We develop a microeconomic model of endogenous growth where clean and dirty technologies compete in production and innovation in the sense that research can be directed to either clean or dirty technologies. If dirty technologies are more advanced to start with, the potential transition to clean technology can be difficult both because clean research must climb several steps to catch up with dirty technology and because this gap discourages research effort directed towards clean technologies. Carbon taxes and research subsidies may nonetheless encourage production and innovation in clean technologies, though the transition will typically be slow. We characterize certain general properties of the transition path from dirty to clean technology. We then estimate the model using a combination of regression analysis on the relationship between R&D and patents, and simulated method of moments using microdata on employment, production, R&D, rm growth, entry and exit from the US energy sector. The models quantitative implications match a range of moments not targeted in the estimation quite well. We then characterize the optimal policy path implied by the model and our estimates. Optimal policy heavily relies on research subsidies as well as carbon taxes. We use the model to evaluate the welfare consequences of a range of alternative policy structures. For example, just relying on carbon taxes or delaying intervention both have significant welfare costs though their implications for medium run temperature increases are quite different.

Counsel for Emigrants, first published in 1834, was one of many guidebooks written to satisfy the demand for reliable information on the conditions facing immigrants in Canada and the United States. Yet the first edition, which contained extracts from dozens of glowing letters written by people who had relocated to North America, met with skepticism. Were immigrants exaggerating their success to justify their decision to leave Europe? Could life in North America really be so good? When the guidebooks anonymous author issued a new edition four years later, he decided to address those questions. He related the story of an Irish immigrant who wrote a letter home bragging that he was doing so well in America that he could now afford to eat meat twice a week, far more often than he had in Ireland. When his employer saw the letter, he asked the immigrant why he did not tell the truth, which was that he now ate meat every day of the week, . . . three times a-day. The immigrant replied that his friends would disbelieve all he had said in the letter if he had told them that. Letters extolling the virtues of America were reliable, the author of Counsel for Emigrants insisted, because immigrants had just as many reasons to understate their success in the New World as to exaggerate it.

Over the 1980s and 1990s the wage differentials between men and women (with similar observable characteristics) declined significantly. At the same time, the returns to 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 women and 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 differentials and returns to education over the 1980-2000 period. In parallel to the aggregate pattern, we find that male-female wage differentials at the city levels moved in opposite direction to the changes in the return to education. We also find 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.download in pdf format

This project addresses a gap in the assimilation literature. Contemporary immigrant assimilation theory compares todays immigrants to Southern and Eastern European immigrants from the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the Ellis Island era), yet the latter groups socioeconomic assimilation has not been tested empirically with longitudinal data. Using several decades of IPUMS census data, we utilize both double cohort methodology and OLS microdata regression to test the Ellis Island myth that those who arrived during the Ellis Island era managed rather quickly to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Our results show that while the first generation (the foreign born) exhibit decidedly inferior labor market outcomes, socioeconomic attainment (measured as SEI points) increases quickly with duration in the US.Persons of the second generation and those of mixed parentage show much less penalty than immigrants. We uncover differences in outcome by European region that do not disappear over the decades we examine.

Areas surrounding colleges and universities are often able to build their local stock of human capital by retaining recent graduates in the area after they finish their education. This paper classifies 41 U.S. metropolitan areas as college towns and investigates differences in employment outcomes between college graduates who stay in the college town where they obtained their degree and college graduates who leave after completing their degree. We find that college town stayers experience less favorable employment outcomes along multiple dimensions. On average, stayers earn lower annual and hourly wages and work in lesseducated occupations.

Conventional wisdom suggests that in developed countries income and fertility are negatively correlated. We present new evidence that between 2001 and 2009 the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women's education in the U.S. is U-shaped. At the same time, average hours worked increase monotonically with women's education. This pattern is true for all women and mothers to newborns regardless of marital status. In this paper, we advance the marketization hypothesis for explaining the positive correlation between fertility and female labor supply along the educational gradient. In our model, raising children and home-making require parents' time, which could be substituted by services bought in the market such as baby-sitting and housekeeping. Highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, which enables them to have more children and work longer hours.

Of all facets of American racial inequality studied by social scientists, racial disparity in incarceration has proved one of the most difficult to explain. This article traces a portion of the rise of racial inequality in incarceration in northern and southern states to increasing rates of African-American migration to the North between 1880 and 1950. It employs three analytical strategies. First, it introduces a decomposition to assess the relative contributions of geographic shifts in the population and regional changes in the incarceration rate to the increase in racial disparity. Second, it estimates the effect of the rate of white and nonwhite migration on the change in the white and nonwhite incarceration rates of the North. Finally, it uses macro- and microdata to evaluate the mechanisms proposed to explain this effect.

