Innovation is a crucial driver of urban and regional economic success. Innovative cities and regions tend to grow faster and have higher average wages. Little research, however, has considered the potential negative consequences: as a small body of innovators gain relative to others, innovation may lead to inequality. The evidence on this point is fragmented, based on cross-sectional evidence on skill premia rather than overall levels of inequality. This paper provides the first comparative evidence on the link between innovation and inequality in a continental perspective. Using micro data from population surveys for European regions and US Cities, the paper finds, after controlling for other potential factors, good evidence of a link between innovation and inequality in European regions, but only limited evidence of such a relationship in the United States. Less flexible labour markets and lower levels of migration seem to be at the root of the stronger association between innovation and income inequality in Europe than in the US.

Explore the occupations and industries of the nations wealthiest households. Rectangles are sized according to the number of people in the top 1 percent. Color shows the percentage of people within that occupation and industry in the top 1 percent.

This paper explores the response of the divorce rate to law reforms introducing unilateral divorce after controlling for law reforms concerning the aftermath of divorce, whichare omitted from most previous studies. We introduce two main policy changes that have swept the US since the late 1970s: the approval of the joint custody regime and the Child Support Enforcement program. Because those reforms affect divorce decisions by counteracting the reallocation of property rights generated by the unilateral divorce procedure and by increasing the expected financial costs of divorce, it is arguable that their omissions might obscure the impact of unilateral divorce reforms on divorce rates. After allowing for changes in laws concerning the aftermath of divorce, we find that the positive impact of unilateral divorce reforms on divorce rates does not vanish over time, suggesting that the Coase theorem may not apply to changes in divorce laws. Supplemental analysis, developed to examine the frequency of permanent shocks in US divorce rates, indicates that the positive permanent changes in divorce rates can be associated with the implementation of unilateral divorce reforms and that the negative permanent changes can be related to the law reforms concerning living arrangements in the aftermath of divorce. This seems toconfirm the important role of these policies in the evolution of divorce rates.

We show that the aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply can greatly exceed the corresponding individual-level parameter, and we illustrate the anatomy of the former in terms of intensive and extensive margins. The methodology consists of using micro data from the PSID to construct a panel of individuals and an aggregate time series obtained by aggregating these individuals each year. These two data sets represent exactly the same sample at different levels of aggregation, and we use them to identify the parameters of two distinct MaCurdy-type micro and macro equations. We find a micro elasticity of about0.1 and a much larger macro elasticity that ranges from 1.1 to 1.7. There is no conflict between the two estimates: the micro one reflects only the intensive margin while themacro one reflects, in addition, the much more volatile extensive margin. Furthermore, aggregation of only continuously employed individuals allows us to provide a reliable estimate of the intensive margin elasticity in the range 0.30.4. This implies an extensive margin elasticity in the range 0.81.4. These findings suggest that micro evidence is not a benchmark for assessing how large the Frisch elasticity of labor supply should be in a model of the aggregate economy.

Black women who drop out of high school are far less likely to marry than those who do not. I hypothesize that these discrepancies are due to differences in the marriage markets women face at each education level. I motivate this with a simple model based on Becker (1981)’s work, which includes two key features: marriage markets that are integrated across education levels and positive assortative mating on education. This model predicts that the marriage prospects of any woman depend on both the total number of available black men at all education levels and the competition from more educated black women. Importantly, it predicts that any gender imbalance disproportionately affects the marriage prospects for the least educated. Using data from the 1979-2004 waves of the NLSY79, I estimate discrete-time hazard models of first marriages for black women, capturing a womans marriage prospects in three ways: (i) using an education-specific simple sex ratio from the educationally segmented marriage markets that dominate the literature, (ii) using a cascading sex ratio implied by Beckers model, and (iii) using a more flexible specification that includes separate measures for the relative availability of men as well as the prevalence of competing women at each edu- cation level. I find that: (i) marriage market measures that allow integration over education levels are better able to explain educational differences in marriage patterns than typical measures that assume independent marriage markets by education level, (ii) the effects of competition from other women are significant, and (iii) the supply of men has larger effects the more similar the education levels.

