Women often cite flexibility and a need to balance work and family life as their reasons for entering into self-employment. This study focuses on whether women can have successful businesses and families just like their male counterparts. Two models are used using a sample of married self-employed individuals and a sample of single self-employed individuals. The models control for demographic, industry, and geographic factors. The results show that married women on average make less than married men, single men, and single women. Children also have a negative impact on womens self-employment wages.

This is a report put out every quarter by CWICstats, a group at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, that describes current workforce data.

There has been considerable debate in the recent literature about whether there is an increasing trend in highly educated women dropping out of work to care for children an opt-out revolution. I use unique features of the of Survey of Income and Program Participation--a large nationally representative sample, longitudinal structure, monthly labor force outcomes, and repeated panels--to conduct a dynamic analysis of opting-out that is currently missing in the literature. I use three-year event studies to compare labor force outcomes of women who gave birth in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. I find substantial and sustained opting-out of mothers in all education categories over the last three decades. But is this a revolution? Three decades of behavior suggest that little has changed-it is an opt-out continuation. Given the substantial increases in women's college completion, the absence of change is just as puzzling and important.

Sjaastad(1962) viewed migration in the same way as education:as an investment in the human agent. Migration and education are decisions that are indeed intertwined in many dimensions.Education and skill acquisition play an important role at many stages of an individuals migration. Differential returns to skills in origin and destination country are a main driver of migration. The economic success of the immigrant in the destination country is to a large extent determined by his or her educational background, how transferable these skills are to the host country labor market and how much he or she invests in further skills after arrival. The desire to acquire skills in the host country that have a high return in the country of origin may be another important reason for a migration. From an intertemporal point of view, the possibility of a later migration may affect educational decisions in the home country long before a migration is realized. In addition,the decisions of migrants regarding their own educational investment and their expectations about future migration plans may affect the educational attainment of their children. But migration and education are not only related for those who migrate or their descendants. Migrations of some individuals may have consequences for educational decisions of those who do not migrate, both in the home and in the host country. By easing credit constraints through remittances, migration of some may help others to go to school. By changing the skill base of the receiving country, migration may change incentives to invest in certain types of human capital.In addition,migrants and their children may create externalities that influence educational outcomes of non-migrants in the destination country. This chapter will discuss some of the key areas that connect migration and education.

This study investigates the dynamics of stagnating racial wage disparity, typically defined as the changes in the wage gap between white and black men from1983 to 2009. By examining regional variation between the Southern U.S. and other regions using the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group, this study uncovers that uneven changes in racial inequality that vary by region, education, and age. Racial wage disparity continuously declined in the South since the 1980s, while it grows linearly in Other Regions. An aggravated cumulative disadvantage for black men during their working careers is generally observed in both regions, but whether it is due to a greater racial disadvantage for the older generation or improvement for the younger generation depends on region. The halt of progress in racial wage disparity since the early 1980s is not the result of the status quo in the national labor market. Instead, it is camouflaged by multiple dynamic forces working in opposite directions. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

The migration of Nepalis to the United States of America is a recent phenomenon that has not received serious academic attention to date. This paper sheds light on this migration flow by analysing data gathered through a survey of 61 Nepalese migrants in the US. There are five major conclusions to be drawn. First, the migration of Nepalis to the US has escalated over the last decade. Second, the migrants tend to be highly skilled. Third, a lack of educational and career opportunities, along with increased migrant networks and political instability in Nepal, are the major factors driving the surge. Fourth, survey data suggest a rapid assimilation of these migrants into the American mainstream. Finally, although skilled Nepalese migrants are less likely to remit to their families, they contribute significantly towards the development of Nepal through personal initiatives and participation in transnational organisations.

Defense activity in Hawaii may account for a significant portion of Hawaii's economic activity, but the extent of this association has not been assessed since the publication in 1963 of a study of the relationship between defense jobs and employment in Hawaii. Therefore, the Hawaii Institute of Public Affairs and the Military Affairs Council of the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii asked RAND to assess the relationship between DoD spending in Hawaii and the levels of output, employment, and earnings in Hawaii's economy. RAND researchers first collected data on defense spending in Hawaii in FY 2007-2009 and then analyzed the data using the regional input-output model for Hawaii, which is maintained by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce and was most recently updated with 2006 data. Data on defense personnel and procurement were obtained from the Defense Manpower Data Center and the Federal Procurement Data System. Personnel data comprise expenditures for active-duty personnel serving in Hawaii, members of the Hawaii Selected Reserve, and DoD civilian employees, as well as retirement benefits paid to military retirees residing in Hawaii. Defense procurement expenditure data include all contracts greater than $3,000 in which Hawaii is designated as the principal place of performance.

