n criminal careers research, reasons why offenders stop offending are of importance. This study tests Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control using a nationally- representative contemporaneous sample and explores three possible turning points in the life course of individuals that could lead to desistance: marriage, military involvement, and parenthood. Racial and ethnic differences in the impact of these social bonds are also analyzed. Supporting previous research, marriage is found to lead to desistance among all racial/ethnic groups. Military involvement and parenthood are not as strongly supported, suggesting possible modifications are needed to Sampson and Laub’s theory. A discussion of these findings and supplementary analyses are also presented.

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics and political economy. Chapter 1 studies the relative decrease of college graduate women’s marriage rates in developed Asian countries—the “Gold Miss” phenomenon. Using a dynamic model, I show that this phenomenon can be explained by the interaction of rapid economic growth combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes. I test the implications of the model using three datasets: Japanese General Social Survey, American Time Use Survey, and the Census. First, in the Japanese data, I find a positive relationship between a mother’s education (and employment) and her son’s gender attitudes. Second, in the U.S., housework time of Asian women is inversely related to the female labor force participation rate in husband’s country of origin. Lastly, college . . .

Income convergence and both endogenous and exogenous factors causing income growth in the southeastern United States were examined by using county level census data between 1980 and 2000. The study found that spatial variations in education, employment, and industries concentrations were strongly related with income convergence in the region.

This report examines trends in median household incomes among New York Citys Latino population between 1990 and 2011, and considers these in comparative perspective with the Citys other major race/ethnic groups as well as with Latinos across the United States.

This dissertation investigates the role of cinema in the modern black experience and the generative role that African Americans played in the creation of American modernity. Two questions animate this study. First, how did African Americans consolidate their institutions and social bonds amid the distending forces of turn-of-the-century migration? Second, how and why did cinema—as a location, medium, and set of practices—become so important to the collective articulation of black identity in the early twentieth century? By mapping the patterns of turn-of-the-century migration with the development of black cinema practices from 1896 to 1927, this project traces black economic, social, and cultural practices across space and time. It begins in the post-Reconstruction period, when African Americans looked inward to fortifying the institutions that stood at the center of black life. Yet at the same time, hundreds of thousands of black migrants were departing the countryside for the urban South and West. At this curious juncture when black life was both turning inward and expanding outward, African Americans used film as a tool for collective racial progress. Black churches, halls, and schools hosted moving picture exhibitions, which brought the race together and raised money for the construction of buildings that conspicuously demonstrated black material progress. Eventually black film exhibition moved into colored theaters, which became celebrated monuments of black life and public claims to urban space in the Jim Crow city. During this time, African Americans associated race and cinema primarily with tangible, physical locations. Yet when colored theaters started to compete with black religious institutions, middle class blacks were forced to reconsider the ideas of racial uplift, which championed both piety and black- owned businesses. After 1910, a series of events—including Jack Johnson’s victory as heavyweight champion of the world—further shifted the focus from the exhibition site to the screen. Black conceptions of freedom and natural rights based on new sensibilities of racial representation informed the first mass protest movement of African Americans in the twentieth century as well as transnational formations of racial identity articulated by the race film industry.

This study examined the factors that influenced population change in 875 counties in the southeastern United States between 1970 and 2000, using U.S. Census data. Binary logistic regression models were used to examine the relationship between socioeconomic factors and population change. The results of marginal probability estimates indicate that race and employment factors have been strongly related to population change in these counties. African-American-dominant counties have lost population to urban areas of more diverse counties. Our results suggest that individuals place high importance on better education, job opportunities, and living conditions in their decisions to move from their traditional places to new places. Additionally, rural counties need to develop resilience by improving community capital and quality of life amenities to sustain rural population and attract more retirees in rural corridors.

