The medical community often argues that physician fear of legal liability increases health care spending. Theoretically, though, the effect could be positive or negative, and empirical evidence has supported both cases. Previous empirical work, however, has ignored the fact that physicians face risk from industry oversight groups like state-level medical licensing boards in addition to civil litigation risk. This paper addresses this omission by incorporating previously unused data on punishments by oversight groups against physicians, known as adverse actions, along with malpractice payments data to study state-level health care spending. My analysis suggests that health care spending does not rise in response to higher levels of risk. An increase in adverse actions equal to 16 (the mean, absolute value of year-to-year changes within a state) is found to be associated with statistically significant average annual spending decreases in hospital care and prescription drugs of as much as 0.25% (nearly $29 million) and 0.29% (almost $9.3 million). Malpractice payments were generally estimated to have smaller, statistically insignificant effects.

Precipitated by the legislative decision to decouple child Medicaid benefits from welfare receipt, the number of young children qualifying for public health insurance grew markedly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. From a baseline of roughly 15% in the average state at the beginning of the decade, the rate increased to more than 40% of all young children in the United States by the time all federal mandates were fully enacted in 1992. This paper extends the academic literature examining early childhood investments and longer-term human capital measures by exploring whether public health insurance expansions to low-income children led to a greater number of high school completers in the 2000s. Building on the literature that uses the generosity of a states Medicaid program as a time-varying, exogenous source of variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find a positive and statistically significant relationship between Medicaid eligibility during early childhood defined as conception through age 5 and longerterm high school completion rates. Completion is examined in two forms: the dropout rate and the traditional four-year high school graduation rate. Intent-to-treat estimates range from a 1.9 to 2.5 percentage point (pp) decrease in the dropout rate for each 10 pp increase in early childhood years covered by the state-level Medicaid program. The same 10 pp increase in child Medicaid program generosity reveals increases of 1.0 to 1.3 pp when applied to graduation rates, indicating that completion gains are propelled by increases in traditional diplomas. Furthermore, results appear to be driven by Hispanics and white students, the two groups which experienced the greatest within-group eligibility increases due to the decoupling of child Medicaid from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

Chicago makes extensive use of tax increment-financing (TIF) districts, which harness growth in property tax revenues to promote economic development in the district. The benefits of these districts are not necessarily equally distributed throughout the city, and while previous analysis has focused on where TIF districts are located, there has been less focus on the level of TIF expenditures within TIF districts. Recognizing the presence of widespread racial segregation in the city, this study examines whether there is a correlation between the level of TIF expenditures and the minority composition of an area at the block group level in a single year. Using city information on TIF expenditures and information from the US Census, I find that there may be a negative relationship between TIF expenditures and the share of the residents of a block group who are Black.

Researchers have frequently attempted to decompose temporal trends in social, demographic, economic, and health outcomes into three aspects of time processes: age, period, and cohort. The analytical problem that has faced analysts for decades is that these three distinct processes are linearly related to each other (cohort = period - age), so disaggregation of temporal trends has to rely on statistical assumptions that are difficult to verify. In this dissertation, I critically evaluate the validity and application scope of two commonly used age-period-cohort (APC) methods: the Intrinsic Estimator and the Cross-Classified Fixed/Random Effects Model. I identify the methodological and theoretical limitations of these methods and conclude that these methods should not be used for estimating the underlying age, period, and cohort patterns without explicit theoretical justification. What should researchers do? Drawing on the literature of demography, sociology, and statistics, I develop a new method, called the age-period-cohort-interaction (APC-I) model, for analyzing age, period, and cohort variations. Unlike other APC methods, the APC-I model is fully identified and does not rely on problematic statistical assumptions. It also relaxes this assumption in other methods about within-cohort dynamics. I use the new APC-I model to analyze the 1962 to 2014 data from the Current Population Survey March Supplement to investigate age and period patterns and deviations between cohorts and dynamics within a cohort’s life course in labor force participation (LFP) for white and black men and women. I found that while men’s LFP was sensitive to social and economic events such as economic recessions and wars, the effects of these events may not carry on to their later ages. However, there are substantial variations in women’s LFP associated with cohort membership that cannot be explained by pure age and period main effects. I also found that while white women’s LFP rates caught up with and exceed those of black women by 1980, after adjusting for educational attainment, the racial differences in participation rates among women were substantially reduced after the late 1980s. In addition, the results suggested that a great deal of the period trend and cohort deviations in black women’s LFP can be explained by changes in their educational attainment. This is less true for white women; the cohort deviations in participation rates remained after adjusting for education. Surprisingly, there was little evidence supporting an association between changes in marital status and the temporal trends in LFP; the shape of the age, period, and cohort patterns in LFP did not seem to change qualitatively after controlling for current marital status. This finding suggests that the temporal variation in LFP may stem from changes in the behaviors of subgroups of the population other than changes in the marriage composition of the population.

