This paper investigates the potential of new urbanism (NU) to serve as a new neighborhood strategy for women. Survey and interview research examines the ways women in suburban NU neighborhoods of MinneapolisSt. Paul interact with the built environment to effect divisions of household labor and social isolation. The analysis shows that women use pedestrian-accessible mixed-use centers and neo-traditional design features (e.g., porches) to lessen the burden of domestic labor and foster social interaction. Despite these affordances, the paper argues that NU neighborhoods do not ultimately serve as resources in breaking patterns of social segregation or womens isolation in suburbia.

In North Carolina, a proportion of those using private well and septic systems live in neighborhoods located directly outside cities that have piped water and sewer services. Use of private systems may have adverse health and societal effects compared to public system use. Using a multi-site case study design, this research sought to illuminate the barriers and avenues to extending water and sewer services. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with local key informants from three communities across North Carolina. Financing for water and sewer service emerged as the predominant factor influencing decisions to extend services. Improved health emerged as a minor factor, suggesting that local officials may not realize the health benefits of extending public water and sewer services. Recognition by local officials that septic systems in these communities are failing was found to be a strong catalyst for extending water and sewer services; however, failed systems are often underreported.

In-depth analysis of individual time use and comparison of time use and finances as problems within financial management can be addressed. The 2012 panel of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) was utilized to investigate how minutes spent in financial management varied by demographic characteristics: education, gender, race, if children are present in the household, marital status, income, and employment status. On average, Americans spent 1.86 minutes (SD=18.24) in financial management daily (N=12,443). Differences in minutes spent in financial management were tested by characteristic via one-way ANOVAs and t-tests. Results indicated that time spent in financial management varies with the presence of children in the household, marital status, education, and employment status, but not by gender, race, or income level.

The globalization of knowledge work includes the physical migration of millions of skilled guest workers. In three essays on this theme, administrative and payroll records are studied to appreciate the scope and consequences of this activity. In the first essay, the large organizational sponsors of skilled guest workers are identified and an analysis is performed on their guest worker sponsoring activities. A positive relationship between guest worker sponsorship and innovation is supported, although increases in guest workers that change the composition of an organization's workforce are linked with labor arbitrage. In the second essay, payroll records from five organizations that sponsor skilled guest workers are analyzed to discern whether institutional barriers to labor mobility restrict the freedom of these workers to switch jobs. While claims of indentured servitude are not supported, the labor market for guest workers is heavily influenced by macroeconomic events. In the third essay, interviews and an analysis of occupations suggest that a framework that separates skill and wage dimensions might better predict the offshoring of skilled knowledge work.

In this study I present a relatively new technique for analyzing a recurring problem in our communities. Using a set of innovative and relatively new modeling methods, I demonstrate ways in which it is possible to directly account for, capture, and visualize the spatial variability in the relationships between U.S. Census data from 1990 and the recent low-school-attainment landscape in both the Omaha and Lincoln Public School (OPS) districts in Omaha and Lincoln, NE. Low school attainment in adults is a correlate of a host of troubling health and economic factors, which, in turn, have an impact on a child's school performance and eventual school attainment. Disrupting this trend is (and has been) the focus of much research because not only is low school attainment predictive of a host of concerning variables, school attainment also has a tendency to persist from generation to generation. In addition, areas of an urban environment characterized by low school attainment seem to remain geographically stable over long periods of time. However, traditionally, researchers modeling the relationships associated with school attainment draw conclusions based on techniques that rely on global inferences (e.g., ordinary least squares regression). Where there is spatial nonstationarity in the coefficients produced by a regression analysis, researchers using these global techniques may miss important local caveats in their predictions. When fully analyzed, these caveats can help to create better statistical models that might help to focus community resources and public policies in more effective ways.

A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum working age legislation was twice as effective in reducing under-aged employment if children had been born with a birth registration law, with positive implications for school attendance. There is some evidence that registration laws also improved the enforcement of schooling laws for younger children. A retrospective analysis with the 1960 census shows that the long-term effect of registration laws was to increase educational attainment by approximately 0.1 years.

We construct and test a new model of employer-provided health insurance provision in the presence of adverse selection in the health insurance market. In our model, employers cannot observe the health of their employees, but can decide whether to offer insurance. Employees sort themselves among employers who do and do not offer insurance on the basis of their current health status and the probability distribution over future health status changes. We show that there a pooling equilibrium is more likely when the costs of switching jobs are high or when health status is not persistent. We test and verify some of the key implications of our model using data from the Current Population Survey, linked to information provided by the US Department of Labor about the job-specific human capital requirements of jobs.

