This study uses the Current Population Survey and a decomposition method proposed by Datt and Ravallion to assess the impacts of income growth and income distribution on poverty across states in the United States. It finds that between 1992 and 2011 growth of income, rather than changes in income distribution, was the major source of poverty reduction across US states. The empirical analysis also shows that there is asymmetrical impact on poverty via both income distribution and income growth during recessions and economic expansions: poor people are hit harder during recessions and benefit less during economic booms.

In 1997, Zambia instituted a School Re-Entry Policy, which officially states that girls who become pregnant as students should be allowed to return to school after giving birth. This policy is part of an effort by the Zambian government to increase education rates among the population and close the gender gap in education by addressing one of the barriers to education that some girls face. This paper uses difference-in-differences models to assess the impact of Zambia’s School Re-entry Policy on educational attainment and adolescent fertility among females in Zambia. Data were drawn from the 2000 and 2010 Zambia Censuses. The results indicate that though educational attainment has increased for adolescent mothers since the policy was implemented, the rate of increase is lower than for females overall. There has been a slight decrease in the likelihood of giving birth as an adolescent since the policy was implemented for females with six or more years of education, while this likelihood has risen for females women with less than six years of education.

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of paid leave legislation on fathers leave taking, as well as on the division of leave between mothers and fathers in dual-earner households. Using difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference designs, we study Californias Paid Family Leave (CA-PFL) program, which is the first source of government-provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the U.S. Our results show that fathers in California are 46 percent more likely to take leave in the first year of their childrens lives when CA-PFL is available. We also examine how parents allocate leave in households where both parents work. We find that CA-PFL increases father-only leave-taking (i.e., father on leave while mother is at work) by 50 percent and joint leave-taking (i.e., both parents on leave at the same time) by 28 percent. These effects are much larger for fathers of sons than for fathers of daughters, and almost entirely driven by fathers of first-born children and fathers in occupations with a high share of female workers.

With debates on immigration occurring around the world, debates in the United States regarding race and racism surrounding police brutality, and discussions on the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, it has become even more pertinent to understand each others backgrounds, surroundings and identities. This paper uses the sociocultural identities of African immigrant women in the United States (US) to try to understand immigration, race, racism, gender, sexism, nationality, and ethnicity in relation to transnational leadership and feminism; all of which can be examined through the identities and experiences of African women in the US. This experiential analysis uses theories on identity development among immigrant students, on transnational feminism, and servant leadership to understand a population that is under studied and a population whose identities, due to the racialized history of the United States, are broadly categorized as Black and/or African American. While race is an important social construct that shapes opportunity and life chances in the U.S, these categories tell us little about the varied ethnic identities within racial groups, which often go unrecognized and misrecognized in research surrounding the role of culture and identity in educational institutions. To critically examine these varied ethnic identities, seven African immigrant women, whom pseudonyms are used for, narrated their experiences in the US educational system. With their intersectional self-defined identities, they described ambitions to work abroad with their immigrant group or countries of origin, and discussed struggles in terms of their nationality, race, ethnicity and gender within the US context. Based on common themes that emerged across their narrations, findings indicate that the narrators perceived their intersecting identities and experiences as different from their African American peers in important ways. These differences include having transnational perspectives and understandings of the systems of oppression that exist within and outside US society. Consequently, from their experiences of being outsiders within, African immigrant women are able to self-define, develop transnational perspectives, and have agency.

