Each month, The Hamilton Project calculates Americas jobs gap, or the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while accounting for changes in the population. As of the end of February 2015, our nation faces a jobs gap of 4.0 million jobs.

How will the inow of foreign computer scientists to U.S. labour market aect wages, employment, educational and occupational choices of native skilled workers? This paper structurally estimates a dynamic discrete choice model using data from U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) and American Community Survey (ACS) over two decades (1994-2014). The structural estimation framework that I develop fully imposes the restrictions of optimization theory and permits an investigation of whether such a theoretically restricted model can succeed in quantitatively tting the observed employment and wage data patterns. I generalize the static Roy model to a dynamic general equilibrium setting where natives make choices based on their comparative advantages. Using suciently exible sector production functions, I nd skilled immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes. Substitution elasticities vary across occupations, 5.73 for computer science (CS) sector and 1.97 for other science technology engineering mathematics (STEM) sector. The covariance matrix of unobservable heterogeneity implies mild positive selection of natives in both sectors. In the counterfactual simulation, when restricting the number of foreign computer scientists to its pre-internet booming level, I nd a smaller crowding-out eect than previous literature.

This paper documents and explains the striking reversal of fortune of urban America from 2000 to 2010. We show that almost all large American cities have experienced large increases in young professionals near their Central Business Districts over the last decade. We assemble a rich database at a fine spatial scale to test a number of competing hypotheses explaining this recent trend. We first estimate a residential choice model to assess the relative roles of changing amenities, job locations, and housing prices, as well as changing attitudes regarding these factors, in drawing the young and college-educated downtown. We find that diverging preferences for consumption amenities - such as retail, entertainment, and service establishments - explain the diverging location decisions of the young and college-educated relative to their non-college-educated peers and their older college- educated counterparts. In complementary analyses, our data rejects other hypotheses, such as changes in home ownership rates or changes in household formation rates due to delayed marriage and childbirth. These stark new trends within cities have important implications for the future of America’s downtowns, whose current revival does not appear to be driven by temporary trends.

The transportation sector accounts for 38 percent of Californias greenhouse gas emissions, the largest source of pollution in the state. Four out of 10 Californians live close to a freeway or busy road. As a result, Californians face an increased risk of asthma, cancer and other pollution-related health hazards. There are now twice as many people dying from trafficrelated pollution as from traffic related accidents. Californians spend $70 billion on gasoline and diesel annually $40 billion of which leaves the state in payments to oil companies and foreign oil-producing countries. These oil companies have a chokehold on our democracy. They use deceptive tactics and spend billions of dollars lobbying policymakers to defeat clean energy initiatives. The states million electric vehicles (EV) goal can help us reduce carbon emissions, clean up the roads, and redirect investments back into our economy. By growing the electric car market, we can help keep investments in the state, stimulating the economy and insulating family budgets from gas price spikes. Money spent charging electric vehicles stays in Californias economy, creating 16 times more jobs than money spent on gasoline.

A key feature of the U.S. labor market since 1980 is the substantial growth of the employment in high skill occupations and low skill manual-service occupations at the expense of the middleskill occupations, and there is a substantial literature attributing this change to technological change. However, since 1999, the employment growth of workers in high skill occupations has decelerated markedly despite continued rapid growth in technology. This paper documents this novel trend in the U.S. labor market and examines the role of technological change in explaining this phenomenon. I hypothesize that technological advancements have expanded what computers can do and, as a result, changed the relationship between technology adoption and labor demand. In this new paradigm, workers in high skill occupations face a double-edged sword of new technology adoption as in earlier periods, some of the tasks performed primarily by workers remain as complements to computerization, while others are now substitutes as a result of the increasing capabilities of technology. This change has depressed the labor demand growth for high skill jobs. I test this hypothesis using the task-based framework developed by Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) and later enriched by Acemoglu and Autor (2011), combined with data from the Current Population Survey and the Online Occupational Network Survey (O*NET). I find evidence for this changed relationship between technology adoption and demand for labor in highly skilled occupations; these changes in labor demand for tasks driven by technological adoption can explain a substantial portion of the stagnancy in labor demand growth for high skill occupation in the 2000s.

