We analyze the impact of Ford Motor Companys compensation practices on the Detroit-area labor market from 1918-1947. Previous studies imply Ford paid race-independent wages, butits Black workers were sorted into undesirable departments. We extend these results using propensity score reweighting of Census data and Fords administrative records, and confirm Ford paid equal wages. We then develop a search model with discriminatory and equal-wage firms, to assess the potential impact of Fords policy on the larger labormarket. Calibrated simulations of the model suggest that Ford may have reduced the wage gap in S.E. Michigan by as much as 50%.

An interesting characteristic of the US labor market is the concentration of immigrants into occupational niches. For example, among college educated immigrants, Filipinos are very likely to be employed as healthcare practitioners, especially as registered nurses, Chinese as scientists and financial specialists, Indians as engineers and in computing and mathematical occupations. This paper uses 2011 American Community Survey (ACS) data to estimate earnings functions to see if there are significant economic consequences to immigrants when they choose niche occupations. OLS regression results suggest that choosing to work in occupational niches does significantly influence earnings of college educated immigrants, but that the effects differ across immigrant groups.

Standard models explain urbanization by rural-urban migration in response to an (expected) urban-rural wage gap. The Green Revolution and rural poverty constitute rural push factors of migration. The Industrial Revolution and the urban bias are urban pull factors. This paper offers an additional demographic mechanism, based on internal urban population growth, i.e. an urban push. Using newly compiled historical data on urban birth and death rates for 7 countries from Industrial Europe (1800-1910) and 33 developing countries (1960-2010), we show that many cities of to-day's developing world are "mushroom cities" vs. the "killer cities" of Industrial Europe; fertility is high, while mortality is much lower. The high rates of urban natural increase have then accelerated urban growth and urbanization in developing countries, with urban populations now doubling every 18 years (15 years in Africa), compared to every 35 years in Industrial Europe. This is further found to be associated with higher urban congestion, possibly mitigating the benefits from agglomeration and providing further insights into the phenomenon of urbanization without growth. Both migration and urban demographics must be considered in debating urbanization.

The wage gap between African-Americans and white Americans is substantial in the US and has slightly narrowed over the past 30 years. Today, blacks have almost achieved the same educational level as whites. There is reason to believe that discrimination driven by prejudice plays a part in explaining this residual wage gap. Whereas racial prejudice has substantially declined over the past 30 years, the wage differential has slightly converged overtime. This ‘prejudice puzzle’ raises other reasons in explaining the absence of convergence of this racial differential. In this paper, I assess the impact which of the boom of jobs in contact with customers has on blacks’ labor market earnings. I develop a search-matching model with bargaining to predict the negative impact which of the share of these contact jobs has on blacks’ earnings in the presence of customer discrimination. I test this model using the IPUMS, the General Social Survey and the Occupation Information Network. My estimates show that black men’s relative earnings are lower in areas where the proportions of prejudiced individuals and of contact jobs are high. I also estimate that the decreased exposure to racial prejudice is associated with a higher convergence of the residual gap, whereas the expansion of contact jobs partly explains the persistence of the gap.

This paper studies the optimal taxation of top labor incomes. Top income earners are modeled as managers who operate a span-of-control technology la Rosen (1982). Managers are heterogenous in their skill level. Effort and skill of the manager are privately observed. Managerial skills increase managers productivity of both effort and supervision, creating a scale-of-operations effect. A tax formula for optimal taxes is derived linking optimal marginal tax rates to preferences and firm technology. We show that a larger scale-of-operations effect prescribes lower tax rates. The model is calibrated using US firm level data. Our quantitative results suggest that optimal top tax rates are in line with the current US tax code.

Paternity leave is expected to give fathers an opportunity to participate in child care and build the father-child bond at an early stage. This study examines the association between married or cohabiting fathers’ paternity leave taking and the amount of time spent in child care within 19 months using the Current Population Survey data linked to the American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2012. On average, 4.61% of fathers in the sample (N=272) took leave during the birth month or up to three months thereafter. Fathers who took paternity leave were less likely to report time spent in play and leisure activities than those who did not take paternity leave. For those who participated in child care, however, paternity leave taking was positively associated with time spent in play and leisure activities. Implications and limitations of this study are discussed.

