We propose a theory of skill mobility across cities. It predicts the well documented city size--wage premium: the wage distribution in large cities first-order stochastically dominates that in small cities. Yet, because this premium is reflected in higher house prices, this does not necessarily imply that this stochastic dominance relation also exists in the distribution of skills. Instead, we find there is second-order stochastic dominance in the skill distribution. The demand for skills is non-monotonic as our model predicts a ``Sinatra'' as well as an ``Eminem'' effect: both the very high and the very low skilled disproportionately sort into the biggest cities, while those with medium skill levels sort into small cities. The pattern of spatial sorting is explained by a technology with a varying elasticity of substitution that is decreasing in skill density. Using CPS data on wages and Census data on house prices, we find that this technology is consistent with the observed patterns of skills.

This paper uses the NLS and CPS to document the remarkable changes in lifecycle wages for womenborn from the 1920s to the 1950s. Using birth-cohort by state-of-residence variation in access to thePill before age 21, our results show that women with earlier access to the Pill earned lower wages intheir twenties as they invested in human capital but 8 percent more by age fifty. Roughly 60 percentof the Pill premium is accounted for by increases in womens labor market experience, and 33percent is due to educational and occupational investments. "Opting-in" with the Pill accounted for1/3 of the wage gains between the 1943 and 1951 cohorts and 10 percent of the narrowing of thegender gap over the 1980s.

While most studies of the decision to immigrate focus on absoluteincome differences between countries, we argue that relative change in purchasingpower or status, as captured by an individuals ranking in the wage distribution, mayalso be another important determinant of the migration decision. Using data onIndian immigrants in the US and the UK matched to comparable data on individualswho remained in India, we show that the average Indian immigrant will experiencea fall in their relative ranking in the wage distribution compared to the positionsimilar individuals achieve by remaining in the origin country. The fall in relativerankings is larger for immigrants to the UK than to the US, and largest of all forthose with intermediate skills.

This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics with a particular focus on women in the labor market. The first essay explores how the labor market responded to the entry of women into occupations and documents that the dynamics of occupational segregation are highly non-linear and exhibit "tipping"-like patterns. Using US Census data from 1910 to 2000, I show that the evolution of male share over time for occupations that experience a relatively large inflow of females shows striking evidence of an inverse-S pattern. Focusing on the 1940s through the 1980s, I find relatively strong evidence of discontinuities in male employment growth at candidate tipping points ranging from 30 to 60 percent female in white-collar occupations and 12 to 25 percent female in blue-collar occupations. Depending on the decade, occupations experience an 18 to 50 percentage point decline in net male employment growth at the candidate tipping points. The observed tipping behavior appears consistent with a simple framework based on Schelling's (1971) social interaction model where occupational tipping results from male preferences toward the fraction female in their occupation. Supporting the model's predictions, evidence from the General Social Survey indicates that tipping points are lower in regions where males hold more sexist attitudes toward the appropriate role of women. Alternative explanations such as omitted variables, changes in the production technology and learning fall short in explaining the full set of empirical observations. The second essay, co-authored with Kerwin Charles and Jonathan Guryan, examines the extent to which cross-market differences in women's relative labor market outcomes are determined by differences across markets in sexism defined as views about the appropriate role women should play in society. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to measure sexism, we show that selection-corrected gender wage gaps and relative employment rates are significantly related to the degree of sexist views held by the median male, but not with male sexism at the 10th or 90th percentile. Consistent with a standard labor supply model in which sexism lowers women's offered wage, we find lower relative employment of women in more sexist markets is concentrated among women who would have worked few hours in sexisms absence. Finally, we show that the patterns described for male sexism . . .

Racial and ethnic inequality has manifested itself in wealth ownership and accessto quality housing. Home ownership is considered a good basis on which to build equity. Whereasproperty values and their appreciation have been analyzed in those inner city neighborhoods thathave high proportions of racially and ethnically underrepresented groups, not much systematicresearch has been undertaken on these issues in homogeneous versus mixed-race suburbs. Byanalyzing census tracts within select counties across the United States with weighted least squares(WLS) regressions, this article investigates differences among suburban census tracts in termsof several factors, including property values and their appreciation rates and factors, that haveinfluenced property values. Based on the results, it is concluded that the assumption that homeownership in the suburbs leads to the building of housing wealth needs to be differentiated.

