Objective:This study is a descriptive investigation of trends in BMI in the USA over time, across race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) groups, and across different datasets. Methods: The study analyzes micro-level data from three widely used cross-sectional US health datasets: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), from the 1970s to 2008. Consistent race/ethnicity and SES groups are constructed for all datasets. SES is measured by education and income. Focusing on adults aged 2074 years, the study estimates BMI time trends, distributional shifts, and incremental associations (gradients) with SES. Results: SES-BMI gradients are consistently larger for women than for men, differ across race/ethnicity groups, and are similar across datasets. Trends in mean BMI are comparable across White, Black and Hispanic males, while Hispanic females range between White and Black females. Self-reported BMI in the NHANES differs markedly from self-reports in the NHIS and BRFSS. Conclusion: The NHANES, NHIS, and BRFSS provide similar evidence regarding BMI trends over time and across race/ethnicity, gender, and SES groups. Racial disparities in BMI remain after adjusting for SES and should be studied further.

Education correlates strongly with most important social and economic outcomes such as economic success, health, family stability, and social connections. Theories of stratification and selection created doubts about whether education actually caused good things to happen. Because schools and colleges select who continues and does not, it was easy to imagine that education added little of substance. Evidence now tips the balance away from bias and selection and in favor of substance. Investments in education pay off for individuals in many ways. The size of the direct effect of education varies among individuals and demographic groups. Education affects individuals and groups who are less likely to pursue a college education more than traditional college students. A smaller literature on social returns to education indicatesthat communities, states, and nations also benefit from increased education of their populations; some estimates imply that the social returns exceed the private returns.

This dissertation is comprised of three essays related to teacher labor markets. The first essay describes a theoretical model which incorporates an oft overlooked fact of educational production, namely the fact that teachers are asymmetrically well informed about what actions are best for their specific classes. The model shows that to take advantage of teachers local knowledge, districts should offer contracts with output-based pay for performance coupled with decentralized decision making and support for teachers to help them set locally appropriate goals. I use data from Minnesotas Q-Comp program to empirically test the model. The data, however, do not confirm (or reject) the theory. The second essay investigates the impact of collective bargaining on teacher contracts using the 2003-04 and 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and data from a survey that I administered. Contracts negotiated via collective bargaining have greater returns to experience than do districts without collective bargaining. Unions do not appear to be a roadblock to basing compensation on student performance but they do oppose basing compensation on administrator review and basing tenure on student performance. The third essay turns to an analysis of average hourly wages. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I compare teachers wages to demographically similar workers in other occupations. First I estimate that teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week annually. Using the ATUS data, I conclude that high school teachers earn approximately 11% less than full time college educated workers in other occupations; but elementary, middle and special education teachers are not underpaid relative to full time college educated workers in other occupations.

Minorities in many countries have been found to have lower participation rates in self-employment. In this paper we introduce beliefs as a channel of persistent discrimination in self-employment despite perfect observability of individual ability. In the theoretical model individuals can become workers or entrepreneurs, where entrepreneurs require the establishment of productive relations. An exogenous shock causes a temporary taste for discriminationamongst few principals against a certain group of individuals. The resulting discrimination negatively affects others through strategic complementarities in productive relations an individual requires to setup an enterprise. Discrimination precipitates across the economy through coordination failures driven by beliefs conditioned on observed discrimination. As a result the discriminated group might persistently have lower participation rates and payoff s from self-employment, even after no more taste for discrimination exists in society. We complement ourtheoretical model with an empirical exercise, indicating that beliefs about discrimination can lead to lower self-employment rates among blacks in the US, and taste for discrimination is not a signifi cant predictor.

The creative class literature centers on regional economic development, urban policy, and amenities. The creative class literature is considered at the metropolitan scale and is argued to be highly mobile. According to Asheim and Hansen (2009) , there are three knowledge bases of the creative class, analytic, synthetic, and symbolic. The three knowledge bases vary across two dimensions of ‘climate’. People climate refers to factors that positively effect the location of people, while business climate refers to factors that positively effect the location of businesses. The analytic knowledge base is comprised of economic activities that are based in scientific processes and have been codified and use formal models. The synthetic knowledge base includes economic activities that apply combinations of existing knowledge in innovative ways. Finally, the symbolic knowledge base involves the processes of creating cultural symbols, design, and images. Combining theories of migration and creative class, this work examines the migration tendencies of two knowledge bases, symbolic and synthetic, artists and engineers respectively, across three scales, metropolitan, submetropolitan, and individual, to determine if these two subgroups have the same residential preferences. This is accomplished using three generalized linear models across three scales. The first model examines the difference between migrating artists and engineers for 52 U.S. metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million. The second model examines the difference between migrating artists and , , ,

