Using a general equilibrium model with endogenous sorting of workers into occupationsbased on comparative advantage, this paper derives the e ects of routine-biased technicalchange on occupational transition patterns and wage changes of individual workers. Thesepredictions are then tested using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)from 1976 to 2007. Consistent with the predictions of the model, occupational mobilitypatterns of routine workers show strong evidence of selection on ability. Workers of relativelyhigh (low) ability are more likely to switch to non-routine cognitive (non-routinemanual) occupations. Also consistent with the predictions of the model, there has beena signi cant increase in the relative wage premium in non-routine occupations. Workersstaying in routine jobs therefore perform signi cantly worse in terms of wage growth thanworkers staying in any other type of occupation. Switchers from routine to non-routinemanual jobs have signi cantly lower wage growth than stayers over horizons of up to twoyears, while those who switch to non-routine cognitive jobs have signi cantly higher wagegrowth than stayers over a variety of time horizons.

We model and estimate the incidence of the corporate income tax under imperfect competition. IdentiÖcation comes from variation in e§ective marginal tax rates in the United States across industries and time. Our empirical results suggest that labor bears a signiÖcant portion of the burden of the corporate income tax. In addition, we Önd that the elasticity of wages with respect to the corporate marginal e§ective tax rate increases with industry concentration. Over all industries, our estimates suggest that a one dollar increase in corporate tax revenue decreases wages by around 60 cents.

Capturing the conditions of children of color living in single-parent families has become more complex due to the growing presence of interracial families. This analysis assesses the size and poverty status of single-female headed families housing multiracial children. Using data from the 2000 Census, we find nine percent of female headed families house either children who are classified with more than one race or are classified as a single race different than their mothers. Logistic regression analyses assessing the odds of poverty finds that multiracial families, like most families of color, are more likely to experience poverty than white monoracial families. The one exception is Asian multiracial families who have similar poverty rates as white monoracial families.

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal governments new check all that apply method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the biracial children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the US Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple-race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.

The notion of a hierarchy among cities has long been part of the theoretical tool kit of urban sociologists, geographers, and economists. Reviewing the evolution of the urban hierarchy concept, this paper empirically demonstrates a hypothesized transition in the U.S. urban hierarchy during the twentieth century, from size based to network based. Three urban types, following distinct trajectories during this shift, are explored: the primate city, the offline metropolis, and the wired town. Data on the economic structure, population size, and airline passenger traffic of 64 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1900 to 2000 are used to test the hypothesis of a hierarchical transition. Results suggest that a size-based hierarchy dominated in the early twentieth century but was replaced or augmented in the mid-1940s with a network-based hierarchy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study's limitations and directions for future research.

Existing studies of social capital formation in US metropolitan areas have found that social capital is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racialfragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of income inequality between racial groups (racial income inequality). I fi nd that greater racial income inequality reduces social capital. Also, racial fragmentation is no longer a signifi cant determinant of social capital once racial income inequality is accounted for. This result is consistent with a simple conceptual framework where concurrent diff erences in race and income are especially detrimental for social capital formation. I find empirical support for further implications derivingfrom this assumption. In particular, I show that racial income inequality has a more detrimental eff ect in more racially fragmented communities and that trust falls more in minority groups than in the majority group when racial income inequality increases.

