Since the beginning of the recent recession, the employment-population ratio for high-school age youth (1617 years old) has fallen by nearly a third, to its lowest level ever.However, this recession has exacerbated a longerrun downward trend that actually began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2000s. There is little research regarding why teen employment has fallen. Some earlier work emphasized labor supply explanations related to schooling and education, such as an increased emphasis on college preparation (Aaronson, Park, and Sullivan 2006), while others have argued that adult immigrants have crowded out teens, at least in part because adult immigrants andnative teens tend to be employed in similar occupations (Sum, Garrington, and Khatiwada 2006, Camarota and Jensenius 2010, Smith 2012). This paper presents updated trends in teen employment and participation across multiple demographic characteristics, and argues that, in addition to immigration, occupational polarization in the U.S. adult labor market has resulted in increased competition for jobs that teens traditionally hold. Testing various supply and demand explanations for the decline in employment since the mid1980s, I find that demand factors can explain at least half of the decline unexplained by the business cycle, and that supply factors can explain much of the remaining decline.

“A jar retains for a long time the odour of the liquid it first contained, and loses it only with great difficulty….” (Erasmus, circa 1529) Long held beliefs of racial and ethnic inferiority do not go away over night or over generations. This “jar” is akin to a society in much the same way as the “odour” is to racial sentiment. The effect of the “odour” has been to uphold legislation and policies enacted during the height of racial prejudice in this country long after its effects have dissipated. As generations continue to uphold these methods, either knowingly or unknowingly, they continue to carry out the negative impact of these policies on its intended targets. Consequently, one cannot easily erase the racial and ethnic sentiment that pushed these methods of racial subordination into existence in the first place. Therefore, it is easy to understand why these methods of racial institutional subordination have persisted through time and continue to plague society The collateral consequences of a felony conviction are one such policy area that has existed through time, unaffected by major changes. Wheelock (2005) classifies felon collateral- consequences policies into four distinct categories: civic, service and aid, employment/occupational and other restrictions. Civic restrictions include the loss of voting rights, the right to serve on a jury, and the right to run for public office. Service and aid restrictions “prohibit ex-felons from receiving scholarships and grants, welfare, public housing, military benefits, and any other form of public assistance” (Wheelock 2005, 85). Employment and occupational restrictions consist of any restrictions that ban or disqualify ex-felons from holding certain governmental positions and occupational licenses. Other restrictions can consist of the loss of parental rights and the use of a felony conviction as grounds for divorce. Depending on how collateral consequences are classified a state can have anywhere between one and 140 collateral consequences of a felony conviction , thus documenting the vast amount of variation that exists between states. The goal of this work is to focus on what specific “odours” a state retains related to felon-collateral consequence policies. By examining these factors we can determine how they contribute to the number of felon collateral-consequence policies preserved by each state. The main question this works attempts to answer is, what role does race play in the preservation of felon collateral-consequence policies in today’s society? The findings revealed that out of all the factors examined, race-based factors accounted for state adoption of a higher number of collateral consequences.

The aim of this chapter is to offer a holistic, forward-looking and multi-level analysis of pressing contemporary topics related to work-life balance policies for families with smaller children and to show how they interact with parents' attitudes and practices. The first section presents a brief overview of current trends in the work-family life related areas. Then the main key drivers of change over the last decade are identified and described. Emphasis is placed on the dramatic organisational changes that have been taking place in the workplace and on their impact on the stategies elaborated by parents to combine their job with family obligations. In the last section, drawing lessons from evidence-based research and the latest data presented in the previous sections, we flesh out the two scenarios to 2030 developed for this purpose in the project.

This thesis studies the economic effects of child labor and compulsory schooling laws (CLLs and CSLs). In the first two chapters I study the consequences of the enactment of CSLs on education and fertility. I use a combination of a difference-in-difference (DID) methodology with an identification strategy based on legislative borders to find that the laws increased enrollment by 7% and educational attainment by about 0.3 years of education over the long run. As for fertility, I find that CSLs imply a contemporaneous reduction in fertility of about 15%. In the long run, women that received compulsory education were expected to have approximately 0.15 to 0.3 fewer children. In the third chapter of this dissertation I look at the effect of CLLs on industrial performance. I find that industries that initially relied extensively on child labor suffered a significant reduction in growth as a consequence of the social legislation. I conjecture that the potentially sizable but narrowly concentrated effects of CLLs could explain why child labor is still common in the developing world today.

We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling dueto tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in theschooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more schooling-intensiveindustries played a less important role. To try and understand this finding theoretically, we considera free trade model with two goods/industries, two skill types, and many regions that produce a fixedrange of differentiated varieties of the same goods. We find that a calibrated version of the model canaccount for shifts in schooling supply being mostly absorbed through within-industry increases inthe schooling intensity of production even if the elasticity of substitution between varieties is substantiallyhigher than estimates in the literature.