I document the life-cycle earnings profile for the 25-year-old college- and high school-educated white men in 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970. I find that older cohorts have flatter average life-cycle earnings profile: The average annual real earnings of college-educated individuals from the 1940 cohort rose by a factor of 4, while those for the 1970 cohort rose by a factor of less than 2.5. Using a version of the Ben-Porath model, I propose an explanation based on the composition effect. In my model, all individuals have a high school diploma and are differentiated by their ability. They must decide whether to work or go to a four-year college. There is a threshold ability above which individuals choose to attend college and below which they work. As in the Ben-Porath model, life-cycle earnings profiles have a hump shape, and individuals with higher ability have steeper earnings profiles. All cohorts face the same ability distribution and an exogenous sequence of wage rate per unit of human capital that grows at a constant rate. That is, individuals from the 1970 cohort will face the same growth in wage rate as the 1940 cohort but start with a higher initial level. A higher initial level of wage rate increases college attainment implying that the average ability is lower for both college- and high school-educated individuals. Since lower ability individuals have less steep increment in their earnings, the average college life-cycle earnings profile for the 1970 cohort will be flatter than that of the 1940 cohort. A similar result holds for the average high school earnings profile. My model is able to quantitatively explain approximately 67 percent of the flattening in the average life-cycle earnings profile for college-educated individuals and about 35 percent of that for high school-educated individuals. The model also consistently predicts the unconditional earnings profile behavior across generations.

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of suchtheories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop amodel of household production in the 19th century United States with own children and slave labor as inputs and usethe model to show how the price of own children would have changed with changes in the households slaveholdings.I propose that slave children born to mothers owned by Southern households imparted plausibly exogenous shocksto the net price of the slaveowning households own children. Using a panel dataset of white Southern householdsbetween 1850 and 1870, I measure the fertility response of families to this changing price and show a strong, negativecorrelation between the predicted price of children and household fertility rates. To further corroborate these results, I measure the fertility response of households to another shock to the price of their own children: slave emancipation. Again, I find a strong, negative correlation between predicted prices and fertility rates. The results are consistent with theories of the demographic transition centered on the rising price of children.

Unbiased cancer rates are important for studying etiology and monitoring population trends in cancer. While much scholarship has focused on the numerator of rates, there has been little consideration of the role of systematic bias in the denominator of rates. Irregular censuses, age-heaping and internal migration are three sources of potential demographic bias affecting the denominator. These issues, although less important than error in the numerator, should be explored. Resumo As taxas de câncer não enviesadas são importantes para estudar a etiologia e monitorar as tendências de câncer na popu-lação. Enquanto muitos estudos têm se concentrado no numerador das taxas, tem havido pouca consideração do papel do viés sistemático no denominador das taxas. Recenseamentos irregulares, erro de informação por concentração em idades preferenciais e migração interna são três fontes de viés demográfico potencial que afetam o denominador. Essas questões, embora menos importante do que o erro no numerador, devem ser exploradas. Palavras-chave: neoplasias; países em desenvolvimento; demografia.

This paper proposes a search theoretic model of optimal employment contract under repeated moral hazard. The model integrates two important attributes of the labour market: workers' work incentive on the job and their mobility in the labour market. The optimal long-term contract is characterized by an increasing wage-tenure profile. The labour productivity of a match also increases with tenure due to a worker's increasing effort provision. Even though all workers and firms are ex ante homogeneous, these two outcomes jointly generate endogenous heterogeneity of the wages and labour productivity. It is also shown that the interaction of these factors provides novel implications for wage dispersion, and the calibrated model generates significantly larger wage dispersion than previous studies.

A neglected area in historical stature studies is the relationship between stature and family size, which are documented here to be positively related. The relationship between material inequality and heath is the subject of considerable debate, and there was an inverse relationship between material inequality and stature. After controlling for family size and wealth variables, the paper supports a positive relationship between the physical environment and stature.

Many changes have occurred in the U.S.labor market since 1940. Examplesinclude changes in the premium collegegraduates are paid over high school graduates,female participation in the labor force,executive compensation, immigration, etc.One aspect that has received little attention isthe changes in the profile of earnings over thelife cycle for people born in different decades.

I structurally estimate an incomplete markets life‐cycle model with endogenous labor supply using data on the joint distribution of wages, hours, and consumption. The model is successful at matching the evolution of both the first and second moments of the data over the life cycle. The key challenge for the model is to generate declining inequality in annual hours worked over the first half of the working life, while respecting the constraints imposed by the data on consumption and wages. I argue that this is a robust feature of the data on life‐cycle labor supply that is strongly at odds with the intratemporal first‐order condition for labor. Allowing for a realistic degree of involuntary unemployment, coupled with preferences that feature nonseparability in the disutility of the extensive and intensive margins of hours worked, allows the model to overcome this challenge. The results imply that labor market frictions are important in jointly accounting for observed cross‐sectional inequality in labor supply and consumption, and may have quantitative relevance for analyses that exploit the intratemporal first‐order condition for labor.

