As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupationsnurses and firefightersuse collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses' concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters' concern with breadwinning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. Firefighter contracts, by contrast, downplay the substance of scheduling processes in favor of emphasizing fairness among firefighters in the context of restrictive weekly schedules and equal access to overtime opportunities. Findings suggest not only that union contracts are an important tool with which workers manage the competing demands of work and family, but that the manner and extent to which such negotiations happen are shaped by gendered occupation.

We investigate the use of intra-household labor allocation as a means of risk coping when subsistence constraints matter in rural El Salvador. We show that households increase the labor supply of its male members to the family farm and abroad in the US after being subjected to adverse agricultural productivity shocks. The latter is the result of a standard substitution effect, whereas the former is the result of subsistence concerns. Theoretically, these results are not at odds with each other if these events differentially impacted rich and poor households. We also show that the earthquakes of 2001 resulted in large reductions in the number of female members who were sent abroad and large increases in hours of domestic labor supplied by female members. We argue that this result is a consequence of subsistence motives because female labor supply at home increased despite lower remuneration. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Hourly wage data from 1990 to 2011 show a narrowing gap between the median wage and the 10th percentile wage, but an increasing gap between the median and 90th percentile wages. In this paper, I investigate the impact of o shoring on the employment and wage distributions to determine whether it has contributed to this polarization. I develop a task-based framework of the labor market with three inputs and model what happens when the world price for the middle task input declines. The model predicts both a decline in domestic employment and a reduction in the wage paid to workers in this task. However, I demonstrate that observed wages within a task can rise due to selection. I construct a proxy measure of o shoring for both service and material inputs, and use industry level production and trade data from the US Census Bureau's Census of Manufactures, and individual level wage data from the US Census and the American Community Survey to test the implications of the model. O shoring has the anticipated effects on employment and polarization. I find a negative effect of o shoring on employment and a positive effect of o shoring on upper tail wage inequality. Moreover, current levels of industry o shoring are significantly correlated with an industry's lagged occupational composition. In particular, both forms of o shoring decrease with the share of manual occupations and service o shoring increases with the share of routine occupations.

Remittances to sub-Saharan Africa make up a central yet poorly understood outcome of the migration process. According to official estimates, remittances from overseas residents and non-resident workers to developing countries amounted to over $300 billion in 2008. Although there is considerable interest in understanding remittances, very few data sources provide a comprehensive picture of the economic ties between African migrants and their origin households.1 Official macro statistics on remittances often underestimate remittance flows in Africa, particularly because a large share of transfers occurs through informal channels.

In this study we develop, estimate, and simulate a nested logit model of migration among 59 Canadian and U.S. sub-national areas using over 70,000 microdata observations on workers across all deciles of the skill distribution obtained from the U.S. and Canadian censuses of 2000/2001. Combining microdata on individual workers with area data, weare able to consider the effects of tax policy differences across countries on worker migration. Our ability to identify highly skilled individuals using these data enables us to simulate the effects of changes to taxes (under balanced budget conditions) on the migration propensities of individuals as well as the magnitude of the aggregate migration streams. Simulations suggest that increasing Canadian after-tax returns to skill and implementing fiscal equalization (reducing the average Canadian tax rate to the average U.S. level with offsetting expenditure reductions to maintain budget neutrality) wouldeffectively reduce southward migration and especially so amongst highly skilled workers. The required reductions in tax rates and public expenditures are relatively large however and therefore would be expected to raise other substantial public policy concerns.

