This paper re-examines the impact of city educational composition on wages, often interpreted as human capital externalities. Using U.S. Census data, I find large, positive spillovers from college education in the 1980s, as documented by Moretti (2004a). In contrast, in the 1990s, the supply of skilled workers has no impact on average wages and may even negatively impact the wages of low-skill workers. These findings invite reinterpretation of previous studies on social returns to education, as shifts in the impact of city education composition on wages are not consistent with standard models of technological human capital externalities.

Our primary purpose is to study how patterns of interstate elderly migration have changed in the 21st century. The replacement of the Census Long Form (CLF) with the American Community Survey (ACS) requires us to devise a methodology for reconciling the differences between the two data sources. Design and Methods: Two additional data sources the Current Population Survey (CPS) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) -- that span 1980-2010 aid in our methodology and illuminate if detected changes in migration are genuine or instead an artifact of using the ACS. Migration rates and state-to-state flows are compared across years and data sources. Results: The elderly migration rate may have decreased or increased since 2000 depending on the methodology and data used. Continuing trends include the decline of Florida and the ascent of Idaho, Georgia and the Carolinas as destinations. Unique to the 2000s is Nevadas dramatic fall as a net-importer. Implications: The ACS can be used to create comparable migration data that reveals a continuation of geographic patterns identified in past work plus some new events. Its small number of migrants, however, casts doubt on its usefulness for analyzing annual migration patterns or for small population states. Most troubling, its changed definition of residence and survey timing leaves us unable to answer definitively the basic question of whether elderly migration has increased, decreased or stayed the same in the 21st century.

Post-secondary education is one of the most important decisions a student is faced with when leaving high school. There have been numerous studies as to whether the additional education is worthy of one's time and attention but what has not been addressed where is important. If one plans to live in a certain area it would be extremely beneficial to know whether your education is going to benefit one's financial situation or not. Utilizing incomes as the dependent variable and Ordinary Least Squares as the econometric method, this paper concludes having advanced degrees in the metropolitan areas are very beneficial whereas it is much less impactful in micropolitan areas. It also suggests the lack of an advanced degree will generate a negative impact on one's income but when taking into consideration the inherent effects of the micropolitan area, there is a small premium to be obtained.

We document the correlations between early childhood health (as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts born between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height and education, a small correlation between height and education, and positive but small returns for both height and education. The relationship between height and education was stronger in the twentieth century and stronger in the first part of the twentieth century than later on (when both investments in education and height stalled), but never as strong as in developing countries. The labor market and wealth returns to height and education also were higher in the twentieth compared to the nineteenth century. We relate our findings to the theory of human capital formation and speculate that the greater importance of physical labor in the nineteenth century economy, which raised the opportunity cost of schooling, may have depressed the height-education relationship relative to the twentieth century. Our findings are consistent with an increasing importance of cognitive abilities acquired in early childhood. 2

Objective. To identify which states achieve comparable enrollment rates for Medicaid-eligible, citizen children with immigrant and nonimmigrant parents. Data Source. A total of 810,345 Medicaid-eligible, citizen children drawn from the 2008-2010 American Community Survey. Study Design. This study estimates a state fixed-effects probit model of uninsured status for Medicaid-eligible, citizen children. State and immigrant family interaction variables test whether citizen children in immigrant families have a higher probability of remaining uninsured compared to children in nonimmigrant families. Simulations predict the uninsured rates for Medicaid eligible children in immigrant and nonimmigrant families and rank states by the differences between the two groups. Principal Findings. While some states have insignificant and near zero differences in predicted uninsured rates, many states have enrollment disparities reaching 20 percent points between citizen children with immigrant and nonimmigrant parents. Conclusions. Many states have large differences in enrollment rates between their Medicaid-eligible, citizen children with immigrant and nonimmigrant parents. Addressing these enrollment disparities could improve the health status of citizen children in immigrant families and earn Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act bonus payments for many states.

This paper addresses the relationship between child access to and use of health services, perceived health, and parental nativity. Parental region of birth is identified to include the underlying cultural differences across immigrant groups. We found that children of immigrant families, regardless of their immigration status, have lower odds to visit the doctor at least once a year and lack of usual place of care. Conversely, this group has better outcomes with regard to their perceived health. Results hold when parental region of birth is included. Overall, non-citizen children of Latino American, Asian and African families have the worse outcomes.

