The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs - including many STEM occupations - shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s.

n these essays, I study the long-term effects of education policies and birth order on educational and labor market outcomes. In my first chapter I study the long-term effects of one of the first early education programs in the US – the Kindergarten Movement (1890-1910). I collected unique data on the opening of public kindergartens across cities in the US during this period. I then link over 100,000 children living in these cities to subsequent Censuses where their adult outcomes can be observed. I find that kindergarten attendance had large effects on adult outcomes. On average, the affected cohorts had about 0.6 additional years of schooling and six percent more income (as measured by occupational score). These effects were substantially larger for second generation immigrant children. The effects of this early intervention are most likely due to language acquisition and the attainment of various “soft skills” early in childhood. In my second chapter I study the long-term effects of an educational reform in Argentina. In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform (Ley Federal de Educación – LFE) that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification for unraveling the causal effect of the reform. The estimations from difference-in-difference models suggest that the LFE had a positive impact on years of education and the probability of high school graduation. The impact on labor market outcomes —employment, hours of work and wages— was positive for the non-poor youths, but almost null for the poor. In my third chapter I use US historical data to empirically test whether long-term birth order effects differ across the leading and lagging regions of the country in the Pre-War World II period. To do so, I create a large panel dataset by linking more than two million children across the 1920 and the 1940 full census counts, and to the World War II army enlistment records. I then study birth order effects on various long-term outcomes (with emphasis on educational outcomes). I find that in general, birth order effects are positive in the “developing” south—i.e. younger siblings do better than older siblings— and negative in the relatively modern north, which is consistent with the available evidence from contemporary data for developed and developing countries. I then exploit state level variation to show that birth order effects are positively correlated with the share of rural population, child labor rates and negatively correlated with the level mechanization in agriculture. I also show that, regardless the state of birth, the effects tend to be larger for the poor. Finally, I complement the analysis by looking at birth order effects on earnings and adult height. While I find relatively similar results for earnings, I find no birth order effects on adult height, which suggests that we can rule out improvements in health or nutrition as the potential mechanisms behind the effects on education and labor outcomes.

Objective: The present study compared indicators of impaired health and disability between older adults in same-sex cohabiting relationships and their peers in opposite-sex cohabiting relationships. Method: Data were obtained on men (n = 698) and women (n = 630) aged 50 years and older and in self-reported same-sex relationships from the National Health Interview Survey. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to estimate differences in physical health, mental health, and disability status. Results: Compared with their peers in married opposite-sex relationships, older men in same-sex relationships exhibited greater odds of psychological distress, and older women in same-sex relationships experienced elevated odds of poor/fair health, needing help with activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living, functional limitations, and psychological distress. Discussion: This study adds to the limited information on health and disability among older lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults. As this population grows, gerontologists must develop a better understanding of the unique issues and challenges facing them and their families.

This dissertation uses survey data and administrative data to explore persistent barriers in access to education. The first chapter explores how constraints on credit supply can impact the level and distribution of higher education, including access to selective and 4-year colleges. I exploit a 2003 Texas constitutional amendment that provided plausibly exogenous variation in access to home lending markets for Texas homeowners, without affecting credit access for renters, or homeowners in other states. By comparing outcomes between groups, I show that this led Texas homeowners to send their children to more selective colleges and spend $4,500 more in tuition (net-of-aid) per line of credit. In the presence of college supply constraints, homeowners’ increased demand for institutions higher in the college selectivity hierarchy forced some renters to attend less selective colleges, and others to forgo college altogether instead of attending less selective colleges. In addition, selective colleges capture some of the private credit supply shock through price-discrimination, raising tuition and shifting aid towards remaining renters. On net, the availability of home equity financing reinforced gaps in access to higher education. These results inform our understanding of how inequality in college access is generated and transmitted from parent to child: the availability of home equity credit reinforces gaps between homeowning and renting families, and it does so through two distinct mechanisms. First, constraints in credit access are relaxed for homeowners, allowing them to ascend the college quality hierarchy. Second, due to college supply constraints, the gains to homeowners crowd out some renters from making otherwise privately optimal investments. By documenting important distributional effects on renters, this paper informs our interpretation of previous research: increases in college choice for one group may come . . .