The 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.

This paper investigates the role of race in the mortgage market using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the census from 1992 to 2003 for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Statistical Area. A multinomial log it model is used to isolate the effect of race on the final outcome of a loan application, after accounting for individual, loan, neighborhood, and property characteristics. The findings of this paper are consistent with those of previous works in this field, that is, being black or Hispanic lowers the probability of a successful loan application. Although data limitations prevent this paper from claiming explicit discrimination in the mortgage market, the project demonstrates that race is a statistically significant variable in predicting the outcome of a mortgage application. Copyright of Race, Gender & Class is the property of Race, Gender & Class and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.

While employers argue that there are not enough workers with technical skills, most prior research has found little evidence that such workers are in short supply. This report uses the latest Census Bureau data available to examine the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Consistent with other research, the findings show that the country has more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data indicate there is no shortage of STEM workers in the United States.

The spatial concentration of ideas is central to economic geography. Yet, how proximity to research aff ects productivity is not well studied. We use the late 19th century establishment of agricultural experiment stations in the United States to estimate research proximity eff ects. Our analysis of county-level agricultural census data from 1870 to 2000 reveals three results. First, research proximity e ffects are dynamic: they peak 20 years after station opening, and subsequently decline, until becoming largely absent today. Second, proximity to station-based discoveries a ffects productivity for 20 to 40 years. Third, research proximity eff ects remain today where: (i) stations focused on basic research, and (ii) few farmers were producing with frontier technology. We conclude that research proximity e ffects can be meaningful depending on research outcomes and the composition of final good producers.

This chapter provides an overview of demographic information related to language diversity and shift among heritage and community language speakers in the United States. It references important national surveys of foreign language instruction and enrollment in primary and secondary school and reviews United States Census American Community Survey data related to language diversity in American families. The chapter notes the importance of drawing on family and community linguistic resources that exist within the population and the need to connect heritage and community languages with the effort to promote language instruction more broadly in U.S. schools.

Immigrants are more likely to travel by carpool than the US-born. Strong ethnic ties within immigrant communities may contribute to immigrants propensity to carpool, enabling residents to find carpool partners more easily and increasing the likelihood that residents will travel to and from common destinations. Drawing on data from the 2000 US census and a 2001 regional travel survey, this paper examines whether residents of ethnic neighbourhoods in Southern California are more likely to carpool than other residents. A strong positive relationship is found between the percentage foreign-born in a census tract and carpooling rates. Analysis of individual data shows that this relationship is strongest for immigrants who live in immigrant neighbourhoods; immigrants living in non-immigrant neighbourhoods are less likely to carpool. These findings suggest an important role for social networks in travel behaviour and the potential benefits of linking land use to the specific needs of local residents.

Este estudo tem como objetivo principal investigar a associação entre condições de acesso ao trabalho das mulheres adultas brasileiras e a presença de criança e de idoso nos domicílios, comparando com a população masculina. A intenção é abordar as condições de inserção das mulheres no mercado de trabalho a partir de uma perspectiva multidimensional. O nível de acesso ao trabalho é captado através de um índice sintético composto por indicadores relacionados a três dimensões – disponibilidade de trabalho, qualidade da ocupação e remuneração auferida no trabalho. Entende-se que tanto o fato de estar ocupada, quanto a qualidade da ocupação e o nível de remuneração são aspectos importantes e que devem ser investigados em conjunto. Utilizando os dados dos censos de 2000 e 2010, foram estimadas regressões para testar . . .

