Der Beitrag geht auf theoretischer und empirischer Ebene der Frage nach, wie Lohn- subventionen und Mindestlöhne in Bezug auf Beschäftigungschancen interagieren und wie diese Interaktionseffekte zwischen einzelnen Arbeitnehmergruppen variieren können. Unter der Annahme eines neoklassischen Arbeitsmarktes und heterogener Arbeit, verdrängen subventionierte Berufserfahrene berufsunerfahrene Arbeitneh- mer. Der Effekt auf nicht subventionierte Berufserfahrene bleibt theoretisch offen. Die empirische Überprüfung für die USA ergibt, dass mit steigendem Mindestlohn die Beschäftigung an Berufsunerfahrenen sinkt, an nicht subventionierten Berufs- erfahrenen konstant bleibt und an subventionierten Berufserfahrenen buckelförmig verläuft. Für Deutschland hingegen zeigen mehrere Simulationsergebnisse, dass die Einführung des Mindestlohns in Höhe von 8,50 Euro in Verbindung mit bestehen- den Lohnsubventionen keine Substitutionseffekte auslöst, sondern die Beschäftigung aller Arbeitnehmer im Niedriglohnsektor unabhängig von deren Förderberechtigung senkt.

In Part I of this thesis, I show that, when immigrants' host and home countries engage in trade, labor market returns to cultural capital specific to the trading partner increase. Using two trade liberalization episodes, NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO . . .

This paper uses the rollout of the first Community Health Centers (CHCs) to study the longer-term health effects of increasing access to primary care. Within ten years, CHCs are associated with a reduction in age-adjusted mortality rates of 2 percent among those 50 and older. The implied 7 to 13 percent decrease in one-year mortality risk among beneficiaries amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the 1966 poor/non-poor mortality gap for this age group. Large effects for those 65 and older suggest that increased access to primary care has longer-term benefits, even for populations with near universal health insurance.

Objectives. The primary objective of this paper is to emphasize the unique professional problems that war and disabled veterans face when returning from military service to the civilian workforce. Secondary objectives include presenting employment outcomes of vulnerable war veterans groups and investigating entrepreneurship and other state and federal employment programs to uncover relevant work opportunities. Methods. This paper describes military life and the distinct professional characteristics of veterans, particularly those with disabilities. Drawing upon the theoretical bases of group dynamics, military socialization, and cumulative inequality, it shapes the experiences of war veterans into a new and cohesive paradigm. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data are utilized to discover the unemployment situation among disabled Vietnam and Post 9/11 veterans and civilians. Finally, government employment programs are examined to catalogue work opportunities for combat veterans struggling to obtain work. Findings. As service-connected disability increases in the veteran population, unemployment increases. Disabled Vietnam and Post-9/11 veterans are shown to experience higher levels of workforce participation than disabled civilians. Additionally, disabled Post-9/11 veterans suffer lower unemployment levels than their disabled civilian counterparts. Conclusions. Although many services exist for war veterans to find employment after military service, veterans need more exposure to such programs to develop real interest. Furthermore, policymakers and private interests might consider bolstering veteran entrepreneurship services with business loan programs.

The purpose of this research was to determine significant bio-physical (physical and environmental) and social variables that can be integrated in to a drought index to predict areas susceptible to drought. Severe drought events are capable of causing millions of dollars in damage. The 1988 drought caused the United States approximately $40 billion in damage. Drought forecasting, modeling, and detection have, therefore, become imperative to understand the social, economic, and environmental impacts of droughts, and also to explore how these impacts play a role in the occurrence of a drought. A number of drought indices widely used in the U.S. rely on physical and meteorological factors to describe and predict drought conditions. Though social factors, especially, urbanization seem to contribute to the occurrence and severity of a drought they are rarely used in drought prediction and monitoring. In this research, the following research questions were answered to aid with drought prediction by incorporating physical and social variables:(1)Which physical parameters are significant in drought forecasting? (2) Can a social variable be used as a predictor for drought? If so, what impact does it have on drought severity?

Almost 60 percent of Oregon men 65 and over served in the military, second only to Alaska, an analysis of federal Census data shows. Nationally, about half the men in that age group have served. That would include all men born before 1948, men who served during peacetime or in wars.

This dissertation investigates the role of trade and trade frictions in shaping the internal structure of economies over time. The first chapter investigates how trade costs in generating the spatial distribution of wages and employment across regions, a classic question in economic geography. It make several contributions to the extensive theoretical and empirical literature on this question. First, building on the recent literature I show that for a wide class of economic geography models the positive implications of changes in trade costs are entirely captured by two reduced form elasticities: the elasticities of wages and employment with respect to market access. Second, I develop a novel instrumental variable approach to consistently estimating these elasticities from changes in observed wages and employment using exogenous changes in the incomes of each location’s trading partners. I implement this approach using data on U.S. MSAs between 1990 and 2007 and find that wages and employment are quite sensitive to differences in market access due to trade costs. Counterfactual simulations indicate that eliminating trade costs would result in large shifts in employment from the Northeast towards the South . . .

