The purpose of the Berrien County Economic and Social Dashboard is to provide the county stakeholders a better understanding of the countys current economic situation and performance. It can be considered as the first step in cultivating the groundwork for the development of a comprehensive economic development strategies plan for the county. While it does not provide a complete assessment of the countys economic and social assets and challenges, it does highlight the county current economic and social conditions and performance.

This dissertation evaluates the impacts of education policies affecting stu- dents early in their educational careers. The first chapter studies the impacts of universally free school breakfast programs on student achievement. I study the staggered implementation of an in-classroom breakfast program in San Diego ele- mentary schools, which provides meals to all students during class time, to deter- mine the impacts of universally free school breakfasts on student attendance rates, classroom behavior and academic performance. Introducing universally free break- fasts increases math and reading test score gains by roughly 15 and 10 percent of a standard deviation on average, respectively. The results suggest that offering universally free breakfast increases participation–perhaps by reducing associated social stigmas–and that the resulting positive impacts on academic achievement are at least partly driven by year round benefits rather than only consumption at the time of testing. Chapter two investigates the long-term effects of school entry age on student achievement and educational attainment. Using finely detailed lon- gitudinal data on students in San Diego, I exploit the discontinuity in student ages resulting from school-entry cutoff dates to investigate the relationships between rel- ative age, classroom environment, differentiated curricula and long-run educational outcomes. I find that achievement premiums from entering school relatively older persist well through the high school years. Older entrants are also more likely to enroll in four-year postsecondary institutions after high school, have higher levels of postsecondary persistence, but not higher levels of attainment. These differences can be partially explained by large and lasting differences in classroom behavior during elementary grades and access to higher level course placements beginning in grade eight. Finally, chapter three studies the impacts of high ability tracking on overall educational attainment for students just on the margin of inclusion in "‘gifted and talented"’ classrooms. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find GATE participation for these students increases rates of postsecondary degree at- tainment by roughly 8 percentage points. The results suggest that expanding high ability tracking programs to include students of slightly lower levels of ability may benefit overall educational attainment through more advanced curricula and higher quality peers.

This paper provides additional evidence on the U-shaped relationship between the process of economic development and women's labor force participation. The experience of the United States is studied in a comparative perspective relative to a sample of rich economies observed over the period 1890-2005. The analysis confirms the existence of a U-shaped female labor supply function, coming from both crosscountry and within country variation. Further analysis of a large cross section of economies observed over the post-WWII period suggests that the timing of a country's transition to a modern path of economic development affects the shape of women's labor supply.

This paper empirically investigates the existence of hysteresis in crime rates. Thisis the first empirical study to consider the existence of asymmetric eff ects on crimefrom variations in the probability of punishment and in the opportunity cost of crime.I investigate whether positive variations on variables associated to those factors, respectively police offi$cers and average level of income, are statistically diff erent from negative variations. Using US crime data at the state level between 1977 and 2010, I find that police force size and real average income of unskilled workers have asymmetrice ffects on most types of crimes. The absolute value of the average impact of positive variations in those variables on property and violent crime rates are statistically smallerthan the absolute value of the average e ffect of negative variations. These eff ects are robust under several specifications. A closer inspection of the data reveals a relatively monotonic negative relationship between wages and property crime rates, as well as negative variations in police and most crime rates. However, the relationships between positive variations in law enforcement size and most crime rates are non-linear. The magnitude of the observed asymmetries supports the hypothesis of hysteresis in crime, and suggests that no theoretical or empirical analysis would be complete without careful consideration of that important feature in the relationships between crime, police and legal income. These results corroborate the argument that policy makers should be more inclined to set pre-emptive policies rather than mitigating measures.

We measure the effects of trade liberalization over the period of 1993-2002 on regional poverty levels in 259 Indonesian regions, and investigate the labour market mechanisms behind these effects. The identification strategy relies on combining information on initial regional labour and product market structure with the exogenous tariff reduction schedule over four three-year periods. We find that poverty reduced more in regions that were more strongly exposed to import tariff liberalization. Among the potential channels behind this effect, we highlight the formalization of the unskilled labour force and structural reallocation of labour. We also show that job formation and increases in unskilled wages were related to reductions in import tariffs on intermediate goods and not to reductions in import tariffs on final outputs. These results point towards increasing firm competitiveness as a driving factor behind the beneficial poverty effects.