This dissertation adopts a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to map gentrification. It explores the combination of GIS and publicly available data as a new research tool to investigate gentrification at the Census Tract level within three New York City neighborhoods (Park Slope, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side). Results are compared to contemporary gentrification studies to argue the advantages of utilizing this methodology. Since the term “gentrification” was coined (Glass, 1964), scholars with different research methods have produced a considerable body of literature. However, debates on causes and effects persist. While disciplinary differences could be the reasons for disagreement, another explanation is the various study geographical scales that can range from a single property to an entire city. This dissertation argues neighborhoods are the suitable spatial scale to study gentrification. Three neighborhoods are defined with selected Census Tracts. Rather than aggregating these selected Census Tracts into a single neighborhood, the gentrification maps were created by connecting socio-economic status indicators from Census Surveys to each Census Tract. This approach demonstrates the different degrees of gentrification within these three neighborhoods. Data from 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 Census Surveys are used for cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons. The advantages of this design are: first, the cross-sectional maps demonstrate the different degrees of gentrification within the neighborhoods at a given time. Second, the longitudinal maps show where gentrification moved and expanded through time. Third, as the surrounding Census Tracts outside the defined neighborhoods are also mapped, the “spillover effect” is also examined. Fourth, the clearly defined geographical boundaries of neighborhoods ensure exact comparisons with other researchers and future studies. These gentrification maps revealed that the gentrification of these neighborhoods has been spatially uneven. Certain areas were gentrified first and subsequent gentrification anchored these initial sections. Further, gentrification did not spread equally or endlessly. There were several factors that either facilitated or impeded the expansion of gentrification, and these factors usually worked in tandem with each other. In summary, the gentrification maps in this study provided an enhanced understanding of the spatial-temporal patterns of gentrification in these three neighborhoods.

Explanations for gender difference often focus on relative differences in time and money connected to employment within couples and cultural (e.g. doing gender) arguments to pinpoint the mechanisms that lead to gender-based inequality. However, previous research indicates clear differences in how heterosexual couples allocate time to childcare, housework, and leisure, suggesting that time/money tradeoffs and cultural pressures may operate in different ways across different areas of time use. Further, research points to couples with atypical work/family allocations, like those with a stay-at-home father or breadwinner mother, as drivers of gender similarity or difference in some areas, finding that families with a breadwinner mother and at-home father are the most equal when it comes to childcare time, but the least equal when it comes to housework allocations. However, a rigorous examination of time use in these atypical families has not been conducted drawing on a population sample. We use integrated American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) analyses to extend previous research focused on pinpointing the mechanisms that underlie gender difference and investigate whether time in childcare, housework, leisure, exercise, and sleep differ among a nationally representative sample of at-home and breadwinner parents to better understand how very unequal employment and care obligations (primary parenting vs. breadwinning) and gender shape these time allocations. Overall, we find that mothers and fathers across employment conditions are more alike than different, suggesting that gender, not jobs, has a stronger influence on time use, even in couples with very unequal paid work commitments.

This dissertation contains three essays about the economics of health and health care. The chapters that follow consider health inputs through multiple channels, including health care providers and family structure. Motivated by extraordinary growth in the outpatient surgery market in the past 30 years, the first chapter examines ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) as an alternative to outpatient surgery in hospitals. For a national sample of Medicare patients that varies over time and controlling for physician fixed effects, we show that ASCs treat healthier patients than hospital outpatient departments. Using the variation in ASC use generated by exogenous changes in Medicare payments, we find that treatment in an ASC is associated with better health outcomes, holding patient risk constant. These results suggest that health policy planners have to trade off the superior and cheaper treatment in ASCs against the subsidy outpatient surgeries provide to hospitals. The second chapter examines the effects of minimum nurse staffing legislation in California on labor market outcomes for registered nurses (RNs). Using annual financial data from California hospitals, I find that nurse-to-patient ratios in California hospitals increased substantially following the staffing mandate. However, individual-level survey data indicate that the law had no effect on the aggregate number of RNs or the hours they worked in California hospitals, and at most a modest effect on wages. My findings suggest that offsetting changes due to hospital closures and shifting staff within hospitals mitigated employment effects of the mandated minimum staffing legislation. The final chapter investigates the effect of the age difference between siblings (spacing) on educational achievement. Because spacing may be endogenous, we use an instrumental variables strategy that exploits variation in spacing driven by miscarriages. The results indicate that a one-year increase in spacing increases test scores for older siblings by about 0.17 standard deviations. These results are larger than ordinary least squares estimates, suggesting that failing to account for the endogeneity of spacing may understate its benefits. For younger siblings, we find no causal impact of spacing on test scores.