This paper constructs new life tables for the American Indian population in the late nineteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thus pushing back the availability of age-specific mortality and life expectancy estimates nearly half a century. Because of the lack of reliable vital registration data for the American Indian population in this period, the life tables are constructed using indirect census-based estimation methods. Infant and child mortality rates are estimated from the number of children ever born and children surviving reported by women in the 1900 and 1910 Indian censuses. Adult mortality rates are inferred from the infant and child mortality estimates using model life tables. Adult mortality rates are also estimated by applying the Preston-Bennett two-census method (1983) to the 1900-1910 intercensal period.

The share of female teachers in the U.S. with an MA more than doubled between 1970and 2000. This increase is puzzling, as it is much larger than that of other college-educatedwomen, and it occurred over a period of declining teacher aptitude. I estimate the contributionof changes in teacher demographic characteristics, increases in the returns to an MA,and changes in teacher certification requirements to increases in teacher MA attainmentrates. I find that the majority of the rise in attainment not attributable to secular trends andincreases in the average age of teachers can be explained by increases in the returns to anMA among teachers. The increase in MA returns among teachers presents a second puzzle,as there is little evidence that masters degrees increase teacher productivity.

This paper contributes to a large literature concerned with identifying the source of the widening wage gap between high school and college graduates by providing a comprehensive, multidimensional decomposition of wages across both time and educational status. Data from a multitude of sources are brought to bear on the question of the relative importance of labor market supply and demand factors in the determination of those wage differences. The results confirm the importance of investments in and use of technology, which has been the focus of most of the previous literature, but are also able to show that demand and supply factors played very different roles in the growing wage gaps of the 1980s and 1990s.

Urban labour market segmentation along the lines of ethnicity/race has drawn considerableattention with the huge influx of immigration in the United States. Using data from the US 2000Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), this study employs a multilevel approach (1) to comparejob earnings of non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic and Asian workers in their respectiveconcentrated and non-concentrated sectors and (2) to examine how metropolitan characteristicsinfluence these earnings. The findings show that engaging in ethnic niche labour market sectors isthe main source of earning inequalities among different ethnic groups. Structural conditionsincluding ethnic composition, growth of immigration, racial residential segregation, economicstructure and macroeconomic conditions vary across regional labour markets at the metropolitanarea level and significantly affect job earnings between niche and non-niche sectors across racial/ethnic groups.

Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America explores the factors that may lead to greater success in ethnic preservation. Pyong Gap Min compares Indian Americans and Korean Americans, two of the most significant ethnic groups in New York, and examines the different ways in which they preserve their ethnicity through their faith. Does someone feel more "Indian" because they practice Hinduism? Does membership in a Korean Protestant church aid in maintaining ties to Korean culture?Pushing beyond sociological research on religion and ethnicity which has tended to focus on whites or on a single immigrant group or on a single generation, Min also takes actual religious practice and theology seriously, rather than gauging religiosity based primarily on belonging to a congregation. Fascinating and provocative voices of informants from two generations combine with telephone survey data to help readers understand overall patterns of religious practices for each group under consideration.Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in Americans remarkable in its scope, its theoretical significance, and its methodological sophistication.

