Distribution of legal services to the American public continues its skew to the top. Data show stunningly low levels of access to civil legal services for most people except for those at the very top in income.1 Low-income persons encounter barriers to accessing even no-cost legal services,2 while people in the middle three income quintiles face unmet legal needs that are almost as great as those of persons in the bottom twenty percent. At the same time, the percentage of legal resources devoted to individual people has fallen over the past half century as legal resources shift toward work on behalf of commercial entities.

In recent years, local officials throughout the United States have attempted to retool workforce development programs that have historically been tied to federal antipoverty efforts to address the needs of employers in industries considered important for local economic development. But are these old and new goals for workforce development reconcilable? Does a more employer- and industry-focused approach affects the ability of policymakers and practitioners to address the problems of low-wage labor markets? This article examines a recent initiative in Chicago to establish sector-based workforce centers in the manufacturing and service industries. This case study finds that efforts to rework the public workforce development system to meet the needs of employers can be at odds with efforts to meet the needs of disadvantaged populations. But greater proximity to employers can also enhance the systems capacity to promote more progressive human resource practices and equitable labor market outcomes.

In this study we examine the importance of assimilation and ethnic enclave residence for smoking outcomes among United States immigrants. We draw data on over 140,000 immigrants from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements between 1995 and 2011. Several patterns emerge from our analysis. First we replicate findings from previous studies that show that longer residence in the U.S is associated with improved employment outcomes while ethnic enclave residence may hinder these outcomes. Second, we find that assimilation similarly extends to coverage of employment-based anti-smoking policies such as worksite smoking bans and smoking cessation programs while enclave residence does not substantially influence these outcomes. Third, we document complex relationships between assimilation, enclave residence, and smoking outcomes. Lastly, we find no strong evidence that immigrants reduce their smoking when faced with more restrictive state anti-smoking policies and find counter-intuitive impacts of tobacco taxes. These findings have important policy implications.

Studies of centenarians are useful in identifying factors leading to long life and avoidance of fatal diseases. In this article we consider several approaches to study effects of early-life and midlife conditions on survival to advanced ages: use of non-biological relatives as controls, the within- family analysis, as well as a sampling of controls from the same population universe as centenarians. These approaches are illustrated using data on American centenarians, their relatives and unrelated shorter-lived controls obtained from the online genealogies. The within-family analysis revealed that young maternal age at person’s birth is associated with higher chances of exceptional longevity. Comparison of centenarians and their shorter-lived peers (died at age 65 and sampled from the same pool of online genealogies) confirmed that birth timing in the second half of the calendar year predicts survival to age 100. Parental longevity as well as some childhood and midlife characteristics also proved to be significant predictors of exceptional longevity.

Impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act on Female Physician Specialty Choice This paper examines the effect that the enactment of the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) had on choice of female physician medical specialty. I use break point testing and joint hypothesis testing to find that the highest R-squared values for the trend break for the system of specialties occur in the year immediately following the legislation’s passage and that the FMLA had a statistically significant trend break in female physician specialty choice in 32 of 39 specialties tested. Legislation that protects the rights of mothers can be utilized to encourage diversity in the selection of specialties in medicine. Further work is required to find the particular characteristics of each specialty that drive choice among female physicians. Impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act on Female Occupational Choice This paper examines whether the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) had any impact on occupational choice among women. Break point testing and joint hypothesis tests find the highest goodness-of-fit for a trend break in all occupations in the year the legislation was enacted. Family formation legislation is found to be a potential tool for encouraging occupational shifts among women. Exploring University Creation and Output of Nanoscience Doctoral Graduates This cross-disciplinary paper focuses on the factors associated with a university beginning to create doctoral graduates in new or emerging science fields (entry) and the factors associated with number of doctoral graduates generated per year (output) once 4 entry has occurred. We focus on the field of nanoscience, finding that a university’s status as a science-heavy institution is important in both entry and output, but that the impact of the other factors such as cumulative university knowledge stock in articles and patents, NIH and NSF grants, cumulative US knowledge stock in articles, and number of university non-nanoscience star scientists differ between the entry and output models.

