This paper examines the relationship between individuals personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital. Focusing on bachelors degree recipients, we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling years select majors that earn higher wages, that have better employment prospects, and that more often lead to work in a related field. Much of this switching behavior can be considered a rational response to differences in particular majors labor market prospects during a recession. However, higher unemployment leads to other meaningful changes in the distribution of majors. Conditional on changes in lifetime expected earnings, recessions encourage women to enter male-dominated fields, and students of both genders pursue more difficult majors, such as STEM fields. These findings imply that the economic environment changes how students select majors, possibly by encouraging them to consider a broader range of possible degree fields. Finally, in the absence of this compensating behavior, we estimate that the average estimated costs of graduating in a recession would be roughly ten percent larger.

Before the fall of the Berlin wall, did the countries of Eastern Europe all have similar levels of fertility ? Did the official policies of gender equality and access to education result in comparable behaviours by level of education ? How did social constraints come into play ? Using census data from seven of these countries, Zuzanna Brzozowska addresses these original research questions by studying the fertility of cohorts who had their children mostly during the socialist period. She applies decomposition and standardization methods to analyse the factors affecting fertility trends, including the central role of rising educational levels. The countries in her study saw a decrease in cohort fertility and a gradual narrowing of fertility differences by level of education, although some, such as Romania, followed a more atypical pattern.

The pervasiveness of tenancy in the postbellum South had countervailing effects on marriage between African Americans. Tenancy placed severe constraints on African American womens ability to find independent agricultural work. Freedwomen confronted not only planters reluctance to contract directly with women but also whites refusal to sell land to African Americans. Marriage consequently became one of African American womens few viable routes into the agricultural labor market. We find that the more counties relied on tenant farming, the more common was marriage among their youngest and oldest African American residents. However, many freedwomen resented their subordinate status within tenant marriages. Thus, we find that tenancy contributed to union dissolution as well as union formation among freedpeople. Microdata tracing individuals marital transitions are consistent with these county-level results.

This study evaluates the direct and indirect economic impact of farmers market and the Certified South Carolina Grown Campaign as transmitted through farmers markets on the South Carolina Economy. We developed an IMPLAN-based SAM model of the South Carolina economy that takes into account the opportunity cost of money spent at farmers markets to estimate the net as opposed to gross impact of the campaign on the state economy. Our results indicate that the Certified South Carolina Grown Campaign (an example of a widely used buy local foods policies) does not make a major contribution to the state economy. Our findings suggest that policy makers need to augment buy local campaigns with other efforts, such as a value-added processing of regionally produced foods, if such policies are to serve as a means of generating economic growth.

After nearly a century of decline, work activity among older people began to increase in the 1980s in response to a variety of factors. The question is whether the impacts of those factors have played themselves out in recent years or whether the trend toward working longer has continued. Since working longer is the key to a secure retirement, the labor force activity of people in their 50s and 60s is a crucial issue. This brief proceeds in four steps. The first section describes the turnaround in labor force activity that began in the 1980s, within the context of the long-run decline in the labor force participation of men. The second section describes the factors responsible for that turnaround. The third section looks at the labor force participation rates of men and women for four years 1963, 1983, 2003, and 2013 showing recent workforce activity significantly above the low point in the 1980s. The fourth constructs, for men and women, average retirement ages the age when 50 percent of the population is out of the labor force. Todays average retirement ages of 64 for men and 62 for women are just about where they were a decade ago, suggesting that some of the factors spurring the turnaround since the 1980s may have exhausted themselves. The final section concludes that, given the importance of working longer for retirement security, a major educational initiative may be warranted to help convince individuals of the benefits.

We use census micro data aggregated at the state level data for US co-horts born between 1915 and 1939 to test the impact of secondary and tertiary schooling in the US at the state-cohort level on R&D and TFP growth across industries in 1970. We instrument our measures of schooling by using the variation in compulsory schooling laws and differences in mobilization rates in WWII, which we relate to the education benefits provided by the GI Bill Act (1944). This novel instrument provides a clean source of variation in the costs of attending college. Two-stage least squared regressions find no effect of the share of population with secondary schooling on outcomes such as n R&D per worker or TFP growth. On the other hand, the share of population with ter-tiary education has a significant effect on both R&D per worker or TFP growth.