This book is the second volume of a three-volume analysis of discrimination. The first volume critiqued existing ways of thinking about discrimination and offered a new definition of discrimination more in line with how discrimination actually operates. This second volume takes the next step by providing empirical analyses of the effect of race and sex discrimination. To do so it first conveys a strategy to measure expected exposure to discrimination. Using this strategy to develop measures, it then studies the effect of anti-black discrimination on blacks and whites, and the effect of anti-female discrimination on women and men. Thirteen distinct outcomes are: special education placement (4th and 8th graders), measured mathematics achievement (4th and 8th graders), labor force participation, employment, hours worked, weeks worked, occupational socioeconomic status, allocation to a menial job (e.g., janitor), allocation to a professional job (e.g., lawyer), occupational segregation, earnings, poverty, and mortality. All but three are studied using IPUMS-CPS data. Just Who Loses? covers the major portions of the socioeconomic lifecycle while extending the analysis to the ultimate outcome of death. Across these many analyses, in most cases discrimination harms both the targeted group and the non-targeted group.

Male nursing students have been found to have higher nursing program and NCLEX-RN failure rates than women (Brady & Sherrod, 2003; Williams, 2006). For nurse educators who seek to help men succeed in course work and the NCLEX-RN it is important to identify the barriers and facilitators of male nursing students’ success in nursing school in order to develop strategies to increase their success. In this affirmative-inquiry based study the perspectives of 12 male RNs and RN nursing students were gathered through interviews. The participants’ thoughts and opinions were explored to discover what the men thought most helpful for learning in nursing courses. The participants indicated facilitators to success were engaged, passionate educators and financial aid assistance. They indicated the barriers that created a gap between what was taught and what needed to be learned included poor teaching methods and unnecessary, busy work that takes time but has little practical nursing value. The participants were aware of the feminine gender bias that is common in nursing. Contrary to current literature, however, they dismissed bias in their own PREVIEW iii experiences, saying it was “insignificant”, probably “due to habit”, and had no affect on their ability to learn or become part of the nursing profession. The men were all career oriented and motivated to succeed. Their suggestions for improving nursing education focused on what they termed improved curriculum and course content, decreasing busywork, and improving student-faculty communication.

In 2011 intra-firm imports accounted for 50.3 percent of the 1.13 trillion U.S. imports, while from 2002-2011 the share of imports in the total purchase of intermediate inputs in the U.S. grew by 30 percent. In this chapter I present a new model that investigates the effect of offshoring and outsourcing on wage and inequality. Utilizing methods from search thoery, I model the decisions regarding outsourcing and offshoring as being driven by labor market frictions, which implies heterogeneous firm selection into sourcing locations and ownership structure. Testing the predictions of my model, I find evidence that ownership plays an important role in determining the effect of offshoring on domestic wages and these effects are also governed by industry specific skill intensity of production as well as the offshorability of an occupation. For example, for workers employed by skill intensive industries, in occupations that cannot be offshored, a one standard deviation increase in intra-firm offshoring increases wages by approximately $7,000 whereas the same increase in inter-firm offshoring has a smaller and negative effect on wages. In addition to these heterogeneous effects on average wages, I also find that offshoring differentially effects the industry specific income distribution depending on ownership as well as the offshorability of occupations.

Has the academic achievement gap between students from high-income and low-income families changed in the last few decades? And if so, why?

We study whether a firms capital structure decisions are affected by the risk that its rivals in product markets could gain access to its non-patented trade secrets. Our tests exploit the staggered recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous event that increases the protection of a firms trade secrets by reducing the mobility of workers with knowledge of the trade secrets to similar jobs at rival firms. We find that firms increase their financial leverage following the recognition of the IDD, especially those in more competitive industries, those whose workers are more likely to know trade secrets, and those that face greater ex-ante risk of losing key employees to rivals. Also, the credit spread on firms bank loans decreases after the recognition of the IDD, implying that firms default risk is reduced. Finally, the recognition of the IDD is accompanied by gains in market share for firms in recognizing states. Overall, our findings imply that the risk of losing intellectual property to rivals affects a firms default risk, and through this channel, it has a significant impact on the firms financing decisions.