This dissertation focuses on long-run patterns of regional inequality by addressing two general themes: the importance of transportation networks for location choices of individuals and firms, and the role of institutions on economic development across Native American reservations. My findings highlight the significance of transportation networks, and local governance for regional economic development. In the first chapter, I measure the effect of improvements in transportation infrastructure on industry growth and concentration. To address the endogenous placement of interstate highways, I instrument for eventual highway location using two proposed government plans. To address the endogeneity surrounding the timing of highway construction, I use a network theory algorithm to predict the timing of highway construction. The results indicate that the expansion of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) led to substantial employment growth in highway counties relative to non- highway counties. This employment growth was concentrated in a few industries. This paper demonstrates the importance of expanding transportation networks for the spatial arrangement of economic activity. In my second chapter, I concentrate on the U.S. agricultural sector. The IHS altered the structure of transportation costs. This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the impact of new interstate highway infrastructure on farm property values and the portfolio of agricultural commodities produced. Estimates correcting for endogenous highway locations and construction timing indicate the value of land per acre fell in highway locations relative to non-highway locations. This loss appears driven by a declining value of agricultural products sold. Additional results find no evidence that highway counties are more specialized in their production than non-highway counties. In the final chapter, I exploit the decentralization of governance across American Indian reser- vations and measure the long-run development differences for reservations that were granted less sovereignty through the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). To mitigate selection concerns regarding IRA adoption, I exploit IRA voting results by restricting my analysis to narrowly determined elec- tions. Results indicate that IRA adoption stifled economic development. Per capita income is over 40 percent lower on IRA reservations. Additional legislation in the late 1980s further decentralized IRA reservations; as a result income differences diminish by 2010.

This article looks at the effects of gentrification on the racial composition and transformation of urban neighborhoods. The investigation examines Washington, DC, a city that has undergone significant and contentious racial transformation in the past few decades. To provide for a more robust analysis of how gentrification is associated with measures of racial displacement and diversity, I employ two separate quantitative measures. Using U.S. Census Bureau long form, American Community Survey, and decennial census data, I compare tract-level changes in racial evenness and displacement between gentrifying and nongentrifying areas from 1990 to 2010. The findings suggest that gentrification is associated with the displacement of blacks, but this racial turnover is not consistently associated with greater levels of racial and ethnic diversity compared with nongentrifying neighborhoods.

Research on intergenerational economic mobility often ignores the geographic context of childhood, including neighborhood quality and local purchasing power. We hypothesize that individual variation in intergenerational mobility is partly attributable to regional and neighborhood conditionsmost notably access to high-quality schools. Using restricted Panel Study of Income Dynamics and census data, we find that neighborhood income has roughly half the effect on future earnings as parental income. We estimate that lifetime household income would be $635,000 dollars higher if people born into a bottom-quartile neighborhood would have been raised in a top-quartile neighborhood. When incomes are adjusted to regional purchasing power, these effects become even larger. The neighborhood effect is two-thirds as large as the parental income effect, and the lifetime earnings difference increases to $910,000. We test the robustness of these findings to various assumptions and alternative models, and replicate the basic results using aggregated metropolitan-level statistics of intergenerational income elasticities based on millions of Internal Revenue Service records.

We investigate job polarization in the US. SigniÖcant heterogeneity is found across sectors, with the tradable goods sector exhibiting anti-polarization. This is consistent with the theoretical trade model of Grossman and Maggi (2000).

Der Beitrag untersucht die historische Entwicklung der Säuglingssterblichkeit in der Hansestadt Rostock und widmet sich im Speziellen der Frage, inwieweit sozioökonomische Faktoren die Höhe der Säuglingssterblichkeit im frühen 19. Jahrhundert beeinflussten. Es lässt sich für die Stadt ein im deutschlandweiten Vergleich äußerst niedriges Säuglingssterblichkeitsniveau feststellen, besonders für das erste Drittel des Jahrhunderts. Dabei kann ein signifikanter Einfluss der beruflichen Schicht des Vaters auf die Überlebenschancen des Kindes im ersten Lebensjahr für das frühe 19. Jahrhundert nachgewiesen werden: Neugeborene von beruflich schlechter gestellten Vätern weisen ein größeres Sterberisiko im ersten Lebensjahr auf als die Nachkommen beruflich besser gestellter Väter. Als Datengrundlage dienen die Beerdigungs- und Taufregister der Rostocker Jakobikirche, welche weitgehend erhalten und zu einem großen Teil digitalisiert sind. Auf der Basis dieser Individualdaten wird erstmals ein Ereignisdatenanalysemodell im Zusammenhang mit der Säuglingssterblichkeit in einer deutschen Stadt im 19. Jahrhundert untersucht. Des Weiteren zeigt dieser Beitrag erstmals die Säuglingssterbewahrscheinlichkeit der Stadt Rostock für das gesamte 19. Jahrhundert nach Geschlecht und schließt damit in zweifacher Hinsicht eine Forschungslücke.

