This paper presents an overview of some of the recent literature about the long-run changes in labour market outcomes in advanced economies. It shows that the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, with inventions in the second half of the 19th century that had a lasting impact up to 1980, resulted in skill upgrading and decreasing overall wage inequality. To the contrary, the Computer Revolution that started in the 1980s is no longer unambiguously skill-upgrading but characterized by an underlying process of job polarization and an increase in upper-tail and overall wage inequality. However, the paper concludes by providing arguments in favour of optimism about future computerization as long as our labour markets are able to provide the necessary worker skills to support such changes.

Background: When compared to White men, Black men are 6 times more likely to ever be incarcerated in their lifetimes. Incarceration inequities are consistent with institutional racism. In the U.S., ever-incarcerated men are at increased risk of poor health as compared to the general population. Conceptual Framework: Guided by the fundamental cause perspective; I proposed that SES disparities are fundamental social causes of health disparities Incarceration may contribute to inequities in health by differentially affecting socioeconomic status (SES) between men. Purpose: to test the proposed relationships among institutional racism, SES, and health outcomes between Black and White U.S. men. Aims: across states and over time I : 1) examined whether inequities in incarceration rates predicted inequities in premature mortality rates between Black and White men and 2) tested whether inequities in rates of incarceration increased inequities in SES which, in turn, predicted inequities in premature mortality rates between Black and White. Design: non-experimental, pooled, cross-sectional, time series. Data: were obtained from multiple sources and merged. Analyses: Latent growth modeling and path analyses were used. Results: across states and over time: Aim 1) a positive and direct relationship between the change in state rates of premature mortality and in incarceration was supported for Black men, but not for White men; Aim 2) as state rates of change in incarceration increased, so too did poverty for Black men; yet, poverty decreased for White men. Support for the hypothesis that poverty mediated the relationship between the change in state rates of incarceration and premature mortality was found for Black men, but not White men. Conclusions: I examined the complex and concerning phenomena of institutional racism, SES inequities, and health inequities. Findings begin to disentangle the pathways among them. Policymakers can alter policies to decrease institutional racism as manifest in incarceration rates. Researchers can examine the possible moderating factors between Black and White men in health outcomes as a consequence of incarceration. Health practitioners can design public health interventions that provide for health resources. Through further research to advance our understanding of fundamental causes, health inequities may be eliminated in the future.

The minimum wage establishes a lower bound on what employers must pay their workers. The federal minimum wage is currently set at $7.25 an hour, but 22 states and the District of Columbia (DC) have established minimum wages above the federal minimum. Today, DCs minimum wage is set one dollar higher than the federal minimum ($8.25), while the minimum wage in the neighboring jurisdictions of Maryland and Virginia use the federal minimum wage. However, DC and two neighboring counties in Maryland (Prince Georges County and Montgomery County) have passed legislation raising their minimum wages to $11.50 an hour by 2016 and 2017, respectively. This report examines the potential effects of raising DCs minimum wage on DC workers, their families, and on the government programs that serve them.

The large difference in the unemployment rates of high and low skilled workers is an important yet poorly understood phenomenon. This paper proposes a novel method to helpdistinguish between competing explanations of this difference: I compute monthly job loss and job finding probabilities in detailed occupations between 1978 and 2012 and I formally compute their contribution to the cross-sectional variation in occupational unemployment. I find a surprising asymmetry: Even though hiring probabilities are strongly procyclical (it is harder to find jobs in recessions), the cross occupational differences in hiring rates are very small. In fact, occupational differences in layoff - rather than hiring - probabilities entirely explain the large cross sectional heterogeneity in occupational unemployment. Then, using a calibrated search and matching model I investigate what exogenous parameterscan account for the observed occupational turnover differences: a mismatch between firms demand and workers supply of skills; UI benefits; skill specific productivity shocks, bargaining power and various adjustment cost differences across skill groups. Most parameters predict occupational differences in hiring that are too large to match the data. Most importantly, skill mismatch and the level of UI benefits are unlikely to have a large contribution to occupational unemployment. Three parameters, however, predict occupational turnover probabilities that are roughly in line with those in the data: 1) the amount of firm specific skills; 2) layoff cost of experienced workers; and 3) the variance of idiosyncratic productivity shocks. The contribution of these parameters to cross occupational unemployment differences, however, is not identified from the turnover data.

The Urban Institutes Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) has been tracking health insurance coverage among nonelderly adults since the first quarter of 2013.1 The HRMS, which was designed to provide early feedback on implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), found that uninsured rates had declined by 4.0 percentage points among nonelderly adults between September 2013 (just before the first open enrollment period began) and June 2014, with larger declines found in states that have expanded Medicaid (Long, Kenney, Zuckerman, Wissoker, et al. 2014). Beginning in June 2013, the HRMS added a supplement to track changes in coverage and other outcomes for children under the ACA. This brief examines findings from the HRMS childrens supplement.