The present research intends to fill gaps identified in the current literature in the classification of the urban environment (i.e. city vs. suburbs), something that is important in urban and transportation planning, especially in the context of seniors. It does so first by proposing an urban/suburban classification that takes into account multiple census variables to provide a richer yet fine-grained and standardized classification of urban and suburban census tracts – the ‘‘Urban Core.’’ The Urban Core is then compared with the more common classification of the ‘‘Inner City,’’ that is based on age of housing. The proposed definition is then applied to examine if recent behavior of seniors has been consistent with the contention that they will increasingly move to the city – something that has been suggested in the media and grey literature. This is done by examining disaggregate data from four Canadian censuses on households moving to the Urban Core or suburbs, by age group. This is done initially graphically, and then logistic regressions are used to analyze how the effect of being a senior on moving to the Urban Core has evolved over the four censuses, while controlling for other socio-demographic variables. As such, using the proposed definition of the Urban Core, analysis suggests that seniors have been increasingly moving away from the Urban Core, behavior that is inconsistent with a hypothesis of a return to the city for seniors in the future.

In this article, we ask whether suburban residence offers the poor a springboard to the middle class or whether it represents a new kind of poverty trap. To answer this question we examine the type of challenge that suburban poverty presents and the responses to it. Drawing on a comparison of the Denver and Chicago regions, we show that the interaction of race and governance influences both the nature of the challenge that suburban poverty represents and the ability of local and regional actors to respond. We emphasize two features of governance: the size of local jurisdictions and the regional footprint. Larger jurisdictions, we argue, are more likely to possess greater administrative capacity from which the poor can benefit. They are also less susceptible to racial tipping than are small jurisdictions. Regions with fewer larger jurisdictions will also find it easier to engage in regional action that benefits the poor.

What is the incidence of housing vouchers? Housing voucher recipients in the US typi- cally pay their landlord a fixed amount based on their income and the government pays the rest of the rent, up to a rent ceiling. We consider a policy that raises the generosity of the rent ceiling everywhere, which is equivalent to an income effect, and a policy which links generosity to local unit quality, which is equivalent to a substitution effect. Using data on the universe of housing vouchers and quasi-experimental variation from HUD policy changes, we analyze the incidence of these policies. Raising the generosity of the rent ceiling everywhere appears to primarily benefit landlords, who receive higher rents with very little evidence of medium-run quality improvements. Setting ZIP code-level rent ceilings causes rent increases in expensive neighborhoods and decreases in low-cost neighborhoods, with little change in aggregate rents. The ZIP code policy improves neighborhood quality as much as other, far more costly, voucher interventions.

Almost all the contributions on human capital and migration have focused on individuals who recently completed a tertiary education degree. Not much has been done with regard to high-school leavers. However, studying the migration of high-school leavers (college-bound individuals) is at least as important as studying college graduates migration. We present an analysis of college-bound individuals migration patterns for the USA. We argue that understanding the main determinants of these migration patterns is fundamental for policy makers in their quest for human capital retention.

Introduction: Smokers exhibit elevated risk for suicide, but it is unknown whether smoking interventions reduce suicide risk. We examined whether state-level policy interventions-- increases in cigarette excise taxes and strengthening of smoke-free air laws-- corresponded to reduction in suicide risk during the 1990s and early 2000s. We also examined whether the magnitude of such reductions correlated with individuals' predicted probability of smoking, as would be expected if the associations stemmed from changes in smoking behavior. Methods: We paired individual-level data on suicide deaths from the U.S. Multiple Cause of Death files, years 1990-2004, with living population data from the same period. These were linked with state data on cigarette excise taxes and smoke-free air policies. Utilizing a quasiexperimental analytical approach, we estimated the association between changes in policy and suicide risk. To examine whether associations correlated with individuals' probability of smoking, we used external survey data to derive a predicted probability of smoking function from demographic variables, which was then used to stratify the population by predicted smoking prevalence. Results: Cigarette excise taxes, smoke-free air policies, and an index combining the two policies all exhibited protective associations with suicide. The associations were strongest in segments of the population where predicted smoking prevalence was the highest and weaker in segments of the population where predicted smoking prevalence was the lowest, suggesting that the protective associations were related to changes in smoking behavior. Conclusion: These results provide support for the proposition that population interventions for smoking could reduce risk for suicide.

In the 1970s, the divorce rate in the United States increased sharply, largely because of changes to divorce laws that permitted one partner to dissolve the marriage without the other’s consent. At roughly the same time, the share of women with college educations also rose steeply, and since then women’s college attainment has accelerated while men’s has stalled. Women’s rising education has coincided with an enormous increase in labor force participation by married women. Could there be a link between divorce and women’s college achievement? And could relations between husbands and wives also explain changes in the labor market over the past half century, including the mass movement of wives into the workforce? Recent research by Minneapolis Fed visiting . . .