This dissertation studies the impacts of employment contracts as well as legal and economic environments on labor market outcomes. Chapter 2 examines the effects of residency laws on public teachers’ wages and residential choices using the natural experiment created by the repeal of the residency laws for teachers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in 2001. The findings suggest that the residency laws decrease public teachers’ wages by ten percent. The data also indicates a significant outflow of residents after the repeal. In order to further investigate whether there is a relocation of teachers due to residency laws, I look at where public teachers are sending their children for schooling. I find that the private school enrolment probability decreases when residency laws are lifted. Chapter 3 studies the factors that determine the enactment of collective bargaining laws for public school teachers. I look at the effects of state specific demographic, political, and economic variables on the decision of a state to adopt collective bargaining laws. I find that state-level school resources such as student- teacher ratio and per pupil expenditures are significant drivers of collective bargaining laws. Furthermore, the political leanings of state governments do not seem to have an important effect on the decision that a state will enact collective bargaining. Finally, state economic conditions appear to have significant effects on bargaining law changes. Chapter 4 focuses on determining whether a spot market or an implicit contracting model better explains the wage determination process over the business cycle. Real business cycle theory employs a spot market model in which current wages are determined by contemporaneous labor market conditions. In contrast, the implicit contract model allows for the history of labor market conditions to determine current wages. I replicate the Beaudry & DiNardo (1991) and extend their investigation along gender, race and regional lines to understand whether labor markets can be explained well or only certain submarkets can be described by one of the models. The results suggest that an implicit contracting model explains the wage determination over the business cycle better than a spot market model for almost all specifications.

We present new evidence on the wage and mobility of young and old workers, which is difficult to explain using standard human capital theory. Instead, we propose a simple dynamic extension of the Roy model, where worker migration and wages are jointly determined at the individual level. According to this model, a higher moving cost among older workers is the main factor driving the lower mobility among this group. Because of the higher moving costs, older workers require a higher wage increase to move across regions than younger workers, a pattern that is consistent with individual-level U.S. data. We also find an interesting dynamic effect suggesting that, given a persistent labor income shock, a higher future moving cost makes workers more mobile today.

The economic integration of highly skilled immigrants particularly their inferior labor market outcomes relative to natives is emerging as a serious policy challenge for both traditional and new receiving countries particularly in European context. To investigate the structural roots of variation and relative inferior outcomes of highly skilled immigrants across countries this research project takes institutional approach (macro level) which is not well documented yet. In this respect, three main influencing structural factors namely, skill-based selecting policies, skill regimes and labour market structure and regulation in host countries are deeply analyzed and their effects on labour market outcomes of highly skilled migrant workers in comparison with their native counter parts are considered. Accordingly, the institutional analysis of highly skilled immigrants' economic integration and the linkage between skill immigration systems and skill regimes are the main research contributions of this work which are carried out for the first time. In this project skill transferability is regarded as a main challenge towards either supply or demand-driven approach of skill-based selecting policies among host countries and skill specificity is also underlined as the linking chain between selecting policy and skill regime in host countries. The labour market outcome gap between native and migrant skilled workers is investigated through risk of being unemployed, job status and labour income as three main output variables. These dependent variables are modelled by two sets of micro sociodemographic (age, gender, level of education, country of birth and years since migration) and macro (migration regime, skill regime, labour market structure, EPL and GDP) independent/control variables. For empirical phase of this project, time series cross sectional (TSCN) hierarchical data of twenty main migrant receiving OECD countries are used. Twostage multilevel modelling is applied to do multivariate analysis which is well suited to dealing with the hierarchical structure of the data. Actually, this research project not only moves towards to expand few existing literature on institutional factors affecting highly skilled migrant workers incorporation process, but also empirically attempts to narrow the gap in migration comparatives studies between European and non-European contexts. Hence it has a various sets of research contributions and policy implementations

Policy-makers have argued that providing public health insurance coverage to the uninsured lowers long-run costs by reducing the need for expensive hospitalizations and emergency department visits later in life. In this paper, we provide evidence for such a phenomenon by exploiting a legislated discontinuity in the cumulative number of years a child is eligible for Medicaid based on date of birth. We find that having more years of Medicaid eligibility in childhood is associated with fewer hospitalizations and emergency department visits in adulthood for blacks. Our effects are particularly pronounced for hospitalizations and emergency department visits related to chronic illnesses and those of patients living in low-income neighborhoods. Furthermore, we find evidence suggesting that these effects are larger in states where the difference in the number of Medicaid-eligible years across the cutoff birthdate is greater. Calculations suggest that lower rates of hospitalizations and emergency department visits during one year in adulthood offset between 3 and 5 percent of the initial costs of expanding Medicaid.

