In the last half a century, married females more than doubled their workforce participation and significantly reduced their time spent on home production. Using a model of family decision making with home production and individual earnings heterogeneity, we subject two prominent explanations for this aggregate change, namely, the evolution of the gender earnings gap and the cost of home appliances, to quantitative tests with respect to changes in participation for disaggregated groups of couples and trends in time spent in leisure and home production activities. We find that both forces are needed to understand the evolution of married female time allocation over time, although the falling cost of home appliances is a dominant explanation for the time allocation outside of workplace, while the gender earnings gap is the dominant explanation for the workforce participation decision.

One of the thorniest issues involving unauthorized immigrants is the situation of their children, the majority of whom are born in the United States. This research focuses on Mexican immigrants, who are a majority of the countrys estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants. We show that their trajectory of obtaining legal and citizenship status affects their childrens educational outcomes, and that the children who get the least schooling are those whose parents, especially their mothers, remain unauthorized. Pathways to legalization thus do matter, not just for the immigrants themselves but also more broadly for the new generation of Mexican American citizens of this country.

Purpose: To investigate the variation in average daily travel time to work among registered nurses (RNs) living in urban, suburban, and rural areas. We examine how travel time varies across RN characteristics, job setting, and availability of local employment opportunities. Method: Descriptive statistics and linear regression using a 5% sample from the 2000 Census and a longitudinal survey of newly licensed RNs (NLRN). Travel time for NLRN respondents was estimated using geographic information systems (GIS) software. Findings: In the NLRN, rural nurses and those living in small towns had significantly longer average commute times. Young married RNs and RNs with children also tended to have longer commute times, as did RNs employed by hospitals. Conclusions: The findings indicate that travel time to work varies significantly across locale types.Further research is needed to understand whether and to what extent lengthy commute times impact RN workforce needsin rural and urban areas.

The study of welfare participation in the United States prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and afterward has primarily focused on comparing native and immigrant households. Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisons across race, with particular focus on Hispanic immigrants. This paper moves away from the existing literature by investigating whether there is a difference in welfare usage among immigrant based on their birthplace. Using a probit model, we investigate this potential difference by testing two related hypotheses. Our results suggest that the probability of welfare usage for immigrants with similar characteristic, differ for some immigrant groups. We also find that for some immigrant groups, citizen and noncitizens differ with respect to welfare usage.

I test if selective out-migration of unhealthy seniors explains why disability rates are so much lower for Florida, as compared to the national average. This particular area of research is timely given the significant demographic changes relating to aging. Moreover, this study contributes to the body of literature examining migration with respect to disability and widowhood. Using State Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) and Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA), I create national maps showing disability rates for the following age-groups: 5059, 6069, and 70?. After creating maps in ARCGIS and conducting univariate and clustering analysis on mobility disability and personal care limitation, I employ multinomial logit (MNL) analysis to test if individuals with disability are more likely to out-migrate from Florida. The regression analyses lend support to the relaxed Litwak and Longino (The Gerontologist, 27(3): 266272, 1987) secondmove hypothesis, which claims individuals with progressively worse health are more likely to undertake another move to be closer to family and friends. I staterelaxed because the data does not allow one to determine the reason for migrationonly that migration occurred during the past year. This research informs policy-makers to recognize that elderly in better health may migrate to places such as Arizona and Florida due to amenity-seeking behavior, but unhealthy elderly aremore likely to leave these states due to assistance-seeking behavior. This outmigration can place excess demand on health services for the incoming regions, which requires state and local government to ensure resources are in place. Also noteworthy, my results are less likely to be flawed by erroneous age and sex data in the public use microdata samples (IPUMS) since I stack the 2006 and 2007American Community Survey (ACS). A recent working studies by Alexander et al.(Inaccurate age and sex data in the Census PUMS files: Evidence and implications.Munich: CESifo, 2010) shows inaccuracies in the IPUMS for the 1 and 5% 2000 Census, the 20032006 ACS, the 20052007 3-year ACS, and the 20042009 current population survey (CPS) files.

For more than five decades, Civil War History has served as the leading venue for scholarly publications on the Civil War era. Even in light of this impressive run, the editors of Civil War History feel that the following contribution by J. David Hacker of Binghamton University, SUNY, stands among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages. Hacker, a specialist in quantitative methods, has utilized recently released microdata samples from nineteenth-century censuses to examine one of the archetypal “facts” about the Civil War—the oft-cited total of 620,000 plus deaths. Through a comparison of male survival rates between 1860 and 1870 with male survival rates in surrounding censuses, Hacker finds the traditional statistic understates the number of actual Civil War deaths by approximately 20 percent. In his estimation, the most probable number of deaths attributable to the Civil War is 752,000, although the upper bounds of his data set point to as many as 851,000 deaths.

