The aim of this paper is to study the long-run effects of a longevity increase on individual decisions about education and retirement, taking macroeconomic repercussions through endogenous factor prices and the pension system into account. We build a model of a closed economy inhabited by overlapping generations of finitely-lived individuals whose labour productivity depends on their age through the build-up of labour market experience and the depreciation of human capital. We make two contributions to the literature on the macroeconomics of population ageing. First we show that it is important to recognize that a longer life need not imply a more productive life and that this matters for the affordability of an unfunded pension system. Second, we find that factor prices could move in a direction opposite to the one accepted as conventional wisdom following an increase in longevity, depending on the corresponding change in the age-productivity profile.

The Great Migration-the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West-was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration.

The main goal of this thesis is to employ the alternative method of purging to assess racial wage disparities in the United States, using data from the 2013 American Community Survey. A distinction was made between discriminatory and non-discriminatory causes for the racial wage gap. The most important wage determinants from relevant theory were used to describe how racial groups differ from the group of whites regarding distributions of the determinants (non-discriminatory), and associations between the determinants and wages (discriminatory). Based on multivariate regression models, a purging procedure was performed to come to counterfactual outcomes. For the purpose of this paper, a package was developed to apply this method using generalized linear models, featuring a decomposition method, bootstrapping techniques to enable hypothesis testing, and plotting functions. Applying associations of whites to disadvantaged racial groups produced varying results. Applying whites' distributions to the underprivileged groups revealed that these groups are generally speaking less advantageously composed regarding the main determinants, and therefore earn on average less than whites. The higher average educational levels and occupational prestige levels held by Asians seem to be the main reason for their higher wages, compared to whites.

Most health insurance in the United States is provided through employers, making it difficult and costly for self-employed individuals to obtain insurance in private markets. Some economists have argued that an increase in public health insurance, such as the Medicaid expansions allowed under the Affordable Care Act, would increase self employment and encourage entrepreneurship. However, little is known about the role health insurance, and particularly public health insurance, plays in self-employment decisions. Between 1988 and 1990, Congress passed a series of legislative reforms that increased Medicaid coverage for young children. I use variation in the initial income thresholds, childrens age cutoffs and timing of implementation across states to estimate the effect of a persons youngest child gaining access to this public health insurance on self-employment. I find that having a child become Medicaid eligible increases a fathers self-employment by 10.5 percentage points and increases business income by $1,269 (2005 dollars). I find no significant effect on self-employment for mothers, but I find that the Medicaid eligibility of their youngest child is associated with a large negative effect on their probability of remaining in a wage or salary job (-31.4 percentage points.) Further investigation shows that this effect only holds for married mothers, which is consistent with households reducing their hours worked in order to keep household income below the eligibility thresholds.

Urban morphological models were created to enhance our understanding of urban growth and form. Prior to Geographical Information Systems (GIS), these models were supplementary products of ideas and concepts that set out to explain the spatial configuration of the urban landscape. While these models are of great importance to the field, they are mostly two-dimensional (2D) and static. Three-dimensional (3D) modeling has strengths in landscape visualization, manipulation, and planning, where analyses of historical urban landscapes may be carried out efficiently and thoroughly. A method that utilizes 3D modeling through time or four-dimensional (4D) modeling will enhance our understanding of transformation of a citys center. Consequently, the primary objective of this study is to demonstrate how 4d modeling may enhance our understanding of the changes in urban structure and form, i.e., morphology, of Knoxville, Tennessee from 1884 to 1950. This period from 1884 to 1950 captures Knoxvilles early metropolitan era, in which technological innovations such as the steel frame building and the automobile arrived, dramatically influencing Knoxvilles urban landscape. A time series of five Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from between 1884 to 1950 of Knoxvilles central business district (CBD) were digitized into five 3D models. Through the results and discussion of this thesis, I found that the general forces that influence center city transformation in most American cites between 1884 and 1950 are definitely prevalent in Knoxvilles urban morphological story. With this in mind, it is safe to assume that this method could be utilized for observing the vertical change of all American CBDs.