Historians of the American South have been diverse in their descriptions of the master- slave relationship over the last half-century, and have engaged in lengthy discussions in an attempt to answer the intricate question of what life was like between slaves and their masters. The phenomenon of slave runaways has perhaps offered the most convincing evidence of the troubles on southern plantations, which has been used in recent decades to emphasize negotiation and agency in the shaping of master-slave relations. The last twenty years have been consequently marked by a plethora of studies that accentuate non-traditional slave holding as it becomes clearer that masters had to compromise with their human chattel. Through an examination 9,975 runaway slave advertisements and 943 testimonies of former slaves, this study illustrates how black bondsmen absented themselves so to negotiate the terms of their working and living conditions. It traces the acts of individual slave runaways in place of broader generalizations that have for a long time contributed to some of the myths and legends of American slavery through examination of the many reasons that slaves chose to stay in bondage.

In a stochastic Becker marriage model (Choo and Siow), supermodularity of the match output function implies stochastic positive assortative matching (PAM): the equilibrium marriage matching distribution has all positive local log odds ratios or is totally positive of order 2 (TP2). The Choo-Siow model rationalizes the practice of studying PAM independent of population vectors and marriage rates and conditional on other spousal characteristics. Using white married couples in their 30s from the 2000 US Census, spousal educational matching generally obeyed TP2. Between 1970 and 2000, there was no general increase in PAM. There was increased homogamy in spousal education matching.

A legacy of immigration laws, families have become more diverse in race and ethnicity. Public policies have created new inequalities by legal status within and between immigrants. U.S. policy shows decisive contradictions. The cornerstone of immigration law is family reunification, but immigration and welfare policies impose burdens fostering insecurity and hardship for families. Often lacking the income, health, and other resources to be self-reliant, older immigrants highlight this contradiction.

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine the impact of financial aid programs on students enrollment decisions, student outcomes, and colleges financial decisions. In the first chapter, I use discontinuities in eligibility criteria for a large merit scholarship program to examine the impact of aid on community college students outcomes both during and after college. Community colleges enroll a large share of first-time freshmen but represent a much smaller share of financial aid research. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but none have yet considered the impact of aid on earnings after college. The findings suggest that reducing the cost of community college does not impact persistence, academic performance, degree completion, expected earnings, or short-term earnings after college for marginally eligible students. In the second chapter, I examine whether colleges are sensitive to state-sponsored merit aid programs. Previous research has emphasized demand-side effects such as how merit aid impacts enrollment and post-matriculation outcomes. Yet much less is known about how merit aid programs affect the supply side of higher education. Using differences-in-differences identification, I collectively analyze multiple programs and explore numerous college-level outcomes. Results suggest that colleges do not capture state-funded merit scholarships through significant increases in published tuition, and colleges increase expenditures on students in response to merit aid programs. Lastly, in the third essay, we use discontinuities in Pell grant eligibility to examine the effect of the Pell grant on college enrollment and college choice. Consistent with prior work, we find no evidence that marginal Pell eligibility increases college-going. We go on to show that just meeting the Pell cut-off has little bearing on where students choose to enroll, in terms of sector or quality dimensions. Below the v threshold, where applicants are needier and the grant is more generous, students sort into colleges with modestly higher published tuition, but no other measure of college quality or college selectivity significantly diverges from the counterfactual. We conclude that students do not use the Pell grant as a tool to shop among college options in ways that systemically improve enrollment outcomes.

In the last half century, marriage rates have fallen dramatically. In this paper, we explore possible drivers of this trend, including declining economic prospects among men, an increase in unwed births that constrain women’s later marriageability, rising rates of incarceration, and a reversal of the education gap that once favored men and now favors women. We estimate that the decline in male earnings since 1970 among both black and less-educated white men can explain a portion of the decline in marriage, but that cultural factors have played an important role as well. We argue that the ratio of marriageable men to women depends critically on how one defines “marriageable.” Looking just at current data rather than historical trends, and using different definitions of marriageability, we find that there are shortages of marriageable men among the black population, but not among the white population (except among the best educated).

When choosing his speed, a driver faces a trade-off between private benefits (time savings) and private costs (fuel cost and own damage and injury). Driving faster also has external costs (pollution, adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers). This paper uses large-scale speed limit increases in the western United States in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions. First, do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social costs? Second, do the private benefits of driving faster exceed the private costs? Third, what is the optimal speed limit? I find that a 10mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3–4mph increase in travel speed, 9–15% more accidents, 34–60% more fatal accidents, and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14–24% (carbon monoxide), 8–15% (nitrogen oxides), 1–11% (ozone) and 9% higher fetal death rates around the affected freeways. Using these estimates, I find that the social costs of speed limit increases are two to seven times larger than the social benefits. In contrast, many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefit from driving faster. Privately, a value of a statistical life (VSL) of $6.0 million or less justifies driving faster, but the social planner's VSL could be at most $0.9–$2.0 million to justify higher speed limits. I conclude that the optimal speed limit was lower, but not much lower, than 55mph.

