Tracing the emergence of academic disciplines in a national context is a useful undertaking, as it goes beyond the definition of a field to an assessment of its evolution within a more specific cultural context. This is particularly the case in the Digital Humanities, where the infrastructural requirements are such that the development of the field is strongly connected to social and economic trends. This paper outlines the emergence of the Digital Humanities in Ireland, detailing the history and key milestones of the field’s development, while delineating those particularities that are culturally significant in contrast with the global picture.

Job losses in the Great Recession were concentrated among middle-skill workers, the same group that has suffered the most over the long run from automation and international trade. How might long-run occupational polarization be related to cyclical changes in middle-skill employment? We find that middle-skill jobs have traditionally been more cyclical than other jobs, in part because of the volatile industries that tend to employ middle-skill workers. Also, unemployed middle-skill workers appear to have few attractive or feasible employment alternatives outside of their skill class, and the drop in male participation rates during the past several decades can be explained in part by a drying up of middle-skill job opportunities. Taken together, these results imply that any model relating polarization to middle-skill employment fluctuations must go beyond pure search motives to include industry-level effects as well as a labor-force participation margin. The results thus provide encouragement for a growing literature that integrates “macro–labor” search models with “macro–macro” models featuring differential industry cyclicalities and convex preferences over consumption and leisure.

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

We consider statistical inference for regression when data are grouped into clusters, with regression model errors independent across clusters but correlated within clusters. Examples include data on individuals with clustering on village or region or other category such as industry, and state-year differences-in-differences studies with clustering on state. In such settings, default standard errors can greatly overstate estimator precision. Instead, if the number of clusters is large, statistical inference after OLS should be based on cluster-robust standard errors. We outline the basic method as well as many complications that can arise in practice. These include cluster-specific fixed effects, few clusters, multiway clustering, and estimators other than OLS.

In April of 2007 and 2008, the U.S. randomly allocated 65,000 H-1B temporary work permits to foreign-born skilled workers. About 88,000 requests for computer-related H-1B permits were declined in each of those two years. This paper exploits random H-1B variation across U.S. cities to analyze how these supply shocks affected labor market outcomes for computer-related workers. We find that negative H-1B supply shocks are robustly associated with declines in foreign-born computer-related employment, while native-born computer employment either falls or remains constant. Most of the correlation between H-1B supply shocks and foreign employment is due to rationing that varies with a city's initial dependence upon H-1B workers. Variation in random, lottery-driven, unexpected shocks is too small to identify significant effects on foreign employment in the full sample of cities. However, we do find that random rationing affects foreign employment in cities that are highly dependent upon the H-1B program. Altogether, the results support the existence of complementarities between native and foreign-born H-1B computer workers.

Documents recent trends in fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa, from the perspective of contraceptive preferences and practices.

Recent empirical work documenting a declining trend in immigrant earnings relative to natives has focused primarily on immigrants who arrive as adults. In this paper, I find a large decline in the earnings of childhood immigrants (who represent over one fifth of the working immigrant population in my sample) in the U.S. between 1990 and 2010, and in particular during the 1990s. This drop in earnings has occurred across all age at arrival groups, but has disproportionately impacted lower-educated immigrants. A large decline in English language proficiency can explain much of this trend. A concentration of source countries (largely, through not entirely, due to an increase in Mexican immigration) has also contributed, mainly through the negative impacts it has had on English language proficiency and education levels.

This paper considers the marginal effect of an airport hub on a metropolitan area’s economy. Specif- ically, it considers the effect of an airport being designated as a “hub” by an airline on its cities economic fortunes. This is estimated relative to cities that have airports, but not hub airports. Using panel re- gression methods and event study techniques, I find that while hub airports do not significantly affect city employment levels overall, hubs do contribute an effect of 1-2 percent on personal income to their respective cities, as well as establishment growth of 1-2 percent. I find the effects of hubs on employment to be most salient in the air transportation and hotel industries, as well as overall closest to the airport; however, the same is not necessarily true for other sectors where tourism might affect employment. This implies that the effects of hub airports, in most cases, likely operate through their ability to facilitate business travel.

This paper studies hours worked volatility and the cyclicality of human capital investments by embedding a Ben-Porath life-cycle model of human capital accumulation into an RBC setting. Agents differ across two dimensions: age and productivity in learning. Our results show that individuals invest more in human capital during economic downturns. However, human capital accumulation is more counter-cyclical for young and low-productivity individuals because they face a lower opportunity cost of education and a higher marginal product of human capital. These results are confirmed empirically using US data from the Current Population Survey and the American Time Use Survey. In addition, the paper contributes to the RBC literature by showing that the models business cycle properties, in particular hours worked volatility, are sensitive to assumptions of heterogeneity. Introducing heterogeneity in productivity increases the volatility of aggregate hours worked and changes the life-cycle profile for hours volatility to better match the data.

This appendix contains eight sections. Section 1 gives technical details of how we calculate standard errors in the CPS data. Section 2 discusses changes in the ACS procedures before 2005. Section 3 examines demographic and economic patterns in migration over the past two decades, in more detail than in the main paper. Section 4 examines the cross-sectional variance of location-occupation interactions in earnings when we define locations by MSAs instead of states. Section 5 describes alternative methods to estimate the variance of location-occupation interactions in income. Section 6 measures the segregation of industries across states and of occupations and industries across MSAs. Section 7 gives technical details on the use of SIPP and census data to calculate repeat and return migration rates. Section 8 discusses transition dynamics in the model.

