The following collection of papers explores the increasing global mobility of produc- tion factors, with a particular focus on the impact of this mobility on U.S. workers. Each of the papers exploits detailed information on the types of production activities that U.S. workers engage in and investigates the relative vulnerability of workers to global forces due to the features of these activities. The first paper explores the im- pact of offshoring on U.S. workers. It is motivated by the fact that the potential for significant and ever-increasing productivity gains due to the offshoring of production tasks has recently been noted in the theoretical trade literature. In order to estimate the impact of offshoring on U.S. employment while accounting for these potential gains, the paper first extends the model of tasks offshoring introduced in Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) to a continuum of sectors with sector-level heterogeneity in the intensity of use of offshorable tasks. The model demonstrates that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and, ultimately, impacts domestic employment through three channels: a direct employment effect, which neg- atively impacts employment; an output effect generated by the productivity gain from offshoring, which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively; and a substitution effect among factors and tasks, which has an ambiguous effect. In addition, the model predicts that the output effect may be increasing in the extent of previous offshoring under given conditions suggesting that, if these conditions hold, offshoring may be employment-enhancing in the long run. Using the model’s structure as a roadmap and applying it to U.S. man- ufacturing sector data over 1997-2007, results from GMM 3SLS regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring. The second paper, joint with Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano, asks: how many ”American jobs” have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by pro- moting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? Again we consider a multi-sector version of the Grossman and Rossi- Hansberg (2008) model and we augment it to include immigrants with heterogeneous productivity in tasks. The model predicts that while cheaper offshoring reduces the share of natives among less skilled workers, cheaper immigration does not, but rather reduces the share of offshored jobs instead. Moreover, since both phenomena have a positive ”cost-savings” effect they may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilled workers. Our model also predicts that offshoring will push natives toward jobs that are more intensive in communication-interactive skills and away from those that are manual and routine intensive. We test the predictions of the model and find evidence in favor of a positive productivity effect such that immi- gration has a positive net effect on native employment while offshoring has no effect on it. We also find some evidence that offshoring has pushed natives toward more communication-intensive tasks while it has pushed immigrants away from them. Lastly, the third paper explores the impact of domestic outsourcing in generating geographic concentration of production activities. This is motivated, first, by the fact that improvements in information and communications technologies increasingly facilitate the outsourcing of tasks by firms. Since the firm’s choice of suppliers will depend on cost considerations, any task-specific productivity advantage in a location may lead to agglomeration, as firms choose to outsource their performance of that task to the most efficient workers. The paper focuses specifically on labor market spillovers as one such productivity advantage, and assesses empirically the importance of the search for spillovers in the outsourcing decisions of firms. The empirics are motivated via a probabilistic model of the firm’s task location decision and are implemented with data on workers, tasks and domestic outsourcing by U.S. firms. The results suggest that increased outsourcing is associated with agglomeration, particularly of the most routine production tasks as well as those requiring minimal human interaction.

We show that close geographical proximity to mothers or mothers-in-law has a substantial positive effect on the labor supply of married women with young children. We argue that the mechanism through which proximity increases labor supply is the availability of childcare. We interpret availability broadly enough to include not only regular scheduled childcare during work hours but also an insurance aspect of proximity (e.g., a mother or mother-in-law who can provide irregular or unanticipated childcare). Using two large datasets, the National Survey of Families and Households and the public use files of the U.S. Census, we find that the predicted probability of employment and labor force participation is 4-10 percentage points higher for married women with young children living in close proximity to their mothers or their mothers-in-law compared with those living further away.

Governments invest heavily in science and those investments are increasingly being justified in terms of the economic spillovers they generate, such as jobs created. Yet there are no accepted methods for quantifying these benefits and their magnitude is widely disputed. We analyze the ways in which science generates economic benefits; lay out how to (and not to) quantify those benefits; and provide a range of estimates. While our estimates vary considerably across specifications, our baseline estimates indicate that a $1B increase in science spending might raise wages by $1.68B and that these wage effects are likely to understate the effects on productivity. We also find that a $1B increase in science might generate 92,500 jobs, with 90% of these jobs being missed even using state-of-the-art job creation methods. Our methods can be applied to measure the local productivity spillovers from other government activity as well.

Domestic migration constitutes the largest flow of people in developing countries and is among the most important opportunities for people to improve their human development. We calculate the Human Development Index by internal migrational status to assess the differences between the levels of human development of internal migrants compared with non-migrants. An empirical illustration for a sample of 16 low-income countries shows that, overall, internal migrants achieve a slightly higher level of human development than non-migrants. These improvements are largely due to higher incomes of migrants while differentials in education and health are smaller.

We provide the first assessment of whether an intensification of product market competition reduces the racial wage gap exactly where taste-based theories predict that competition will reduce labor market discrimination. in economies where employers have strong racial prejudices. We use bank deregulation across the U.S. states to identify an intensification of competition among banks, which in turn lowered entry barriers facing nonfinancial firms, especially firms that depend heavily on bank credit. Consistent with taste-based theories, we find that competition boosted blacks relative residual wages within the banking industry and bank-dependent industries, but only in states with strong tastes for discrimination.