In recent decades, the proportion of college-educated workers in the United States entering professional occupations has declined. While the rising incomes of college graduates signals the growing value of skills and education, it seems that these skills are increasingly put to use outside of the professions. This paper examines the occupations of American college graduates since 1950 and the implications of these trends for the position of professional occupations. The results show that while the economic rewards of professions remain high, a falling proportion of college students aspire to enter the professions. Some college graduates have shifted to managerial positions, but a substantial number also aspire to and enter positions outside of professional and managerial work.

Using the 3-year sample of the American Community Survey (ACS) for 2009 to 2011, we compute public school teacher salaries for comparison across U.S. states. Teacher salaries are adjusted for state differences in teacher characteristics, cost of living, household amenity attractiveness and federal tax rates. Salaries of non-teaching college graduates, defined as those with occupations outside of education, are used to adjust for state household amenity attractiveness. We then find that state differences in federal tax-adjusted teacher salaries relative those of other college graduates significantly affects the share of education majors that are employed as teachers at the time of the survey.

El objetivo de este trabajo es comparar las condiciones de inserción laboral de los trabajadores mexicanos con posgrado tanto en México como en Estados Unidos con el fin de explorar la relación entre las condiciones del mercado laboral mexicano y la migración hacia Estados Unidos. El estudio analiza la correspondencia entre las credenciales académicas de los posgraduados mexicanos y el tipo de ocupación que desempeñan, en ambos países, con énfasis en aquellos formados en áreas de ciencias, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas (ctim). Los resultados muestran que el mercado laboral mexicano «castiga» a los posgraduados en las áreas de ctim, a los más jóvenes, y ofrece condiciones menos favorables para las mujeres y para los que poseen estudios de doctorado. En contraste, el mercado laboral de Estados Unidos «premia» a los posgraduados mexicanos en las áreas de ctim, a los más jóvenes, favorece a las mujeres, a los que cuentan con grado de doctor, a los que estudiaron en aquel país y a los mexicanos que poseen la ciudadanía estadounidense.

Research on immigrant and second generation outcomes has often examined their locations, following ideas that geographic dispersion facilitates social mobility and that characteristics of the ethnic environment enable or constrain progress. I contend that second generation socioeconomic outcomes depend in part on the location choices and characteristics of a previous immigrant generation. Further, I suggest that this relationship reflects the changing geography of immigrants and labor markets, rather than geographically-unfolding assimilation. Using the 1940, 1970, and 2000 IPUMS files from the US Census I regress second and 1.5 generation wage and educational outcomes in 1970 and 2000 on metro-area characteristics of a previous generation (1940 and 1970, respectively). Current labor market and second generation characteristics are included as controls and to facilitate interpretation. Characteristics of a previous immigrant generation’s location were more important for second generation outcomes in the 1940-1970 period, while current place characteristics become more significant in 2000. There is evidence of selection operating through the positive intergenerational effects of places where immigrants’ educational levels were high a generation ago. Metro level immigrant concentration and manufacturing employment also have generally positive effects although variations across generations and by nationality suggest their significance for social mobility is inadequately understood. The historic immigrant geographies of the US, and the ways in which metro labor market conditions intersect with immigrants’ locational choices, both within and between generations, are thus a critical piece of the economic and spatial assimilation puzzle.

While OLAP has a key role in supporting effective exploration of multidimensional cubes, the huge number of aggregations and selections that can be operated on data may make the user experience disorientating. To address this issue, in the paper we propose a recommendation approach stemming from collaborative filtering. We claim that the whole sequence of queries belonging to an OLAP session is valuable because it gives the user a compound and synergic view of data; for this reason, our goal is not to recommend single OLAP queries but OLAP sessions. Like other collaborative approaches, ours features three phases: (i) search the log for sessions that bear some similarity with the one currently being issued by the user; (ii) extract the most relevant subsessions; and (iii) adapt the top-ranked subsession to the current user's session. However, it is the first that treats sessions as first-class citizens, using new techniques for comparing sessions, finding meaningful recommendation candidates, and adapting them to the current session. After describing our approach, we discuss the results of a large set of effectiveness and efficiency tests based on different measures of recommendation quality.

