This paper analyzes how driving patterns are affected by gasoline taxes and the availability of a substitute for drivingpublic transportation. We develop a measure of transportation substitutability based on the difference between individuals predicted commute times by private and public transit, conditional upon their demographic characteristics and geographic location. Improved substitutability decreases annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by inducing modal shifts to public transit, though gasoline taxes are found to have a much larger impact on VMT. Our results imply that a policy that raises gasoline taxes and recycles the revenues into public transit improvements can have even larger impacts on driving patterns than either policy alone.

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 withinestablishments 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.

Empirical research on the family cites the tendency for couples to relocate for husbands' careers as evidence against the gender neutrality of household economic decisions. For these studies, occupational segregation is a concern because occupations are not random by sex and mobility is not random by occupation. I find that the tendency for households to relocate for husbands' careers is better explained by the segregation of women into geographically dispersed occupations rather than by the direct prioritization of men's careers. Among never-married workers, women relocate for work less often than men, and the gender effect disappears after occupational segregation is accounted for. Although most two-earner families feature husbands in geographically clustered jobs involving frequent relocation for work, families are no less likely to relocate for work when it belongs to the wife. I conclude that future research in household mobility should treat occupational segregation occurring prior to marriage rather than gender bias within married couples as the primary explanation for the prioritization of husbands' careers in household mobility decisions.

Recent advances in the modeling of public opinion have dramatically improved scholars' ability to measure the public's views on important issues. For instance, Bayesian item-response theory (IRT) models provide a flexible framework for placing survey respondents in a low-dimensional space, while the combination of multilevel modeling and poststrati cation (MRP) improves small-area estimation of public opinion. However, it has been di$fficult to extend these techniques to a broader range of applications due to computational limitations and problems of data availability. In this paper, we develop a new group-level Bayesian IRT model that overcomes these limitations. Rather than estimating opinion at the individual level, we propose a hierarchical IRT model that estimates mean opinion in groups de fined by demographic and geographic characteristics. Opinion change over time is accommodated with a dynamic linear model for the parameters of the hierarchical model. The group-level estimates from this model can be re-weighted to generate estimates for geographic units. This approach has substantial advantages over an individual-level IRT model for the measurement of aggregate public opinion. It is much more computationally efficient and permits the use of sparse survey data (e.g., where individual respondents only answer one or two survey questions), vastly increasing the applicability of IRT models to the study of public opinion and representation. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach for the study of the American public's policy preferences in both the modern and mid-20th century periods. We also demonstrate a potential application of our model for the study of judicial politics.

Julius Drachsler's 1921 book, Intermarriage in New York City, examined 171,356 individual marriage license applications from New York City in the years 190812. The author found little intermarriage across social lines among immigrants but a considerable amount among their U.S.-born children. This study replicates Drachsler's by taking a 1% sample (N = 1,714 cases) of the same set of marriage license applications for the same years. The replication results show that Drachsler correctly found an increasing trend to intermarriage between the first and second generations, and with close to the same proportions as Drachsler's work. The replication study of New York City marriage licenses is also consistent with the results from a 1910 sample of married couples living in New York City, taken from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample. The replication study differs from Drachsler's reported findings on the extent of intermarriages across social lines of nationality and race, mainly due to the idiosyncratic way that Drachsler defined those two constructs. The New York City marriage license files offer the researcher further opportunities to pose and answer questions about intermarriage.

One of the most striking changes in the American labor market over the twentieth century has been the virtual disappearance of older men from the labor force. Moen (1987) and Costa (1998) estimate that the labor force participation rate of men age 65 and older declined from 78 percent in 1880 to less than 20 percent in 1990 (see Table 1). In recent decades, the labor force participation rate of somewhat younger men (age 55-64) has been declining as well. When coupled with the increase in life expectancy over this period, it is clear that men today can expect to spend a much larger proportion of their lives in retirement, relative to men living a century ago.

With the dramatic growth of shale gas in the U.S., lease negotiations have become an important part of the energy landscape. Royalty payments are a potential source of benefit to homeowners and restrictions negotiated in lease clauses are a primary tool by which the shale gas industry is regulated. Bargaining associated with the transfer of mineral rights from lessor to lessee shares many features of the classic Coasian framework. If bargaining were indeed Coasian, efficiency would be achieved without the need for costly government oversight. Using a unique combination of data sets, we test for whether the lease negotiation process exhibits characteristics of Coasian efficiency in Tarrant Co., Texas. While our results show that important determinants of willingness-to-pay for avoiding shale gas development (e.g., income) do indeed affect bargaining outcomes, we also find significant differences across race groups, suggesting a failure of Coasian bargaining. Results of a hedonic analysis show that lease clauses are directly capitalized into housing values, meaning that failures of the lease negotiation process have important pecuniary implications. Moreover, lease clauses are correlated with the likelihood of certain kinds of violations, suggesting that they may also affect health and safety.

