This paper asks four questions. Is there a difference in the motherhood wage gap (MWG) between native born and immigrant women? Do MWGs vary by the number of children within immigrant status groups? Further differentiating immigrants, do MWGs vary by country of origin? Fourth, do United Nations indicators for gender-related social conditions and policies from immigrant countries of origin explain the variation in immigrant MWGs? To answer these questions, we use the 2000 U.S. Census Public Use microdata files to estimate MWGs for women ages 25 to 49 for both U.S. native born and first-generation immigrant women by their country of birth. We then regress the immigrant MWGs on UN indicators of origin country measures of gender development and empowerment. We obtain MWGs between 4 to 14 percent with nonlinear increases by number of children. The MWG is smaller for immigrants as a group than U.S. native born women. We find the unanticipated result that coming from countries with higher Gender Development Indices and Gender Empower Measures is not associated with a smaller motherhood penalty in the U.S.

Background: Although racial and educational disparities in obesity are well established, few studies have examined recent population-based trends. Methods: We analyzed data of a nationally-representative sample of 174,228 (31,878 Black and 142,350 White) US-born adults participating in the National Health Interview Survey from 1997 to 2008. We determined trends in mean Body Mass Index (BMI) by educational attainment and race and Black-White prevalence ratios for overweight/obesity (BMI>25 kg/m2) using adjusted Poisson regression with robust variance. Results: From 1997-2008, mean BMI increased by at least 1 kg/m2 in all race-sex groups, and appeared to increase at a faster pace among Whites. Blacks with greater than a high school education had a consistently higher BMI over time than Whites in both women (28.3 0.14 to 29.7 0.18 kg/m2 vs. 25.8 0.58 to 26.5 0.08 kg/m2) and men (28.1 0.17 kg/m2 to 29.0 0.20 vs. 27.1 0.04 kg/m2 to 28.1 0.06 kg/m2). For participants of all levels of educational attainment, age-adjusted overweight/obesity was greater by 44% (95%CI: 1.42 -1.46) in Black vs. White women and 2% (95%CI: 1.01 -1.04) in Black vs. White men. Among those with greater than a high school education, prevalence of overweight/obesity was much greater (PR 1.52; 95%CI: 1.49 -1.55) in Black vs. White women, but only slightly greater (PR 1.07; 95%CI: 1.05 -1.09) in Black vs. White men.Conclusions: BMI increased steadily in all race-sex and education groups (albeit at a faster pace for Whites) from 1997 to 2008, and Blacks (particularly women) had a consistently higher BMI than their White counterparts. Overweight/obesity trends and racial disparities were more prominent among individuals with higher levels of educational attainment, compared to their counterparts with lower levels of educational attainment.

We use data on immigrants who live in the Unites States to study the effects of exposure to hyperinflation on occupational choice. To do so, we calculate the number of years an individual had lived under hyperinflation before arriving to the US. We find that its marginal effect on the probability of being self-employes instead of wage earner is 0.87 percentage point. This effect depends on the age individuals had when exposed to hyperinflation. In particular, it is stronger for individuals who experienced hyperinflation at an early age, but it vanishes for those over the age of 40. These results suggest that the macroeconomic environment an individual grows up in permanently affects his economic behavior.

