PurposeFor classical Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), migrant studies could elucidate contributions of environmental factors (including EpsteinBarr virus (EBV)) to the lower rates in non-whites. Given the well-described etiologic complexity of HL, this research requires a large, immigrant population, such as California Hispanics.MethodsWith 19882004 California Cancer Registry data (2,595 Hispanic, 8,637 white HL cases) and tumor cell EBV status on a subset (218 Hispanics, 656 whites), we calculated ethnicity- and nativity-specific HL incidence rates simultaneously by age, sex, and histologic subtype, and tumor cell EBV prevalence.ResultsCompared with white rates, Hispanic HL rateswere lower overall (70 %) and for nodular sclerosis HL,particularly among young adults (6065 % for females).However, they were higher among children (200 %) andolder adults, and for mixed cellularity HL. Compared withrates in foreign-born Hispanics, rates in US-born Hispanicswere higher among young adults (>threefold in females),lower for children and adults over age 70, and consistentlyintermediate compared with rates in whites. EBV tumorprevalence was 67, 32, and 23 % among foreign-bornHispanics, US-born Hispanics, and whites, respectively,although with variation by age, sex, and histology.ConclusionsFindings strongly implicate environmentalinfluences, such as nativity-related sociodemographic dif-ferences, on HL occurrence. In addition, lower young adultrates and higher EBV prevalence in US-born Hispanicsthan in whites raise questions about the duration/extent ofenvironmental change for affecting HL rates and also pointto ethnic differences in genetic susceptibility. Lesser variation in mixed cellularity HL rates and greater variation in rates for females across groups suggest less modifiable factors interacting with environmental influences.

Physical activity and inactivity have distinct cardio-metabolic consequences, suggesting that combinations of activities can impact health above and beyond the effects of a single activity. However, little work has examined patterns of non-labor market time activity in the US population, particularly among full-time employees in sedentary occupations, who are at increased risk of adverse health consequences associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Identification of these patterns, and how they are related to total physical activity levels, is important for developing effective, attainable physical activity recommendations among sedentary employees, who typically have less time available for exercise. This is, especially the case for low-income employees who face the highest time and financial barriers to achieving physical activity goals. This study uses cluster analysis to examine patterns of non-labor market time use among full-time (≥40 h/week) employed adults in sedentary occupations (<3 MET-h) on working days in the American Time Use Study. We then examine whether these patterns are associated with higher likelihood of meeting physical activity recommendations and higher overall physical activity (MET-h). We find that non-labor market time use patterns include those characterized by screen activities, housework, caregiving, sedentary leisure, and exercise. For both genders, the screen pattern was the most common and increased from 2003 to 2012, while the exercise pattern was infrequent and consistent across time. Screen, sedentary leisure, and community patterns were associated with lower likelihoods of meeting physical activity recommendations, suggesting that interventions targeting screen time may miss opportunities to improve physical activity among similarly sedentary groups. Alternately, non-labor market time use patterns characterized by housework and caregiving, represented feasible avenues for increasing overall physical activity levels, especially for those with low financial and time resources. Consideration of non-labor market time use patterns may improve strategies to increase physical activity and decrease inactivity among full-time employed adults in sedentary jobs.

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop a rich overlapping generations model featuring an explicit family structure, extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, endogenous accumulation of labor market experience as well as standard intertemporal consumption-savings choices in the presence of uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk. We calibrate the model to US macro, micro and tax data and characterize the labor income tax Laffer curve under the current choice of the progressivity of the labor income tax code as well as when varying progressivity. We find that more progressive labor income taxes significantly reduce tax revenues. For the US, converting to a flat tax code raises the peak of the Laffer curve by 6%, whereas converting to a tax system with progressivity similar to Denmark would lower the peak by 7%. We also show that, relative to a representative agent economy tax revenues are less sensitive to the progressivity of the tax code in our economy. This finding is due to the fact that labor supply of two earner households is less elastic (along the intensive margin) and the endogenous accumulation of labor market experience makes labor supply of females less elastic (around the extensive margin) to changes in tax progressivity.