Changing jobs after age 50 has become increasingly common. To assess the employment opportunities available to these job-changers, this study examines how the range of occupations in which they find jobs narrows as they age and whether this pattern differs by socioeconomic status (SES), using education as a proxy. The results indicate that workers in their early 50s who change jobs find employment in a reasonably similar set of occupations as do prime-age workers but that the opportunities increasingly narrow as they enter their late 50s and early 60s. These results vary by educational attainment. Interestingly, while job opportunities narrow as workers age, the number of opportunities available to older workers at any given age has improved significantly between the late 1990s and early 2010s though the gains have gone primarily to better-educated older workers. Consistent with previous research, the study also finds: 1) employer policies that emphasize employee training, respect for seniority, and hiring from within create barriers to the hiring of older job-seekers; 2) older workers are less likely to be hired in jobs requiring strong cognitive skills; but 3) physical demands and adverse working conditions are not serious impediments.

In response to increasing income inequality, many private educational institutions have adapted new approaches to financial aid, tuition, and campus investment. Implications of this changing strategy include the rise of an ‘educational arms race’—in which institutions compete to enroll the best (and, at times, wealthiest) students by funding non-academic services (e.g. luxury dorms)—and the risk of relying on such policies to establish socioeconomic diversity. My analysis examines the consequences and implications of rising income inequality on higher education finances and supply-side decisions. In particular, I assess the changes instituted by private, non-parochial high schools, which have policies that closely resemble those of their post-secondary counterparts, when faced with varying levels of local inequality. Using data from the National Association of Independent Schools, and standard methods for addressing pooled, cross-sectional, time series data, I find that income inequality does not have significant effects on financial aid policies or tuition. However, rising inequality does appear to significantly increase the value of endowments (and assumed endowment spending) in these schools.

Nieto (2009) asserts, "Educational researchers, teachers, and policy makers have all had their say about what causes school achievement or failure" (p. 11). Students, however, are rarely involved in the conversation, and the voices of students from disempowered groups and communities are often not heard. Given the number of problems facing African American males in PreK-12 schools, research must shed light on their day to day realities in schools in an effort to challenge mainstream accounts of their experiences. Knowing several of the issues concerning the schooling of Black males typically begin in elementary school (Ferguson, 2001; Kunjufu, 2004), I sought to capture the salient schooling experiences from five pre-adolescent Black male students who have been labeled as "at-risk" by their school using a qualitative, case study methodology. Drawing on data derived from document analysis, as well as individual and focus group interviews, this study's findings reveal that many factors, such as their interactions with teachers and various school policies, influenced the students to disengage and/or devalue school.

Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails are less likely to receive a response if signed by a black-sounding name compared to a white-sounding name. Given a response rate of 72% for white senders, emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer. We also find that responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests demonstrate that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race.

Relatively little is known about what determines whether a heterogeneous population ends up in a cooperative or divisive situation. This paper proposes a theoretical model to understand what social structures arise in heterogeneous populations. Individuals face a trade-off between cultural and economic incentives: an individual prefers to maintain his cultural practices, but doing so can inhibit interaction and economic exchange with those who adopt different practices. We find that a small minority group will adopt majority cultural practices and integrate. In contrast, minority groups above a certain critical mass, may retain diverse practices and may also segregate from the majority. The size of this critical mass depends on the cultural distance between groups, the importance of culture in day to day life, and the costs of forming a social tie. We test these predictions using data on migrants to the United States in the era of mass migration, and find support for the existence of a critical mass of migrants above which social structure in heterogeneous populations changes discretely towards cultural distinction and segregation.