This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of education. In chapter 1, I investigate teacher performance under performance pay incentives. Over the last decade many districts have implemented performance pay incentives to reward teachers for improving student test scores. Economic theory suggests that these programs could alter teacher work effort, cooperation, and retention. Because teachers can choose to work in a performance pay district that has characteristics correlated with teacher behavior, I use the distance between a teachers undergraduate institution and the nearest performance pay district as an instrumental variable. Using data from the 2003 and 2007 waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), I find that teachers respond to performance pay incentives by working fewer hours per week at school. Performance pay also decreases participation in unpaid cooperative school activities, while there is suggestive evidence that teacher turnover decreases. The treatment effects are heterogeneous; male teachers respond more positively to performance pay than female teachers. In Florida, which restricts state performance pay funding to individual teachers or teams, I find that work effort and teacher turnover increase.In chapter 2, I use a restricted use version of the 2007 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) to estimate the effect of tenure on teacher behavior and time allocation at school and outside of school. In most states, K-12 teachers receive tenure after serving a probationary period of several years. Teachers with tenure, or a continuing contract, are guaranteed due process before they can be dismissed from their job. Estimates of teacher behavior are obtained by exploiting the cross-state variation in the probationary period length of novice teachers within a difference-in-difference framework. I find that in the year that teachers are evaluated for tenure, they spend significantly more of their own money on classroom materials. Relative to the tenure evaluation year, once teachers receive tenure, they communicate less with students and parents outside of class and participate less in school and district committees. In those districts where at least one probationary teacher is fired, I find that teachers reallocate their teaching time. Immediately after receiving tenure, they spend less time teaching math and more time teaching English.In chapter 3 (with Richard Jensen), we empirically examine commercialization of university faculty inventions through startup firms from 1994 through 2008. Using data from the Association of University Technology Managers and the 2010 NRC doctoral rankings, our research reveals several findings. We find that university entrepreneurship is more common in bad economic times and that engineering department quality and biological sciences department size are more important after the NASDAQ stock market crash in 2000. We also find that the quality of a biological sciences department is positively associated with startup company activity. Conditional on creating one startup, each additional TTO employee significantly increases university startups.

The chapters in this dissertation each look at some aspect of immigration or internal migration in the United States, highlighting the spatial nature of population distribution and mobility. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the effect of immigrant residential clustering on crime and Chapter 3 explores the internal migration behavior of Puerto Ricans.In the first chapter, we investigate the effect of immigrant concentration on patterns of homicide in Los Angeles County. We also suggest an alternative method by which to define immigrant neighborhoods. Our results indicate that immigrant concentration confers a protective effect against homicide mortality, an effect that remains after controlling for other neighborhood structural factors that are commonly associated with homicide. Controlling for the spatial dependence in homicides reduces the magnitude of the effect, but it remains significant.Chapter 2 examines how foreign born population concentration impacts homicide rates at the county level. This chapter utilizes a longitudinal study design to reveal how changes in the immigrant population in the county are associated with changes in the homicide rate. The analysis is carried out using a spatial panel regression model which allows for cross-effects between neighboring counties. The results show that increasing foreign born population concentration is associated with reductions in the homicide rate, a process observed most clearly in the South region of the United States.In Chapter 3 we explore the internal migration patterns of Puerto Ricans in the United States, comparing the migration behavior of individuals born in Puerto Rico to those born in the United States. Second and higher generation Puerto Ricans are more mobile than their first generation counterparts, likely an outcome of the younger age structure and greater human capital of this former group. Puerto Ricans born in the United States also appear to be less influenced by the presence of existing Puerto Rican communities when making migration decisions. Both mainland- and island-born Puerto Rican populations are spatially dispersing, with the dominant migration stream for both groups being between New York and Florida.

Conditional on education and experience, the distribution of personal labor income appears to be double Pareto, a distribution that obeys the power law in both the upper and lower tails. In particular, the error term of the classical Mincer equation appears to be Laplace, or double exponential. This double power law is not rejected by goodness-of-fit tests. I compare two diffusion processes (one mean-reverting, the other unit root) with a stationary double Pareto distribution as a model of income dynamics. The data favors the mean-reverting process for modeling income dynamics over the unit root process.