The health consequences of excess body weight have been widely documented and publicised, and the weight related health paradigm has come to be widely accepted in western society. With this acceptance however has come a construction of the overweight individual as irresponsible, lacking in ability to self-regulate and constituting a burden to society. Stigma has been attached to weight, with bias and discrimination toward overweight individuals, the outcome. Resisting such discrimination and attempting to de-stigmatize weight are two movements in particular, Health At Every Size and Fat Acceptance. These social and political movements pose a challenge to the dominant ideology, based on the harmful effects of weight stigma and the growing body of evidence suggesting the contentious nature of the weight-health relationship. This study examined responses to these resistance movements via a Critical Discourse Analysis of focus group discussions of these movements among Australian undergraduate women. Twenty one female participants took part in a series of focus group where messages and images from the Health At Every Size and Fat Acceptance movements were presented. Although participants were generally sympathetic to the problems caused by weight stigma and stereotypes of overweight people, and endorsed the view that all people should be treated with respect, they also frequently fell back on widespread understandings of weight as personally controllable and health as a moral obligation, as a rationale for rejecting these messages. These findings are discussed in terms of the challenges faced by these resistance movements providing a means of reducing weight stigma.

I provide evidence on the micro elasticity of substitution between capital and labor using cross-sectional variation in local wages for identification and a comprehensive dataset of US manufacturing plants. I estimate an elasticity of substitution of 0.52 for 1987; estimates across industries mostly range between 0.4 and 0.7. I then use these elasticity estimates to separately identify labor augmenting and capital augmenting productivity. I find that labor augmenting productivity to be the primary dimension of productivity, as it is more persistent and more highly correlated with size and exports than capital augmenting productivity.

Despite the increasingly positive perception of highly-skilled (labour) migrants from the perspective of receiving countries, pinning down a definition of high-skilled migration is a complex issue. The resulting ambiguity hinders the measurement of human capital, stymies meaningful international comparisons of the mobility of skills and undermines the evaluation of immigration policies. In this paper, we adopt three alternative stances to conceptualise high-skilled migration: from the perspective of those responsible for recording immigrants at the country level, from the standpoint of the methodologies that underpin countries’ occupational nomenclatures and lastly an inductive approach that classifies high skilled migrants based upon nations’ unilateral immigration policies. Each of the three approaches is contentious such that we identify three major discordances: a definitional discordance whereby the same individual may be deemed as highly skilled depending upon the variables used to define them, an occupational discordance whereby the same individual may be classified as highly skilled depending upon the occupational classification used to record them and a policy discordance whereby individuals defined similarly and working in the same occupations may be considered as highly skilled or otherwise depending upon the prevailing immigration policies. We discuss all three discordances in detail, before making recommendations to remedy each of them.

Social scientists have long demonstrated that socioeconomic resources benefit health. More recently, scholars have begun to examine the potential stratification in the health returns different groups receive for a given resource. Motivated by fundamental cause theory, this paper examines homeownership as a salient health resource with potentially stratified benefits. Homeowners have significantly greater housing quality, wealth, neighborhood quality and integration, and physical and mental health than renters. However, there are compelling theoretical reasons to expect the health advantage of homeownership to be unequally distributed across racial and ethnic groups. Regression analyses of 71,874 household heads in the United States from the 2012 March Current Population Survey initially suggest all homeowners experience a significant health advantage. Further examination finds robust evidence for a homeowner health advantage among Whites, on par with the difference between the married and divorced. The advantage among minority households is considerably smaller, and not significant among Latinos or Asians. Conditioning on a broad array of observable characteristics, White homeowners emerge as exceptionally healthy compared to White renters and all minority groups. This leads to the unexpected finding that racial/ethnic differences in health are concentrated among homeowners. The findings demonstrate the interactive nature of racial/ethnic stratification in health through both access to and returns from socioeconomic resources.

A recent study by Colman, Dee, and Joyce (CDJ) used data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (NYRBS) and found that parental involvement (PI) laws had no effect on the probability that minors abstain from sex or use contraception. We reexamine this issue using data from the NYRBS in combination with data from the State Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (SYRBS) and a variety of identification strategies designed to address the role of state-level time-varying unmeasured heterogeneity. Consistent with CDJ, we find that PI laws have no effect on minor teen females' abstinence decisions. However, when we (i) exploit additional state policy variation than was available to CDJ, (ii) use 18+ year-olds as a within-state control group, and (iii) rely on states with enjoined PI laws as an additional counterfactual group, we find evidence that the enforcement of PI laws decreases the probability of unprotected sex and increases use of the birth control pill. Despite the potential to diminish unwanted pregnancy, our findings provide only limited evidence that PI laws are associated with improved adolescent psychological well-being.

