning issues could explain why McHarg's study would have been difficult to implement. Our findings illustrate the tradeoffs between economic development with long term environmental benefits. This emphasizes the need and opportunity to work with nature and employ urban sustainability approaches and ecological wisdom to mitigate future threats.

This study builds on prior research that examined labor market outcomes for Arab and Muslims post 9/11. Using integrated public use micro-data samples from both the 2000-year Census and American Community Survey I found that Arab, Afghani, Iranian and Pakistani men have lower wage premiums in the year 2000 and 2011 than non-Hispanic whites in the New York City metropolitan area. This wage differential decreased in magnitude in the decade between the two years of focus. I have also chosen to study the demographic profiles and ancestry of Arabs and Muslims in the New York City metropolitan area to better understand the socio-economic makeup of the city’s Middle Eastern and Muslim population.