This dissertation empirically evaluates how wages of U.S. native workers in various education levels, occupations, and industries, are affected by immigration in recent decades. Across education and occupation, the results confirm common expectations that less educated or less skilled native workers are more negatively affected by immigration than more highly educated or highly skilled native workers. However, the reason is not the larger volume of less educated immigrants in recent decades intensifying competition in those skill levels. Rather, it is due to the nature of tasks prevalent among less educated and less skilled occupation holders. Among less skilled native workers, only those that work in certain industries are negatively affected by immigration. Industries seem to respond differently to the availability of less skilled immigrants, leading to differential wage impacts across industries. In particular, the findings are consistent with the theory that industries that use less skilled workers intensively are able to expand as less skilled immigrant workers are more readily available, allowing these industries to absorb immigrants without a negative impact on wages of less skilled . . .

This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of labor economics and economic demography. The first essay builds on previous research, which has analyzed the economic impacts of divorce using various methods and outcomes, and from this research it is clear that divorce has economic consequences for women. One consequence of divorce that has not been explored is changes time allocation. Time allocation, specifically time spent in leisure, is directly related to the well-being of individuals, and it is expected to change with divorce when time-use gains from joint household production are no longer realized. The results show that divorced women spend more time in market work, and less time in housework than their married counterparts. Divorced women with children are found to have less leisure time than married women, and divorced women are found to spend the same amount of time in primary childcare yet significantly less time with children while doing other activities. The second essay is on the decision to enter the labor force for women with children. This decision is based on a variety of factors that includes characteristics of spouses. Husbands work schedules, work hours, and flexibility of work time will play an important role in this decision to enter the labor force, and additionally, in the decision to work part-time or a set number of hours. This paper uses detailed time-dairy and work schedules data to investigate the relationship between husbands work schedules and maternal employment. The results show married women with children are less likely to participate in the labor force when their husbands finish work after 6:00pm when compared to husbands that finish work before 6:00pm, even while controlling for simultaneous relationship between husbands work stopping time and wifes labor force participation. Finally, the third essay of this dissertation analyzes the effect of state-level changes in divorce law on the time allocation of married men and women. The results show that married mens time allocation is not impacted by the change in divorce law, yet women are found to be spending more time in leisure and less time in household production in states with unilateral divorce law.

We use the cross-state, cross-time variation in bank deregulation across the U.S. states to assess how improvements in banking systems affected the labor market opportunities of black workers. Bank deregulation from the 1970s through the 1990s improved bank efficiency, lowered entry barriers facing nonfinancial firms, and intensified competition for labor throughout the economy. Consistent with Beckers (1957) seminal theory of racial discrimination, we find that deregulation-induced improvements in the banking system boosted blacksrelative wages by facilitating the entry of new firms and reducing the manifestation of racial prejudices in labor markets.

We hypothesize that in modern societies the striving for high positions in the hierarchy of organizations is equivalent to the striving for status and power in historical and traditional societies. Analyzing a sample of 4,491 US men and 5,326 US women, we find that holding a supervisory position or being in charge of hiring and firing is positively associated with offspring count in men but not in women. The positive effect in men is attributable mainly to the higher proportion of childlessness among men in non-supervisory positions and those without the power to hire and fire. This effect is in accordance with the positive relationship between other status indicators and reproductive success found in men from traditional, historical, and modern societies. In women, we further find a curvilinear relationship between income percentile and offspring number by analyzing US census data, indicating that women may strive for resources associated with advancement rather than for status per se.

Age-friendly communities are committed to improving the physical and social environments that surround older adults to facilitate independence and neighborhood cohesion. The movement to create these places is being facilitated by policy makers, planners, and researchers from a variety of disciplines who are collaborating under the premise that traditional aging services must be seen within the context of the wider community. Although not a panacea for all the challenges faced by community dwelling elders, this approach will be an important component of the future of environmental gerontology because it rests on acknowledging the effect of the environment on health outcomes.

Cross-country variation in effective retirement age is usually attributed to institutional differences that affect individuals incentives to retire. This paper suggestsa different approach to explain this variation. Since working individuals in different occupations naturally retire at different ages, the composition of occupations within an economy matters for its average effective retirement age. Using U.S. Census data we infer the average retirement age by occupation, which we then use to predict the retirement age of 38 countries, using the occupational distribution of these countries. Our findings suggest that the differences in occupational composition explain up to38% of the observed cross-country variation in retirement age.

