Heritable and environmental factors may contribute to differences in colorectal cancer (CRC)incidence across populations. We capitalized on the resources of the California Cancer Registry(CCR) and California s diverse Asian population to perform a cohort study exploring the relationshipsbetween CRC incidence, nativity, and neighborhood-level factors across Asian subgroups.

The US labour market has experienced a remarkable polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, recent empirical work has documented a sharp increase in the wealth to income ratio in that period. Contemporary to these inequality trends, the US faced a fast technological catch-up as European countries and especially Japan drastically improved their global innovation and patenting activity. Is foreign technological convergence an important source of the recent evolution of the US wage and employment structure? Can it contribute shaping the dynamics of wealth-to-income ratio? To answer these questions, we set up a Schumpeterian model of endogenous technological progress with two asymmetric countries, heterogeneous workers, and endogenous skill formation. High ability people acquire education and become skilled, those with intermediate abilities work as unskilled workers in production jobs, and those at the bottom of the ability distribution work in service occupations. Service workers provide personal services allowing their employers to save working time. In equilibrium, only skilled workers buy personal services. Fiercer foreign competition triggered by technological catching up shifts production jobs abroad and forces domestic firms to innovate more. Hence, the employment share of production workers shrinks, while the demand for both high skilled and service sector workers rises, thus increasing polarization. Calibrating the model to match key facts of the US economy, we find that foreign technological catching-up observed between the late 1970s and early 1990s reproduces a non-negligible part of US wage polarization and substantial part of the increase in the wealth-to-income ratio in that period.

The following qualitative study sought to explore the living and parenting experiences of Latino immigrant parents in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Snowball sampling, via an email to the researcher’s family, friends and colleagues, was used to recruit a total of twelve individuals (female=8; male=4) for participation in the study. Participants ranged from 31 to 68 years of age and had immigrated to the United States from Peru (n=6), Colombia (n=2), El Salvador (n=2), Ecuador (n=1) and Uruguay (n=1). Data for the study was gathered during individual, semi-structured interviews between the researcher and participants, which were audio recorded, transcribed and manually coded. Participants’ narratives revealed personal accounts with acculturation and socialization; varying feelings associated with ethnic identity (i.e. pride, liminality, advantages and disadvantages of multiculturalism) preparing for and experiencing discrimination in the U.S. and efforts to preserve their second generation children’s cultural identity and sense of family unity. The study illuminates the need for social workers to meet immigrants’ intersecting identities, struggles and achievements with sensitivity, empowerment and a lens that encompasses analysis of immigrant individuals and their families within the varying contexts of their environments.

How much can governments shift the cost of their expenditure from today's voters to tomorrow's generations of immigrants, without resorting to taxation that is explicitly dis-criminatory? I demonstrate that if their societies are absorbing continuous flows of new immigrants, we should expect governments that represent the interests of today's population to choose policies that shift some portion of the tax burden to the future, even if that population is altruistically linked to future generations. To measure the deficit bias, I analyse the dynamic behavior of an optimal growth model with overlapping dynasties and factor taxation, calibrated for the US economy, and consider the welfare implications for today's population and their descendants of intertemporal shifts in the tax rates on labour and capital as well as transfer payments. Models with overlapping infinite-lived dynasties allow for a very clear distinction between natural population growth (an increase in the size of existing dynasties) and immigration (the addition of new dynasties). They also provide an alternative to the strict dichotomy between models with overlapping generations, where agents disregard the impact of their choices on future generations, and the quasi-Ricardian world of infinite-lived dynasties with representative agents that fully participate in both the economy and the political system in every period. The trajectory of the debt burden predicted by the model is a good match for the rise in US Federal Government debt since the early 1980's, as well as the increases in debt projected by the Congressional Budget Office over the next few decades. JEL classification: E62, F22, H62

One of the important facts on marriage that has not been emphasized in the literature is the hump-shaped pattern of the prevalence of marriage in the U.S. over the last 100 years. In this paper, we study the mutual relationship between the demographic structure and the industrial structure of the economy. As an empirical contribution of the paper, we establish two facts using cross-country panels; i) the hump-shaped pattern of marriage is observed in the most of the OECD countries, and ii) the manufacturing share in GDP has a significant positive correlation with the prevalence of marriage. Given those observations, we propose a model of the structural change with endogenous household formation. In our model, individuals incentives to marry are affected by the underlying structure of the economy, and the home production sector is operated by different types of household with different scales. In addition to the ability of our model to match the pattern of marriage, we show that our model is also able to generate a pattern of the manufacturing and service shares consistent with the observed data, which the standard model of structural change fails to generate.

