This paper presents evidence that since 1980, relative to other immigrants, the earnings of Taiwanese immigrants have grown rapidly as they assimilate into the U.S. economy. Our estimates indicate that the rising returns to education, pre-migration experience and hours worked per week play pivotal roles for their relatively successful economic assimilation. We investigate the earnings differentials, finding that the growing gap can be largely explained by differences in individuals endowments of which more than two-thirds can be solely attributed to education. We show that more recently arrival cohorts of Taiwanese immigrants have earned more than the older ones since 1980.

When summary measures of latent concepts such as \the gender gap" fail to be adequately representative, one must seek better definitions and measures. This paper presents a set of complementaryconcepts and measurements of the gender gap that move beyond the traditional summary comparisons of the earnings distributions. In particular, we propose a new concept of "the gender gap" based on the the distance between entire distributions with compelling properties: It is free of outlier effects, is capable of representing populations with heterogeneous gaps at different parts of the outcome distributions, and is invariant to increasing transformations. When the gender gap is different or of even different sign at different quantiles, subjective comparisons become inevitable in any summary, cardinal comparisons. In response, we introduce tests based on stochastic dominance to allow for uniform rankings of the earnings distributions between men and women. Using the Current Population Survey data, we first construct a new series on the gender gap from 1976 to 2011 in the United States. We find that traditional \representative" or moment-based measures underestimate a declining trend in "the gender gap" during this period. More important, these traditional measures do not necessarily reflect the cyclicality of the gender differentials in earnings distributions, and may even lead to false conclusions about how labor market conditions are related to the gender gap at the aggregate level. Second, while we find first-order stochastic dominance in most cases, even for the recent recession where men were hit harder, we also find a few instances where definite conclusions regarding the gender gap cannot be drawn at all or only under more restrictive social evaluation functions. Finally, we conduct full distribution counter-factual analysis which suggests that, in many cases, altering the earnings structure would be more effective in improving women's welfare (reducing "discrimination") than would changing human capital characteristics.

This dissertation consists of three chapters on labor economics. The first two chapters focus on education, and the third examines inequality and incarceration. Chapter one explores whether college students strategically delay exiting college in response to poor labor market conditions. It exploits variation in U.S. state unemployment rates to identify the causal impact of unemployment rates on time to graduation. Strategic delay is observed among both men and women. Results indicate that students delay graduation by approximately 0.4 months for each percentage point increase in junior-year unemployment rates, implying the average student delays by approximately half a semester during a typical recession. Effects are greatest for men with freshman majors in education, professional and vocational technologies, the humanities, business, and the sciences, and for women in education, the sciences, or undeclared. Delays are robust to fluctuations in students in-school work hours, earnings, and job market conditions. Chapter two assesses the impact of over-the-counter access to emergency contraception on womens educational attainment using variation in access produced by state legislation since 1998. Approximately 5% of American women of reproductive age experience an unintended pregnancy annually, indicating a significant unmet need for contraception. Results indicate that cohorts with greater access to emergency contraception are more likely to graduate from high school and attain the associates degree. Effects for high school graduation are most pronounced among black women, while increases in associates degree attainment are driven primarily by white and Hispanic women. Chapter three explores the relationship between incarceration and generational inequality. Using a calibrated OLG model of criminal behavior with race, inheritance and endogenous education, I calculate how much longer prison sentences, and a higher likelihood of capture and conviction contribute to income inequality. Results indicate that changes to criminal policy mirroring those of the tough on crime legislation of the 1980s and 1990s, including an 18% increase in criminal apprehension and a 68% increase in prison sentence length, have little impact on inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. Instead, the model provides evidence that these enhanced enforcement measures deter crime and decrease incarceration rates.

Using 1% Public-Use Microdata Samples (PUMSs) of the 1980, 1990, and 2000 census and the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS), this study evaluates three simultaneous longitudinal trends in immigrants English fluency: the assimilation process, variations across arrival cohorts, and periodical changes. The key findings include that the declining initial English fluency among new immigrants reported in a previous study based on 1980 and 1990 data (Carliner, 2000) was reversed in the 1990s and 2000s. Immigrants who arrived during the 2000s have the highest level of English fluency at the year of entry among all cohorts. Immigrants are assimilating. However, changes in social and linguistic environment in the US during the past two decades have suppressed the advancement of immigrants. The decline in the average English attainment from the 1980s to the 1990s reported in a previous study (Pitkin and Myers, 2011) was found to extend to the 2000s. Using new census data, this study updated the current knowledge on immigrants English fluency by revealing a never documented upward trend among recent immigrants and suppressive period effects from 1990 to 2010.

