...In the three essays presented here we draw on anthropometric data to better understand this crucial transition period. Nationwide data on US Army recruits permit us to pinpoint, for the first time, the trends, levels, and determinants of height in the general population1. To shed further light on height correlates, we supplement this broad military sample with data at three lower levels: county, city, and family...

The humble origins of many recent immigrants combined with sharp declines inmanufacturing jobs and persistent patterns of racial discrimination have led scholars totake pessimistic stances on the future of immigrants in the US. This paper uses 1980and 2000 US Census data to track the incidence of poverty across two generations ofPost-Civil Rights era immigrants and determine whether this pessimism is warranted.Results indicate that the incidence of poverty is high in the first generation but very lowin the second. The humble origins of immigrant parents seem not to inhibit themovement of their children out of poverty. However, intergenerational advancementout of poverty is most pronounced for white immigrants and least pronounced for blackimmigrants leaving black adults of the new second generation more likely than whiteand other immigrants to experience poverty. Implications of these findings arediscussed.

This paper explores the relationship between anti-miscegenation laws, interracial marriageand black males geographical distribution in the U.S. during and after the Great Migration.The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which forced thelast 16 Southern states to strike down their anti-miscegenation laws, creates a uniqueopportunity to explore the impact of an exogenous change in a states laws regulatinginterracial marriages. Analyzing the U.S. Census data, I find that anti-miscegenation laws inan individuals state of birth affect the sorting of inter- and intraracially married black malesinto destination states differentially.

Oregon’s system of public finance is profoundly shaped by the educational attainment of its population. The state gets the bulk of its revenues from people who have completed a four-year college degree, and spends a disproportionate share of its budget providing services to those with just a high school diploma or less education. The close relationship between educational attainment and state revenues and expenses means that the Oregon budget has a huge stake in improving the educational attainment of the state’s population. There is a large “fiscal return” on the state’s investment in improving education—higher educational attainment both increases state revenues and drives down the cost of key state programs. Revenue. Oregon income tax revenues, the principal source of revenue for the state’s General Fund, come disproportionately from well-educated Oregonians. Better educated persons have higher incomes: In Oregon, in 2008, the average household headed by a person with at least a four-year degree had an income 70 percent higher than the average household headed by a person with just a high school diploma. Better educated households had both more income, and paid a higher personal income tax rate than less well educated households. In 2008, households headed by a person with a four-year degree constituted 36% of all households, but paid more than 53% of all state income taxes. Increasing educational attainment is likely to translate . . .

The 1960s ushered in a new era in US demographic history characterized by significantly lower fertility rates and smaller family sizes. What catalyzed these changes remains a matter of considerable debate. This paper exploits idiosyncratic variation in the language of "Comstock" statutes, enacted in the late 1800s, to quantify the role of the birth control pill in this transition. Almost 50 years after the contraceptive pill appeared on the US market, this analysis provides new evidence that it accelerated the post-1960 decline in marital fertility.

The Housing Act of 1949 established a federally subsidized program that helped cities clear areas of existing buildings for redevelopment, rehabilitate deteriorating structures, complete comprehensive city plans, and enforce building codes. The program ended in 1974, but not beforefinancing over 2,100 urban renewal projects and generating great controversy. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the programs effects on city-level outcomes. The estimates are generally positive and economically significant and are not driven by differential changes in cities demographic composition. We caution that the results do not imply that the program was an equitable or optimal approach to dealing with central-city problems.

We propose a new identification strategy to measure the causal impact of government spending on the economy. Our methodology isolates exogenous cross-sectional variation in government spending using a novel instrument. We use the fact that a large number of federal spending programs depend on local population levels. Every ten years, the Census provides a count of local populations. A different method is used to estimate non-Census year populations and this discontinuous change in methodology leads to variation in the allocation of billions of dollars in federal spending. We use this variation to analyze the effect of exogenous changes in federal spending across counties on local economic outcomes. Our IV estimates imply that government spending has a local income multiplier of 1.88 and an estimated cost per job of $30,000 per year. These estimates are robust to the inclusion of potential confounders, such as local demand shocks. We also show that the local effects of government spending are not larger than aggregate effects at the MSA and state levels. Finally, we characterize the cross-sectional heterogeneity of the impacts of government spending. These results conrm that government spending has a higher impact in low growth areas and leads to reduction of inequality in economic outcomes.

The elderly population is growing at a faster rate than the overall U.S. population. In addition, the elderly immigrant population is also growing at a fast rate in the U.S. Both population groups face various challenges concerning their needs and in receiving assistance from healthcare and human services. As scant literature concerning meeting the needs of elderly immigrants exists, this paper examines Human Services' ability to provide adequate assistance and the efforts of multi-sectoral planning, while attempting to meet the needs of elderly immigrants in the U.S.

