The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was the most destabilizing recession since the Great Depression. After the mortgage securitization bubble burst in 2007, the Great Recession erased more than half of the stock market capitalization (Grusky et al., 2011). The financial collapse led to waves of job loss and unemployment. In March of 2007 the national unemployment rate was 4.4%. By October 2009, unemployment had increased almost six percentage points to 10.1%. The number of unemployed people in the United States more than doubled between 2008 and 2009. Unemployment rates reached record highs after the onset of the recession, particularly among black men (a group that already had a heightened risk of unemployment prior to the recession). By March of 2010, nearly one in five black male labor force participants over the age of 20 was unemployed. The black/white employment gap among women also increased, as well as the employment gap between the most educated and the least educated. White and foreign-born Hispanic men maintained relatively low unemployment rates, even during the recession. Social scientists have a clear understanding of the patterns and sources of income inequality. This dissertation investigates patterns and sources of employment inequality. I focus on a unique historical period: the Great Recession and its aftermath. Compared to other recessionary periods, the labor market repercussions from the Great Recession were especially severe and long-lasting (Grusky et al., 2011). I examine how these repercussions vary by race, ethnicity, and gender. Based on their socioeconomic characteristics, Mexican immigrant men should have very high unemployment. More than half do not have a high school diploma. One in four works in construction; at the height of the recent recession, 20% of construction workers were unemployed. Yet their unemployment rates are similar to those of native-born white men. Chapter 2 examines potential reasons for the Mexican immigrant employment paradox. I consider explanations based on theories about out-migrant and in-migrant selection, disparities in reservation wages, and employer preferences for immigrant labor. Chapter 3 examines the extent to which the public sector protected black workers from the employment shocks of the Great Recession. Historically, the public sector has served as an equalizing institution through the expansion of job opportunities for minority workers. Using Current Population Survey cross-sectional and longitudinal data, I investigate changes in public sector employment and unemployment 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 substantially more likely than white and Hispanic public sector workers to be unemployed. 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 public sector workers, black women are the least likely to transition into private sector employment. Compared to the private sector, however, the post recession public sector has had consistently lower levels of racial and ethnic employment stratification. Chapter 4 investigates whether and how labor market context affects racial and ethnic employment disparities. I find that black men are more likely to be employed when they reside in areas with 1) a large concentration of public sector jobs, or 2) relatively lax employment, labor, and hiring regulations. I conclude that while black men are more likely to be working when employers have fewer impediments to hiring and firing, black men also benefit from access to highly regulated public sector employment opportunities.

This paper estimates the effect of the charitable contribution tax deduction on charities' donation revenue from charities' tax filings. A one percent increase in the tax cost of giving causes charitable receipts to fall by about four percent, an effect three times larger the consensus in the literature. Further analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in the tax response by subsector: health care and home care are more tax-sensitive than other charities, while higher education and arts are less tax-sensitive. The results are consistent with substantial tax response heterogeneity within the sample and between sampled and unsampled charities, implying that the mean tax elasticity of charitable contributions is a poor predictor of tax incentive effects for individual charities.

Despite significant structural similarities, Canadian and American Rust Belt cities have very different levels of inner core land abandonment. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland are filled with thousands of vacant lots. No abandonment of this magnitude exists in the Canadian Rust Belt, despite significant deindustrialization, suburbanization, wealth, and localist politics—all factors theorized to be central causes for American Rust Belt abandonment. This paper considers why such a vast difference in land abandonment exists between the two contexts. It centers on the role of racialization, but in a way that challenges Canadian exceptionalist narratives about the ostensible lack of racialization. Racialization took place on both sides of the border, I argue, but only the American form contributed to land abandonment.

The May 2012 State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) report, "The Broadband Imperative: Recommendations to Address K-12 Education Infrastructure Needs," pushed educators and policy makers nationwide to increase high-speed broadband access in schools, with specific recommendations regarding access, funding, and policies to support teaching and learning. In April 2016, SETDA and Common Sense Kids Action released the "State K-12 Broadband Leadership: Driving Connectivity and Access" report (see ED569341) highlighting the powerful impact of state leadership in driving critical policy decisions at the national and state level to support broadband networks, bandwidth capacity and home access for low-income families. In this companion report, "The Broadband Imperative II: Equitable Access for Learning," SETDA continues to advocate for increasing robust access both in and out of school to best prepare all students for college and careers. SETDA provides the following updated recommendations for policy makers and school leaders: (1) Increase Infrastructure to Support Student-Centered Learning; (2) Design Infrastructure to Meet Capacity Targets; (3) Ensure Equity of Access for All Students Outside of School; and (4) Leverage State Resources to Increase Broadband Access. Appendices provide research methodology, Federal programs/initiatives that support school access, resources, exemplars, and a glossary.

