This article describes the use of interactive theater, audience response assessment, and peer educators to create community-generated approaches for bystander interventions (i.e., actions taken by people who become aware of controlling, abusive and violent behavior of others) to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and to foster change in community norms. We include a case example of an ongoing universitycommunity partnership, which mobilizes community members to develop and implement socioculturally relevant IPV prevention programs in multiple Asian communities. We used interactive theater at a community eventa walk to raise awareness about IPV in South Asian communitiesand examined how the enacted bystander interventions reflect specific community contexts. We detail the challenges and limitations we have encountered in our attempts to implement this approach in collaboration with our community partners.

One of the most striking changes in American society in the last forty years has been the decline and delay in marriage. The fraction of young men and women who have never been married increased significantly between 1970 and 2000. Idiosyncratic labor income volatility also increased over the same period. This paper establishes a quantitatively important link between these two facts. Specifically, if marriage involves consumption commitments, then a rise in income volatility results in a delay in marriage. Marriage, however, also allows for diversification of income risk since earnings fluctuations between spouses need not be perfectly correlated. We assess the hypothesis that rising income volatility contributed to the delay in marriage vis-à-vis other explanations in the literature, using an estimated equilibrium search model of the marriage market. We find that the increase in volatility accounts for about 20% of the observed delay in marriage. Thus, we find that the effects of consumption commitments due to increased income volatility outweigh the effects of the insurance gains provided by spouses.

This dissertation contains three chapters analyzing the effect of labor policy and regulation on labor market outcomes, as well as cultural determinants of intimate partner violence. The first chapter, “What is the effect of Salary History Bans on the Labor Supply of Mothers?”, examines the impact of state-level Salary History Bans (SHBs) on the employment status of mothers in the United States. SHBs, which prohibit employers from using salary history during the hiring process, aim to address gender pay disparities and promote fairer hiring practices. Existing literature has demonstrated the effectiveness of SHBs in reducing the gender pay gap by increasing wages for women. This paper investigates the effect of these increased wages on the employment rates of mothers. Utilizing a pseudo-panel approach, data from the Current Population Survey, and staggered implementation estimators developed by Callaway and Sant’Anna, I find that SHBs have little impact on overall employment rates among mothers.

This paper examines how fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Exploiting geographic variation in the affect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I demonstrate a negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations but weaker when the slaveholder is female. A similar correlation is not present for white children, slave children with white fathers, or for slave children born prior to the Fugitive Slave Law. The negative correlation suggests the promise of freedom played an important role in the everyday lives of slaves.

Do wars affect fertility? Although in the popular view wars are thought to cause swings in fertility, evidence suggests that wars were followed by only short term increases in fertility rates (Ryder, 1980). In this paper I examine the effect of wars on fertility by comparing the fertility response of American women of ancestry belonging to the winners and losers of World War II. The analysis, based on the number of children ever born shows that American women of Axis ancestry have increased their fertility by less than other women in the U.S. between 1940 and 1960. Nevertheless, a more careful analysis shows that only women of Italian origin drives the results while women of German origin show no response. Moreover, falsification tests, comparing 1930 to 1940 show effects between 1930 and 1940. I conclude that the setting chosen here cannot teach us much about this interesting question.

The micro-level mechanisms explaining variation in women's housework time are contested. The heavily-cited finding that women who out earn their partners compensate for gender deviance by over performing housework had been largely discarded, but new findings have revived this perspective. I weigh in on this debate with two innovations (1) by exploiting variation by day of the week I generate new hypotheses to test leading explanations of women's housework time, (2) I use the largest sample to date (American Time Use Survey 2003-2012) with splines to study the contested upper tail of the distribution. There is no evidence of gender deviance neutralization. Womens absolute income, to a point, reduces womens housework. Results by day of the week best support a time constraint approach. The real question is not why gender deviant women do more housework, but why womens earnings and employment hours only move the needle on housework so far.

