Self-help has been a central feature of African Americans’ response to the historically limited opportunities faced by blacks in their efforts to become fully functioning American citizens since the 18th century. While widely embraced within the black community, historically the meaning of self-help has been contested. Black liberals and progressives following the lead of W.E.B. Du Bois have seen self-help as a strategy for organizing the black masses to advocate for and demand changes in the social system and in the racial distribution of resources and wealth. They understood self-help as a strategy for political empowerment. As such, their goal is to encourage government to provide the programs and resources necessary for full black economic, social and political participation. The more ideologically conservative elements of the black community have traditionally seen black community self-help as an approach to empower blacks to build their own communities and institutions. From this more conservative perspective, blacks can only become fully functioning citizens if they are not dependent on government (and some would say whites) for their wellbeing. Community self-help is the only logical pathway for blacks to develop the personal and group capacity necessary to participate in society as full citizens. Community self-help is not just relevant for African Americans. It also has become a prominent strategy for promoting citizen participation among low-income individuals in anti-poverty initiatives in both advanced and underdeveloped economies. Modern economic development theory and practice finds that anti-poverty efforts are more successful when residents of poor and disadvantaged places are full participants in the planning, implementation and evaluation of community development initiatives. This study examines the intersection of the black self-help traditions and the modern manifestations of community self-help, such as community capacity building and social capital. A review of the literature finds that black self-help, while having its own unique aspects and history, shares some common features with modern notions of civic engagement, social capital and community capacity building. However, while there has been considerable discussion of black community selfhelp in the scholarly and popular literature, there are few empirical studies of black community self-help. In particular, there are only limited studies that attempt to explain empirically why self-help varies from one spatial community to another. Based on the scholarly literature, black self-help is defined as the combination of black civic engagement and black local entrepreneurship. Using a sample of 59 medium to large metropolitan areas as the spatial unit of analysis, this study finds four distinct types of spatial locations that describe different configurations of self-help: 1) metropolitan areas with high levels of both civic engagement and local entrepreneurship, 2) places with high levels of black local entrepreneurship and low civic engagement, 3) metropolitan areas with high black civic engagement and low local entrepreneurship, and 4) locations with v both low black civic engagement and low black local entrepreneurship. On average, each of these four types of locations has their own unique configuration of metropolitan contextual characteristics. However, there also are differences in contextual characteristics between metropolitan areas within each of the four types of self-help groups. Finally, average black self-help appears to have grown across the metropolitan areas in the study sample.

Although the socioeconomic impact of school desegregation in the U.S. has been well documented, little is known about the health consequences of this policy. The purpose of thisstudy was to quantify the associations between school desegregation and adolescent births among black and white females. We compared the change in prevalence of adolescent births in areas that implemented school desegregation plans in the 1970s with areas that implemented school desegregation plans in other decades, using difference-in-difference methods with 1970 and 1980 Census microdata. School desegregation policy in the U.S. in the 1970s was associated with a significant reduction of 3.2 percentage points in the prevalence of births among black female adolescents between 1970 and 1980. This association was specific to black female adolescents and was not observed among white adolescents.

This work makes a joint analysis of prevention and saving decisions. First we determine the optimal levels of the two variables and we analyze substitution between them. Second we provide some results about the effects on optimal saving and prevention of changes in exogenous present and future wealth and in possible future loss. Finally we introduce insurance into the model and we extend the separation result, derived in the literature which studies the substitution between insurance and saving, to the case where prevention is considered too.

Recent military engagements in Iraq (OIF) and Afghanistan (OEF) raise questions about the effects on service members of overseas deployment, which can include service in a combat or war zone, exposure to casualties, or both. The 2010 National Survey of Veterans, which asked a broad cross section of living veteran cohorts about deployment to OEF/OIF and combat exposure, provides some new insights into short and long-term relationships between characteristics of military service and outcomes. Analysis of these data suggests that the impacts of deployment and combat on the current socioeconomic well-being of returning OEF/OIF veterans may be relatively small, but the effects of combat exposure on self-reported health and other nonpecuniary indicators of their well-being appear to be negative. Among older veteran cohorts, where there is clearer sorting into treatment and control groups because of strong variation in combat exposure by year of birth, patterns are broadly similar. These results are consistent with a veterans compensation system that replaces lost earnings but does not necessarily compensate for other harms associated with combat exposure such as mental health trauma.