Some see the regional equity perspective as placing undue emphasis on intersectoral cooperation and the complementarity between growth and equity. Is regional equity a departure from an Advocacy Planning paradigm in which values are central, justice is key, and decision making is contentious? We try to reconcile the perspectives and use case studies of Fresno and San Antonio to explore when conflict yields new alliances and when it produces stalemate. We conclude with lessons for advocacy planners operating at the regional scale in which the lack of government and need for governance necessitate new skills of collaboration, (principled) conflict, and community building.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model that features the decisions of health care consumption, health insurance take-up, Disability Insurance (DI) claims to evaluate the long-term effects of health care reforms. The model suggests that the combination of insurance subsidies, an individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion reduces the uninsured rate and DI inflows. Reduced cost-sharing of individual insurance, however, raises the uninsured rate and individual insurance premiums. Behavioral changes in insurance take-up and health care consumption explain 78 percent of the premium increase associated with reduced cost-sharing. DI affects the individual insurance market by inducing market exits of individuals with either high or low demand for health care

Modernization theory predicts that rising education should increase assortative mating by education and decrease sorting by race. Recent research suggests that effects of educational expansion depend on contextual factors, such as economic development. Using log-linear and log-multiplicative models of male household heads ages 36 to 75 in the 1940 U.S. census datathe first U.S. census with educational attainment informationI investigate how educational assortative mating changed with one instance of educational expansion: early U.S. compulsory school attendance laws. To improve on existing research and distinguish effects of expansion from changes due to particular years or cohorts, I capitalize on state variation in the timing of these compulsory laws (ranging from 1852 to 1918). Aggregate results suggest that compulsory laws had minimal impact on assortative mating. However, separate analyses by region (and supplemental analyses by race) reveal that assortative mating by education decreased with the laws in the South but increased in the North. Whether due to economic, legal, political, or other differences, results suggest that the implications of educational expansion for marital sorting depend on context. Contemporary implications are discussed in light of President Obamas 2012 suggested extension of compulsory schooling to age 18.

This paper establishes that the rise in the income share of information and communication technology accounts for half of the decline in labor income share in the United States. This decline can be decomposed into a sharp decline in the income share of “routine” labor—which is relatively more prone to automation—and a milder rise in the non-routine share. Quantitatively, this decomposition suggests large effects of information and communication technology on the income distribution within labor, but only . . .

In criminal careers research, reasons why offenders stop offending are of importance. This study tests Sampson and Laubs age-graded theory of informal social control using a nationally representative contemporaneous sample and explores two possible turning points in the life course of individuals that could lead to desistance: marriage and parenthood. Racial and ethnic differences in the impact of these social bonds are also analyzed. In mixed support of the theory, marriage is found to lead to changes in levels of offending among whites and Hispanics but not blacks. Parenthood leads to decreases in offending among whites but not blacks or Hispanics. These results suggest possible modifications are needed to Sampson and Laubs theory. A discussion of these findings is presented.

During the US Industrial Revolution, educational expansion may have created skilled jobs through innovation and skill upgrading or reduced skilled jobs by mechanizing production. Such arguments contradict classic sociological work that treats education as a sorting mechanism, allocating individuals to fixed occupations. I capitalize on state differences in the timing of compulsory school attendance laws to ask whether raising the minimum level of schooling: (1) increased school attendance rate; or (2) shifted state occupational distributions away from agricultural toward skilled and non-manual occupation categories. Using state-level panel data constructed from 1850-1930 censuses and state-year fixed effects models, I find that compulsory laws significantly increased school attendance rates, particularly among lower-class children, and shifted the categorical distribution toward skilled and non-manual occupations. Thus, rather than deskilling through mechanization, raising the minimum level of education seems to have created skilled jobs and raised the occupational distribution through skill-biased technological change. Results suggest that education was not merely a sorting mechanism, supporting the importance of education as an institution even around the turn of the century.

Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, such as education, urban location, and regional and demographic differences, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States for the period 20082010. Gay men are more likely to be in female-majority occupations than are heterosexual men, and lesbians are more represented in male-majority occupations than are heterosexual women, but even after accounting for this tendency, common to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity to concentrate in occupations that provide task independence or require social perceptiveness, or both. This study offers a theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.