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The Örst article studies the determinants of the labor force participation of elderly American males and investigates the factors that may account for the changes in retirement between 1950 and 2000. We develop a life-cycle general equilib- rium model with endogenous retirement that embeds Social Security legislation and Medicare. Individuals are ex ante heterogeneous with respect to their preferences for leisure and face uncer- tainty about labor productivity, health status and out-of-pocket medical expenses. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy in 2000 and is able to reproduce very closely the retirement be- havior of the American population. It reproduces the peaks in the distribution of Social Security applications at ages 62 and 65 and the observed facts that low earners and unhealthy individuals retire earlier. It also matches very closely the increase in retirement from 1950 to 2000. Changes in Social Security policy - which became much more generous - and the introduction of Medicare account for most of the expansion of retirement. In contrast, the isolated impact of the increase in longevity was a delaying of retirement. In the second article, I develop an overlapping generations model of criminal behavior, which extends prior research on crime by taking into account individualsílabor supply decisions and the stigma e§ect that a§ects convicted o§enders, lowering their likelihood of employment. I use the model to guide a quantitative assessment of the determinants of crime and of a counterfactual experiment in which an income redistribution policy is thought as an alternative to greater law enforcement. The model economy considered in this paper is populated by heterogeneous agents who live for a realistic number of periods, have preferences over consumption and leisure, and di§er in terms of their age, their skills as well as their employment shocks. In addition, savings may be precautionary and allow partial insurance against the labor income shocks. Because of the lack of full insurance, this model generates an endogenous distribution of wealth across consumers, enabling us to assess the welfare implications of the redistribution policy experiment. I calibrated the model using the US data for 1980 and then use the model to investigate the changes in criminality between 1980 and 1996. The main results that come out of this study are: 1) Law enforcement policy was the most important factor behind the fall in criminality in the period, while the increase in inequality was the most important single factor promoting crime; 2) Stigmatization is not a free-cost crime control policy; 3) Income redistribution can be a powerful alternative policy to Öght crime. Finally, the third article studies the impact of HIV/AIDS on per capita income and education. It explores two channels from HIV/AIDS to income that have not been su¢ ciently stressed by the literature: the reduction of the incentives to study due to shorter expected longevity and the reduction of productivity of experienced workers. In the model individuals live for three periods, may get infected in the second period and with some probability die of Aids before reaching the third period of their life. Parents care for the welfare of the future generations so that they will maximize lifetime utility of their dynasty. The simulations predict that the most a§ected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa will be in the future, on average, thirty percent poorer than they would be without AIDS. Schooling will decline in some cases by forty percent. These Ögures are dramatically reduced with widespread medical treatment, as it increases the survival probability and productivity of infected individuals.

This study examined how well socio-demographic factors (including health insurance), global region of birth, and acculturation (as measured by length of stay) predict the physical health of immigrants in the United States. The study also tests the mediation effect of health behavior and insurance on the relationship(s) between socio-demographic characteristics, global region of birth, acculturation and physical health. There is an overwhelming indication from previous research that acculturation is a determinant of health. Due to the complexity in defining acculturation, various measures have been utilized as evidenced in the literature. Measurements of acculturation have included indirect measures such as length of stay and language preference, especially where data is limited with regards to direct measures such as dietary habits and structural assimilation. This study uses a proxy measure for acculturation or length of stay. Acculturation theory posits that the decline in general health status among immigrants is due to acculturation, and that this decline depends with the level of acculturation. Various health outcomes including BMI and self-rated health have been used to ascertain this proposition. Data from the 2005-2009 National Health Interview Study (NHIS) were used to assess the degree to which predictor variables (age, gender, marital status, educational attainment, employment status, and global region of birth); length of stay; health insurance; and health behavior (cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical inactivity) explain physical health. This study proposes an aggregate measure of physical health, particularly poor physical health, which combines self-rated health, and the presence of chronic conditions/ diseases into a summary score. A binomial logistic regression and complex samples are used for analyses. Results indicate that acculturation was a determinant of physical health even after controlling for socio-demographic factors. While health behavior and insurance did not have a mediating effect, insurance showed statistically significant suppressor effects on employment. Results also showed that BMI is a problematic measure of physical health. This was evidenced by the reliability coefficient of the physical health (dependent variable) when BMI was included (cronbach alpha= .323) and reliability coefficient when BMI was excluded (cronbach alpha= .92) from the physical health summary score.