We develop a theory of career paths and earnings in an economy in which agents organize in production hierarchies. Agents climb these organizational hierarchies as they learn stochastically from other individuals. Earnings grow over time as agents acquire knowledge and occupy positions with larger numbers of subordinates. We contrast these and other implications of the theory with U.S. census data for the period 1990 to 2010. The model matches well the Lorenz curve of earnings as well as the observed mean experience-earnings profiles. We show that the increase in wage inequality over this period can be rationalized with a shift in the distribution of the complexity and profitability of technologies relative to the distribution of knowledge in the population.

Effects of land use on hydrology, organic matter sources, and processing may be proportionately greater in tidal creeks than large estuaries, yet tidal creek systems have been undervalued in assessments of emerging effects of anthropogenic land use. Through sampling of dated sediment cores, we identified indicators of historical land use change (past 150 yr) in a microtidal northern Gulf of Mexico tidal creek system in the early stages of urbanization. We found that tidal creeks differed from open water sites, and urbanized sites differed from less altered sites, primarily due to changes in carbon sources indicated by differences in sediment stable carbon isotope (13C) values, and concentrations of fecal indicator bacterium Clostridium perfringens. Total organic carbon (%TOC) and carbon : nitrogen (C : N) increased twofold in tidal creeks during upstream urbanization in the early 20th century, which led to elevated mid-century sediment TOC accumulation rates (510 mg C cm2 yr1), followed by decreases in TOC accumulation in tidal creeks and open waters since the 1960s (0.41.8 mg C cm2 yr1). C. perfringens and nitrogen stable isotope values (15N) were, respectively, 1.8 and 1.5 times higher at wastewater-influenced sites than at other sites, increasing through time or remaining high at wastewater-influenced sites from approximately the 1950s-present, when human populations quadrupled. Hence, urbanization altered estuarine inputs from upland C sources and increased inputs from human-derived N and microbes. These findings suggest that tidal creeks are more sensitive archives of land-use change than open water systems due to their proximity and greater connectivity to the watershed.

This paper exploits the original introduction of Medicaid (1966-1970) and the federal mandate that states cover all cash welfare recipients to estimate the effect of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health, labor supply, program participation, and income. Cohorts born closer to Medicaid implementation and in states with higher pre-existing welfare-based eligibility accumulated more Medicaid eligibility in childhood but did not differ on a range of other health, socioeconomic, and policy characteristics. Early childhood Medicaid eligibility reduces mortality and disability and, for whites, increases extensive margin labor supply, and reduces receipt of disability transfer programs and public health insurance up to 50 years later. Total income does not change because earnings replace disability benefits. The government earns a discounted annual return of between 2 and 7 percent on the original cost of childhood coverage for these cohorts, most of which comes from lower cash transfer payments.

This paper analyzes k nearest neighbor classification with training data anonymized using anatomy. Anatomy preserves all data values, but introduces uncertainty in the mapping between identifying and sensitive values. We first study the theoretical effect of the anatomized training data on the k nearest neighbor error rate bounds, nearest neighbor convergence rate, and Bayesian error. We then validate the derived bounds empirically. We show that 1) Learning from anatomized data approaches the limits of learning through the unprotected data (although requiring larger training data), and 2) nearest neighbor using anatomized data outperforms nearest neighbor on generalization-based anonymization.

This research investigates if and how much the shapes of school attendance zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. We find that the typical school attendance zone is relatively compact and resembles a square-like shape. Compact zones typically draw children from local residential areas, and since local areas are often racially homogeneous, this suggests that high levels of racial segregation in the largest school districts are largely structured by existing residential segregation. Still, this study finds that the United States contains some attendance zones with highly irregular shapessome of which are as irregular as the most irregular Congressional District. Although relatively rare, highly irregular attendance zones almost always contain racially diverse student populations. This racial diversity contributes to racial integration within their encompassing school districts. These findings contradict recent theoretical and empirical scholarship arguing that irregularly shaped zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. Our findings suggest that most racial segregation in school attendance zones is driven by large-scale segregation across residential areas rather than a widespread practice among school districts to exacerbate racial segregation by delineating highly irregularly shaped attendance zones.