Governments throughout the world intervene heavily in housing markets, and most have multiple policies to pursue multiple goals. This chapter deals with two of the largest types of housing policies in the United States, namely, low-income rental assistance and policies to promote homeownership through interventions in mortgage markets. We describe the rationales for the policies, the nature of the largest programs involved, the empirical evidence on their effects, and the data and methods used to obtain them. Because the US government uses such a wide range of policies of these types, this evidence has lessons for housing policy in other countries.

This study focuses on the question of whether job mobility relates to improved la- bor market outcomes among young college-educated individuals in the United States. I analyze unemployment duration, overeducation, and wage earnings among college graduates. The analysis centers around three specific questions: (1) Are there differ- ences in labor market outcomes for those who migrate (movers) and those who stay (stayers)? (2) Did the recent economic crisis exacerbate the mover-stayer differences? (3) Do mover-stayer differences vary for individuals based on their demographic char- acteristics or where they live? I examine data on migrant status, location before and after a move, reasons for moving, wages, overeducation (by occupation), unemploy- ment duration, and other related socioeconomic characteristics of college graduates aged 22 to 30 years. I use yearly data from the March Supplements of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The data are consistent over time, allowing for comparisons between the time periods before and after the 2008 economic crisis. The results for the relationship between job mobility and labor market outcomes are mixed. Moving for job reasons correlates with shorter unemployment durations before and (seemingly more strongly) after the recession. For certain individuals, job mobility relates to lower overeducation propensities, but by and large overeducation and job migration do not seem to move together. Regarding wages, once again an overall correlation between moving and earnings is not found. Certain specific de- mographic groups experience positive (“boomerang” movers before the recession and immigrants after the recession) and negative (women before the recession) correla- tions between the two variables. Among groups of individuals for whom moving for job reasons counterintuitively correlates with worsened labor market performance, it is likely that some unmeasured confounding effect (perhaps amenity preference) is present. The research is of some interest to policy makers hoping to attract young highly educated individuals, but due to uncertainty regarding causality its applica- bility is limited.

Social engagement is theorized to promote health, with ages 55 to 75what some call encore adulthoodpotentially being a time for ongoing engagement or social isolation. We use the American Time Use Survey (N = 11,952) and a life course perspective to examine associations between paid work, resources, relations, and healthy time use for men and women in the first (5564) and second (6574) halves of the encore years. Work limits sufficient sleep (full-time working men) and television watching (all workers) but also time spent in physical activity (full-time workers). College-educated and healthy encore adultsacross age and gender dividesare more likely to exercise and watch less television. Marriage and caregiving encourage socializing and limit television watching, despite differential effects on physical activity and sleep. These findings fit well with a gendered life course perspective suggesting socially patterned (by work, resources, relationships, gender, age) health behaviors.

This report reviews the need for subsidized child care in Massachusetts. Gaps between need and supply were identified by comparing estimates of children needing care to licensing and subsidy data. Additional information was collected through interviews with experts across the state. The reports findings include gaps for infant and toddler care, children in two of six sub-state regions, and families working nontraditional hours. It also highlighted challenges geographically matching needs and supply and the link between the child care subsidy system and the broader child care market.

We assessed the association between the health of people in same-sex relationships and the degree and nature of the legal recognition of same-sex relationships offered in the states in which they resided. We conducted secondary data analyses on the 2010 to 2013 Current Population Survey and publicly available data from Freedom to Marry, Inc. We estimated ordered logistic regression models in a 4-level framework to assess the impact of states legal stances toward same-sex marriage on self-assessed health. Our findings indicated, relative to states with antigay constitutional amendments, that same-sex couples living in states with legally sanctioned marriage reported higher levels of self-assessed health. Our findings suggested that full legal recognition of same-sex relationships through marriage might be an important legal and policy strategy for improving the health of same-sex couples.

This paper examines the roles of relationship skill and human capital in determining life-cycle outcomes in education, labor, and marriage markets. We find strong empirical evidence of an individual fixed factor that affects both job and marriage separation hazards and extract an index of non-cognitive skill that increases the durability of relationships in marriages and in the labor market. Using this index, we develop and estimate a two-factor life-cycle model of schooling, job search, and marriage. We find that relationship skill can explain about 40% of the persistence in employment turnover and 35% of the persistence in marriage turnover.