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankruptcy make higher out-of-pocket medical payments, conditional on the amount of care received. In turn, I find that households with greater wealth at risk are more likely to hold health insurance. The implicit insurance from bankruptcy distorts the insurance coverage decision. Using a microsimulation model, I calculate that the optimal Pigovian penalties are three-quarters as large as the average penalties under the Affordable Care Act.

This paper investigates how the 2008 financial crisis affected child poverty in California. Using panel data from 2003 to 2012, this paper evaluates the effect of unemployment and foreclosure rates, as well as exogenous household characteristics, on the likelihood of a child being in poverty in California. Data from both the individual household level and the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level are used. The main finding is that the recession has had a statistically significant effect on the likelihood of a child being in poverty in terms of unemployment and foreclosure rates, especially when fixed effects are applied. At the same time, household characteristics such as education, race and marital status are also statistically significant in their effects on a childs poverty status. However, changes in exogenous household characteristics can have a larger effect on childs poverty status as compared to the cyclicality of the economy.

As immigrants settle and extend their stay in the U.S., they may be exposed to a food culture and lifestyle that impacts their food choice decisions and health outcomes. This paper focuses on the behavioral changes and acculturation level of different generations of Asian immigrants on food choice decisions employing the 2013 American Time Use Survey. Heckman two-step regression results indicate that the 1st generation immigrants participate or spend more time on eating and drinking, food preparation, and grocery shopping; and less in travel-related eating and drinking compared with natives. The 1st generation is least likely to acculturate into American food culture. The 1.5 generation behaves more similarly to natives regarding the four food choice decisions and appears to acculturate over time. The 2nd generation shows no significant difference to natives. Immigrants acculturate by the food habit change from food at home to food away from home.

Women attend college today at higher rates than men, but continue to select disproportionately into low-paying majors. This paper aims to explain these gender gaps in college attendance and choice of major. I provide reduced-form evidence that, first, degrees may provide insurance against very low income for women, especially in case of divorce; and second, majors differ substantially in the degree of "work-family flexibility" they offer, such as the size of wage penalties for temporary reductions in labor supply. Based on this evidence, I construct and estimate a dynamic structural model of marriage, educational choices, and lifetime labor supply. I use the model to quantify the relative importance of rising skill premiums and changes in the marriage market for the observed changes in the college gender gaps between 1960 and 2010. I then use the model to test the effects of educational and work-family flexibility policies on educational choices. Differential tuition policies that charge less for technical majors, as proposed in some U.S. states, can substantially increase the share of women choosing such majors, but only subsidize men who would have chosen technical majors regardless of the policy. Among interventions intended to improve work-family flexibility, subsidized child care and part-time work entitlements increase the share of women in science and business, while extended maternity leaves have the opposite effect. * I would like to give special thanks to Maurizio Mazzocco and Dora Costa. Thanks also to

This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.

In-depth analyses of population dynamics require longitudinal data spanning multiple decades. The Census Bureau has initiated a project to create a core set of linkable census, survey, and administrative records that would provide data on the American population across seven decades. The core linkable data files consist of the 1940 Census, the 2000 Census, the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey, and the Current Population Survey. Using the core as a foundation, researchers can then integrate administrative records or other external data sources, depending on their research objectives. In this paper, we discuss the development of this project and provide an overview of the record linkage techniques that enable the creation of longitudinal data of this magnitude. We also report our progress on building a linkable version of the 1940 Census.

Over 7 million African Americans left the South for industrial cities in the North between 1915 and 1970, a period often referred to as the Great Black Migration. For black migrants, the North held the promise both of better-paying job opportunities and of social and political equality. During this period, and particularly between 1940 and 1970 when the majority of black migration occurred, the earnings of black men grew faster than those of white men nationwide. In 1940, black men earned a mean of 40 cents to the dollar earned by white men; by 1970, the black-to-white ratio had increased to 70 cents to the dollar. Although improvement in the quality and quantity of education for black students was the most important cause of the narrowing of this wage gap, migration to a higher-wage region also played a role.

The changes in womens and mens work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50 years (19642013) of US Census Annual Demographic Files (March Current Population Survey) to track the changing returns to human capital (measured as both educational attainment and potential work experience), estimating comparable earnings equations by gender at each point in time. We consider the effects of sample selection over time for both women and men and show the rising effect of selection for women in recent years. Returns to education diverge for women and men over this period in the selection-adjusted results but converge in the OLS results, while returns to potential experience converge in both sets of results. We also create annual calculations of synthetic lifetime labor force participation, hours, and earnings that indicate convergence by gender in worklife patterns, but less convergence in recent years in lifetime earnings. Thus, while some convergence has indeed occurred, the underlying mechanisms causing convergence differ for women and men, reflecting continued fundamental differences in womens and mens life experiences.

Persons with psychiatric disorders (PD) are known to be at an increased risk of committing elder abuse, with much of this abuse occurring towards women. However, there is no evidence available speaking to the extent of this problem. The objective of the present study is to explore rates of abuse committed against older women by a relative with PD. In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, 217 women residing across the U.S. are at least 55 years of age and who have a relative with PD completed an online survey. Analyses found that in the past 6 months 15% of survey respondents experienced physical abuse committed by their relative with PD, 20% experienced financial abuse, and 42% experienced psychological abuse. Given these high rates of abuse it is imperative that research into factors predicting abuse be conducted, as such information would help target and determine the nature of interventions.