Does computerization increase or reduce the extent of skills that workers are required to have? Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) show empirically that adoption of computer-based technologies (CBT) was greater in industries historically intensive in routine tasks, and that computerization increased complex problem-solving and communication activities and reduced routine cognitive and manual activities. We extend this argument and claim that the effects of CBT are neither universal nor uniform, but a bifurcation emerges: occupations that historically (pre-computerization) required low skills and entailed low-complexity tasks do not experience a lot of CBT in their environment, or if they do, they remain low skill (or in extremis become less skilled) occupations, whereas historically high-skill occupations that entailed high complexity see much CBT as well as increases in the skills they require. We test these propositions in a unique dataset that includes measures of the degree of computerization and changes attendant to computerization in the level of seven skills of core employees (content, complex problem-solving, etc.) for a sample of 819 firms in 2000. We link this dataset by core employees occupation to US occupation-level data on three dimensions of task complexity (with respect to data, people and things) in 1971 (pre-CBT). We find that: (1) higher pre-CBT task complexity is associated with subsequent adoption and intensity of CBT; and (2) for occupations that were historically characterized by complex tasks, CBT affects most skills positively, but for simple tasks, CBT does not affect skills or affects them negatively. Our results shed light on the skill-based technological change and skilling-deskilling debates and suggest that the relationships are contingent in more nuanced ways than the literature has suggested.

This paper investigates how high-speed home Internet has impacted married womens labor force participation. I estimate the net effect of individual Internet usage on labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy which exploits cross-state variation in supply-side constraints to residential broadband Internet access. Results indicate that married women who use the Internet are more likely to participate in the labor force. The average effects mask substantial heterogeneity and increases in participation are concentrated on women with higher levels of education and children. The results suggest home Internet facilitates work-family balance for highly educated women.

While the link between geographic and social mobility has long been a cornerstone of sociological approaches to migration, recent research has cast doubt on the economic returns to internal U.S. migration. Moreover, important racial disparities in migration patterns remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from the 2000 census, the author reappraises the link between migration and social mobility by taking relative deprivation into consideration. She examines the association between migration, disaggregated by region of origin and destination, and absolute and relative earnings and occupational prestige, separately by race. Findings lend new insight into the theoretical and stratification implications of growing racial disparities in migration patterns; while both blacks and whites who move north-south generally average lower absolute incomes than their stationary northern peers, they enjoy significantly higher relative social positions. Moreover, the relative gains to migration are substantially larger for blacks than for whites. The opposite patterns obtain for south-north migration.

This study investigates the effect of introducing a revenue-neutral increasing block-rate water budget price structure on residential water demand. We estimate that demand was reduced by at least 18 percent, although the reduction was achieved gradually over more than three years. As intermediate steps the study derives estimates of price and income elasticities that rely only on longitudinal variability. We investigate how different subpopulations responded to the pricing change and find evidence that marginal, rather than average, prices may be driving consumption. Additionally, we derive alternative revenue-neutral rate structures that might have been implemented, and assess the estimates demand effects of those rate structures.

This article examines the effect of receiving a housing voucher on the mobility and neighborhood attributes of low‐income households. Housing policy has shifted toward vouchers in lieu of public housing projects to allow households to move away from high‐poverty areas. We use administrative records collected from an experiment to examine this issue. We find that households moved immediately after receiving the subsidy but did not relocate to lower poverty neighborhoods until several quarters later. Our findings suggest that recipients initially lease in nearby units to secure the subsidy, while continuing to search for housing in lower poverty neighborhoods.