Approximately 43 percent of private sector workers living in Prince George’s County, Maryland lack paid sick time, and among those, low-income and part-time workers are especially unlikely to be covered. Access to paid sick time promotes safe and healthy work environments by reducing the spread of illness1 and workplace injuries,2 reduces health care costs,3 and supports children and families by helping parents to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities.4 This briefing paper presents estimates of access to paid sick time in Prince George’s County by sex, race and ethnicity, occupation, part/full-time employment status, and personal earnings through analysis of government data sources, including the 2011–2013 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS).

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on the design of safety net programs for low-income households in the U.S. Many U.S. safety net programs involve in-kind transfers, which are used in order to both alter consumption patterns among recipients and limit take-up by ineligibles. However, in the absence of its own network of providers, the government must rely on private vendors to serve as its agents in rendering transfers, giving rise to two types of agency problems: (1) vendors may refuse to participate in government programs, leaving needy people unserved or (2) vendors may engage in fraud in order to increase their payoff from participation. A separate issue arises when government intervention in private markets causes general equilibrium effects on third parties. The first essay examines attempts to reduce vendor fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) using data on the staggered rollout of a fraud reduction program in Texas. Vendors were required to move to an electronic payment system, which allowed regulators to more easily verify reimbursement claims. I show that the program was effective in reducing fraud, but also that it increased vendor non-participation, leading to a reduction in WIC take-up among eligible women. I also show that the fraud reduction program increased prices paid by non-WIC shoppers by 9\%. My results indicate that the effectiveness of policies intended to alter consumption patterns among welfare recipients depend crucially on the incentives of providers and that enforcement measures interact with these incentives. The second essay, co-authored with Ilyana Kuziemko and Maya Rossin-Slater, analyzes the effects of contracting out Medicaid benefits to insurance companies on health disparities among low-income mothers and children. Increasingly in U.S. public insurance programs, the state finances competing, capitated health plans rather than using a fee-for-service (FFS) model. We study how high- and low-cost infants (blacks and Hispanics, respectively) are affected by the transition from FFS to Medicaid managed care (MMC). We find that black-Hispanic infant health disparities \emph{widen}---e.g., black mortality increases by 12\% while the Hispanic mortality \emph{decreases} by 22\%---and care worsens for blacks. Additionally, black birth rates fall. We present a model of risk-selection in which capitation incentivizes competing plans to offer better care to low-cost clients to retain them in future periods. The third essay uses a novel identification design to study the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on fertility among low-income mothers. Maternal labor market time is thought to play an important role in childbearing. Therefore, wage subsidies like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) may impact fertility among low-income households. Existing literature finds no effect of the EITC on completed fertility, however. I therefore consider whether the EITC affects a different fertility outcome: birth spacing. If there are economies of scale in childrearing, mothers may reduce space between births to minimize time spent out of the labor market. Close spacing is thought to be detrimental to child health and educational outcomes. To identify the effects of the EITC, I use a new regression discontinuity design (RD) in first child's birth month around the end of the year. Children born before the end of the year can be claimed as dependents on that year's tax returns, substantially increasing EITC eligibility for first time parents. My design incorporates recent evidence that first time EITC eligibility functions as an information shock for many recipients. I find that EITC receipt decreases time to second child by 3-4\%. Effects are concentrated among single mothers (19\% decrease), whereas I find no effects for married mothers or on completed fertility. My findings suggest there may be unintended negative effects of welfare-to-work policies on children in single parent households. Taken together, my findings demonstrate that the design of welfare programs --- including whether or not delivery of benefits is contracted out to private firms --- plays a crucial role in program efficacy, affecting both equity and efficiency concerns. My findings regarding the role of private vendors contrast with traditional economic research on safety net programs, which tends to focus on agency issues between the government and the low income recipients.

