This paper studies the effect of infectious disease exposure in early childhood on adult labor market outcomes. To do this, I exploit the exogenous variations in public health projects and new drugs during the Mortality Revolution (1901-1955) in the United States, an era with unmatched mortality decline, driven by innovations in disease control technologies. I create an index of early childhood disease exposure that exploits cross-state variation in pre-intervention disease prevalence, and time variation arising from medical innovations during this period. The results indicate that higher disease prevalence in childhood reduces adult education attainment and earnings, and that public health interventions contributed to roughly 10% of the changes in labor market outcomes between the 1901 and 1955 cohorts. The effect per unit of mortality decline is stronger in the second half of this period (1937-1955), when medications such as penicillin and sulfa drugs were introduced. My findings also shed light on the benefit of controlling infectious diseases in the developing world.

Even as scholars, advocates, and policymakers contest the argument of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan that immigration constitutes “the single most important determinant of American foreign policy,”1 they hold little doubt that the recent era of globalization and transnational migration requires a broader, multiplayer framework for understanding the complexity of US relationships with other countries. The participation of Chinese Americans in transnational activities and US-China relations is a case in point. Their strong interest in this bilateral exchange offers a particularly vivid illustration of how and why immigrants, as individuals and as a community, care about US relations with their “old home.”

When we wrote our first Shriver report five years ago, we showed how women were the new breadwinners. We focused on understanding a seismic shift. Between 1967 and 2008, the share of mothers who were breadwinners or co-breadwinners in American families rose from under a third to two-thirds. . .

This paper first elaborates a model of intermediate selection where potential migrants must have both the resources to finance the migration cost (liquidity constraint restriction) and an income gain of migrating (economic incentives restriction). We then test the predictions of the model regarding the impact of output in the sending country and migration costs on average skill level of immigrants to the United States from 1899 to 1932, where immigration was initially unrestricted by law and then highly limited. Our panel of 39 countries includes data on occupations that immigrants had in their country of origin, providing a more accurate skill measure than previously available datasets. We find that migration costs have a negative but skill-neutral effect on quantity of immigrants and an increase in output, measured as GDP per capita, has a positive effect on quantity and a negative effect on average skill level of immigrants, suggesting that the main channel by which changes in output affected the average skill level of migrants in that time period is through the easing or tightening of the liquidity constraints and not through the economic incentives as in previous models. Also, using migrants occupation in the United States as a measure of skills would lead to misleading conclusions.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 are public policies designed to improve the quality of life for African-Americans by opening access to opportunities for employment and housing, respectively. As this polity is now fourteen years into the twenty-first century, the appearance of triumphs that occurred because of the civil rights movement did not result in the long-term equality that policy makers hoped would occur because of legislative enforcement. This study examined the distribution of income and wealth among African-Americans as an indirect consequence of the Civil Rights Acts (CRA) of 1964 and 1968. Did the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 have an indirect . . .

America has long recognized that protection and preservation of its cultural landmarks are in the public interest and crucial to maintaining its legacy of cultural resources for future generations. Despite these efforts, many historical sites continue to be lost. Bodie State Historic Park, one of 278 historically significant sites within the California State Park system, represents one such at-risk landmark. This thesis is intended to augment current efforts to preserve and promote this unique cultural landscape by developing a GIS-based inventory of the nearly 170 buildings that comprise the remnants of Bodie, and creating a GIS-based thematic gazetteer that links historical attributes with the built environment. The chapters that follow describe ways in which GIS has been specifically adapted for use in historical research, and demonstrate that traditional methods of historical landscape reconstruction and visualization in GIS can be enhanced through the use of site-specific, high-resolution aerial imagery and photogrammetry.

