My dissertation addresses two important individual level decisions: the choice of location made by young college graduates and the demand for owner-occupied housing. Young college graduates are an important component of the skilled labor force and one of the population groups with the highest risk of relocation. As a result, they are often targeted by state level policies aimed at attracting or retaining them in the labor force. My research reveals an important factor that determines the location chosen by young college graduates at the beginning of their career, and therefore informs policy makers on novel ways to make a location more attractive for this group. The second part of my dissertation addresses the empirical analysis of the demand for housing services. My research attempts to explain the large differences among the estimates of the slope of the demand for housing services found in the literature. The second objective is to assess the existence of an asset appreciation effect of the price of owner-occupied housing services on the quantity demanded of owner-occupied housing services, which may explain recent price bubbles in the U.S. housing market. In the first chapter I develop and estimate a dynamic model of location choice for young college graduates. My theoretical model predicts that individuals who are uncertain about their earnings prospects in different locations will prefer to move to the place with the highest earnings variance, all else equal. This result follows from the dynamic nature of the location choice decision: if earnings in the first location turn out unsatisfactory, the individual can always move to a location with better prospects. Mobility limits the loss of earnings from a low realization of earnings to just oneperiod. I test the theoretical implications using a nested logit model that allows for over one hundred location choices. Using a large sample of young college graduates from the 2000 US Census, I find a higher earnings variance increases the probability of choosing a location with low to moderate earnings variance. Increasing the earnings variance for locations with high earnings variance may increase or decrease their choice probability, depending on the specific combination of mean and variance of their earnings distribution. Estimates from a random parameters logit model suggest that preferences for mean earnings and earnings variance show very little variation across individuals in my sample. In the second chapter I take a semi-non-parametric approach to the estimation of the demand for housing services. Previous studies have found very different estimates for the slope of the demand for owner-occupied housing services. These differences may be an artifact of restrictive parametric methods used to estimate the hedonic functions in the first step of the analysis. In this paper I estimate the demand for owner-occupied housing services using the semi-non-parametric Fourier series estimator to fit the hedonic price functions, and compare the results to some of the parametric methods of estimation used in the literature. I find that changing the estimation method of the hedonic functions leads to different estimates for the slope of the demand, but the estimation method alone cannot explain the large differences found in the literature. Further evidence suggests that the Box-Cox model used in the literature may be overly restrictive for estimating housing hedonic functions. The second objective of this paper is to assess the existence of an asset appreciation effect of owner-occupied housing price on owner-occupied housing consumption, in the light of the recent finding in the literature of a positive effect of price on the quantity demanded of owner-occupied housing services. This may again be the result of using a restrictive parametric method in the first step or it may be an effect specific to some localized markets. Using data on multiple housing markets, I find evidence of a negative effect of price on quantity, under the assumption of homogenous preferences across housing markets. When I relax the homogeneity assumption and allow for state specific effects, I find evidence consistent with an asset appreciation effect in about half of the U.S. states.

Using 19802000 Census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants' labor supply assimilation profiles, we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low-female-supply countries. While both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival, women from high-female-participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely, and women from low-female-labor supply countries eliminate most of it. Men's labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation, suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles.

We find that households living in California homes built in the 1960s and 1970s had high electricity consumption in 2000 relative to houses of more recent vintages because the price of electricity at the time of home construction was low. Homes built in the early 1990s had lower electricity consumption than homes of earlier vintages because the price of electricity was higher. The elasticity of the price of electricity at the time of construction was -0.22. As homesbuilt between 1960 and 1989 become a smaller share of the housing stock, average household electricity purchases will fall.

How do credit standards on the mortgage market affect neighbourhood choice and the resulting level of urban segregation? To answer this question, we first develop a model of neighbourhood choice with credit constraints. The model shows that a relaxation of credit standards can either increase or decrease segregation, depending on racial income gaps and on races' preferences for neighbourhoods. We then estimate the effect of the relaxation of credit standards that accompanied the 1995-2006 mortgage credit boom on the level of school segregation. Census tract racial composition is strongly correlated with the racial composition of the 10 closest schools in the cross section. Matching a national data set of mortgage originations with annual racial demographics of each of the public schools in the United States from 1995 to 2006, we find that the relaxation of credit standards has caused an increase in the segregation of blacks through a lower exposure of blacks to Hispanics and whites.