Residential segregation in metropolitan areas has been the subject of much research, but this article analyzes patterns of whiteblack and whiteHispanic segregation in counties across the United States. Our purpose was to understand county variations in this one dimension of inequality. Conceiving of segregation as relative inequality of access to neighborhood resources, we measured segregation in 2000 by the index of dissimilarity (D) calculated by blocks, mapped the index values, and correlated them with census variables. Three filters enabled us to eliminate counties with characteristics that could have corrupted the analyses, leaving us with more than 1,000 counties in each analysis. Both minority groups were less segregated from whites in the West and South and in metropolitan counties. Lower segregation was strongly associated with higher minority socioeconomic status and higher percentages of minorities living in housing built in the 1990s, and Hispanicwhite segregation was lower where more Hispanics were U.S.-born or English proficient. The racial threat hypothesis was supported only weakly and inconsistently. Mapping made it possible to identify regional and local patterns of high and low segregation as well as the lower segregation of suburban counties in some large metropolitan areas.

Wage evidence suggests that immigrant workers are imperfectly substitutable for native-born workers with similar education and experience. Using U.S. Censuses and recent American Community Survey data, I ask to what extent differences in language skills drive this. I find they are important. I estimate that the response of immigrants' relative wages to immigration is concentrated among immigrants with poor English skills. Similarly, immigrants who arrive at young ages, as adults, both have stronger English skills and exhibit greater substitutability for native-born workers than immigrants who arrive older. In U.S. markets where Spanish speakers are concentrated, I find a "Spanish-speaking" labor market emerges: in such markets, the return to speaking English is low, and the wages of Spanish and non-Spanish speakers respond most strongly to skill ratios in their own language group. Finally, in Puerto Rico, where almost all workers speak Spanish, I find immigrants and natives are perfect substitutes. The implications for immigrant poverty and regional settlement patterns are analyzed.

Given a record set D and a query score function F , a top-k query returns k records from D, whose values of function F on their attributes are the highest. In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic connection between top-k queries and dominant relationships between records, and based on which, we propose an efficient layer-based indexing structure, Pareto-Based Dominant Graph (DG), to improve the query efficiency. Specifically, DG is built offline to express the dominant relationship between records and top-k query is implemented as a graph traversal problem, i.e. Traveler algorithm. We prove theoretically that the size of search space (that is the number of retrieved records from the record set to answer top-k query) in our algorithm is directly related to the cardinality of skyline points in the record set (see Theorem 3). Considering I/O cost, we propose cluster-based storage schema to reduce I/O cost in Traveler algorithm. We also propose the cost estimation methods in this paper. Based on cost analysis, we propose an optimization technique, pseudo record, to further improve the search efficiency. In order to handle the top-k query in the high dimension record set, we also propose N-Way Traveler algorithm. In order to handle DG maintenance efficiently, we propose “Insertion” and “Deletion” algorithms for DG. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods have significant improvement over its counterparts, including both classical and state art of top-k algorithms.

The Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS ASEC) is an important source of information about health insurance coverage in the U.S. Due to its long time series, its state representative sample and its detailed series on health insurance, the CPS ASEC is a critical data source for federal and state policy making and health policy research (Blewett et al., 2004). It is routinely used in surveillance activities and in policy evaluations; to project the cost of proposed legislation; and was historically used as an input in the federal allocation formula of the State Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).The U.S. Census Bureau is engaged in an on-going effort to improve the quality of health insurance information in the CPS ASEC (Ziegenfuss and Davern, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to explain the latest development in their quality improvement effort a change to the imputation routine for health insurance coverage. In an experimental version of the 2009 CPS ASEC, the change to the imputation routine and a simultaneous correction to the coding of directly purchased coverage increased the percent of people with health insurance coverage by about 0.5 percentage points (1.5 million people), primarily through an increase in private coverage. The Census Bureau implemented the new method with the 2011 CPS ASEC and retroactively applied the new routine for the 2000 to 2010 CPS ASECs. In addition to the new allocation procedures, the new data files reflect all data processing adjustments that have occurred since 2000 (see below for details). The data were released as supplementary files available from the Census Bureaus health insurance web page.The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First, we describe the CPS ASEC, review its imputation procedures and discuss previous work that identified problems with the way health insurance was imputed. Next, we describe the modifications that the Census Bureau made to correct the problem. Finally, we empirically evaluate the new procedure and discuss the implications of our findings.

The objectives of this research study were to (a) illustrate and quantify the impacts imposed by the energy sector on Texas’s transportation system and (b) identify key energy demand indicators by energy source that TxDOT can track in an effort to anticipate the associated future transportation impacts on Texas’s transportation system. This report describes how Texas’s energy sector uses the transportation system and quantifies the impact imposed by the energy sector on Texas’s road infrastructure. It is, however, also important to understand what the future holds—which industries within the energy sector are expected to grow, which industries are expected to decline, and how Texas’s transportation system could be impacted in the future. The focus of this report is the development of four energy scenarios that reflect different assumptions and outcomes for Texas’s future energy sector over a 20- to 30-year period. Analyses of several factors, referred to as drivers, that may impact the energy sector are presented within.