U.S. policymakers are concerned that negative home equity arising from the housing market crash may be constraining geographic mobility and consequently serving as a factor in the persistently high national unemployment rate. Indeed, the widespread drop in house prices since 2007 has increased the share of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages. At the same time, migration across states and among homeowners has fallen sharply. Using a logistic regression framework to analyze data from the Internal Revenue Service on state-to-state migration between 2006 and 2009, we discover evidence that "house lock" decreases mobility but find that it has a negligible impact on the national unemployment rate. A one-standard deviation increase in the share of underwater nonprime households in the origin state reduces the outflow of migrants from the origin to the destination state by 2.7%. When aggregated across the United States, this decrease in mobility reduces the national state-to-state migration rate by 0.05 percentage points, resulting in roughly 103,000 to 140,000 fewer individuals migrating across state lines in any given year. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the impact of reduced mobility due to negative housing equity on the national unemployment rate is likely to be small on the order of less than one-tenth of a percentage point each year.

Social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, have long been interested in intergenerational occupational mobility. Indeed, among sociologists the interest is so common that they often refer to intergenerational occupational mobility simply as social mobility. Most notable among innumerable contributions to the large literature on social mobility are the landmark studies by Blau and Duncan (1967) and Featherman and Hauser (1978) for the United States and by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) for Europe. In these studies, social mobility is taken to measure a societys openness. A widely accepted view rooted in neoclassical liberalism is that more social mobility, i.e., more openness, is good for a society, as it encourages placement of individuals in social positions according to competence rather than social origin (Hout 1988).

This study explores whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I develop a model of asymmetric learning that nests the symmetric learning case and allows the degree of asymmetry to vary. I then show how predictions in the model can be tested with compensation data. Using the NLSY, I test the model and find strong support for asymmetric information. My estimates imply that in one period, outside firms reduce the average expectation error over worker ability by only a third of the reduction made by incumbent firms.

The United Nations (2009) declared that the year of 2007 was the first time in human history when the majority of the world’s human population was not living in rural areas. That being said, there is currently no official definition of the term “rural”. Consequently, the discourses in academics and politics about this theme are controversial. Some approaches have sought to define “rural” in either descriptive or socio-cultural terms, while others believe there are no differences between rural and urban. In spite of this, there are authors trying to create a rurality index, which contributes to delineate “rural” in the literature. Several authors have taken part in this approach, generating a web of studies in which they applied rurality indexes to different objectives, such as aiding public policies. With the objective of better understanding the peculiarities and interactions among these authors and indices, this chapter seeks to build a network concerned with this line of research. In these studies, the primary tendency was the definition of “rural” as a lifestyle. In this investigation, we created a network by using the social network methodology. The results demonstrated the centrality around Cloke (1986; 1977) and his seminal role. The outcomes also showed low modularity and density in the network, which suggests that the discussion is still at an elementary level and that there is no wide exchange of ideas between authors concerned with rurality indexes.

Medicine in American prisons came to be defined by a characteristic set of health concerns and treatment challenges through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foremost among them was the essential tension between the prisons retributive, disciplinary, or reformatory objectives and the ideals of care at the core of medical practice. This dissertation examines the history of the American prison and its population by considering the prison as a medically therapeutic and rehabilitative institution constrained by its punitive mission, using the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater as a primary case study. It situates the prison within a historiography of medical institutions that has heretofore focused on hospitals and asylums.

In the United States, the female unemployment rate had been considerably higher than the male unemployment rate since World War II. However, this gap disappeared after 1980. This article argues that the sudden and sustained decrease in gender unemployment gap was due to technological changes that a§ected skill demands and wages in certain male dominated occupations. To analyze this conjecture, we build a life-cycle search and matching model with endogenous job separation and heterogeneous experience levels. We Önd that the model can account for the observed decrease in gender unemployment gap, both at the aggregate level and by age.