Women's work and wealth in the United States has been pivotal in shaping the trajectory of the economy, but historical understanding of their economic contributions remains fragmented. This paper examines the impact of various property and labor rights laws on women's property and income growth as well as their rise in various occupations from 1850 to 1870. This especially focuses on married women's property acts, earnings laws, and sole trader laws on women's economic liberation through this time. Prior to the 1870s, there is a lack of national data on women's economic status, with existing case studies often limited to specific states or industries. Theoretical discussions clarify the importance of property rights in women’s economic participation, with laws enabling women to hold property being directly correlated with increased market engagement. Married women’s property acts are predicted to positively influence labor force participation rates by providing greater economic autonomy. Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-difference model, this project analyzes data from the IPUMS Full Count census for 1850, 1860, and 1870, encompassing 48 states. Four models assess the impact of property laws on women's real property holdings, labor force participation, household types, and real property values. By quantifying the impact of various legal reforms on women's economic empowerment, this project fills a gap in the understanding of the intersection between law, society, and women's economic agency during a transformative period in pre-industrial American history. These impacts can implicate the effectiveness of legislative measures in advancing gender equality and economic mobility in the modern day. 1 Ultimately, my findings showed that none of these laws impacted women’s real property values or overall labor force participation rates with statistical significance. Married women’s property acts did have significant impacts on overall unemployment, lowering unemployment in states which passed the law. Sole trader laws, similarly, increased the number of women in trade professions in a statistically significant manner in states where the law was passed. States which passed married women’s property acts were more likely to have women living in family households and less likely to live in non-family households. States which passed sole trader laws saw the opposite effects in household preferences. Earnings acts were not effective across any models.

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between educational and income inequalities in a historical perspective, using a newly developed annual dataset of average years of education in Europe. Theoretically one would expect a reduction in educational inequality should, given the positive correlation between education level and income, initially increase and then, at a later stage, reduce income inequality. Testing for such a Kuznets-type relationship between educational and income inequalities yields an unexpected result: we find the expected inverse U-cure before the 1950s, but the relationship changes into a normal U curve afterward. We explain this observation by a change in the trend of skill premium during the second half of the twentieth century due to an increased relative demand for skills, which contradicts the usual assumption of decreasing returns to education. Due to lack of appropriate wage data, we cannot directly capture this effect. Yet, once we use an instrumental variable estimation method to filter out the effect of the omitted skill premium, the expected inverse U curve also appears for the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Couples make dynamic joint decisions, including how much each spouse works at home and in the market throughout life. By building a dynamic model of taxation, I quantify the welfare gains of moving to a gender-based tax. Further, I explore the implications of a gender-based income tax for labor market and time-use choices within a couple, taking into account changing labor market attachment through life. The key finding is that while gender-based taxation always improves household and social welfare, the model-specific household time allocations and government policy implications depend on underlying assumptions about gender differences. I model the inefficiency of income tax due to pooling old individuals and young individuals who differ in their skill distribution and use of time. Because age is correlated with ability and time investments in education, allowing tax rules to vary with age shrinks labor distortions. I use an overlapping generations model to study the effect of an age-based income tax on efficiency. I analytically show the efficiency gains and I numerically estimate a welfare gain equivalent to 5% of aggregate consumption when age-based taxes are implemented. Adult women generally, and married women in particular, spend more time than men doing housework and childcare activities. While gender differences in time-use patterns among adults at home are readily accepted and well documented, the onset and development of gender time-use differences over the adolescent years and into early adulthood are not well understood. In this research, I describe the development of time-use gender differences over the teenage years and into the early adult years using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data, with a focus on activities relating to family duties and child care activities. I find gender divergence in home duties prior to the teenage years, which sharply stratifies upon high school graduation. Further, I find that time-use outcomes disproportionately impact women from disadvantaged socio-economic and family backgrounds.