The United States labor force is projected to increase from 155.7 million in 2010 to 196.2 million in 2060, with the most rapid growth being in the Hispanic (153.6%) and nonHispanic Asian and Other labor forces (132.2%). The labor force is projected to become more diverse from 2010 to 2060 from 66.1 to 43.4% nonHispanic White, 11.4 to 12.5% nonHispanic Black, 15.2 to 30.6% Hispanic and from 7.3 to 13.5% nonHispanic Asian and Other. Because of lower levels of education for Hispanic and nonHispanic Black populations, without improvements in the level of education for such groups, the percentage of the labor force with higher levels of education and in managerial and professional positions will decrease resulting in decline in overall income levels (in 2010 constant dollars) from 2010 to 2060. If the education and workforce opportunities for nonHispanic Black and Hispanic workers are not improved future returns to labor in the United States will decrease.

We construct a structural model of household decision-making and matching and estimate the returns to schooling within marriage. We consider agents with idiosyn- cratic preferences for marriage that may be correlated with education, and we allow the education levels of spouses to interact in producing joint surplus. Using US data on marriages of individuals born between 1943 and 1972, we show that the preference for assortative matching by education has significantly increased for the white population, particularly for highly educated individuals; but not for blacks. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the ?marital college-plus premium? has increased for women but not for men.

The skill gap in geographical mobility is entirely driven by workers who report moving for a new job. A natural explanation lies in the large expected surplus accruing to skilled job matches. Just as large surpluses ease the frictions which impede job search in general, they also help overcome those frictions (specifically moving costs) which plague cross-city matching in particular. I reject the alternative hypothesis that mobility differences are driven by variation in the moving costs themselves, based on PSID evidence on self-reported willingness to move. Evidence on wage processes also supports my claims.

Historically, the U.S. government has passed legislation to mitigate discrimination and unequal access to education, employment, housing, and wealth for minorities. Federal programs such as affirmative action, school desegregation, and the Fair Housing Act were created in an effort to eliminate unequal access and allow minorities the opportunity to improve their socio-economic well-being. In this dissertation, I address a pair of important public policy questions. First, what defines “progress” in terms of how we as a society view policies such as affirmative action, which were intended to address the social, economic, and political equality of minorities compared to whites? Second, how do we measure progress? This analysis sets out to frame this debate by talking about outcomes. How much do people succeed when they come out the other end? Utilizing common measures of inequality, I examined the extent to which whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and all other races have become more alike in their incomes, education, and occupations using census data from 1980 to 2010. Seven metropolitan areas were selected based on differences in their racial composition, residential segregation, and social inequality. There will be two main contributions from this study. First, I will establish a common metric for measuring how equal minorities and whites have become. Second, I will assess the extent to which the income, education, and job profiles of people from different races have become more or less alike over a 30-year span. The research found significant differences between blacks, Hispanics and all other races compared to whites in the distributions of income, education, and jobs. Asians only differed significantly from whites on education. Race, time, and metropolitan region were significantly related to the variation in incomes, education, and job over three decades. Future research should examine these variables for gender, and across all major metropolitan areas. In the meantime, policy makers should begin to evaluate socio-economic outcomes of well-being to measure progress for groups that have faced historical discrimination.

This article revisits Michel Chevaliers work and discussions of tariffs. Chevalier shifted from Saint-Simonism to economic liberalism during his life in the 19th century. His influence was soon perceived in the political world and economic debates, mainly because of his discussion of tariffs as instruments of efficient transport policies. This work discusses Chevaliers thoughts on tariffs by revisiting his masterpiece, Le Cours dconomie Politique. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was conducted to test Chevaliers hypothesis on the inefficiency of French tariffs. This work showed that Chevaliers claims on French tariffs are not validated by DEA.

Once the backbone of U.S. immigration flows, European migration to the United States has steadily declined since 1960, with a small uptick following the end of communism in the 1990s. European immigrants numbered 4.8 million in 2014, out of a total immigrant population of 42.4 million. The share of Europeans among the total U.S. foreign-born population plunged from 75 percent in 1960 to 11 percent in 2014, as immigration from Latin America and Asia surged to new prominence after the Immigration Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas that gave preference to European migration. The motivations and demographic composition of immigrants have changed over the long history of European migration to the United States. The first wave, between the 16th and 18th centuries, largely consisted of Englishspeaking settlers from the British Isles seeking economic opportunity and religious freedom. Considering the high costs of crossing the Atlantic, Europeans arriving in this era were a mix of well-to-do individuals and indentured servants. From the 1840s to 1850s, the second wave witnessed . . .