Although vaccination has been known as one of the most effective public health policies for improving children’s health throughout the twentieth century, the long-term economic effect of vaccination is less explored. This paper examines the effect of vaccination in early life on income in adult, exploiting the 1980-2000 IPUMS data sets and the legislation history of US school immunization law. One of the main findings shows that those who lived at age 5 in the states where school immunization law was implemented had about 1% higher income in adult than those who lived in the states where school immunization was not enforced. The result suggests that the policies of promoting vaccination may have a longer-term effect on economic productivity.

Few pieces of social science research have stirred as much controversy or had as great an impact as 1965s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The U.S. Department of Labor report, more commonly referred to as the Moynihan report after its author, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, focused on the deep roots of black poverty in the United States. Moynihan argued that the decline of the black nuclear family would significantly impede blacks progress toward economic and social equality. Over the ensuing decades, the report has been hailed by some as prophetic and derided by others as a classic example of blaming the victim. To this day, scholars and advocates concerned about poverty and economic opportunity continue to revisit the issues raised in the Moynihan report.

The number of black immigrants living in the US has increased 13-fold from 1970 to 2010, increasing their share of the black population from 1% to 10%. Black immigrants labor market outcomes surpass those of native blacks. This paper determines in how far the relative success of black immigrants is passed on to the second generation. While blacks of the second generation have equal or higher education and earnings levels than the first generation, the return on their unobservable characteristics is converging to that of native blacks. Race premia are put into a broader context by comparing them to Hispanics, Asians, and whites. Blacks are the only group that experiences a decrease in residual earnings when moving from the first to the second generation. Black immigrants do not only converge to native blacks across generations but also within a generation. For Asians and Hispanics, residual earnings decrease monotonically with age of immigration. For blacks, the residual earnings-age of immigration profile is upward sloping for those immigrating before the age of 15. Convergence across generations is mostly driven by low-educated second generation blacks that drop out the labor force in greater numbers than low-educated first generation immigrants do. Similarly, convergence within a generation is mostly driven by low-educated blacks who immigrate when they are young dropping out of the labor force in greater numbers than those who immigrate when they are older. A social interactions model with an assimilation parameter that varies by age of immigration helps explain this phenomenon. When making their labor force participation decision, immigrant men of all races, but not women, generally place more weight on the characteristics of natives the earlier they immigrate.

Since Badgetts (1995a) landmark study on the wage effects of sexual orientation, interest in and production of scholarly work addressing the economics of sexual orientation has grown tremendously. Curious puzzles have emerged in the literature on the economics of same-sex couple households, three of which are addressed in detail in this dissertation. Most studies of the wages of women in same-sex couples versus different-sex couples find that the former earn more, even controlling for differences in present labor market supply, education, experience, area of residence, and occupation. However, most previous studies of the sexual orientation wage gap omit the role of motherhood in the lesbian-straight women wage gap, and most take the sample of lesbians to be a homogenous group compared to straight women. Chapter 1 uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to study the wage gap between lesbians and straight women, putting motherhood in intra-household differences at the center of the analysis. The analysis shows that in terms of earnings, lesbian couples are quite heterogeneous; one partner has a large wage premium over straight women, and the other faces a large wage penalty. These findings are enhanced when a child is present in the lesbians home, possibly suggesting a household division of labor in lesbian homes. Chapter 2 considers the possibility that same-sex couples, like many different-sex couples, have one person who specializes in paid work while the other specializes in unpaid work for the household, such as housework and childcare. Chapter 2 presents a study which uses American Time Use Survey Data pooled from 2003-2011 to analyze the time spent in household, care, and paid work for members of different couple types and finds that in same-sex as well as different-sex couple households, some personal characteristics, such as being the lower earner in the household, are correlated with spending more time in household and care work. Chapter 3 offers a study of poverty in same-sex versus different-sex couple households, exploring which characteristics are correlated with poverty for same-sex and different-sex couple households. When controlling for a couples education level, area of residence, race and ethnicity, age, and household composition, same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than their different-sex counterparts.

We use the Immigrants Admitted to the United States (microdata) supplemented with special tabulations from the Department of Homeland Security to examine how family reunification impacts the age composition of new immigrant cohorts since 1980. We develop a family migration multiplier measure for the period 19812009 that improves on prior studies by including immigrants granted legal status under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and relaxing unrealistic assumptions required by synthetic cohort measures. Results show that every 100 initiating immigrants admitted between 1981 and 1985 sponsored an average of 260 family members; the comparable figure for initiating immigrants for the 19962000 cohort is 345 family members. Furthermore, the number of family migrants ages 50 and over rose from 44 to 74 per 100 initiating migrants. The discussion considers the health and welfare implications of late-age immigration in a climate of growing fiscal restraint and an aging native population.