This paper looks at the effects of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) on Native American educational attainment. Using a difference-in-difference-in-difference model, this paper attempts to isolate the effects of these schools on Native Americans living in states with TCUs. First, the results offer evidence that TCUs’ effects are not evenly distributed across age groups or between the sexes. The findings show that these schools have significant positive effects on associate’s degree attainment for older Native Americans, increasing associate’s degree attainment by three percent for Native Americans 35 to 55 while not significantly increasing associate’s degree attainment for 25 to 55 year olds. There is also evidence that TCUs lower bachelor’s degree attainment levels for Native Americans. An additional TCU per 10,000 Native Americans per state lowers bachelor’s degree attainment by 4 to 14 percent for 25 to 55 year olds and by 0 to 13 percent for 35 to 55 year olds. This negative effect appears to be disproportionately felt by Native American men. This paper also finds that TCUs do not appear to significantly increase or decrease the overall years of education for Native Americans in TCU states.

The Code of Virginia requires that goals relating to jobs-to-housing ratios be considered when projects are selected for the state's transportation program. Because the code does not specify the relative importance of the jobs-housing balance, this paper examines its influence on average jurisdiction commuting times. After regional differences were controlled for, the correlations between shorter commuting times and higher jobs-labor force ratios were from -.71 to -.76 for 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2006 data sets. A 20% increase in the 2000 ratio led to travel times being decreased by 5.3 min (about 18.5% of the statewide average). However, higher ratios may be associated with better transit service or other variables. Correlations alone do not prove causality and are potentially misleading. Consequently, a longitudinal model was developed that predicted changes in commuting time from 1990 to 2000 for each urban Virginia jurisdiction examined. This model estimated that the average impact of a given urban jurisdiction improving its balance by 20% was a reduction in commuting time of 2.2 min (7% of the average urban value). This effect is evident only if several factors, such as the manner in which the region is defined, are carefully controlled for. Otherwise, commuting time is not significantly affected by a change in balance. This finding suggests that the jobs-housing balance has a statistically significant impact on commute-related travel, but that the impact is more modest than a correlation-only analysis would suggest. Modifications necessary to apply this approach at a census tract level of analysis are discussed.

This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skill distribution in recentdecades. Increases in wage inequality started in the US and UK at the end of the 1970s, but are now widespread. A good fraction of this inequality trend is due to technology-related increases in the demand for skilled workers outstripping the growth of their supply. Since the early 1990s, labor markets have become more polarized with jobs in the middle third of the wage distribution shrinking and those in the bottom and top third rising. I argue that this is because computerization complements the most skilled tasks, but substitutes for routine tasks performed by middle wage occupations such as clerks, leaving the demand for the lowest skilled service tasks largely unaffected. Finally, I argue that technology is partly endogenous, forexample it has been spurred by trade with China. Thus, trade does matter for changes in the labor market, butthrough a different mechanism than conventionally thought.

Official poverty statistics in the United States measure the percent of individuals whose income is below a threshold. The Census Bureau defines a set of income thresholds that depend on family size and composition, and family members are considered to be in poverty if their family's total income is less than the specified threshold. Over the last 40 years, poverty rates have varied between 11 percent and 15 percent of the population, with a clear cyclical pattern. The latest figures available are from 2009, and they show a sharp rise in the poverty rate during the last recession.

The black-white gap in schooling among southern-born men narrowed sharply between the world wars. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 schools were constructed as part of the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative. Using census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educationalgains of rural southern blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.