We use data from a housing-assistance experiment to estimate a model of neighborhood choice. The experimental variation effectively randomizes the rents which 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.

Social and ecological effects of development-driven landscape fragmentation have been documented across spatial scales, yet most land-use policy studies have been confined to single jurisdictions. The primary goal of this research was to quantify the effects of local land-use policies on development outcomes at regional scales. I first examined the characteristics of jurisdictions (townships in Michigan, USA) that made them likely or unlikely to adopt zoning ordinances. Then, I explored how zoning adoption influenced subsequent development patterns and how these patterns varied with distance to urban centers. I studied development impacts in three ways: a large-n study of 707 Michigan townships to quantify general trends in housing development and forest fragmentation; a case study of two counties (one in Michigan and one in Wisconsin) to examine fine-scale housing patterns; and a spatial analysis of frac sand mine development, which in Wisconsin is regulated primarily by local zoning. I used these three studies to draw conclusions about how different types of development manifest on the landscape, those part of gradual processes like suburbanization (housing growth) as well as those that are due to stochastic market forces (frac sand mining). The result is a comprehensive study of zoning outcomes across jurisdictional boundaries, setting the groundwork for an overdue evaluation of this widely used land-use policy. I drew methodologies from the fields of economics (causal inference) and landscape ecology (spatial analysis) to complete this work, and research findings reflected this dual focus. I found evidence for a clear rural-urban gradient effect determining zoning effects on housing growth rates. Zoning adoption resulted in higher housing growth in jurisdictions near cities but lower housing growth outside of commuting distance from cities compared to unzoned controls. Frac sand mines were preferentially sited in unzoned jurisdictions, with higher mine counts in more remote areas. I found no evidence, however, that zoning adoption predicted forest fragmentation rates or specific development patterns, such as clustering near population centers or protected areas. Zoning is a local policy tool but its patchwork implementation across rural landscapes results in regional effects—housing units and mines preferentially clustered in some jurisdictions over others.

This research proposes the hypothesis that societies with long histories of agriculture have less equality in gender roles as a consequence of more patriarchal values and beliefs regarding the proper role of women in society. We test this hypothesis in a world sample of countries, in a sample of European regions, as well as among immigrants and children of immigrants living in the US. This evidence reveals a significant negative relationship between years of agriculture and female labor force participation rates, as well as other measures of equality in contemporary gender roles. This finding is robust to the inclusion of an extensive set of possible confounders, including historical plough-use and the length of the growing season. We argue that two mechanisms can explain the result: (1) societies with longer agricultural histories had a higher level of technological advancement which in the Malthusian Epoch translated into higher fertility and a diminished role for women outside the home; (2) the transition to cereal agriculture led to a division of labor in which women spend more time on processing cereals rather than working in the field.

Media platforms compete for both consumers and advertisers, especially when consumers divide their attention among multiple platforms. While traditional economics models assume consumers patronize a single platform ("single-homing"), I model consumer demand for multiple products ("multi-homing"), advertiser demand, and platform pricing decisions in the context of magazine markets. Using a novel data set on U.S. magazine sales at the metro level and characteristics from 2003 to 2012, and survey data that reveal consumers' order of magazine choice, I estimate the model and quantify the cross-group externalities in the magazine markets. On the reader side, I find that consumers' ad nuisance cost is approximately 5 cents per ad page-in contrast to the ad-neutrality or ad-loving findings in the print media literature. On the advertiser side, my model relates to an emerging theoretical two-sided market literature that emphasizes the importance of multi-homing. I provide the first direct evidence that media ad prices reflect advertisers' differential valuation of exclusive and shared consumers. I find that advertisers value exclusive consumers at 11 cents per eyeball, more than twice of the value of an overlapping consumer. I illustrate the importance of consumer multi-homing in a counterfactual analysis, in which demand for magazines is assumed to be as strong as in 2003. My results suggest that the rise of the Internet has caused magazines to lose proportionally more exclusive consumers than shared consumers, contributing greatly to the weakening of magazine advertising markets.

