While children's orientations to achievement are strong predictors of attainments, little is known about how parental economic hardship during recessionary times influences children's orientations to their futures. The Youth Development Study has followed a community sample of young people in St Paul, Minnesota from mid-adolescence through their mid-thirties with near-annual surveys, and has recently begun surveying the children of this cohort. Using linked parent and child data, the present study examines the relationship between parental economic hardship and children's achievement orientations in the aftermath of the recent "Great Recession." Initial OLS analyses draw on 345 parent-child pairs, with data collected from parents during their adolescence, during the decade prior to the recession, and in 2011, and from their children (age 11 and older) in 2011. Then, first difference models are estimated, based on a smaller sample (N=186) of parents and children who completed surveys in both 2009 and 2011. Our findings indicate that when families are more vulnerable, as a result of low parental education and prior parental unemployment experience, children's achievement orientations are more strongly threatened by the family's economic circumstances. For example, as parental financial problems increased, economic expectations declined only among children of the least well-educated parents. Low household incomes diminished educational aspirations only when parents experienced unemployment during the ten years prior to the recent recession. Parental achievement orientations, as adolescents, were also found to moderate the impacts of shifts in the family's economic circumstances. Finally, boys reacted more strongly to their parents' hardship than girls.

In this paper, I analyze how a substantial increase in Seattles minimum wage now the highest in the US will affect workers eligibility for the EITC. I find that the benefit of a $15 per hour minimum wage is partially offset by the resulting EITC changes. That is, despite generous EITC parameters, I estimate that the higher minimum wage will shift 36 percent of EITC recipients in Seattle out of eligibility, including 10 percent of whom were originally in the phase-in and plateau regions of the EITC schedule. I also provide the demographic characteristics of individuals who were shifted around and out of eligibility and calculate the net gains of all EITC recipients. I find that after the minimum wage increase, among those who were not shifted out of eligibility, the credit amount was unchanged for 16.7 percent, higher for 31.6 percent and lower for 51.6 percent of recipients. Shifts in EITC eligibility are important because workers in different regions of the EITC face different effective marginal tax rates, which in turn can influence labor supply decisions.

Using time diary data from the mid-1970s, the relationship between unilateral divorce and couple-level time allocation is estimated. Married women in states with unilateral divorce are found to be spending less time in household production and core housework than those in states without unilateral divorce, and married men are found to be doing a greater share of housework within families. This paper also uses cross state and time variation in divorce law by including data from the early 1990s to estimate the effect of the adoption of unilateral divorce on daily time use. The analysis confirms the findings for women in the 1970s, as unilateral divorce is found to significantly decrease time in housework for women.

Economists and economic historians seeking to explain what happened in the recent or distant past are often faced with data that is often limited to price and quantity, At a conference honoring Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate Gary Becker stated that economists seem to have forgotten how much you can learn from the use of simple supply and demand models. Our goal in this paper is to use the basics of simple supply and demand models to develop estimates of the size of shifts in labor demand and labor supply for female and male workers over the course of the 1940s.

Most policy changes generate winners and losers. Political economy and optimal policy suggest questions such as: Who wins, who loses? How much? Given a choice of welfare weights, what is the impact of the policy change on social welfare? This paper proposes a framework to empirically answer such questions. The framework is grounded in welfare economics and allows for arbitrary heterogeneity across individuals as well as for endogenous prices and wages (general equilibrium effects). The proposed methods are based on imputation of money-metric welfare impacts for every individual in the data. The key contribution of this paper are new identification results for marginal causal effects conditional on a vector of endogenous outcomes. These identification results are required for imputation of individual welfare effects. Based on these identification results, we propose methods for estimation and inference on disaggregated welfare effects, sets of winners and losers, and social welfare effects. We furthermore provide results relating aggregation with social welfare weights to the distributional decomposition literature. We apply our methods to analyze the distributional impact of the introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), using variation in state supplements to the federal EITC and the CPS-IPUMS data.

This paper estimates the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. Motivated by the fact that nearly half of all college students fail to earn a bachelor's degree, we study a model of risky college completion. The central idea is that students drop out of college mainly because they fail to complete the requirements for earning a degree. This introduces two levels of ability selection that reinforce each other. (i) In college, low ability students typically do not succeed academically and drop out. (ii) At the college entry stage, their poor graduation prospects deter low ability students from even attempting college. Taken together, the two levels of selection generate a large ability gap between college graduates and high school graduates. We calibrate the model to data for men born around 1960 and find that ability selection accounts for nearly half of the college lifetime earnings premium. JEL-Code: E240, J240, I210.