Agricultural implements played a key role in the mechanization of the West after the Civil War, both in manufacturing and in farming. Civil War experience changed many citizens and many economic factors in both areas, and these experiences drove industrialization. While many have advocated railroads as the model from industrialization, military organization and the Civil War seems to have had much more impact, at least in the West. Military organization forged soldiers into cohesive units and provided a model of a low-skill, interchangeable-laborer industry, which led to ex-soldiers' greater suitability to factory jobs but also to an increased sense of the value of their labor. Wartime labor shortages, combined with the Homestead Act, drove adoption of new technologies on the farm, leading to an upheaval in traditional farm labor structure. Finally, wartime innovations in precision manufacturing, coupled with incremental technological advances, led to increased production capacity and decreased labor costs especially at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, resulting in higher-quality, laborsaving, feasible agricultural implements for the Great Plains.

Over the past decade, there has been significant volatility in the housing market. During the first half of the decade, housing prices increased at an unprecedented rate and homeownership rates reached an all-time high. With an unrelenting demand for housing, many multifamily rental units were converted to condominiums and the overall stock of rental units decreased substantially. With the price of rental housing increasing and incomes remaining stagnant, many low- and moderate-income households found themselves struggling to maintain an adequate standard of living. This was magnified during the second half of the decade when the housing and financial credit markets crashed, leading to a parade of foreclosures and ultimately forcing millions of households into the rental housing market. During this same time period, government land-use regulations have increasingly become more restrictive. In theory, government-imposed land-use regulations place constraints on how land can be utilized which limits supply and increases costs. As a result, the cost of housing will increase, placing unnecessary burdens on low- and moderate-income households. Composed of three essays, this dissertation addresses various aspects of how increased regulation affects housing markets.In the first essay, I review the historical evolution of land-use regulations with an emphasis on the regulatory environment in the state of Florida. An exhaustive review of the empirical literature describing the effects of land-use regulations on the housing market and the rental housing market is provided. While variations in magnitude exist, the majority of empirical studies find that increased land-use regulations increase housing prices.The second essay of this dissertation focuses on the determinants of the rental housing market, attempting to examine how the percentage of income that a household allocates to rent changes as a result of increased land-use regulations. A description of the data used to access the regulatory environment is presented. The regulatory data is then quantified, using four unique econometric methods, and is used to estimate the relationship between the percentage of income that a household spends on rental housing and land-use regulations. Results from the empirical models indicate that, consistent with theory, the rent-to-income ratio for renter households increases with more stringent land-use regulations.The third essay investigates the relationship between land-use regulations and high-risk loan originations. In order to motivate the empirical analysis, a review of the descriptive and empirical literature surrounding the determinants of subprime lending, the relationship between subprime loans and mortgage default, and housing supply elasticities is presented. After reviewing aggregate trends in income, home prices, loan installments, and foreclosure rates, I lay out the empirical model. The model is then estimated using regulatory and loan data from jurisdictions in the state of Florida. The empirical model finds that increased regulations may lead to a higher percentage of high-risk loan originations.The final chapter of this dissertation concludes and offers suggestions for future research.

This report analyzes the demographic and economic characteristics of newlyweds who marry spouses of a different race or ethnicity, and compares the traits of those who marry out with those who marry in. The newlywed pairs are grouped by the race and ethnicity of the husband and wife, and are compared in terms of earnings, education, age of spouse, region of residence and other characteristics. This report is primarily based on the Pew Research Centers analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey (ACS) in 2008-2010 and on findings from three of the Centers own nationwide telephone surveys that explore public attitudes toward intermarriage. For more information about data sources and methodology, see Appendix 1.

A major demographic shift is underway in the United States. According to the 2010 Census, White babies now make up a little less than 50 percent of all babies in the country. By 2030, the majority of U.S. residents under 18 will be youth of color. And by 2042, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other non-Whites will collectively comprise the majority of the U.S. population.1 For the first time since Colonial days, the United States will be a majority-minority country. How will the nation adjust to the massive demographic changes set to take place over the next 30 years? And what will be the state of the racial economic divide? If we do not change course, we will continue on a path toward becoming a country in which the overwhelming share of the emerging non-White majority is economically insecure. While Whites will make up a dwindling percentage of the population through 2042 and beyond, the overwhelming share of the nation’s income and wealth will remain solidly in White hands. Communities of color have borne the brunt of our nation’s history of racism and White supremacy. Although there have been many social and economic gains made for all races, people of color continue to be left behind. Vast racial disparities still exist in wealth and income, education, employment, poverty, incarceration, and health. Extreme inequality continues to entrench racial disparities and further shrink the broad middle class that has been the foundation of a strong American economy and a cohesive society. Closing the racial economic divide is first and foremost a moral issue. Our commitment to closing this divide should not depend on whether people of color make up 5 percent or 75 percent of the population. Nonetheless, as people of color become the new majority, the persistent racial disparities of the past threaten to jeopardize the social fabric of our nation and our economic stability. If the trends in racial economic inequality of the last thirty years continue for the next thirty years, the racial economic divide in 2042 will be vast and devastating for communities of color and the nation as a whole. Economic inequality between Whites and people of color will persist unless bold and intentional steps are taken to make meaningful progress towards racial equity, to sever the connection between race and poverty, and ultimately to eliminate the racial economic divide altogether.

