The Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) has had dramatic impacts on reducing the numbers of uninsured Americans. However, it explicitly left out one important segment of the population with a noticeable lack of access to health insurance and medical care: unauthorized immigrants. While the politics of that decision were understandable, the consequences are problematic in states like California where an important share of the population (roughly seven percent) is undocumented and where an even larger share of children (nearly a fifth) have at least one undocumented parent. Insurance matters, although the connection to health is sometimes tenuous and unclear. Still, most Americans would rather be with than without – and one clear connection that does promote individual well-being is the way in which medical insurance helps to reduce financial risk . . . .

Marquée par la mise en place et par le développement graduel d’importantes transformations de type socioéconomique et démographique, la deuxième moitié du 19e siècle constitue le scénario à partir duquel nous analysons et comparons le phénomène de la mobilité sociale intergénérationnelle au Québec et en Ontario, plus précisément dans la période 1852-1881. Grâce à la disponibilité de bases de microdonnées censitaires largement représentatives de la population qui habitait dans chacune de ces deux provinces en 1852 et en 1881 ainsi qu’au développement récent d’une technique de jumelage automatique, nous avons réussi à obtenir un échantillon de 4226 individus jumelés entre les recensements canadiens de 1852 et de 1881. Ces individus sont les garçons âgés de 0 à 15 ans en 1852, qui habitaient majoritairement en milieu rural au Québec ou en Ontario et qui se trouvent dans l’échantillon de 20% du recensement canadien de 1852. Cet échantillon jumelé nous a permis d’observer les caractéristiques de la famille d’origine de ces garçons en 1852 – par exemple, le statut socioprofessionnel du père et la fréquentation scolaire – ainsi que leur propre statut socioprofessionnel (en tant qu’adultes) en 1881. Malgré certains défis posés par la disponibilité et le type de données ainsi que par la procédure de jumelage, cet échantillon illustre bien les changements majeurs qui ont eu lieu durant la période étudiée dans le marché du travail, soit le déclin du groupe des cultivateurs au profit des travailleurs non-manuels et des travailleurs manuels (surtout les qualifiés). De plus, cet échantillon nous a permis d’identifier que malgré le déclin du groupe des cultivateurs entre les pères (en 1852) et les fils (en 1881), l’agriculture aurait continué à être importante durant cette période et aurait même été ouverte à des individus ayant des origines socioprofessionnelles ou socioéconomiques différentes, c'est-à-dire, à des fils de non-cultivateurs. Cette importance soutenue et cette ouverture de l’agriculture semble avoir été plus importante en Ontario qu’au Québec, ce qui pourrait être associé aux différences entre les provinces en ce qui a trait aux caractéristiques et au développement du secteur agricole entre 1852 et 1881.

This paper studies the causal effect of local access to finance on employment growth in service occupations. Using changes in liquor laws as exogenous shifts in labor-intensive economic opportunities, I document that employment growth in service occupations increases most in areas with high local access to finance. The growth comes from young businesses, suggesting a stronger effect of local financing on younger firms. I explore the implications of these findings in the aggregate US labor market. The results show that local finance is correlated with employment growth in low skill service occupations, which has reshaped the distribution of employment growth in recent decades.

During the 1930s Franklin Roosevelts New Deal created a wide range of spending and loan programs. Brief descriptions are provided for the programs created by the New Deal and loan and spending programs that were in place before the New Deal. I worked with others to create a panel data set with estimates of the spending and lending by the programs each year from 1930 through 1940. The data aggregated to broad categories are reported here and the methods and sources used to construct the estimates of the spending and lending for the categories are discussed.

Prior studies have observed a high prevalence of psychosocial distress, including depression, inpatients with voice problems. However, these studies have largely been performed in care-seeking patients identified in terti-ary care voice clinics. The objective of this study was to examine the association between depression and voice problems in the U.S. population. hese findings indicate that the co-occurrence of voice problems and depressive symptoms is observed inthe general population, not only in care-seeking patients, and that depressive symptoms may influence reported likelihood ofreceiving voice treatment and effectiveness. This suggests that voice care providers should take mental health symptoms intoaccount when treating patients, and also indicates a need for further investigation

Large low-skilled immigration flows influence both the distribution of local school resources and also local relative wages, which exert counterbalancing pressures on the local return to schooling. I use the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) and U.S. Census data to show that low-skilled immigration to an area induces local natives to improve their performance in school, attain more years of schooling, and take jobs that involve communication-intensive tasks for which they (native English speakers) have a comparative advantage. These results point out mechanisms that mitigate the potentially negative effect of immigration on natives' wages.