Employer learning about workers’ abilities plays a key role in determining how workers sort into jobs and are compensated. This study explores whether learning is symmetric or asymmetric, i.e., whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I develop a model of asymmetric learning that nests the symmetric learning case and allows the degree of asymmetry to vary, yielding testable implications for the prevalence of asymmetric learning. I then show how predictions in the model can be tested using compensation data. Using the NLSY, I test the model and find strong support for asymmetric information. I first exploit the fact that groups of workers differ in their variances in ability – based on economic conditions at time of entry into a firm – to show that incumbent wages track differences in ability distributions more closely than do outside firm wages. Second, I show that learning about ability is more symmetric for occupations that require more communication outside the firm. Finally, I show how to uncover the key parameter of interest in my model representing the degree to which information is asymmetric. My estimates imply that in one period, outside firms reduce the average expectation error over worker ability by roughly a third of the reduction made by incumbent firms. Thus outside firms retain sizeable expectation errors due to asymmetric information.

Production teams have become a dominant form of work organization as labor markets have become increasingly diverse. This transition likely affects coworker networkspossibly undermining entrenched patterns of workplace segregation. Contact theory suggests that teams can foster network diversity when workers cooperate and share values emphasizing mutual respect. Yet variants of conflict theory, including the critical teams literature, contend that the benefits of teamwork may be eroded by associated factors, including peer discipline, work intensification, and job insecurity. This study uses 2006 General Social Survey data to assess whether and how teamwork affects the racial diversity of worker acquaintance networks, contrasting worker- and manager-directed teams. We find a positive relationship between teams and diversity, but only when teams are worker directed. Despite countervailing tendencies highlighted in the literature, teams foster greater cooperation between workers, which in turn promotes cross-racial friendships. African Americans tend to receive the greatest diversity payoffs from teams. These findings suggest that teamwork can undermine segregation, though only with certain implementations and with variation across groups.

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from the United States from 1880-2000, we find an increase in the employment share of interactive occupations within sectors over time that is larger in metro areas than non-metro areas. We provide evidence that this increase in the interactiveness of employment is related to the dissemination of improvements in transport and communication technologies. Our findings highlight a change in the nature of agglomeration over time towards an increased emphasis on human interaction.

Each chapter of this dissertation studies a different question within the field of Applied Microeconomics. The first chapter examines the mid- and long-term effects of the 1998 Asian Crisis on the educational attainment of Indonesian children ages 6 to 18, at the time of the crisis. The effects are identified as deviations from a linear trend for specific age groups using data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) and Census data. Contrary to previous studies, I find that the crisis had negative mid-term effects on the probability of attending school (5 to 7 percentage points) and grade progression (5 to 14 percentage points) of older children, aged 13 to 18 at the time of the crisis. Similarly, these children lost around 0.5 years of education and increased the numbers of hours worked, suggesting that the income effect (lower income) dominated the substitution effect (lower opportunity cost of school). More importantly, the evidence points to large long-term negative effects of around 1.5 years of education for these same children, about twice the increase of the average educational attainment in the last decade. There are also adverse long-term effects on high-school graduation rates and real wages; where the latter are largely (but not fully) explained by the lower educational attainment. The second chapter explores the causal effect of peer feedback on the teaching perfor- mance of graduate teaching assistants (TAs) using a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).1 The participants of the intervention were the TAs of the Department of Economics of a large public university, and the duration of the intervention was one academic quarter. We ana- lyzed the students’ evaluations of these TAs, both for the quarter in which the intervention took place as well as for the following quarter, and the students’ raw grades for the quarter in which the intervention took place. The results show an effect of almost one half of a standard deviation for the students’ TA evaluations in the quarter following the interven- tion. Nonethless, the intervention had no effect on the student evaluations of the concurrent quarter, suggesting that it takes time for TAs to adjust their teaching practices. A detailed analysis of the TA evaluations for the following quarter suggests that the intervention had a large effect on the TAs’ communication skills, and a more modest effect on the following aspects: concern with student learning, organization, and interaction with students. Finally, the third chapter studies risk sharing and heterogeneous risk preferences. More specifically, it introduces a simple test that incorporates risk preference heterogeneity in the traditional test of efficient risk sharing, overcoming a problem previous studies may have encountered: rejecting the efficient risk sharing hypothesis even when it was true. The requirement to implement this test is a household panel data set with considerable waves, that besides expenditure and income recordings contains a measure of risk preferences. To my knowledge, no dataset fulfills all these requirements at the moment, so I develop an alternative way to incorporate risk preference heterogeneity into the analysis: implement the traditional test within groups of households that share the same risk preferences, using the Mexican Family Life Survey (MXFLS). I use a measure of risk aversion to classify households in one of six groups (in which homogenous risk preferences are likely to hold, as required by the traditional test) and implement the traditional test within each of these groups. The results show that within-groups efficient risk sharing is rejected in almost 60% of the cases, mainly when the total household income is considered as the relevant income variable (as opposed to non-labor income). Further refinement of the risk groups result in low power as a result of few observations in the sub-groups.