Are households more likely to be homeowners when "housing risk" is higher? We show that homeownership rates and loan-to-value (LTV) ratios at the city level are strongly negatively correlated with local house price volatility. However, causal inference is confounded by house price levels, which are systematically correlated with housing risk in an intuitive way: in cities where the land value is larger relative to the local cost of structures, house prices are higher and more volatile. We disentangle the contributions of high price levels from high volatilities by building a life-cycle model of homeownership choices. The model is able to explain much of the cross-city dispersion in homeownership and LTV. We find that higher price levels explain the lower homeownership, while higher risk explains the lower LTV in high land value cities. The relationship between LTV and risk highlights the importance of including other means of incomplete insurance in models of homeownership. Finally, we use the model to show why regression-based inferences about the effect of risk on homeownership are biased.

A neglected area in historical stature studies is the relationship between stature and family size. Using robust statistics and a large 19th century data set, this study documents a positive relationship between stature and family size across the stature distribution. The relationship between material inequality and health is the subject of considerable debate, and there was a positive relationship between stature and wealth and an inverse relationship between stature and material inequality. After controlling for family size and wealth variables, the paper reports a positive relationship between the physical environment and stature.

This dissertation deals with how Chilean emigrants who have migrated to the US since the 1950s remember and define their migration decision in connection to changing historical processes in both the country of origin and that of destination. Using mainly oral histories collected from 30 Chileans I compare the processes that led to their migration; their memories of Chile at the time of migration; the arrival to the United States, as well as their intermediate migrations to other countries; their memories of Chile during the visits to the country of origin; and their self identifications with the countries of origin and destination. I also use census data and migration entry data to characterize and analyze the different waves of Chilean migration to the United States. I separate each wave by a major historical moment. The first wave commences at the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War; the second with the military coup of September 11, 1973; the third with the economic crisis of 1982; and the fourth with the return to democratic governments in 1990. Connecting the oral histories, migration data and historiographies to current approaches to migration decision-making, the study of social memory, and the construction of migrant identities, this dissertation explores the interplay of these multiple factors in the social constructions underlying the decisions to migrate.

The prevalence of overweight is higher for Hispanic children of immigrants than children of natives. Thisdoes not fit the pattern of the epidemiological paradox, the widely supported finding that immigrants tend to be healthier than their U.S.-born peers, and it suggests that exposure to the U.S. increases immigrant childrens risk of overweight. This studys primary contribution is to better assess how exposure to the U.S. environment affects childhood overweight among a homogamous ethnic group,Mexican-Americans. We do so by using an innovative binational study design to compare the weight ofMexican-American children of immigrants, Mexican-American children of natives, and Mexican children in Mexico with different propensities of having immigrant parents. Cross-sectional data are derived from a pooled sample of 9982 6e19 year old children living in either Mexico or the United States in the early 2000s. Mexican-resident children with a very high propensity to have immigrant parents have significantly lower percentile BMIs and lower odds of overweight than Mexican children with lower propensitiesof emigration and U.S.-resident Mexican-American children. This suggests that selection into immigration streams does not account for the high prevalence of overweight among children of Mexican immigrants. Rather, U.S. exposure significantly raises children of Mexican immigrants risk of being overweight. Moreover, second generation children have the highest percentile BMIs and greatest odds ofoverweight of all comparison groups, including children of natives. This suggests that they experience risks above and beyond the effects of exposure to American society.

Although the divorce rate in the United States increased throughout much of the twentieth century, it has declined in recent decades. Here we explore the variation in women’s rate of divorce and the proportion of ever-married women separated/divorced from 1900 to 2022 using National Vital Statistics, Decennial Census, and American Community Survey data. We then examine the proportion of currently separated/divorced among ever-married women from 1940 to 2022, disaggregating trends by race/ethnicity and educational attainment. This profile is an update to FP-20- 22 and a companion profile to FP-24-10, which details variation in marriage trends over the last century.

Over the 1980s and 1990s the wage diff erentials between men and women (with similar observable characteristics) declined signifi cantly. At the same time, the returnsto education increased. It has been suggested that these two trends may reflect a common change in the relative price of a skill which is more abundant in both womenand more educated workers. In this paper we explore the relevance of this hypothesis by examining the cross-city co-movement in both male-female wage diff erentials andreturns to education over the 1980-2000 period. In parallel to the aggregate pattern, we fi nd that male-female wage differentials at the city levels moved in opposite direction to the changes in the return to education. We also fi nd this relationship to be particularly strong when we isolate data variation which most likely reflects the effect of technological change on relative prices. We take considerable care of controlling for potential selection issues which could bias our interpretation. Overall, our cross-city estimates suggest that most of the aggregate reduction in the male-female wage differential observed over the 1980-2000 period was likely due to a change in the relative price of skill that both females and educated workers have in greater abundance.