In recent years, historians and historical geographers have become interested in the use of GIS to study historical patterns, populations, and phenomena. The result has been the emergence of a new discipline, historical GIS. Despite the growing use of GIS across geography and history, the use of GIS in historical research has been limited largely to visualization of historical records, database management, and simple pattern analysis. This is, in part, due to a lack of accessible research on methodologies and spatial frameworks that outline the integration of both quantitative and qualitative historical sources for use in a GIS environment. The first objective of this dissertation is to develop a comprehensive geospatial research framework for the study of past populations and their environments. The second objective of this dissertation is to apply this framework to the study of daily life in the nineteenth-century city, an important area of scholarship for historical geographers and social historians. Other daily life studies have focused on various experiences of daily life, from domestic duties and child rearing to social norms and the experience of work in early factories. An area that has received little attention in recent years is the daily mobility of individuals as they moved about the ‘walking city’. This dissertation advances our understanding of the diurnal patterns of daily life by recreating the journey to work for thousands of individuals in the city of London, Ontario, and its suburbs in the late nineteenth century. Methodologies are created to capture past populations, their workplaces, and their relationship to the environments they called home. Empirical results outline the relationship between social class, gender, and the journey to work, as well as how social mobility was reflected through the quality of individuals’ residential and neighbourhood environments. The results provide a new perspective on daily mobility, social mobility, and environment in the late nineteenth- century city. Results suggest that individuals who were able to be upwardly socially mobile did so at the expense of substantial increases in their journey to work.

A large gap in incarceration rates between black and white men has been evident since the early 20th century. This paper examines the effect of access to schooling on black incarceration in this historic period. I use the construction of 5,000 new schools in the US South, funded by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald between 1913 and 1932, as a quasi-natural experiment that increased the educational attainment of southern black students. I link individuals across Census waves in order to assign exposure to a Rosenwald school during childhood and to measure adult incarceration. I find that one year of access to a Rosenwald school decreased the probability of being a prisoner by 0.1 percentage points (seven percent of the mean). Using other data from archival and government sources, I find that Rosenwald schools affected juvenile crime and all categories of adult crime. Multiple identification strategies corroborate my results. I investigate the channels through which Rosenwald schools reduced crime, including educational attainment, school quality, and migration responses. Effects are largest in counties with strong rule of law. These results contribute to a broader literature on racial gaps in social outcomes in the US throughout the 20th century.

This paper estimates the conditional wage gaps between black and white full-time male workers at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level using data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses. The magnitudes of the wage gaps are found to vary substantially across location. As predicted in Becker's (The economics of discrimination, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1957) seminal theory on wage discrimination, we find that the wage gaps are greater in MSAs that have a larger proportion of black workers in the labor force. This is the most consistent result across all specifications and years. We also find the gaps to be greater where there is an overrepresented black population in jail and a more segregated population if the MSA is in the South. The proportion of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement in the private sector is associated with greater relative black earnings. We find that although the relationship between race and wages has diminished over time as famously suggested in Wilson (The declining significance of race: Blacks and changing American institutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978), the significance of race remains.

Skyline query processing over uncertain data streams has attracted considerable attention in database community recently, due to its importance in helping users make intelligent decisions over complex data in many real applications. Although lots of recent efforts have been conducted to the skyline computation over data streams in a centralized environment typically with one processor, they cannot be well adapted to the skyline queries over complex uncertain streaming data, due to the computational complexity of the query and the limited processing capability. Furthermore, none of the existing studies on parallel skyline computation can effectively address the skyline query problem over uncertain data streams, as they are all developed to address the problem of parallel skyline queries over static certain data sets. In this paper, we formally define the parallel query problem over uncertain data streams with the sliding window streaming model. Particularly, for the first time, we propose an effective framework, named distributed parallel framework to address the problem based on the sliding window partitioning. Furthermore, we propose an efficient approach (parallel streaming skyline) to further optimize the parallel skyline computation with an optimized streaming item mapping strategy and the grid index. Extensive experiments with real deployment over synthetic and real data are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed techniques.

