Using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Censuses, this project measures the association between educational attainment and outmigration from the State of Michigan. I begin by using descriptive statistics to document basic trends over time, focusing especially on the states where two groups, the college educated and the less than college educated, have moved. Intergroup comparisons are also presented and discussed. Next, logistic regression is used to analyze how Michigan outmigration differs by educational group after statistically controlling for select demographic, economic, and social characteristics. This study concludes by offering policy recommendations that Michigan officials should consider in an effort to reduce the Michigan exodus. Specific study results indicate that the destination states of Michigan outmigrants have been relatively constant regardless of educational level or census year. However, one key finding to emerge was that the number of college educated outmigrants was nearly twice that of the non-college educated group. Study results support the notion of a Michigan brain drain and also identify key characteristics that are likely contributors to outmigration. More specifically, results from logistic regression models indicate that even when controlling for educational status, the most powerful predictors of outmigration are age, previous migration, number of children under five and 18, and tenure. The magnitude of some of these differences changed slightly time, however, the directions remained consistent.

Public investment in early childhood education is rising rapidly. Between 1990 and 2008, the number of three to five year olds enrolled in public early childhood education and care programs (excluding kindergarten) more than doubled from 1.2 to 2.7 million children.2 This rise in public investment – attributed to such factors as growth in female labor force participation, welfare reform, and an increasing understanding of early child development (Gormley, 2007; Loeb & Bassok, 2008) signals a significant expansion in the role of federal, state and local governments in the development of young children. State-level investment has grown particularly rapidly, more than doubling from $2.4 billion in 2001 to $5 billion in 2008 (Barnett, Epstein, Friedman, Boyd, & Hustedt, 2008).

This paper explores occupational stratification through analysis of the social networks of occupational incumbents. Data is taken from the US Current Population Survey from1970 to 2010 to explore marriage patterns by occupational position. The paper supports Treimans (1977) hypothesis that the relative advantage and prestige of occupationsremains consistent over time. Through adopting a social network perspective, it is possible to identify changes which are occurring within the occupational structure,particularly regarding educational expansion, and understand how structures remain resilient despite socio-cultural changes. The categorization of occupations into social classes is also explored, with a case study demonstrating that the aggregation of management roles can produce suboptimal categories.

In an era of increasing social and economic inequality, why are popular labor laws such as increasing the minimum wage slowly realized in the United States, if at all? This situation is puzzling in a purported democracy where one would expect that the extensive political rights of a broad electorate should translate to pro-labor policy. Central to this dissertation are the highly popular minimum wage laws that were enacted in an increasing number of states between 1997 and 2006 after decades of state governments passively adhering to the often stagnant federal level. Is the fact that state governments are now likely to increase their minimum wages above the national standard a sign that these sub-national bodies are more likely to enact policy that reduces social and economic inequality? This research uses the case of the minimum wage to examine the progressive federalism thesis to understand the democratic institutions such as the structure and culture of the legislature and ballot initiatives that differentiate states and their potential for enacting such popular anti-inequality legislation. In addition, this project will examine social, political and economic factors that may also have been instrumental in both the likelihood and extent to which states increased the minimum wage during the 1997-2006 period. Finally, this study will make use of broad differences among the states to evaluate the effectiveness of minimum wage laws in reducing income inequality among workers or whether such laws may have had negative impacts on employment.

