This dissertation extends and connects prior research on wage inequality and immigration to the U.S.. Focusing on evidences derived from cross-metropolitan comparisons, it finds unique temporal trends and spatial patterns of wage inequality among immigrant workers, identifies wage differentials among immigrant groups by individual characteristics, and evaluates the roles of different labor market conditions in determining changes in immigrant wage inequality and their spatial variations. These findings point to the fact that race and ethnicity and geography are two key factors in understanding immigrant wage inequality. While race and ethnicity play an increasingly important role in determining wage disparities among immigrant workers, wage inequality of immigrant workers also depends on their settlement patterns and labor market conditions in their destinations. Wage inequality among immigrants in the U.S. is a function of different types of metropolitan areas, which serve as urban contexts to accommodate racial and ethnic concentration of immigrant workers and their divergent historical economic incorporation. Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) data of the Decennial Census for the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and pooled 5-year ACS data in 2009, my empirical analysis shows that immigrants had wider wage gap and higher rates of inequality growth during the past three decades than the native-born workers in the U.S.. There was great heterogeneity in urban wage inequality among immigrant workers. But all metropolitan areas experienced a rapid growth in wage inequality since 1980. A decomposition of wage inequality of the overall labor force in the U.S. by . . .

ACT on Alzheimers (ACT) is a voluntary collaborative in Minnesota started in 2011, with the goal of implementing legislative recommendations to prepare the state for the personal, social and budgetary impacts of dementia. One of ACT on Alzheimers five leadership groups set out to identify and encourage investment in promising approaches that reduce costs and improve care. The leadership group decided to develop a model useful both now and in the future to provide Minnesota policy makers and health care leaders with relevant estimates of potential cost savings associated with varying dementia care approaches to help guide the investment of resources in the future. To this end, the group commissioned an economic model to estimate the cost-saving potential of proven interventions.

The goal of Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) is to generate a sanitized (i.e. harmless) view of sensitive personal data (e.g. a health survey), to be released to some agencies or simply the public. However, traditional PPDP practices all make the assumption that the process is run on a trusted central server. In this article, we argue that the trust assumption on the central server is far too strong. We propose METAP, a generic fully distributed protocol, to execute various forms of PPDP algorithms on an asymmetric architecture composed of low power secure devices and a powerful but untrusted infrastructure. We show that this protocol is both correct and secure against honest-but-curious or malicious adversaries. Finally, we provide an experimental validation showing that this protocol can support PPDP processes scaling up to nation-wide surveys.

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of income inequality between racial groups (racial income inequality). I find that greater racial income inequality reduces trust. Also, racial fragmentation is no longer a significant determinant of trust once racial income inequality is accounted for. I also show that racial income inequality has a more detrimental effect in more racially fragmented communities and that trust falls more in minority groups when racial income inequality increases. The results hold under both least squares and instrumental variable estimation.

This report for New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive think tank, makes the case for increasing New Jersey's minimum wage for tipped workers.

Affluent Americans support pro-wealthy policies more than the non-affluent, and government responds more to the affluent. We develop, test and find support for a neglected source of affluent Americans wealth-justifying opinions: predominantly affluent college campuses. We rely on a large panel dataset (29,113 affluent students from 359 schools) with a high response rate. The affluent school effect holds with controls and matching analyses, among students whose school choice is more limited, and in a school undergoing a sudden change in affluence. Further support comes from placebo tests. The mechanism is campus norms of profit-seeking. In line with classic studies of socialization, college may affect citizens in their formative years. Contrary to those studies, college may align young adults with the upper-class perspectives and interests of affluent adults. Concentrated affluence can undermine universities mission of developing a future elite that checks its pursuit of profit with a sense of communal responsibility.

Cigarette smoking has long been a target of public health intervention because it substantially contributes to morbidity and mortality. Individuals in different-sex marriages have lower smoking risk (i.e., prevalence and frequency) than different-sex cohabiters. However, little is known about the smoking risk of individuals in same-sex cohabiting unions. We compare the smoking risk of individuals in different-sex marriages, same-sex cohabiting unions, and different-sex cohabiting unions using pooled cross-sectional data from the 19972010 National Health Interview Surveys (N = 168,514). We further examine the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and psychological distress in the relationship between union status and smoking. Estimates from multinomial logistic regression models reveal that same-sex and different-sex cohabiters experience similar smoking risk when compared to one another, and higher smoking risk when compared to the different-sex married. Results suggest that SES and psychological distress factors cannot fully explain smoking differences between the different-sex married and same-sex and different-sex cohabiting groups. Moreover, without same-sex cohabiters education advantage, same-sex cohabiters would experience even greater smoking risk relative to the different-sex married. Policy recommendations to reduce smoking disparities among same-sex and different-sex cohabiters are discussed.