This dissertation studies determinants of the U.S. labor market structure and human capital development, with a focus on technological change. A key feature of the U.S. labor market since 1980 is the substantial growth of the employment in high skill occupations and there is a substantial literature attributing this change to technological change. However, since 1999, the employment growth of high skill occupations has decelerated markedly despite continued rapid growth in technology. The first essay documents this novel trend and examines the role of technological change in explaining this phenomenon. It shows that technological advancements since the late 1990s, such as the onset of Internet, have expanded what computers can do and become substitutes for high skill occupations. This change can explain a substantial portion of the stagnancy in employment growth for high skill occupation in the 2000s. The second essay examines the role of computer adoption in explaining the differences in the change of gender wage gap between 1980 and 2000 across cities in the United States. It uses the city-level routine task intensity in 1980 to predict the subsequent increase in computer adoption and shows that cities with one percent greater increase in computer adoption experienced a 0.7 percent more decrease in the change of vii male-female wage ratio between 1980 and 2000. Computerization explains about 50 percent of the decline in the male-female wage gap between 1980 and 2000. The third essay studies the causal effect of maternal education on the gender gap in childrens non-cognitive skills. It shows that maternal education reduces boys disadvantage in non-cognitive behaviors relative to girls at age 7. To explain the mechanism of this effect, it provides suggestive evidence that better educated mothers spend more time going outings with boys while reading to girls at age 7, and going outings could be more closely related to non-cognitive development than reading.

Migration to Europe is a well-established phenomenon, although the intensity, patterns, and composition of migration flows have varied greatly over time and across European countries. This chapter focuses on the pendular migration of the older first-generation migrants in Europe who periodically travel back and forth between their host and home countries. It then challenges few of them by providing a review of the existing literature, together with results from the own work. Pendular migration is commonly considered in public and policy debates as a temporary phenomenon. No strong empirical evidence was found either for the second common belief that pendular migration is a second-best option. Governments, health care providers, and public agencies can play an important role in ensuring a "good old age" for pendular migrants, whose number is likely to increase in the future. During the economic boom after World War II, most migration was the product of a spontaneous decision in response to labor demand.

This paper investigates the impact of mothers’ earnings on birth weight and gestational age of infants in the U.S. It also analyzes the impact of earnings on mothers’ consumption of prenatal medical care, and their propensity to smoke and drink during pregnancy. The paper uses census division-year-specific skill-biased technology shocks as an instrument for mothers’ earnings and employs a two-sample instrumental variables strategy. About 14 million records of births between 1989 and 2004 are used from the Natality Detail files along with the CPS Annual Demographic Files from the same period. The results reveal that an increase in weekly earnings prompts an increase in prenatal care of low-skill mothers (those who have at most a high school degree) who are not likely to be on Medicaid, and that earnings have a small positive impact on birth weight and gestational age of the newborns of these mothers. Specifically, if a mother's earnings double, this produces a weight gain of the newborn by about 100g and an increase in gestational age by 0.7 weeks. An increase in earnings does not influence the health of newborns of high-skill mothers (those with at least some college education). Variations in earnings have no impact on birth weight for mothers who are likely to be on Medicaid.