Over recent decades, Australia has experienced an unprecedented rate of population ageing due to increasing longevity and declining fertility. The proportion of the population in the older age groups is set to increase dramatically as the large cohorts of the baby boom, those born between 1946 and 1976, move into their retirement years. As we now face a tidal wave of some three million Australian boomers retiring over the next 20 years, it is important to understand how this distinctive cohort will shape Australia’s future. One key aspect which is the focus of attention here is the future spatial mobility of the boomer generation, particularly their migration in retirement. This thesis identifies three key issues which will shape the intensity, patterns and characteristics of retirement migration in Australia: the distinctive behaviour of the baby boomer cohorts; the changing nature of the retirement transition; and the destination choices of retirees. Compared to today’s generation of retirees, the baby boomer generation is characterised by a higher level of education and affluence, a larger share of dual-earner families and a greater dependence on superannuation as retirement income. Moreover, there has been a historic reversal in the trend towards early retirement since 2000. The effective retirement age is likely to increase even further in response to public policy and financial necessity. Most studies assume that retirement occurs instantaneously at age 65 and that migration takes place soon after retirement, but in practice, there is no hard evidence to support this assumption. Whether the baby boomers take early retirement or whether they continue to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65 will have important consequences for their migration behaviour. The timing of retirement and the distinctive behaviour of the boomers are interrelated with their destination choices. In other countries, research findings are indicative of shifts in the spatial structure of retirement migration. In the absence of conclusive research, it is unclear whether such shifts have occurred in Australia over the last three decades. Against this background, the overall goal of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of retirement migration and the likely future trajectory of retirement migration as Australia’s baby boomers enter their retirement years. The thesis has four specific aims: 1. To determine the spatial structure of retirement migration in Australia and how it has changed over the last 30 years. 2. To establish the relationship between retirement and migration in the life-course. 3. To establish how cohort size has shaped the migration behaviour of the Australian baby boom generation as it has moved through the life-course. 4. To determine the likely future retirement migration trajectory of the baby boom cohort. To address these aims, an array of state-of-the-art analytical methods drawn from several disciplines is applied to cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets. The thesis uses a battery of spatial indicators, event history models, age-period-cohort analysis, spatial interaction models and multi-regional cohort component projections methods to better understand the spatial structure of retirement migration, the relative timing of migration and retirement, and the distinctive behaviour of the baby boomers. The use of a sophisticated research design is facilitated by the availability of novel data sources on migration: the Australian Internal Migration (AIM) database and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Data from the AIM database are used to determine the spatial structure of retirement migration in Australia and how it has changed over the last 30 years. The results show a tendency toward a greater dispersal of flows, which can be explained by societal change, the attractiveness of natural amenities and the changing demographic composition of the population. This expansion of retirement destinations means that the dominance of the coastal resorts in northern NSW and Queensland declined to the benefit of coastal destinations in southern NSW, Victoria and Tasmania. These shifts in the spatial structure of retirement migration can partly be ascribed to fundamental changes in the timing of retirement over the last 30 years. Contrary to conventional assumptions, retirement is a gradual and protracted process of transition that is spread across a 30-year age range. The results from the event history analysis show that the propensity to move is highest in the year of retirement and decreases as age at retirement increases. The propensity to move in the year of retirement varies with household composition, health status and the husband’s age at retirement. The APC analysis show that the baby boomer cohorts had a 45 per cent higher risk of moving than the pre-baby boomers, but the post-baby boomers had even higher movement propensities. The finding shows that the migration behaviour of the Australian baby boomers is markedly different from those observed in the US. Migration intensities were slightly depressed for the 1961-66 cohort, but the relationship between mobility and birth cohort size is clearly positive. Given the distinctiveness of the baby boomers and the striking fiscal and social consequences of their retirement, understanding of the boomers’ future trajectory is crucial. Building upon the results of aims 1, 2, and 3, the thesis uses alternative scenarios that consider shifts in destination choices and changes in retirement age to highlight ways in which retirement migration may change between 2006 and 2036.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, has issued a challenge to enroll the millions of uninsured children eligible for public insurance in Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This paper provides estimates of the rates at which children in the various states participated in these programs in 2008 as well as the number who were eligible for them but uninsured. According to our coverage estimates, an estimated 7.3 million children were uninsured on an average day in 2008, of whom 4.7 million (65 percent) were eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not enrolled. Participation rates varied across states from 55 percent to 95 percent, and ten states had participation rates close to or above 90 percent. Thirty-nine percent of eligible uninsured children (1.8 million) live in just three states-California, Texas, and Florida-and 61 percent (2.9 million) live in ten states. Meeting Secretary Sebelius's challenge means achieving success in these populous states, in part through tools and resources available under the 2009 CHIP reauthorization law.

