Background: Prior to the establishment of the uniform drinking age of 21 in the United States, many states permitted legal purchase of alcohol at younger ages. Lower drinking ages were associated with several adverse outcomes, including elevated rates of suicide and homicide among youth. The objective of this study is to examine whether individuals who were legally permitted to drink prior to age 21 remained at elevated risk in adulthood.Methods: Analysis of data from the U.S. Multiple Cause of Death files, 1990 to 2004, combined with data on the living population from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. The assembled data contained records on over 200,000 suicides and 130,000 homicides for individuals born between 1949 and 1972, the years during which the drinking age was in flux. Logistic regression models were used to evaluate whether adults who were legally permitted to drink prior to age 21 were at elevated risk for death by these causes. A quasi-experimental analytical approach was employed, which incorporated state and birth-year fixed effects to account for unobserved covariates associated with policy exposure.Results: In the population as a whole, we found no association between minimum drinking age and homicide or suicide. However, significant policy-by-sex interactions were observed for both outcomes, such that women exposed to permissive drinking age laws were at higher risk for both suicide (OR = 1.12, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.18, p = 0.0003) and homicide (OR = 1.15, 95% CI: 1.04, 1.25, p = 0.0028). Effect sizes were stronger for the portion of the cohort born after 1960, whereas no significant effects were observed for women born prior to 1960.Conclusions: Lower drinking ages may result in persistent elevated risk for suicide and homicide among women born after 1960. The national drinking age of 21 may be preventing about 600 suicides and 600 homicides annually.

We examine how location-based tax incentives affect quality of life and business environment through changes in property values and equilibrium wages. Using the federal Empowerment Zone program, which offers tax incentives to firms, as a natural experiment we determine whether this form of economic redevelopment policy improves the welfare of the citizens and attractiveness to firms. To the best of our knowledge this paper is one of the first to analyze a tax policy that affects only a subset of a metropolitan area by demonstrating that quality of life methodologies can be applied using small geographically-aggregated data, such as census block groups, opening new possibilities to the literature. We find that the tax incentives offered by the Empowerment Zone program notably enhances the quality of business environment for firms in the area while modestly improving the quality of life for the individuals living in the area.

While it is widely acknowledged that the increase in incomes that migrants from Mexico, whether legal or illegal, receive upon migrating to United States are quite large, so far there has little systematic analysis of the actual size. Hence the present paper undertakes to estimate the magnitude of these gains. In so doing I identify three principal ways in which migration to US affects Mexican nationals’ wages. The first and the most obvious one is the difference between the wages that Mexican migrants receive when in US and the wages that they would have received had they not migrated. However, the out migration of workers from Mexico also results in shifts in relative labor supplies of different education and experience groups within Mexico. In order for the estimates of the first kind to be in accordance with economic theory, the relevant comparison of the gains for migrants to US is not between wages that they get in US vs. wages that currently prevail in Mexico, rather it is the wages they get in US as compared to counterfactual wages that would result were they to have stayed. Furthermore, the changes in relative labor supplies also affect the wages of those Mexican workers who remain in Mexico – this is the second channel through which migration affects wages. Depending on whether the out migrating workers are substitutes or complements to the workers who stay behind in the production process, this could result in either a loss or a gain to particular groups of workers who stay in Mexico. The third channel is the effect on wages of having migrated on those migrants who eventually return to Mexico (whether voluntarily or not). This paper documents that former migrants receive a sizeable wage premium upon their return, given their education and experience level. This can be taken as evidence for either the hypothesis that the migrants to US are selfselected groups who have intrinsically higher ability (in which case their wages would have been higher even had they not migrated to US) or that while in US they have acquired additional human capital and skills which, for whatever reasons, they could not have acquired had they staid (in which case their wages would have been comparable to the average in their education/experience group). The obvious type of “skill” here would of course be the learning of English, but others forms of “labor embodied technology transfer” are possible – for example Mexican workers in US could observe different, more efficient ways of organizing productive activity while in US, which they then apply upon their return. While the data at this point is not detailed enough to distinguish Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2182870 between the two hypothesis there is some suggestive evidence that both forces are at work.

