This thesis studies the causal factors of US slavery prior to the Civil War. My main data set is the 1860 census from the National Historical GIS (nhgis.org), which is aggregated to the county level. Historians have traditionally broken the slave owning South into vague regions, called "belts" based on the dominant cash crops of those regions. There is no spatial demarcation of these boundaries, and this regionalization completely ignores areas that are not conceptualized as cash crop production areas. As old territories exhausted their soil and evolved from slave societies into societies with slaves. Slavery is seen as a single system migrating across the South, with new territories being brought into the monolithic system. As a result, there is limited qualitative or quantitative understanding of regional diversity within the South, and the existing regions have not been questioned for over a hundred years. I use county level census data to study the entire slave owning South. This allows the study of the interrelation of the various cash crop producing regions as well as the areas that were not involved in these industries. I will also be able to gauge the impact of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and the impact of autocorrelation on my models of different study areas. The result is the rejection of the null hypothesis based on traditional historical conceptualizations that slave density was dependent on cash crop cultivation. I present a new alternative hypothesis that explains slavery as a more generic phenomenon, capable of deriving profits from a wide variety of crops and industrial products as well as the more traditional cash crops. This thesis argues that there were many facets to slavery, and that necessitates the discussion of these facets. Profitability from slavery was more general and not just from cash crops. Cash crops had become less labor intensive by 1860. Money could be made from slaves in many economic pursuits, including cash-crops, grain crops, urban industry, and rural industry. These products were not substitutes for each other. Most of them, especially cash-crops, were only capable of growing in certain locations under certain conditions. Cotton could not have substituted for tobacco in the tobacco belt any more than sugar could have been grown in the colder climate of Virginia. Because a profit could be made off of slave labor in many agricultural and industrial activities, the value of putting a slave to work in a corn field in Kentucky was competitive with putting that same person to work in a cotton field in Mississippi or an iron blasting furnace in Virginia. By 1860, the supply and demand for enslaved people was at equilibrium across the South and the Upper South was not diminishing or economically dependent on the slave trade. The slave population of the Upper South was not decreasing in the antebellum period or even stagnating. It was instead growing while still supplying the Lower South with slaves through the domestic slave trade. The Upper South had not and was not transferring to a society with slaves, nor was it moving in that direction. This was not even true within urban settings.

Stark disparities exist in late-life economic security between U.S. racial/ethnic groups, with minority elders consistently exhibiting lower levels. These differences can be partially mitigated by eliminating racial/ethnic disparities in life-course income. Previous research has identified shifting relationships between demographics of race/ethnicity and worklife income, but these studies have not integrated occupational standingthe relative status of people who share an individuals occupational classification. We use 2000 Decennial Census and 2005-2013 American Community Survey data to investigate these forces, focusing on Latinos. Using a mid-working age population (aged 30-50), three measures of occupational standing are analyzed, derived from: earnings, educational attainment, and combined earnings and education. A hierarchy emerged between racial/ethnic groups across all three markers: Asians consistently scored the highest, followed by non-Latino whites (NLWs), non-Latino blacks, and finally Latinos. Trajectories, however, depended on the metric used. For NLWs and Latinos, the combined earnings/education measure was flat, the education measure improved (17% NLWs; 24% Latinos), and the earnings measure dropped (-1% NLWs; -7% Latinos); for both non-Latino blacks and Asians, increases were seen on all three measures. Among Latinos, improvements were seen for both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens, with greater improvements among naturalized citizens. Non-citizen Latinos saw a drop in both the earnings (-22%) and combined earnings/education (-14%) measures, but a 25% increase in the education measure. By better understanding occupational standing trends, racial/ethnic disparities can be targeted for policy interventions. More parity in occupational standing can help minimize income differences and improve racial/ethnic minorities prospects for economic security in retirement.

This policy brief discusses the role of human capital and more specifically CPS skills in determining wages. CPS skills are found to contribute significantly to earnings and their importance for success on the labour market is likely to remain high due to prevailing structure of the demand for skills.

We explore the economic growth consequences of increased financial investment by nonfinancial firms, finding consistent evidence that financialization in the non-finance sector reduced total value added. Employing an expanded conceptualization of value added which identifies internal (capital, labor) and external (creditors, government, charities) stakeholders with claims on the value generated in production and exchange, we also find that the declining value added produced by financialization was born most strikingly by labor and the state, while increasing value was channeled to corporate debt and equity holders. Corporate charities also had a net loss.

