Community colleges are a critical resource for women seeking to achieve economic security and stability, yet many women who are community college students face challenges that make it difficult to persist in their education and complete their degrees. To understand the circumstances and experiences of female community college students in Mississippi, the challenges to their academic progress, and the resources that enable them to persist and succeed, the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) conducted an online survey of women who are students in the state's community colleges, commissioned by the Women's Foundation of Mississippi (WFM). Nearly 550 students from 13 of the state's 15 community colleges responded to the survey, with the majority of responses (60 percent) coming from two schools. Students answered questions about the factors that inspired them to pursue postsecondary education, their personal and career goals, and which types of student supports they find most helpful and needed. To supplement the findings from students' responses to the survey, IWPR interviewed eight community college administrators about their perceptions of students' greatest unmet needs, the ways their schools strive to meet these needs, additional services they believe would be useful to the students they serve. These interviews and the survey supplement draw on insights from the "Community College Completion Project" conducted by the Social Science Research Center of Mississippi State University, a study that examined the challenges and obstacles women students in Mississippi encounter in fulfilling their community college goals. Recommended changes to address these challenges include the following: (1) Enhance career counseling and remedial education; (2) Expand and improve student supports and services; and (3) Increase access to financial aid and other financial supports. The following are appended: (1) Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Respondents; and (2) Age Distribution of Respondents.

I evaluate the wage impacts from exogenous and endogenous peer effects within different metropolitan areas. I construct comparison groups for workers within the same industry and PUMA residence based on support from existing literature on social networks, and estimate peer and network effects in a spatial auto-regressive model with a network structure that incorporates group fixed effects. Inclusion of these effects reveals that both observed and unobserved factors within each network have significant effects on individual outcomes. This is the first attempt to estimate the social effects on wages using the spatial econometric approach proposed by Lee (Journal of Econometrics 2007; 140(2), 333-374). The industry-PUMA combination is a statistical association that merges geographic and social space for a new perspective on the realm of spatial effects. The model includes spatial autoregressive processes in the dependent variable. I find limited evidence of spillover (endogenous) effects, which vary significantly across the cities in the analysis. JEL-Classification: J31, C31

This paper empirically investigates the effects of the two-rate (split-rate) property taxation on the capital intensity of land development in Pennsylvania. This study makes the first attempt to overcome the major data limitations in the existing literature and further enriches the dataset by including the most recent policy changes. Using the new dataset, the study improves estimation efficiency and controls for potential biases in the estimates. Consistent with previous studies, the results indicate that taxing land at a higher rate than structures on land increases the capital/land ratio. Further, this improvement effect comes from increased density of housing units rather than bigger houses. The estimates in this paper are bigger than the ones in the literature, suggesting a stronger impact of the two-rate property tax. The findings have important policy suggestions regarding the use of tax instruments to combat urban sprawl.

It’s not that no one mentions population growth, it’s that they still lead with the “top line” number. And they all have that horizontal line at the raw number of jobs when the recession started as the benchmark. I don’t know why. Maybe in some crazy economics world the absolute number of jobs is what really matters for evaluating a recovery, and that explains the fixation on that horizontal line. From a social perspective what matters is the proportion of people with jobs. I could see the logic if you had a finite number of employers that never change, where you could literally count up the jobs at two points in time, and see who added and who subtracted from their payrolls (this is why retail chains report “same-store” trends, so the statistics aren’t confounded by the changing number of stores). But we have zillions of employers, constantly changing and moving around — largely in response to population changes. So that static image seems pointless.

Passed with bipartisan support in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) celebrated its 16th anniversary in August 2013. Legislation reauthorizing CHIP, the Childrens Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA), was signed into law on February 4, 2009, providing significant new financial support for the program and introducing various initiatives to increase enrollment, improve retention, and strengthen access and quality of care in Medicaid and CHIP. A total of 8.13 million children were enrolled in CHIP at some point in FFY 2013. Congress mandated in CHIPRA that the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conduct an independent comprehensive evaluation of CHIP patterned after an earlier evaluation Congress mandated in the Balanced Budget Refinement Act (BBRA) of 1999. Mathematica Policy Research and its partner the Urban Institute were awarded the contract in 2010 to conduct the current evaluation, which is being overseen by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation(ASPE). An interim report was sent to Congress in 2011 that described the status and evolution of state CHIP programs throughout the United States as of 2010 and summarized the evidence available at that time about the role and impacts of CHIP. This final report synthesizes evidence collected through the CHIPRA evaluation of CHIP.

