We study the increasing number of families where the breadwinning role has shifted from men to women. We suggest that the rising population of stay-at-home father families is driven by economic conditions, human capital, and changes in gendered expectation. We make a distinction between unable-to-work and caregiving stay-at-home father families. When unemployment rates increase male spouses lose their employment and female spouses become the sole earners in unable-to-work stay-at-home father families.The proportion of caregiving stay-at-home father families is unrelated to the unemployment rate but increases linearly over time due to changing gendered expectations regarding the division of paid and unpaid labor in families. Furthermore, the growing gender education gap in favor of women makes human capital differences within couples a crucial factor in decision-making about dividing responsibilities for paid-work and caregiving. We test these prepositions using Current Population Survey data from 1968-2012. Using logistic and multinomial logistic regressions we find that unemployment rates are associated with a growing proportion of unable-to-work stay-at-home fathers but not caregiving stay-at-home fathers. Changing gendered expectations and an educational gap within couples are also associated with a greater probability of a household becoming a stay-at-home father family.

Immigrants make up the fastest-growing group in the US, representing 13% of the population in 20133. The proportion of Minnesota residents that are immigrants has increased 38% over the past decade, and in 2011 immigrants represented 7% of the state's population, or 389,000 residents. (Note: these figures only include immigrants and exclude any children of immigrants who were born in the US.)

Previous economic research shows that recessions lead to worsening substance abuse. In this paper we study the effect of recessions on admissions to specialty substance abuse treatment using administrative data between 1992 and 2015. Using data from Treatment Episode Data Set and a differences-indifferences empirical strategy, we find no evidence that recessions influence the overall number of admissions. However, we document substantial heterogeneity across drugs of abuse. Combining our findings with previous economic studies suggests that unmet need for substance abuse treatment increases during recessions.

The economic opportunities of married women, relative to their husbands, have improved dramatically over the past half-century. This paper exploits variation in the relative demand for male and female labour during the Great Recession to estimate the effect of women's relative economic opportunities on the resources that parents allocate to children, particularly educational resources. Using data from the American Time Use survey (ATUS), over 2003-12, we find that variation in the household female-to-male wage ratio substantially affects parents' time with children and educational expenditures. Our results imply that the mean increase in the household female-to-male wage ratio observed over the last decade of 5 percentage points show have led to parents spending more than 15 additional minutes per week with their children, including 11 additional minutes in educational activities. The estimates response is even larger for families with young children, with parents estimated to spend an additional 45 minutes in educational activities, which may have significant implications for the intra-household production of child human capital.

In this paper we consider urban spatial structure in US cities using a multidimensional approach. We select six key variables (commuting costs, density, employment dispersion and concentration, land-use mix, polycentricity, and size) from the urban literature and define measures to quantify them. We then apply these measures to 359 metropolitan areas from the 2000 US Census. The adopted methodological strategy combines two novel techniques for the social sciences to explore the existence of relevant patterns in such multidimensional datasets. Geodesic self-organizing maps (SOM) are used to visualize the whole set of information in a meaningful way, while the recently developed clustering algorithm of the max-p is applied to draw boundaries within the SOM and analyze which cities fall into each of them.

This paper provides a methodology to generate stochastic forecasts of future age- and gender-specific self-assessed health. We first apply the framework of Lee and Carter (1992), which decomposes self-assessed health into a time effect and an age effect. We then extend the Lee-Carter model by further decomposing the time effect into observed macro-economic quantities (GDP and unemployment rate) and an unobserved latent time factor. Using a vector auto regression model (VAR) to forecast the observed and unobserved time effects, this paper forecasts future health and quantifies the forecasting uncertainty. Changes in the U.S. populations self-assessed health for both males and females are estimated and forecasted based on this approach. The estimation results show that trends in health can be largely captured by trends in the observed macroeconomic quantities. A back testing analysis suggests that the Lee-Carter model with macro-economic quantities significantly improves the forecasting accuracy for future health development compared with the original Lee-Carter model. An extensive sensitivity analysis adds robustness to our results. As an application of health forecasting, this paper estimates and predicts life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, and quantifies the degree of uncertainty in their predictions.