We use the 2003-2012 American Time Use Survey to examine how mothers leisure varies by marital status. We find that never-married mothers have more total leisure time than married mothers, but the quality of leisure is poorer. The majority of never married mothers leisure time is passive and socially isolatedactivities with few social, health, or cognitive benefits. We also find that race-ethnicity moderates the effect of relationship status on time spent in social and active leisure. Unpartnered and black mothers spend the most time in socially isolated leisure, such as time spent alone watching television. Our results strongly suggest that types of leisure differentiate mothers experience of time in ways related to other dimensions of inequality, such as economic, health, and social capital disparities.

This thesis studies the effects of the conformity motive and temptation on individual decision-making. Social dissonance is the discomfort of choosing an action different from what others have chosen. A game-theoretical framework is used to study situations where social dissonance influences behavior or expression of opinions. Each individual may have different intrinsic preferences but is affected by the same “institution” which is modeled by a social dissonance function that evaluates the negative effect of disagreement with others. Equilibria of social dissonance games have properties such as monotonicity of choices with respect to intrinsic preferences, and monotone comparative statics with respect to changes in intrinsic preferences and institutions. “Impulse and Temptation” acknowledges that consumers who purchase larger packages of certain goods are tempted to consume more than originally needed. The analysis attempts to understand policies that prohibit the purchase of smaller packages, exploring issues of consumer naivete about temptation and addiction. It makes little sense to restrict access to small packages in a one-period model with or without consumer naivete, but it is possible that in a multi-period setting, defense against addiction is a valid reason for prohibiting sale of small packages of tempting goods.

This paper investigates the eects of a large temporary shock on the agglomeration of economic activity. Using variation in the potential damage intensity of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake across counties in the American West, we nd that the earthquake persistently decreased various measures of economic activity, such as population size and total wage expenditures. The main reason for this long-lasting eect is that the earthquake changed the location choice of migrants, who decided to settle in less aected areas of the American West. Our ndings suggest that a large temporary shock can have a persistent eect on the location of economic activity.

Many activists and writers have ascribed continuing racial segregation in American schools to a failure of will. In this view, forced transfers of students and other aggressive judicially mandated policies would lead to greater equality in education if only legislators and judges had the will to continue trying to make school districts conform to plans for redesigning schools and even American society. Controls and Choices: The Educational Marketplace and the Failure of School Desegregation provides a detailed examination of the nature of the educational marketplace, supported by historical evidence, to argue that school desegregation failed because it involved monopolistic efforts at redistributing opportunities. These efforts were fundamentally at odds with the self-interest of the families who had the greatest ability to make choices in the educational marketplace. The authors use the concept of the educational marketplace to explain how market-based attempts at school reform, notably vouchers and charter schools, have grown out of the failure of desegregation and remain hampered by lack of recognition of how the schools really function as markets.

For good reason, it is often said the United States is a nation of immigrants. Almost every person in the United States is descended from someone who arrived from another country. This article discusses immigration to the United States from colonial times to the present. The focus is on individuals who paid their own way, rather than slaves and indentured servants. Various issues concerning immigration are discussed: (1) the basic data sources available, (2) the variation in the volume over time, (3) the reasons immigration occurred, (4) nativism and U.S. immigration policy, (5) the characteristics of the immigrant stream, (6) the effects on the United States economy, and (7) the experience of immigrants in the U.S. labor market.

Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of one another, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint distribution of race/ethnicity and income among neighborhoods. In this paper, we use a new technique to describe the average racial composition and income distributions in the neighborhoods of households of different income levels and race/ethnicity. Using data from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, we investigate how patterns of neighborhood context in the United States over the past two decades vary by household race/ethnicity, income, and metropolitan area. We find large and persistent racial differences in neighborhood context, even among households of the same annual income.

Global brands represent between 10% and 40% of the total value of many multinational corporations, ranging from automobiles, telecom, and technology to retail, banks, media, and cosmetics. Global brands generate value to the firm along one or more of the COMET dimensions:  Consumer preference for global brands (quality, prestige, global myth, country of origin);  Organizational benefits (internal operations, roll-out of new products, global competitive moves, firm identity, attraction of global talent);  Marketing program effectiveness (media spillover, pooling of resources, leveraging creative ideas);  Economic benefits (economies of scale and scope in procurement, manufacturing, R&D, marketing);  Transnational innovation (pooling of best minds, bottom-up and frugal innovation). I develop a scorecard to assess what the sources of value are for your global brand, and where it falls short. The COMET benefits accrue to the firm to the extent that it adopts a globally integrated brand strategy. A strong global brand does not need to score high on all COMET dimensions. But a brand . . .