In the early 1990s, several US states enacted community rating regulations to equalize the private health insurance premiums paid by the healthy and the sick. Consistent with severe adverse selection pressures, their private coverage rates fell by 8-11 percentage points more than rates in comparable markets over subsequent years. By the early 2000s, however, most of these losses had been recovered. The recoveries were coincident with substantial public insurance expansions (for unhealthy adults, pregnant women, and children) and were largest in the markets where public coverage of unhealthy adults expanded most. The analysis highlights an important linkage between the incidence of public insurance programs and redistributive regulations. When targeted at the sick, public insurance expansions can relieve the distortions associated with premium regulations, potentially crowding in private coverage. Such expansions will look particularly attractive to participants in community-rated insurance markets when a federal government shares in the cost of local public insurance programs.

Among possible lifestyles, the DINKs (“double income no kids”) are couples choosing to be childless, while the DEWKs (“dually employed with kids”) are couples with children. We develop a theory of marriage and parenthood decisions, where we distinguish the choice to have children from the choice of the number of children. The deep parameters of the model are identified from the 1990 US Census. The quantitative model allows us to measure voluntary and involuntary childlessness from the data, and to understand (1) why single women are more likely to be childless than married women but, when mothers, their fertility is close to that of married mothers; (2) why childlessness exhibits a U-shaped relationship with education for both single and married women; and (3) why there is a hump-shaped relationship between marriage rates and education levels. We show how family patterns have been shaped over time by the rise in education levels and wage inequality, and by the shrinking gender wage gap.

Although most theoretical models of the household have assumed perfect information, empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation. In this study, I demonstrate their importance in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute. I implement an experiment among 1,300 Salvadoran migrants in Washington, DC and their family members in El Salvador that examines how (1) changing the ability of participants to observe each other and (2) revealing migrant preferences can affect the sending and spending of remittances. Migrants make an incentivized decision over how much of a cash windfall to keep and how much to send home, and recipients over how to allocate the spending of a remittance. Participants are all randomly allocated into two groups: half are told their family member will be informed of their choice and half that their family member will not be informed. Additionally, half the recipients are also informed of the migrants preferences for their choice. Migrants remit significantly less when their choice is secret, but recipients do not alter their spending based on whether or not their choices will be revealed. Recipients do make choices closer to the migrants preferences when they are informed of those preferences. The results are consistent with a model of remittance behavior where migrants and recipients are driven by the extent to which their family can enforce remittance contracts. For example, the effects of the migrant experiment are concentrated among pairs where recipient ability to punish migrants is plausibly high. Given this heterogeneity, the results suggest that while information asymmetries are important, they may not matter for all families where resources are shared.

One of the major challenges of data integration is to resolve conflicting numerical attribute values caused by data heterogeneity. In addressing this problem, existing approaches proposed in prior literature often ignore such data inconsistencies or resolve them in an ad-hoc manner. In this study, we propose a decision-theoretical framework that resolves numerical value conflicts in a systematic manner. The framework takes into consideration the consequences of incorrect numerical values and selects thevalue that minimizes the expected cost of errors for all data application problems under consideration. Experimental results show that significant savings can be achieved by adopting the proposed framework instead of ad-hoc approaches.

This report explores trends in Latino voter participation in U.S. presidential elections. It also examines the geographic distribution of Latino voters across the U.S.The data for this report are derived from three main sources. The first is the November Voting and Registration Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a monthly survey of about 55,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CPS is representative of the non-institutionalized population of the U.S. It does not include data on the voting behavior of enlisted military personnel and those who are institutionalized. The November Voting and Registration Supplement of the CPS is one of the richest sources of information available about the characteristics of voters. It is conducted after Election Day and relies on survey respondent self-reports of voting and voter registration. In addition to the November Voting and Registration Supplement to the Current Population Survey, this report also uses the August 2012 Current Population Survey.The second data source is the 2010 American Community Survey (1% IPUMS). The 2010 provides detailed geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for Latino and non-Latino eligible voters and is the main source for the state-level analysis of this report.Voter registration data for Latino voters in the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina are from voter registration statistics published by each state.Accompanying this report are state profiles of Latino eligible voters in 41 states and the District of Columbia.1 Also accompanying this report is an interactive map showing key characteristics of Latino voters in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.This report was written by Mark Hugo Lopez. Analysis for the report was provided by Seth Motel and Eileen Patten. Motel and Patten wrote the state fact sheet reports. Paul Taylor provided editorial guidance and comments. Jeffrey Passel and Rakesh Kochhar provided comments. Antonio Rodriguez provided research assistance. Eileen Patten number-checked the report. Bruce Drake was the copy editor.