This dissertation is composed with three essays, each of which empirically examines the effects of reproductive health policy on marriage, fertility and risky sexual behavior. The first essay provides rigorous tests of the Akerlof, Yellen and Katz’s (1996) hypothesis that legalization of abortion in the early 1970s changed young women’s marriage decisions by making shotgun marriage unnecessary in the event of premarital pregnancy. The essay empirically investigates the role of greater abortion access in explaining changes in marriage rates, the age at first marriage and the probability of a shotgun marriage. The essay finds that the increase in abortion availability during the 1970s significantly reduced teen marriage rates and raised the age at first marriage. Empirical evidence also lends support to the Akerlof et al.’s hypothesis that legalization of abortion caused teenage women to be less likely to marry in response to premarital pregnancy. The second essay uses unique data on abortions performed in New York State from 1971-1975 to analyze the impact of legalized abortion in New York on abortion and birth rates of non-residents. The essay demonstrates that women travelled hundreds of miles for a legal abortion before Roe. Abortion rates declined by 12.2 percent for every hundred miles a woman lived from New York in the years before Roe. Each abortion was associated with approximately 0.60 fewer births among residents in states nearest to New York. The results suggest that if recent legislative policies were to eliminate abortion providers in some states, the change in population measures of birth and abortion rates would be small, but that they would have more substantial effects on the birth rates of teens and less advantaged women. The third essay tests whether the easier pharmacy access to emergency contraception (EC) induced teenager and young unmarried women to change their sexual risk-taking behavior in a way that leads to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and abortions. Using synthetic control method, the essay evaluates the causal effect of easier access to EC on rates of gonorrhea and abortions in Washington State. The State approved pharmacy sell of EC in 1998 as part of a pilot program ten years prior to FDA’s decision. The results indicate that Washington’s pilot program had little effect on the prevalence of STD and abortion.

Wealthy elites may end up retarding economic development for their own interests. This paper examines how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic development at the county level between 1840 and 1960. To capture the planter elites potential to exercise de facto power, I construct a new dataset on the personal wealth of the richest Southern planters before the American Civil War. I find that counties with a relatively wealthier planter elite before the Civil War performed significantly worse in the post-war decades and even after World War II. I argue that this is the likely consequence of the planter elites lack of support for mass schooling. My results suggest that when during Reconstruction the US government abolished slavery and enfranchised the freedmen, the planter elite used their de facto power to maintain their influence over the political system and preserve a plantation economy based on low-skilled labor. In fact, I find that the planter elite was better able to sustain land prices and the production of plantation crops during Reconstruction in counties where they had more de facto power.

This profile examines demographic changes in womens marriage patterns over the past century using data from the National Vital Statistics, Decennial Census, and American Community Survey. Although the marriage rate and the proportion of women who are married have risen and fallen from the 1890s to the 1960s, they have declined precipitously since 1970 with both now at record lows. Furthermore, womens median age at first marriage is the highest it has been in over a century at 26.6 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012).

This article provides an overview of changes in the U.S. child population (persons under age 18) based on data released from the 2010 census. Today, the number of children in the United States (74.2 million) is at an all-time high, but the share of the national population who are children (24 %) is at an all-time low. The number of children in the population grew by 1.9 million between 2000 and 2010, but the overall national figure masks many important details and divergent paths. The growing racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. is more advanced among children than among adults. Some areas of the country and some demographic groups grew significantly over the decade, while the number of children in other areas and in other groups fell.

This paper presents an overview of some of the recent literature about the long-run changes in labour market outcomes in advanced economies. It shows that the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, with inventions in the second half of the 19th century that had a lasting impact up to 1980, resulted in skill upgrading and decreasing overall wage inequality. To the contrary, the Computer Revolution that started in the 1980s is no longer unambiguously skill-upgrading but characterized by an underlying process of job polarization and an increase in upper-tail and overall wage inequality. However, the paper concludes by providing arguments in favour of optimism about future computerization as long as our labour markets are able to provide the necessary worker skills to support such changes.

This paper evaluates the impact of the Louisiana Road Home grant program on the post-Hurricane Katrina location choices of New Orleans homeowners. Using data from the Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey linked to administrative property assessment records, I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of households rebuilding, resettlement, and borrowing/savings choices. Counterfactual experiments find that the grant program significantly increased the rebuilding rate in New Orleans, particularly among households with limited credit access and large uninsured losses. I estimate that location preferences are highly heterogeneous, and that the distortion caused by expected future bailouts to New Orleans is relatively small.