Asian Americans with disabilities are an invisible minority within an invisible minority. Approximately 12% of the Asian American population of 14.6 million has a disability. Unfortunately, this population has attracted very little attention in the research literature on disability policy and Asian American studies. In particular, the labor market experiences of Asian Americans with disabilities have received virtually no mention in the academic literature of immigrant labor markets and ethnic enclave economies. This is largely due to cultural, religious and language stigma associated with Asian Americans with disabilities, that people with disabilities should be kept out of the public view. This dissertation aims to begin the identification and explanation of the challenges faced by Asian Americans with physical and developmental disabilities in their attempts to access the U.S. labor market. The dissertation starts with conceptual models delineating the challenges and barriers Asian Americans with disabilities face in trying to find employment. The methodological approach utilized is a parallel mixed-methods design. Focus groups of English and non-English speaking Asian Americans with disabilities were conducted to gain insight into their labor market experiences. Data gathered from the focus groups was used to inform and formulate questions for the individual interview stage. The second part is analysis of PUMS 2005 census survey data measuring the effects on employment and income, given disability, English-speaking ability, race, gender and location. The third part of the research consisted of open-ended qualitative interviews with 18 Asian Americans with disabilities to collect text data to further explain the causal relationships revealed by the focus groups and PUMS analysis. The results of this research revealed that disability has a significant effect on labor market opportunities for Asian American with disabilities. Further, gender and English-speaking ability also have significant measurable effects. Arguably, disability, gender and English-speaking ability in combination produced the clearest results of labor market disparities. The study concludes with recommendations for future research and implications for policy makers and practitioners. Potential audiences for this dissertation are individuals with disabilities and their families, community-based organizations, federal employment programs, work search programs, mainstream disability service organizations, legislators and planners.

Although data disclosure is advantageous for many obvious reasons, it may incur some risk resulting from potential security breaches. An example of such privacy violation occurs when an adversary reconstructs the original data using additional information. Moreover, sharing private information such as address and telephone number insocial networks isalwayssubjecttoapotential misuse. Inthisdissertation, we address both the scalability andprivacy risk ofdata anonymization. Wedevelop a framework that assesses the relationship between thedisclosed data and the resulting privacy risk and use it to determine the optimal set of transformations that need to be performed before data is disclosed. We propose a scalable algorithm that meets differential privacy when applying a specific random sampling.The main contribution of this dissertation is three-fold: (i) we show that determining the optimal transformations is an NP-hard problem and propose a few approximationheuristics, which wejustify experimentally,(ii) wepropose apersonalized anonymizationtechniquebased on an aggregate(Lagrangian) formulation and provethat itcouldbesolved inpolynomialtime,and(iii)weshowthatcombining the proposed aggregate formulation with specific sampling gives an anonymization algorithm that satisfies differential privacy. Our results rely heavily on exploring the supermodularity properties of the risk function, which allow us to employ techniques from convex optimization. Finally, we use the proposed model to assess the risk of private information sharing in social networks.Through experimental studies we compare our proposed algorithms with other anonymization schemes in terms of both time and privacy risk. We show that the proposed algorithm is scalable. Moreover, we compare the performance of the proposedapproximate algorithms with the optimal algorithm and show that the sacrifice in risk is outweighed by the gain in efficiency

In this paper, we develop a new method of inferring child mortality from the age gaps between surviving children. Based on the idea that higher child mortality produces an increased frequency of large gaps between surviving children, we use microsimulation to estimate the mortality rates implied by the observed distribution of age gaps.Application to populations with known child mortality shows that the method can reproduce well the estimates and differentials in child mortality seen in real populations. Estimates of child mortality from census-like data could be a valuable new addition to the toolkit of demographers to apply to the proliferation of historical census data via the IPUMS, NAPP, and the new Mosaic project, allowing thestudy of mortality and fertility (via the own child method) within populations and across time and space. This method, if successful, would enable researchers to estimate both mortality and fertility from a single census cross section, allowing full advantage of the richness of available census material.