Prior research has had success identifying client financial characteristics that influence auditors’ going concern reporting decisions. In contrast, relatively little research has addressed whether auditors’ circumstances and surroundings influence their propensities to issue modified opinions. We investigate whether auditors’ decisions to issue GC opinions are affected by the rate of GC opinions being given in their proximate area. Controlling for factors that prior research associates with going-concern opinions and state-level economics, we find that non-Big 4 auditors located in states with relatively high first-time going-concern rates in the prior year are up to 6 percent more likely to issue first-time going-concern opinions. The results from our state-based GC measure casts doubt that this increased propensity is explained by economic factors and suggests that psychological factors may explain this behavior among auditors. Interestingly, this higher propensity increases auditors’ Type I error rates without decreasing their Type II error rates, further suggesting economics alone do not explain these results. Such evidence challenges the generally accepted notion that a higher propensity to issue a going-concern opinion always reflects higher audit quality.

Thomas Piketty predicts that “It is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of [wealth] will attain extremely high levels.†His forecast is based on an assumption that most bequests are motivated by an altruistic motive to accumulate assets to endow one’s own children. Piketty claims that a similar mechanism was operative in the U.S. during the Gilded Age (roughly 1870-1917). In this paper I make three claims. One: Piketty’s argument that the bequest motive for accumulating wealth dominates the retirement and precautionary motives inaccurately describes the lifecycle hypothesis of saving associated with Franco Modigliani. As a result of his misunderstanding Piketty inappropriately concludes that the bequest motive must logically dominate the dynamics of wealth accumulation. Two: I examine the one-percent sample of the manuscript returns from the U.S. Census of 1870 to estimate the distribution of wealth at an early date during the Gilded Age. Synthetic cohorts derived from the cross section suggest that family wealth holdings declined sharply after an age in the mid-fifties. The bulk of saving during the Gilded Age was generated by the middle class during the families’ peak-earning years. Three: A massive digital collection of wills and probate records assembled by Ancestry.com, which has been available on line since September 4, 2015, should make it possible to trace the financial life histories of the very rich. I propose a research project that would focus on the wealthiest families included in the 1870 census sample. I present the results of my first attempt to use the Ancestry.com archive to literally follow the money for a few members of this elite. My preliminary work suggests that many of the large fortunes of 1870 were the result of business success and luck rather than of inheritance. Many of the super-rich spent lavishly on consumption and philanthropy and thus dissipated much of their fortune before death (if they lived long enough). When some bequeathed a large sum it was typically the unintended consequence of dying at a significantly younger age than prudent lifecycle planning would have anticipated. I offer a tentative suggestion that an important motive for accumulating wealth in the Gilded Age was entrepreneurial combined with an effort to keep a family firm intact and in the firm control of its founder. At the time institutions that would make it easy to separate ownership from management were nonexistent or risky. The illiquidity of business assets might explain the failure on the part of some entrepreneurs to consume the bulk of their wealth before death. Typically, the businesses lived on intact after their owner-founder died. Businesses do not leave bequests.

We examine the influence of neighborhood peer effects on the decision of women to work using panel data that follows clusters of adjacent homes between 1985-1993. Modeling assumptions imply rank order restrictions that enable us to classify individuals into peer groups while identifying peer effects and underlying mechanisms. For women, peer effects influence labor supply in part because women appear to emulate the work behavior of nearby women with similar age children. For men, peer effects are mostly absent, consistent with inelastic work decisions. Geographically concentrated panel data are crucial for these estimates. Our approach could also be applied to other instances in which neighborhood peer effects are important.

The share of women working today is near an all-time high. While their earnings and projected retirement income have grown compared to previous generations of women, a significant gender gap still exists. At the same time, women continue to bear most of the responsibility of caregiving, and many must juggle the demands of work and caring for a child or adult loved one. Moreover, more women today are either never married or divorced, meaning they have to handle these responsibilities on their own. These challenges make it harder for women to sustain adequate earnings and save for retirement. Social Security has proven to be the most effective vehicle for women to achieve retirement security. Provisions that increase benefits for low earners, caregivers, and older seniors, or modernize benefits for certain marital statuses such as the divorced and survivors, would address some of the challenges that particularly affect women. However, they would be available on a gender-neutral basis and would benefit other vulnerable groups, including people of color. (To close the projected long-term shortfall and expand benefits, increased Social Security revenue would be necessary. For a review of revenue-raising options, which are beyond the scope of this brief, see the Academy report: Fixing Social Security: Adequate Benefits, Adequate Financing. 1 )

This paper examines the evolution of the gender gap in the United States for several decades, including the most recent recession. We simultaneously address two largely overlooked issues, namely a) heterogeneity and b) selection in labor force participation. We find that these considerations argue in favor of broader definitions and measures of the gender gap that better reflect heterogeneity and the evolution of the gap between distributions of wages. A new quantile-Copula modeling approach to the joint determination of wages and participation decision for both men and women is examined. This approach addresses the selection issue beyond mean and median that the prior literature has largely focused on. It also relaxes the rank invariance assumption commonly made in the Quantile Treatment Efect (QTE) literature and allows us to recover the gender gap . . .

