This dissertation focuses on furthering our understanding of how labor markets work. Each essay sheds light on how individual, governmental, and institutional factors combine to determine economic outcomes within specific labor markets. The first chapter uses the Affordable Care Acts employer mandate to ask if variation in health expenses at the individual level can affect labor market outcomes. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy the essay shows that higher cost workers face lower wages and increased unemployment as a result of the employer mandate. Specifically, each dollar of annual medical expenses is associated with a $0.30 to $0.40 wage penalty. The negative changes in labor market outcomes for higher cost workers highlight that firms face the same incentives as an insurer to limit access and price discriminate. The second chapter focuses on why antebellum slave prices were higher in the deep South. Existing research suggests price differences were due to productivity differences. This essay shows that the chance of escape was a complementary source of price differences. To do so, the paper examines the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Act was designed to reduce the chance of successful escape and the paper shows it caused slave prices in northern slave states to increase by between 15 and 30 percent relative to the deeper South. In 1854, reinstated loopholes reverse the effects of the Act. These findings are backed up by advertisements for runaways collected from antebellum newspapers. The third chapter uses a correspondence study to examine how employers view degrees earned online. Many major universities in the US have online programs that claim to be comparable to a traditional degree. The essay uses fictional resumes to apply for real jobs but randomly varies the degree held. Estimates suggest employers do not value these programs equally: After controlling for co-variates a traditional degree-holder is twice as likely to be called for interview compared to an individual with an online degree.

Based on testimonials of migration journeys of indigenous Canaris from southern highland Ecuador, this paper examines strategies of mobility and social networking employed by migrants and facilitators in the human smuggling market. Following a series of economic crises in the late 1990s, Ecuadorian transnational migration increased significantly, with a 55.5 percent increase to the United States between 2000 and 2008, and staggering 12,150 percent increase to Spain between 1998 and 2005. This article focuses on the growth of a regional migration industry in the southern highland region, and pays special attention to the roles of indigenous Canari migrants and migration merchants. The guiding questions are: how does indigeneity figure in mobility strategies; in what ways is indigenous identity strategically employed in the migration journey; and how might indigenous migration merchants contribute to the expansion of migration? As migration routes become increasingly dangerous, migrants and human smuggling actors employ more innovative and riskier strategies. I contend that while indigenous identity may be used strategically and allow migrants to forge new transnational social networks, indigenous migrants struggle for legibility in the face of ethnic and linguistic discrimination, in communities of origin, along migratory routes, and in migration destinations.

School segregation has returned to the front burner of public and political debate. Against the backdrop of police shootings and civic unrest in many U.S. cities, concerns about the role of public education in terms of race relations and segregation have grown. President Obama has also highlighted and put forward policies to address various dimensions of economic and racial inequality, including a proposal in his 2017 budget for a new $120 million grant program, Stronger Together, to support local efforts to integrate schools by income. In that context, this report compares various measures of school segregation and reviews research findings on the extent of school segregation, trends in school segregation over time, and the relationship between academic achievement and segregation by income and race. The role of school quality in mediating and moderating the associations between school segregation and academic achievement is examined through observational and experimental research findings. Research on charter schools receives particular attention.

This paper studies the heterogeneous effects of the birth control pill and abortion rights on young people's career plans. In particular, these effects are allowed to vary by sex, race, religion, and, importantly, by level of academic ability. Using annual surveys of over two million college freshmen from 1968 to 1976, I find that the pill mainly affected high ability women, by shifting their plans toward occupations with higher wages and higher male ratios. Abortion rights, in contrast, were mainly shown to affect women in the low ability group, with their plans shifting toward careers associated with lower income and lower prestige scores. My findings also suggest that the career plans of black males were positively affected by both increased access to the pill and abortions.