It is a commonly held view that the quality of unemployed workers varies counter- cyclically. During economic downturns, Örms raise standards for retaining workersó better workers are Öred, so it is natural to expect an accompanying rise in the unemployment poolís quality. However, I present a model in which the reverse is true. Firms learn about employee quality over time and Öre their lowest quality workers, but workers enter unemployment also via quitting. In equilibrium, the quality of the unemployment pool reáects a balance between áows of selective Örings and of (relatively higher quality) quits. Although Örms Öre better workers during economic downturns, there are more of these Örings at such times, and quits are no longer su¢ cient to balance the corresponding negative selectionó the unemployment pool thus declines in quality. I use the model to explore the dynamic consequences of this. Firms limit hiring in response, and even after the economy rebounds otherwise, hiring will not resume until the unemployment poolís quality recovers. This o§ers a possible contributing factor to jobless recoveries. Using CPS micro-data and JOLTS, I then provide empirical support for several testable implications of the model, focusing on direct evidence for the mechanism driving the decline in unemployment pool quality. The model is consistent with other, previously-observed empirical patterns as well, and it provides a tractable framework for dynamic analysis of labor markets with private learning during employment. Chapter 2: We consider a dynamic trading environment, where heterogeneous buyers and sellers are randomly paired in each period. Within each match, seller types become observable while buyer types remain private information, and sellers make take-it-or-leave-it o§ers. We Örst establish the existence of steady-state equilibrium where sellers o§er prices that are continuous in their types. We then characterize properties of sorting under search frictions of varied strength, focusing on two extreme cases. With maximal search frictionsó complete disregard for future payo§só we demonstrate that log-supermodularity (log-submodularity) of the production function is a necessary and su¢ cient condition for positive (negative) assortative matching. Log-supermodularity (Log- submodularity) is stronger than the standard supermodularity (submodularity) sorting condition. The resistance to sorting comes from the fact that higher type sellers have stronger incentive to secure trade by lowering prices. At the other extreme, the incentive to secure trade grows inconsequential when search frictions vanish and hence the condition for positive (negative) sorting returns to supermodularity (submodularity). Chapter 3: We study the dynamics of a market where agents trade assets that are heterogeneous in quality, but publicly indistinguishable. All agents begin with only public knowledge of the aggregate asset pool composition, but each owner learns privately about the quality of an asset in her possession. Ownership entails a constant choice between (i) the value of retaining the asset (and its corresponding payo§s) and (ii) that of selling it on the market for a uniform price that reáects the instantaneous average quality of assets being sold. In turn, the market composition reáects not only those owners who have opted for (ii), but also owners selling for reasons unrelated to asset quality. Learning is gradual, so ownership can be understood as an optimal experimentation problem. Whereas an environment with public learning would entail symmetric timing of sales, private learn- ing precludes this due to externalities sellers exert on other market participants. Instead, owners must spread sales over a broad time interval and, in turn, must experiment ine¢ ciently. Qualitatively, price dynamics resemble those found in speculation-fueled ìpanicsî of the sort often invoked to explain market breakdowns. After an initial period without movement, prices enter a steady decline. Eventually, the stockó and corresponding áowó of owners looking to sell due to poor asset performance grows thin. Prices stop falling and Önally rise as the presence of adverse selection fades from the market.

There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across U.S. metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than other Americans. Newer residents of these cities appear to be as unhappy as longer term residents, and yet some people continue to move to these areas. While the historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past. One interpretation of these facts is that individuals do not aim to maximize self-reported well-being, or happiness, as measured in surveys, and they willingly endure less happiness in exchange for higher incomes or lower housing costs. In this view, subjective well-being is better viewed as one of many arguments of the utility function, rather than the utility function itself, and individuals make trade-offs among competing objectives, including but not limited to happiness.

Are households more likely to be homeowners when housing risk is higher? We show that home-ownership rates and loan-to-value (LTV) ratios at the city level are strongly negatively correlated with local house price volatility. However, causal inference is confounded by house price levels, which are systematically correlated with housing risk in an intuitive way: in cities where the land value is larger relative to the local cost of structures, house prices are higher and more volatile. We disentangle the contributions of high price levels from high volatilities by building a life-cycle model of home-ownership choices. We find that higher price levels can explain most of the lower home-ownership. Higher risk in the model leads to slightly lower home-ownership and LTV ratios in high land value cities. The relationship between LTV and risk is corroborated by LTV's negative correlation with price volatility in the data and highlights the importance of including other means of incomplete insurance in models of home-ownership.

In spite of the differential impact of the Great Recession on unemployment across the US, migration rates remain largely unresponsive to local labor market shocks. To isolate which mechanisms prevented migration as insurance against shocks, I estimate a dynamic, non-stationary model of migration and labor supply using a national longitudinal survey from 2004-2013. I focus on the role of employment frictions on migration decisions in addition to other explanations in the literature. My results show that large moving costs are the main impediment to migratory insurance. Model simulations show that spatial unemployment insurance in the form of a moving subsidy can help workers move to more favorable markets. Take-up rates are highest for young, unemployed workers who were not born in the weak location.