We investigated preterm birth (PTB) in relation to maternal occupational exposure and whether effect measures were modified by Hispanic ethnicity and nativity in a population-based sample with high proportion of Hispanics.

This study explores the role of opportunity cost in the decision to attend college and its implications for the gap in enrollment between women and men. I provide new causal evidence that enrollment goes up in response to negative local labor demand shocks and down in response to positive ones. I then use variation in the opportunity cost of attending college to explore whether differences in labor market opportunities contribute to the enrollment gender gap. First, I find evidence that men are more sensitive to local labor demand shocks, suggesting that labor demand has gender-specific components. To isolate these components, I construct measures of gender-specific demand by classifying occupations by gender and education level. I find that there is a high degree of gender segregation by occupation at all education levels, but that most male jobs are low education, while female jobs are distributed more evenly across education levels. I present evidence that demand shocks to low education male jobs predict the gender gap and that the gap would shrink by 20 percent if low education male jobs disappeared.

In this paper, I will use finely detailed archival records from high schools in early twentieth-century Tennessee to explore returns to education during the ascent of the high school movement. With these newly compiled data, I can observe both the diffusion of new high schools and the “quality” of schools using information on teacher qualifications, teacher workload, and school amenities. This, in turn, can provide a more informative picture of how variation in schooling opportunities and resources translated into differences in school attendance (when young) and labor market outcomes (when adult). The labor market outcomes will be obtained by linking the school quality measures to local boys, ages 4–18, in the 1920 IPUMS 1 percent census sample. This sample can be linked to the 1940 census manuscripts to observe adult earnings and final educational attainment for this cohort. This data will allow me to analyze the high school movement’s effect on labor markets, considering both returns to quality and promotion rates as an indicator of quality on learning. Multinomial choice models will let me measure high school quality’s impact on career paths (e.g., college, business, normal school, etc.). An important challenge is that school location and quality may be endogenous. I am developing an instrumental variable approach that draws on the ability, granted by the state legislature, of some “special school districts” to levy taxes on railroads. Although I am still exploring the instrument’s validity, historical sources indicate that districts near railroads commonly used this special status to improve local schools.

This paper develops a signaling theory where brain drain as well as the opposite of brain drain, a phenomenon we call lame-drain can result. In particular, we assume there are three types of agents according to their intrinsic abilities; education (with endogenous intensity) consists of two stages: undergraduate and graduate. There are two types of jobs: entry level and managerial. It is shown that under some circumstances the equilibrium is semi-pooling where the medium type chooses to work after undergraduate education while (a fraction of) both high and low types pursue graduate studies at home and abroad. Some high and low ability students return to work in the indigenous country in equilibrium. However, our model differs from the traditional brain drain models in that some low ability agents also go abroad in equilibrium and work in the host country after graduation, resulting in the recipient country hiring low ability agents, a phenomenon we call lame-drain. We then provide empirical evidence that lame-drain is indeed happening using U.S. Census data.

Feminist concerns about the epistemological problems of quantitative methods have resulted in an underdevelopment of quantitative approaches that could contribute to existing intersectional theory. Further, feminist scholars commonly consider the effects of gender as it intersects with race or class, but relatively little of this research has included nativity (being either an immigrant or native-born to a society). This article addresses these shortcomings by examining patterns of earnings inequality at the intersection of gender, race, and nativity, comparing cohorts of African-born Black and white immigrants to their US-born counterparts over multiple time-points. Further, the depressive effects of gender are large enough so that while there are differences in womens earnings across race and nativity, nearly all groups of men still earn more than nearly all groups of women. The articles results demonstrate that privilege has a magnifying effect, with the advantages conferred from one privileged status increasing the effects of other privilege statuses, which become larger over time. These findings contribute to how feminists understand privileges and oppressions emerging from the intersections of gender with other social statuses, and how such intersections shape economic inequality.

This study investigates how spouses cultural backgrounds mediate the role of intra-household bargaining in the labor supply decisions of foreign-born and US-born couples, in a collective-household framework. Using data from the 2000 US Census, I show that the hours worked by US-born couples, and by those foreign-born coming from countries with gender roles similar to the US, are significantly related to common bargaining power forces such as differences between spouses in age and non-labor income, controlling for both spouses demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Households whose culture of origin supports strict and unequal gender roles do not exhibit any association of these power factors with their labor supply decisions. This cultural asymmetry suggests that spousal attributes are assessed differently across couples within the US, and that how spouses make use of their outside opportunities and economic and institutional environment may depend on their ethnicities.