Positive assortative matching in terms of traits like ethnicity, race and per- sonality has been prevalent in marital formation. One possible explanation for this is that husbands and wives in endogamous marriages have complementary skills and tastes that in- crease marital surplus. This paper aims to estimate the e?ects of ethnic assortative matching on a variety of household outcomes by using the exogenous variation in immigrant ?ows in the United States during the period 1900-1930 to disentangle the selection e?ect of part- ners. The major ?nding is that the complementarities in home production from same ethnic marriage enhances investment in household public goods such as childrearing and home own- ership and reduces the market labor supply of wives. OLS and Logit estimates of this e?ect appear to be substantially biased downward, indicating positive selection into intermarriage in terms of unobservable traits that increase marital surplus.

This thesis is composed of three essays on inequality and poverty in the United States and Canada. Despite their nominal wage disadvantage, immigrants in the United States tend to settle in the most expensive locations in the country. I show that incorporating spatial price variation into the price index dramatically worsens estimates of immigrant integration. In comparison with nominal measures, real measures show twice as much immigrant wage disparity, much slower assimilation over time, and a more pronounced decline in entry wages of more recent cohorts. To rationalize these location patterns, I use a spatial equilibrium model. The model allows us to distinguish between quality of life and productivity differences as competing explanations for the concentration of immigrants. Parameterizing the model and using housing cost and wage differentials each year, the productivity channel seems to be the more plausible explanation. It also appears to have become more important over time. Like the United States, several studies document the tendency for immigrants in Canada to live in areas with high costs of living: approximately 90% live in metropolitan areas. In the second chapter, I re-examine immigrant wage disparity and poverty estimates in Canada after adjusting immigrant incomes for their relatively high costs of living. In the third chapter, I outline an Oaxaca-Blinder detailed decomposition method based on the Shap- ley Value. It is path-independent and adds up intuitively to the aggregate decomposition components. It is also simple to implement in practice for various limited dependent variable regression models. I show how this decomposition method can be used in tandem with the recentered influence function regression framework (Firpo et al., 2009). Together, this constitutes a flexible framework to decompose differences of a wide variety of poverty measures over time or between groups. The empirical application examines the decline in U.S. poverty during the 1990s, in particular the importance of technological change and offshoring. I find these are important determinants of poverty in a given year but cannot explain any of the change in the poverty rate over time. Changes in the return to family size explain the entire change in the poverty rate. I also find that the methods we use to examine poverty can easily change the conclusions we draw.

Public housing during the Great Depression was touted as a way to provide large scale slum clearance in a bid to reinvigorate neighborhoods. Using a unique dataset that capitalizes on the timing of surveys of city-wide housing stock, this paper explores the economic and political factors that influenced the selection of neighborhoods for public housing across six cities between 1934 through 1940. The paper finds some evidence that housing officials selected densely populated neighborhoods with lower median rents. Yet, neighborhood characteristics associated with slums such as dwellings requiring major repairs were largely not statistically significant outside of Boston and Washington, DC. National politics also do not appear to be a significantly factor for public housing sites. However, there is evidence that public housing was located in areas that typically voted Republican in mayoral elections. This is perhaps an effort by housing authorities to limit potential criticism of any favoritism. Historical evidence suggests that court decisions which restricted the use of eminent domain for public housing as well as property speculation may have also limited the scope of public housing projects during the period.