Este trabajo expone, da magnitud y corrige la preferencia de dgito en la declaracin del ao de entrada a Estados Unidos de Amrica (EUA), de los nacidos en Mxico migrados entre 1990 y 2010. A partir del aprovechamiento de los resultados de la American Community Survey (ACS), se emplean ndices de regularidad de declaracin para los aos terminados en 0 y 5. Se observa que para el periodo de correccin, la preferencia digital llega a ser de hasta 46 por ciento respecto a la declaracin en los dems aos. El mtodo de correccin aqu empleado se basa en el prorrateo de las desviaciones promedio de dichos ndices. La distribucin corregida del fenmeno mantiene la estructura original observada de la serie, conserva los totales quinquenales y decenales, los porcentajes acumulados y los promedios anuales. El establecimiento de una poblacin base para ejercicios de prospectiva demogrfica involucra la estimacin de la migracin internacional, adems de la fecundidad y la mortalidad. Para el caso de Mxico, uno de los componentes de la migracin: El flujo emigratorio internacional, se obtiene principalmente de fuentes de informacin de EUA, ya que cerca del 90% del fenmeno se comparte con este pas. La ACS se ha adoptado como la principal fuente de la estadstica de dicha corriente, por lo que es importante conocer, evaluar y corregir los potenciales errores de sus resultados, esto como un procedimiento inicial de la estimacin de la emigracin internacional de Mxico. Cabe sealar que la presente exposicin no pretende minimizar el aprovechamiento de los resultados de dicha fuente, o descalificarla, sino por el contrario, se enaltece su utilidad, nica en la materia, y se invita a la reflexin de su empleo y de algunos resultados obtenidos para la experiencia migratoria de Mxico. Por lo que en este trabajo se expone la preferencia digital en la declaracin del ao de entrada al pas anglosajn, para el periodo de captacin 1910-2010, y a partir de los aos de las encuestas de 2000 a 2010 se da magnitud a dicha preferencia y se propone un mtodo de correccin para estimar el nivel y tendencia del flujo de nacidos en Mxico y residentes en EUA, por ao de llegada para 1990 a 2010.

The latest Census data on American incomes drove home a troubling fact: people arent making as much as they once did. The median household income in the United States in 2013 was $51,939, down 8 percent from 2007 when adjusted for inflation. Though the recession technically ended several years ago, large numbers of people continue to suffer from flat wages and rising prices. But while the middle class continues to suffer, many slices of the population are doing better. Using individual-level Census data for 2008 to 2012--15 million records in total--TIME crunched the numbers for every demographic by gender, age, education and marital status. The following calculator will tell you how your salary stacks up and how thats changed over time. (The information you enter is not recorded. In fact, it never leaves your computer.)

There is an urgent need for improved models that address the interdependencies between land use and transportation, and considerable new work is underway to develop such models in Oregon and elsewhere. These models and planning practices to integrate land use into the process, however, require the integration of massive amounts of land use data that is messy and incomplete. There have been considerable advances in the treatment of such data problems in other domains, drawing on data mining and machine-learning techniques to address issues in various domains. To date, however, little systematic effort has applied these technological advances to the problem domain of land use and transportation data. Experience suggests that as much as 70% of the total effort in developing integrated land use and transportation models is directly or indirectly associated with data development, integration and cleaning, yet there is remarkably little systematic research focused on the development of reusable methods and tools to support this problem domain. In coordination with an ongoing project of similar theme funded by University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), this project will focus on bringing interdisciplinary methods to develop land use datasets for integrated land use and transportation planning and modeling, with special . . .

A decade after the monumental appeals court ruling in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State, funding equity for public elementary and secondary education in New York State is 42nd in the nation, or 8th from the bottom. This inequity has roots in the decades of public policy decisions made by the executive and legislative branches of government driven by political dynamics at the state, regional and local levels. Only after 14 years of litigation by a New York City based organization known as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) resulted in a trilogy of Court of Appeals decisions in 1995, 2003 and 2006 directing the State to correct this inequity did reform begin. In 2007 the State enacted major education financing and accountability reforms entitled Foundation Aid and the Contract for Excellence. These reforms embarked the State on a historic journey toward improving the quality of education provided in the poorest urban, rural and suburban communities in the state. Unfortunately, that journey has been halted for the time being at least. Even in the first year . . .