Despite extensive research into the toll of persistent psychosocial stress on individual physiology and health, little is known about the effects of chronic biosocial stress for immigrant populations. In the present paper, the authors review challenges encountered when integrating minimally-invasive stress-related biomarkers (e.g., blood pressure, Epstein-Barr Virus [EBV] antibodies, C-reactive protein [CRP], and salivary cortisol), as well as anthropometric (e.g., height, weight, waist circumference) and metabolic measures (e.g., glucose, cholesterol), into research with Latino immigrant adults and families in Oregon, USA. Finally, the authors present lessons learned and discuss strategies to support the full engagement of Latino immigrants as participants in studies that rely on the collection of biological data as a central component of research into psychosocial stress and its effects.

Education may increase political participation, but does high school affect partisan identification and voting? Political economy theories imply that schooling makes citizens more conservative by increasing current or expected income, or by imparting general skills that reduce demand for social insurance. Sociological theories suggest schooling more immediately affects political preferences by increasing political engagement, post-materialism and network externalities. This paper utilizes compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) in the US and Great Britain to identify late high schools effect on political preferences. Raising CSLs by a year induces a five percentage point partisan swing toward the Republican or Conservative party. Instrumental variable estimates show an additional year of late high school increases the probability that CSL-compliers support right-wing parties by more than ten percentage points. Assessing the theoretical mechanisms, the income-based political economy channel receives clear support. These results pose serious strategic problems for left-wing parties traditionally supporting further public education.

Public policy in the United States is disproportionately responsive to the wealthy, and the traditional response to this problem, campaign finance regulation, has failed. As students of politics have long recognized, however, political influence flows not only from wealth but also from organization, a form of political power open to all income groups. Accordingly, as this Essay argues, a promising alternative to campaign finance regulations is legal interventions designed to facilitate political organizing by the poor and middle class. To date, the most important legal intervention of this kind has been labor law, and the labor union has been the central vehicle for this type of organizing. But the labor union as a political-organizational vehicle suffers a fundamental flaw: unions bundle political organization with collective bargaining, a highly contested form of economic organization. As a result, opposition to collective bargaining impedes unions' ability to serve as a political-organizing vehicle for lower- and middle-income groups.

We use a gravity model of migration and alternative estimation strategies to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by focusing on newly arrived less-educated immigrants between 2000 and 2009. Our sample is unique in that the vast majority of our observations take zero values. Models that include observations with zero-flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to differences in (short-term) GDP fluctuations between origin countries and U.S. states, and perhaps to (long-term) trend GDP differences as well. More specifically, GDP fluctuations pull less-educated male immigrants into certain U.S. states, whereas GDP trends push less-educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin. Effects for less-educated women are less robust, as GDP coefficients tend to be much smaller than for men.

A voluntary army’s quality exceeds or deceeds a drafted army’s quality de- pending on whether selection is advantageous or adverse. Using a collection of data sets that covers the majority of the U.S. Army soldiers during World War II, we test for the possibility of adverse selection into the military. Rather, we find advantageous selection: volunteers and drafted men showed no significant difference in fatality outcomes, but volunteers earned distinguished awards at a higher rate than drafted men, particularly after Pearl Harbor.