Individuals that were born in a foreign country, have a bachelors degree or higher from a foreign post-secondary education institution, and are not working at their full level of expertise, are referred to more concisely as internationally trained professionals (ITPs). Social workers have called becoming informed about immigrants integration needs a new frontier of social service and professional development. All fields of human services will benefit from any data resulting from descriptive exploration of the ITP integration issue. The bounded system that serves for this case study is the current limited response to the ITP issue seen in Virginia, USA. In the North of the state we see a mature, urban response by the local state-run community college and various community-based organizations. In the West we see an emergent, rural response by a community coalition of service providers and interested parties from all three sectors of society. Detailed in the case is the acting of leaders to address the marginalization of ITPs. Using the theoretical lens of activist entrepreneurship, the case illustrates the necessity that activist entrepreneurs feel in their work for marginalized peoples, the internal and external environmental opportunities that these leaders identify as facilitating their inner drive, and the broad social needs underpinning the opportunities and necessities. Both qualitative and quantitative data are used to describe Virginia's response to the ITP issue. A threshold for service entry is established across three ITP variables. A snapshot of the impact of a coalition in its formation stage is explicated. Cross-sector partnerships are key tools in responding to the ITP issue. Several ideas for both quantitative and qualitative follow-up research are generated. Examining ITP variables for relationships and more fully describing the essence and process of activist entrepreneurship are among the proposals.

Many rare and threatened California plant species are endemic to ultramafic serpentine soils. Understanding what specifically makes these species rare is of high value to conservation and management efforts statewide. While there is no one definition of what makes a plant rare, there are many characteristics that are thought to contribute to a species rarity. My study focuses on environmental and reproductive attributes of a rare serpentine endemic species to evaluate their contribution to the plants rarity. Packera layneae, or Laynes Butterweed, is a federally threatened and state listed rare species occurring in small, fragmented populations on gabbro and serpentine soils in the northern California Sierra Nevada. I evaluated environmental factors that potentially define its restrictive habitat, including elevation, light availability, duff depth, and slope. I found the studied populations to occur between 2140 and 2920 feet in elevation, and to have established in a variety of habitats where the evaluated environmental factors were moderate, including presence beneath intermediate canopy cover (40-60% of available light), widely variable duff depth (0.25 to nearly 6cm), and generally lower slopes (5 to 16%). I also conducted an experiment to evaluate the role of dispersal limitation as a contributing factor to this species limited distribution, and found that this species disperses the majority of its seeds very close to the parent plant. I also conducted an experiment to determine the specific germination requirements for P. layneae, and found that its seeds will germinate in a variety of soil types, but only following a period of light exclusion. Using the modeling program Maxent, a species distribution model was constructed using presence locations in conjunction with environmental variables in an attempt to yield a predictive map of potential habitat occupied by this species. Unfortunately, the very small number of known populations available for input into the model, in combination with high environmental variability across presence locations, resulted in a model with reduced predictive function. Determining why this species is so patchily distributed and understanding its unique habitat and physiological requirements will be vital to its conservation and long-term success. This work will also contribute to our understanding of plant rarity and help guide management efforts.

This paper argues that monetary intervention alleviated banking panics during the early stages of the Great Depression. Throughout the course of the depression, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta aggressively intervened to stabilize its banking system. To assess the effectiveness of these policies, I analyze the performance of banks along counties straddling the border of the Atlanta Federal Reserve District. My results indicate that expansionary initiatives designed to inject liquidity into the banking system reduced the incidence of bank suspensions by 32 to 48% in some regions. Moreover, an analysis of the balance sheets of individual Federal Reserve Districts suggests that liquidity intervention did not expend large resources and that a concerted, system-wide interventionist policy response was feasible during the first half of the depression. Thus, the Federal Reserve System committed a major policy mistake by not acting as a lender of last resort to stabilize the country’s banking system in the early stages of the depression.

The Voting Right Act guaranteed the right to vote for minorities, including the prohibition of any electoral discriminatory practices on the basis of race. This triggered a series of court decisions outlawing discriminatory electoral rules between 1970 and 1990. I study the effects of several court orders that guarantee minority representation on city public budgets, and find that both local public good expenditures (5-7.5%) and city tax collection (5-10%) increased, after the changes towards non-discriminatory electoral rules. I also explore the distributional consequences of non-discriminatory elections and find that the fraction of black public workers and citizens increased after changes in the election system, while those of whites decreased. The growth rates of black house values and rents also increase more. The findings are inconsistent with a negative effect of ethnic heterogeneity in the city council on public goods, and with common-pool theories. I show evidence that the most plausible channel that explains the results is the new legislative bargaining power that black communities gained.