Every civilization has faced inequality due to the division of labor in society (Merton, 1934). The United States was founded on the ideal that all men are created equal and as such should have equal opportunity to work toward their goals. The extremely complex issues of race, class, and gender inequality have continuously been at the forefront of social dynamics since the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s. Scholars studying inequality agree that labels and categories used to stratify society are socially constructed and not naturally occurring in the world (Hochschild, 1996). In the United States, the stratification that results from these constructed labels and groups create limitations on the opportunities available to individuals in society. While it may not be immediately apparent, such limitations affect the upward mobility of individuals affected by these social constructs. One such example of limitations on individual upward mobility addressed in this study is the perception of the ability to achieve the American Dream through hard work/work ethic. This thesis examines several issues regarding the concept of the American Dream in terms of individual perception based on socially constructed inequalities including race, gender, and social class. When looking at the American Dream, do individuals believe that it is relevant today? Is the American Dream accessible by all Americans or only those exempt from socially constructed inequalities? The American Dream has been a core component of American ideology as a motivational cornerstone of American life. Whether an American citizen, immigrant, or a visitor, the American Dream holds meaning to anyone wanting to better him/herself; they want to have the good life, a life better than their preceding generations, a life that shows progression in upward mobility. In light of the 2008 economic recession, the decline in both the housing market and the stock market, and lack of confidence in the financial sector of society, the definition of the American Dream has shifted for most Americans to reflect new realities in todays economy. Yet, realities facing individuals in the contemporary economic climate vary based on social stratification; thus, ones perception of the American Dream depends upon the opportunities available in light of socially constructed inequalities (Jiang & Cheng Lee, 2009). The overall goal of this thesis is to establish the influence of socially constructed race, class, and gender inequalities on individual perceptions of the possibilities for upward social mobility in light of the shrinking middle class caused by the 2008 economic recession. While I expect the general relationship of decrease, I expect the decrease to be more dramatic for Blacks than for Whites, for those in the lower class than those in the middle or upper class, and for women more so than men.

I expand the common pool resource literature by creating and utilizing longitudinal data. I take advantage of historical happenings centering on the Spanish common property irrigation systems called acequias to study the economic performance of various irrigation institutions in the American southwest. Following a detailed analysis of irrigation statutes and development in New Mexico, I compare and contrast the acequia organization with larger irrigation districts. Utilizing a Social- Ecological System framework, I highlight the distinction between irrigation districts and acequias before I conduct a difference-in-difference hedonic price analysis of counties that formed irrigation districts to those that did not. Using data from U.S. Agricultural Censuses, 1910-1987, I find the districts improve land values by nearly 12 percent due to increased production. I then consider how the proportional water rights of acequias compare to the more prevalent seniority rights (prior appropriation). I derive testable hypotheses from a theoretical model. I test the model through a natural experiment where acequias developed in New Mexico Territory later are divided by the formation of Colorado, exogenously forcing a subset to be subject to the priority system. Using annual satellite imagery from 1984-2011, I compare performance under various stream flow. As predicted, communal sharing generally performs better, though suffers more during drought. Last, I consider the importance of population stability in a common-property management system. Empirical work has neither addressed these issues in a dynamic nature utilizing longitudinal data, nor addressed the endogeneity of the user group. Combining satellite imagery and water right transfer records, I build a unique panel data set of 50 acequias in Taos, New Mexico from 1984-2011. With these data I am able to identify the role of repeated interactions and diagnose the extent of omitted variable bias. The acequias are resilient to the new users but struggle to absorb additional users. Notably, there is a positive bias present in cross-sectional treatments—entrants self-select into well performing systems. The statistical results are corroborated through follow up surveys of 17 acequias.

We estimate how capital gains realizations respond to marginal tax rates on capital gains using a panel of aggregate data for U.S. states for the years 1957 through 2007. In specifications controlling for state fixed effects and year fixed effects, where identification comes from difference-in-differences variation in effective state marginal tax rates, our point estimate of the elasticity of capital gains realizations with respect to the marginal tax rate is -0.66 with a standard error of 0.21. This point estimate suggests a significant and policy-relevant responsiveness of capital gains realizations to incentives, implying that the revenue gain from a capital gains tax increase would be in the ballpark of one-third as large as it would have been in the absence of the behavioral response, and is based on a relatively more convincing identification strategy than has been used in the previous literature. When we remove state and / or year fixed effects, relying on cross-state variation in tax rates and / or federal time-series variation tax rates for identification, our estimates of the elasticity of capital gains to the marginal tax rate are larger in absolute value, but also potentially subject to greater concerns about omitted variable bias.

This chapter examines immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. We quantify immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields and using multiple definitions. While significant research effort has gone into understanding the economic impact of immigration into the United States, comprehensive data for quantifying immigrant entrepreneurship are difficult to assemble. We combine several restricted-access U.S. Census Bureau data sets to create a unique longitudinal data platform that covers 1992-2008 and many states. We describe differences in the types of businesses initially formed by immigrants and their medium-term growth patterns. We also consider the relationship of these outcomes to the immigrant's age at arrival to the United States.