This research answers the question whether immigration contributes to metropolitan areas’ productivity and economic growth, and it also quantifies the impacts of immigration on productivity and economic growth. It examines the relationships between metropolitan Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the measures of immigration in the United States from 2000-2010 and attempts to find evidence in three mechanisms through which immigration can contribute to the economic growth: the overall effects, the skill effects and the complementarity effects. In each effect’ analysis, this research uses reduced- and structural-form equations and uses fixed-effects and first-difference models. First, reduced-form analysis with the specification of GDP per worker as the dependent variable and share of immigrant workers in total workforce as the independent variable revealed that the overall immigration has a small negative impact on metropolitan productivity growth, and this potential negative impact increases with metropolitan population size. Structural-form analysis with the specification of GDP level as the dependent variable and numbers of immigrant worker as the independent variable found that immigration has a significant positive impact on economic growth. However, using instrumental variables cannot enhance this finding with reduced endogeneity. Second, neither reduced- or structural- form analysis found that high-skilled immigrants contribute to the productivity and economic growth. Interestingly, fixed-effects panel regression results pointed out that low-skilled immigrants make a substantial contribution to the productivity and economic growth. Third, this research revealed evidence that immigration contributes to the economic growth through complementing native workers and the complementarity comes from both the immigrant and native workers with the same and with different levels of education. Immigration’s impact on labor market outcomes has been extensively studied. However, previous literature seldom focuses on immigration’s effect on the aggregate economic measurement such as GDP. By providing an in-depth analysis of immigrants’ impact on metropolitan GDP, this research seeks to fill the gap in the immigration economic impact and regional economic growth literature. This research’s findings provide direct guidance in making and implementing metropolitan-specific immigration policy.

This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended conse- quences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations in- tended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work. Chapter 1 examines the effect of state-level health insurance mandates, which are regulations intended to expand access to health insurance. It finds that these regulations have the unintended consequence of increasing insurance premiums, and that these regulations have been responsible for 9-23% of premium increases since 1996. The main contribution of the chapter is that its results are more general than previous work, since it considers many more years of data, and it studies the employer- based plans that cover most Americans rather than the much less common individual plans. Whereas Chapter 1 estimates the effect of the average mandate on premiums, Chapter 2 focuses on a specific mandate, one that requires insurers to cover prostate cancer screenings. The focus on a single mandate allows a broader and more careful analysis that demonstrates how health policies spill over to affect the labor market. I find that the mandate has a significant negative effect on the labor market outcomes of the very group it was intended to help. The mandate expands the treatments health insurance covers for men over age 50, but by doing so it makes them more expensive to insure and employ. Employers respond to this added expense by lowering wages and hiring fewer men over age 50. According to the theoretical model put forward in the chapter, this suggests the mandate reduces total welfare. Chapter 3 shows that the employer-based health insurance system has deterred entrepreneurship. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Af- fordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate, which de-linked insurance from employment for many 19-25 year olds. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the mandate increased self-employment among the treated group by 13-24%. In- strumental variables estimates show that those who actually received parental health insurance as a result of the mandate were drastically more likely to start their own business. This suggest that concerns over health insurance are a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States.

Black Women in the United States, 2014, is a groundbreaking report developed by the Black Women’s Roundtable to assess the overall conditions of Black women in the U.S. In these pages are the triumphs and tragedies surrounding Black Women’s lives across a variety of different indicators and areas of inquiry. Here we examine virtually the full spectrum of the Black woman’s contemporary experience in America. And though, we find that on many accounts, significant progress has been made since key historical markers such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, and the onset of the War on Poverty, there are many areas that remain in need of dire national attention and urgent action. The following are some of the key findings from this report.

The intent of this book is to take on four very big challenges: (1) a framework that makes it easier to think about suffering and measure it, (2) a compilation of available data on how much suffering exists in the world, (3) rationales for why people should become more aware of the vast volume of severe suffering around the world, and (4) justification for giving higher priority to the reduction of suffering in our personal, state, and global policy objectives. With these goals, you should not be surprised that the book looks at suffering from many different angles.

This article theorizes a fundamental shift in the US migrant labor system as it pertains to migrants from Mexico and Central America. It identifies three different periods, each defined by the way immigration law and enforcement constitute migrant workers as cheap and flexible labor. Between 1942 and 1964, the legalization period, immigration law and enforcement secured the exploitation of migrant workers by reinforcing their legal attachment to coercive farm labor contracts. The late 1960s to the mid-1980s was a transition period, characterized by the diffusion of migrant workers throughout the economy, debate over the future of immigration law and the emergence of an enforcement approach centered on the USMexico border. Between 1986 and the present, the illegalization period, immigration law and enforcement secured the exploitation of migrant workers by reinforcing their illegality and vulnerability to deportation. I argue that the post-2001 increase in internal surveillance and deportations, in particular, may be understood as a deepening of the illegalization process through the reincorporation of enforcement tactics used during the legalization period.