This thesis consists of three essays examining issues related to human capital, careers, and financial economics. In the first chapter, I examine how the process of corporate bankruptcy varies by human capital intensity using a sample of 1,493 public firms that filed for Chapter 11 between 1980 and 2003. I document two key patterns. First, human-capital-intensive are more likely to avoid and delay bankruptcy conditional upon entering distress, and they are more likely to use debt issuance to raise funds prior to bankruptcy. Second, human-capital-intensive firms are more likely to be liquidated within bankruptcy. In the second chapter (co-authored with Pierre Azoulay and Joshua Graff Zivin), we estimate the magnitude of human capital spillovers generated by 112 academic "superstars" who died prematurely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5 to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor and star/coauthor dyad characteristics, we find evidence that spillovers are circumscribed in idea space, but less so in physical or social space. In particular, superstar extinction reveals the boundaries of the scientific field to which the star contributes - the "invisible college." In the third chapter, I examine the role of artistic films in the careers of star actors and directors. Using data from all films released in the United States from 1980 and 2005 and the career histories of 100 star directors and 94 star actors, I document evidence on the interaction between artistic films and the value of stars over their careers. Artistic films make up 12% of star careers, and they are associated both with significantly lower film revenues and lower monetary compensation. The propensity for stars to work on artistic films is relatively constant across their career, although it is slightly higher when stars are under 30 or over 60 relative to middle age. Furthermore, artistic films are significantly associated with Oscar awards.

Even before the Great Recession left a vast swath of Americans without jobs and career prospects, young men of color were struggling. Over the past two decades the social system in which they live has become less forgiving of youthful mistakes. Public schools have become “zero-tolerance” zones equipped with metal detectors, Tasers, surveillance cameras, and even armed security and the criminal justice system has become more punitive, jailing more people than any other country in the world while doing less and less to rehabilitate prisoners and discourage recidivism. Meanwhile, a more demanding economy has continued to sort the highly skilled workers (who earn big paychecks) from the low-skilled workers (who earn increasingly smaller ones). Although many Americans have been affected by these trends, the country’s young men of color have felt the pressures most sharply, resulting in a diminished opportunity to lead productive lives.

Environmental regulation can impact local labor markets, potentially reducing in-comes and employment and inducing reallocation across sectors. The labor marketconsequences of environmental regulation are di$cult to isolate because regulationsfrequently apply to large areas, such as the entire United States, and researchers can-not directly observe the counterfactual, in the absence of regulation. I claim thatprotection of the northern spotted owl in the Paci c Northwest in the 1990s led to anexogenous decline in labor demand in that region. I use this policy change to iden-tify the local and regional impacts of endangered species regulation on employmentand incomes in the timber industry. I estimate the local labor market impact of owlprotection by comparing counties in the region with and without owl-protected ar-eas. Depending on the choice of control areas and the inclusion of additional controlfactors, northern spotted owl protection plausibly led to a small loss of incomes andemployment in the region.

The recession-era boom in the size of freshman classes at four-year colleges, community colleges and trade schools has been driven largely by a sharp increase in minority student enrollment, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education. Freshman enrollment at the nation’s 6,100 post-secondary institutions surged by 144,000 students from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008. This 6% increase was the largest in 40 years1, and almost three-quarters of it came from minority freshman enrollment growth. From 2007 to 2008 (the first year of the recession), the freshman enrollment of Hispanics at post-secondary institutions grew by 15%, of blacks by 8%, of Asians by 6% and of whites by 3%. Some of this minority enrollment surge is a simple byproduct of demographic change. In a nation whose population of youths is far more diverse than its population of adults, each new year brings a slightly larger share of minority teenagers into the pool of potential college freshmen. In addition, the first year . . .

I examine the impact of a property tax-relief program in New York State that lowered the marginal cost of school expenditure to homeowners. I find that a typical school district, which received 20% of its revenue through the program in the school year 20012002, raised expenditure by 4.1% and local property taxes by 6.8% in response to the program. I then examine how the preferences of various groups of local taxpayers affect educational spending by identifying systematic variation across districts in the response to fiscal incentives. These results support the hypothesis that homeowners are more influential on localexpenditure decisions than renters, owners of second homes, or owners of non-residential property.