The National Academy of Sciences’ (2007) report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, called for more scientific and technical innovation to maintain America’s economic growth and vitality. Countless other reports over the past few decades have all called for more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, culminating in President Obama’s “this is our generation’s sputnik moment” speech at the 2011 State of the Union. The more STEM knowledge students gain, the more prepared they will be for the 21st century knowledge-based economy, the thinking goes. STEM jobs, however, account for a mere 5 % of all U.S. jobs, which suggest that prudent allocation of resources is a principle consideration. Do all students need STEM education or should it be focused primarily on the mathematically and scientifically inclined? Here, demographics may hold the key to such questions from which a 21st century education model should be based on.

Economic literacy in our modern society is becoming a core requirement. In the United States, beginning in 1976, some states started requiring a course in economics to graduate from high school. By 2011, twenty-four states had adopted this requirement. This paper uses survival analysis regressions to examine the determinants of a state legislature's decision to adopt a high school economics graduation mandate. Key state characteristics considered important to this decision are categorized as stemming from political, budgetary, economic, demographic, educational, poverty or economic insecurity and geographic considerations. I find that budgetary, economic, and political variables are related to shorter years of waiting to adopt the legislation among otherwise similar states.

We examine differences in household specialization between same-sex and different-sex couples within and across three birth cohorts: the Baby Boom Generation, Generation X and Generation Y. Using three measures of household specialization, we find that same-sex are less likely than their different-sex counterparts to exhibit a high degree of specialization. However, the "specialization gap" between same-sex and different-sex couples narrows across birth cohorts. These findings are indicative of a cohort effect. Our results are largely robust to the inclusion of a control for the presence of children and for subsets of couples with and without children.

One of the striking trends in recent decades is the reversal in the level of educational attainment of men and women in the United States. To quantitatively assess the relative importance of several possible determinants of the reversal stressed in the literature, I develop and structurally estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of the marriage market, embedding premarital human capital investment decisions and noncooperative intra-household decisions into a Mortensen (1988) style spousal-search model. In the model, there are three exogenous changes that are considered as possible determinants of the reversal: a) time-varying labor market returns to education; b) time-varying values to the husband and wife of the wife's home time. c) time-varying cohort size and initial schooling at age 18. The model also incorporates gender heterogeneity in the utility value of schooling net of it's eff ort cost as another possible driving force. Estimation is done by Simulated Method of Moments. From the counterfactual experiments based on the estimated model, I find that the relative increase of women's skill rental price is the key driving force of the relative increase of women's educational attainment. However, the relative increase of women's skill rental price itself cannot replicate the reversal. On the other hand, neither the declining value of the wife's home time (to both husbands and wives) nor the gender heterogeneity in the net consumption value of schooling alone can explain the relative increase in women's educational attainment. The reversal can be fully explained only by combining these two factors with the relative increase in the skill rental price of women.

A significant obstacle to studying business cycle properties of job polarization has been the presence of inconsistencies in aggregate employment data for difference occupation groups. In order to overcome this problem, we construct aggregate hours series using the method of 'conversion factors', which was originally developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After showing that our data outperform previously available data in terms of consistency, we analyze two business cycle properties of job polarization that have not yet been studied before: (1) the changes in volatility of employment of each occupation group since the mid-1980s and (2) the asymmetric effects of recessions on employment of different occupation groups. We find that employment volatility of middle-skill occupations has decreased by 40% since the mid-1980s due to jobless recoveries observed in the last three recessions.

Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both national and local policymakers in the U.S. have called for efforts to increase the stock of college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, but data availability has thus far prevented researchers from directly connecting STEM education to human capital externalities. This paper uses the 2009-2011 American Community Survey to examine the external effects of college graduates in STEM and non-STEM fields on the wages of other workers in the same metropolitan area. I find that both types of college graduates create positive wage externalities, but STEM graduates create much larger externalities.

This dissertation examines African American attitudes towards Africa, African colonization, and African identity. It addresses the question: what did Africa mean to these African Americans by defining a spectrum of African identity. It focuses on elite African American sources, mainly pamphlets, sermons, and books, but it places them in the broader context of American history and efforts to define an American identity. It begins with the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania and ends with the jailing of Marcus Garvey, tracing the changing debates about Africa over space and time.

This article examines forces underlying the housing recovery to determine when sustained construction growth will resume. The analysis suggests that very strong multifamily construction growth is likely to resume by early 2014 and that moderately strong single-family construction growth is likely to resume by early 2015. The longer term outlook is especially positive for multifamily construction, reflecting the aging of the baby boomers and an associated shift in demand from single-family to multifamily housing. By the end of the decade, multifamily construction is likely to peak at a level nearly two-thirds higher than its highest annual level during the 1990s and 2000s. Notwithstanding renewed growth, the level of single-family construction is likely to remain moderate. By the end of the decade, it is likely to peak at a level comparable to what prevailed just prior to the housing boom. Thereafter, single-family construction is projected to contract at a moderate rate.

Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This paper explores whether the distinct geographical settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across US counties. It uses micro-data from the 1880 and 1910 censuses in order to identify where migrants from different nationalities settled and then regresses these patterns on current levels of economic development, using both OLS and instrumental variable approaches. The analysis controls for a number of factors which would have determined both the attractiveness of different US counties at the time of migration, as well as current levels of development. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive impact associated with overall migration, the national origin of migrants does not make a difference for the current levels of economic development of US counties.