BACKGROUNDMen's ability to fill the provider role remains a consistent requirement for marriage across the class spectrum and cross-nationally. Fiscal concerns appear less salient for transitions to parenthood or to informal unions such as cohabitation.OBJECTIVEThis paper evaluates whether marital expectations and marital transitions of new mothers are associated with the economic characteristics of father.METHODSAnalyses are based on observed and imputed data on fathers from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Logistic regression models assess factors predicting mothers initial expectations of marrying their baby's father, and transitions into marital unions by the second interview.RESULTSMost women expect to marry their baby's father, although estimates are lower when men's data are repaired by imputation. Multivariate analyses find mother's marital expectations are most strongly associated with men's educational attainment, but not with men's earnings at the child's birth. Transitions to marriage are positively associated with men's earnings levels, although estimates are considerably lower than previously reported thresholds. Furthermore, the odds of marrying do not increase monotonically as men's income level rises once missing data are imputed.

In this study, we use a Geographic Information System-based index to measure spatial accessibility of public high schools. The index is applied to the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area in 1990, 2000, and 2010. Overall, urban areas had consistently worse accessibility scores compared with suburban and rural areas. High schools with more African American students tended to have poorer accessibility levels. Schools with lower accessibility tended to be associated with poorer average student performance, and the effect strengthened between 2000 and 2010. In developing a better understanding of the accessibility of public high schools, this paper reaffirms the significance of space, place, and race, and challenges the notion of declining relevance of accessibility in Louisiana public education policymaking.

We examine variation in local wage levels, housing costs, and commuting costs for 2071 areas covering the United States within and across metropolitan areas. In an equilibrium model of residential and workplace choice, we use these measures to construct a willingness-to-pay index for a typical household. When households are sufficiently homogeneous and mobile, this index indicates the perceived value of local household amenities, or “quality of life.” Wage levels vary little within metropolitan areas relative to across them, while individual characteristics that predict wages vary more within, suggesting patterns about sorting. Quality of life varies as much within metros as across them, and is typically high in areas that are dense, suburban, mild, safe, entertaining, and have higher school-funding.

In the last decade there has been a convergence of factors that have contributed to an increase in food deserts, obesity, and income inequality in the US. Two-thirds of US adults are overweight or obese. This prevalence disproportionately affects low income areas with high minority populations (Ruelas et al., 2012). Simultaneously, research shows that grocery stores are tending to move away from low income, inner city communities and towards affluent urban and suburban areas. In order to combat the growing food deserts and obesity rates as a result of this shift, farmers markets have been proposed and utilized as a means to increasing access to fresh, healthy, nutritious, and affordable food (Jilcott et al., 2011). The number of farmers markets in the US has increased by 84% in the last decade (Alkon, 2008). With over 8,000 reported farmers markets in the US in 2012, the spatial distribution of farmers markets has power to provide insight into the continuing discussion on food, health, and poverty. This geographic analysis examines the relationship between urban farmers markets, race, income, and obesity rates in the United States. While farmers markets have been offered as a tool for social justice in low income areas, they have likewise been associated with organic, high quality, and sustainable sources of food in higher income areas (Alkon, 2008). Furthermore, farmers markets are perceived as a positive community building platform for urban areas. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between income, race, and obesity rates among highly urban areas with a high number of farmers markets.

Many migrants return back to their home country after a short period of stay. Often these migrants are returning to poorer countries, which is at odds with a simple economic model where individuals maximize lifetime earnings. In this dissertation, I explore the motivations for return migration in the early 1900s, the only time in United States history when the government recorded those leaving the country. In the first paper, we estimate the effect of the 1920s immigration quotas on (1) out-migration rates, (2) emigration across skill groups, and (3) the duration of temporary migrants’ stays in the U.S. Higher quota restrictions reduced emigration rates, mostly for unskilled laborers and farmers. Higher quota restrictions also increased duration of stay, as the share of migrants staying less than 5 years fell and the share staying 5 to 10 years rose. In the second paper, I turn to the self-selection of return migrants. In addition to observing migrants who actually leave, I also have a dataset on migrants’ intentions to leave at arrival. At least 45% more migrants returned home than had initially planned. While those who planned to return . . .