Do compulsory schooling laws reduce crime? Previous evidence for the U.S. from the 1960s and 1970s suggests they do, primarily working through their effect on educational attainment to generate a causal impact on crime. In this paper, we consider whether more recent experience replicates this. There are two key findings. First, there is a strong and consistent negative effect on crime from stricter compulsory schooling laws. Second, there is a weaker and sometimes non-existent link between such laws and educational attainment. As a result, credible causal estimates of the education-crime relationship cannot in general be identified for the more recent period, though they can for some groups with lower education levels (in particular, for blacks).

Health care is expected to be a source of middle-skilled job opportunities in the future. This paper explores the education and training pathways to these occupations in allied health care, which generally require less than a bachelors degree for entry. Monitoring the growth of job opportunities and changes expected of health care workers is a challenge due to decentralized nature of data collection for allied health professions. The expectation, however, is that the roles of allied health workers will change as the health needs of the US population change and team-based delivery of care becomes more common. Middle-skilled health care workers will need to learn how to coordinate and manage care, work in teams, and help patients navigate the system. Federal and state programs fund health care job-specific training opportunities and job assistance programs, but often operate in unpredictable and uncertain funding environments. Community and technical colleges are particularly important players in educating the middle-skilled health workforce. Private for-profit institutions are emerging as alternative sources for education and training, although there is some concern about whether they provide comparable returns to education as not-for-profit institutions. Public-private partnerships have shown success in training a health care workforce with the skills desired by employers. Several barriers exist to building a strong middle-skilled allied health workforce capable of meeting the changing needs of the health care delivery system. Credentials and scope-of-practice laws, which keep patients safe, make it difficult for health care workers to move geographic locations or find flexibility in their careers. The pathway to a health care career is often not clear, especially in relatively new and emerging positions. Additionally, socioeconomic concerns may impact the attraction of workers into health care careers including the availability of jobs in desirable locations, low wages and low job quality, and high educational requirements. This study offers six recommendations for generating a strong case for middle-skilled health care jobs: 1. Improve data collection by filling in the gaps for non-licensed workers, bring together siloed datasets, and identify novel ways to track emerging job titles; 2. Increase the research and discussion around career pathways and ladders; 3. Increase interprofessional dialogue throughout the educational pipeline with employers; 4. Explore apprenticeship opportunities especially in rural areas where access to training may be a challenge; 5. Raise awareness of the allied health career opportunities early in the educational pathway; and 6. Develop a panel of experts to regularly monitor the pulse of the allied health workforce.

In this paper, we examine the effect of the EITC on the employment and income of single mothers with children. We provide the first comprehensive estimates of this central safety net policy on the full distribution of after-tax and transfer income. We use a quasi-experiment approach, using variation in generosity due to policy expansions across tax years and family sizes. Our results show that a policy-induced $1000 increase in the EITC leads to a 5.6 to 7.8 percentage point increase in employment and a 5.4 to 9.4 percentage point reduction in the share of families with after-tax and transfer income below 100% poverty. These results are robust to a rich set of controls and to whether we limit our analysis to the sharp increase in EITC due to the 1993 expansion or use the full period of policy expansion, back to the 1986 Tax Reform Act. We find that the income increasing effects of the EITC are concentrated between 75% and 150% of income-to-poverty with little effect at the lowest income levels (50% poverty and below) and at levels of 250% of poverty and higher. Importantly, by capturing the indirect effects of the credit on earnings, our results show that static calculations of the anti-poverty effects of the EITC (such as those released based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Short 2014) may be underestimated by as much as 50 percent.

The objective of this exploratory study is to assess the effects of within-host location determinants on the intensity of foreign investment as measured by employment in foreign-owned establishments. This statistical analysis is unique for its use of firm-level microdata from the National Establishment Time-series, which tracks business activity in U.S. establishments over time and isolates the universe of firms that were at one point foreign-owned from 2000 to 2011. Using a series of mixed models with time, industry, metro, and state fixed effects, this study finds that the most important drivers of employment intensity in foreign-owned establishments are firmlevel characteristics, vertical factors pertaining to labor supply and wages, local industrial specialization, business attraction subsidies, market capacity, and investor country characteristics. Measures accounting for business climate, human capital formation, and information-based assets did not generate substantial evidence of a relationship with the relative scale of investment in establishments, however more work is needed.

We downloaded race and ethnicity data from NHGIS at the block group level to be able to analyze the proximity of Chicago residents to bike lanes, based on their race or ethnicity.

This thesis analyzes the difference in income between college and high school graduates—referred to as the “college premium”— between 1971 and 2014. Data from the Current Population Survey are used to investigate trends, demographic factors, and several determinants of college premiums. The results presented here indicate that premiums, after falling for the first half of the 1970s, increased dramatically over the remainder of the period under study. In addition, premiums differed significantly among certain demographic groups. Special consideration is given to the impact of selection bias and the popularity of different fields of study, in order to show that the economic value of a college degree increased with college premiums.