The history of Mexican immigration to the United States is best characterized as the movement of unskilled, manual laborers pushed northward mostly by poverty and unemployment and pulled into American labor markets with higher wages. Historically, most Mexicans have been economic immigrants seeking to improve their lives. In moments of civil strife, such as the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926–1929), many fled to the United States to escape religious and political persecution. Others, chafing under the weight of conservative, patriarchal, tradition-bound, rural agrarian societies, have migrated seeking modern values and greater personal liberties. Since the last quarter of the 19th century, due to increasing numeric restrictions on the importation of immigrant workers from Europe, Asia, and Africa, American employers have turned to Mexico to recruit cheap, unskilled labor. Before 1942, Mexico minimally regulated emigration. While attentive to the safety and well-being of its émigrés, the Mexican government deemed out-migration a depletion of the country’s human capital. Monetary remittances helped compensate for this loss, contributing perhaps as much as 10 percent of the country’s yearly gross national product, vastly improving national life, particularly when emigrants returned with skills and consumer goods, seeking investment opportunities for their accumulated cash. Since the 1980s, single Mexican women have become a significant component of this migration, representing 40 percent of the total immigrant flow, employed mostly as service workers, domestics, and nannies, and less so . . .

Corporations are retaining ever-larger corpuses of personal data; the frequency or breaches and corresponding privacy impact have been rising accordingly. One way to mitigate this risk is through use of anonymized data, limiting the exposure of individual data to only where it is absolutely needed. This would seem particularly appropriate for data mining, where the goal is generalizable knowledge rather than data on specific individuals. In practice, corporate data miners often insist on original data, for fear that they might miss something with anonymized or differentially private approaches. This paper provides a theoretical justification for the use of anonymized data. Specifically, we show that a support vector classifier trained on anatomized data satisfying l-diversity should be expected to do as well as on the original data. Anatomy preserves all data values, but introduces uncertainty in the mapping between identifying and sensitive values, thus satisfying l-diversity. The theoretical effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated using several publicly available datasets, showing that we outperform the state of the art for support vector classification using training data protected by k-anonymity, and are comparable to learning on the original data.

Constituye un hecho palpable que todo proceso migratorio lleva cultura y regresa algunas pautas tomadas del país receptor. La migración Guatemala-Estados Unidos no es la excepción. De esta manera, al presentarse una considerable migración de indígenas guatemaltecos, ellos se autodesignan como maya-guatemaltecos haciendo enfasis en su origen étnico, aunque algunos jóvenes nacidos en aquel país prefieren denominarse mayas-estadounidenses. La presente obra tiene como objetivo principal realizar un abordaje sobre los guatamericans que el autor define como: "Un estadounidense de descendencia guatemalteca que conserva sus pautas culturales tradicionales; una identificación con su condición de nuevo mestizo y una identidad con el grupo que lo liga espiritual e ideológicamente a su país de origen, aunque se asuma como ciudadano estadounidense".

This dissertation combines three empirical studies of human behaviors as they relate to environmental economics and the valuation of non-market environmental goods like air quality and climate. The first studies the effect of a large-scale program that aimed to improve air quality in New York City, and its effect on people’s valuation of residential real estate. The second explores how people respond differently to heat waves, with multiple consecutive days of high temperatures, than to single days with high temperatures, by increasing their demand for air conditioning and electricity use. In the third, we estimate household preferences over local climates, and use the estimates to project the welfare loss due to climate change by the year 2100. In Chapter 1 I present evidence of inefficiency in the valuation of an important non-market good, air quality, in New York City. Large buildings burning fuel oil for heat are a major contributor to particulate matter and other air pollutants in NYC. A recent NYC policy that rapidly phased out certain types of fuel oil boilers, combined with a randomly-assigned compliance deadline, gives me exogenous variation in air quality. Using the universe of home sales between 2003 and 2014, I test whether the conversion of a dirty oil boiler affects nearby home prices, and furthermore, whether this effect is different during different months of the year. In the absence of information asymmetry and projection bias in the housing market, I would expect to find that an oil boiler conversion increases nearby housing prices, and that this effect is nearly constant across the year. Instead, I find that while there is a positive effect on housing prices, the effect . . .