Objectives. I examined how labor market and health insurance outcomes were affected by the loss of dependent coverage eligibility under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Methods. I used National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data and regression discontinuity models to measure the percentage-point change in labor market and health insurance outcomes at age 26 years. My sample was restricted to unmarried individuals aged 24 to 28 years and to a period of time before the ACAs individual mandate (20112013). I ran models separately for men and women to determine if there were differences based on gender. Results. Aging out of this provision increased employment among men, employer-sponsored health insurance offers for women, and reports that health insurance coverage was worse than it was 1 year previously (overall and for young women). Uninsured rates did not increase at age 26 years, but there was an increase in the purchase of nongroup health coverage, indicating interest in remaining insured after age 26 years. Conclusions. Many young adults will turn to state and federal health insurance marketplaces for information about health coverage. Because young adults (aged 1829 years) regularly use social media sites, these sites could be used to advertise insurance to individuals reaching their 26th birthdays.

This study provides insight on the links between cultural values and economic outcome. Using the epidemiological approach on 1994-2014 US survey data, we analyze the impact of inherited cultural differences on the economic outcome of US citizens with foreign ancestry while keeping formal institutions constant. With the disease environment of the country of origin as a measurement for collectivism and a data set comprising nearly 37,000 homogamous second-generation immigrants,we are the first to find that higher scores of collectivism are associated with higher income earned in the US. We demonstrate that the number of hours worked and the labor force participation are vital determinants of the positive impact of collectivism. We further find evidence for assimilation since the positive effect of collectivism declines in age. Our findings are robust to the use of other measurements and specifications. With this paper, we contribute to the literature by exhibiting the importance of cultural values in the economic behavior in general and in the context of migration in particular.

This dissertation contributes to the current understanding of human capital and its importance for earnings inequality and taxation. Human capital is typically defined as the stock of knowledge or skills acquired through education and working experience. The first chapter analyzes student borrowing behaviors in postsecondary education in the United States, the second chapter studies cross-country differences in earnings inequality within an endogenous growth model of human capital accumulation, and the third chapter examines the impact of endogenous human capital formations over a life-cycle on optimal fiscal policy. In Chapter 1, I document that new federal student loans for higher education in the United States have risen more than 5 times over the past 20 years. What caused this dramatic increase? I develop a heterogeneous life-cycle model of human capital accumulation to analyze individual college and borrowing decisions. Using this framework, I assess the quantitative contributions of changes in the college wage premium, college costs, maximum borrowing limits, and loan interest rates to explain the significant rise of federal student loans. I find that the calibrated model accounts for 57 percent of the actual increase in loans from 1990 to 2011. Increases in the college wage premium and college costs are important factors in generating the sharp rise in loans and, particularly, the increase in the fraction of borrowers and borrowing amounts. The expansion of credit availability and decreased loan interest rates have a relatively minimal impact on individual college and borrowing decisions. Chapter 2 explores why earnings inequality has been substantially higher in the US than in European countries over the last 30 years. I focus on the role of differences in tax progressivity, intergenerational earnings persistence, returns to education investments, and public education spending. I develop a growth model of human capital accumulation, and show analytically how those factors affect the dynamics of earnings inequality. The calibrated model accounts for 31 percent of the observed differences in earnings inequality between European countries and the US for 2003-07. Differences in returns to education investments and intergenerational earnings persistence are quantitatively important, suggesting the potential role of educational policy in ameliorating rising earnings inequality. Chapter 3, written jointly with Martin Gervais, analyzes the role of endogenous human capital accumulation in shaping optimal fiscal policy within a life-cycle growth model. We show that when investment in human capital is not verifiable---making the tax code incomplete---a non-zero capital income tax becomes optimal in order to alleviate the distortionary effects of the labor income tax on investment in human capital. This is true even if the government has access to a full set of age-dependent labor and capital income taxes. The main result is in sharp contrast to the finding in Jones et al. (1997) that all interest taxes are zero in infinitely-lived agent models with endogenous human capital formation.