The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the history of the city of Milan, Italy, employing Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Using historical maps and ancillary data, the spatiality of historical events that interested the city is analyzed, interpreted and explained by means of new geospatial technologies used to both corroborate and at the same time confute previous believes upon the history of the city. The body of this dissertation is divided into three main chapters that analyze the urban history of the city under different scales both temporal and spatial. First I use an analytical methodology on historical maps to detect the changes that have occurred on the urban fabric at a city‐wide scale over a period of four centuries. Once detected, these are shown to be related with the major events that characterized the social and urban history of the city. In the second chapter the main historical layers that comprise the formation of Milan are revealed. Compared with the analysis of the first chapter, here I increase the spatial scale (neighborhood/street‐wide scale) as well as deepen the temporal scale up to two millenniums. A hybrid approach trying to bridge qualitative and quantitative methods is used to analyze the toponymic patter of the downtown streetscape. Furthermore a cluster analysis is conducted to inquire into the more local identities that are part of the daily experience of the space. In the third and final chapter I deal with the identification, classification and visualization of cases of positional accuracy and uncertainty in historical Landscape Pattern Analysis (LPA). Employing a sample of a map analyzed in the first chapter, my goal is to detect spurious changes in the context of a feature change map analysis, showing these are connected with the map generalization process operated by the map maker and how this process can affect the map reliability. I finally conclude with important remarks on scale dependency of geographical events and how GIScience can be fruitfully used to discover the multiple spatial and temporal layers of the history of the city.

During the recent labor market downturn, there has been a surge in the number of people who have been unemployed for a long period of time. For the fourth quarter of 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that a little more than 11 percent of those who were unemployed indicated that they had been looking for work for two years or more. The BLS and the Census Bureau decided, effective January 2011, to make changes to the Current Population Survey (CPS) to allow respondents to report unemployment durations up to five years. This upper boundary was selected to allow the Obama administration and policy analysts the ability to provide a more accurate analysis of people who have been unemployed for a longer period of time.1 The CPS is considered to be one of the longest stand- ing national surveys used for labor and socioeconomic research. While the primary purpose of the CPS is to track unemployment, over the years its scope and coverage has expanded. It is important as government information specialists to understand the historical context and evolu- tion of the survey as well as some of the ways that the data is being published and made accessible to our users.

The utilization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other geospatial technologies in historical inquiry and the humanities has led to a number of projects that are exploring digital representations of past landscapes and places as platforms for synthesizing and representing historical and geographic information. Recent advancements in geovisualization, immersive environments, and virtual reality offer the opportunity to generate digital representations of cultural and physical landscapes, and embed those virtual landscapes with information and knowledge from multiple GIS sources. The development of these technologies and their application to historical research has opened up new opportunities to synthesize historical records from disparate sources, represent these sources spatially in digital form, and to embed the qualitative data into those spatial representations that is often crucial to historical interpretation. This dissertation explores the design and development of a serious game-based virtual engine, the Spatial Experience Engine (SEE), that provides an immersive and interactive platform for an experiential approach to exploring and understanding place. Through a case study focused on the late nineteenth-century urban landscape of Morgantown, West Virginia, the implementation of the SEE discussed in this dissertation demonstrates a compelling platform for building and exploring complex, virtual landscapes, enhanced with spatialized information and multimedia. The SEE not only provides an alternative approach for scholars exploring the spatial turn in history and a humanistic, experiential analysis of historical places, but its flexibility and extensibility also offer the potential for future implementations to explore a wide range of research questions related to the representation of geographic information within an immersive and interactive virtual landscape.

We explore racial differences in multigenerational living arrangements in 1910, focusing on trigenerational kin structures. Coresidence across generations represents a public function of the family, and we observe this across different ages or life-course stages through which adults came to be at risk for providing simultaneous household support for multiple generations of kin dependents. Using data from the 1.4 percent 1910 Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, our comparisons adjust for marital turnover, including widow(er)hood/divorce and remarriage, as rates are known to be historically higher among African Americans in this period. Across subgroups defined by age and sex, we find that African Americans are virtually always as likely as or more likely than European Americans (of both native and foreign parentage) to live as grandparents in trigenerational households. Widow(er)hood/divorce generally increased the likelihood of trigenerational coresidence, while remarriage sometimes increased, sometimes decreased, and sometimes had no association with this living arrangement. Also, we find that the life-course staging of household kin support in 1910 differed across race/generation partly due to different economic and demographic circumstances, suggesting more complexity in kin support than previously considered. We discuss these findings in relation to the histories of African American and European American families as well as their implications for future research.