Mass demographic changes in the ethnic and racial composition of the United States since the 1960s are commonly considered a force driving major transformations in contemporary American politics. In political science, there are longstanding research traditions that examine the political implications of demographic change: how demographic change leads to growing intergroup political contestation over political power and public policies; how demographic changes lead to shifts in the group bases of partisan support; how demographic changes are associated with changes in the demographic composition of politicians and elected officials; and how the changing face of America affects the political responsiveness of elected officials to historically underrepresented but increasingly prominent segments of the population. Despite the proliferation of empirical studies on these topics, numerous causal claims central to broader arguments about the political implications of demographic change deserve greater theoretical and empirical scrutiny. In this dissertation, I make use of novel datasets and methods for descriptive and causal inference to contribute more credible evidence that test these claims and develop new avenues of research.

Despite concern regarding labor market discrimination against Hispanics, previously published estimates show that Hispanic women earn higher hourly wages than white women with similar observable characteristics. This estimated wage premium is likely biased upwards because of the omission of an important control variable: cost of living. We show that Hispanic women live in locations (e.g., cities) with higher costs of living than whites. After we account for cost of living, the estimated Hispanic-white wage differential for non-immigrant women falls by approximately two-thirds. As a result, we find no statistically significant difference in wages between Hispanic and white women in the NLSY97.

Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of white households. To our knowledge, there has been no research on racial income disparities and the role that economic freedom might have in alleviating or exacerbating the problem. We find evidence that economic freedom is associated with an increase in the racial income gap.

Students whose native language is not English and who attend American schools, or who are English language learners (ELLs), face challenges in achieving academic success. Krashen’s theory of English acquisition has influenced most programs designed to help ELL students. However, no research to date has focused on whether ELL teachers think these programs actually work. The goal of this qualitative study was to address this gap using teachers’ responses to questions regarding the effectiveness of current ELL programs. The research questions that guided this study focused on how ELL teachers perceived the effectiveness of ELL instructional methods, how they perceived the ELL programs implemented by their schools, and the factors they perceived as contributing to how quickly ELL students learn. Sixteen ELL teachers in five Texas elementary charter schools participated in this research by completing an open-ended survey. The qualitative information obtained from the surveys was used to identify themes that were used to answer the research questions. The teachers reported that they believed the most effective instructional methods built on basic language theory and utilized repetition and a variety of resources to communicate the basics of word recognition, phonetics, tenses, grammar, and reading comprehension. Participants also expressed dissatisfaction with federal programs and standards-based assessments. Additional research, such as a longitudinal study or one with a larger sample (perhaps including schools in other regions), would increase the generalizing of these results and further increase existing knowledge about what teachers perceive to be effective methods for teaching ELL students.

Development Economics: theory and Practice provides students and practitioners with the perspectives and the tools they need to think analytically and critically about the current major economic development issues in the world. Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet identify seven key dimensions of development; growth, poverty, vulnerability, inequality, basic needs, sustainability, and quality of life, and use them to structure the contents of the text. This book gives a historical perspective on the evolution of thought in development. It uses theory and empirical analysis to present readers with a full picture of how development works, how its successes and failures can be assessed, and how alternatives can be introduced. The authors demonstrate how diagnostics, design of programs and policies, and impact evaluation can be used to seek new solutions to the suffering and violence caused by development failures. This text is fully engaged with the most cutting edge research in the field, and equips readers with analytical tools for the impact evaluation of development programs and policies, illustrated with numerous examples. It is underpinned throughout by a wealth of student-friendly features including case studies, quantitative problem sets, end-of-chapter questions, and extensive references. This unique text aims at helping readers learn about development, think analytically about achievements and alternative options, and be prepared to compete on the development job market.

In two essays, we examine several problems in industrial organization. In the first essay, we study the effectiveness of partially-privatized Medicare by estimating the costs that private firms face when providing care equivalent to that of the public sector. In contrast to previous studies, we take a dynamic approach, driven by the idea that consumers face large switching costs. We find that private firms face higher costs than the government after adjusting for patient characteristics and generosity of benefits. The second essay focuses on the effectiveness of U.S. merger policy by studying the acquisition behaviors of cable telecommunication companies. We con- struct a novel dataset of acquisitions in the cable industry from 2000-2012 and find the Hart-Scott-Rodino disclosure threshold only affects firm behavior when acquiring firms with overlapping geographic coverage areas.

In this paper, we show how differential rates of adaptation to an economy-wide technology shock the Computer Revolution of the 1980shave altered patterns in urban development across U.S. cities. Specifically, we document that the diffusion of computer technologies has contributed to a reversal in the task content of new occupational titles: while new types of work were still associated with routine tasks in the 1970s, additions of new work have mainly appeared in cognitive occupations and industries since 1980. Cities that historically specialized in cognitive work benefited differentially by shifting workers into new occupations, experiencing simultaneous relative increases in population, human capital and wages, subsequent to the Computer Revolution. Our results suggest that the recent divergence of U.S. cities can partly be explained by the complementarity of new technologies and historical patterns of task specialization.