I examine the effect of English language proficiency on the occupational choices of childhood immigrants into the United States. Following Bleakley and Chin (2004; 2010), I use an instrumental variables approach that exploits young children's superior language acquisition abilities to estimate the causal effect of English language skills on immigrants' choice of occupation. I find that immigrants with higher proficiency are more likely to work in jobs that require a sophisticated use of the English language, such as sales and administrative occupations. By contrast, immigrants with a weaker grasp of English are more likely to end up in occupations that do not rely on language skills, e.g. food preparation, farming, or production. I show that this effect is not driven primarily by the education channel, but is rather mostly the result of individuals' choice of the most suitable job within their educational category.

Based on 1890 returns, the U.S. Bureau of the Census declared the frontier closed. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner began expressing his well-known thesis regarding the importance of the frontier in America's growth and development. Freely-available land depleted over time and frontier culture changed a great deal; however, one important aspect of the frontier remained--people continued moving west. It was not until 100 years later, during the 1990s, that net migration to the West ceased. Why? That is the question addressed in this paper, which uses modified gravity models of interstate migration based on 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 census data in combination with seemingly unrelated Tobit regressions to demonstrate that the concentration of the foreign born in the West has been an important factor in the native-born population departing the West and tending to not move there.

Home ownership is a cornerstone of the American Dream for the economic and social benefits it conveys, but the past decade was a nightmare of foreclosures and inaccessibility for some groups. By 2011, the ownership gaps between black and white households, poor and rich households, less-educated and more-educated house- holds widened considerably compared to the situation a decade earlier. In addition, America’s younger generations have had greater financial obstacles to homeownership than did previous generations at the same stage in life: a fate unlikely to change soon.

This paper examines the role of ethnic networks in determining Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplementary Security Income (SSI) take-up among working-age immigrants in the United States. Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we find that even when controlling for country of origin and area fixed effects, immigrants residing amidst a large number of co-ethnics are more likely to receive disability payments when their ethnic groups have higher take-up rates. We show that this pattern can be partially explained by cross-group differences in satisfying the work history or income and asset requirements of the disability programs. However, we also present evidence suggesting that social norms play an important role. Information sharing appears to be important in determining SSI take-up but not DI take-up. Leisure complementarities, on the other hand, do not seem to be a driving force behind the network effects in disability program participation.

This paper compares U.S. fertility transitions in the early 20th century and post-1960 period. After affirming the similarities between declines in period fertility rates (births in a year per indicated population) and mean completed childbearing (cohort-based measures from the Census), our analysis describes five distinct features of the post-1960 period. Cohorts reaching childbearing age in the post-1960 period were substantially more likely to have exactly two children and significantly less likely to be childless (feature 1). The post-1960 period also witnessed a decoupling of sex and marriage, sex and childbearing, and marriage and childbearing. Cohorts reaching childbearing age in the post-1960 period formed their first households (through marriage or cohabitation) at similar ages as cohorts born from 1900 to 1910, but recent cohorts were much more likely to precede first marriage with non-marital cohabitation (feature 2). More recent cohorts delayed motherhood compared to the cohorts born from 1900 to 1910 and, among women marrying before having children, increased the interval between first marriage and motherhood (feature 3). These cohorts had intercourse at earlier ages but gave birth at later ages and more frequently outside of marriage (feature 4). Mothers education has become an increasingly strong predictor of age-at-first birth and non-marital childbearing in the post-1960 period (feature 5). These five features of the post-1960 period have implications for behavioral models of childbearing and the human capital acquisition of women and children.

Our study looks at the dynamic relationship between entrepreneurship, unemployment, and growth across 10 sectors of the U.S. using quarterly data for the period 2000-2009. The models measure entrepreneurship using the net entry rate of establishments from the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) dataset compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and growth using real value added (GDP) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Past entrepreneurship has a positive effect on growth in 4 out of 10 sectors, and a negative effect on unemployment in 4 out of 10 sectors. Past growth has a positive effect on entrepreneurship in 4 out of 10 sectors, and a negative effect on unemployment in 6 out of 10 sectors. Past unemployment has a positive effect on entrepreneurship in 3 out of 10 sectors, and a positive effect on growth in 4 out of 10 sectors. In other words, entrepreneurship and growth have a dynamic relationship in which one generates the other; unemployment spurs entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship dampens unemployment; and growth dampens unemployment, but unemployment spurs growth.