These essays focus on improving both the measurement and valuation of time devoted to family care, as well as exploring factors, such as gender, age, and earnings, that affect time allocation. The first essay examines whether time devoted to primary child care activities can be truly understood to represent the total amount of time devoted to child care (as is implied by the focus on primary care activities that dominates the time-use literature), exploring problems of conventional definitions of child care and utilizations of time-use surveys. The second essay explores the measurement issues of relative temporal burden on “sandwich” family caregivers by comparing time spent on child care and adult care. Re-categorizing activities of caring for adults and children in the ATUS in terms of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) allows for greater comparability with studies that measure needs based on assistance with these activities. Building on the improved measures of care time developed in the first two essays, the third essay develops a household production . . .

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing labor income taxes? In this paper we provide a quantitative answer to this question, and study the importance of the progressivity of the tax schedule for the ability of the government to generate tax revenues. We develop a rich overlapping generations model featuring an explicit family structure, extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, endogenous accumulation of labor market experience as well as standard intertemporal consumption-savings choices in the presence of uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk. We calibrate the model to US macro, micro and tax data and characterize the labor income tax Laffer curve under the current choice of the progressivity of the labor income tax code as well as when varying progressivity. We find that more progressive labor income taxes significantly reduce tax revenues. For the US, converting to a flat tax code raises the peak of the Laffer curve by 6%, whereas converting to a tax system with progressivity similar to Denmark would lower the peak by 7%. We also show that, relative to a representative agent economy tax revenues are less sensitive to the progressivity of the tax code in our economy. This finding is due to the fact that labor supply of two earner households is less elastic (along the intensive margin) and the endogenous accumulation of labor market experience makes labor supply of females less elastic (around the extensive margin) to changes in tax progressivity.

This dissertation consists of two papers in the field of Macro Labor and one paper in the field of global games. In particular, the first two chapters focus on studying why the progress of job polarization has been different across industries between 1980 and 2010 and the last chapter analyzes the interaction between the precision of exogenous and market-generated information in coordination economies. The first chapter empirically explores the relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials. By using the U.S. Census and EU KLEMS data, we find that the progress of job polarization between 1980 and 2009 was more evident in industries that initially paid a high wage premium to workers than in industries that did not. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained as a dynamic response of firms to interindustry wage differentials: firms with a high wage premium seek alternative ways to cut production costs by replacing workers who perform routine tasks with In- formation, Communication, and Technology (ICT) capital. The replacement of routine workers with ICT capital has become more pronounced as the price of ICT capital has fallen over the past 30 years. As a result, firms that are constrained to pay a relatively high wage premium have experienced slower growth of employment of routine workers than firms in low-wage industries, which led to heterogeneity in job polarization across industries. Then the second chapter proposes a theory that unveils the mechanism underly- ing the close relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials, which is studied empirically in the first chapter. In particular, we develop a two-sector neoclassical growth model with three key features. First, industries differ in the wage rates they pay to workers. Second, routine workers are relative substitutes for capital while non-routine workers are relative complement to capital. Last, there is an exoge- nous investment-specific technology change. Main predictions of the model are that (1) job polarization is more evident and (2) capital-routine worker ratio increases more in the industry that pays higher wages to workers when there is an investment-specific technology change, which are consistent with the empirical findings in the first chapter. In the last chapter, we study the interaction between the precision of exogenous and market-generated information in a class of economies where firms display coor- dination motives in presence of dispersed information and where the outcome of the coordination is traded in a competitive asset market a ́-la Grossman and Stiglitz (1980). We show that when more private information is injected in the coordination economy the equilibrium asset price becomes less informative. To showcase the relevance of our re- sult we present an application to a problem of endogenous information choice where the “Knowing What Others Know” property of information acquisition derived by Hellwig and Veldkamp (2009) breaks down in presence of market-generated information.

My intention for this comparison study was to bring awareness to the struggles of Pakistani and American Pakistani women’s in achieving higher education. Additionally, the study measured the influence of social construction of gender, parental expectations, socioeconomic status, culture, and gender dynamics within family and education of Pakistani and American Pakistani women in pursuit of their educational goals. Through quantitative and qualitative data, the researcher reached several conclusions. The results indicated that parental expectations, experience with education system and culture, socioeconomic status and gender dynamics within family, and gender dynamics within education affected the participants of this study in a significant way. The quantitative data indicated to the researcher that both American Pakistani and Pakistani participants in this study holds a high regard and respect for parental expectations. Respondents in this particular sample had varied experience with education system and culture. Specifically, American Pakistani women reported positive attitudes about the American education system and culture. In comparison, 69% of Pakistani women strongly supported the Pakistani education system while 31% disagreed. Inconsistencies with attitudes toward Pakistani education system are due to inequalities and access to education. Even though quantitative data on socioeconomic status and gender dynamics within the family opposed disparities and inequalities in women’s education, discussion of the same issues in qualitative results reported otherwise. Similarly, participants in this study strongly favored that their gender does not define their performance in education. Yet, thematic analysis of qualitative data that asked participants’ interpretations on barriers keeping women from achieving their educational goals exposed contradictory results.