We develop a dynamic multi-region model, with uctuating regional house prices,where an owner-occupied households location choice depends on its current wealthand its current type and involves both consumption and investment considerations.The relative strength of the consumption motive and the investment motive in thelocation choice determines the equilibrium pattern of residential sorting, with astrong investment (consumption) motive implying sorting according to the type(wealth). The model predicts a negative relation between the size of house priceuctuations and the degree of residential sorting in the type dimension. Also, moversshould be more sorted than stayers in the type dimension. These predictions areconsistent with evidence from US metropolitan areas when income, education andage are used as proxies for household type.

The thesis focuses on the role of race and poverty programs in influencing the housing market in the 1930s. I investigate claims that African American in-migration resulted in the decline of neighborhood property values in New York during the Great Depression. I find that contrary to the expectations of economists and government officials, African American migration initially increased housing values. However, this premium disappeared as the neighborhood was increasingly settled by African Americans. During the 1930s the federal and state governments introduced several programs designed to help people stay in their homes. In my analysis using U.S. Census data from 1920, 1930, and 1940, the results suggest that among the New Deal programs for non-farm households, the Federal Housing Administration was the only program that had a positive and statistically significant influence on the probability of home ownership for both white and black households. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation appears to have had no influence on home ownership rates. Among the farm programs, Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) grants are negatively associated with white farm home ownership rates, but had no statistically significant effect for black farmers which are consistent with previous findings that found the AAA spurred black out-migration from the rural south. Mortgage moratorium laws were associated with an increase in white farmers home ownership rates. Federal public housing for the poor was introduced during the New Deal. I examine how housing officials selected the location of public housing and measures the effect of public housing on surrounding contract rents in New York City between 1934 and 1940. I find that public housing was constructed in poor, crowded neighborhoods with nearby public transportation. My findings also suggest that public housing increased the share of contract rents throughout the city. The magnitude of the effect also appeared to not dissipate as the distance to public housing increased. However, my results suggest that the early public housing projects constructed by the Public Works Administration led to greater spillovers in in contract rents than the later projects constructed by the United States Housing Authority.

Growing interests in multi-criteria decision support applications have resulted in a flurry of efficient skyline algorithms. In practice, real-world decision support applications require to access data from disparate sources. Existing techniques define the skyline operation to work on a single set, and therefore, treat skylines as an add-on on top of a traditional Select-Project-Join query plan. In many real-world applications, the skyline dimensions can be anti-correlated such as the attribute pair {price, mileage} for cars and {price, distance} for hotels. Anti-correlated data are particularly challenging for skyline evaluation and therefore have commonly been ignored by existing techniques. In this work, we propose a robust execution framework called SKIN to evaluate skyline over joins. The salient features of SKIN are: (a) effective in reducing the two primary costs, namely the cost of generating the join results and the cost of dominance comparisons to compute the final skyline of join results, (b) shown to be robust for both skyline-friendly (independent and correlated) as well as skyline-unfriendly (anti-correlated) data distributions. SKIN is effective in exploiting the skyline knowledge in both local within individual data sources and across disparate sourcesto significantly reduce the above-mentioned costs incurred during the evaluation of skyline over join. Our experimental study demonstrates the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art techniques to handle a wide variety of data distributions.

Since parents have limited resources, they face a tradeoff between the quantity and quality of their children the more children they have, the fewer resources they can allocate to each. Since Becker first introduced this Quantity-Quality model in 1960, a number of studies have attempted to verify it through empirical analysis. One difficulty is that parents choose both the number of children and resource allocation, so there can be omitted variables influencing both decisions, making it difficult to identify causal effects. In order to avoid this omitted variables bias, I use the exogenous differences in family size generated by parents preferences for having both boys and girls. Because parents tend to want children of both genders, they are more likely to have a third child when their first two children are the same gender. I focus on the impact of the Quantity-Quality tradeoff on resource allocation by using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses to study the effect of number of children on whether children attend private school. This paper contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the heterogeneous impact of the Quantity-Quality tradeoff across different demographic groups. The most significant result is found in the difference between boys to girls while an increase in the number of children from two to three decreased boys probability of attending private school by 5.0 percentage points, there was no similar effect for girls. Heterogeneous results were also found by childs age, age difference between the first two children, and region of the country.

This is a study of intergenerational mobility in the United States in the period 1880-1900. Following the lead of what we regard as seminal work in this area (Landale and Guest, 1990; Ferrie, 2005), we propose to examine the relationships among three dimensions of mobility: 1) occupational mobility, 2) domestic migration, and 3) generational shifts in nativity. The study is based on a linked file for men across 1880-1900 created by IPUMS.