Volunteer labor is generally modeled as an individualistic pursuit, akin to leisure or to human capital accumulation. Some activities labeled as volunteering, however, may be more usefully thought of as quid pro quo time commitments that are part of securing services for family members. Parents are frequently expected to volunteer, for example, when their children participate in youth sports leagues or school marching bands. In such cases, volunteering is essentially an instance of household production undertaken outside the home. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we divide volunteering into three categories—youth-related, religious, and non-youth-related secular—according to the likelihood that an instance of volunteering in the category represents household production. We find evidence that husbands and wives respond to one another’s time pressures such that youth-related volunteering looks like a task for which husbands’ and wives’ time inputs substitute for one another. Further, we find this pattern for housework, and not for other forms of volunteering. An increase in either spouse’s hours of market work will significantly reduce that spouse’s likelihood of volunteering for youth-related activities while raising the partner’s likelihood of volunteering. A similar pattern holds for hours volunteered to youth-related activities, with the wife’s responses achieving statistical significance.

According to culinary scholars, American food retained a strongly British character through most of its history. Chinese food was the exception. Beginning in the early-twentieth century, Chinese restaurants began appearing outside of Chinatowns and the cuisine entered the cultural mainstream. This paper is an effort to explain why only the Chinese were able to take their ethnic food outside their enclaves to the larger American public. It begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forced the transnational Chinese community to devise new institutions to continue its migration and maintain connections between those in the United States and their families back home. Paradoxically, the new institutions that emerged from the crisis broke traditional family bonds and replaced them with individual relationships in the guise of paper families. These new institutions were smaller, more profit-oriented, and better funded than earlier ones. They allowed the Chinese to move out of the low-skilled wage work that had been their primary employment and into self-employment. The first industry they chose was laundry, a competitive industry with low capital requirements that effectively offered a subsistence wage to a seemingly unlimited number of people (viewed from the perspective of Chinese immigrant flows) who were willing to work long hours in remote locations. When Americans became interested in exotic food, the Chinese were perfectly situated to respond. No other ethnic group had developed the same kinds of transnational, business-oriented institutions that allowed them to funnel exotic ingredients and young, eager, hardworking, and loyal workers to America and oversee their deployment across communities around the country. Their singular history provided the Chinese with both the motivation and the capacity to carry out Americas first culinary revolution.

The social sciences have four explanations for the gender wage gap: preference, crowding, power, and socialization. Neoclassical economists explain the wage gap as the result of employers and employees work-related preferences. Crowding theorists argue the wage gap is caused by women crowding into a small number of occupations. Power theorists contend men use their socioeconomic superiority to maintain a two-tier wage system that discriminates against women. Socialization theorists note womens secondary status in the labor markets is a result of lifelong socialization processes. Previous econometric research has mostly overlooked the power explanation. Crowding researchers have also not examined the crowding hypothesis over the entire post-World War II era, choosing instead to focus on one particular year or a few years; this research decision is made even though women were continually increasing their share of the labor force throughout the postwar era.The purpose of this study is to address the two mentioned shortcomings. A wage model is constructed with controls for compensating differentials, power, and femaleivcrowding. The model is fitted on male and female workers who were employed in 103 occupations; the 103 occupations were selected because their categorizations have remained consistent between 1950 and 2008. Approximately 30 percent of male workers and 40 percent of female workers are employed in the 103 selected occupations. The robustness of the wage model is tested on ten time-sensitive Census and American Community Survey PUMS.The study finds supporting evidence for the power and crowding explanations. Male workers earn wage premiums when employed in occupations with high degree of collective bargaining whereas women receive wage penalties. Women also receive no premiums in occupations with apprenticeship requirement until 1990, even though their presence in these occupations has not changed between 1950 and 2008. Also, men and women employed in female-crowded occupations receive wage penalties in every surveyed postwar year, but women are more likely to be employed in female-crowded occupations than their male counterparts.