Expanded coverage under the ACA promises health centers new revenues to expand and improve care, and newly insured patients stand to gain greater access to specialists as they join health plans with broader provider networks. In states that do not expand Medicaid, health centers and some 1 million uninsured health center patients will miss out on these improvements. Even as coverage expands, health centers will continue to serve many uninsured people and provide services not covered by insurance. Ongoing grant funding is needed to meet these costs. With expected changes in the health center population as many uninsured adults gain coverage, health centers may begin to strengthen their capacity to manage serious and chronic conditions and to enhance their adult preventive services to keep adults healthy and active.

This dissertation consists of three essays on education and macroeconomics. The first chapter analyzes whether public education financing systems can account for large differences among developed countries in earnings inequality and intergenerational earnings persistence. I first document facts about public education in the U.S. and Norway, which provide an interesting case study because they have very different earnings distributions and public education systems. An overlapping generations model is calibrated to match U.S. data, and tax and public education spending functions are estimated for each country. The benchmark exercise finds that taxes and public education spending account for about 15% of differences in earnings inequality and 10% of differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between the U.S. and Norway. Differences in private education spending and early childhood education investments are also shown to be quantitatively important. The second chapter develops a life-cycle model to study increases in college completion and average ability of college students born from 1900 to 1972. The model is disciplined with new historical data on real college costs from printed government surveys. I find that increases in college completion for 1900 to 1950 cohorts are due primarily to changes in college costs, which generate large endogenous increases in college enrollment. Additionally, I find strong evidence that post-1950 cohorts under-predicted large increases in the college earnings premium. Modifying the model to restrict perfect foresight of the education premia generates a slowdown in college completion consistent with empirical evidence for post-1950 cohorts. Lastly, I find that increased sorting of students by ability can be accounted for by increasingly precise ability signals over time. The third chapter assesses how structural transformation is affected by sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and capital-labor substitutability. CES production functions are estimated for agriculture, manufacturing, and services on post-war U.S. data. I find that sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress are the dominant force behind changes in sectoral labor and relative prices. Therefore, Cobb-Douglas production functions with labor-augmenting technological change capture the main technological forces behind post-war U.S. structural transformation.

Over the past few decades, the number of immigrants entering the U.S. has increased substantially. This paper studies the wage and welfare implications of immigration, and the migration responses of workers. The local impacts of immigration may differ from national impacts since some cities attract more immigrants, and workers have different degrees of mobility. In particular, moving may be more costly for lower skill and older workers. I develop and estimate a spatial equilibrium model where labor differs by skill level, gender, experience and nativity. Cities vary in productivity levels, housing prices and local amenities. Workers are heterogeneous in city preferences and place attachments. The results indicate that a 10 percent increase in the stock of immigrants has a small impact on the average wages and welfare of natives. If the incumbent workers (natives and previous immigrants) are constrained to remain in their original locations, the initial wage impacts on previous immigrants are negative and much more severe in the popular destinations for new immigrants. When workers migrate in response to the immigration, the negative wage impacts are generally diffused. However, in some locations the negative impacts on the wages of low skill workers intensify. This is because low skill workers have stronger attachments to places, and hence are less mobile relative to high skill workers. An out-migration of workers of a given type raises the local wages for all workers of that type, while reducing the local wages of workers with complimentary characteristics. The extent to which the migration responses reduce the adverse wage impacts depends on the city's labor composition. The migration responses, however, significantly reduce the negative effects on welfare. Additionally, I use the model to assess skill-selective and location-specific immigration policies.

This paper analyzes the influence of business cycles in childhood on economic performance later in life. First, I relate unemployment rates between the year before one’s birth and the year of one’s fifteenth birthday to schooling, employment, and income as an adult. Next, I study how the background characteristics of parents raising children vary with the state of the macroeconomy. Finally, I document the impact of economic fluctuations on home environments and parenting behaviors. The average unemployment rate in childhood normally has a negative effect on parental investments in offspring and the stock of human capital in adulthood.

We analyze administrative data about new legal permanent residents for the period 1981-2009 to investigate the mechanisms driving two unintended consequences of the 1965Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act: (1) the surge in Asian immigration and (2) the gradual increase inlate-age immigration. Using an indicator of family unification migration that allows for variation in the size of new LPR cohorts by regional origins, age and visa categories, we show that between 1981 and 1996, every 100 initiating immigrants from Asia directly or indirectly sponsored between 220 and 255 relatives, of whom between 46 and 51 were ages 50 and above; from 1996 through 2000, Asian family unification migration spiked such that each 100 initiating immigrants sponsored nearly 400 relatives, with one-in-four ages 50+. Regional comparisons of the top four sending countries show direct links between specific policies and changes in the composition of family unification migration.