In previous literature, immigrant enclaves, as they pertain to immigrant businesses, have most often been measured by the concentration of own-country immigrants living in an area. Despite the extensive previous research using this definition of enclave, the studies have produced little consensus and often inconclusive results regarding the enclaves affect on business ownership and income. In order to better answer the question of the effects of enclaves, we deviate from the previous literature in looking at not only the concentration of immigrants, but also at what characteristics of enclaves influence the decision of becoming self-employed and affect business income. Using a basic binary logit model for the probability of owning a business and a semi-log model for business earnings, though the percent of own-country immigrants in the MSA of residence does not seem to effect self-employment, the percent of any-country immigrants has a significant positive effect. We also find that both the income per capita and percent who speak poor English of own-country immigrants increases the probability of being self-employed and of business earnings.

A key step to promoting smart growth in urban environments is the reclamation of dilapidated, underutilized or abandoned contaminated urban sites, also known as brownfields. Brownfield redevelopment promotes smart growth because it promotes land reuse in urban areas and economic and community vitality. Various transportation-related parameters influence the impact of brownfield restoration on the overall contribution to urban revitalization, such as the proximity of the developed property to public transport, highways and intersection density. Indexing schemes such as LEED ND can be utilized to assess these parameters and the smart growth potential of a brownfield. However, for a brownfield redevelopment project the environmental attributes of the contaminated land are equally important. Moreover, socioeconomic factors such as property values and the demographics of an area may be important for decision makers and fund allocation. This paper explores a prioritization scheme for brownfield redevelopment using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) implemented to visualize socioeconomic factors, smart growth and environmental attributes of brownfield sites and their surrounding areas. Its application to the City of New Haven, Connecticut as a case study demonstrates a general prioritization scheme that can be used by urban planners and public agencies to pinpoint smart growth and environmentally sensitive locations that can be set as priority areas for funding.

Diff erences between blacks and whites in test scores and labor market outcomes are stark. While much catchup occurred post-Civil rights, convergence has slowed.We examine how diff erences across education and labor market outcomes vary by maternal race and own race with identifi cation coming from families where the race ofthe mother diff ers from the race of the child. While black students with white mothers come from families with similar demographics to black students with black mothers, their education and labor market outcomes are very di fferent. There are no signifi cant diff erences in test scores, grades, college graduation, and wages between black andwhite males with white mothers, yet large diff erences exist between these groups and black males with black mothers. These results are insensitive to alternative measuresof own-race, using skin tone instead of own race, and including school fixed e ffects.

Among American Indians and Alaska Natives, most aspects of ethnicity are tightly associated with the person’s tribal origins. Language, history, foods, land, and traditions differ among the hundreds of tribes indigenous to the United States. Why did almost one million of them fail to respond to the tribal affiliation part of the Census 2000 race question? We investigate four hypotheses about why one-third of multiracial American Indians and one-sixth of single-race American Indians did not report a tribe: (1) survey item non-response which undermines all fill-in-the-blank questions, (2) a non-salient tribal identity, (3) a genealogy-based affiliation, and (4) mestizo identity which does not require a tribe. We use multivariate logistic regression models and high-density restricted-use Census 2000 data. We find support for the first two hypotheses and note that the predictors and results differ substantially for single race versus multiple race American Indians.

We assess the role of supply, through the demographic changes of the workforce, in accounting for the large changes in the return to labor market experience over time. Using the PSID (1968-2007), we find that the movement of the return to experience is almost perfectly explained by demographic changes alone, with no role attributable to demand shifts. Moreover, these demographic changes account for the differential dynamics of the age premium across education groups emphasized by Katz and Murphy (1992), and account for the differential movements of the college premium across age groups emphasized by Card and Lemieux (2001). Thus, our analysis attributes a key role to demographic change in shaping several empirical regularities that are a focus of active research in macro and labor economics.

Using microdata from the 2001-2009 American Community Surveys, the 2000 U.S. decennial census, and the 2001-2011 Current Population Surveys, this paper analyzes the earnings and employment patterns of Hispanic entrepreneurs in the first decade of the 2000s. In light of this populations heterogeneity, our analyses also consider gender- and immigrant-related outcomes. The findings indicate a rising presence of Hispanics in the entrepreneurial sector during the 2000s, especially for immigrants. This increase resulted from the overall growth in the Hispanic population in the U.S. as well as from rising self-employment rates within the Hispanic workforce. Analyses of earnings further indicate that the most recent recession offset some (but not all) of the progress Hispanic women had made with respect to reducing their self-employment penalties in the decade, but this was not the case for Hispanic men. Moreover, the recession led to higher rates of microentrepreneurship (defined as having fewer than ten employees) among the self-employed, particularly for foreign-born Hispanic women. These findings indicate Hispanic entrepreneurial growth appeared to have a positive impact on job creation in the 2000s, but mostly at the scale of smaller firms, especially near the end of the decade. The paper concludes with a set of policy implications.