We investigate the effect of introducing a fiscally neutral increasing block rate water budget price structure on residential water demand. We estimate that demand was reduced by around 17%, although the reduction was achieved gradually over more than three years. As intermediate steps we derive estimates of price and income elasticities that rely only on longitudinal variability. We investigate how different subpopulations responded to the pricing change and find evidence that marginal, rather than average, prices may be driving consumption. We also derive alternative rate structures that might have been implemented, and assess their estimated demand effects.

Male-female wage gaps declined significantly over the 1980s and 1990s, while returns to education increased. In this paper, we use cross-city data to explore whether, like the return to education, the change in the gender wage gap may reflect changes in skill prices induced by the diffusion of information technology. We show that male-female and education-wage differentials moved in opposite directions in response to the adoption of PCs. Our most credible estimates imply that changes in skill prices driven by PC adoption can explain most of the decline in the US male-female wage gap since 1980.

This report finds that unionization and prevailing wage laws strongly reduce income inequality in the construction industry while right-to-work laws tend to intensify the problem. Ultimately, pro-worker policies are the best strategy for raising worker incomes, increasing consumer demand, and reducing inequality.

The US Census Bureau regularly releases Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), datafiles which contain de-identified subsets of the data provided by respondents to someof its various surveys and to the Decennial Census itself. This allows data users toperform “micro” -analyses rather than the “macro” -tabulations which are regularlyperformed by the Bureau. These data users range from non-government (say, university)researchers to government policymakers. These micro-analyses typically depend on thejoint distribution of two or more variables over individuals or households. As a verysimple example, think of the relationship of wages of individuals to their individualages by a linear regression equation. We will use this very simple example throughoutthis paper to illustrate the effects we are interested in. In order to protect the privacyof the data supplied by respondents, as required by Title 13 U.S.C., the Bureau usesa variety of methods to modify the data so that it is very difficult for data users toidentify individual respondents. Although some kind of privacy protection measuresare necessary by law, most of them (top-coding, in particular) have a detrimental effecton the micro-analyses because application of these privacy protection measures changesthe interdependence of two or more variables and, in many cases, renders the analysesmoot.This paper is a very brief review of Census Bureau privacy protection methods and asmall exploration of the effect that top-coding, in particular, has on some specific micro-analyses. Throughout this document: a) we have focussed on the American CommunitySurvey (ACS) PUMS because it is one of the richest national datasets; and b) we haveused Alaska and California as example states because they have, respectively, very smalland very large populations and because the age distributions and wage distributionsare quite different between the two states. We have performed each of our analysesfor every state and the results for the other states are available in the supplementarymaterials. In Section 2 we discuss privacy protection methods in a little more detailand, in particular, focus on a detailed understanding of top-coding, as currently usedby the Census Bureau. In Section 3 we give a brief description of the data sets that weused in our attempts to correct top-coding in Section 4. We introduce the Health andRetirement Study, a non-Census Bureau survey, as a potential tool for correcting the effect of top-coding. In Section 4 we describe the various correction approaches we tried,why they failed, and why there appear to be no other viable approaches to restoring thedistributional properties (e.g., the correlation) of pairs of variables, at least one of whichhas been top-coded. Section 6 discusses the errors in the Census PUMS discovered by[1] and the fix provided by the Census Bureau, and some additional errors we discoveredin the Minnesota Population Center IPUMS. Finally, in Section 7 we briefly discuss theimplications of our study for statistical and economic analyses based on PUMS datawhich have been top-coded.

In this data brief, we describe changes in the labor market of Kentucky's metros during the recession and recovery period of 2006-2011. Educational levels of young workers remained virtually unchanged during this period, yet compared to all U.S. metros, the Kentucky metro labor market has a lower high school drop-out share and a higher share of post-graduate degree workers. Occupations available to non-college bound youth, such as Transportation, Healthcare Support, Personal Care, and Food Preparation & Services, grew in employment but experienced decreases in real wages.

Recent work in gender economics has identified trade as a potential determinant of female labor force participation (REP). It is usually suggested that FLFP rises whenever trade expands those sectors which use female labor intensively. This paper develops a theoretical model to argue that, quite surprisingly, the opposite effects can occur. Distinguishing between female intensive sectors (FIS) and male intensive sectors (MIS), we show that FLFP may actually fall if trade expands EIS. When FIS are capital intensive, trade integration of a capital-abundant economy expands FIS and contracts MIS. Consequently, male workers migrate from MIS to FIS, diluting the capital-labor ratio in the FIS. Under a high complementarity between capital and female labor, the marginal productivity of women drops more than that of men. Thus, the gender wage gap widens and FLFP falls. Employment patterns in the U.S. following NAFTA are broadly consistent with our theory.