This dissertation develops a network model of migration. While the importance of ties between family members and friends in migration has been long recognized by anthropologists and sociologists and is increasingly confirmed by econometric studies, few economic models of networks in migration exist. This dissertation introduces a new, flexible tool, agent-based modeling, which it applies to the case of migration between Ecuador and the United States. The agent-based model makes it possible not only to reproduce a wider range of stylized facts for Ecuadorian migration, but also to investigate little-researched phenomena such as clustering and distributions. The first chapter reviews stylized facts for migration world-wide as well as for the case of Ecuador and the U.S. that serve as a guide to the empirical regularities migration models should explain. It outlines the history of economic thought on migration, and discusses prevalent models of migration and their shortcomings with respect to stylized facts, providing a methodological rationale for using agent-based modeling in economic migration research. The second chapter develops an artificial economy, in which the population moves between three locations, rural and urban Ecuador, and New York. The decision to migrate is determined within a multinomial logit framework by a range of factors identified in the economic literature of migration, including income differences, overlapping generation elements, and budget and liquidity constraints. However, the key elements in migration decisions are network effects. The simulations generate stable patterns and detailed information on distributions, which reproduce the available data for the geographical population distribution, wealth, debt, and remittances. More innovatively, the model shows the clustering of migrants both at the origin and at the destination that is one of the most pervasive and resilient stylized facts of migration research. The third chapter applies six remittance theories distilled from the literature to the model. It demonstrates that the various theories fit different aspects of the data, including age-wealth profiles as well as the distribution of the population, and of wealth and remittances. The chapter concludes that a combination of theories is most likely to have the best overall fit to the data.

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 secondgeneration are still children and attend primary and secondary school. Only recently have second-generation immigrants begun to enter postsecondary 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 , , ,

Hanna Rosin has written that she hesitate[s] to get drawn into data wars (and suggested my blog to those readers who have an appetite for them).1 But statistics are not mere technical details, academic in the pejorative sense; they are reflections of reality numbers that represent characteristics of a sample which, if done right, reflect the population from which the sample is drawn. It is in the broad sense of measuring reality, not the narrow sense of quibbling over details at the nth decimal place, that The End of Men is not true. Its depiction of reality is not accurate...

This thesis provides three essays in macroeconomics.The first chapter analyzes trends in fertility and time allocation. Falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been stable while female wages have continued to grow. Over the same period, women's hours spent on housework have declined, but men's have increased. A model with a shrinking gender wage gap is proposed capturing these trends. While rising relative wages increase women's labour supply, they also lead to a reallocation of home production from women to men, and a higher use of labour-saving inputs. Both are important in understanding why fertility did not decline further.The second chapter presents a life-cycle model with heterogeneous households and incomplete financial markets to study the implications of a reform that eliminates capital taxation. In the economy individuals differ in terms of their gender and marital status, and decision making within the couple is modeled as a contract under limited commitment. When capital taxes are set to zero, there is a strong increase in wealth accumulation that originates in dual earner households. Moreover, the policy change has important implications for the division of resources within the family and for households' insurance possibilities.The third chapter is motivated by the dramatic reshuffling in relative positions between East Asian and Latin American economies. It studies the dynamic response of a twosector, manufacturing and agriculture, economy in the presence of import tari s and export subsidies on manufacturing goods, similar to those that characterized government policy in these countries. It is shown that the response to these policies depends on the level of productivity in the agricultural sector. Quantitative work, however, finds that differences in agricultural productivities themselves are key in explaining the differential growth experiences.