This study examined the relationship betweenexperiences of day-to-day discrimination and two measuresof health among Gujaratis, one of the largest ethnic groupsof Asian Indians in the U.S. Data were collected viacomputer-assisted telephone interviews with a randomsample of Gujarati men and women aged 1864 in Metropolitan Detroit (N = 423). Using structural equation modeling, we tested two gender-moderated models of the relationship between day-to-day discrimination and health, one using the single-item general health status and the other using the 4-item emotional well-being measure. For both women and men, controlling for socio-demographic and other relevant characteristics, the experience of day-today discrimination was associated with worse emotional well-being. However, day-to-day discrimination was associated with the single-item self-rated general health status only for men. This study identified not only gender differences in discrimination-health associations but also the importance of using multiple questions in assessing perceived health status.

This paper examines the consequences of the collapse of the national bargaining structure in the American meat industry during the 1980s. It argues the driving force behind the collapse was the substitution of chicken for beef in the American diet. The relatively high price of beef was no longer sustainable when it came into competition with poultry products that were less costly, healthier, more convenient, and more malleable to further processing. The substitution of chicken for beef, put wages back into competition as consumers redefined market boundaries. Poultry processors were nonunion, paying low wages, and had developed a high productivity growth production system, known as the broiler complex. They were located in the union hostile rural South and had grown their businesses using African American labor in the Southern Black Belt.

In recent decades, immigrant settlement in the United States has undergone tremendous changes. Chinese immigrants, who have long been known for their concentration in inner city Chinatowns, now are increasingly becoming suburban residents. In contrast to the predictions of the spatial assimilation model, many suburban Chinese immigrants are not assimilating into mainstream society culturally and structurally; rather, they are forming ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in suburbs—ethnoburbs. Little theoretical explanation has been offered for the emergence and growth of ethnoburbs. Focusing on the Chinese community in the Greater Washington, DC metropolitan area, in this dissertation I first portray the changes in residential patterns of Chinese immigrants and verify the emergence of ethnoburbs in DC area by Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping; second, I reevaluate spatial assimilation theory by analyzing degree of segregation and predictor of residential location using 1970 and 2010 IPUMS data; third, I conduct in-depth interviews with community leaders and residents from DC’s Chinatown and inner suburbs to further examine spatial assimilation theory and to provide individual perspectives about the changing dynamics of the Chinese community in DC area; last, I propose new conceptual models to address the nature and implications of studying ethnoburbs. My conclusion is that the changes in the residential patterns of Chinese immigrants reflect a “paradoxical outcome” of assimilation (Zhou 2009). As the assimilation theory predicts, many Chinese immigrants have transformed their socioeconomic gains to spatial mobility and residential assimilation into white-dominant suburbs; however, the emergence and growth of ethnoburbs contradicts some of the predictions of the assimilation model. Rather, as Li (2009) has proposed, ethnoburbs have emerged under the influence of the changing local and global economy, race relations, immigration policies, and increasing transnational connections. Further research will be needed to predict how long ethnoburbs will persist.

In the current digital world, data is becoming an increasingly valuable resource and the demand for sharing or releasing data has never been higher. Organizations need to make available versions of the data they collected for business or legal reasons and at the same time they are under strong obligation to protect sensitive information about individuals represented in the dataset. This has motivated fruitful research on data privacy over the past decade and various models have been proposed to address the problem of privacy-preserving data analysis. Initial efforts to ensure privacy of released data are based on syntactic definitions such as k- anonymity while subsequent efforts like differential privacy try to provide a more semantic guarantee. In this thesis we contribute to the research of data privacy from several perspectives. First, we address the issue of data usability by proposing a data model to work with anonymized data. This is based on the observation that data anonymized by syntactic models does not fit naturally within the relational model. The data model we proposed, called LICM, is able to succinctly represent and query anonymized data and in general any uncertain data with cardinality constraints. Second, we study the application of differential privacy to two important data management tasks: releasing spatial data (e.g. GPS coordinates) and mining frequent subgraph patterns from a graph database. These two pieces of work contribute to the research on differential privacy by extending the data types that can be handled by differential privacy from tabular data to location and graph data, which have become more significant with the advancement in mobile computing and social network. Finally, after addressing both syntactic models and differential privacy, we propose a unifying platform to study and compare the empirical privacy-utility trade-off in various privacy models. We propose metrics of empirical privacy and empirical utility and found that in practice, the difference between differential privacy and early syntactic models is less dramatic than previously thought.

