(taken from preface)This book is the product of more than a decade of research that began with a hallway conversation in May 2001, when we were both professors at Duke University. Tom's youngest daughter was finishing her first year of middle school. Tom had just come from an ice cream social and ceremony that the superintendent of the Durham County Schools hosted for all the sixth graders who had finished the academic year with perfect report cards. Tom and his wife, Katherine, and lots of other parents took off their lunch hour on a warm May day to watch their kids eat ice cream and to search the glossy program for their child's name on the list of honored students.After ice cream, the students got in line, the superintendent began calling their names, one after another they shook his hand and received a certificate, they filed back back to the waiting area...and the gender imbalance became impossible to ignore. It seemed that two out of every three students in the line were girls. After the event ended and Tom returned to the Sociology Department, he told Claudia about the pattern of gender inequality in academic achievement that was on display at the Durham County Schools ice cream social and about how much it must have broader implications that were worthy of systematic research.

This report examines the geographic distribution and demographic characteristics of the U.S. Hispanic population in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the nations more than 3,000 counties, and the 60 largest metropolitan area populations by Hispanic population. The data for this report are derived from the 2011 American Community Survey (1% IPUMS), the 2000 Census (5% IPUMS), and U.S. Census Bureau county population datasets.

This paper assess increasing wage inequality by showing that the top deciles of college earners are enjoying signi?cant relative wage growth, which is underpinned by the link between ex ante math ability, math- heavy college majors and highly quantitative occupations. This mechanism is further strengthened by the strong and accelerating shift away from math-heavy college majors and occupations. We develop a general equilibrium model with multiple education choices whose outcomes depends on ex ante abilities, coupled with preferences, that lead to occupational opportunities that mimic the facts presented. This research shows that a large portion of wage inequality is determined by initial math/quantitative abilities. Furthermore, these results imply that policy measures aimed at increasing college enrollment to decrease wage inequality do not address the underlying process and, in some cases, may exacerbate wage inequality.

This paper contributes to the literature on the tradeoff between child labor and educational attainment by exploiting a unique shift in agricultural production that occurred in the early twentieth-century American South to analyze the role of a child labor intensive crop (cotton) in determining school enrollment and attendance rates. In the early twentieth-century South the harvesting of cotton required a large number of extra workers for three months of the year. Children were employed to help fill this seasonal labor demand. Because the harvest happened during the fall, it conflicted directly with traditional school attendance. This paper investigates how cotton production affected schooling decisions, with a particular focus on racial differences. Since whites were wealthier and attended better schools than blacks on average, a theoretical model of the time allocation of children predicts that the educational attainment of blacks was more responsive to changes in cotton production. I test this prediction using newly collected county-level panel data on educational attainment and quality in Georgia a major cotton producer. Because cotton production may be endogenous, I use the arrival of the cotton boll weevil as an instrumental variable. Preliminary 2SLS results suggest that a 10 percent reduction in cotton production caused a 2 percent increase in the school enrollment rate of blacks. By contrast, I find little evidence that cotton production affected the enrollment rate of whites. This result suggests that the production of child labor intensive agricultural products can have a significant negative impact on educational attainment. Additionally, the racial difference is important because it suggests that the shift away from cotton production after the arrival of the boll weevil may explain an economically significant amount of the convergence of the black-white education gap observed in the decades that followed.

This thesis is composed of three papers, each relating to labor market imperfections and their implications for firms staffing practices. In the first paper, I examine why hospitals provide direct financial support to nursing schools and faculty. This support is striking because nursing education is clearly general, clearly paid by the firm, and information asymmetries appear minimal. Using AHA and survey data, I find hospitals employing a greater share of their MSAs registered nurses are more likely to provide such support, net of size and other institutional controls. I interpret this result as evidence that technologically-general skills training may be made de facto-specific by mobility frictions.In the second paper, I present a theory of couples job search whereby women sort into lowerpaying geographically-dispersed occupations due to expectations of future spouses geographically-clustered occupations and (thereby) inability to relocate for work. Results confirm men segregate into geographically-clustered occupations, and that these occupations involve more-frequent early career relocations for both sexes. I also find that the minority of the men and women who depart from this equilibrium experience delayed marriage, higher divorce, and lower earnings. Results are consistent with the theorys implication that marriage and mobility expectations foment a self-fulfilling pattern of occupational segregation, with individual departures deterred by earnings and marriage penalties.In the third paper, I examine the use and misuse of authority and incentives in organizational hierarchies. Through a principal-supervisor-agent model inspired by sales settings, I propose organizations delegate authority over salespeople to front-line sales mangers because they can decompose performance measures into ability and luck. The model yields the result that managers on the cusp of a quota have a unique personal incentive to retain and adjust quotas for poor performing subordinates, permitting me to distinguish managers' interests from those of the firm. I parametrically estimate the model using detailed person-transaction-level microdata from 244 firms that subscribe to a ?cloud?-based service for automating transaction processing and compensation. I estimate 13-15% of quota adjustments and retentions among poor performers are explained by the managers' unique personal interest in meeting a quota. I use agency theory to evaluate firms mitigation practices.