Long-run labor market inequities are frequently attributed to disparities in primary and secondary school quality,and modern philanthropists often resort to targeted and tightly conditioned gifts to address these quality disparities. We match data on the Rosenwald Schools Program, an early 20th century initiative aimed at the Southern blackwhite school quality gap, to newly assembled data on local school districts and measure the impact of Rosenwald gifts on African-American public school resources. Although these gifts increased contemporaneous expenditures on African-American schools, results show that they yielded no lasting change in multiple school quality proxies. Further, because Rosenwald funds were diverted or implicitly matched to favor white schools, we find no evidence that the Fund impacted the black-white gap in superficial school quality. We demonstrate, however, that public spending had a comparatively steep impact on black attendance and literacy, which helps to explain why the Rosenwald program led to meaningful human capital gains for black, but not white, individuals (Aaronson and Mazumder, forthcoming) despite its failure to impact relative school quality.

Utilizing a principal-agent model as a heuristic framework and data envelopment analysis as an analytical framework, this study examined relative efficiencies and resource utilization of U.S. Carnegie 15 (very high research activity) and 16 (high research activity) public and private non-profit four-year research universities in the year 2007/08 measured against baccalaureate degree production and graduation rate efficiency. The empirical findings reveal that, on average, overall technical inefficiency for all sets of research universities is primarily attributed to managerial decisions ratherthan failure to operate at most productive scale size. The results for public Carnegie 15 research universities (PCRU-15s), on average, show that resource utilization is better when measured against baccalaureate degree production than against graduation rate efficiency as indicated by LPTIE scores for all PCRU-15s corresponding with baccalaureate degree production (LPTIE % = 14.22) and graduation rate efficiency (LPTIE % = 22.65). The results for public Carnegie 16 research universities (PCRU-16s), on average, show that resource utilization is better when measured against graduation rate efficiency than against baccalaureate degree production as indicated by LPTIE scores for PCRU-16s corresponding with baccalaureate degree production (LPTIE % = 44.54) and graduation rate efficiency (LPTIE % = 40.58). Comparing the magnitude of LPTIE scores for private non-profit Carnegie 15 research universities (PNCRU-15s) corresponding with baccalaureate degree production (LPTIE %= 8.65) and graduation rate efficiency (LPTIE %= 10.69), results indicate that managerial decisions for PNCRU-15s, on average, are such that resource utilization is better when measured against baccalaureate degree production than against graduation rate efficiency. Consistent with private non-profit Carnegie 15 research universities, the magnitude of LPTIE scores for private non-profit Carnegie 16 research universities (PNCRU-16s) corresponding with baccalaureate degree production (LPTIE %= 8.53) and graduation rate efficiency (LPTIE %= 13.53), results indicate that managerial decisions for PNCRU-16s, on average, are such that resource utilization is better when measured against baccalaureate degree production than against graduation rate efficiency.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Road Home program provided cash grants directly to individual homeowners to offset repair costs and to encourage rebuilding. I develop a dynamic discrete choice model of New Orleans homeowners’ post-Katrina choices regarding residential locations, home repairs, home sales, and amounts to borrow or save, and I derive and implement a maximum likelihood estimator for the model’s structural parameters. Using simulations I find that the Road Home program significantly increased the fraction of homes rebuilt within four years of Katrina, mostly by relaxing fi- nancing constraints for borrowing constrained households who would have strongly preferred to rebuild even in the absence of a subsidy if the associated costs could have been spread out over time. I find that location preferences are highly heterogeneous, and most households are far enough from the mar- gin with respect to their preferred location that even large location subsidies induce few households to change locations. These findings suggest that disaster-related subsidies to dangerous locations generate substantially smaller economic distortions than would be predicted by spatial equilibrium models with homogeneous agents.

The decision to enter the labor force for mothers is based on a variety of factors that includes characteristics of spouses. Husbands work schedules, work hours, and flexibility of work time will play an important roll in this decision to enter the labor force, and additionally, in the decision to work part-time or a set number of hours. This paper uses detailed time-dairy and work schedules data to investigate the relationship between husbands work schedules and maternal employment. Preliminary results suggest that married women with children are less likely to participate in the labor force when their husbands finish work after 6:00pm when compared to husbands that finish work before 6:00pm.