There is currently a tug-of-war going on surrounding data releases. On one side, there are many strong reasons pulling to release data to other parties: business factors, freedom of information rules, and scientific sharing agreements. On the other side, concerns about individual privacy pull back, and seek to limit releases. Privacy technologies such as differential privacy have been proposed to resolve this deadlock, and there has been much study of how to perform private data release of data in various forms. The focus of such works has been largely on the data owner: what process should they apply to ensure that the released data preserves privacy whilst still capturing the input data distribution accurately. Almost no attention has been paid to the needs of the data user, who wants to make use of the released data within their existing suite of tools and data. The difficulty of making use of data releases is a major stumbling block for the widespread adoption of data privacy technologies.In this paper, instead of proposing new privacy mechanisms for data publishing, we consider the whole data release process, from the data owner to the data user. We lay out a set of principles for privacy tool design that highlights the requirements for interoperability, extensibility and scalability. We put these into practice with UMicS, an end-to-end prototype system to control the release and use of private data. An overarching tenet is that it should be possible to integrate the released data into the data user's systems with the minimum of change and cost. We describe how to instantiate UMicS in a variety of usage scenarios. We show how using data modeling techniques from machine learning can improve the utility, in particular when combined with background knowledge that the data user may possess. We implement UMicS, and evaluate it over a selection of data sets and release cases. We see that UMicS allows for very effective use of released data, while upholding our privacy principles.

El estudio de la migración entre México y Estados Unidos implica el conocimiento de una historia que atraviesa ya tres siglos, en la cual han participado investigadores de México, Estados Unidos y de otras latitudes. Existe un vasto acervo de análisis cualitativos y cuantitativos que datan desde su inicio. La investigación de sus volúmenes y perfiles ha utilizado información censal y registros administrativos de los servicios estatales de migración en ambos países. Asimismo ha impulsado el diseño, levantamiento y explotación de encuestas especializadas en el tópico migratorio, y el desarrollo y aplicación de métodos específicos para su conocimiento, caracterización, medición y estimación. No obstante, la riqueza de materiales documentales, estadísticos, visuales y gráficos, y de las notables contribuciones y desarrollo de enfoques propios de diversos estudiosos del tema, desde los estudios pioneros de Redfield, Taylor y Gamio hasta las perspectivas de Galarza, Bustamante y Durand, hoy persisten varios retos para el mejor conocimiento de su pasado, presente y evolución futura. Por ejemplo, aún hay la necesidad de revalorar los alcances y limitaciones, los pros y contras de la regulación migratoria que abarcó casi un cuarto de siglo y que en los años setenta fue materia de reflexión del ejecutivo federal y al inicio del siglo XXI fue parte sustantiva de las posibilidades de una agenda bilateral; continuar la investigación del retorno-repatriación de los años veinte del siglo pasado y de lo ocurrido en los años de la Gran Depresión; o lograr una evaluación de los métodos y procedimientos que han dado origen a las estimaciones hechas hasta ahora sobre su volumen y nivel reciente. En esta última dirección, este trabajo aborda algunos de los esfuerzos académicos e institucionales en México y en Estados Unidos que han dado cuenta de los cambios, continuidades y tendencias del proceso social migratorio entre estos dos países vecinos. En particular, se destaca el contexto cuantitativo, en el que la pérdida de población por efecto de la migración, para el caso de México parece haberse estabilizado. De acuerdo a las proyecciones de población vigentes en el país, las hipótesis de su evolución futura, aunque próximas a la realidad inmediatamente anterior, como lo evidencian los ejercicios de prospectiva previos, son sin duda inciertas. Inciertas incluso para los nuevos métodos estadísticos aplicados para prever su volumen en los próximos años.

An increasing concern among regional growth policymakers who aim to promote balanced growth is the widening economic disparity among the communities in metropolitan areas. But the causes and consequences of such disparities have not been fully addressed in planning and public policy literature. Using the longitudinal data (1970–2009) for 566 municipalities in the State of New Jersey in US, this study shows that overall metropolitan economic disparity is attributable to interjurisdictional economic disparity. The inter-jurisdictional economic disparity arises from the disproportionate distribution of human capital and minority populations across municipalities. Our study also confirms that housing market constraints, municipal taxes, and public expenditures play a significant role in inter-jurisdictional economic disparity and polarization. Since narrowing interjurisdictional disparity is imperative for community stability and regional economic competitiveness, we discuss the policy implications for reducing inter-jurisdictional disparity within metropolitan areas.