This dissertation consists of three studies analyzing causes and consequences of location decisions by economic agents in the U.S. In Chapter 1, I address the longstanding question of the extent to which the geo- graphic clustering of economic activity may be attributable to agglomeration spillovers as opposed to natural advantages. I present evidence on this question using data on the long-run effects of large scale hydroelectric dams built in the U.S. over the 20th century, obtained through a unique comparison between counties with or without dams but with similar hydropower potential. Until mid-century, the availability of cheap local power from hydroelectric dams conveyed an important advantage that attracted industry and population. By the 1950s, however, these advantages were attenuated by improvements in the efficiency of thermal power generation and the advent of high tension transmis- sion lines. Using a novel combination of synthetic control methods and event-study techniques, I show that, on average, dams built before 1950 had substantial short run effects on local population and employment growth, whereas those built after 1950 had no such effects. Moreover, the impact of pre-1950 dams persisted and continued to grow after the advantages of cheap local hydroelectricity were attenuated, suggesting the presence of important agglomeration spillovers. Over a 50 year horizon, I estimate that at least one half of the long run effect of pre-1950 dams is due to spillovers. The estimated short and long run effects are highly robust to alternative procedures for selecting synthetic controls, to controls for confounding factors such as proximity to transportation networks, and to alternative sample restrictions, such as dropping dams built by the Tennessee Valley Authority or removing control counties with environmen- tal regulations. I also find small local agglomeration effects from smaller dam projects, and small spillovers to nearby locations from large dams. Lastly, I find relatively small costs of environmental regulations associated with hydroelectric licensing rules. In Chapter 2, I study the joint choice of spouse and location made by individuals at the start of their adult lives. I assume that potential spouses meet in a marriage market and decide who to marry and where they will live, taking account of varying economic opportunities in different locations and inherent preferences for living near the families of both spouses. I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates a collective model of household allocation, conditional on the choice of spouse and location, with a forward-looking model of the marriage market that allows for the potential inability of spouses to commit to a particular intra-household sharing rule. I address the issue of unobserved heterogeneity in the tastes of husbands and wives using a control-function approach that assumes there is a one-to-one mapping between unobserved preferences of the two spouses and their labor supply choices. Estimation results for young dual- career households in the 2000 Census lead to three main findings. First, I find excess sensitivity of the sharing rule that governs the allocation of resources among couples to the conditions in the location they actually choose, implying that spouses cannot fully commit to a sharing rule. Second, I show that the lack of commitment has a relatively larger effect on the share of family resources received by women. Third, I find that the failure of full commitment can explain nearly all of the gap in the interstate migration rates of single and married people in the U.S. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine unintended consequences of environmental regula- tions affecting the location of power plants. I present evidence that while hydroelectric licensing rules do conserve the wilderness and the wildlife by restricting the development of hydro projects in some counties, they lead to more greenhouse gas emissions in those same locations. Such environmental regulations aimed to preserve natural ecosystems do not seem to really protect nature. Basically, land conservation regulations give rise to a replacement of hydropower, which is a renewable, non-emitting source of energy, with conventional fossil-fuel power, which is highly pollutant. Restrictions imposed by hydroelectric licensing rules might be used as leverage by electric utilities to get permits to expand thermal power generation. Each megawatt of hydropower potential that is not developed because of those regulations induces the production of the average emis- sions of carbon dioxide per megawatt of U.S. coal-fired power plants. Environmental regulations focusing only on the preservation of ecosystems appears to stimulate dirty substitutions within electric utilities regarding electricity generation.

In this paper, we begin by documenting substantial variation in house price growth across neighborhoods within a city during city-wide housing price booms. We then present a model which links house price movements across neighborhoods within a city and the gentrification of those neighborhoods in response to a city wide housing demand shock. A key ingredient in our model is a positive neighborhood externality: individuals like to live next to richer neighbors. This generates an equilibrium where households segregate based upon their income. In response to a city-wide demand shock, higher income residents will choose to expand their housing by migrating into the poorer neighborhoods that directly abut the initial richer neighborhoods. The in-migration of the richer residents into these border neighborhoods will bid up prices in those neighborhoods causing the original poorer residents to migrate out. We refer to this process as “endogenous gentrification”. Using a variety of data sets and using Bartik variation across cities to identify city level housing demand shocks, we find strong empirical support for the model's predictions.