This paper develops methods for assessing the sensitivity of empirical conclusions regarding conditional distributions to departures from the missing at random (MAR) assumption. We index the degree of nonignorable selection governing the missing data process by the maximal Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance between the distributions of missing and observed outcomes across all values of the covariates. Sharp bounds on minimum mean square approximations to conditional quantiles are derived as a function of the nominal level of selection considered in the sensitivity analysis and a weighted bootstrap procedure is developed for conducting inference. Using these techniques, we conduct an empirical assessment of the sensitivity of observed earnings patterns in U.S. Census data to deviations from the MAR assumption. We find that the well documented increase in the returns to schooling between 1980 and 1990 is relatively robust to deviations from the missing at random assumption except at the lowest quantiles of the distribution, but that conclusions regarding heterogeneity in returns and changes in the returns function between 1990 and 2000 are very sensitive to departures from ignorability.

The Jeanes Fund trained and supported Black teachers in over 600 Southern counties between 1909 and 1930, reaching over 40% of Black students by 1930. No evaluation of the program yet exists. Combining novel county-level data created from the Jeanes Fund's archived records, I estimate the Fund's impact on racial gaps in enrollment and literacy. I then compare these e ects with those from the Rosenwald Fund, which built 5,000 schools for Black students over the same time period, allowing me to compare returns on investments in human resources (Jeanes teachers) with investments in physical capital (Rosenwald schools), and to estimate the combined impact of both programs. I estimate that the Jeanes Fund contributed to approximately 16% of the decline in the Black-White gap in enrollment and 8.5% of the decline in the literacy gap during this time, and that taken together full exposure to both programs between ages 7 and 14 would have closed 9 and 13 percentage point gaps in enrollment and literacy respectively, roughly equivalent to initial Black-White gaps conditional on family background.

In 1919, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, barring states from making distinctions in voter qualifications on the basis of sex, was passed by the U.S. Congress. Ratification came the next year, when Tennessee became the state that put the amendment over the three-fourths threshold. The overarching goal of the organized American woman suffrage movement was achieved. As NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt pointed out to the press . . .

High earnings inequality goes hand in hand with low intergenerational earnings mobility across developed countries. I study this relationship in a dynastic overlapping generations model, in which a parent can invest in the early education of his child and decides whether to send the child to college. Countries vary in terms of tertiary education characteristics, in particular the college premium. An increase in the college premium translates into increased incentives to invest in early education because of assumed dynamic complementarities between early and tertiary education. It also increases the earnings gap between college and non-college attendants, which results in larger differences in parents ability to finance education. Public education could mitigate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. However, public expenditure on education is negatively correlated with inequality. I replicate this cross-country relationship by endogenizing education policies via probabilistic voting, while accounting for biases in voter turnout towards the educated. The model is calibrated to the US as the benchmark economy, which exhibits high inequality and low mobility. Experiments comparing the US to other OECD countries demonstrate that tertiary education characteristics can account for two-thirds of the differences in inequality. Patterns of voter turnout across countries explain nearly one-quarter of the differences in inequality and mobility. A counterfactual exercise for the US suggests that compulsory voting could foster intergenerational mobility, whereas the effect on pretax inequality is comparably low.

A puzzle has emerged from studies examining the wage effects of sexual orientation for women. Although lesbian and bisexual women face discrimination in the labor market, most studies of the wages of female full-time workers in same-sex couples versus those in different-sex couples find that the lesbians earn more, even controlling for differences in present labor market supply, education, years of experience, area of residence, and occupation. However, previous studies of the sexual orientation wage gap consistently suffer from two important omissions: first, the role of motherhood in the straight-lesbian wage gap has not been adequately addressed, and second, researchers have taken the sample of lesbians to be a homogenous group compared to straight women without considering the possibility that there is a primary and secondary group of earners among lesbians, as there is in different-sex couples. This paper uses 2010 American Community Survey data to preform OLS wage regressions, a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and a DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decomposition to test for a wage gap between lesbians and straight women, giving particular attention to the role of motherhood and incorporating the possibility that in terms of wages, two distinct groups of lesbians exist. The results show that while motherhood is typically negatively correlated with wages for straight women, it is positively related to wages for the group of lesbians as a whole. The positive relationship between earnings and wages holds only for primary lesbian partners; the relationship between motherhood and wages is negative for the secondary partners.