This dissertation consists of three essays that broadly deal with the growth and development of economies across time and space. Chapter one is motivated by the fact that agricultural labor productivity is key for understanding aggregate cross-country income differences. One important proximate cause of low agricultural productivity is the low use of intermediate inputs, such as fertilizers, in developing countries. This paper argues that farmers in poor countries rationally choose to use fewer intermediate inputs because it limits their exposure to large uninsurable risks. I formalize the idea in a dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets, subsistence requirements, and idiosyncratic productivity shocks. Quantitatively, the model accounts for two-thirds of the difference in intermediate input shares between the richest and poorest countries. This has important implications for cross-country productivity. Rel- ative to an identical model with no productivity shocks, the addition of agricultural shocks amplifies per capita GDP differences between the richest and poorest countries by nearly eighty percent. Chapter two deals with the changes in college completion in the United States over time. In particular, this paper develop a dynamic lifecycle model to study the increases in college completion and average IQ of college students in cohorts born from 1900 to 1972. I discipline the model by constructing historical data on real college costs from printed government reports covering this time period. The main finding is that that increases in college completion of 1900 to 1950 birth cohorts are due primarily to changes in college costs, which generate a large endogenous increase in college enrollment. Additionally, evidence is found that supports cohorts born after 1950 underpredicted sharp increases in the college earnings premium they eventually received. Combined with increasing college costs during this time period, this generates a slowdown in college completion, consistent with empirical evidence for cohorts born after 1950. Lastly, the rise in average college student IQ cannot be accounted for without a decrease in the variance of ability signals. This is attributed the increased precision of ability signals primarily to the rise of standardized testing. Chapter three again deals with cross-country income differences. In particular, it is concerned with the fact that cross-country income differences are primarily accounted for by total factor productivity (TFP) differences. Motivated by cross-country empirical evi- dence, this paper investigates the importance individuals who operate their own firms be- cause of a lack of other job opportunities (need-based entrepreneurs). I develop a dynamic general equilibrium labor search model with with entrepreneurship to rationalize this mis- allocation across occupations and assess its role for understanding cross-country income differences. Developing countries are assumed to have tighter collateral constraints on en- trepreneurs and lower unemployment benefits. Because these need-based entrepreneurs actually have a comparative advantage as workers, they operate smaller and less productive firms, lowering aggregate TFP in developing countries.

Studies have indicated that U.S. physicians may not consider Chagas disease when diagnosing immigrant patients from Chagas-endemic areas. The purpose of this quantitative cross-sectional study was to estimate the prevalence of Chagas disease and chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy and evaluate physician knowledge of Chagas disease in 6 Appalachian Ohio counties. The epidemiologic triangle informed this study’s focus on the impact of environment on the relationship between agent and host, including disease burden and potential barriers to diagnosis in Appalachian Ohio. Prevalence was estimated using existing data, and physician knowledge was assessed by self-administated survey. The estimated prevalence rates of Chagas disease and chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy were 1.3% and 0.1%, respectively. Surveys were sent to 262 Appalachian Ohio physicians, and 105 completed surveys were used in the analysis. Appalachian Ohio physicians were less likely to identify the clinical manifestations of Chagas (11%), the progression of chronic disease (44%), and to consider Chagas disease in diagnosis (27%) than a published national sample. Knowledge was not significantly associated with physician age, time since residency, gender, specialty, ethnicity, or foreign origin. The prevalence indicated that there are likely individuals with chronic Chagas disease living in Appalachian Ohio. A lack of physician awareness of Chagas disease may create a barrier to care by decreasing the likelihood of proper diagnosis and treatment. The results of this study may lead to positive social change by supporting the need for interventions to ensure proper diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease in Hispanic immigrants in rural Appalachian Ohio.

Heckman et al. (1996) challenge the claim of Card and Krueger (1992) that returns to education for different states in US are approximately log-linear above the state-specific threshold level of schooling. Heckman et al. (2008) formally reject the hypothesis of linearity in returns to education in the Mincer regression under exogenous schooling and earnings. I test and reject the linearity assumption under endogeneity of schooling and earnings. I estimate the marginal rate of return to education using both a polynomial model and a semiparametric partial linear model based on the standard Mincer regression. To analyze the linearity assumption under endogeneity of schooling and earnings, I use a control function approach for IV estimation with spouses and parents education as instruments. Results suggest that estimates that do not account for endogeneity are biased downwards at the tails of the education spectrum and biased upwards for returns between middle-school and college education.

This study aims to identify the relationship between field of study and women's fertility among U.S. college graduates. Using data from the 2010 American Community Survey, this study provides the person Poisson regression analysis to compare the number of children women have with women's undergraduate fields of study. Of the 37 fields of study that are examined, I find 22 fields are statistically significant, suggesting that field of study is a significant factor in how many children a woman decides to have.