We examine the effect of genetic diversity on economic development in the United States. Our estimation strategy exploits that immigrants from different countries of origin differed in their genetic diversity and that these immigrants settled in different regions. Based on a sample of over 2250 counties, we find that increases in genetic diversity of US counties that arose due to immigration during the 19th century had a significant positive effect on US counties economic development. We also detect a significant positive long-run effect of 19th century immigrants genetic diversity on contemporaneous measures of income.

The average quality of teachers declined precipitously between 1960 and 2000, coinciding with a decline in the ratio of pay in teaching as compared to pay in alternative professions: relative pay. The effect of relative pay on the quality of teachers is difficult to measure because teacher pay may be correlated with working conditions, such as the school's neighborhood quality, student behaviors, and other challenges associated with the work environment. To address this concern I exploit state-by-cohort variation in whether women had legal access to the birth control pill in young adulthood. Previous work has shown that young adult pill access improved early career investments by enabling better control of childbirth timing, producing landmark improvements in the alternative professional pay available to high-ability women. This lowered the effective relative teacher pay for high-ability women. I therefore use a measure of young adult pill access as an instrument for relative pay. This instrumental variables approach assumes that the pill rollout is random with respect to state-by-cohort variation in working conditions, thus producing unbiased estimates of the effect of relative pay on the propensity to teach among women who entered the labor market between 1960 and 1975. The primary results indicate that a 10 percent increase in relative pay increases the likelihood of choosing to teach by 5 percentage points. In addition, my results show no significant differences in the labor supply elasticity to teaching by ability suggesting that high-ability women are about equally responsive to relative pay as low-ability women. In culmination, the results reveal that the opportunity cost to teaching produces a significant effect on the average quality of U.S. teachers.

This article outlines a long-term research agenda on immigrant assimilation by calling on scholars to be more explicit about how we model and measure assimilation, and to move away from previously aspatial approaches to the topic. After briefly overviewing the field, I draw on original qualitative data from a new immigrant destination region to highlight several places where I believe we scholars can better clarify definitions of and assumptions about assimilation, as well as choices about and interpretations of our data, to foster transparency and facilitate scholarly discovery. I conclude by arguing that scholars working in new immigrant destinations are well poised to examine how legal status a key structural feature of the context of reception in a host society or locale shapes assimilation processes and outcomes.

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary income support to workers who have lost their jobs and are seeking reemployment. This paper reviews the origins of the federal-state UI system in the United States and outlines its principles and goals. It also describes the conditions for benefit eligibility, the benefits themselves, and their financing through the UI payroll tax. The UI system is complex and includes many interested parties, including employers, worker advocates, state UI administrators, and the federal government. These parties differing views have led to controversies over benefit eligibility, adequacy, and whether the states or federal government should bear primary responsibility for UI. The Great Recession caused most states UI trust funds to become insolvent and has led to renewed debate over the structure and financing of the system.

In survey sampling, stratified random sampling and post-stratification can increase the precision of estimation. In some cases, however, there may be multiple ways to stratify a population. We present a method, based on a non-informative Bayesian approach, that uses a finite mixture model to incorporate information from each stratification into estimation. This approach works well when the response variable is categorical or discrete, and for some non-response types of problems. We provide the theoretical basis for our method, present some simulation results, discuss various extensions, and define some software that implements the method.

An estimated 395,000 Hispanics of Nicaraguan origin resided in the United States in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Nicaraguans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Nicaraguan origin; this means either they themselves are Nicaraguan immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Nicaragua. Nicaraguans are the 12th-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 0.8% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2011. Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 33.5 million, or 64.6%, of the Hispanic population in 2011. 1 This statistical profile compares the demographic, income and economic characteristics of the Nicaraguan population with the characteristics of all Hispanics and the U.S. population overall. It is based on tabulations from the 2011 American Community Survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. Key facts . . .