This report sets out to estimate the total annual expenditures on children in New York City and to create a “fiscal map” to detail them. This fiscal map describes these expenditures according to a series of clas- sifications, including age of child (early childhood, elementary, and high school); source of funding (public, tax-related, and philanthropic); level of government (city, state, and federal); and child disadvantage as measured using poverty criteria. The goal of the map, derived from analysis of budgetary data and official sources, is to depict expenditures on children in a clear and comprehensive fashion. Based on data for 2010, we estimate that annual fiscal spending for the average child in New York City is $15,630, which, adjusting for inflation, represents a slight decline over the period since 2005. For all 2.02 million city children, this amounts to a total of $31.5 billion, Most of that money is spent on schooling; expenditures for developmental supports for children, such as early childhood care and education and out- of-school time programs, as well as medical care and critical programs such as homeless services, amount to less than one-third of the total. Over the period, the pattern of expenditures changed significantly. Our fiscal map also shows that the primary source of funding for New York City children is the city government, which provides almost half of the direct funding for programs for children. The state is the next largest source. Direct expenditures by the federal government are nearly equaled by the resource implications of rules on tax-related expenditures (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit). Notably, the map does show that public investments are disproportionately allocated toward disadvantaged children. Whereas average annual direct public spending per child is $13,340 (net of tax-related expenditures and philanthropic contributions), spending for a child who lives in a household with an income that is less than 185% of the federal poverty level is $19,280. However, we caution that the full amount of this spending gap should not be interpreted as a redistribution to benefit those with the greatest needs: it includes spending on rehabilitative programs and the juvenile justice system, for example, and includes very little spending that might be classed as preventive.

Income inequality has dramatically increased over the past 30 years in the United States. Simple comparisons of pre- and post-tax income distributions show nonetheless a substantial effect of the progressive tax system, including extensions of the EITC, in reducing the extent of inequality. In this paper, we ask if, and to what extent, the tax system and the policy changes occurring over 1978-2007 have indeed slowed or accelerated trends towards greater income disparities. To isolate the policy effect from other factors, i.e., changes in the pre-tax income distribution, we perform a series of detailed counterfactual simulations. Our decomposition ofinequality changes shows that the cumulative increase in redistribution over time is essentially due to the increased inequality in pre-tax incomes. Looking at morespecific periods, we show that the actual policy effects are in line with popular perceptions regarding the political cycle, i.e., with disequalising (equalising) effects observed for policy changes implemented during Republican (Democrat) administrations. There were significant differences between results for the lower and upper parts of the distribution.

This paper examines the relationship between Southern members of Congress and the state publics they represented in the 1930s and 1940s, using the issue of labor unions as a lens for doing so. I use multilevel modeling and calibration weighting to estimate state-level opinion towards labor unions while correcting for the unrepresentativeness of quota-sampled polls from this period. These public opinion estimates are compared with the congress-specific ideological ideal points of members of Congress estimated using item-response theory (IRT) model. I show that between 1937 and 1943, which span the origin of the conservative coalition in Congress, Southern representatives' swing to the right was mirrored at the mass level by the opinions of their constituents. I also find that Southerners' estimated ideal points on left-right economic issues become increasingly predictive of their votes on roll calls related to unions, relative to similar non-labor roll calls. These results provide suggestive evidence that despite the exclusionary and undemocratic attributes of the one-party South, intra-party competition in Democratic primaries was sufficient to induce an electoral connection between Southern MCs and their (white) constituents. They also suggest that by the early 1940s, fear of an expanding and increasingly egalitarian national state had begun to color not only Southern MCs' positions on labor unions, but on all New Deal issues.

This paper examines the relationship between household food security status, SNAP participation, and time used in food preparation and acquisition. Using the American Time Use Survey linked with the Current Population Survey's Food Security Supplement, we find that food insecurity and SNAP participation are positive predictors of number of minutes single adult households use in food preparation. Meanwhile, SNAP participation is a negative predictor of food acquisition. Although these results do not imply a causal relationship, they do reveal reflect that food insecure households and households that participate in the SNAP program use time differently than food secure and non-participating households.

In a classic study of racial segregation within the US labor force entitled The Effect on White Incomes of Discrimination in Employment. economist Barbara Bergmann, found that Black men were more concentrated in laborer and low skill occupations than their white counterparts and virtually excluded from high status occupations (Bergmann. 1971). In a follow up study Revisiting Occupational Crowding in the United States: A Preliminary Study Gibson, Darity and Myers found similarly high levels of occupational crowding in some blue-collar occupations, high levels of gender segregation in the occupational distribution and under-representation of Blacks in high status/wage occupations. Gibson, et al used regional data from the 1990 US Census to analyze occupational crowding among 59 occupations in Detroit, Michigan and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The regional focus captures many of the localized aspects of each regions labor market that are obscured with national level data. This study builds upon the previous two by utilizing the same crowding index and similar regional data to evaluate Black occupational patterns in Portland, Oregon and the Seattle, Washington in 2000. This study finds that occupational segregation persists in the new millennium, as there were similarly high levels of occupational in some blue collar occupations, high degrees of occupational sex segregation and underrepresentation of Blacks in high wage/status occupations in both Portland and Seattle. However, Black men and women in Seattle had significantly higher levels of representation in healthcare and clerical occupations. Black men in Portland were slightly better represented in skilled crafts occupations than Black men in Seattle.