Relative to those for high school graduates, lifetime earnings for college graduates are higher for more recent cohorts. At the same time, across successive cohorts born after 1950, there is a stagnation in the fraction of high school graduates that go on to complete a college degree. What explains this phenomenon? I formulate a life-cycle model of human capital accumulation in college and on the job, where successive cohorts decide whether or not to acquire a college degree as well as the quality of their college education. Cohorts differ by the sequence of rental price per unit of human capital they face. My model reproduces the observed pattern in college attainment for the 1920 to 1970 birth cohorts. The stagnation in college attainment is due to the decrease in the growth rate of the rental price per unit of human capital commencing in the 1970s. My model also generates about 80% of the increase in lifetime earnings for college graduates relative to those for high school graduates observed across cohorts. JEL: I24, J2, J3.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Lanham Act of 1940, a heavily-subsidized and universal child care program that was administered throughout the U.S. during World War II. I begin by estimating the impact of the Lanham Act on maternal employment using 1940 and 1950 Census data in a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. The evidence suggests that mothers paid work increased substantially following the introduction of the child care program. I then study the implications of the Lanham Act for childrens long-run outcomes related to educational attainment, family formation, and labor market participation. Using Census data from 1970 to 1990, I assess well-being in a lifecycle framework by tracking cohorts of treated individuals throughout their prime working years. Results from difference-in-differences models suggest that the Lanham Act had strong and persistent positive effects on well-being, equivalent to a 0.36 standard deviation increase in a summary index of adult outcomes. In addition, a supplementary analysis of distributional effects shows that the benefits of the Lanham Act accrued largely to the most economically disadvantaged adults. Together, these findings shed light on the design of contemporary child care systems that balance the twin goals of increasing parental employment and enhancing child well-being.

Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African-American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white households to the suburban ring, which reduced the price of urban housing units conducive to owner-occupancy. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that 26 percent of the national increase in black homeownership over the period is explained by white suburbanization.

Compared to established immigration gateways, we know relatively little about foreign-born Latino labor market experiences in new immigration destinations. This studys objective is to examine labor market experiences of the foreign-born Hispanic labor force in five southern metropolitan statistical areas as relatively new Latino destinations, compared to Miami as an established gateway. Utilizing data from the 20062010 American Community Survey, this study examines foreign-born Latino labor market concentration patterns and associated characteristics. Results indicate high concentrations of foreign-born Latinos in generally low-skill, low-wage industries such as construction, restaurants, building services, and landscaping across nearly all MSAs. While education, English proficiency, and length of time in the U.S. are significantly associated with these patterns, newer Latino immigration destinations demonstrate higher levels of industrial concentration.

Understanding how families make economic decisions about how to allocate scarce household resources is crucial for the development and implementation of effective development policy. This dissertation investigates three specific questions related to this broad area of research. The first chapter demonstrates the importance of information asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute. I implement an experiment among 1,300 Salvadoran migrants in Washington, DC and their family members in El Salvador that examines how (1) changing the ability of participants to monitor each other and (2) revealing migrant preferences can affect the sending and spending of remittances. Migrants make an incentivized decision about how much of a cash windfall to keep and how much to send home, and recipients decide how to allocate the spending of a remittance. Migrants remit significantly more when their choice is observed by recipients, and this effect is concentrated among pairs where recipient ability to punish migrants is plausibly high. The results support a model of remittance sending where migrants react strategically to being monitored, but only when recipients can enforce remittance agreements. Recipients make spending choices closer to the migrants’ preferences when they are revealed, suggesting that recipients’ choices may be inadvertently affected by imperfect information on migrant preferences. Together, these results indicate that information imperfections in families are varied and can affect resource allocation in both strategic and inadvertent ways. In the second chapter, I examine how the exogenous change in individual income provided by eligibility for the South African government pension can affect decision making in the household. Exploiting the age discontinuity in pension eligibility, I find that eligible females are 13 to 16 percentage points more likely to be the primary decision makers for expenditures than non-eligible females--rare direct support for bargaining models of the household. There is no corresponding effect for eligible males. Due to labor force withdrawal, male income does not increase at the age of eligibility, providing an explanation for the lack of impacts of male eligibility on decision making. The increase in female decision-making power translates into improved nutritional outcomes for girls and higher levels of durable goods ownership. Because male income does not increase, these findings invite a reconsideration of the common assumption that women make more productive use of cash transfers than men. The third chapter, written jointly with Diego Aycinena and Dean Yang, returns to transnational households. We study the intersection of two research areas: educational subsidies and migrant remittances. We implement a randomized experiment offering Salvadoran migrants cash subsidies for education, which are channeled directly to a beneficiary student in El Salvador chosen by the migrant. The subsidies – in the form of matching grants – lead to increases in educational expenditures, higher private school attendance, and lower labor supply of youths in El Salvador households connected to migrant study participants. We find substantial “crowd in” of household educational investments, particularly for female students: for each $1 received by female beneficiary students, educational expenditures on that student increase by close to $5. There is no evidence of shifting of educational expenditures from other students in the household to the target student, and the subsidy has no substantial effect on remittances sent by the migrant.