This paper describes the transformations in federal classification of ethno-racial information since the civil rights era of the 1960s. These changes were introduced in the censuses of 1980 and 2000, and we anticipate another major change in the 2020 Census. The most important changes in 1980 introduced the Hispanic Origin and Ancestry questions and the elimination of two questions on parental birthplace. The latter decision has made it impossible to adequately track the progress of the new second generation. The change in 2000 allowed respondents to declare origins in more than one race; the anticipated change for 2020 will create a single question covering race and Hispanic Origin—or, stated more broadly, race and ethnic origin. We show that the 1980 changes created problems in race and ethnic classification that required a “fix,” and the transformation anticipated for 2020 will be that fix. Creating the unified question in the manner the Census Bureau is testing will accomplish by far the hardest part of what we believe should be done. However, we suggest two additional changes of a much simpler nature: restoring the parental birthplace questions (to the annual American Community Survey) and possibly eliminating the Ancestry question (the information it gathered will apparently now be obtained in the single race-and-ethnicity question). The paper is historical in focus. It surveys how the classification system prior to 1980 dealt with the tension between ethno-racial continuity and assimilation (differently for each major type of group); how the political . . .

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded eligibility for Medicaid to millions of low-income adults. While many expanding states implemented their expansion in 2014, five states and the District of Columbia expanded eligibility as early as 2010 by taking advantage of provisions in the ACA and Medicaid waivers. We used restricted data from the National Health Interview Survey to examine the impact of California’s Low Income Health Program, an early expansion program that began in 2011. Our study demonstrates that the county-by-county rollout of expanded public insurance coverage in California significantly increased coverage, by 7 percentage points, and significantly reduced the likelihood of any family out-of-pocket medical spending in the previous year, by 10 percentage points, among low-income adults.

This paper contributes to the debate over the relationship between capital deepening and the aggregate labor share from the sectoral perspective. The study focuses on a specific group of equipment capital: information and communication technology (ICT) capital and exploits the sectoral heterogeneities in the labor share trends, paces of ICT capital specific technological progress and occupational compositions of labor used in production (routine and non-routine) to characterize the conditions under which the surge in ICT capital cause the labor share to fall. Allowing for sectoral differences in substi-tutabilities between ICT capital and types of labor, I document significant capital-task complementarity at each sector. An interesting empirical finding is that the decline in ICT capital prices turns out to have a positive impact on the labor share. However, the income gains enjoyed by labor devoted to non-routine task occupations are offset by the losses of labor employed in routine task occupations when a sector has: (i) initially high load of employment in routine task occupations, and (ii) weak absolute complementar-ity between ICT capital and labor working in occupations associated with non-routine tasks. Since sectors satisfying these two conditions have compromised the majority of the economy, the aggregate labor share has exhibited a downward trend so far, leading to the illusion that information technology has been hurting labor. However, there are two promising facts concerning the future: in one hand, the share of these sectors in value added is persistently falling and on the other hand, the share of routine task employment continues to fall at every sector. Thus, the decline in the labor share can be considered as a temporary consequence of our transition to the new information economy triggered by cheapening of ICT capital. Once the structural shifts and within sectoral adjustments are completed, the decline in the labor share should revert back.