Recent research has related variation in the labor force composition of cities to the cost of housing. First, workers with more human capital tend to locate in cities with high housing costs (income elasticity effect). Second, households with low demand for housing also select into expensive cities (housing preference effect). This paper applies both effects to the location patterns of Hispanic versus non-Hispanic white workers across U.S. cities. Skill intensity in the labor force of both groups is expected to increase with the cost of housing according to the income elasticity effect. However, a number of low skill Hispanics are not permanent, long-term residents of cities and hence have relatively low demand for housing. This suggests an inverse relation between Hispanic skill intensity and house price based on the housing preference effect. Empirical tests show that skill intensity varies positively with house price for non-Hispanic white workers as expected, and negatively for Hispanics (housing preference effect dominates income elasticity effect). The dominance of the housing preference effect means that the location patterns of Hispanic households by skill level are significantly different than those of non-Hispanic households. The results challenge models that assume homothetic or homogeneous preferences over housing, and show that the two effects together can explain the changing distribution of Hispanic households across U.S. cities.

Skilled workers have a rising tendency to emigrate from developing countries, raising fears that their departure harms the poor. To mitigate such harm, researchers haveproposed a variety of policies designed to tax or restrict high-skill migration. Those policies have been justified as Pigovian regulations to raise efficiency by internalizingexternalities, and as non-Pigovian regulations grounded in equity or ethics. This paper challenges both sets of justifications, arguing that Pigovian regulations on skilledemigration are inefficient and non-Pigovian regulations are inequitable and unethical. It concludes by discussing a different class of policy intervention that, in contrast, has the potential to raise welfare.

Most developed countries have foreign aid programs that aim to alleviate poverty and foster economic growth in less developed countries, but with very limited success. A large body of evidence indicates that the root of the economic development problem is cross-country differences in the productivity of labor. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, the obvious way to help people in less developed countries is to allow them to help themselves by moving to places where they can be more productive. Yet immigration laws severely constrain such movement.

This thesis analyzes the determinants that influence Southeast Asian immigrant labor force participation. In this analysis variables regarding human capital, time allocation and assimilation are used in a probit model. These variables include educational attainment, family income, citizenship status, marital status, family structure characteristics, age, sex, and others. Findings suggest that sex, age, citizenship status and family structure (having more than one family in a household, being married and being linguistically isolated) have a greater impact on labor force participation than traits such as educational attainment or the ethnic enclave effect.

There has been increased attention to urban form in the recent segregation literature, showing population density and changes in housing structure as having crucial influence on segregation patterns (Spielman and Harrison 2013; Rothwell and Massey 2010; Watson 2006). However, there has been little work examining areas with newly constructed housing, looking at what kinds of people move to these places, and the consequences of this movement for residential segregation across the built environment of the United States. This project addresses this gap, using 2000 and 2010 decennial Census data to isolate areas of population growth, and understand their racial compositions in context with urban form. Three theoretical perspectives on segregation are used to understand these dynamics with previous understandings of segregation dynamics: Spatial Assimilation, Place Stratification, and Group Threat. It is found that growing areas are generally less segregated than older comparable areas. The implications of the results are discussed, and future avenues of research into segregation and urban form are identified.

Although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory- arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows. Second, it shows that even if these increases were correctly measured, cross-country regressions would have too little power to detect their effects on growth. Third, it points out that the greatest driver of rising remittances is rising migration, which has opportunity cost to economic product at the origin. Net of that cost, there is little reason to expect large growth effects remittances in the origin economy. Migration and remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty at the origin, on the welfare of migrants and their families, and on global gross domestic product; but detecting their effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive.