In the first chapter of this dissertation, I examine the role of persistent e ffects of past labor market conditions in explaining trends in the college-high school wage gap inthe US. I document increases in the wage gap for workers since the late 1990s, which are larger than those predicted by standard explanations and are consistent with animportant role for persistence in the wage gap. Using a semi-parametric estimation procedure, I show that the increases are caused by changes in age pro files in the wagegap across birth cohorts, rejecting the assumption of constant age profi les in prior work and providing evidence of persistence in the wage gap. I fi nd that higher unemployment at the age of high school graduation leads to higher college-high school wage gaps through age 30 in the birth cohort. I identify the persistent e ffects of initialunemployment rates controlling flexibly for unobserved transient eff ects of contemporaneous conditions. The fade out of persistent e ffects of initial unemployment rateswith age can account for over a third of the unexplained increase in the wage gap for older workers, and nearly all of the increase for younger workers. The results implythat an important component of wage inequality is driven by the luck of birth cohorts to enter the labor market when conditions are favorable. To alleviate the eff ects ofpersistent wage inequality, policy makers should consider targeted cross-generational transfers over transfers designed to alleviate only the eff ects of transitory labor market conditions.The second chapter, written jointly with Brian Jacob, examines the relationship between the formal ratings that principals give teachers and a variety of observableteacher characteristics, including proxies for productivity. Prior work has shown that principals can differentiate between more and less e ffective teachers, especially at the tails of the quality distribution, and that subjective evaluations of teachers are strongly correlated with subsequent student achievement. However, whereas prior work has relied on survey data, we consider formal ratings from a setting in which the stakes are reasonably high. We fi nd that the ratings are correlated with an array of teacher qualities including experience for young teachers, education credentials, and teacher absenteeism. Our fi nding that principals reward qualities of teachers known to be related to student productivity provides reason to be optimistic about policies that would assign more weight to principal evaluations of teachers in career decisions and compensation.In the third chapter, I ask whether the benefi ts of pre-school participation can account for the magnitude of the e ffects of school entry policies on student outcomesusually attributed to the student's age of entry into school. I develop a dynamic model of human capital accumulation, which accounts for diff erential pre-school experiences of children. Using the model, I show that differences in the rate of participation in pre-kindergarten activities between students assigned to enter school at diff erent ages could lead to upward bias in prior estimates of effects of entry age on student achievement, and downward bias in estimates of the eff ects of time in school. I fi nd that students assigned more time out of school are more likely to attend prekindergarten.Accounting for pre-kindergarten participation, I fi nd larger eff ects of time in school on math scores than in prior work. To account for all of the eff ects of entry policies usually attributed to entry age, the benefi ts of pre-kindergarten would need to be implausibly large. However, using variation in the response to and compliance with school entry policies across states and time, I fi nd evidence of large e ffects of pre-kindegarten attendance on math scores.

Beginning with the 1996 federal welfare reform law many of the central safety net programs in the U.S. eliminated eligibility for legal immigrants, who had been previously eligible on the same terms as citizens. These dramatic cutbacks affected eligibility not only for cash welfare assistance for families with children, but also for food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP, and SSI. In this paper, we comprehensively examine the status of the U.S. safety net for immigrants and their family members. We document thepolicy changes that affected immigrant eligibility for these programs and use the CPS for 1995-2010 to analyze trends in program participation, income, and poverty among immigrants (and natives). We pay particular attention to the recent period and examine how immigrants and their children are faring in the Great Recession with an eye toward revealing how these policy changes have affected thesuccess of the safety net in protecting this population.

American soldiers who have fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gulf War II) have faced unusually stressful work conditions. The disruption to home life from repeated deployments and the stress from fighting wars overseas make their job more difficult than most. Using data from the 2009 ACS from IPUMS, veterans of Gulf War II show adverse effects from their military service in a few basic measures of well-being, when compared to other Americans who have not served in the military. These measures include disability status, unemployment, and divorce rates. I am particularly interested in whether there is a discernible increased risk for cognitive disability for veterans versus a similar civilian population. I found that Gulf War II veterans have 1.6 times higher odds than non-veterans of reporting cognitive difficulties. They have much higher odds of divorce, especially female veterans. I found that veterans faced lower unemployment than similar non-veterans.

Many federal government housing policies began during the New Deal of the 1930s. Many claim that minorities benefited less from these policies than whites. We estimate the relationships between policies in the 1920s and 1930s and black and white home ownership in farm and nonfarm settings using a pseudo-panel of repeated cross-sections of households in 1920, 1930, and 1940 matched with policy measures in 460 state economic areas. The policies examined include FHA mortgage insurance, HOLC loan refinancing, state mortgage moratoria, farm loan programs, public housing, public works and relief, and payments to farmers to take land out of production.