Despite evidence that prior waves of immigrants have largely been absorbed into American society, concern over the fate of newly arriving immigrants from Latin America and Asia persist. Much of the debate focuses on the pattern of their adaptation and the factors that explain different paths to incorporation. Immigration scholars, however, frequently treat theories of adaptation as antithetical; pitting one against the other from which one emerges as the superior account. To complicate matters, firm conclusions regarding the trajectory of adaptation are difficult to draw given the recent arrival of late-twentieth-century immigrants where the majority of the second-generation are still children and attend primary and secondary school. Only recently have second-generation immigrants begun to enter post-secondary institutions in large numbers and evidence of their future socioeconomic prospects more apparent.In order to close these gaps in the extant literature and develop a greater understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the assimilation process, I revisit a fundamental question to the study of immigration: How well are immigrants assimilating into the American mainstream and what factors account for their pattern of incorporation? Specifically, the purpose of this study is to both describe and explain the post-secondary educational career paths of immigrant and native youth in the United States, through the lens of several theoretical perspectives of immigrant incorporation and within a status attainment perspective.Generational trends among national origin groups over the 20th century indicate that second-generation immigrants consistently attain higher levels of education than their first and three-plus generation counterparts. The second-generation advantage, however, occurs within a segmented assimilation framework wherein European and Asian immigrants come to resemble the native white population across generations and immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries assimilate to educational levels near those of African Americans. Overall, none of theories examined fully account for generational differences. Empirical evidence is greatest for the optimism hypothesis as parental and student expectations are important factors. Results also show modest support for elements of the segmented assimilation theory, although evidence for selective acculturation is associated with immigrants homeland rather than conditions of the local environment.

Intergenerational mobility has been a topic of persistent interest in sociology and, increasingly, in economics. Nearly all of these studies focus on fathers and sons. The possibility that intergenerational mobility is more than a simple two-generational AR(1) process has been difficult to assess because of the lack of the necessary multi-generational data. We remedy this shortcoming with new data that links grandfathers, fathers, and sons in Britain and the U.S. between 1850 and 1910. This permits an analysis of mobility across three generations in each country and a characterization of the differences in those patterns across two countries for which we have found substantial differences in two-generation mobility in previous work. We find that, in both countries, grandfathers mattered: even controlling for fathers occupation, grandfathers occupation significantly influenced the occupation of the grandson. For both Britain and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century, therefore, assessments of mobility based on two-generation estimates significantly overstate the true amount of mobility.

Thirty-six percent of working Massachusetts residents, or approximately 910,000 employees, lack access to paid sick days.1 This fact sheet reports findings from research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) on how increased access to paid sick days would improve both access to health care and health outcomes in Massachusetts. The research also quantifies the savings gained by providing access to paid sick days to all workers, thereby preventing some emergency department visits in Massachusetts.

This paper explores the latent effect of childhood health on educational attainment for a moderate ever-present shock risk. I estimate the effect of increased influenza epidemics during childhood on educational outcomes later in life. Influenza is a severe annual health threat to children, and virulence varies greatly across states and time. I use elderly influenza deaths as a proxy for exposure, as children experience most of the morbidity, while the elderly (=65 years) are most likely to experience mortality. Outbreaks in influenza likely to affect children can be measured through elderly influenza mortality. I combine the Multiple Cause of Death (MCOD) files and the US Census. I find that overall influenza reduces lifetime education and health. Individuals are 0.12%1.70% less likely to report higher levels of educational attainment due to influenza. However, this glosses over the dichotomy in the timing of exposure, where immunity acquisition in children too young to attend school serves to increase their educational attainment. These gains are then outweighed by influenza later in childhood. Children exposed to influenza during the latter portion of primary school (3rd to 6th grade) have an average 0.24%4.67% drop in educational attainment.