For decades, prominent members of the accounting community have argued that the quality of accounting education is falling. Support for this claim is limited because of a scarcity of data characterizing the constructs of interest. This study is a comparative evaluation of the quality of accounting education from the 1970s to the 2000s using unique data to quantify education quality for accounting and many comparison disciplines. I find that, compared to most other types of college education, accounting education quality has been steady or increasing over the sample period. However, relative to other business degree programs, the evidence is mixed. The quality of students self-selecting non-accounting business degrees has increased while the quality of accounting students has not. The disparity in student quality is not reflected in the pay received by accounting graduates, which has remained stable relative to the pay received by graduates with other business degrees, although this result is likely influenced by regulatory changes during the 2000s, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Together, the evidence suggests that the quality of accounting education has not declined rapidly over the last four decades, but in the competition among business degree programs for high-quality students, accounting has underperformed.

Multi-criteria decision making problem has been well studied for many years. One popular query for multi-criteria decision making is top-k queries which require each user to specify an exact utility function. In many cases, the utility function of a user is probabilistic and finding the distribution on the utility functions has been widely explored in the machine learning areas, such as users recommender systems, Bayesian learning models and users preference elicitation, for improving users experience. Motivated by this, we propose a new type of queries called k-hit queries, which has not been studied before. Given a set D of tuples in the database, the distribution on utility functions and a positive integer k, we would like to select a set of k tuples from D in order to maximize the probability that at least one of tuples in the selection set is the favorite of a user. All applications for top-k queries can naturally be used in k-hit queries. In this paper, we present various interesting properties of k-hit queries. Besides, based on these properties, we propose a novel algorithm called k-hit_Alg for k-hit queries. Finally, we conducted comprehensive experiments to show that the performance of our proposed method, k-hit_Alg, is superior compared with other existing algorithms which were originally used to answer other existing queries.

Almost universally, economists treat self-reported ethnic identity as an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But in cases where one’s ethnic identity is subjective, does individual ethnic identification respond to economic incentives? This paper provides a first examination of this question by linking data on ethnic self-identification with changes in affirmative action policies in higher education. Consistent with a diminished incentive to identify as an ethnic minority, we find that individuals with weaker ancestral ties to an ethnic origin are less likely to identify in states where affirmative action admission policies have been struck down. In contrast, those with stronger ancestral ties to an ethnic origin are more likely to identify once affirmative action policies are no longer in place. We argue that these differences along ancestral lines are consistent with a model in which the political and social climate surrounding affirmative action policies impart a stigma on individuals who appear to belong to an underrepresented minority group and this stigma effect outweighs any economic incentive to identify for those with stronger ancestral ties. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate whether ethnic self-identification responds to local economic and social conditions in the United States. As such, it has broad implications for understanding the impact of affirmative action policies and the emerging literature on the construction of race and ethnicity.

This study explores possible methods for geocoding a database for events that are transitory on the landscape such as historical military campaigns. Both contemporary digital gazetteers and historical gazetteers are used to prepare a database of paratrooper drops during the French Indochina War. The French Indochina War is an important conflict that connects US involvement in South East Asia during the period between World War II (1939-1945) and US involvement during the Vietnam War (1964-1975). From 1945-1954 over two hundred paratroop drops were conducted by the French military ranging in size from platoon size (30) to the size of a division (4,500). A qualitative assessment of the accuracy of the geocoded operations is performed by comparing the results from the different gazetteer sources against sketch maps found in archival sources. By integrating these sources with GIS, these events can be placed in both space and time for later spatial analysis of the military events surrounding the conflict.