Graph data are extensively utilized in social networks, collaboration networks, geo-social networks, and communication networks. Their growing usage in cyberspaces poses daunting security and privacy challenges. Data publication requires privacy-protection mechanisms to guard against information breaches. In addition, access control mechanisms can be used to allow controlled sharing of data. Provision of privacy-protection, access control, and data integrity for graph data require a holistic approach for data management and secure query processing. This thesis presents such an approach. In particular, the thesis addresses two notable challenges for graph databases, which are: i) how to ensure users' privacy in published graph data under an access control policy enforcement, and ii) how to verify the integrity and query results of graph datasets. To address the first challenge, a privacy-protection framework under role-based access control (RBAC) policy constraints is proposed. The design of such a framework poses a trade-off problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. Novel heuristic solutions are provided to solve the constraint problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scheme that studies the trade-off between RBAC policy constraints and privacy-protection for graph data. To address the second challenge, a cryptographic security model based on Hash Message Authentic Codes (HMACs) is proposed. The model ensures integrity and completeness verification of data and query results under both two-party and third-party data distribution environments. Unique solutions based on HMACs for integrity verification of graph data are developed and detailed security analysis is provided for the proposed schemes. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted to illustrate the performance of proposed algorithms.

Using the NLSY’s weekly work history data to precisely measure labor market outcomes and the school-to-work transition, I document severe but short-lived effects of leaving school in a recession for men with 9–12 years of education. I find significant effects of entry labor market conditions on wages, job quality, and the transition time from school to work. In contrast to published evidence on more educated workers, I also find large effects on work hours on both the extensive and the intensive margins. When workers leave high school in a recession, they take substantially longer to find a job, earn lower wages, and work fewer full-time weeks and more part-time weeks. A 4-point rise in the initial unemployment rate leads to an increase in the school-to-work transition time of 9 weeks, a 16% decline in year-one average wage, a 28% fall in hours worked in the first year, and a 45% decline in first-year earnings. However, effects of entry conditions are not persistent and are largely gone after the first year.

Previous work has established that U.S. immigrants earn more if they are fluent in English, but a portion of that premium likely reflects biases because fluency is correlated with unobserved factors like self-selection, ability to job-shop, and legal status. Since those unobserved factors represent potentially important barriers to immigrants' economic assimilation, this paper investigates them by looking for variation in the raw fluency premiums earned by different groups of immigrants. One key distinction is between refugees and other immigrants; while refugees have greater legal access to the labor market, non-refugees benefit from greater ability to self-select into both migration and (pre-migration) fluency, and those relative advantages change during the years after individuals migrate. Empirically, non-refugees initially earn a much larger raw wage premium for fluency (even though the effect of fluency on productivity is likely similar between the groups), suggesting that fluency is more strongly correlated with unobserved skills among non-refugees -- as expected given their greater opportunity to self-select. This gap persists in the first years after immigration, even though English-speaking refugees presumably have greater ability to take advantage of refugees' greater latitude in seeking more suitable employment matches. However, the refugees' premium does eventually grow at around the same time that more of them learn English, likely because more capable refugees are more likely to become fluent. Nevertheless, the gap never vanishes, possibly because the less successful non-refugees return-migrate, while that is not a practical option for most refugees. It thus appears that much of the variation in the fluency premium reflects correlations between fluency and other skills, rather than English-speakers advantage in terms of job search.

To understand human population dynamics fully, before considering complex human agency it may be useful to construct baseline models to see where such agency may and may not be necessary. In fact, the dynamics of human populations may be amenable to mathematical modeling with relatively parsimonious mechanisms. We review some of the more prominent of such models, namely, the spatial Galton-Watson (GW) model, modifications of the GW model that add migration and immigration, and the Bolker-Pacala model, in which mortality (or birth rate) is affected by competition. We show that change in the distribution of population density over the last century for 12 American rural states may be captured by the simplest of the models, the spatial GW model.