Rivers in watersheds dominated by agriculture throughout the US are impaired by excess sediment, a significant portion of which comes from non-field, near-channel sources. Both land-use and climate have been implicated in altering river flows and thereby increasing stream-channel erosion and sediment loading. In the wetland-rich landscapes of the upper Mississippi basin, 20th century crop conversions have led to an intensification of artificial drainage, which is now a critical component of modern agriculture. At the same time, much of the region has experienced increased annual rainfall. Uncertainty in separating these drivers of streamflow fuels debate between agricultural and environmental interests on responsibility and solutions for excess riverine sediment. To disentangle the effects of climate and land-use, we compared changes in precipitation, crop conversions, and extent of drained depressional area in 21 Minnesota watersheds over the past 70 years. Watersheds with large land-use changes had increases in seasonal and annual water yields of >50% since 1940. On average, changes in precipitation and crop evapotranspiration explained less than one-half of the increase, with the remainder highly correlated with artificial drainage and loss of depressional areas. Rivers with increased flow have experienced channel widening of 1040% highlighting a source of sediment seldom addressed by agricultural best management practices. Copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objective: To better understand presenteeism and absenteeism on the basis of the choices employees make about working when they experience episodes of illness. Methods: We examine nationally representative data to describe employees' work responses to episodes of illness and how different leave policies contribute to their decisions. Results: Illness episodes typically result in absence from work rather than working a normal or adjusted routine. Employees adjust their routine when ill primarily to save leave or because they have too much work. Paid sick leave and scheduling flexibility influence the likelihood of absence in different ways. Conclusions: Although flexibility to adjust work routines can reduce absences, it is not known to what extent productivity suffers when this occurs. Measures of both short- and long-term presenteeism are necessary to understand the full productivity costs of illness in the workforce.

Tijuana y San Diego son ciudades fronterizas colindantes geogrficamente. A pesar de que cada una de ellas pertenece a un pas con caractersticas sociales, culturales y econmicas distintas. Se localizan en una de las fronteras ms transitadas del mundo con redes sociales, econmicas y familiares que se han fortalecido histricamente generando interacciones desde el trabajo, compras, turismo, educacin y familia, as como elementos naturales del hbitat (Alarcn, 2005). Ambas se caracterizan por tener un crecimiento demogrfico por arriba del promedio nacional, estatal y de sus pares fronterizos. En este punto es importante destacar el papel de la actividad econmica en este proceso, describiendo a estas ciudades como polos de desarrollo de la regin, lo que motiva un efecto de atraccin y de empuje descrito por Harris-Todaro (Morillas & Miana, 2005). En el caso de Tijuana, este efecto se observa en las migraciones internas y externas por las fuentes de empleo generadas en la industria, el comercio y el turismo, sectores que tuvieron un crecimiento, en parte, por las externalidades positivas que la economa vecina ofrece. El efecto en San Diego, se desarrolla ms por cuestiones de poltica econmica, militar y demogrfica de su pas y no responde a las externalidades que pueda generar Tijuana (Alegra, 2007). A pesar de la asimetra en estas ciudades, sus diferencias estructurales acentan las interacciones demogrficas y econmicas entre sus habitantes ya sea por bsqueda de empleo, cambio de residencia o la reunificacin familiar motivando el crecimiento de la poblacin de origen mexicano en San Diego. En lo que respecta a las caractersticas peculiares en la poblacin econmicamente activa (PEA) de Tijuana es un mosaico de culturas al ser destino de migraciones internas. Recibe en promedio 35.5 mil inmigrantes anualmente, as como los extranjeros residentes en la ciudad que en la franja fronteriza equivalen en promedio a 12.1 extranjeros por cada mil habitantes, un valor importante comparado con 5.4 por mil en el total del pas (Mojarro, 2002), incidiendo en un cambio constante en la estructura de la poblacin. Si bien la participacin de migrantes del extranjero es mayor, no es significativa para las estructuras de poblacin ni de la PEA, por lo que no se considera en este anlisis. En el caso de San Diego el objeto de inters es la poblacin de origen mexicano la cual ha tenido una tendencia de crecimiento en los ltimos aos llegando a ser la minora de mayor importancia no slo en este condado sino tambin en Estados Unidos.

Focusing on macro-level processes, this article combines Decennial Census and Current Population Survey data to simultaneously test longitudinal and cross-sectional effects on ethnic intermarriage using structural and cultural explanations. Covering a 130 year period, the results of our multilevel analysis for 140 national-origin groups indicate that structural characteristics explain why some origin groups become more open over time while others remain relatively closed. Ethnic intermarriage is more likely to increase over time when the relative size of an immigrant group decreases, sex ratios grow more imbalanced, the origin group grows more diverse, the size of the third generation increases and social structural consolidation decreases. Cultural explanations also play a role suggesting that an origin groups exogamous behavior in the past exerts long-term effects and exogamous practices increase over time when the prevalence of early marriage customs declines. For some of the discussed determinants of intermarriage, longitudinal and cross-sectional effects differ calling for a more careful theorizing and testing in terms of the level of analysis (e.g., longitudinal vs. cross-sectional).