Languid youth, robot destroyers, foreign invaders and an epidemic sound like the lineup for Netflix’s fall dramas primed for uploading and binge watching. However, these themes are part of a growing list of explanations for the remaining frictions in the labor market, that all else equal, would not be expected to persist in an environment where the unemployment rate is near a 15-year low of 4.4%. As a result, attention has shifted away from the gold standard of labor market indicators such as the unemployment rate to more nuanced measures of labor market soundness such as the employment-topopulation and the participation rate.

Essay 1: Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning? Biological evidence indicates that adolescents’ internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2: Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes In universities, teaching assistants (TAs) play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. Such quality variation weakens students’ incentives to put in substantial effort in their studies. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course i n w h ic h s t ud e nt s a r e c o nd i t io na l l y r a nd o m l y a s s i g ne d t o T A s . I n a d d i t io n t o administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students’ initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3: A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student’s choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.

We examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in Missouri. In Missouri school districts, pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level. In spite of this apparently mechanical rule for determining pay, female teachers earn less than male teachers, after controlling for experience and education. We explore how such a difference could arise from differential job mobility and find some evidence to support this idea. However, within district differences in pay are a more important source of differences in pay between men and women.

Existing skill-biased technical change theory predicts that differences in factor endowments will affect technology adoption and the return to skill. We document regional variation in endowments in the American past. We then estimate the returns to education using a new data source: a report from the Commissioner of Education in 1909. We find significant variation in the returns to schooling aligned with differences in resource endowments, with large (within occupation) returns in the Midwest and Southwest but much lower returns in the South and West. Our results appear generalizable to broader returns to education in the United States.

Puerto Ricans are concentrated in low-wage jobs and experience higher rates of unemployment and poverty than other Hispanic subgroups. Through a cross-sectional data analysis from the American Community Survey, 2006–2008, we examine the experience of Puerto Rican workers. Though educational attainment and language disparities play a role, structural factors such as concentration in low-wage service industries also explain the disadvantaged standing of Puerto Ricans in the labor market. This analysis highlights the importance of ethnic-specific studies and the need for research on factors that may influence Puerto Rican workers’ mobility in and out of low-wage jobs

New evidence from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census of Housing indicates that expenditure shares on housing are constant over time and across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSA). Consistent with this observation, we consider a model in which identical households with Cobb-Douglas preferences for housing and non-housing consumption choose a location and locations differ with respect to income earned by their residents. The model predicts that the relative price of housing of any two MSAs disproportionately reflects differences in incomes of those MSAs and is independent of housing supply in each MSA. According to the predictions of our calibrated model, the dispersion of rental prices across low- and high- wage MSAs should be larger than we observe: High-wage MSAs like San Francisco are puzzlingly inexpensive relative to low-wage MSAs like Pittsburgh. (Copyright: Elsevier)

This paper explores the U.S. militarys preference for commuting by automobile. After controlling for typical predictors of travel behavior such as socio-economic, demographic, family-related, immigration, transit availability, and built environment variables, militarypersonnel are still more likely to drive to work than civilian counterparts. We investigate a number of incentives for driving to base such as discounted gasoline, free parking, and lack of walkability. We find that veterans have a greater likelihood of driving to work than civilian workers after controlling for the same predictors of travel, suggesting either a self-selection of auto-oriented individuals into the military or a peer effect whereby military individuals are conditioned to drive to work while in the military. We find evidence of the latter but cannot refute the former. An inherent bias towards consumptive behavior in the private lives of military members could have major implications for the militarys overall energy use and environmental impact.