Existing research shows that poor economic conditions such as job loss, low wages, and financial insecurity increase nonmarital fertility. However, there are economically-depressed areas of the United States that have low levels of nonmarital fertility. Why are these areas unique, and what can they tell us about the significance of place in shaping fertility outcomes? Although much of the current research focuses on economic explanations, some attention has been given to other factors that play a role in influencing nonmarital fertility rates. These studies show that religion, migration, and education are also significant predictors of nonmartial fertility. This study builds off of economic explanations and considers whether these other factors help explain low nonmarital fertility rates in socioeconomically deprived counties. To examine this topic, this research combines data from various sources on 2,989 counties across the United States in conjunction with a multinomial logistic regression analysis. Overall, this study makes important contributions for researchers interested in the role of places in structuring demographic outcomes.

A growing literature stresses the importance of early childhood human capital. I ask whether variation in early childhood investments can help explain cross-country income differences. I provide new empirical evidence: the adult outcomes of refugees are independent of age at arrival to the United States up to age six, despite dramatic improvements in income and environment upon arrival. A standard model is consistent with this finding if parents but not country are important for early childhood development. This finding limits the mechanisms for generating cross-country early childhood human capital differences. I also provide suggestive evidence on parental inputs.

Although one would expect the unemployed to be the population most likely affected by immigration, most of the studies have concentrated on investigating the effects immigration has on the employed population. Little is known of the effects of immigration on labor market transitions out of unemployment. Using the basic monthly Current Population Survey from 2001 and 2013 we match data for individuals who were interviewed in two consecutive months and identify workers who transition out of unemployment. We employ a multinomial model to examine the effects of immigration on the transition out of unemployment, using state-level immigration statistics. The results suggest that immigration does not affect the probabilities of native-born workers finding a job. Instead, we find that immigration is associated with smaller probabilities of remaining unemployed, but it is also associated with higher probabilities of workers leaving the labor force. This effect impacts mostly young and less educated people.

Andar, poner en marcha las piernas para dirigirse a algún lugar determinado está condicionado no solo por la infraestructura urbana, la cual no es ajena al actor social, sino también por el factor emotivo, donde los andares del migrante pueden estar moldeados por emociones. En todo caso, los andares cotidianos de los migrantes no son vistos como meros desplazamientos neutros, sino que enuncian algo, por elementos afectivos activados y relacionados con ciertos lugares y horarios: evocan otros espacios, de tranquilidad o inseguridad. Este trabajo explora apenas algunas pistas sobre este asunto en lugares de New Jersey y New York, donde dos migrantes con un antecedente parecido echan a andar al mismo tiempo sus piernas y sus emociones.

Millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000, have captured the attention of researchers, media, and the food industry alike, as their tastes and preferences are increasingly shaping what is being purchased at the grocery store. Market analysis has shown that this generation is demanding healthier and fresher items and spending fewer of their food expenditures at restaurants. However, to our knowledge, no research has specifically examined how millennials’ purchasing decisions differ after controlling for a robust set of demographic and socioeconomic (SES) variables. The goal of our research is to investigate whether the purchasing decisions of millennial households differ significantly from the rest of the population, looking both at the healthfulness of food purchases as well as the shopping environment used to purchase food-at-home. Overall, our study finds that being a millennial had a small and positive effect on diet quality when we measure diet quality as the deviation from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. However, once we correct for overconsumption of healthy foods and underconsumption of unhealthy foods, this difference disappears suggesting that millennials are better at complying to the recommended guidelines.

In this paper, we show that labor-market adjustment to immigration differs across tradable and nontradable occupations. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign-born labor crowds native-born workers out of (or into) immigrant-intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980 to 2012, we find that consistent with our theory a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native-born workers in more relative to less immigrant-intensive nontradable jobs, but has no such effect within tradable occupations. Further analysis of occupation wage bills is consistent with adjustment to immigration within tradables occurring more through changes in output (versus changes in prices) when compared to adjustment within nontradables, thus confirming the theoretical mechanism behind differential crowding out between the two sets of jobs. We then build on these insights to construct a quantitative framework to evaluate the consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration. Reducing inflows from Latin America, which tends to send low-skilled immigrants to specific U.S. regions, raises local wages for native-born workers in more relative to less-exposed nontradable occupations by much more than for similarly differentially exposed tradable jobs. By contrast, increasing the inflow of high-skilled immigrants, who are not . . .