Central cities’ populations have rebounded over the last few decades, but scholars are unsure why. I propose and offer econometric evidence for a novel hypothesis—legal changes have driven central cities’ resurgence. In particular, state fiscal aid for schools in poor cities, mandated by state courts, has made poor cities more desirable places to live by improving their schools and reducing their taxes. I test my hypothesis by taking advantage of the natural experiment resulting from the dramatic increase in transfers to some states’ poor cities in response to court- ordered school finance equalization, using Census data on over 20,000 cities and towns. The key threats to accurate measurement are that poor places may have grown differently than rich places in the absence of school finance redistribution, and places in high-redistribution states may have grown differently than places in low- redistribution states. To address these concerns, I use a continuous version of the “difference-in-difference-in-differences” econometric technique. The results show that redistribution had a large effect on urban population growth between 1980 and 2010, explaining about one-third of the “return to the central city.” I then conduct a case study on the local finances of Connecticut, and find that the state transfers for education led to tax reductions, as well as the intended increases in education spending. Finally, the Article suggests the importance of considering two underappreciated efficiency virtues of state aid to poor places in discussions on fiscal federalism. First, financing schools locally discourages people from living in poor cities by requiring that their residents pay for the costs of providing services to the cities’ poor. The results show that the location choices of many people are affected by this local financing. Second, the Article shows that school finance redistribution promotes the positive externalities associated with central city living. These arguments could be used in future legislative debates or litigation in support more school finance redistribution.

The choice of whether and where to attend college is among the most important investment decisions individuals and families make, yet people know little about how institutions of higher learning compare along important dimensions of quality. This is especially true for the nearly 5,000 colleges granting credentials of two years or fewer, which together graduate nearly 2 million students annually, or about 39 percent of all postsecondary graduates. Moreover, popular rankings of college quality, such as those produced by U.S. News, Forbes, and Money, focus only on a small fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and tend to reward highly selective institutions over those that contribute the most to student success. Drawing on a variety of government and private data sources, this report presents a provisional analysis of college value-added with respect to the economic success of the college’s graduates, measured by the incomes graduates earn, the occupations . . .

Over the course of the second half of the 19th century, states in the US, which were entirely dominated by men, gave married women property rights. Before this womens liberation, married women were subject to the laws of coverture. Coverture had detailed laws as to which spouse had ownership and control over various aspects of property both before and after marriage. This paper develops a general equilibrium model with endogenous determination of womens rights in which these laws affect portfolio choices, leading to inefficient allocations. We show how technological advancement eventually leads to men granting rights, and in turn how these rights affect development. We show how key implications of the model are consistent with cross-state empirical evidence in the US. Specifically, the dynamics of non-agricultural employment after rights are granted fit exactly with the models prediction.

Based on their socioeconomic characteristics, Mexican immigrant men should have very high unemployment. More than half do not have a high school diploma. One in four works in construction; at the height of the recent recession, 20% of construction workers were unemployed. Yet their unemployment rates are similar to those of native-born white men. After controlling for education and occupation, Mexican immigrant men have lower probabilities of unemployment than native-born white men both before and during the recent recession. I consider explanations based on eligibility for unemployment benefits, out-migrant selection for unemployment, and employer preferences for Mexican immigrant labor.

In 2011, the passage of Wisconsin Act 10 eliminated substantive collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin. How did politicians in Wisconsin invoke racial symbolism in the policy contest over public sector collective bargaining rights? To what extent did this policy battle reconstruct racial identities of blackness and whiteness? In this analysis, we leverage a multi-method approach to speak to these questions. We use a historical analysis of race in Milwaukee and current public opinion around support for public sector cuts to frame a discourse analysis of political rhetoric employed by the Walker campaign. We join critical race perspectives to examine how politicians play on existing inequalities as a method of gaining political and electoral legitimacy and achieving a retrenchment of the modern state. Moreover, we build a case supporting the claim that Governor Walker and his allies activated the racial animus of white workers.

The purpose of this research is to understand how a college degree will affect an individual’s earnings. I use data from the American Community Survey and a human capital model to investigate the question. Earnings increase around 60 percent when an individual earns any form of college degree. There are other factors that influence both income and an individual’s decision to continue education after high school, but this model suggests that furthering education should lead to higher earnings.