This dissertation consists of three essays at the intersection of labor economics and macroeconomics. It tackles macroeconomic questions with a focus on labor markets. It makes use of micro level and regional level data in order to understand how macroeconomic developments affect labor market outcomes of individuals. Chapter 2 combines two intensively discussed topics at the intersection of labor economics and macroeconomics, namely labor market polarization and intergenerational mobility. This paper investigates whether there is a causal relationship between rising labor market polarization and declining intergenerational mobility in the United States. The former relates to the disappearance of middle-wage routine jobs and the rise of both high- and low-income jobs. The latter measures the cross-generational link between the income of parents and that of their children. The rising demand for extreme skills in the labor market - driven by falling costs for information and communications technology - induces young generations to attain either very high or very low levels of education. Children from low-income parents typically experience less parental support, in particular to finance high educational attainment. This lower level of parental investment into children’s education implies limited chances for upward economic mobility for children from low-income parents. On the other hand, children of high-income parents have better access to high levels of education, and are therefore less likely to fall down the economic ladder. Therefore, children from both low- and high-income parents are less likely to make cross-generational transitions in terms of employment, occupational group and income. Children of middle-income parents are also more likely to choose very high or very low levels of educational attainment, consequently parental income becomes less important for the children’s incomes. Chapter 3 examines the development and the role of firms in the gender pay gap in 21 European countries. It exploits information on employees and employers to understand how firms contribute to the gender wage gap. Firms can contribute to the earnings inequality between men and women in two ways. First, women receive lower wages than men from the same firm. Second, men and women can work for employers with differing in the wages they pay their employees. The paper shows that both factors on average play an equivalent role, but it finds strong heterogeneity across countries. The gender wage gap also grows with age, and the analysis provides evidence that women and men increasingly work in different firms in terms of wage payments. The rising divergence of employer segregation between men and women can be associated with family formation. The paper relates distinct institutional settings to the two factors of how firms contribute to the gender pay gap. A higher incidence of central wage bargaining in a firm tends to increase the gender wage gap, which is possibly driven by bonuses. Family policies which allow a better work-life balance for women tend to reduce the wage gap caused by sorting into different firms, in particular for age groups after family formation. Chapter 4 explores the interaction between trade shocks and labor market frictions for eight Western European countries. The rise of China in global commodity markets since the beginning of this century has adversely affected many manufacturing workers in advanced economies. Previous research typically focused on regional variation within a country, and these studies typically find heterogeneous average responses in the magnitude of the decline in manufacturing employment. One potential explanatory factor behind these may be labor market institutional settings because they impact employment decisions of both workers and firms. The paper investigates whether labor market frictions exacerbate the detrimental impact of the rise in import competition from China on manufacturing employment, and which sector of activity absorbs this adverse shock. The main finding confirms that regions more exposed to the rise of China have suffered from a reduction in manufacturing employment shares, and that this shock grows larger with regional labor market friction. Moreover, the paper finds that employment in public services, and not in construction or private services sector, absorbed the negative shock to the manufacturing sector. The unemployment rate, the labor force participation rate, and wages in all sectors are largely unresponsive to import competition from China.

Objectives. We assessed the burden of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) among Arab and Chaldean Americans residing in southeast Michigan. Methods. For those meeting SLE criteria from the Michigan Lupus Epidemiology and Surveillance Registry, we determined Arab or Chaldean ethnicity by links with demographic data from birth certificates and with a database of Arab and Chaldean names. We compared prevalence and incidence of SLE for Arab and Chaldean Americans with estimates for non-Arab and non-Chaldean American Whites and Blacks. Results. We classified 54 individuals with SLE as Arab and Chaldean Americans. The age-adjusted incidence and prevalence estimates for Arab and Chaldean Americans were 7.6 and 62.6 per 100000, respectively. Arab and Chaldean Americans had a 2.1-fold excess SLE incidence compared with non-Arab and non-Chaldean American Whites. Arab and Chaldean American women had both significantly higher incidence rates (5.0-fold increase) and prevalence estimates (7.4-fold increase) than did Arab and Chaldean American men. Conclusions. Recognizing that Arab and Chaldean Americans experience different disease burdens from Whites is a first step toward earlier diagnosis and designing targeted interventions. Better methods of assigning ethnicity would improve research in this population.