The quadrennial presidential nominating conventions are the biggest campaign events of the election cycle. Previous studies find that conventions significantly impact national-level candidate preferences; however, scholars have not yet specified the effects that such large campaign events have on residents of the host areas. As fairly uniform and one-sided interventions across years and parties, the conventions offer an opportunity for a cross time, cross-sectional analysis of the local effect of campaign events. We develop a difference-in-difference analysis to show conventions significantly affect the presidential candidates’ county-level vote shares. Individual-level data from panel surveys from before and after the 2000 and 2004 conventions are used to validate the aggregate-level findings. Beyond providing strong evidence of meaningful campaign event effects, the results demonstrate how campaign effects can be conditional on local political characteristics and geography. Overall, we find Democrats are more likely to gain support in convention host communities than Republicans.

This paper studies a simple, tractable model of labor adjustment in a trade model that allows researchers to analyze the economys dynamic response to trade liberalization. Since it is a neoclassical market-clearing model, duality techniques can be employed to study the equilibrium and, despite its simplicity, a rich variety of properties emerge. The model generates gross flows of labor across industries, even in the steady state; persistent wage differentials across industries; gradual adjustment to a liberalization; and anticipatory adjustment to a pre-announced liberalization. Pre-announcement induces anticipatory flight from the liberalizing sector, driving up wages there temporarily and giving workers remaining there what this paper calls anticipation rents. By this process, pre-announcement makes liberalization less attractive to export-sector workers and more attractive to import-sector workers, eventually making workers unanimous either in favor of or in opposition to liberalization. Based on these results, the paper identifies many pitfalls to conventional methods of empirical study of trade liberalization that are based on static models.

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners significant wage growth is underpinned by the link between ex ante ability, math-heavy college majors and highly quantitative occupations. We develop a general equilibrium model with multiple education outcomes, where wages are driven by individuals ex ante abilities and acquired math skills. A large portion of within-group and general wage inequality is explained by math-biased technical change (MBTC).

This paper analyzes intergenerational mobility experiences of daughters and sons with respect to their fathers occupational status and documents changes in gender differences over time. While women have been in occupations with lower overall earnings potential, men are more likely to be in occupations characterized by long hours and low returns. The mobility gap in earnings has been closing and a mobility advantage with respect to education has been emerging

In the general area of immigrant incorporation studies, few investigations have looked at interconnections among different kinds of incorporation, but instead have usually focused on only one facet of incorporation at a time. Scholars vary considerably in their perceptions of immigrant incorporation, and this variation is particularly pronounced for Mexican immigrants. Some scholars emphasize slow but steady mobility while others focus on barriers and downfalls. Still others see Mexicans and their descendants as unassimilable. Classic assimilation theory proposes that with the occurrence of “structural assimilation,” or entrance into mainstream primary groups, all other forms of assimilation will naturally follow in no particular order. It further holds that exposure to the host country will also help account for similarities shared by newcomers and natives, if for no other reason than time diminishes differences. This dissertation investigates relationships between indicators of the American Dream and some of the most important aspects . . .

Steep socio-economic gradients in family size were a major source of disparities for children in the early 20th century and prompted much social research and public commentary. By the 1960s, a scholarly consensus was emerging that SES differentials in womens fertility in western countries were tending to narrow but developments since then have received limited attention and a childrens perspective relating to the distinct question of sibling numbers (or sibsize) has been lacking. Drawing mainly on data from the United States but with some comparative information for other western countries, this paper finds that a sharp reduction in social disparities in sibsize occurred in the final third of the twentieth century and acted as an important (though in the US case, incomplete) social leveller for children. This development is significant as a counter to other aspects of sociodemographic change in the same period which have been found to widen social inequalities for children. A key implication is that until we pay closer attention to sibsize patterns, our picture of how socio-demographic change has affected social inequalities among children in recent decades may be both incomplete and unduly negative.

Educational attainment, particularly in STEM fields, is a national priority. The Federal Government devotes tens of billions of dollars a year to educational assistance programs for needy post-secondary students and to scientific research. From 2007 to 2011, the Federal Government managed two grant programs- the ACG and SMART Grants- with the stated objectives to motivate greater academic achievement in high school and college, to augment college persistence rates, and to induce more students into STEM majors and fields of study. Using 2002-2012 panel data composed of institutional, labor market, and grant data, this thesis assesses how effective these grants were in meeting their educational objectives. Attention is also directed to the factors- academic, financial, or otherwise- that influence college persistence and major choice. This thesis concludes that the ACG Grant had no marked impact on college persistence, and that the SMART Grants impact was ambiguous, with conflicting results. Furthermore, scholastic aptitude and academic achievement are the primary causal factors in students educational decisions and outcomes.