A common assumption is that the rise of drug testing among U.S. employers must have had negative consequences for black employment. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to identify the impacts of testing on black hiring. I find that adoption of protesting legislation increases black employment in the testing sector by 7% to 30% and relative wages by 1.4% to 13.0%, with the largest shifts among low-skilled black men. The results are consistent with ex ante discrimination and suggest that drug testing may benefit African Americans by enabling nonusing blacks to prove their status to employers.

Using a nationally-representative dataset of adults 1830 years old in the United States, this study examined the relationship between hookah use and subjective well-being. Levels of sadness, happiness, tiredness, pain, and stress were compared between persons who have used hookah and those who have not. Data were merged from the Tobacco Use Supplement of the Current Population Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the Subjective Well-being Supplement to the American Time Use Survey for the years 20102012 for persons 1830 years old (n = 1147). Wald tests were used to compare mean differences in subjective well-being between hookah users and non-users. Lastly, multivariable regression was used to determine whether there were significant differences in subjective well-being between hookah users and non-users, controlling for demographic factors, self-perceived health, and cigarette smoking. The lifetime prevalence rate of hookah use was 5.2% among 1830 year olds. Hookah users reported higher levels of stress and sadness than non-users. These relationships remained significant after controlling for demographic characteristics, self-perceived health, and cigarette use. The results were robust to the use of different statistical models, different age cut-offs, the inclusion of additional covariates (such as income and population density), and separate analyses by sex. Hookah use is an emerging public health issue associated with increased levels of stress and sadness. Similar to cigarette use, healthcare providers may consider expanding their screening tests to include hookah use. Public policy geared toward greater prevention and control of hookah use is also recommended.

The federal housing program known as HOPE VI lasted nearly two decades and had significant impact on public housing throughout the United States. HOPE VI provided federal grant funds to public housing authorities throughout the county to revitalize severely distressed public housing stock. The mixed finance and mixed income principles, along with New Urbanism design implemented in the HOPE VI program reshaped the physical, social, and economic structures of public housing. Philadelphia received five HOPE VI revitalization grants between 1993 and 2004, allowing the Philadelphia Housing Authority to redevelop the citys most distressed public housing. Previous studies have attempted to quantify the effects of HOPE VI revitalization efforts on surrounding neighborhoods and have found dramatic appreciation of home values in areas of HOPE VI redevelopment. This study provides an updated analysis of available census data to assess the effects of HOPE VI revitalization of five Philadelphia public housing sites. Factors examined in this study include median home values, median contract rental rates, vacancy rates, and median household income. This study concluded that HOPE VI redevelopment positively impacted local real estate markets surrounding revitalized sites, most notably in dramatic appreciation of home values.

We investigate whether economic conditions at labor market entry have persistent effects on law graduate earnings. We find that unemployment levels at graduation continue to affect law earnings premiums within 4 years after graduation for earners at the high end and middle of the distribution. However, the effect fades as law graduates gain experience and the impact on lifetime earnings is moderate. Outcomes data available prior to matriculation do not predict unemployment or starting salaries at graduation. Earnings premiums are not predicted by BLS projected job openings. We find little evidence for the predictive power of cohort size. An inverted yield curve does not predict future law earnings premiums. For medium to high earning graduates, successfully timing law school could increase the value of a law degree ex-post, but simulations show that no strategy for ex-ante timing is readily available.

That wages grow over lifetime is a well-known economic fact. Ever since the seminal work of Jacob Mincer (1974) lifetime earnings growth has been attributed to the investment in human capital, which was thought to take place primarily in the form of education and on-the-job training. The data show that, taking into account compositional differences of the workforce, average wage rate grows by 23% in the first 10 years since employment, 15% in the subsequent 10 years, 10% after that and finally halts with virtually no growth before retirement typically starts. While wages in all occupations follow this general pattern, there is considerable unevenness in the magnitude of growth (fig. 1). Wages increase most in occupations that require considerable skill, such as managers and professionals, and least in low skilled occupations like craft and elementary workers. Traditionally the existence of wage curves was attributed to declining training (Ben-Porath 1967). In order to explain such differences across occupations, three explanations can be put forth. First, training in some of them may be much more prevalent. Second, higher wage growth may be a return on considerable education investment necessary to undertake more demanding occupations. Lastly, workers in some occupations may be faster learners. In a seminal paper Kenneth Arrow (1962) suggested that learning-by-doing may be a major source of productivity growth and talked about two of its types: learning by repetition and learning by problem solving. The latter type is arguably responsible for the bulk of lifetime productivity growth, and occupations where this type of learning is prevalent are conducive to fast improvements of skills and productivity. This policy brief discusses the role of lifelong learning in the form of learning by problem solving and job complexity in determining earnings and the kind of employment.