Historically, the public sector has served as an equalizing institution through the expansion of job opportunities for minority workers. This study examines whether the public sector continues to serve as an equalizing institution in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Current Population Survey cross-sectional and longitudinal data, I investigate changes in public sector employment and unemployment between 2003 and 2013. My results point to a post-recession double disadvantage for black public sector women: they are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are substantially more likely than other public sector workers to be without work. These two trends are a historical break for the public sector labor market. Among public sector workers, black women are the most likely to enter unemployment, the least likely to find private sector employment, and the most likely to exit the labor force. I find that deteriorating employment outcomes for black public sector women cannot be explained by differences in education, occupation, or any of the other measurable factors that are typically associated with employment.

Scholarly investigations of intergenerational mobility typically focus on either the occupations of fathers and sons or their incomes. Using an identical sample of fathers and sons, we examine how estimates of intergenerational mobility in income and occupational prestige are affected by (1) measurement that uses long time averages and (2) varying the point in the life cycle when outcomes are measured. We find that intergenerational occupational mobility is overstated when using a single year of fathers occupation compared to a 10-year average centered on mid-career. We also find that for both income and occupation, mobility estimates are largest when sons are in their mid-career, suggesting that this may be the ideal period in which to measure their status. Finally, we see differences in the pattern of estimates across the two types of measures: for income, estimates of intergenerational persistence are highest when fathers are in their mid-career; for occupation, estimates are much larger when fathers occupations are accounted for late in their careers.

Young adults aged 19 to 29 are significantly less likely than those in other age groups to have health insurance since most family insurance policies cut off dependents when they turn 19 or finish college. Between 2003 and 2009, several U.S. states relaxed their eligibility requirements to allow young adults to remain covered under their parents’ employer-provided health insurance policies. For those who qualify for these benefits, the expansion of dependent coverage partially reduces the value of being employed by a firm that provides health insurance or of working full-time, as adult children can now obtain health insurance through an alternate channel. The authors employ quasi-experimental variation in the timing and generosity of states’ eligibility rules to identify the effect of the policy changes on young adults’ labor market choices. Their results suggest that the expansion increases the group dependent coverage rate and reduces labor supply among young adults, particularly in full-time employment.

The Digitising Scotland (DS) project aims to digitise the 24 million vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) for all residents in Scotland since 1855 (ie transcribe them into machine encoded text). This will allow research access to information on individuals and their families for those who have ever lived in Scotland between 1855 to the present day. In this paper we present the methodology for geocoding these 24 million historical addresses in Scotland from 1855 to 1974 by introducing the Historical Address Geocoder – GIS (HAG-GIS) spatial framework and its matching algorithms implemented for the needs of the DS project. The matching processes link the historical addresses to the contemporary addresses by exact and fuzzy matching algorithms. Apart from geocoding the historical addresses, we also produce pseudo registration district boundaries using the pilot historical addresses from death event records in 1950 and 1951.

The skill of complex problem solving drives innovativeness, which drives higher productivity which drives higher incomes, higher profits and higher welfare. Complexity resolution therefore makes a particularly valuable target for lifelong learning activities. Skills in general are even more valued in the labor market than was suggested by previous empirical evidence. To be able to learn such skills not only in formal education during childhood and youth, but also to acquire skills in various circumstances of lifelong learning is therefore of growing importance. Fortunately, there is various evidence that these skills are learnable and trainable throughout a working life biography. Enterprises play a central role in providing directly and indirectly the opportunities for lifelong learning. They are the organizers of the work place, and thus determine . . .

We find that changes in the credit spreads of state-issued municipal bonds around gubernatorial elections predict future economic outcomes. A 0.203% (one standard deviation) increase in credit spread around an election is associated with a 3.1% decline in state GDP per capita and a 0.06% increase in the state unemployment rate at the end of the elected governor's tenure. As a possible channel of predictability, we show that changes in credit spreads predict fiscal outcomes, such as changes in deficits during the tenure of elected governors. Also, changes in municipal bond credit spreads around gubernatorial elections predict the market value, revenue, and operations of firms locally operating within a state. Our finding is consistent with the idea that quality of government is an important determinant of the cost of state financing, and that investors have access to information on local politics, which is reflected in municipal bond markets.