While research on the behavior and circumstance of single mothers is voluminous, existing research on single fatherhood is quite limited. Due to their increasing prevalence and unique circumstances, single fathers present an interesting study of household behavior. I profile the current U.S. single father population using the American Community Survey 2011 1% Sample and perform longitudinal analysis using 1990-2009 samples of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Compared to married fathers, single fathers experience a decrease in income and wages and an increase in weekly hours of housework; moreove their wages remain suppressed after single fatherhood has ended (i.e. after they remarry or their children have left the household). These results provide additional evidence that housework has a negative effect on wages, and suggest that these effects may extend beyond the actual years of increased domestic responsibilities. In addition, the decreased earnings of single fathers suggest that the group might warrant increased attention from a policy perspective.

This paper uses data drawn from the 1970-2010 decennial Censuses to examine the evolution of immigrant earnings in the U.S. labor market. The analysis reveals that there are cohort effects not only in the level of earnings, with more recent cohorts generally having relatively lower entry wages, but also in the rate of growth of earnings, with more recent cohorts having a smaller rate of economic assimilation. Immigrants who entered the country before the 1980s typically found that their initial wage disadvantage(relative to natives) narrowed by around 15 percentage points during their first two decades in the United States. In contrast, the immigrants who entered the country after the 1980s have a negligible rate of wage convergence. Part of the slowdown in wage convergence reflects a measurable reduction in the actual rate of human capital accumulation. In particular, there has been a concurrent decline in the rate at which the newer immigrant cohorts are picking up English language skills. The study identifies one factor that explains part of these trends: the rapid growth in the size of specific national origin groups in the United States reduces incentives for acquiring English language skills. The growth in the size of these groups accounts for about a quarter of the decline in the rates of human capital acquisition and economic assimilation.

In this paper, we begin by documenting substantial variation in house-price growth across neighborhoods within a city during citywide housing price booms. We then present a model which links house-price movements across neighborhoods within a city and the gentrifi cation of those neighborhoods in response to a citywide housing-demand shock. A key ingredient in our model is a positive neighborhood externality: individuals like to live next to richer neighbors. This generates an equilibrium where households segregate based upon their income. In response to a citywide demand shock, higher-income residents will choose to expand their housing by migrating into the poorer neighborhoods that directly abut the initial richer neighborhoods. The in-migration of the richer residents into these border neighborhoods will bid up prices in those neighborhoods, causing the original poorer residents to migrate out. We refer to this process as “endogenous gentrifi cation.” Using a variety of data sets and using Bartik variation across cities to identify city-level housing demand shocks, we fi nd strong empirical support for the model’s predictions.

Crosscountry variation in average retirement age is usually attributed to institutional differences that affect individuals' incentives to retire. We suggest a different approach. Since workers in different occupations naturally retire at different ages, the composition of occupations within an economy matters for its average retirement age. Using U.S. data we infer the average retirement age by occupation, which we then use to predict the retirement age of 38 countries according to the occupational composition of these countries. Our findings suggest that the differences in occupational composition explain up to 32.4% of the observed crosscountry variation in retirement age.

As the workforce ages we are finding it a challenge to recruit new employees at all levels. So our question involves what can we do to attract and retain young people to our company? We have some insight into how to attract employees but where we would like your help is how to design our work and career paths to maintain the employees?

For the last three decades, assessments of the future of survey data collection have had a significant focus on longitudinal surveys. Among the three major surveys sponsored by NSF, the PSID has always been known as longitudinal survey and for good reason. It tracked respondents coming from the Survey of Economic Opportunity plus an augmentation sample, for decades. Using yearly, and later biennial, surveys the PSID collects data on the household and its evolution through time. The other two main NSF-sponsored surveys - the ANES and the GSS are primarily thought of as cross-sectional, but longitudinal elements have been present in these two surveys for decades...

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through formal workforce participation; through home work of various sorts; and through selling subsistence, providing in-home services to nonfamily members in exchange for cash. Unlike earlier works which focused on single locations or ethnic or racial groups or female occupations, I tell a national story of ever-married women's cash-producing work. Working-class wives and mothers filled in the economic gaps existing in the interactions of their families with the capitalist marketplace through a range of different methods. While early 20th-century unions called for the establishment of a living wage for male workers, the world in which those workers lived required both family wages and family strategies to bring in other forms of cash for their survival.

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