This report examines the Hispanic population of Mexican origin in the United States by its nativity. Several data sources were used to compile the statistics shown in this report. The data for the demographic portrait tables are derived from the 2011 American Community Survey (1% IPUMS), which provides detailed geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for each group. Historical trends for the Mexican-origin and Mexican foreign-born population are based on the U.S. Census Bureaus Current Population Survey (CPS) March Annual Social and Economic Supplement conducted for 1995 to 2012 and U.S. censuses from 1850 to 2010. Estimates of the unauthorized population are based on augmented data from the March supplement of the CPS.

This article examines the link between social capital and community development. The purpose is to increase the understanding of social capital and its role and function in the neighborhood revitalization process within first-suburbs (also known as inner-ring suburbs). In doing so, it briefly outlines the challenges of the first-suburbs, in light of suburban decline. It also addresses the role and function of social capital as a community development tool within the first-suburbs. Finally, this piece provides case study examples describing the context in which first-suburban communities mobilize and use their social capital to implement community development initiatives, with the focus on the Greater Cincinnati region.

The health care industry has been an engine of job growth, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is expected to stimulate further growth. Over the next decade, the health care sector could add 4.6 million jobs, representing a 31% increase from current employment. New job opportunities from entry-level positions to highly trained professions are expected to emerge in the industry. In this report, we present an inventory of health care jobs occupied by people of color, and the changes in occupation mix over time. We then estimate job growth in the health care industry and present potential job opportunities for people of color. If we assume the current racial and ethnic distribution of the health care workforce persists, we would expect that in the future at least one-third of the total health care workforce will comprise people of color. This estimate is almost certainly lower than what will occur, because many people of color especially Blacks and Hispanics are in occupations that are among the fastest growing in the U.S. The goal of this report is to provide knowledge that can help foster and enhance racial/ethnic diversity of the health care workforce.

This research argues that immigrants’ political, social and economic incorporation experiences, which are embedded in individual life-course trajectories and heavily influenced by governmental policies, play an important role in producing diverse health outcomes among the older foreign-born in the U.S. Specifically, using data from the 2008-2010 American Community Survey, this research demonstrates how naturalization, a key indicator of social and political inclusion, is related to functional health in midlife and old age. Among those foreign-born who immigrated as children and young adults, naturalized citizens have better health in old age compared to non-citizens. However, among those older foreign-born who immigrated in middle and old age, naturalized citizens have worse health compared to non-citizens. Consistent with the idea of a positive effect of socio-economic incorporation on health, these findings suggest . . .

This dissertation examines the impact of contemporaneous American participation in war on military labor and conflict duration. Chapter one uses variation in occupation-specific retention bonuses and mortality risks observed in the U.S. Army during the war on terror to estimate the rate at which volunteers for active military service are willing to trade wealth and risk of death when making reenlistment decisions. Our estimate of the Value of Statistical Life among first-term soldiers is between $0.1M and $0.5M. Bonus policy is an effective tool for meeting near-term military manpower shortages. Increasing the bonus offer by $1,000 leads to an increase in the probability of reenlistment of 1.5 percentage points. Chapter two documents a substantial increase in the post-service one-year mortality rate of recent veterans using estimates constructed by matching Army administrative data to the Social Security Administration's Death Master File. The total mortality of service in the Army between 2001 and 2010 is likely understated by approximately 10% or over 350 deaths. Approximately 91% of the change in post-service mortality is due to the effect of exposure to high rates of mortality while in-service. The relationship between in-service and post-service mortality has likely always existed, but the higher rates of in-service mortality . . .

This paper investigates the question whether long-term human capital outcomes are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. by the time mothers spend at home with their newborn before returning to work. Employing RD and difference-indifference approaches, this paper exploits an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for children born on July 1, 1990 or later. We use test scores from the Austrian PISA test of birth cohorts 1990 and 1987 as measure of human capital. The evidence suggest no significant overall impact of the extended parental leave mandate on standardized test scores at age 15, but that the subgroup of boys of highly educated mothers have benefited from this reform while boys of low educated mothers were harmed by it.