This study examines changes in patterns of work, poverty, and the relationship between work and poverty between 2005 and 2013. It also explores the implications of heterogeneous work-poverty dynamics for the distribution of poverty risk across race and sex groups. Our analyses address three specific objectives. First, we track changes in work and poverty status among householders during the 2005 to 2013 period. Second, we use a regression-based decomposition approach to quantify how shifts in hours and weeks worked among householders contributed to changes in poverty between 2005 and 2013. Third, we track race- and sex-based differences in work-poverty dynamics during this period. We specifically quantify how changes in work patterns among particular race- and sex- groups affected the distribution of poverty risk between groups. Our results demonstrate that changing patterns of work had a large, but not exclusive effect on poverty rates during the recession. In contrast, changes in work explain very little of post- recession poverty dynamics. We also find evidence of systematic variation in work- poverty dynamics between race and sex group. Our findings show a male and minority disadvantage during the recession and uniquely persistent disadvantages among non- Hispanic black males in the post-recession period.

During the Great Recession in the US, there were distinct housing and labor markets that were particularly hard hit. This was primarily due to the fact that the housing industry had fueled much of the recent economic growth. This paper takes advantage of the shock to the construction industry in order to investigate the responses of Latino immigrants in metropolitan areas that were most heavily concentrated with Latino immigrants in the construction industry. While declines in construction jobs did predict moving out of a metropolitan area, decline in the overall job market had a larger impact on mobility. The shifts in employment and the dramatic changes in housing costs, following the economic boom, provide a unique opportunity to assess the impact of housing affordability on the decision to move. The analysis shows that affordability based upon single and dual incomes differs mainly in degree. Areas with high unaffordability for two incomes are less likely to have in-migration. The measure created helps to highlight the changes in affordability to households if the make-up of households remained constant through the years.

From 1961 to 2007, U.S. aggregate hours worked increased and the labor wedgemeasured as the discrepancy between a representative households marginal rate of substitution and the marginal product of labordeclined substantially. The labor wedge is negatively related to hours and is often attributed to labor income taxes. However, U.S. labor income taxes increased since 1961. We examine a model with gender and marital status heterogeneity which accounts for the trends in the U.S. hours and the labor wedge. Apart from taxes, the models labor wedge reflects non-distortionary cross-sectional differences in households hours worked and productivity. We provide evidence that household heterogeneity is important for long-run changes in labor wedges and hours in other OECD economies.

We use state-level panel data on life insurance in force in the United Statesand nd that a $1 increase in government debt, at either the state or federallevel is associated with a $0.96 increase in the face value of the averagelife insurance holdings per capita for a household in the average state. Thisincrease represents an intention to save that would almost completely offsetthe government debt in specic states of the world (i.e., if the insured dies).Because this state of the world is rare, the immediate increase in actualsavings is only about $0.03, the cost of the additional insurance. We nd, inaddition, that this response occurs mainly on the intensive margin, meaningthat the size of the average life insurance policy increases when governmentdebt increases. Along the extensive margin, we nd the number of policiesin force falls slightly with federal debt, and rises slightly with state debtincreases. The results show altruistic planning in response to changes ingovernment debt that are consistent with Ricardian Equivalence and thelong-run neutrality of government debt.

This paper investigates costs and benefits of calling back expatriates of a developing country. I employ a life cycle model with a rich and poor country with endogenous migration and return migration. Cost of bringing back a worker is the compensation that is paid to him while the benefit is the increased output because of his higher skill level and positive externalities, which are empirically estimated, from him resulting in higher skill levels for local workers. Results show that welfare gains are maximized when workers with skill levels 1.28 standard deviations above the domestic mean skill level are called back.

This paper theorizes and provides evidence for the segregation of men into clustered occupations and women into dispersed occupations in advance of marriage and in anticipation of future colocation problems. Using the Decennial Census, and controlling for occupational characteristics, I find evidence of this general pattern of segregation, and also find that the minority of the highly educated men and women who depart from this equilibrium experience delayed marriage, higher divorce, and lower earnings. Results are consistent with the theory that marriage and mobility expectations foment a self-fulfilling pattern of occupational segregation with individual departures deterred by earnings and marriage penalties.

Over the past eight decades, millions of people have been surveyed on their political opinions. Until recently, however, polls rarely included enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as IRT models at the individual level, preventing scholars from taking full advantage of historical survey data. To address this problem, we develop a Bayesian group-level IRT approach that models latent traits at the level of demographic and/or geographic groups rather than individuals. We use a hierarchical model to borrow strength cross-sectionally and dynamic linear models to do so across time. The group-level estimates can be weighted to generate estimates for geographic units. This framework opens up vast new areas of research on historical public opinion, especially at the subnational level. We illustrate this potential by estimating the average policy liberalism of citizens in each U.S. state in each year between 1972 and 2012.