This dissertation examines the intergenerational effects of maternal early health, the intergenerational effects of maternal education and the distributional effects of school size. Chapter 1 is an introduction that summarizes the contributions made in this dissertation. Chapter 2 examines a new question with important implications: Does a mothers early health affect her childs human capital development? My coauthor and I use two extremely different and established methodologies to identify variation in mothers early health: variation in early life disease environment and variation in early life economic environment. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each childs birth record. To identify childrens outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3rd through 10th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find that a one standard deviation improvement in maternal early health improves 10th grade test performance in the following generation by .07 to .08 standard deviations. Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational effects of maternal education. My coauthor and I use variation in compulsory schooling laws across states and over time to identify exogenous variation in maternal education; we estimate local average treatment effects using Two-Stage Least Squares instrumental variables estimations. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each childs birth record. To identify childrens outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3rd through 10th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find an additional year of maternal education improves 3rd grade test performance in the following generation by .31 standard deviations on average and that this relationship is driven by children born to white mothers. Chapter 4 uses state-wide, student-level data from Illinois to examine the distributional effects of school size. I apply two established strategies to identify variation in school size; I use population-level panels of data to identify year-to-year changes in enrollment within schools and I exploit variation induced by school openings. I find smaller schools simultaneously improve average ACT achievement in 11th grade and close achievement gaps between more and less advantaged students. Specifically, a 20 percent decrease in school size improves students ACT performance by 1 percent on average and improves ACT performance by 1.5 percent on average for African American students that receive free or reduced price lunch.

The dental care market in the United States is mainly made up of numerous private solo practice providers. However, it could not be characterized as the perfectly competitive market due to the complexity in the relationship among consumers, sellers, and payers, as well as the professional regulations. Chapter one uses repeat cross-section data from 1981 to 2011 of the American Dental Association Survey of Dental Practice (SDP) to estimate the degree of market power in the private dental practice, how it has changed over time, and the extent of any economies of scale in the provision of dental services. I identify market power by estimating an index measuring the ability of a firm to markup the price above the marginal cost. This parameter is estimated from the price index, the demand function and the system of equations including the cost function and labor input factor demand functions. Both specifications of flexible cost functions - the generalized Leontief and the translog cost functions - show that the dentist services market is monopolistic competitive while the hygienist services market is close to perfectly competitive. I also find that private dental practice shows significant economies of scale and demand for dental services are inelastic. The results provide important information about practice organization and pricing behaviors for public welfare and reimbursement policy

A well-known privacy-preserving network data publication problem focuses on how to publish social network data while protecting privacy and permitting useful analysis. Designing algorithms that safely transform network data is an active area of research. The process of applying these transformations is called anonymization operation. The authors recently proposed the (,,,)-SNP (Social Network Privacy) model and its an anonymization technique. The present paper introduces a novel anonymization algorithm for the (,,,)-SNP model. The desirability metric between two individuals of social network is defined to show the desirability of locating them in one group keeping in mind privacy and data utility considerations. Next, individuals are grouped using a greedy algorithm based on the values of this metric. This algorithm tries to generate small-sized groups by maximizing the sum of desirability values between members of each group. The proposed algorithm was tested using two real datasets and one synthetic dataset. Experimental results show satisfactory data utility for topological, spectrum and aggregate queries on anonymized data. The results of the proposed algorithm were compared in the topological properties with results of two recently proposed anonymization schemes: Subgraph-wise Perturbation (SP) and Neighborhood Randomization (NR). The results show that the proposed method is better than or similar to SP and NR for preservation of all structural and spectrum properties, except for the clustering coefficient.