Every cultural society at every time is under the influence of its health and diseases. Diseases play a vital role in people lives, regarding how and by whom they are treated as in what way they affect social institutions. Diseases are historically, anthropologically and culturally relevant and can give important informations about the way of living in the societies of the world. This BA assignment is an experimental work with a data base that has been in work under the arrangement of the State Archive in Iceland and dr. Ólöf Garðarsdóttir, historian. This is a part of a project called North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP), which is collaborate work with Canada, Great-Britain, Iceland, Norway and U.S.A. This project aims to make all informations from existing census from those participating countries available as electric data and in that way create an accessible data base with informations about more than 90 million people. The assignment is a research based on source documents, which documents are gained from the work with NAPP. It is based on census in Iceland from the 19th century – to be exact, the census from 1880 in West part of Iceland - where illnesses were regularly noted in a specific remark box. The reason this part of the country and this exact year was selected lies in the fact that the author worked herself with the typing for the data base and took responsibility for filling in informations from this specific part of cencus. The remark about mental illness gave people a public state as a patient, bound in census. Individuals that had a note in the census about some mental illnesses in the West part of Iceland in the year 1880 were the major subjects. The notes were for example mentally ill (geðveikur), idiot (fábjáni), insane (vitskertur) or crazy (vitstola) and notes like these was what indicated their situation, both in the home and as an Icelandic citizen at that time. Meaning of those concepts has changed through time, for example the concept idiot (fábjáni) refers now to someone who is behaving in a childish on un-orthodox way, without being mentally ill. While working with these census, those concepts struck the author, for they sounded inappropriate. In the census of 1880 in the West part of Iceland, 54 individuals had some notifications about their healt, physically and mentally. Seventeen individuals of those 54 were listed with some mental illness – eleven women and six men. They lived at different kind of homes, with different families and their official status, according to the census varied also. The results turned out to have a gender biased conditions for those individuals, especially regarding their home. Four of five men lived with their families and only one woman of eleven. Men lived with their relatives but women were placed with strangers. Some of those women were paupers, others given to foster families, still other were labourers. Because of the poverty in Iceland in the 18th century all families couldn´t provide their sick relatives. People had to seek help and assistance from the state or the province and sometimes that help included dissolving families. The ratio of paupers in the year 1870 was 12% in Iceland. One man of those five mentally ill in the West part of Iceland 1880 was registerd as a pauper and five of the eleven women. The discourse at this time about gender roles was quite different from our times and according to the Icelandic laws in the 19th century, the government of the house belonged to men, they were the face and in control of the family, women were "behind the scenes“, taking care of the children and food. The law had great influence on the discourse of gender roles and reflects the conditions of the mentally ill, in gender comparison. For example women in Iceland didn´t get eligibility to vote equal to men until 1920. Age is also a possible relevant variable regarding those results, because at that time women got older than men. According to the sources women with mental illness in the West part of Iceland were relatively older than the men – no man was above 59 years old but the women were 3 that were older than 59, oldest one 80 years old. Three boys were from the age of 1 to 14, two women. Those reflects the way in which age differs as well amongst those people. In that way it is established that gender is not the only variable affecting the difference in the conditions for those mentally ill individuals, but other as well.

This study explores the question of structural change and inclusive development in South Africa and Brazil. Using Census data from the two countries, the analysis combines a household level multidimensional indicator of well-being with the applications of growth incidence curves and a sectoral decomposition of change to provide insight into the relationship between the place of households in the economy as reflected by employment sector and geographical location, and the extent to which the residents of those households are sharing in the benefits from growth. The results here suggest that current patterns are in some ways contradictory to received models of development and distribution, and, further, that redistribution alone is insufficient in creating inclusive development if the patterns of structural change do not sufficiently involve people in the processes of growth, particularly through accessible and remunerative employment.

Background Educational disparities in U.S. adult mortality are large and have widened across birth cohorts. We consider three policy relevant scenarios and estimate the mortality attributable to: (1) individuals having less than a high school degree rather than a high school degree, (2) individuals having some college rather than a baccalaureate degree, and (3) individuals having anything less than a baccalaureate degree rather than a baccalaureate degree, using educational disparities specific to the 1925, 1935, and 1945 cohorts. Methods We use the National Health Interview Survey data (1986-2004) linked to prospective mortality through 2006 (N=1,008,949), and discrete-time survival models, to estimate education- and cohort-specific mortality rates. We use those mortality rates and data on the 2010 U.S. population from the American Community Survey, to calculate annual attributable mortality estimates. Results If adults aged 25-85 in the 2010 U.S. population experienced the educational disparities in mortality observed in the 1945 cohort, 145,243 deaths could be attributed to individuals having less than a high school degree rather than a high school degree, 110,068 deaths could be attributed to individuals having some college rather than a baccalaureate degree, and 554,525 deaths could be attributed to individuals having anything less than a baccalaureate degree rather than a baccalaureate degree. Widening educational disparities between the 1925 and 1945 cohorts result in a doubling of attributable mortality. Mortality attributable to having less than a high school degree is proportionally similar among women and men and among non-Hispanic blacks and whites, and is greater for cardiovascular disease than for cancer. Conclusions Mortality attributable to low education is comparable in magnitude to mortality attributable to individuals being current rather than former smokers. Existing research suggests that a substantial part of the association between education and mortality is causal. Thus, policies that increase education could significantly reduce adult mortality.