IPUMS-USA were used to proxy the characteristics of older immigrants who are exempt from taking the English language test at the time of naturalization.

Due to its important applications in data mining, many techniques have been developed for outlier detection. In this paper, an efficient three-phase outlier detection technique. First, we modify the famous k-means algorithm for an efficient construction of a spanning tree which is very close to a minimum spanning tree of the data set. Second, the longest edges in the obtained spanning tree are removed to form clusters. Based on the intuition that the data points in small clusters may be most likely all outliers, they are selected and regarded as outlier candidates. Finally, density-based outlying factors, LOF, are calculated for potential outlier candidates and accessed to pinpoint the local outliers. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data sets show that the proposed approach can efficiently identify global as well as local outliers for large-scale datasets with respect to the state-of-the-art methods.

This dissertation contains three essays analyzing how families form and how family members interact. The first chapter studies and connects recent trends in age at marriage and divorce. The second chapter looks within marriages to analyze household bargaining. The final chapter examines the effects on cohort characteristics of the changes in fertility induced by the legalization of abortion. In my first essay, I explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the rapid decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying from 1980 to 2004. Three different empirical approaches all demonstrate that an increase in women’s age at marriage can explain at least 60 percent of the decline in the hazard of divorce since 1980. I further develop and simulate an integrated model of the marriage market to demonstrate that monotone decreases in gains to marriage could lead to both the initial rise in divorce and its subsequent fall. My second essays analyzes the impact of the early 1990s state waivers from welfare guidelines to understand how changes in options outside of marriage affect household expenditures. Welfare waivers decreased the public assistance available to impoverished divorced women and thereby reduced a woman’s bargaining threat point in marriage. Using expenditure data and an empirical synthetic control approach, I find that decreases in potential welfare benefits altered the expenditure patterns of two-parent families containing less-educated or stay-at-home mothers. The changes in expenditure patterns suggest that reductions in a wife’s outside options cause her utility within marriage to decline. My third essay examines how cohorts whose mothers had legal and safe access to abortion differ from those whose mothers did not. Using both birth certificate and wage data, I demonstrate that granting women access to abortion led to changes in child characteristics, even among groups of children born within months or weeks of each other. Analysis further suggests that soon after legalization, women used abortion to better-time their births. Moreover, access to abortion increased the eventual wages of low-wage, black, and Hispanic workers but not the wages of whites or high-wage workers.

In this paper we create, validate, and apply new dynamic measures of state partisanship and state policy mood from 1956 to the present. Our approach utilizes the advantages of two leading techniques for measuring state public opinionmultilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) and survey aggregation. We also rely on multiple question items in our estimates of state opinion in order to reduce measurement error. The resulting estimates are based on 910 survey questions asked in 317 surveys with a total of more than 530,000 respondents. After validating our measures, we show how dynamic measures of state opinion can reveal new substantive findings about U.S. politics. We find that state opinion is an important predictor of gubernatorial election outcomes and, specifically, that policy mood becamerelevant for gubernatorial elections beginning in the late-1970s, a shift that is consistent with the convergence of racial and economic issues in U.S. politics.

Steep declines in the uninsured population under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will depend on high enrollment among newly Medicaid-eligible adults. We use the 2009 American Community Survey to model pre-ACA eligibility for comprehensive Medicaid coverage among non-elderly adults. We identify 4.5 million eligible but uninsured adults. We find a Medicaid participation rate of 67% for adults; the rate is 17 percentage points lower than the national Medicaid participation rate for children, and it varies substantially across socioeconomic and demographic subgroups and across states. Achieving substantial increases in coverage under the ACA will require sharp increases in Medicaid participation among adults in some states.

This paper studies how advances in home production technologies affect fertility and child health. The analysis focuses on the period 1930 to 1960, when electricity and a host of new consumer durables diffused rapidly into most American homes. I relate changes in the proportion of households with electricity and modern appliances to changes in fertility and infant mortality rates, exploiting substantial cross-county and cross-state variation in the timing of when households acquired these new goods. The fact that the decision to purchase a modern appliance may have been correlated with unobservable family characteristics creates a challenging identification problem, which I address using instruments created from a new dataset that provides information on the construction of over 1600 new power plants between 1930 and 1960. Identification relies on plausibly exogenous changes in the cost of supplying power to different communities based on their location. I find that modern household technologies led families to make a child quantity-quality tradeoff favouring quality: modern appliances were associated with decreases in infant mortality and decreases in fertility. I show that the declines in infant mortality were particularly large in states that relied heavily on coalfor heating and cooking, consistent with modern stoves reducing indoor air pollution directly. Health improvements were also larger in states that had previously invested heavily in maternal education, suggesting that household modernization also led parents to provide better infant care. The results do not appear to have been driven by local economic development, cross-county migration, or changes in the quality of local health care. Overall, the diffusion of electricity into the home can account for between 25% and 30% of the decline in infant mortality during this period. The paper has implications for current policy, given that over 1.6 billion people worldwide still do not have access to electricity. In particular, the analysis suggests that there is considerable scope for new o -grid electrification programs to improve child health in the developing world.