Twenty years ago, Arlie Hochschild described the “stalled revolution”: women have fully entered the full-time labor force, increasingly in male-dominated fields, yet men have not comparably shifted into female-dominated fields or responsibility for household labor and childcare. This study investigates whether the revolution is still “stalled.” To what extent do contemporary young women and men hold non-traditional goals? What role do their parents play in the formation of non-traditional or traditional goals? Are men and women who want to cross gender boundaries in family or work able to achieve their nontraditional goals? To address these questions, I use longitudinal data from the National Survey of Families and Households which include surveys with young adults at ages 18–23 and ages 28–33, and focus on a group that should have the most opportunities to pursue non-traditional goals: predominantly-white, middle- to upper-income young adults. Results indicate that, even among this privileged sample, the revolution is still stalled. Although both young women and men hold high marriage and parenthood desires, only 25% of women and 10% of men aspire to non-traditional occupations. Most young adults with non-traditional aspirations did not achieve those goals, though there are great gender differences in occupational trajectories. The results show that women experience high levels of work/family conflict and men are still constrained by a narrow definition of “appropriate” masculinity. The influence of parental socialization factors on occupational trajectories, however, may be evidence that the revolution will unfold across generations. For instance, fathers’ egalitarian attitudes about gender increase men’s likelihood of pursuing non-traditional occupations. Similarly, mothers’ egalitarian attitudes increase women’s non-traditional aspirations. As contemporary young adults hold more egalitarian attitudes than previous generations, these young adults may increase their own children’s willingness to pursue non-traditional paths. Likewise, women were more likely to achieve non-traditional goals if their mothers worked outside the home. Since contemporary women are more likely to work when they have young children, they may increase the next generation of young women’s willingness and ability to pursue non-traditional paths. Although the revolution may be appear quite stalled, these findings support the claim that it is slowly unfolding.

Chapter 1 assesses the impact of household car ownership on individual labor supply. Various economic theories suggest one reason for low rates of employment among low-skill, inner-city residents is that their residences are spatially separated from suburban jobs. To measure this, I exploit changes in state insurance rate regulation which has beenshown to suppress auto insurance prices, thereby decreasing the cost of owning a car. I find that rate regulation increases multi-car ownership among married couples withchildren. I find that the additional car in the household consequently encourages married mothers to decrease their labor supply while their husbands increase their labor supply. One possible explanation of this result is that second cars are stronger complements to time spent in home production (and especially childrearing) than they are to time spent in the labor market.Chapter 2 (with Shawn Moulton) tests for political budget cycles among US municipalities. According to the political budget cycle hypothesis, in election years government officials engage in opportunistic fiscal policy manipulation for electoral gains. This chapter tests that hypothesis using data on taxes and spending for a panel of268 US cities over the period 1970-2004. While our estimates provide no evidence of altered total expenditures or taxes in election years, we do find a 0.7 percent increase in total municipal employment, including increases in police, education, and sanitation employment.Chapter 3 (with Andrew Deines, David Lodge, and Richard Jensen) assesses trade-offs between fisheries and hydropower production in a tropical floodplain fishery.We compile catch per unit effort, total harvest, and monthly-mean hydrographs from the Kafue River in Zambia for the years 1955-1996 and develop population growth models to test for effects of density, total fisheries harvest, and water regime. We find that alteration of the flood regime has reduced fish density but enhanced hydroelectric production. The total cost of replacing this hydroelectricity is less than a third of the additional surplus generated by a natural flood regimes impact on fisheries production, implying changes in dam operation to provide environmental flows can be a cost-effective means of improving the material well-being of subsistence fishermen.

The research reported in this article shows that public employees, both state and local government employees, are not overpaid and may be slightly undercompensated. Comparisons with the private-sector employees that control for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, and disability indicate that the public-employment compensation (wages and benefits) penalty is relatively small. On average there is a 3.7 percent penalty in total compensation for full-time state and local employees when compared to similar private-sector employees. The data analysis also reveals substantially different approaches to staffing and compensation between the private and public sectors. On average, state and local public-sector workers are more highly educated than the private-sector workforce; 54 percent of full-time state and local public-sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree compared to 35 percent of full-time private sector workers. For college-educated labor, state and local governments pay salaries on average over 25 percent less than private employers. The public sector appears to set a floor on compensation, particularly improving the compensation of workers with high-school educations, when compared to similarly educated workers in the private sector. Benefits are allocated differently between private- and public-sector full-time workers. State and local government employees receive a higher portion of their compensation in the form of employer-provided benefits. Public employers provide better health insurance and pension benefits. National polling data indicate that the public does not believe public employees are overpaid. They oppose pay and benefit cuts, but believe pay freezes and greater employee contributions to their health and pensions plans may be appropriate. Nevertheless, thirteen states revised their public-sector collective-bargaining laws, mainly weakening employee bargaining power or severely restricting or eliminating collective bargaining, while the majority of the public opposed those changes.