In this paper, I offer a framework for analyzing non-market oriented household activities in a way that overcomes some issues about defining the boundaries among household activities. I utilize the concept of a social process and discuss how unpaid household activities are part of labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. Next, I explain the importance of introducing economic class and social class processes into the framework, as well as the importance of making a distinction between the two. Economic class accounts for the basics of the capitalist economy, and social class opens contexts of variation. The framework allows for a multidimensionality of individuals and opens the question of unpaid activities varying in categorization based on economic class. Also, it helps the economic analysis of capitalism consider that maintaining a household lifestyle directly involves and pertains to unpaid household activities that are part of each of the delineated labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes.

How have racial shifts starting in 1960s Baltimore relate to the growing unrest and police action following the death of Freddie Gray.

Socioeconomic inequality in the United States persists with disparities in education, earnings, and health evident across racial and ethnic groups. Somewhat less attention has been given to the importance of inequality within minority racial and pan-ethnic groups. This paper considers the increasing divergence of socioeconomic status within cohorts of American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) adults in the United States. The analyses rely on US Census data for 1990, 2000, and 2010 to examine the relative contribution of demographic change and change in self-identification to the size of AIAN adult cohorts over time. Decomposition analyses demonstrate that declines in poverty within the AIAN cohorts are largely attributable to the more advantaged status of individuals who select AIAN in combination with other racial identifications.

Tax records indicate that intergenerational mobility (IM) has been stable for cohorts entering the labor market since the 1990s. I show that when using educational attainment as a proxy for adult income, stable IM is a new phenomenon: IM rose significantly for cohorts entering the labor market from 1940 to 1980. I measure IM directly in historical Census data for children still living with their parents at ages 22-25, and indirectly for other children using an imputation procedure that I validate in multiple data sets with parent-child links spanning the full 1940-2000 period. Post-war mobility gains were larger in the South and for blacks, and were driven by gains in high school rather than college enrollment. Controlling for region and year, states with higher IM have had lower income inequality, higher income levels, more educational inputs, higher minimum dropout ages, and lower teen birth rates. IM gains plausibly increased aggregate annual earnings growth by 0.125-0.25 percentage points over the 1940-1980 period.

We employ EOP definitions that have appeared in the philosophical literature on distributive justice, and apply it to a formal economic model which incorporates human capital investment and luck within and across generations. The human capital acquisition technology features multiple stages of parental investments during childhood, and on-the-job investments in adulthood. The benchmark model features an intergenerational borrowing constraint, education and low-income subsidies which are financed by a progressive income tax, and a self-financed PAYGO social security system. We calibrate this model to the U.S. in 1990 and provide an operationalization of philosophical concepts in the model by using the childrens continuation values as outcomes, and the state space of the recursive decision problem as circumstances. This reveals that intergenerational investments should be accounted for when comparing measures of EOP. When conditioning on parental luck instead of outcomes, EOP looks much larger: luck is overwhelmed by human capital accumulation. In contrast, when looking at childrens net wealth instead of lifetime earnings, EOP looks worse: intergenerational borrowing constraints are more pronounced in wealth than in earnings. In counterfactual experiments, we find that education subsidies increase utilitarian welfare and decrease overall inequality, but does little to promote EOP. This is for two reasons: when one takes the view that intergenerational efforts should be rewarded, there is little room for improvement in EOP to begin with. On the other hand, when one takes the view that intergenerational efforts should not be rewarded, much stronger redistribution is needed for the policies to have a quantitative impact.

The purpose of this exploratory empirical note is to provide at least preliminary insight into whether a greater degree of labour market freedom (LABMKTFREE) elicits an increase in the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) in the US. Initial empirical support for this hypothesis is provided in this study since the estimated coefficient on the LABMKTFREE index is positive and statistically significant at the 5% level. This result implies that, other things held the same, the higher the LABMKTFREE index, the greater the FLFPR. Indeed, the findings imply that a 1% increase in the LABMKTFREE index would lead to a 0.294% increase in the FLFPR.