Past research has shown that Hispanic students make test score gains relative to whites as they age through school; however, this finding stands in contrast to the experience of blacks, who show little change in their relative position over the same time frame. Distinguishing Hispanic students by immigrant generation, I find that the children of immigrants (first- and second-generation Hispanics) drive the improvement in Hispanic test scores. Latergeneration Hispanics consistently perform slightly below whites, perhaps due to negative selection into ethnic identification. Thus, previous estimates vastly understate the progress of first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants. From a negative gap in 3rd grade, these students surpass socioeconomically similar whites in math and reading by middle school and end 8th grade as much as a quarter of a standard deviation ahead. Assimilation alone cannot explain this progress; a potential explanation is that immigrant parents create a home environment that fosters achievement.

Why does income influence vote choice in some places and not others? We argue that a countrys ability to tax the income and assets of wealthy citizens is critical to whether politicians will mobilize citizens using fiscal policy. While most theories of redistributive politics assume that elected officials can deliver on promises of redistribution, in fact across contemporary democracies, the potential tax exposure of the relatively wealthy varies considerably. Politicians can, and do, appeal to relatively poor using redistributive platforms that take many forms. However, politicians promises to low-income citizens only credibly threaten the interests of high-income citizens if the state has the capacity to tax income and assets. In the absence of a credible redistributive threat, politicians are less likely to mobilize people in ways that allow income to influence vote choice. We show that bureaucratic capacity increases voting along class lines in contemporary democracies. We also explore sub-national variation in class voting in the U.S. in the mid-1930s at a time when the party system was less nationalized than it is today. During this period, class influenced political preferences more in states where taxes comprised a greater proportion of state revenues.

El proceso historico de integracion entre Mexico y Estados Unidos, acentuado por la vecindad geografica entre ambos paises, no solo esta determinado por factores economicos y comerciales, sino tambien por . . .

Working with sensitive data is often a balancing act between privacy and integrity concerns. Consider, for instance, a medical researcher who has analyzed a patient database to judge the effectiveness of a new treatment and would now like to publish her findings. On the one hand, the patients may be concerned that the researcher's results contain too much information and accidentally leak some private fact about themselves; on the other hand, the readers of the published study may be concerned that the results contain too little information, limiting their ability to detect errors in the calculations or flaws in the methodology. This paper presents VerDP, a system for private data analysis that provides both strong integrity and strong differential privacy guarantees. VerDP accepts queries that are written in a special query language, and it processes them only if a) it can certify them as differentially private, and if b) it can prove the integrity of the result in zero knowledge. Our experimental evaluation shows that VerDP can successfully process several different queries from the differential privacy literature, and that the cost of generating and verifying the proofs is practical: for example, a histogram query over a 63,488-entry data set resulted in a 20 kB proof that took 32 EC2 instances less than two hours to generate, and that could be verified on a single machine in about one second.

Objectives/Hypothesis Determine the prevalence of pediatric voice and swallowing problems in the United States. Methods The 2012 National Health Interview Survey pediatric voice and language module was analyzed, identifying children reporting a voice or swallowing problem in the preceding 12 months. In addition to demographic data, specific data regarding visits to health care professionals for voice or swallowing problems, diagnoses given, and severity of voice or swallowing problem were analyzed. Results An estimated 83989 thousand children (1.4%0.1%) reported a voice problem. Overall, 53.5%1.9% were given a diagnosis for the voice problem and 22.8%4.6% received voice services. Laryngitis (16.6%5.5%) and allergies (10.4%4.0%) were the most common diagnoses. A total of 16.4% graded the voice problem as a big or very big problem. An estimated 56963 thousand children (0.9%0.1%) reported a swallowing problem. A total of 12.7%3.8% received swallowing services and 13.4%1.6% were given a diagnosis for their swallowing problem. Neurological problems were the most common diagnoses (11.1%4.5%). A total of 17.9% graded the swallowing problem as a big or very big problem. Conclusion These data provide the first insight into the prevalence of childhood voice and swallowing problems, which affect approximately 1% of children annually. A relative minority seek care for their problem, despite the disease impact.