Two prominent ways of viewing U.S. inequality are American apartheid and concentrated poverty. These perspectives are largely geographic ones. This manuscript argues it is necessary to view the reproduction of the black professoriate through a relational lens. The relational view is a conflict one that focuses on daily activities to subjugate the black professoriate. This manuscript establishes why the relational view is important vis--vis geographic views. It then presents data to show disparities of the black professoriate class when compared to the white professoriate class. Using U.S. Census data, it selects fulltime in the labor market respondents holding doctoral degrees, and it finds that in relative terms the social and economic position of black Americans is similar to the social and economic position of the black professoriate. It then uses an autoethnographic method and it shows how black professoriate degradation is quotidian reproduction.

This paper investigates whether the 9/11 attacks will have a long-term impact by altering the fertility and assimilation rate of immigrants from Muslim countries in the United States. Terror attacks by Islamic groups are likely to induce a backlash against the Muslim community, and therefore, tend to raise the costs of assimilation for Muslims in the West. We test this hypothesis by exploiting variation across states in the number of hate crimes against Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Our results show that Muslim immigrants living in states which experienced the sharpest increase in hate crimes also exhibit: (i) greater chances of marrying within their own ethnic group; (ii) higher fertility; (iii) lower female labor force participation; and (iv) lower English proficiency. Importantly, the state-level increase in hate crimes against Muslims after the 9/11 attacks was not correlated with the pre-existing state-level trend in any of these assimilation outcomes. Moreover, we do not find similar effects for any other immigrant group after the 9/11 attacks. Overall, our results show that the backlash induced by the 9/11 attacks increased the ethnic identity and demographic strength of the Muslim immigrant community in the U.S. These findings shed light on the increasing use of terror attacks on Western countries, with the concurrent rise in social and political tensions surrounding the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in several European countries.

The Technical Report for the California Immigrant Integration Scorecard documents the methodology used to generate the data for this project. It is intended for those looking to understand the underlying data analysis.

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 18201909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human capital selectivity of international migrants. In a sample of 52 source and five destination countries we find selective migration determined by relative anthropometric inequality in source and destination countries. Other inequality measures confirm this. The results remain robust in OLS and ArellanoBond approaches. We confirm the RoyBorjas model of migrant self-selection. Moreover, we find that countries like Germany and UK experienced a smallpositive effect, because the less educated emigrated in larger numbers.

This article takes a new approach to gender and housework by identifying a new measure of gender deviance--work in gender-atypical occupations--and by arguing that men who do "women's work" and women who do "men's work" in the labor market may seek to neutralize their gender deviance by doing male- and female-typed work at home. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Families and Households and the 2003-7 waves of the American Time Use Survey shows that men who do "women's work" in the market spend more time on male-typed housework relative to men in gender-balanced occupations and their wives spend more time on female-typed housework. Women in gender-atypical occupations also do more female-typed housework than women in gender-balanced occupations. The article provides clearer evidence about the important ways in which cultural conceptions of gender shape and are shaped by economic processes.

This dissertation is a collection of essays written in preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics. The essays are grouped into three parts that address three areas of public economics. Part I, On the Effects of Government Spending at the Local Level, includes two chapters co-authored with Philippe Wingender that analyze the effects of government spending at the local level. These chapters propose and exploit a new identification strategy to measure the causal impact of government spending on the economy. In Chapter 2 we use this strategy to estimate the short term effects of government spending at the local level. Our estimates imply that government spending has a local income multiplier of 1.88 and an estimated cost per job of $30,000 per year. In Chapter 3 we analyze the economic incidence of sustained changes in federal government spending at the local level. We develop a spatial equilibrium model to show that when workers value publicly-provided goods, a change in government spending at the local level will affect equilibrium wages through shifts in both the labor demand and supply curves. Our estimates of this model conclude that an additional dollar of government spending increases welfare by $1.45 in the median county. Part II, On Behavioral Responses to Taxation, includes two chapters that analyze how the behavior of private agents responds to tax incentives. In Chapter 4 we study how individuals respond to non-linear taxes. We use a laboratory experiment to document and characterize a behavioral deviation from the standard economic model and argue that this deviation from the rational benchmark has important consequences for the welfare analysis of non-linear pricing schemes and non-linear taxes as well as for policies that advocate the provision of information regarding marginal incentives. In Chapter 5 we study how entrepreneurs organize their firms and how taxation might influence this choice. We focus on the dynamic choice of organizational form for startup firms and we quantify the impacts of tax and non-tax advantages of incorporation. Results from estimating a dynamic discrete choice model show that static models underestimate fixed costs of reorganization while overestimating the non- tax advantages of incorporation. The revised estimates also lead to a substantive downward revision of the risk-taking incentive inherent in the flexibility to change organizational forms. Part III, On Applied Econometrics, is composed of a single chapter co-authored with Charlie Gibbons and Mike Urbancic and addresses the use of fixed effects in applied econo- metrics. Though common in the applied literature, it is known that fixed effects regressions with a constant treatment effect generally do not consistently estimate the sample-weighted treatment effect. Chapter 6 demonstrates the extent of the difference between the fixed ef- fect estimate and the sample-weighted effect by replicating nine influential papers from the American Economic Review.