According to recent estimates a large minority of retirees will return to work at some point during their retirement. However, it is unclear how local labor markets impact retirees' labor force behavior. To this end we use data from 2009 Annual Community Survey to ask two questions. First, does the age structure of local labor markets impact retirees decision to reenter the labor force? Second, after reentering the labor force, are former retirees chances of securing new employment limited by the age structure of the local labor market? We find that retirees have greater odds of returning to the labor force in metropolitan areas where people over 65 comprise a larger share of the labor market but retirees also have lower odds of securing new employment in these areas.

Using a spatial Durbin model (SDM), we estimate the migratory response of those with various levels of education to state differences in economic freedom. We find that states with greater overall economic freedom attract those with a secondary education and, to a lesser extent, those with some college experience. States with greater government expenditures as a percent of Gross State Product witness a net in-migration of those with college experience and out-migration of those with only an elementary education. The opposite is true for transfers and subsidies. States with greater union density witness non-selective out-migration.

The US is often viewed as being more open and more tolerant to the minority ethnic groups than Britain. While this view is supported in studies of employment status and class position, there is very limited research on the labour market earnings of minority ethnic groups between the two countries. Drawing on the General Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey for Britain and Integrated Public Use Microdata series(IPUMs) for the US covering the early 1990s and the early 2000s, this analysis shows that minority ethnic men in both countries earned significantly less than White men, with little cross-country difference. Women had poorer socio-economic conditions than men, but minority ethnic women were not paid less than White women in either country. The overtime change showed more ethnic groups with worsening earnings in the US than in Britain. Overall, we found grave gender gaps and marked ethnic penalties for men but no signs of greater equality or progress enjoyed by the US minority ethnics than by their British counterparts. American exceptionalism is not supported in this study, and reducing gender wage gap and male ethnic penalty is the top priority for bringing about greater equality in both countries.

Building on prior theories of gender segregation in the labor market, this thesis investigates the mutually reinforcing forces of gender segregation at the macro-level - specifically, cultural beliefs about gender and occupational identities and structural arrangements of employment. I hypothesized that changes in gender distributions within occupations would be predicted by the distance in cultural meanings between gender and occupational identities and that those distributional changes would, in turn result in future changes in cultural meanings about gender and/or occupations. My data were only sufficient to test the first part of that argument and did not support the hypotheses. The (dis)consonance between gender identity and occupational identities meaning does not predict changes in the gender distributions within occupations over time, even after controlling for the main effects of the identities meanings. With new wave of data collected underway, studies can test the hypothesized reciprocal relationship in the future.

Asian Americans are often referred to as the “model minority” due to perceptions of their high income and educational attainment; yet relatively little is known about their economic assimilation experience. The purpose of this study is to determine economic assimilation of Chinese immigrants over time. This research follows a cohort of Chinese immigrants from 1994 to 2011 and compares their earnings performance with natives that have similar educational attainment. Multiple regression analysis is used to analyze data from the Current Population Survey. Results show that, although the cohort of Chinese immigrants initially has earnings substantially lower than the natives, it is only about 10 years before they reach income parity. By 2011, Chinese immigrants’ earnings exceed natives’ earnings by about 4 percent. The study concludes that despite the language and adjustment challenges, Chinese immigrants do show rapid economic assimilation in the United States.

This dissertation consists of two separate essays on economics of education. First, the role of teacher-student interactions is analyzed. Teacher effectiveness is generally characterized by a single effect that is common across students. However, educators are multi-task agents that choose how to allocate their efforts among pupils. Some teachers may target their courses towards the top students in the class while others to the bottom, leading to different complementarity effects. Moreover, the intro- duction of accountability programs, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), could induce a reallocation of teacher’s efforts, affecting the dynamics of student-teacher interactions. This study shows that the role of complementarities is key from a policy perspective. In this regard, an analytical framework and a novel iterative algorithm are implemented in order to characterize and quantify these effects. Re- sults indicate that interaction effects played a crucial role in shaping the distribution of student achievement, especially after the implementation of NCLB. While more than half of the total gains in test scores experienced by the bottom third of the stu- dent achievement distribution post NCLB are due to adjustments in teacher-student complementarities, those with the very highest abilities have seen decreases in their performance. In the second essay, gender disparities in educational attainment are explored across races. The sizable gender gap in college enrollment, especially among African Americans, constitutes a puzzling empirical regularity that may have serious consequences on marriage markets, male labor force participation and the diversity of college campuses. For instance, only 35.7 percent of all African American under- graduate students were men in 2004. Results show that, while family background characteristics cannot account for the observed gap, proxy measures for non-cognitive skills are crucial to explain it.