This study targets Chinese immigrants in the U.S with a college degree. The choice of a college major for Chinese immigrants is compared to that of other groups, specifically, Japanese immigrants and Korean immigrants, as well as native born non-Hispanic Whites. The study specifically focuses on how the choice of major affects employment opportunities and pay. The three main research questions are stated below:Question 1: Are there certain majors most frequently chosen by Chinese immigrants? Are they different from other groups choices?Question 2: Which majors that Chinese immigrants have had, have lead to a better chance of being employed? Do those majors correspond to the most popular ones?Question 3: Which majors that Chinese immigrants have had, have yielded a higher monetary return? Are those majors the most popular ones? How does the pay level for Chinese immigrants compare to pay level for non-Hispanic Whites and the other Asian immigrants who graduated with the same major?According to the blocked opportunity theory and the assumption of ability preference, I hypothesize that science related majors are most frequently chosen by Chinese immigrants, and that these majors yield a higher probability of being employed and a higher wage rate for Chinese immigrants than other majors. The level of wage differential for individuals from China than from other groups under the same college major is yet unknown.

An estimated 259,000 Hispanics of Venezuelan origin resided in the United States in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Venezuelans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Venezuelan origin; this means either they themselves are Venezuelan immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Venezuela. Venezuelans are the 13th-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 0.5% 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 Venezuelan population with the characteristics of all Hispanics and the U.S. population overall. It is based on tabulations from the 2011 American Community Survey . . .

The paper examines the effects of skilled immigration on US wages that are due to innovation. We extend the studies by Hunt & Gauthier-Loiselle (2010), and Hunt (2011) to explore the immigration-innovation-wages nexus. Using the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) and the US Census datasets we find a significant positive effect of immigration on wages that are attributable to immigrants‘ contribution to innovation. Our findings suggest that as the share of skilled immigrants increases in a particular group, the wages of both natives and immigrants in that group get a positive boost. The effects are more pronounced through immigrants‘ impact on patent granted and patent commercialized, compared with their impact on other measures of innovations. The results also show that the immigrants are more likely to present a paper at a conference or publish in professional journals, primarily because they are more educated or concentrated in the related occupation compared to the natives. Our findings indicate that immigrants make a substantial contribution to the host economy‘s innovation which is a major driver of productivity growth.

Although multiracial youth represent a growing segment of children in all American families, we have little information on their well-being within single-mother households. This article examines multiracial children's level of poverty within single-mother families to identify the degree to which they may stand out from their monoracial peers. Using data from the 20062008 American Community Survey (3-year estimates), we explore the level of racial disparities in child poverty between monoracial White children and monoracial and multiracial children of color. Fully adjusted multivariate logistic regression analyses (n?=?359,588) reveal that nearly all children of color are more likely to be poor than White children. Yet many multiracial children appear to hold an in-between status in which they experience lower rates of poverty than monoracial children of color. The high level of variation across groups suggests that the relationship between race and childhood poverty is more complicated than generally presumed.

This paper analyzes the impact of income tax policy on household labor supply through two key life-cycle choices: education and marriage/divorce. To this end, I construct a quantitative life-cycle model to study the effects of changes in the degree of tax progressivity and in the unit of taxation on household labor supply. The model is calibrated to match key statistics in the United States economy, and then I analyze the impact of several tax reforms on labor supply. I find that when the unit of taxation is changed from the family to the individual this reduces the tax burden on secondary earners, which increases womens education and labor supply, but has a negligible effects on men. Further, I find that smallreductions in the progressivity of the tax schedule increase college enrollment and labor supply. To drive these results, the marriage/divorce decision is important because it amplifies the effect of tax reforms on labor supply and education. My experiments demonstrate that one underestimates the impact of income tax reforms on labor supply if life-cycle choices are ignored.

An estimated 1.2 million Hispanics of Guatemalan origin resided in the United States in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Guatemalans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Guatemalan origin; this means either they themselves are Guatemalan immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Guatemala. Guatemalans are the sixth-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 2.3% 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 Guatemalan 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 . . .