The present dissertation examines nativity-status and place-of-birth-differences in locational outcomes among native-born black American, and foreign-born black Caribbean and black African households. The main objective is to evaluate the degree to which the spatial assimilation model, which was formulated to capture the experience of white European ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can describe the outcomes of black immigrant ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Using data from the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census extracted from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I investigate the degree to which native-born black Americans and foreign-born black Caribbeans and black Africans are able to translate their individual-level socioeconomic status attainments, such as income and educational levels, into residence in suburban versus central-city neighborhoods. In addition I also test to see if black immigrants' returns to their socioeconomic attainments differed from those of native-born blacks. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant socioeconomic and locational attainment in three ways. First, it revisits traditional residential assimilation theories, and attempts to identify the factors that enable black immigrants to reside in qualitatively different neighborhoods compared to those in which native-born black Americans reside. Second, it examines intra-ethnic black locational outcomes by place-of-birth/national origin status. Finally, up-to-date census data will provide an updated snapshot of black immigrants' socioeconomic and residential status attainments, an important endeavor given the large increase in size and diversity for this population.

Considering immigration processes and home country characteristics together from a gendered perspective, this dissertation examines the effect of home country characteristics on the labor market success of migrants and the decision to migrate to the U.S., focusing on female immigrants. In order to reflect cultural and institutional conditions that shape gender inequalities in the immigrants' home country, two gender related indices, GDI (Gender Development Index) and GEM (Gender Empowerment Measure), are included in the analysis. The GEM reflects women's access to leadership positions and economic wealth, while the GDI indicates the basic living standard of women. Utilizing the one percent sample of the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS), I find the substantial effect of cultural based gender status on the earning capacity of immigrants in the U.S. across 42 countries of origin. The GEM and the GDI show different effects on women and men. The GEM has a positive effect on wages of both female and male immigrants, but it has greater effect on women than men. The GDI has a positive effect on male immigrants' wages but it has a small negative effect on female immigrants' wages. Selectivity is determined by calculating the Net Different Index (NDI) which compares differences in educational attainment between immigrants in the U.S. and nonmigrants in the home country using the 2006 ACS and the Barro-Lee Educational Attainment Measure. By modeling this selectivity measures as a function of home country characteristics, such as GDI, and GEM, the systematic relations between interaction of these conditions and the pattern of self-selection of immigrants are tested. U.S. immigrants from 42 source countries are positively selected. The results indicate that GEM does not affect the degree of positive selectivity when distance and Gini coefficient measures, reflecting migration cost and income distribution of source countries, are taken into account. In general, the level of positive selectivity is mostly determined by the migration costs and income inequality in the home country. This provides the evidence of the home country conditions on the selectivity of immigrants, which follows conventional income maximizer hypothesis in self-selection.

We examine Becker’s (1960) contention that children are “normal.” For the cross section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the U.S., we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly-educated women living in similarly-expensive locations, completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband’s income. The empirical evidence is consistent with children being “normal.” In an effort to show causal effects, we analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid-1970s increase in world energy prices – an exogenous shock that substantially increased men’s incomes in the Appalachian coal-mining region. Empirical evidence for that population indicates that fertility increases in men’s income.

This study examines the educational achievements and attainments of 1.5 andsecond-generation Korean Americans. Drawing from the 1998 New York and the 2004IIMMLA surveys as well as forty follow-up in-depth interviews (selected among the 1998New York survey participants), the study finds that second-generation Korean Americansare attaining high levels of education similar to the educational attainments of theirimmigrant parents. A high proportion of second-generation Korean Americans also attendelite high schools and colleges, giving the impression of them as model minorities. Closeranalysis, however, suggests a more complex dynamic at work, one that involves Koreanimmigrants selective educational and occupational background and the particularities ofadolescent life. School-related factors, especially teachers expectations, peers, and degree ofsocializing, have considerable impact, both positive and negative, on the educationalattainments of second-generation Korean Americans.

This paper uses the PSID from 1979-2005 to estimate lifecycle-consistent labor supply elasticities of U.S. females with nonlinear taxes, in a two-stage budgeting framework. The paper is the first to estimate U.S. female labor supply models using semiparametric unobserved effects panel data methods with censoring, selection and endogeneity. The paper finds that female labor supply elasticities are sensitive to both the method used to account for unobserved effects and to economic assumptions regarding lifecycle behavior and taxes. Participation and hours wage elasticities are substantially smaller for unobserved effects panel data models compared with pooled panel data models pointing to upward bias from ignoring unobserved heterogeneity. The estimated lifecycle-consistent uncompensated wage elasticity for U.S. females from the correlated random effects model with instrumentalvariables is 0.37 on the extensive margin and 0.27 on the intensive margin, implying an overall wage elasticity of 0.64. Fixed effects models yield an overall wage elasticity of 0.61 compared with 0.80 from pooled panel models.

The 1940s were a decade of sharp contraction in wage inequality, particularly at the top of the distribution. We study this narrowing using a new dataset on the compensation of top executives. Relative to average earnings, median executive pay declined 0.34 log points from 1940 to 1949.We find that government regulationincluding explicit salary restrictions and taxationhad, at best, a modest effect on top incomes during the war period. Instead, a decline in the returns to firm size and an increase in the power of labor unions contributed greatly to the compression in executive pay relative to other workers earnings.