With the significant rise in immigration to the U.S. over the last few decades, fully understanding the economic impact of immigration is paramount for policy makers. As such, this dissertation consists of three empirical essays contributing to the literature on the impact of immigration. In my first essay, I re-examine the impact of immigration on housing rents and completely controlling for endogenous location choices of immigrants. I model rents as a function of both contemporaneous and initial economic and housing market conditions. I show that existing estimates of the impact of immigration on rents are biased and the source of the bias is the instrumental variable strategy common in much of the immigration literature. In my second essay, I present a new approach to estimating the effect of immigration on native wages. Noting the imperfect substitutability of immigrants and natives within education groups, I posit an empirical framework where labor markets are stratified by occupations. Using occupationspecific skill to define homogeneous skill groups, I estimate the partial equilibrium (within skill group) effect of immigration. The results suggest that when one defines labor market cohorts that directly compete in the labor market, the effect of immigration on native wages is roughly twice as large as previous estimates in the literature. In my third essay, I return to the housing market and examine the effects of immigration within metropolitan areas. Specifically, I investigate the relationship between immigrant inflows, native outflows, and rents. Taking advantage of the unique settlement patterns of immigrants, I show that the effect of immigration on rents is lower in both high-immigrant neighborhoods and portions of the rent distribution where immigrants cluster. Contrary to the existing belief in the literature, the results suggest that the preferences of natives, not immigrants, bid up rents in response to an immigrant inflow.

In this paper we propose and quantify a channel by which income inequality may yield a rise in growth through its effects on differential fertility. The conventional wisdom has been that, given the historically negative relationship between income and fertility, increasing inequality will tend to result in relatively more children being born to poorer household, and thus receive less education. However, since 1980 there has been a stark rise in inequality with a simultaneous flattening of the relationship between fertility and income. We reconcile standard models with the empirical reality by arguing that inequality leads to the cost of childcare and home good substitutes being relatively low for high income mothers. This results in an increased ability for high income mothers to marketize home production, and thus increases their fertility. The net result is the subsequent generation having, on average, higher human capital and thus more growth.

Approximately 65,000 undocumented immigrants graduate from American high schools annually, among them valedictorians and salutatorians. Only about 6,500 of these prospective future leaders go on to college. There are 50 different state-level immigrant-tuition policies, most of which severely limit undocumented students’ college/university and financial aid options. This study is situated in the state of California, whose Master Plan for Higher Education aims to grant college access to all Californians and whose favorable immigrant-tuition policies work toward that end; it could serve as a model for U.S. states with restrictive or neutral immigrant-tuition policies. To date, there is limited discussion of undocumented student college choice in the higher education literature. To explore how undocumented students navigate college decision-making in the U.S., this study uses the conceptual constructs of Perna’s (2006) contextual college choice model, Hossler and Gallagher’s (1987) foundational choice model, and single-element models (chain enrollment and proximity). These frameworks and Dervin’s Sense-making Theory (1999-2014) helped me retrospectively explore the . . .

Disabled individuals under 65 years old account for 15% of Medicaid recipients but half of all Medicaid spending. Despite their large cost, few studies have investigated the effects of Medicaid expansions for disabled individuals on insurance coverage and crowd-out of private insurance. Using an eligibility expansion that allowed states to provide Medicaid to disabled individuals with incomes less than 100% of the federal poverty level, I address these issues. Crowd-out estimates range from 49% using an ordinary least squares procedure to 100% using two-stage least-squares analysis. This potentially large degree of crowd-out could have fiscal implications for the Affordable Care Act which has greatly expanded Medicaid eligibility in 2014.

Promoting fair pay and eliminating the gap between the wages of women and men in the United States is more important than ever. Women make up nearly half of the workforce1 and are breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of families with children.2 More than 15.2 million households are headed by women,3 and more than half of those women are single parents. 4 Put simply: Womens wages are essential to families and the economy. Yet women, especially women of color and mothers, continue to lose precious income to a pervasive, gender-based wage gap. This issue brief takes an in-depth look at the countrys gender-based wage gap for full-time, year-round workers. It examines what the gender-based wage gap costs women and families, its demographic and geographic prevalence, and in a new contribution to the literature on the impact of the wage gap the pronounced disparities suffered by mothers overall, single mothers and mothers of color. It then outlines several changes that lawmakers, employers and individuals should make to help level the playing field and pave the way toward the fair and family friendly workplaces the country urgently needs.