Full-time working couples are more likely to face the co-location issue than other couples. Co- location conflicts could affect migration decisions, labor market choices, and ultimately, marital stability. This dissertation studies how occupation mobility (or occupation migration rate) affects these outcomes for full-time working couples in the United States. Having some probability of relocating one's job in the future can create a locational conflict between spouses if the other spouse is also working and has his/her own preferred job location. If this locational conflict is not fully expected before marriage, joint location becomes less possible and marital stability is endangered. In this study I use occupation mobility as the proxy for the uncertainty of future occupation migration. Occupation mobility is measured as the fraction of workers in an occupation who have moved across state lines during the five years prior to the year of U.S. Census report. The dissertation consists of three parts: a study on migration and earning outcomes using cross-sectional data from the 5% Public-Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of Census 2000, an analysis of marital status based on the same data from Census 2000, and a study on marital stability using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and three rounds of Census: 1980, 1990 and 2000.

President Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric suggested a significant shift away from the militarist intervention practiced by U.S. administrations since the Reagan presidency, and his emphasis on multilateral diplomacy was endorsed by some key foreign policy elites. Focusing on home-grown obstacles to the hoped-for change in Latin American policy, such as domestic ideologies and narrow corporate interests, may underestimate the role of Latin American resistance and of the global shifts that have presented alternatives to the multilateral diplomacy of the OAS and the regional economic integration of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian agenda offers a direct challenge to neoliberal globalization as promoted by the United States under presidents of both parties. While for a number of reasons it is unlikely to bring U.S. hegemony in Latin America to an end, it has facilitated alternative forms of cooperation for economic integration and security, and this poses a significant dilemma for the Obama administration.

This paper borrows from the tradition of other social sciences in considering the impact that culture (broadly defined as the economic and social environment in which the poor live) plays in determining early, non-marital childbearing. Along with others before us, we hypothesize that the despair and hopelessness that poor, young women may face increases the likelihood that they will give birth at an early age outside of marriage. We derive a formal economic model that incorporates the perception of economic success as a key factor driving ones decision to have anearly, non-marital birth. We propose that this perception is based in part on the level of income inequality that exists in a womans location of residence. Using individual-level data from the United States and a number of other developed countries, we empirically investigate the role played by inequality across states in determining the early childbearing outcomes of low socioeconomic status (SES) women. We find low SES women are more likely to give birth at a young age and outside of marriage when they live in higher inequality locations, all else equal. Less frequent use of abortion is an important determinant of this behavior. We calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizeable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates both across U.S. states and across developed countries.

Italy has the lowest labor force participation of women among OECD countries. Moreover, the labor force participation of Italian married women is positively correlated to their husbands' income. In this paper, we show that, despite an individual based tax system, the set of tax credits and cash transfers raises the tax burden levied on two-earner household, generating a disincentiveto participate in the labor force for married women, typically the second earner of the family. Using micro data from EU-SILC, we estimate a structural model where men's labor supply and incomes are given, and women sequentially decide whether to work and accept a given job o er. We then use the estimated parameters to measure the behavioral effects of alternative tax systems: the joint family taxation, the gender-based taxation (a la Alesina, Ichino, and Karabarbounis (2011)), the Working Tax Credit, and a mixture of the Italian and the joint taxation system.

Women born in the decades after the 1940s will be reaching retirement ages in the coming decades. This chapter shows how those women have started families later and later than previous generations, and considers how the delayed onset of marriage and motherhood may affect their economic wellbeing later in life. Data from the Original Cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys (Young and Mature Women) make it possible to track individual women for 35 years and link their fertility and marital histories with wage and wealth trajectories. This chapter uncovers cross-sectional associations in these data suggesting that delayed motherhood can lead to substantial improvements in womens economic wellbeing later in life. Delayed marriage is less important. Taken together, the results suggest some optimism for the economic wellbeing of future cohorts of retiring women, relative to prior cohorts, even after accounting for their wage gains.

Iron deficiency reduces productive capacity in adults and impairs cognitive development in children, causing worldwide losses that reach into the billions of dollars. In 1943, the United States government issued War Food Order No. 1, which required the fortification of bread and flour with iron to reduce iron deficiency in the working age population during World War II. This universal fortification of grain products increased per capita consumption of iron by 32 percent. I use the exogenous timing of the federal law and the Study of Consumer Purchases in the United States 1935-1936 to measure the economic effects of the fortification program. Areas with lower levels of iron consumption prior to the mandate experienced greater increases in wages and school attendancebetween 1940 and 1950. A long-term follow up suggests adults in 1970 with more exposure to fortification during childhood received higher wages, more years of schooling, and were less likely to live in poverty.

This ethnographic case study explores one mid-western state university’s response to the challenge of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), especially Latino/a, student recruitment and retention. BESITOS (Bilingual/ Bicultural Education Students Interacting To Obtain Success) is an inte- grated teacher preparation program implemented at a predominantly White university that seeks to both increase Latino/a students’ initial access to higher education and provide institutional support to facilitate a high rate of graduation. The researchers consider key elements of the BESITOS program model as they relate to and support the sociocultural, linguistic, academic, and cognitive dimensions of the CLD student biography. For each dimension, the program model is first placed in the context of existing literature on CLD student education. The key elements and strategies of the program model used to successfully meet recruitment and retention goals are then discussed.