In 2011, the United States deported a record high of 391,953 foreign-born people (Preston 2012). In the same year, Immigration Control and Enforcement detained a record number of immigrants, 429,000 (Preston 2012). An even greater number have been returned to their country of origin through voluntary departure, which included 476,000 in 2010 and 580,000 in 2009 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2010a, 2010b). Contrary to popular perception, deportees and returnees are typically not criminal offenders (Human Rights Watch 2009). Many live in families, with spouses and children; others have family members in their home country who depend on them. More than one hundred thousand of those deported between 1998 and 2007 were parents of U.S.-born citizens (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2009.). Today, more than three-quarters of the children of immigrants are U.S. citizens and one-third live in mixed-status families (Capps and Fortuny 2006; Fortuny et al. 2009). Contemporary deportation policies potentially affect millions of children living in the United States.

This report offers an estimate of the cost of a statewide scholarship program for the State of Oregon that has a similar program structure as the existing Kalamazoo Promise. It is assumed that the proposed Oregon scholarship program would begin in the fall of 2013, and the full cost of the scholarship would not occur until 2016 when four years of scholarship-eligible students are enrolled in college. This report includes estimates on the scholarship costs, as well as, costs associated with administering the scholarship program...

Prior research found that Americans born in 6 southeastern states (the AF-risk zone) had elevated risk of AF-related mortality, but no mechanisms were identified. We hypothesized the association between AF-related mortality and AF-risk zone birth is explained by indicators of childhood social disadvantage or adult risk factors. In 24,323 participants in the US Health and Retirement Study, we found that birth in the AF-risk zone was significantly associated with hazard of AF-related mortality. Among whites, the relationship was specific to place of birth, rather than place of adult residence. Neither paternal education nor subjectively assessed childhood SES predicted AF-related mortality. Conventional childhood and adult cardiovascular risk factors did not explain the association between place of birth and AF-related mortality.

Womens office holding in the state executive branches varies across the American states, across time and across policy fields. Contrary to some scholarship on gender and politics, women are not concentrated in feminine policy fields, such as public education; and, they are not absent in masculine policy fields, such as finance. In fact, where and when women have been likely to hold policy-specific offices has changed considerably since women first secured suffrage in 1920. Today, in many states, women are more likely to be Secretary of State, a gender-neutral position, and as likely to be State Treasurer, a masculine position, as they are to be Superintendent of Education, a feminine position. In this paper, I argue that variation in womens state office holding is explained in part by stability and change in womens careers; by their increasing presence as policy actors at lower levels of government, and by changes in selectoral mechanisms for statewide offices. This study confirms that a gendered dimension to policy responsibility exists across the states. More importantly, it shows how this dimension has shifted over time in ways that have altered womens pathways to power.

Young workers start their first jobs in big cities where they would be able to experience more rapid wage growth. After labor force entry, workers leave big cities for less populated areas. If the wage growth premium in these big cities increases, they relocate there in later stages of their work lives. This paper suggests that the typical life-cycle migration pattern, together with the increase in the dynamic benefits from agglomeration economies in larger locations since the 1980s, provide another explanation for falling internal mobility in the U.S. over the past three decades. The estimates suggest that, for the age cohort 27-35 in my sample, the changes in wage growth differentials of MSAs for labor force entry alone can account for about 74 % and 33% of the actual declines in inter-MSA migration rates during the 1980-1990 and 1980-2000 time periods, respectively.

Unlike traditional economists, revisionists claim that non-market factors, such as the falling real minimum wage and unionization in the U.S. labor market, may increase wage inequality, in particular in the 1980s, rather than market factors, such as shifts in labor supply and demand. But even though they do not agree with the revisionists' view, traditional economists have not yet shown explicitly that a falling real minimum wage is unrelated to wage inequality. In this paper, we demonstrate that, using dynamic models, the minimum wage may have a spurious relationship with wage inequality, and that shifts in relative labor supply and demand are still important factors determining wage inequality.