While the possible disemployment effect of the minimum wage on teenagers has been the subject of contentious debate, comparatively little attention has been paid to the impact of the minimum wage on teen educational outcomes. This is surprising given that education is more directly linked to the later-life success of teenagers than is teen employment. In this paper, I investigate the educational effects of changes in the minimum wage, looking specifically at high school dropout decisions. I identify the effect of the minimum wage using two sources of variation (within state over time and cross-border at one point in time) and three individual-level datasets (ACS, CPS, and SIPP). I consistently find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage lowers the likelihood of dropping out for low-SES teenagers by 0.5-0.9 percentage points, roughly 4-10% of the groups dropout rate, but has no effect on higher-SES teenagers. Additionally, I find that an increase in the minimum wage has a negative effect on hours worked that is concentrated at the upper tail of the hours distribution (not at the employment margin) for low-SES teens, but not for other young and similarly low-skilled groups. Taken together, these findings suggest that an increase in the minimum wage generates an income effect on low-SES teens, which leads them to shift their allocation of time to school-related activities and away from paid work.

My dissertation consists of three chapters. The common theme that unifies the chapters is the analysis of how globalization and trade impact labor market outcomes. In the first chapter, I summarize the literature on this theme and analyze the shortcomings that are present in existing works. In the early 1990s, a large body of work was developed that showed that many of the predictions of the standard Heckscher-Ohlin theory failed to hold in the data. As a result, many authors disregarded increased trade and globalization as a possible driving force behind the observed changes in labor market outcomes. However, in more recent years, authors have begun modifying new trade theories to begin to explore how trade and globalization might impact wages and unemployment through different channels. In this chapter, I summarize the innovations that have occurred along these lines, as well as the empirical support that exists for the proposed theories. The second chapter of my dissertation explores the business cycle effects of increased globalization. Over the past 20 years, following recessions, recoveries in labor markets have been slow and weak relative to their post-war average. Over the same period, the United States has become increasingly open to trade and global forces. In this chapter of the thesis, I argue that changes in labor market outcomes can be tied to increased globalization. I build a model in which increased openness to growing economies generates a downward trend in employment which is amplified by recessions, thus generating jobless recoveries. I provide empirical evidence for the relationship between globalization and labor market outcomes and I show that the model is able to qualitatively match not only the targeted changes in labor markets, but also a persistent negative trade balance and increasing income inequality. In the third chapter of my dissertation, I explore the impact that trade has upon investment in technologies that are skill-augmenting and how this, in turn, impacts the relative return to skilled labor. In the decade following the Mexico-U.S. trade integration, the manufacturing skill premium rose by almost 60 percent in Mexico and by only 12 percent in the U.S. Standard trade theory predicts that when countries with different levels of skilled labor integrate, the skill premium should fall - not rise - in the skillscarce country. In the third chapter, I reconcile theory and data by building a model in which intermediate goods are produced using rented technology. After integration, producers in Mexico begin to rent technologies from the United States, which are more advanced and, hence, more skill-intensive. This has two effects: The skill premium in Mexico rises due to adoption of the more advanced technology and the skill premium in the U.S. rises due to increased investment in this technology, which is driven by the increased marginal return on technology arising from to its adoption in Mexico. The mechanism is supported by industry-level evidence: Mexican industries which are integrated into the U.S. supply chain have higher skill premia than their non-integrated counterparts. The calibrated model can account for about two-thirds of the increase in the skill premium in each country.

A historical perspective differentiates between the industrial demographic transition, which describes the decline in mortality and fertility that has accompanied the industrial revolution, and the epidemiologic transition, which was developed a half century later and describes the changes in cause of death that accompanied the demographic transition. The demographic transition is a model describing the decline in mortality and fertility that occurred over the last 300 years. Since this process coincides with the industrial revolution, it is assumed to be the catalyst. The secular trends in age‐specific mortality are a new addition to the demographic transition, largely due to improvements in the quality of data available, such as the Human Mortality Database. This chapter talks about other transitions like the height transition and the subnational transitions. The use of more sophisticated methods has also contributed to one's understanding of demographic transitions.

The present study advances research on union status and health by providing a first look at alcohol use differentials among different-sex and same-sex married and cohabiting individuals using nationally representative population-based data (National Health Interview Surveys 19972011, N = 181,581). The results showed that both same-sex and different-sex married groups reported lower alcohol use than both same-sex and different-sex cohabiting groups. The results further revealed that same-sex and different-sex married individuals reported similar levels of alcohol use, whereas same-sex and different-sex cohabiting individuals reported similar levels of alcohol use. Drawing on marital advantage and minority stress approaches, the findings suggest that it is cohabitation statusnot same-sex statusthat is associated with elevated alcohol rates.

This paper provides evidence that supply-side factors significantly drive the high share of unbanked households. Using interstate branching deregulation in the U.S. after 1994 as an exogenous shock, we show that an increase in bank competition is associated with a large drop in the share of unbanked households. The effect is even stronger for populations that are more likely to be rationed by banks, such as black households living in high racial bias states. The improved access to bank accounts leads to higher savings rates but does not translate to higher levels of indebtedness.