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs. A common assumption is that the rise of drug testing must have had negative consequences for black employment. However, the rise of employer drug testing may have benefited African-Americans by enabling non-using blacks to prove their status to employers. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to identify the impacts of testing on black hiring. Black employment in the testing sector is suppressed in the absence of testing, a finding which is consistent with ex ante discrimination on the basis of drug use perceptions. Adoption of pro-testing legislation increases black employment in the testing sector by 7-30% and relative wages by 1.4-13.0%, with the largest shifts among low skilled black men. Results further suggest that employers substitute white women for blacks in the absence of testing.

The United States Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which forced 16 Southern states to strike down their anti-miscegenation laws, creates a unique opportunity to explore the impact of an exogenous change in a states laws regulating interracial marriages. This study investigates the relationship between anti-miscegenation laws, black/white interracial marriage and black Americans geographical distribution using three decades of the U.S. census data. The results suggest that the timing and voluntary/involuntary repeal of statutes banning black/white interracial marriages impacted the locational distribution of married black males. The relationship is less clear-cut for black females. However, length of exposure to anti-miscegenation laws is found to be related to the geographical sorting patterns of both black males and females. A few patterns in the data suggest that social norms and local culture may be influential in this relationship and the findings imply that unless a society is ready to change, the government cannot fully offset the negative impact of past bans and punishments.

We study why China suddenly exhibited a large surge in births -- a 50% increase in 2000 relative to 1999 -- in the 2000 Year of the Dragon by disaggregating birth rates at the city level. We define the dragon effect as a relative jump in birth rates compared to the trend. Prior to 2000, Asian nations with large numbers of ethnic Chinese -- but not China -- exhibited strong dragon year effects. We exploit the uneven economic growth of regions in China to understand the emergence of the dragon effect. We find that the dragon effect was most pronounced in rapidly developing cities having higher incomes, higher average education, and greater employment prospects as proxied by the share of non-local residents. Our main findings at the city level are supported by our micro-level analysis, where we show the dragon effect to be strongly correlated with educational attainment of family members and membership in a multi-generational household.

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring ‘new institutions’ into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment underline its relevance. We discuss the measurement of wage inequality, data sources, and stylized facts of wage dispersion for rich countries. The literature explaining the dispersion of wage rates and the role of institutions is evaluated, from the early 1980s to the recent literature on job polarization and tasks as well as on the minimum wage. Distinguishing between supply-and-demand approaches and institutionalones, we find the former challenged by the empirical measurement of technological change and a risk of ad hoc additions, without realizing their institutional preconditions. The institutional approach faces an abundance of institutions without a clear conceptual delineation of institutions and their interactions. Empirical cross-country analysis of the correlation between institutional measures and wage inequality incorporates unemployment and working hours dynamics, discussing the problems of matching individuals to their relevant institutional framework. Minimum wage legislation and active labour market policies come out negatively correlated to earnings inequality in US and EU countries.

The TRA project is a unique research approach based on the nationwide collection of historical individual-level data on the personal, occupational and economic situation of people having married or died between the early nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Coinciding with the release of the first part of the data produced by the project, this article looks at the project’s founding principles and sources before going on to assess its geographical and temporal representativeness. Taking as an example the trend in the proportion of individuals leaving no wealth behind when they die, as established using the database, a tool such as this provides an interesting basis for writing an economic history that is both micro- and macro-social. Our analysis then shows how the approach adopted for the TRA project can be extended to any new individual-level data. This is the very principle and purpose of the TRA project, which, far from being closed, is a matrix for studying the transformations that have affected French society and many other societies over the last two centuries.

In recent years, students have been paying more to attend college and earning less upon graduationtrends that have led many observers to question whether a college education remains a good investment. However, an analysis of the economic returns to college since the 1970s demonstrates that the benefits of both a bachelors degree and an associates degree still tend to outweigh the costs, with both degrees earning a return of about 15 percent over the past decade. The return has remained high in spite of rising tuition and falling earnings because the wages of those without a college degree have also been falling, keeping the college wage premium near an all-time high while reducing the opportunity cost of going to school.