The need to share data often conflicts with privacy preservation. Data obfuscation attempts to overcome this conflict by modifying the original data while optimizing both privacy and utility measures. In this paper we introduce the concept of Constrained Obfuscation Problems (COPS) which formulate the task of obfuscating data stored in relational databases. The main idea behind COPs is that many obfuscation scenarios can be modeled as a data generation process which is constrained by a predefined set of rules. We demonstrate the flexibility of the COP definition by modeling several different obfuscation scenarios: Production Data Obfuscation for Application Testing (PDOAT), anonymization of relational data, and anonymization of social networks. We then suggest a general approach for solving COPs by reducing them into a set of Constrained Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Such reduction enables the employment of the well-studied CSP framework in order to solve a wide range of complex rules. Some of the resulting CSPs may contain a large number of variables, which may make them intractable. In order to overcome such intractability issues, we present two useful heuristics that decompose such large CSPs into smaller tractable sub-CSPs. We also show how the well-known l-diversity privacy measure can be incorporated into the COP framework in order to evaluate the privacy level of COP solutions. Finally, we evaluate the new method in terms of privacy, utility and execution time.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the public is becoming increasingly interested in spatial data exploration. The potential for Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) to be adopted for Science through collaborations between researchers and non-scientists is of special interest to me. In particular, mobile devices and wireless communication permit the public to be more involved in research to a greater degree. Furthermore, the accuracy of these devices is rapidly improving, allowing me to address questions of uncertainty and error in data collections. Cooperation between researchers and the public integrates themes common to VGI and PGIS (Participatory Geographic Information) to bring about a new paradigm in GIScience. This dissertation discusses VGI in the context of a new paradigm, eScience, and the broader framework of Neogeography. I discuss current issues with data quality and uncertainty regarding VGI and detail one approach to quality credibility of the data. Finally, the dissertation outlines the framework for utilizing VGI in the context of case study in disease ecology for the purpose of surveillance of tsetse flies, the primary vector of African Trypanosomiasis. My system allows for two-way communication between researchers and the public for data collection, analysis, and the ultimate dissemination of results. Enhancing the role of the public to participate in these types of projects can improve both the efficacy of disease surveillance as well as stimulating greater interest in science.

Using a Bayesian Spatial Autoregressive estimation strategy, we find that native born US residents and immigrants with no exposure to high school fail to migrate in response to state differences in the minimum wage. In contrast, both native born residents and immigrants with some high school and immigrant high school graduates migrate to states with higher minimum wage rates. Native high school graduates, however, do not migrate in response to minimum wages. We find support for the hypothesis that the different migratory response by native and immigrant high school graduates is due to immigrants greater willingness to participate in the non-covered labor market.

Little is known about how work schedules affect social connectedness beyond family relationships. The authors use detailed time diary data from 12,140 respondents in the 2008 through 2010 American Time Use Surveys to examine how work schedules affect six forms of community involvement. Results show that night and evening shift work reduces community involvement, but only on weekdays. Daytime shifts reduce community involvement when they are very short, when they involve working from 8 to 5 instead of from 7 to 4, and when they are on weekends. These results call into question tacit assumptions about how shift work affects workers social lives.

Many countries impose restrictions on some immigrants' job mobility, likely reducing their wages. We quantify such effects for Mexican-born men in the U.S. by recognizing that immigrants who marry U.S. natives receive expedited green cards (Permanent Residency). Robust IV estimates indicate that intermarried Mexicans earn a 40 percent wage premium, and larger for the most mobile subgroups. Analogous premiums are statistically insignificant for men from Puerto Rico, who acquire no new rights because they are already U.S. citizens. Attributing the approximately 30 percent difference to green cards, we estimate that eliminating wait times would increase Mexicans' mean earnings $120,000$150,000 in present value.

The skyline query as an important aspect of big data management, has received considerable attention from the database community, due to its importance in many applications including multi-criteria decision making, preference answering, and so forth. Moreover, the uncertain data from many applications have become increasing distributed, which makes the central assembly of data at one location for storage and query infeasible and inefficient. The lack of global knowledge and the computational complexity derived from the introduction of the data uncertainty make the skyline query over distributed uncertain data extremely challenging. Although many efforts have addressed the skyline query problem over various distributed scenarios, existing studies still lack the approaches to efficiently process the query. In this paper, we extensively study the distributed probabilistic skyline query problem and propose an efficient approach GDPS to address the problem with an optimized iterative feedback mechanism based on the grid summary. Furthermore, many strategies for further optimizing the query are also proposed, including the optimization strategies for the local pruning, tuple selecting and the server pruning. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data sets have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach by comparing with the state-of-the-art approaches.

We document empirical life cycle profiles of wages and hours of work for pay from CPS and the PSID. We bring to light a new fact: for the youngest cohorts whose entire working life can be observed, hours start falling much earlier than wages. Wages do not fall (if they fall at all) until one's late 60's. The data suggest that many workers start a smooth transition into retirement by working progressively fewer hours while still facing an upward-sloping wage profile. We show that this pattern is not an artifact of staggered abrupt retirement or selection. We explore the nontrivial restrictions this evidence imposes on dynamic models of the aggregate economy, and we provide updated numerical profiles that can be readily used in quantitative macroeconomic analysis to incorporate this new pattern into aggregate models.

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.