European dominance in US immigration flows has waned since World War II, a result of economic, demographic, and policy trends on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, immigrants from European Union(EU) Member States represent about 10 percent of all permanent immigrants to the United States,down from over half in the mid-20th century and 90 percent in the mid-19th century.That said, Europe punches above its weight as a source of high-end workers (both temporary and permanent). Substantial numbers of European scientists, professionals, and businesspeople come to the United States for its high-quality universities and research centers, or to join the US offices of global firms. EU citizens are particularly well represented among the ranks of exceptionally talented O-1 visa recipients.Individuals who immigrate from the European Union to the United States differ significantly from other immigrant groups. They earn more; are more highly educated; are better represented in professional, managerial, and scientific occupations; and have greater English proficiency than other immigrants. They also tend to be older than other immigrants (most often because they arrived earlier) and are more likely to be naturalized citizens.Because the immigration debate in the United States usually focuses on the large unauthorized population, these highly skilled migration flows from the European Union have maintained a relatively low profile in policy circles. However, these flows have, on occasion, made their way into the immigration policy debate. Perhaps the single most significant policy affecting movement from the European Union to the United States is the Visa Waiver Program(VWP), which primarily benefits Europeans and which has facilitated an increase in the short-term mobility of tourists and business visitors. In light of the large flows of people traveling across the Atlantic and the fact that many have the option of visa-free travel, border security measures have been the main focus of EU-US dialogues in the field of migration. Other potential areas of cooperation such as labor migration and the circulation of professionals have received little attention.

African American males compose less than 2% of the teacher workforce within the United States of America. The primary focus of this study was to examine the attitudes of African American male college students' attitudes toward considering teaching as a profession by looking at seven dimensions: (1) formative educational experiences/schooling, (2) access into college, (3) family background/parental influence, (4) mentoring and academic support, (5) perception of the importance of the teaching profession, (6) career options, and (7) future plans. Semi-structured interview protocol questions were developed based on the research literature that addressed these seven dimensions for African American students. Eleven African American male college students were interviewed. The results of the study revealed that academic success, teachers' role in their lives, college access and recruitment, perseverance, strong support system, and spirituality were factors that contributed to African American males' college access and college retention. The results of the study also demonstrated that African American males who are in college chose professions other than teaching because there is lack of interest in the teaching field; career choices are selected from perceived salary attainment; career paths are not established while in school; teaching is not seen as an avenue to social mobility and, there is lack of respect by others for the teaching profession.

The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and ensuing government crackdown affected the Chinese not only at home but around the world. The U.S. government responded to theevents in China by enacting multiple measures to protect Chinese nationals present in the U.S. It first suspended all forced departures among Chinese nationals present in the country as of June 1989 and later gave them authorization to work legally. The Chinese Student Protection Act, passed in October 1992, made those Chinese nationals eligible for lawful permanent resident status. These actions applied to about 80,000 Chinese nationals residing in the U.S. on student or other temporary visas or illegally. Receiving permission to work legally and then a green card is likely to have affected recipients labor market outcomes. This study uses 1990 and 2000 census data to examine employment and earnings among Chinese immigrants who were likely beneficiaries of the U.S. governments actions. Relative to immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Koreacountries not covered by the post-Tiananmen immigration policy measureshighly-educated immigrants from mainland China experienced significant employment and earnings gains during the 1990s. Chinese immigrants who arrived in the U.S in time to benefit from the measures also had higher relative earnings in 2000 than Chineseimmigrants who arrived too late to benefit. The results suggest that getting legal work status and then a green card has a significant positive effect on skilled migrants labor market outcomes.