This dissertation makes a contribution to regional studies by constructing Multi-FactorProductivity (MFP) growth measures at the state level for the US. The first essay of thedissertation exploits a dual growth accounting technique to calculate sector-specific MFPgrowth for all US states from 1980 onwards. In the process, the essay contributes by constructinga data set on the state level real user cost of capital paying particular attentionto inter-state variations in the composition of output, relative prices of investment goods,effective corporate taxes, and inflation rates for the manufacturing and service sectors. Someof the key implications of our analysis are: a) The contribution of MFP growth in drivinglabor productivity is higher in the manufacturing sector compared to the service sector; b)The source of divergence between the primal and dual measures of MFP growth originatesfrom inconsistencies between the constructed real user cost and the implied real user costof Bureau of Economic Analysis; c) The real user cost for the service sector demonstratesnegative growth rate resulting from a rapid decline in the relative price ratio of investmentgoods providing support for Investment Specific Technological Change and also implyinghigh rates of capital accumulation; d) The average growth in the real user cost of capital isnon-zero and shows wide variability across states for both the sectors.The primary focus of the second essay is to capture the positive impacts of schoolingand Research and Development (R&D) expenditure on MFP growth for US states. Whilethe evidence for positive externalities from schooling has been disappointing in the regionalliterature, the evidence of externalities from R&D is seldom found at the state level in US.The essay argues that a state with higher level of education not only creates better ideas, butalso is more favorable to adopt, implement and execute the newly available ideas and hence,to absorb the knowledge spillovers. Further, it is argued that the states with favorable R&Dpolicies attract more efficient firms and hence, experience higher MFP growth. To achievethis, the essay extends the dual accounting exercise to construct MFP growth measuresfor the non-farm, non-mining, private sector for all US states and successfully establishesthe superiority of the dual measures. The empirical exercise documents significant positiveexternalities from schooling and R&D only after controlling the catch-up effect where poorstates converge towards the rich states and attributes an important role to schooling andR&D in speeding up this process.

This report analyzes changes among the current top five Latino national groups over the period between 1990 and 2008 in New York City Community District 4 of the borough of the Bronx, which comprises the neighborhoods of High Bridge, Concourse, and Mount Eden. A profile of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics including population distribution, age, homeownership, income, educational attainment, employment, and citizenship is provided. These characteristics are compared, whenever appropriate, with those of the other major racial/ethnic components of the Bronx population - non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, and Asians. The term Latino and Hispanic will be used interchangeably throughout this report.

Using Singer's typology of different types of immigration gateways, this study mainly addresses how metropolitan area conditions impact ethnic labor force entrepreneurial choices across ethnicity and gender, within the contexts of different types of immigration gateways. Employing the 5 percent 2000 Integrated Public Usable Microdata Samples and a multilevel regression strategy, this study demonstrates that different types of immigration gateways have distinctive impacts on ethnic entrepreneurship. After controlling for both personal- and metropolitan-level characteristics, it is found that whites and blacks are more likely to own businesses in newer immigration gateways, while Hispanics and Asians are more likely to do so in the more established gateways. In addition, differences as to the interaction effects of gender and regional labor markets are the most significant for blacks and Asians. Such interaction effects reshape gender differences in business ownership across ethnic groups.

Population researchers are increasingly giving attention to how geographic information systems (GIS)‐based analytical techniques can answer questions about the spatial aspects of demographic processes. This broader turn toward spatial demography, however, has occurred concurrently with concerns within population geography about the sub‐discipline’s position within human geography as it turns toward critical social theory. These developments create distinct tensions for population geographers who seek to engage with the growing interest in GIS and spatial analysis outside of geography, and remain relevant within an increasingly theoretical human geography. This article evaluates the challenges in incorporating insights from critical social theory into spatial demographic research, with attention to issues such as the social construction of space and scale and the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). The article then assesses the potential of qualitative GIS as a methodological resolution to these challenges, and considers the prospects for theoretically informed spatial demographic research in population geography.

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphologic feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these points, while some falls provided water power during early industrialization. These factors attracted commerce and manufacturing. Although these original advantages have long since been made obsolete, we document the continuingand even increasingimportance of these portage sites over time. We interpret this finding in a model with path dependence arising from local increasing returns to scale.