Analysis of the Republican Party popular vote in Georgia county congressional elections of 1876 suggests that Charles Tilly's (1978) model of interest-based collective action would be useful if embedded in the dynamic model of political processes and mechanisms that Tilly (2007) proposes. Specifically, class (petit bourgeois), status (black), and party (liberal Republican) interests explain 25 percent of the variance in the election returns. Adding a racial-change variable increases the explained variance to 32 percent but fails to distinguish the yeoman and freedman constituencies and the process through which the Democratic Redeemers divided and conquered the opposition in the process of "de-democratization" (ibid.). By embedding the structural analysis in the analysis of process (quantitatively and qualitatively), we can appreciate how yeoman and freedman constituencies experienced contract/convict labor differently and expressed opposition to Redeemers in qualitatively different ways, ultimately facilitating divide-and-conquer efforts.

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to assess the fertility implications of the fluctuations in both output (as argued by demographers) and grandmother-availability induced child-care costs over the period 1920-1970. Model does a good job of mimicking the bust-boom-bust pattern during this period. When the child-care cost channel is shut down, the models performance weakens significantly; in particular, it fails to capture the bust in the 1960s altogether.

Over the past 70 years, all states in the United States began to publicly subsidize kindergarten using state revenue. The variation in adoption dates across states allows for a unique opportunity to measure the effectiveness of the largest early education program implemented in recent history. The significant, immediate increase in the availability of kindergarten within a state is used to identify the effect of enrollment in kindergarten. Hispanic children, non-English speakers, children from immigrant households, and children of low socioeconomic status benefit the most from the increased availability of kindergarten. Hispanic children with access to kindergarten are 17% less likely to be below grade for their age and earn wages 5% higher as adults.

One of the biggest changes in marriage and dating over the past 100 years has been the rapid advancement in contraceptive technology. My work addresses the questions of how this drastic change in access has changed women's sexual and marital decision making. I develop a model where individuals date before marrying in order to learn about relationship quality. While dating, individuals face the risk of pregnancy or contracting a sexually-transmitted infection (STI). The model predicts that contraceptive improvements increase the number of sexual partners, increase sexual acts, increase STI rates, and, under certain conditions, delay marriages and lower single motherhood rates. I use changes in states' over-the-counter (OTC) sales policies for emergency contraception as a natural experiment in varying access to contraceptive technology. Using multiple sources of data on birth rates, STIs, marriages, and sexual activity, I confirm the predictions of the model and find that OTC policies have a significant impact on sexual behavior and relationships. Applying the lessons of that model to the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s and 1970s, I find that access to the pill decreased stability for preexisting marriages.

This paper analyzes the impact of income tax policy on household labor supply through two key life-cycle choices: education and marriage/divorce. To this end, I construct a quantitative life-cycle model to study the effects of changes in the degree of tax progressivity and in the unit of taxation on household labor supply. The model is calibrated to match key statistics in the United States economy, and then I analyze the impact of several tax reforms on labor supply. I find that when the unit of taxation is changed from the family to the individual this reduces the tax burden on secondary earners, which increases womens education and labor supply, but has a negligible effects on men. Further, I find that small reductions in the progressivity of the tax schedule increase college enrollmentand labor supply. To drive these results, the marriage/divorce decision is important because it amplifies the effect of tax reforms on labor supply and education.My experiments demonstrate that one underestimates the impact of income tax reforms on labor supply if life-cycle choices are ignored.