The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems. For example, Bartik (1987) and Epple (1987) each describe a source of endogeneity in the second stage of Rosen's procedure that has proven difficult to overcome. In this paper, we propose a new approach for recovering the marginal willingness-to-pay function that altogether avoids these endogeneity problems. Applying this estimator to data on large changes in violent crime rates, we find that marginal willingness-to-pay increases by ten cents with each additional violent crime per 100,000 residents.

This dissertation presents studies of collisions between bodies ranging in size from hundreds of kilometers up to the largest expected Earth-like planets (super-Earths), with applications to the formation of the solar system and extra-solar planetary systems. The first half of the dissertation focuses on giant impacts, a key physical process in the late stage of terrestrial planet formation. Chapter 2 describes the simulation code employed throughout the work (GADGET2)—including some testing and benchmarking—and uses this code to derive scaling laws for giant impacts between bodies of terrestrial composition. Chapter 3 combines these scaling laws with simple dynamical arguments to make a prediction for the maximum possible collisional mantle stripping for Earth-like planets, and the corresponding minimum radius as a function of mass. Chapter 4 extends these collisional scaling laws to bodies of icy-rocky composition and presents a general model for the collisional erosion of differentiated bodies. Chapter 5 focuses on the prospects of identifying collisional families in the Kuiper belt, concluding that families should be numerous and that future surveys (e.g., LSST) should be capable of identifying families with progenitors of radius [special characters omitted] 250 km. Appendix A presents a detailed model for the formation of the Kuiper belt's only currently known collisional family, which exists around the fourth largest known Kuiper belt object (KBO), Haumea. In this model, the family formed from a low-speed, grazing collision between the proto-Haumea and an equal-sized projectile in a novel impact scenario termed a "graze-and-merge."

As the homeownership rate in the United States reached its highest ever level in 2004, the distribution of homeownership remained uneven along racial and ethnic lines. Using data from the 20052007 3-Year Sample of the American Community Survey (ACS), this paper employs a multivariate regression model and a decomposition technique to delineate the socio-economic and demographic characteristics as well as the immigration and spatial patterns that shape racial and ethnic inequality in homeownership. The findings reveal three distinct patterns; the Asian-white homeownership gap is explained entirely by differences in immigration and spatial patterns of residence, whereas the disadvantage of blacks and Puerto Ricans is attributable to demographic, socio-economic and unobserved factors. For Mexicans and other Hispanics, all four sources influence homeownership patterns, with socio-economic factors relatively important for Mexicans and spatial variables relatively important for other Hispanics.

Many American communities seek to attract or retain businesses with tax abatements, tax credits, or tax increment financing of infrastructure projects (TIFs). The evidence for 1999 indicates that communities are most likely to offer one or more of these business development incentives if their residents have low incomes, if they are located close to state borders, and if their states have troubled political cultures. Ten percent greater median household income is associated with a 3.2 percent lower probability of offering incentives; ten percent greater distance from a state border is associated with a 1.0 percent lower probability of offering incentives; and a 10 percent higher rate at which government officials are convicted of federal corruption crimes is associated with a 1.2 percent greater probability of offering business incentives. TIFs are the preferred incentive of communities whose residents have household incomes between $25,000 and $75,000; whereas TIFs are much less commonly offered by communities whose residents have household incomes below $25,000. The need to finance TIFs out of incremental tax revenues may make it infeasible for many of the poorest of communities to use TIFs for local business development.

How does intermarriage affect the economic well-being of immigrants and the children of immigrants? The rapid increase in the population of first and second generation immigrants in the United States raises questions about the processes through which immigrants are integrated into the stratification structure. Intermarriage is a key component of both old (Gordon 1964) and new (Alba and Nee 2003) perspectives on immigrant assimilation, and stratification researchers likewise see marital homogamy as evidence of rigidity in the stratification structure. Long-term trends in assortative mating in the US suggest increasing closure based on educational attainment, and increasing openness on the basis of race and ethnicity. Yet after decades of rising rates of intermarriage, Qian and Lichter (2007) found that during the 1990s, rates of inter-racial marriage between whites and Hispanics and whites and Asian-Americans declined, and intermarriage between immigrant and native-born co-ethnics increased. They interpret these trends as the results of the increased availability of co-ethnic marital partners. The question remains as to how trends in assortative mating affect income disparities between immigrant and non-immigrant households. We use pooled cross-sectional data from the IPUMS-CPS to compare trends in the economic outcomes of immigrant and non-immigrant couple-headed households in the United States between 1996-2010. Based on previous research, we hypothesize that (1) Increasing ethnic homogamy will be associated with declines in educational homogamy among immigrants, and (2) Declining rates of intermarriage will slow the pace at which second generation immigrant households will achieve economic parity with non-immigrant households. We further hypothesize that (3) rates of intermarriage and educational homogamy will be highest for immigrants with a college degree, and that this group will compare favorably with non-immigrant households in terms of household employment and income.