This report explores news media consumption among Hispanic adults. The data used in this report are derived primarily from the Pew Hispanic Centers 2012 National Survey of Latinos (NSL), which was conducted from September 7 through October 4, 2012, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia among a randomly selected, nationally representative sample of 1,765 Latino adults. The survey was conducted in both English and Spanish on cellular as well as landline telephones. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. Interviews were conducted for the Pew Hispanic Center by Social Science Research Solutions (SSRS).

This research advances the hypothesis that resource abundant economies characterized by a socially cohesive workforce and network externalitites triggered the emergence of efficiency-enhancing inclusive institutions designed to restrict mobility and to enhance the attachment of community members to the local labor market. However, the persistence of these institutions, and the inter-generational transmission of their value, ultimately resulted in the misallocation of talents across occupations and a reduction in the long-run level of income per capita in the economy as a whole. Exploiting variation in resource intensity across the American Midwest during its initial development, the empirical analysis establishes that higher initial resource-intensity in 1860 is indeed associated with greater community participation over the subsequent 150 years, and reduced mobility and labor misallocation in the contemporary period.

We exploit exogenous variation in the risk of waterborne disease created by implementation of a major water reform in Mexico in 1991 to investigate impacts of infant exposure on indicators of cognitive development and academic achievement in late childhood. We estimate that a one standard deviation reduction in childhood diarrhea mortality rates results in about a 0.1 standard deviation increase in test scores, but only for girls. We show that a reason for the gender differentiated impacts is that the water reform induces parents to make complementary investments in education that favor girls, consistent with their comparative advantage in skilled occupations. The results provide novel evidence of the potential for clean water provision to narrow test score gaps across countries and, within countries, across gender.

This study examined disability trends by marital status among older adults aged 60 and above from 1997 to 2010 in the U.S. We addressed two questions: (1) Has the relationship between marital status and disability changed over the study period? (2) Can the trends be explained by changes in socioeconomic status? We paid special attention to potential gender and racial variations in these patterns. Data were drawn from the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) 19972010 (N = 170,446). Consistent with previous literature, our results from logistic regression models suggested that the married had lower odds of reporting either ADL or IADL disability than the unmarried groups over the entire study period across all gender and racial subgroups examined. More importantly, we found that the ADL disability gaps of widowed white men, widowed white women, and divorced white women in comparison to their married white counterparts decreased from 1997 to 2010; the IADL disability gaps of widowed white men and widowed black women in comparison to their married counterparts also decreased, while the IADL disability gap between never married white men and married white men increased over time. Socioeconomic status could explain little of these trends. These results, coupled with the growth of unmarried elderly population, suggest that the national long-term care system needs to get prepared for the potentially significant increase in demand for their services among the vulnerable unmarried elderly (especially blacks) and provide affordable and adequate services to those in need.

There is a growing body of evidence showing that negative childhood health shocks have long term consequences in terms of health, human capital formation and labor market outcomes. However, by altering the relative prices of child quality across siblings, these health shocks can also affect investments in and the outcomes of healthy siblings. This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic to test how household resources are reallocated when there is a health shock to one child. Using a new dataset linking census data on childhood households to health and education data from military enlistment records, I show that families with a child in utero during the pandemic shifted resources to older siblings of that child, leading to significantly higher educational attainments and high school graduation rates for these older siblings. There are no significant effects for younger siblings born after the pandemic. These results suggest that the reallocation of household resources in response to a negative childhood health shock tended to reinforce rather than compensate for differences in endowments across children.

Scientists, Technology professionals, Engineers, and Mathematicians (STEM workers) are the fundamental inputs in scientific innovation and technological adoption. Innovation and technological adoption are, in turn, the main drivers of productivity growth in the U.S. In this paper we identify STEM workers in the U.S. and we look at the effect of their growth on the wages and employment of college and non-college educated labor in 219 U.S. cities from 1990 to 2010. In order to identify a supply-driven and heterogenous increase in STEM workers across U.S. cities, we use the dependence of each city on foreign-born STEM workers in 1980 (or 1970) and exploit the introduction and variation (over time and across nationalities) of the H-1B visa program, which expanded access to U.S. labor markets for foreign-born college-educated (mainly STEM) workers. We find that H-1B-driven increases in STEM workers in a city were associated with significant increases in wages paid to both STEM and non-STEM college-educated natives. Non-college educated show no significant wage or employment effect. We also find evidence that STEM workers caused cities to experience higher housing prices for college graduates, increased specialization in high human capital sectors, and a rise in the concentration of natives in cognitive occupations. The magnitudes of these estimates imply that STEM workers contributed significantly to total factor productivity growth in the U.S. and across cities and-to a lesser extent-to the growth in skill-bias between 1990 and 2010.