This dissertation examines the rationality of social action. The firm adopting the “red hat” strategy or individuals seeking partners with matching assets and qualifications can all be seen as agents who try to maximize their utilities by searching for what they regard as the most profitable action. The dissertation includes three distinct chapters. The first chapter reexamines the status exchange hypothesis (Davis 1941; Merton1941), and specifically reanalyzes the data from Fu (2001) on recent marriages among whites, blacks, Mexicans, and Japanese (from the 1990 PUMS data), which claims to corroborate the status exchange hypothesis for intermarriage between whites and blacks as well as between whites and Mexican Americans. Using a simple quasi- symmetry model, I show that the same-race and mixed-race marriage share a broadly similar pattern of educational homogamy, which is quasi-symmetric in character. Thus, I argue that this suggests little, if any, evidence for the status exchange hypothesis. Furthermore, the evidence strongly indicates that there is a remarkable consistency and symmetry in husband/wife educational attainment regardless of race (with the possible exception of white/white marriages); intermarried couples share a similar level of education, and educational homogamy dominates the educational marriages, no matter what their or their spouse’s races are. The second chapter employs a game theory framework as well as case studies to examine the interactions between entrepreneurs and local governments under transitional institutions and examine how these actors play extensive games with perfect information. According to this game, the adoption of the “red hat” strategy is the rational results of the interaction between private firms and local governments. The third chapter employs multi-level logistic models to examine the ACS 2008 data and shows that the multilevel modeling helps to decompose the variance of intermarriage to individual level (preference) and context-level characteristics constraints in the analysis of interracial marriage. Metropolitan-level variables, which are typically ignored in previous research, provide additional understanding of the previous of Asian interracial and endogamous marriage in the United States. Studies of interracial marriage can no longer easily overlook the population geographic distribution and the nativity or generation structure of minority groups.

A resilient community is one that does not experience serious degradation in critical services when a hazard occurs and, in the event of degradation or failure, recovers to a similar or better level of service in a reasonable amount of time. The most efficient means of making a community resilient is to make its critical services and capital robust – minimize damage/loss probability or the consequences from damage/loss through mitigation. If a community's critical services and capital are not robust, efforts must be put into recovery. Based on the measurable aspects of community capital, we have developed a simulation model called ResilUS that operationalizes community resilience across multiple, hierarchical scales in relation to a range of policy and decision variables associated with each scale. ResilUS is implemented using fragility curves to model loss and Markov chains to model recovery with respect to time. ResilUS was applied to the 1994 Northridge earthquake disaster in order to calibrate several output variables with empirical data. ResilUS represents a significant step forward for spatial decision support for disaster mitigation and recovery planning, in comparison to existing loss estimation models.

The questions of whether and why black immigrants earn higher wages than US-born blacks have been discussed since the 1970s with no consensus. This study uses 2000 US census data to highlight sample selection as a possible reason for lack of agreement in previous research. Without consistent definitions of ethnic groups and without differentiating between full and part-time employees, researchers may have found an immigrant wage advantage where one does not exist, thereby explaining illusory wage differentials. The sample chosen for this analysis differs from previous samples by defining Caribbean and African immigrants by linguistic heritage and using full-time employment as a selection criterion in the wage equation. I find that selection into full time employment is a key determinant in wage differences among blacks in the United States causing the wage results here to differ from that of previous studies. Methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson's A Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser's Sea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

Scholarly research has been written on the forces behind the barriers preventing Hispanic women from reaching the top of the public school ladder. These barriers are to be recognized and addressed. This study focuses not on the barriers which hinder forward and upward career movement, but instead examines how many Hispanic American women have not allowed these barriers to prevent them from achieving their goals of attaining the principalship. This study seeks to determine how Hispanic women principals came to grips with the challenges and barriers to promotion, and to success as K-12 school leaders. This qualitative research study consisted of 12 Hispanic female school principals from the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area. The three districts selected were Fort Worth Independent School District, Arlington Independent School District, and Grand Prairie Independent School District. Three principals were from Grand Prairie Independent School District, two principals were from Arlington Independent School District, and seven principals were from the Fort Worth Independent School District. All of the 12 Hispanic school principals were interviewed. From the responses to each of the questions, themes became evident. The themes expressed what individual principals had done and the strategies they used to overcome the varied barriers which they confronted. The responses to the interview questions and the themes were very insightful and displayed the women's tenacity, courage, perseverance, and determination to succeed in their aspirations to become Hispanic female principals and leaders in their school districts.