Income inequality in America has increased substantially since the early 1980s. Although several theoretical traditions in sociology suggest an important impact for property and authority relations on changes in income distribution, recent empirical studies have largely ignored the social relations of production, focusing instead on how income distribution is shaped by occupations in the technical division of labor; education, skills, and other types of human capital; and demographic characteristics. This study investigates trends in income distribution between different positions in the property and authority structure of the workplace from 1983 to 2010. Drawing on historical research about shifting power dynamics among proprietors, managers, and workers, this study delineates and tests a theory of class structure and income distribution that predicts highly divergent income trends over the past three decades between those with and without property and authority in production. Consistent with this theoretical approach, semiparametric estimates from the GSS and CPS indicate that income differences between classes, defined in terms of property and authority relations in production, have grown substantially wider since the early 1980s. Conservative estimates indicate that between-class income differences increased by about 50 percent from 1983 through the mid-2000s, net of the potentially confounding influence of measured skills, social background, and demographic characteristics.

With the rapid development of various communication technologies such as the Internet, information sharing has become easier. Countries, businesses and individuals can more easily collect the useful information they need. At the same time, with the application of data mining and data publishing, the issue of privacy protection has also received more and more attention from all walks of life. In the past, most studies focused on the privacy protection methods of static data sets. However, in practical applications, the data sets that are usually released are changed with time. Therefore, how to implement privacy protection for such problems is a research focus. This paper focuses on the privacy protection of data sets with internal sensitive attribute value updates. In order to protect the privacy of data sets with this type of update, this paper introduces anonymization technology and bucket technology, and proposes on this basis. Λ-variety algorithm: Firstly, the method of reading the sensitive attribute field type of the data table is used to judge the update type of the attribute value; secondly, for different types of data set update, different bucket creation and record allocation methods are adopted. Finally, divide the equivalence class and publish it anonymously. In addition, this paper focuses on the accuracy of the data after anonymization, and proposes the (D, λ)-variety algorithm. The (D, λ)-variety algorithm adopts the greedy idea, which implements privacy protection in the data set to be distributed. It also guarantees the availability of published data sets. This paper uses the Income dataset and OCC dataset from http://ipums.org to conduct experiments. The results show that the proposed λ-variety algorithm and (D, λ)-variety algorithm can have external updates and Data sets with different categories of internal attribute value updates provide better privacy protection. In addition, the (D, λ)-variety algorithm proposed in this paper can guarantee the accuracy of the anonymized data set compared with the λ-variety algorithm proposed in this paper, but the former has a lower degree of privacy protection than the latter. Therefore, when using the privacy protection of the data set to be published, whether the λ-variety algorithm or the (D, λ)-variety algorithm is used may depend on the specific application target.

This thesis serves as a historical case study of the squatter movement of New York City’s East Village and Lower East Side from the 1970s-2000s. Informal squats form in Western cities experiencing blight and abandonment, with a plethora of vacant buildings reclaimed by a population unaccounted for by the “for-profit” housing market. The civic action taken in East Village and Lower East Side resulted in 11 buildings previously owned by the city to be converted into low-income cooperatives through an urban homesteading program. By examining the squatter movement as it relates to gentrification, this thesis aims to pull key demographic patterns to indicate how the neighborhood changed during its transition from disinvestment to reinvestment, as well as investigate the feasibility of urban homesteading as an alternative solution to housing crisis.

We study how a large and overlooked source of business risk that costs firms and investors billions of dollars annuallythe risk of property theftimpacts a firms cost of equity capital. We hypothesize that a firm with a greater exposure to the risk of property theft has higher cash flow risk and lower expected cash flows, which results in a higher cost of equity. To test this hypothesis, we exploit variation in state-level property crime rates as a source of changes in a firms exposure to the risk of property theft. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a firm located in an area with a higher property crime rate has a higher cost of equity, especially when individuals have greater incentives and opportunities to steal from the firm. Additional analyses help rule out the alternative explanation that omitted variables related to overall criminal activity, local economic conditions, and characteristics of local labor markets drive our findings. Lastly, we provide evidence that a firm located in a more crime ridden area also has a higher cost of bank debt. Overall, our paper shows that a firms exposure to the risk of property theft can have an economically important impact on its financing costs.