The first and second chapters examine the disincentive effects of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program’s generosity on the employment decisions of prime age blind and/or deaf individuals. Using an individual-level model with state and time-fixed effects and the Difference-in-Difference method, I find only small impacts of an increase in monthly SSI benefits. Grouping all blind and deaf individuals together, the estimated impact of a $100 increase in monthly maximum SSI benefits (about a 17% increase) is only a 0.4 percentage point reduction in labor force participation. The estimated effects from separate analysis by demographic groups, however, suggest larger reductions (about 1 percentage point) in labor force participation. The largest impact found in this study suggests a 4 percentage point reduction in the labor force participation of high school dropout blind and/or deaf individuals from a $100 increase in monthly maximum SSI benefits. Using an alternative definition of labor supply (hours of work per year) I still find only a small impact of SSI generosity on the labor force participation decision. Specifically, a $100 increase in maximum SSI benefits per month reduces hours of work per year by 4 hours for all the blind and/or deaf individuals. The third chapter explores the effects of chronic child illness on married mother’s labor force participation decision using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Child Development Supplements (CDS). Mothers of sick children may remain at home in order to care for their children. Alternatively, mothers may decide to enter the labor force to pay for additional health resources. While previous studies suggest that a sick child negatively affects mothers’ labor supply, most studies use only cross-section datasets and therefore lacking information on changes in both child health and labor supply of mothers over time. The long term or permanent nature of chronic child illness may adversely affect a married mother’s labor force participation decision over several years in a way that cannot be observed in a single year analysis. Using a pooled Probit model and exploiting the panel structure of the data from 1997 to 2007, I find that having at least one child with a chronic illness condition reduces married mother’s probability of working by almost 2.5 percentage points. This is a small effect considering almost 72% of the mothers in the dataset are employed. The pooled OLS model suggests that with the existence of at least one chronically ill child, a married mother increases her hours of work by almost 10 years per year. However this effect is not significant. Considering that the married mother’s average hours of work per year are almost 1587 hours, this effect is almost negligible indicating no substantial change in mother’s hours of work per year.

In recent decades, federal housing policy has attempted to address problems associated with concentrated poverty through programs that promote geographic mobility and the dispersal of low income households. However, while cities such as Chicago are redeveloping public housing communities and dispersing poor households, some Midwestern communities are preemptively passing legislation that would prevent a diaspora of low-income migrants from moving to their communities to obtain housing assistance. Specifically, some public housing authorities are creating jurisdictional waiting list preferences by housing authority; effectively reducing the ability of out-of-jurisdiction applicants to receive housing assistance in their community. This paper poses two questions: 1. Can the adoption of jurisdictional preference policies by housing authorities be connected to a perception that there is an influx of low-income migrants from Chicago? And 2. How does this phenomenon fit into the larger context of mobility/dispersal oriented housing policy?This study examines four rural/small housing authorities within a single Midwestern state which have adopted jurisdictional preference policies. Using interviews with housing authorities and affordable housing organizations as well as content analysis of government documents and newspaper articles, I investigated the narratives of migration related to housing assistance and policy change in each community. Key findings reveal that the Chicago migration narrative is present within these communities and organizations, and has significantly affected the regulatory and political environment in which they operate; relating to community support, political context, and administrative duties. These factors, combined with funding shortfalls, have contributed to the adoption of jurisdictional preference policies. Although these policies can be seen as an effort to give primary preference to jurisdictional residents in a landscape where the poor are allowed ever increasing mobility and choice in residence, it also gives some insight into how the organizations themselves are adapting to the reality of a more mobile cohort of low-income households.

Objectives. We compared health outcomes for adults with the General Equivalency Diploma (GED) and regular high school diploma to determine whether GED recipients are equivalent to regular graduates despite research that documents their disadvantages in other outcomes.Methods. We used 1997 to 2009 National Health Interview Survey cross-sectional data on high school dropouts, graduates, and GED recipients aged 30 to 65 years (n = 76 705). Five general health indicators and 20 health conditions were analyzed using logistic models.Results. GED recipients had a significantly higher prevalence of every health outcome compared with high school graduates (odds ratios = 1.32.7). The GEDhigh school differences attenuated but remained evident after controlling for health insurance, economic status, and health behaviors. For most conditions, the 95% confidence interval for GED earners overlapped with that for high school dropouts.Conclusions. The high school equivalency diploma was associated with nonequivalent health: adults with a GED had health comparable to that of high school dropouts, not graduates. GED recipients were at increased risk for many health conditions, and their health should be viewed as distinct from regular graduates. The findings have implications for health and educational policies.

We propose a framework for summarizing former analyses to assist the user exploring a data cube. In this framework, simple operators are used for automatically summarizing log files consisted of sequences of unevaluated OLAP queries. We provide a simple implementation of the framework for summarizing logs of OLAP queries, and we test it with respect to a query personalization technique based on mining a query log.

The next step in the argument is through another example: a model of a retail system. This serves as a valuable demonstrator of a number of model design principles. It is both simple and easy to understand but can also be developed in a way that is rich and realistic. As usual, we have a discrete spatial system: zones for residential areas and what are taken as points for retail centresso in this case origins, i, and destinations, j, represent different spatial systems. London is shown as an example in Fig. 2.1: there are 623 wards with centroids shown as dots, and 220 retail centres shown in blocks...