The influx of immigrants has increased diversity among ethnic minoritiesand indicates that they may take multiple integration paths in American society.Previous research on ethnic integration has often focused on panethnic differences,and few have explored ethnic diversity within a racial or panethnic context. Using2000 U.S. census data for Puerto Rican, Mexican-, Chinese-, and Filipino-originindividuals, we examine differences in marriage and cohabitation with whites, withother minorities, within a panethnic group, and within an ethnic group by nativitystatus. Ethnic endogamy is strong and, to a lesser extent, so is panethnic endogamy.Yet, marital or cohabiting unions with whites remain an important path of integrationbut differ significantly by ethnicity, nativity, age at arrival, and educationalattainment. Meanwhile, ethnic differences in marriage and cohabitation with other racialor ethnic minorities are strong. Our analysis supports that unions with whites remain amajor path of integration, but other paths of integration also become viable options forall ethnic groups.

Age at arrival matters for schooling outcomes in a way predicted by child development theory: The chances of being a high school dropout increase significantly each year for children who arrive after the age of eight. We document this process for immigrants from a number of regions relative to appropriate comparison regions. Using instrumental variables we find that the variation in education outcomes associated with variation in age at arrival influences adult outcomes that reflect values important to the American mainstream, notably English language proficiency and intermarriage. We conclude that children experience migration differently from adults depending upon the timing of migration, and we show that migration during the early years of child development influences educational outcomes. We also find that the variation in education induced by the interaction of migration and age at arrival changes the capacity of children to become fully integrated into the American mainstream as adults.

Combining unique individual level H-1B data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and data from the 2009 American Community Survey, we analyze earnings differences between H-1B visa holders and US born workers in STEM occupations. The data indicate that H-1Bs are younger and more skilled, as measured by education, than US born workers in the same occupations. We fail to find support for the notion that H-1Bs are paid less that observationally similar US born workers; in fact, they appear to have higher earnings in some key STEM occupations, including information technology

This paper examines the labor market effects of state health insurance mandates that increase the cost of employing a demographically identifiable group. State mandates requiring that health insurance plans cover infertility treatment raise the relative cost of insuring older women of child-bearing age. Empirically, wages in this group are unaffected, but their total labor input decreases. Workers do not value infertility mandates at cost, and so will not take wage cuts in exchange, leading employers to decrease their demand for this affected and identifiable group. Differences in the empirical effects of mandates found in the literature are explained by a model including variations in the elasticity of demand, moral hazard, ability to identify a group, and adverse selection. 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management

How racial barriers play in the experiences of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. Some consider Mexican Americans similar to European Americans of a century ago that arrived in the United States with modest backgrounds but were eventually able to participate fully in society. In contrast, others argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout U.S. history, and this limits their participation in society. The evidence of persistenteducational disadvantages across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping supportsthe racialization argument. In this paper, we explorethe ways in which race plays a role in the lives of MexicanAmericans by examining how education, racial characteristics, social interactions, relate to racial outcomes. We use the Mexican American Study Project, a unique data set based on a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio combined with surveys of thesame respondents and their adult children in 2000, therebycreating a longitudinal and intergenerational data set. First, we found that darker Mexican Americans, thereforeappearing more stereotypically Mexican, report moreexperiences of discrimination. Second, darker men reportmuch more discrimination than lighter men and thanwomen overall. Third, more educated Mexican Americansexperience more stereotyping and discrimination than theirless educated counterparts, which is partly due to theirgreater contact with whites. Lastly, having greater contactwith whites leads to experiencing more stereotyping anddiscrimination. Our results are indicative of the ways inwhich Mexican Americans are racialized in the United States.