In this article, we examine the link between innovation and earnings inequality across Canadian cities over the 1996–2006 period. We do so using a novel data set that combines information from the Canadian long-form census and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The analysis reveals that there is a positive relationship between innovation and inequality: cities with higher levels of innovation have more unequal distributions of earnings. Other factors influencing differences in inequality include city size, manufacturing and government employment, the percentage of visible minority in an urban population, and educational inequality. These results are robust to the use of different measures of inequality, innovation, alternative specifications, and instrumental variables estimations. Questions are thus raised about how the benefits of innovation are distributed in society and the long-term sustainability of such trends.

This thesis explores issues related to public and private insurance of income shocks, and the importance of human capital accumulation. The first chapter argues that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor supply is a state-dependent variable which strongly depends on the return to human capital accumulation. Estimating a life cycle model I find that the average i.e.s. is low (0.35), and comparable with micro estimates, even in the presence of human capital. However, the average i.e.s. hides important heterogeneity: for college graduates the i.e.s. more than doubles over the life cycle, whereas it increases by about 58 percent for workers without a college degree. The second chapter argues that heterogeneous returns to human capital accumulation affects the degree to which search effort of unemployed deviates from the socially optimal level, and the reason behind the deviation. I find that (i) the main social costs associated with unemployment insurance are not due to moral hazard problems, but are due to distortionary effects of labor income taxes needed to finance the insurance. (ii) The magnitude of the moral hazard problem and the tax distortion problem differs substantially by age and education. And, (iii) the degree of tax progressiveness and benefit regressiveness has important effects on the deviation of search effort. The third chapter studies the relation between co-movement of income shocks and precautionary asset holdings. If households perceive spousal labor supply as an insurance mechanism, it is evident that this mechanism should work better the lower the co-movement of income shocks. We find that (i) households in which both spouses have the same education level or work in the same industry have a higher correlation of income shocks compared to couples with different education/industry. And, (ii) households who face larger co-movements of income shocks hold larger precautionary buffers.

A data warehouse is a huge multidimensional repository used for statistical analysis of historical data. In a data warehouse events are modeled as multidimensional cubes where cells store numerical indicators while dimensions describe the events from different points of view. Dimensions are typically described at different levels of details through hierarchies of concepts. Computing the distance/similarity between two cells has several applications in this domain. In this context distance is typically based on the least common ancestor between attribute values, but the effectiveness of such distance functions varies according to the structure and to the number of the involved hierarchies. In this paper we propose a characterization of hierarchy types based on their structure and expressiveness, we provide a characterization of the different types of distance functions and we verify their effectiveness on different types of hierarchies in terms of their intrinsic discriminant capacity.

The accuracy of counts of U.S. racial/ethnic and immigrant groups depends on the coverage of the foreign-born in official data. Because Mexicans constitute by far the largest single national-origin group among the foreign-born in the United States, we compile new evidence about the coverage of the Mexican-born population in the 2000 census and 2001 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) using three techniques: a death registration, a birth registration, and a net migration method. For the late 1990s and first half of the 2000-2010 decade, results indicate that coverage error was somewhat higher than currently assumed but had substantially declined by the latter half of the 2000-2010 decade. Additionally, we find evidence that U.S. census and ASC data miss substantial numbers of children of Mexican immigrants, as well as people who are most likely to be unauthorized: namely, working-aged Mexican immigrants (age 15-64), especially makes. The findings highlight the heterogeneity of the Mexican foreign-born population and the ways in which migration dynamics may affect population coverage.

This paper explores the relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials. Using the U.S. Census and EU KLEMS data, we find that the progress of job polarization between 1980 and 2009 was more evident in industries that initially paid a high wage premium to workers than in industries that did not. With a two-sector neoclassical growth model to highlight the key mechanism, we argue that this phenomenon can be explained as a dynamic response of firms to interindustry wage differentials: firms with a high wage premium seek alternative ways to cut production costs by replacing workers who perform routine tasks with Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) capital. The replacement of routine workers with ICT capital has become more pronounced as the price of ICT capital has fallen over the past 30 years. As a result, firms that paid a relatively high industry wage premium have experienced more apparent job polarization.

This paper analyzes how the frequency and predictability of facing spells of unemployment impacts households’ demand for home equity loans or lines of credit (HELOC). These devices represent a low transactions cost way of extracting stored home equity. Using American Community Survey 2003-2012 data, I find working age household heads whose occupational unemployment rates are significantly impacted by changes in GDP, or business cycle effects, are more likely to secure access to a HELOC. Estimated effects are strongest for younger individuals. For this group facing seasonality in employment, as measured by the spread between highest and lowest monthly unemployment rate factors, further increases their tendency to hold a HELOC. Evidence of these impacts on younger households’ probability of holding a HELOC is most robust when coupled with house price appreciation that likely lifts credit supply restrictions they may face. Results are consistent with consumption smoothing motives impacting the demand for HELOCs.