This thesis studies the economics of local labor markets. There are three chapters in the thesis, and each chapter studies how economic outcomes are affected by local labor market conditions. The first chapter studies the incidence of local labor demand shocks. This chapter starts from the observation that low-skill workers are comparatively immobile. When labor demand slumps in a city, college-educated workers tend to relocate whereas non college workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. A standard explanation of these facts is that mobility is more costly for low-skill workers. This chapter proposes and tests an alternative explanation, which is that the incidence of adverse shocks is borne in large part by (falling) real estate rental prices and (rising) social transfers. These factors reduce the real cost of living differentially for low-income workers and thus compensate them, in part or in full, for declining labor demand. I develop a spatial equilibrium model which, appropriately parameterized, identifies both the magnitude of unobserved mobility costs by skill and the shape of the local housing supply curve. Nonlinear reduced form estimates using U.S. Census data document that positive labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, that this asymmetry is larger for lows kill workers, and that such an asymmetry is absent for wages, housing values, and rental prices. Estimates of the full model using a nonlinear, simultaneous equations GMM estimator suggest that (1) the asymmetric population response is primarily accounted for by an asymmetric housing supply curve, (2) the differential migration response by skill is primarily accounted for by transfer payments, and (3) estimated mobility costs are at most modest and are comparable for high-skill and low-skill workers, suggesting that the primary explanation for the comparative immobility of low-skilled workers is not higher mobility costs per se, but rather a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks. The second chapter, written jointly with Daron Acemoglu and Amy Finkelstein, studies how local area health spending responds to permanent changes in local area income. This chapter is motivated by the fact that health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century, and a common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. This strategy enables us to capture both the partial equilibrium and the local general equilibrium effects of an increase in income on health expenditures. Our central estimate is an income elasticity of 0.7, with an elasticity of 1.1 as the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval. Point estimates from alternative specifications fall on both sides of our central estimate, but are almost always less than 1. We also present evidence suggesting that there are unlikely to be substantial national or global general equilibrium effects of rising income on health spending, for example through induced innovation. Our overall reading of the evidence is that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health share of GDP. The third chapter, written jointly with Kory Kroft, studies theoretically and empirically how optimal Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits vary with local labor market conditions. Theoretically, we derive the relationship between the moral hazard cost of UI and the unemployment rate in a standard search model. The model motivates our empirical strategy which tests whether the effect of UI benefits on unemployment durations varies with the local unemployment rate. In our preferred specification, a one standard deviation increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the magnitude of the duration elasticity by 32%. Using this estimate to calibrate the optimal level of UI benefits, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 6.4 percentage point increase in the optimal replacement rate.

BACKGROUND Asians and Hispanics have the highest incidence rates of liver cancer in the United States, but little is known about how incidence patterns in these largely immigrant populations vary by nativity, acculturation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Such variations can identify high-priority subgroups for prevention and monitoring. METHODS Incidence rates and rate ratios (IRR) by nativity among 5,400 Hispanics and 5,809 Asians diagnosed with liver cancer in 1988-2004 were calculated in the California Cancer Registry. Neighborhood ethnic enclave status and SES were classified using 2000 U.S. Census data for cases diagnosed in 1998-2002. RESULTS Foreign-born Hispanic males had significantly lower liver cancer incidence rates than U.S.-born Hispanic males in 1988-2004 (e.g., IRR = 0.54, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.50-0.59 in 1997-2004), whereas foreign-born Hispanic females had significantly higher rates in 1988-1996 (IRR = 1.42, 95% CI = 1.18-1.71), but not 1997-2004. Foreign-born Asian males and females had up to 5-fold higher rates than the U.S.-born. Among Hispanic females, incidence rates were elevated by 21% in higher-enclave versus lower-enclave neighborhoods, and by 24% in lower- versus higher-SES neighborhoods. Among Asian males, incidence rates were elevated by 23% in higher-enclave neighborhoods and by 21% in lower-SES neighborhoods. In both racial/ethnic populations, males and females in higher-enclave, lower-SES neighborhoods had higher incidence rates. CONCLUSIONS Nativity, residential enclave status, and neighborhood SES characterize Hispanics and Asians with significantly unequal incidence rates of liver cancer, implicating behavioral or environmental risk factors and revealing opportunities for prevention. IMPACT Liver cancer control efforts should especially target foreign-born Asians, U.S.-born Hispanic men, and residents of lower-SES ethnic enclaves.

In the early 1990s, several states significantly compressed premiums in their private insurance markets, generating within-market transfers from the healthy to the sick. Private coverage in these markets fell 7-11 percentage points more than in comparable markets during subsequent years, but had recovered by the early 2000s. The recoveries were coincident with substantial public insurance expansions (for unhealthy adults, pregnant women, and children) and were largest in the markets where public coverage of unhealthy adults expanded the most. I show why, absent substantial public coverage of the sick, strict premium regulations significantly distort insurance markets in which purchases are voluntary.