On 50th Anniversary of The Moynihan Report, Family Structure is *Still* Not the Problem. Economic and social changes since the 1965 dispute idea that family change has caused poverty and inequality or that getting people married would solve it.

This paper studies the impact of legal differences in state-level employment nondiscrimination acts (ENDAs) for gay men on their labor market outcomes. I focus on what effect legal differences have on cohabiting gay men. Using a differences-in-differences approach, the results show that ENDAs increased the wages of gay men when enacted. When treating all laws as the same, ENDAs increase hourly wages by 3.4% and have no effect on employment. When we control for legal differences between laws, the wage increase of ENDAs is shown to be 5.7% in states with damages and not statistically significant in states without damages. ENDAs increase employment by 1.4% in states that do not allow plaintiffs to recoup attorney's fees. In states with the attorney's fees provision, employment declines by 2.7%. Caps on damages result in positive employment growth for gay men. There are significant differences in the effect of ENDAs across demographic groups and geographies.

The purpose of this study is to model and determine significant predictors of tornado death index values, and to investigate these significant predictors and what makes people vulnerable to tornado fatalities through expert interviews. This study also provides an understanding of the study participant’s perceptions of their county’s vulnerability to tornado fatality and demonstrates a true integration of methods and fields by studying geographic, meteorological, and sociological phenomena by use of quantitative and qualitative methods. The study consists of two parts: 1) A quantitative exploration of variables hypothesized to predict Tornado Death Index (TDI) values, 2) A qualitative investigation to further understand what leads to higher tornado fatalities. For the quantitative portion of the study descriptive statistics and multiple linear regressions were run on TDI values. It was predicted that several tornado characteristic, demographic, housing type and characteristic, religious, region, rural vs. urban, and potential casualty variables were significant predictors of TDI values. For the qualitative portion of the study a highest order emergency manager was interviewed, coding was done and themes, sub-themes, and categories emerged, and quotes that demonstrated the themes and categories were examined. Overall, significant predictor variables of TDI are tornado frequency, tornado width, ages 35-44, percent born in the Northeast, percent rural housing units, and potential casualties. As tornado width, and percent of rural housing units increases TDI increases (positive relationship), whereas as tornado frequency, ages 35-44, being born in the Northeast, and potential casualty increases TDI decreases (negative relationship). In the interview, age, cultural beliefs, and mobility challenges were found to increase risk to tornado fatality. It was also suggested that differences in tornados may exist between the Midwest and the South in terms of tornado development, duration, and warning lead-times. Finally, vulnerability can be reduced by educating the public, and reaching out to vulnerable populations and their caregivers.

This paper studies how immigrant parents value education for their children in the United States when making residential decisions. Parent valuation of education is examined through the differential effects of school quality on the residential location choices of households with and without children. The analysis relies on data from the 2000 Census and focuses on the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. The results suggest that immigrant parents place a positive weight on school quality when choosing residences. The weight assigned to school is positively associated with household income and householder’s education. The paper further explores variation across immigrants to get at the potential economic mechanisms for differential valuation of school quality. Number of school-aged children in the household, selective migration, and potential returns to education may explain variation in the emphasis immigrant parents place on school quality in residential location choices.