We study one potential source of urban agglomeration economies: better job matching. Focusing on college graduates, we construct two direct measures of job matching based on how well an individuals job corresponds to his or her college education. Consistent with matching-based theories of urban agglomeration, we find evidence that larger and thicker local labor markets help college graduates find better jobs by increasing both the likelihood and quality of a match. We then assess the extent to which better job matching of college-educated workers increases individual-level wages and thereby contributes to the urban wage premium. While we find that college graduates with better job matches do indeed earn higher wages on average, the contribution of such job matching to aggregate urban productivity appears to be relatively modest.

We use hierarchical cross-classified random-effects models to simultaneously measure age, period, and cohort patterns of mortality risk between 1986 and 2006 for non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black men and women with less than a high school education, a high school education, and more than a high school education. We examine all-cause mortality risk and mortality risk from heart disease, lung cancer, and unpreventable cancers. Findings reveal that temporal reductions in black and white mens and womens mortality rates were driven entirely by cohort changes in mortality. Findings also demonstrate that disparate cohort effects between education groups widened the education gap in all-cause mortality risk and mortality risk from heart disease and lung cancer across this time period. Educational disparities in mortality risk from unpreventable cancers, however, did not change. This research uncovers widening educational differences in adult mortality and demonstrates that a cohort perspective provides valuable insights for understanding recent temporal changes in U.S. mortality risk.

Recent population forecasts issued by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest that by 2030 Sunbelt migration could result in two-thirds of all Americans living in the South and West. What's more, 30% of all Americans could live in California, Texas, and Florida (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). Regardless of whether such high levels of continued Sunbelt migration occur or other patterns emerge, population movement will have electoral implications as the composition of migration streams change the balance of party identifiers at both origins and destinations. To illustrate how migration streams can exhibit very different levels of political effectiveness, this research substantively addresses three key issues under-examined in the current literature: 1) the ability of migration to both reinforce and dilute party strength, 2) the changes in partisanship at the origin and destination of migration streams effected through processes analogous to packing and cracking in electoral redistricting literature, and 3) the importance of migration selectivity. This research uses an innovative, albeit far-from-precision method to suggest how recent U.S. migration trends may portend changes in Republican and Democratic partisanship. Using 2000 Presidential election exit polls by state, along with 19952000 PUMS migration data, individual party identification is inferred from individual migrant characteristics. This research calls attention to and argues for research to address the highly complex relationships of migration with electoral geographies.

We investigate whether the degree production and R&D activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital in the metropolitan areas where they are located. Our results indicate only a small positive relationship exists between a metropolitan area's production and stock of human capital, suggesting that migration plays an important role in the geographic distribution of human capital. We also find that academic R&D activities increase local human capital levels, suggesting that spillovers from such activities can raise the demand for human capital. Consistent with these results, we show that metropolitan areas with more higher education activity tend to have a larger share of workers in high human capital occupations. Thus, this research indicates that colleges and universities can raise local human capital levels by increasing both the supply of and demand for skill.