This dissertation consists of two essays on the impact of state-mandated Advanced Placement (AP) programs in public high schools on student outcomes. In the first essay, I examine the effects of a 2004 state-mandate in Arkansas on student achievement (measured by test scores), high school graduation and dropout rates, and student composition within a school. In the second essay, using the same policy, I study the effects of the mandate on college enrollment measures, as well as high school completion. The first essay examines the effect of a state mandate to offer Advanced Placement (AP) programs at all public high schools on student outcomes. Requiring schools to offer a program they may otherwise not have offered could produce unintended consequences through the shifting of resources or re-sorting among students. To investigate these possibilities, I take advantage of a 2004 state-wide mandate to offer AP programs in Arkansas and use a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify the effects of the policy on graduation and attendance rates, student achievement measures, and student composition within a school. Results suggest that on average, the 4-year graduation rate increases by 3.3 percentage points and the dropout rate increases by nearly one percentage point at schools required to comply with the mandate. I find no effect on student achievement (measured by end-of-course exams and ACT scores) attributable to the mandate, however. Additionally, the share of students choosing to attend an out-of-district school increases by almost two percentage points and the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch decreases by more than three percentage points, which suggests that the policy may have important sorting effects. In the second essay, I build on the work from the previous chapter of this thesis by examining the impact of state-mandated Advanced Placement (AP) programs on college enrollment and high school graduation rates. By extending the analysis to college-going, we can gain a better understanding of how increased rigor in the high school curriculum can affect college matriculation, which itself has important implications for later labor market outcomes. Furthermore, corroborating the estimates on high school completion from the previous work will contribute to the scant existing literature on the causal impact of AP program participation. I use a triple differences estimation strategy that exploits exogenous variation in AP program exposure generated by the 2004 mandate in Arkansas to identify the causal impact of the reform on student outcomes. While robust standard errors suggest the results are statistically insignificant, the point estimates are indicative of positive impacts on the rate of high school completion for nearly all gender and racial sub-groups of students analyzed, and mixed impacts on measures of college attendance by race and gender. I find positive impacts on ever having enrolled in college for females (negative for males) and positive impacts on currently enrolled in college for non-Hispanic white students (negative for non-Hispanic black students).

Studies have shown a connection between finance and growth, but most do not consider how financial and real factors interact to put a virtuous cycle of economic development into motion. As the main transportation advance of the nineteenth century, railroads connected established commercial centers and made unsettled areas along their routes better candidates for development. We measure the strength of links between railroads and banks in seven Midwest states using an annual transportation geographic information system (GIS) database linked to a census of banking. These data indicate that those counties that already had a bank were more likely to see their first railroad go through over the next decade, while new banks tended to enter a county a year or two after a railroad was built. The initial banking system thus helped establish the rail system, while the rapid expansion of railroads helped fill in the banking map of the American Midwest.

A top-k query retrieves the best k tuples by assigning scores for each tuple in a target relation with respect to a user-specific scoring function. This paper studies the problem of constructing an indexing structure for supporting top-k queries with varying scoring functions and retrieval sizes. The existing research efforts can be categorized into three approaches: list-, layer-, and view-based approaches. This paper focuses on the layer-based approach that pre-materializes tuples into consecutive multiple layers. We first propose a dual-resolution layer that consists of coarse-level and fine-level layers. Specifically, we build coarse-level layers using skylines, and divide each coarse-level layer into fine-level sublayers using convex skylines. To make our proposed dual-resolution layer scalable, we then address the following optimization directions: (1) index construction, (2) disk-based storage scheme, (3) the design of the virtual layer, and (4) index maintenance for tuple updates. Our evaluation results show that our proposed method is more scalable than the state-of-the-art methods.

More than one-third of all children were eligible for both Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid/Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits in 2011, the most recent year of data available. Far fewer adults were jointly eligible. Reasons for the difference include childrens high poverty rates and state eligibility policies. However, joint participation rates (the percent of eligibles receiving benefits) suggest that many eligibles were not participating. In four out of five of states with available data, less than three-quarters of those jointly eligible (adults and children) were receiving both benefits. Efforts to streamline and integrate application systems have the potential to improve program reach to families in need.

An increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would lift at least 20,000 people in same-sex couples out of poverty. The study also finds that a minimum wage increase would reduce the poverty rate by 24 percent or more for couples. Poverty rates fall for the most vulnerable people in same-sex couples—particularly women and African Americans—as well as for children in households led by same-sex couples. For example, among all people in same-sex couples, 7 percent of people are African American, but they are 14 percent of the group of people in same-sex couples who would move out of poverty. Similarly, same-sex couples with children make up 20 percent of all couples, but they are 37 percent of families leaving poverty. The study simulates the impact of an increase in the federal minimum wage from the current rate of $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour on the family incomes of same-sex couples and different-sex couples.