My research studies how fiscal policies affect an economy and uncovers the cause behind the "Jobless Recovery." The first essay "Consumption Response to Tax Cuts in Life-Cycle Economies" studies the aggregate consumption response to a tax cut in a life-cycle economy. I construct a general equilibrium model where households have a finite lifespan and smooth consumption using one asset. The asset is associated with a stochastic adjustment cost. The model replicates the lifetime mean net worth profile observed in the data. The implied aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of the tax cut ranges from 14% to 43%. In contrast to the frictionless version, this model generates a substantial rise in aggregate consumption under the tax cut without needing a large aggregate MPC. The model also indicates the quantitative importance of how a tax cut is financed. The second essay "A Model of the Consumption Response to Government Expenditures" develops a structural model to examine the effect of an increase in government spending. The model has finitely-lived households who smooth consumption using two assets. The first asset is a low return free-to-adjust asset lent by the households to the government; the second asset is a high return costly-to-adjust asset used as capital by a representative firm. Working-age households supply a fixed amount of labor to the firm. The government raises taxes to finance its spending and . . .

This paper estimates the impact of the boom in international gold prices on child labor and schooling in Colombia. I first set up a simple agricultural household model of child labor and commodity prices hocks which guides the empirical analysis. Then, I use individual level information from the censuses of 1985, 1993 (when prices where stable) and 2005 (when prices surged) merged with regional data on gold production capabilities. I define Gold Boom as an interaction between regional gold production capabilities and the international price of gold. I find that child labor is increasing (0.3 standard deviations) and school attendance is decreasing (0.9 standard deviations) in the measure of gold boom. Accordingly, the gold boom decreases school attainment (0.2 standard deviations). This is consistent with the model when initial child labor is low and substitution effects dominate income effects. Finally, I find that the years of education of the head of the head of the household but not her ownership of assets mitigate the collateral effects of the gold boom.

This paper examines the effects of laws mandating that health insurance cover specific conditions, procedures, providers, and beneficiaries. Unlike previous work, this paper considers the market for employer-based health insurance rather than the much smaller individual market, and uses a panel data approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity among states. Using a fixed effects model, I find that the average mandate increases premiums by 0.44–1.11 percent annually. This implies that new mandates were responsible for 9–23 percent of all premium increases over the 1996–2011 period.

Activists in the San Fernando Valley between 1996 and 2002 renewed efforts to secede from the city of Los Angeles. The movement mobilized many of the constituencies and grievances associated with the 1970s tax revolt and anti-busing protests in the Valley. While mostly white homeowners associations were the principal activists for secession, they needed to enlist the Valleys Latino population. Though secession failed, Valley activists crafted a color-blind rhetoric of community empowerment that won support from many Valley Latinos and offers a preview of future metropolitan politics as whites retain economic privilege but lose demographic predominance.

Research on women's experiences with work schedules and flexibility tends to focus on professional women in high-paying careers, despite women's far greater prevalence in low-wage jobs. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the work-hours problems faced by women precariously employed in low-wage jobs by addressing how work-on-demand scheduling and other features of part-time labour in the neoliberal economy limit women's ability to make ends meet. Using data from 17 in-depth interviews, we identify four themes unpredictable schedules, inadequate hours, time theft and punishment-and-control via hours-reduction and the problems they present. Results suggest that much-championed flexible work policies that seek to encourage women's career advancement may have little bearing on the work-hours dilemmas faced by low-wage women workers. We conclude that social change efforts need to encompass work policies geared to low-wage workers, such as guaranteed minimum hours and increases in the minimum wage.

This study analyzes the marriage-market aspects of season of birth in the United States, estimating whether and how marital status is related to quarter of birth by gender and race, also incorporating cohabitation as a separate relationship status. For couples, additional analysis considers who is matched with whom and the spousal (partners) trade-offs of quarters of birth and socioeconomic attributes. Using the American Community Survey data 2010-2012, I show that white women born in the fourth quarter are more likely to be married than never married (marriage more likely than cohabitation), while never married white men from the second birth quarter are less likely to be cohabiting than single. Black men from the first birth quarter are less likely to be married rather than cohabiting but more likely to be cohabiting than single. White women from the third birth quarter and black women from the second are more likely to be divorced, always controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Among white married couples, men born in the first quarter have more educated and richer wives, and conversely women from the same first quarter have less educated husbands. In cohabiting couples, white men and women born in the third quarter have richer and less educated partners, respectively, and black women from the first quarter have poorer partners. Finally, in all types of couples, black women born in the fourth quarter have richer husbands.