This study provides quantitative evidence that southern blacks were able to form networks soon after Emancipation – during Reconstruction and the Great Migration – but only in places where specific conditions prevailed. Our theory indicates that networks will only form when social connectedness in the population from which they are drawn is sufficiently large. This implies that there exists a threshold below which there is no relation between social connected- ness and network-based outcomes - political participation, church membership, migration - and above which there is a positive association. Using county cropping patterns to measure social connectedness in the black farm population, we document the existence of thresholds at which the specific “slope change” predicted by our theory holds. This finding is robust to rigorous testing, and these tests do not detect the nonlinearity implied by our theory for blacks at other points in time; for whites; or for variables not associated with networks. Our results imply that black migration from southern counties above the connectedness threshold would have been significantly smaller in the absence of network externalities. Consistent with the presence of ex- ternalities, migrants from those counties were much more likely to move to the same destination cities than migrants from elsewhere.

This thesis consists of three essays on corporate R&D and innovations in the United States. Utilizing the newly collected survey of Business Research Development and Innovations (BRDIS), the first chapter establishes several stylized facts regarding the distribution of R&D spending as well as innovation outcomes, highlighting the fact that businesses with very little reported R&D also produce a fair amount of innovations, measured both by patent filings and new product introductions. In addition, service industries have surpassed manufacturing industries to become the major contributor to R&D spending and patenting activities. As most of our traditional studies in innovations have focused on manufacturing firms, these newly documented facts suggest a new perspective for future innovation research, with a refreshed look at the traditional definition of industry and firm linkages, as the rigid definition based on a manufacturing-dominated economy becomes less and less relevant in a new era of service-dominated economy. The second chapter of the work validates the self-reported measures of innovations from the BRDIS survey by studying its relationship with . . .

The most straightforward understanding of, and the first requirement for, protecting privacy when releasing a data collection is indeed the protection of the sensitive data included in the release. However, privacy protection should not prevent recipients from performing legitimate analysis on the released dataset, and should ensure adequate visibility over non sensitive information. In this chapter, we illustrate a solution allowing a data owner to publicly release a dataset while satisfying confidentiality and visibility constraints over the data, expressing requirements for information protection and release, respectively, by releasing vertical views (fragments) over the original dataset. We translate the problem of computing a fragmentation composed of the minimum number of fragments into the problem of computing a maximum weighted clique over a fragmentation graph. The fragmentation graph models fragments, efficiently computed using Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs), which satisfy all the confidentiality constraints and a subset of the visibility constraints defined in the system. To further enrich the utility of the released fragments, our solution complements them with loose associations (i.e., a sanitized form of the sensitive associations broken by fragmentation), specifically extended to safely operate on multiple fragments. We define an exact and a heuristic algorithm for computing a minimal and a locally minimal fragmentation, respectively, and a heuristic algorithm to efficiently compute a safe loose association among multiple fragments. We also prove the effectiveness of our proposals by means of extensive experimental evaluations.

Scholars have been examining the relationship between fertility and unemployment for more than a century. Most studies find that fertility falls with unemployment in the short run, but it is not known whether these negative effects persist since women may simply postpone child bearing to better economics times. Using over 140 million U.S. birth records for the period 1975 to 2010, we analyze both the short and long-run effects of unemployment on fertility. We follow fixed cohorts of U.S. born women defined by their own state and year of birth, and relate their fertility to the unemployment rate experienced by each cohort at different ages. We focus on conceptions that result in a live birth. We find that women in their early 20s are most affected by high unemployment rates in the short-run and that the negative effects on fertility grow over time. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate experienced between the ages of 20 and 24 reduces the short-run fertility of women in this age range by 6 conceptions per 1,000 women. When we follow these women to age 40, we find that a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate experienced at 20 to 24 leads to an overall loss of 14.2 conceptions. This long-run effect is driven largely by women who remain childless and thus do not have either first births or higher order births.

We use data from a housing-assistance experiment to estimate a model of neighborhood choice. The experimental variation effectively randomizes the rents households face and helps identify a key structural parameter. Access to two randomly-selected treatment groups and a control group allows for out-of-sample validation of the model. We simulate the effects of changing the subsidy-use constraints implemented in the actual experiment. We find that restricting subsidies to even lower poverty neighborhoods would substantially reduce take-up and actually increase average exposure to poverty. Furthermore, adding restrictions based on neighborhood racial composition would not change average exposure to either race or poverty.