Relative to those for high school graduates, lifetime earnings for college graduates are higher for more recent cohorts. At the same time, across successive cohorts born after 1950, there is a stagnation in the fraction of high school graduates that go on to complete a college degree. What explains this phenomenon? I formulate a life-cycle model of human capital accumulation in college and on the job, where successive cohorts decide whether or not to acquire a college degree as well as the quality of their college education. Cohorts differ by the sequence of rental price per unit of human capital they face and by the distribution of initial human capital across individuals. My model reproduces the observed pattern in college attainment for the 1920–1970 birth cohorts. The stagnation in college attainment is due to the decrease in the growth rate of the rental price per unit of human capital commencing in the 1970s. My model also generates about 80% of the increase in lifetime earnings for college graduates relative to those for high school graduates observed across cohorts.

Age at firstmarriage systematically relates to personal income earned later in life. I propose a theory that explains the patterns and evolution of the gender-specific income-marriage age relationships over the last fifty years in the United States and around the world. Becker (1973) and Keeley (1977) argue that personal income and marriage age are negatively correlated for men and positively correlated for women. Higher wage men and lower wage women gain more from household specialization and are better marriage partners because men specialize in market activities and women in household. If men need time to demonstrate their wage earning abilities in market activities, Bergstromand Bagnoli (1993) identify a benefit of waiting to reveal abilities for more able men so that personal income and marriage age should be positively correlated for men and uncorrelated for women. However, both theories and their combination fail to explain the evidence over time satisfactorily, especially both genders inverse U relationship in the current American marriage market - those who marry in the late twenties earn the most and those who marry before or after earn less. I combine and extend upon these theories by focusing on the two key drivers - stochastic returns from human capital investment and differential fecundity that interferes females investment decision but not males. Declining importance of fecundity in marriage explains the changes.

Information about the unauthorized resident population is needed to develop and evaluate US immigration policy, determine the social and economic effects of unauthorized immigration, and assist public and private service providers in carrying out their missions. Until recently, estimates have been available only for selected data points at the national and sometimes the state level. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) convened a meeting in September 2013 to assess the need for information about the unauthorized resident population. The meeting included leading academics, researchers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that serve immigrants, and local, state, and federal government representatives. Based on the recommendations from that meeting, CMS initiated a project to derive estimates of the size and characteristics of the unauthorized population at the national, state, and sub-state levels, and to make the information readily available to a wide cross-section of users. A series of statistical procedures were developed to derive estimates based on microdata collected by the US Census Bureau in the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS). The estimates provide detailed demographic information for unauthorized residents in population units as small as 100,000 persons. Overall, the estimates are consistent with the limited information produced by residual estimation techniques. A primary consideration in constructing the estimates was to protect the privacy of ACS respondents.

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps-specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs-as a potential explanation for these patterns. In a nationally representative survey of U.S. household heads, we show that perceptions of college costs and benefits are severely and systematically biased: 74 percent of our respondents underestimate the true benefits of college (average earnings of a college graduate relative to a non-college worker in the population), while 77 percent report public college costs that exceed actual sticker costs. There is substantial heterogeneity in beliefs, with larger biases for the more disadvantaged groups, lower-income and non-college households. We show that these biases are problematic since they (indirectly) impact the respondents' reported intended likelihood of their (pre-college-age) child attending college. We simulate an "information intervention," and find that were individuals to be provided with the correct population distribution of college costs and returns, the intended child's college attendance would increase significantly, by about 0.2 of the standard deviation in the baseline intended likelihood. Importantly, as a result of the simulated intervention, gaps in college attendance by household income or parents' education persist but decline by 30 to 50 percent.