Historically, the public sector has served as an equalizing institution through the expansion of job opportunities for minority workers. This study examines whether the public sector continues to serve as an equalizing institution in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using data from the Current Population Survey, I investigate changes in public sector employment between 2003 and 2013. My results point to a post-recession double disadvantage for black public sector workers: they are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are more likely than white and Hispanic public sector workers to experience job loss. These two trends are a historical break for the public sector labor market. I find that race and ethnicity gaps in public sector employment cannot be explained by differences in education, occupation, or any of the other measurable factors that are typically associated with employment. Among unemployed workers who most recently worked for the public sector, black women are the least likely to transition into private sector employment.

Recent work in American Political Development argues left-leaning unions liberalized the Democratic Party on race. Yet practice did not always match principle in local politics. Drawing on secondary and archival sources, I reconstruct the Democratic Partys successful attack on proportional representation (PR) in Cincinnati. A process-tracing approach uncovers the pivotal role of organized labor. At the prod from national officials, local arms of the Congress of Industrial Organizations secured PRs repeal. This was to stop cooperation between African-American Democrats and liberal Republicans in city government. That cooperation targeted job, housing, and other forms of discrimination. Mounting evidence of labors local behavior means we should reconsider its role as an agent of racial liberalism. Party mattered more than policy commitments. That raises questions about the value of coalition choices made at midcentury.

Maternal mortality was the second-largest cause of death for women in childbearing years until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, 20 times as many mothers suffered pregnancy-related conditions, which made it hard for them to engage in market work. Between 1930 and 1960 there was a remarkable improvement in maternal health. We argue that this development, by enabling women to reconcile work and motherhood, was essential for the joint rise in women’s labor force participation and fertility over this period. We also show that the diffusion of infant formula played an important auxiliary role.

This dissertation investigates race as a determinant of health trajectories for immigrants to the United States. Previous research suggests that integration into U.S. society can be detrimental to the health and mortality outcomes of many minority immigrant groups. Popular explanations for post-migration health changes have focused on individual-level mechanisms, such as behavioral changes associated with acculturation. I use multiple sources of data and a variety of quantitative methods to situate these changes in a context of racial inequality for three migrant groups. In my first case, I draw on historical data collected from the Vital Statistics of the United States and the U.S. Census to analyze the changing health trajectories associated with European immigrants’ transition from marginalized minorities to members of the white majority in the early 20th century. My second case draws on restricted-use data from the National Survey of American Life to test how interpersonal and institutionalized racial discrimination influence health patterns of black immigrants from the Caribbean. In my third case, I use population-level birth data from New York City (2000-2010) to investigate changes in birth outcomes associated with elevated anti-Muslim sentiment after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Taken together, these cases demonstrate how racial formation in the United States shapes patterns of post-migration outcomes. I find . . .

This paper investigates the degree to which single Ph.D.-trained workers, both domestic and foreign-born, face trade-offs between marriage and labor market opportunities. Facing dual thin labor and marriage markets, highly trained foreign-born singles may be forced to choose between metropolitan areas that offer better employment opportunities or better marriage markets. Using U.S. Census data, I find significant evidence of a “sorting” effect – the local marriage market is a location-specific consumer amenity for which highly trained singles may sacrifice real wage in equilibrium to access a more active dating environment. Locating in an MSA with 1,000 more own-ethnic college-above single men – the likely dating pool – reduces the wage of single, foreign-born, female PhDs by roughly 2 percentage points. This effect is larger for young versus older women. No such effect arises for domestic Ph.D.-trained single women who have geographically expansive marriage markets. Trade-offs between marriage market opportunities and labor market outcomes also appear to be smaller for single male PhDs. Evidence of a “distraction” effect that reduces work hours, possibly to free up time for dating, is present in some models but is less robust.