Privacy Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) is a research field that deals with the development of methods to enable publishing of data while minimizing distortion, for maintaining usability on one hand, and respecting privacy on the other hand. Sequential release is a scenario of data publishing where multiple releases of the same underlying table are published over a period of time. A violation of privacy, in this case, may emerge from any one of the releases, or as a result of joining information from different releases. Similarly to [37], our privacy definitions limit the ability of an adversary who combines information from all releases, to link values of the quasi-identifiers to sensitive values. We extend the framework that was considered in Ref. [37] in three ways: We allow a greater number of releases, we consider the more flexible local recoding model of cell generalization (as opposed to the global recoding model of cut generalization in Ref. [37]), and we include the case where records may be added to the underlying table from time to time. Our extension of the framework requires also to modify the manner in which privacy is evaluated. We show that while [37] based their privacy evaluation on the notion of the Match Join between the releases, it is no longer suitable for the extended framework considered here. We define more restrictive types of join between the published releases (the Full Match Join and the Kernel Match Join) that are more suitable for privacy evaluation in this context. We then present a top-down algorithm for anonymizing sequential releases in the cell generalization model, that is based on our modified privacy evaluations. Our theoretical study is followed by experimentation that demonstrates a staggering improvement in terms of utility due to the adoption of the cell generalization model, and exemplifies the correction in the privacy evaluation as offered by using the Full or Kernel Match Joins instead of the Match Join.

The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and ensuing government crackdown affectedChinese nationals not only at home but around the world. The U.S. government responded tothe events in China by enacting multiple measures to protect Chinese nationals present inthe U.S. It first suspended all forced departures among Chinese nationals present in thecountry as of June 1989 and later gave them authorization to work legally. The ChineseStudent Protection Act, passed in October 1992, made those Chinese nationals eligible forlawful permanent resident status. These actions applied to about 80,000 Chinese nationalsresiding in the U.S. on student or other temporary visas or illegally. Receiving permission towork legally and then a green card is likely to have affected recipients labor marketoutcomes. This study uses 1990 and 2000 census data to examine employment andearnings among Chinese immigrants who were likely beneficiaries of the U.S. governmentsactions. Relative to immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea countries notcovered by the post-Tiananmen immigration policy measures highly-educated immigrantsfrom mainland China experienced significant employment and earnings gains during the1990s. Chinese immigrants who arrived in the U.S in time to benefit from the measures alsohad higher relative earnings in 2000 than Chinese immigrants who arrived too late to benefit.The results suggest that getting legal work status and then a green card has a significantpositive effect on skilled migrants labor market outcomes.

Over the past forty years, the types of jobs offered by New Yorks economy have shifted from a more manufacturing-based economy to one with more professional, management, and service jobs. This report looks at how Latino immigrants and later generations have integrated into this changing economy, and how their job categories have shifted as well. Occupation strongly indicates lifestyle and its accompanying socioeconomic measures (Alba and Nee 2003). Changes in the distribution of occupation in groups as they enter New York and as their children gain jobs in the economy lend insight into how economic assimilation is occurring. More specifically, how gender, citizenship, age, and country of birth impact the job categories occupied by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorians shows whether they are becoming more, or less, like the average New Yorkers over time. Building on an earlier Latino Data Project report (Limonic 2008) on the changes in occupations of New Yorks Latino population, this report focuses on variation amongst and within the four most populous Latino sub-national groups...

This paper measures the role of quality-adjusted years of schooling in accounting for cross-country output per worker differences. While data on years of schooling are readily available, data on education quality are not. I use the returns to schooling of foreign-educated immigrants in the U.S. to measure the education quality of their birth country. Immigrants from developed countries earn higher returns than do immigrants from developing countries. I show how to incorporate this measure of education quality into an otherwise standard development accounting exercise. The main result is that cross-country differences in education quality are roughly as important as cross-country differences in years of schooling in accounting for output per worker differences, raising the total contribution of education from 10% to 20% of output per worker differences.

Over the past half century, American children have experienced increasingly unequalchildhoods. The goal of this chapter is to begin to understand the implications of recent trends insocial and economic inequalities among children for the future of inequalities in health amongadults. The relative importance of many of the causal pathways linking childhood social and economic circumstances to adult health remains underexplored, and we know even less about how the magnitudes of some of these causal pathways have changed over time. In this chapter, I combine a series of original analyses with reviews of relevant literature in a number of fields to inform my discussion of what growing childhood inequalities might mean for future inequalities in adult health. In the end, I argue that there is good reason to suppose that growing inequalities in childrens social and economic circumstances will lead to greater heterogeneity in adults morbidity and mortality.