Over the past several decades the wages earned by Mexican immigrants stagnated relative to those earned by native Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. In this article we draw on data from the decennial census and American Community Survey to understand why and how this stagnation occurred. We test two competing explanations: a decline in the quality of successive cohorts of Mexican immigrants and a shift in the political economy that increased the number of people lacking full labor rights in the United States while increasing discrimination and exclusion against such people. We present evidence in favor of the latter explanation by showing that observed quality increased rather than decreased and that what happened instead was a systematic decline in the returns to various measures of human capital and a wholesale drop in wages for all immigrants after 2000.

Depression-era bank suspensions and failures are conceptualized as products of the first part of what Polanyi (1994) called "The Great Transformation," which involved an imbalanced institutional arrangement in which the economy dominated other institutions Relying on Durkheim (1897/1951) and Merton (1938, 1968), it is argued that these banking problems accentuated the type of chronic anomie that Durkheim theorized would create normative deregulation and elevated suicide rates over the long-term Results from county-level analyses are supportive as the 1930 bank suspension rate is positively related to the 2000 suicide rate, controlling for contemporary and historical factors The mediating roles of integration and chronic anomie are considered, with the latter measured using data from the geocoded General Social Survey

This paper compares changes in wages of university-educated new immigrant workers in Canada and in the U.S. over the period from 1980 to 2005, relative to those of their domestic born counterparts and to those of high school graduates (university wage premium). Wages of university-educated new immigrant men declined relative to those of domestic-born university graduates over the entire study period in Canada, but rose between 1990 and 2000 in the U.S.The characteristics of entering immigrants underwent more change in Canada than in the U.S. over the 1980-to-2005 period; as a result, compositional changes in the immigrant population had a larger negative effect on the outcomes of highly educated immigrants in Canada than in the U.S. However, even after accounting for such compositional shifts, most of the discrepancy in relative earnings outcomes between immigrants to Canada and immigrants to the U.S. persisted. The university premium for new immigrants was fairly similar in both countries in 1980, but by 2000 was considerably higher in the U.S. than in Canada, especially for men.

Background: In the United States, where coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of mortality, CHD risk assessment is a priority and accurate blood pressure (BP) measurement is essential. Methods: Hypertension estimates in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Wave IV (2008)-a nationally representative field study of 15,701 participants aged 24-32-was referenced against NHANES (2007-2008) participants of the same age. We examined discordances in hypertension, and estimated the accuracy and reliability of blood pressure in the Add Health study. Results: Hypertension rates (BP: >= 140/90 mm Hg) were higher in Add Health compared with NHANES (19% vs. 4%), but self-reported history was similar (11% vs. 9%) among adults aged 24-32. Survey weights and adjustments for differences in participant characteristics, examination time, use of antihypertensive medications, and consumption of food/caffeine/cigarettes before blood pressure measurement had little effect on between-study differences in hypertension estimates. Among Add Health participants interviewed and examined twice (full and abbreviated interviews), blood pressure was similar, as was blood pressure at the in-home and in-clinic examinations conducted by NHANES III (1988-1994). In Add Health, there was minimal digit preference in blood pressure measurements; mean bias never exceeded 2 mm Hg; and reliability (estimated as intraclass correlation coefficients) was 0.81 and 0.68 for systolic and diastolic BPs, respectively. Conclusions: The proportion of young adults in NHANES reporting a history of hypertension was twice that with measured hypertension, whereas the reverse was found in Add Health. Between-survey differences were not explained by digit preference, low validity, or reliability of Add Health blood pressure data, or by salient differences in participant selection, measurement context, or interview content. The prevalence of hypertension among Add Health Wave IV participants suggests an unexpectedly high risk of cardiovascular disease among US young adults and warrants further scrutiny.

The level of the Frisch labor supply elasticity, as well as the pro file over the lifetime are essential for welfare analysis of many policy changes in general equilibrium models. This paper uses a pseudo panel to examine two open questions with regards to the Frisch labor supply elasticity. First, can the diff erence between the macroeconomic calibration values and microeconometric estimates of the Frisch elasticity be explained by the extensive margin? Second, what is the shape of the Frisch labor supply elasticity profi le? With regard to the first question, including only the intensive margin, I find estimates of the Frisch elasticity between 0.6-0.64.Including both the intensive and extensive margins, the elasticity estimates increase to 1.86-2.11. The diff erence between the two ranges indicates that the impact of the extensive margin is large enough to explain the diff erence between previous micro estimates of the Frisch elasticityand macro calibration values. With regard to the second question, the Frisch elasticity profi le including just the intensive margin is at over the working life. Including both the intensive and extensive margin, the Frisch elasticity profi le is at until the age of 55, at which point it increases a statistically signifi cant amount.