For the past two years, UC Berkeley's Library Data Lab has played a key instructional rolefor a large enrollment undergraduate Economic Demography course. In addition toproviding assistance to students in locating and evaluating data sets for their term projects,the Lab provides training and support in the use of SDA, a web-based data analysisapplication freely available on a growing number of data archive websites. This paper willfocus on the rationale for using SDA, particularly how it helps us achieve certain dataliteracy goals, and offer practical advice to those interested in pursuing this type ofinstruction at their own institutions.

Since 1986 the United States has made considerable efforts to curb illegal immigration. This has resulted in an increase in migration costs for undocumented immigrants. More stringent border enforcement either deters potential illegal immigrants from coming to the U.S., or moves the point of crossing for illegal immigrants from traditional crossing routes to more inhospitable routes. These changes are likely to place a heavier burden on illegal immigrant women as they are more likely to be kidnapped, smuggled, or raped when crossing illegally. If migration costs are not the same for all migrants, higher migrating costs may result in a change in the number and in the composition of immigrants to the United States. In the face of higher migration costs, only immigrants with relatively high expected benefits of migration will choose to migrate. Based on our theoretical model, we test for three empirical results that are associated with a stronger selection of immigrant women from Mexico relative to men as a result of higher migration costs: 1) A decrease in the relative flow of older and highly educated undocumented immigrant women relative to men; 2) A change in the skill composition of immigrant women to men; and 3) An increase in the average earnings of those groups most affected by increased migration costs. Using data from the 1990, 2000 Decennial Census, and from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey we empirically confirm these predictions.

This dissertation examines the environmental, social and economic consequences of federal flood control and agricultural policy in the Yazoo Delta, that portion of the Mississippi alluvial valley located in the state of Mississippi. It traces the history and development of the regional economy and explores its implications for economic and social justice and environmental restoration, using an approach that integrates political economy, natural resource analysis, and public policy. It contributes to several current geographic debates. First, this work brings renewed attention to the states role in regulating agricultural production by suggesting that federal policy and practices have played important roles in determining not only what crops are planted, which plots of land they are planted on and how they will be cultivated (industrialization), but also in selecting who would farm. Second, this work addresses recent scholarship on neoliberalism and the environment. In contrast to scholarship that highlights the transformative effect of neoliberalization, this research documents a more nuanced and unpredictable dynamic. On the one hand, this work suggests that programs designed to transform nature, like the civil works program of the Army Corps of Engineers, may be less affected by neoliberal practices than those designed to regulate nature. On the other hand, this dissertation examines how and under what circumstances environmentalists deploy neoliberal rhetoric to advance their goals of creating more Dpublic goods, like improved water quality and expanded wildlife habitat, whereas farmers use rhetoric associated with state-led regulation to argue that an entitlement approach will make them more globally competitive. Finally, this work contributes to the literature on thevenvironment and justice by examining the ramification of the political success of environmental justice movement. Specifically, this research details how advocates of flood control policies that would primarily benefit wealthy landowners have mobilized discourses of racial equality to suggest that federal funds should be used to support flood control rather than other measures that might more directly address racial and economic inequality.

This report focuses attention on the benefits of exporting and highlights the existing and emerging strengthsand some weaknessesof the Intermountain Wests large metropolitan areas in global trade.

The analysis of the wage differential between Asian Americans and whites indicates that discrimination against Asians (except Japanese) is still substantial in the U.S. labour market. However, the second-generation Asians have, by large, achieved income parity with comparable whites.

This paper investigates how the geographic distribution of human capital evolves over time. With U.S. data, I decompose generation-to-generation changes in local human capital into three factors: the previous generation's human capital, intergenerational transmission of skills from parents to their children, and migration of the children. I find evidence of regression to the mean of local skills at the state level and divergence at the commuting zone level. Labor market size, climate, local colleges, and taxes affect local skill measures. Skills move from urban to rural labor markets through intergenerational transmission but from rural to urban labor markets through migration. JEL Codes: R23, J61, J11

Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, there are far fewer women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages, our computations yield some striking new findings: (1) the vast majority of missing women in India and a significant proportion of those in China are of adult age; (2) as a proportion of the total female population, the number of missing women is largest in sub-Saharan Africa, and the absolute numbers are comparable to those for India and China; (3) almost all the missing women stem from disease-by-disease comparisons and not from the changing composition of disease, as described by the epidemiological transition. Finally, using historical data, we argue that a comparable proportion of women was missing at the start of the 20th century in the United States, just as they are in India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa today.

We use panel data from El Salvador to investigate migration and the intra-householdallocation of labor as a strategy for coping with uninsured risk. Consistent with a model of afarm household with a binding subsistence constraint, we show that adverse agriculturalproductivity shocks increased both male migration to the US and the supply of maleagricultural labor within the household in El Salvador. In contrast, after damage sustainedfrom the 2001 earthquakes, female migration from El Salvador declined. This is consistentwith the earthquakes increasing the demand for home production. Overall, householdresponses to uninsured risk appear to be consistent with a simple framework in whichhousehold members are allocated to sectors according to their comparative advantage.Finally, we show no evidence that the labor market in El Salvador is capable of helping ruralSalvadoran households to buffer the effects of adverse shocks.

This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on US technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and patenting by inventors with Indian and Chinese names in cities and firms dependent upon the program relative to their peers. Most specifications find limited effects for native SE employment or patenting. We are able to rule out displacement effects, and small crowding-in effects may exist. Total SE employment and invention increases with higher admissions primarily through direct contributions of immigrants.

This paper measures the role of quality-adjusted years of schooling in accounting for cross-country output per worker differences. While data on years of schooling are readily available, data on education quality are not. I use the returns to schooling of foreign-educated immigrants in the United States to measure the education quality of their birth country. Immigrants from developed countries earn higher returns than do immigrants from developing countries. I show how to incorporate this measure of education quality into an otherwise standard development accounting exercise. The main result is that cross-country differences in education quality are roughly as important as cross-country differences in years of schooling in accounting for output per worker differences, raising the total contribution of education from 10% to 20%of output per worker differences.

Using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Census, I find little support for the opt-out revolution – highly educated women, relative to their less educated counterparts, are exiting the labor force to care for their families at higher rates today than in earlier time periods – if one focuses solely on the decision to work a positive number of hours irrespective of marital status or race. If one, however, focuses on both the decision to work a positive number of hours as well as the decision to adjust annual hours of work (conditional on working), I find some evidence of the opt-out revolution, particularly among white college educated married women in male dominated occupations.

This paper empirically studies the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, usingdata for more than 100 US occupations over the period 19972006. A model of firm behaviour basedon separability allows derivation of the labour demand elasticity with respect to service offshoring foreach occupation. Estimation is performed with quasi-maximum likelihood, to account for high degreesof censoring in the employment variable. The estimated elasticities are then related to proxies for theskill level and the degree of tradability of the occupations. Results suggest that service offshoringis skill-biased, because it increases employment in more skilled occupations relative to less skilledoccupations. At a given skill level, however, service offshoring penalizes tradable occupations relativeto non-tradable occupations.

Markusen A. Organizational complexity in the regional cultural economy, Regional Studies. Cultural industries offer a truncated understanding of the regional cultural economy, undercounting self-employed workers and others outside the for-profit sector. Commercial, public, non-profit, and unincorporated community sectors produce, present, train, organize, guide, and regulate elements of the cultural economy, each with distinctive structures, goals, and operational systems. Using survey and Census data on artists for two large California regions, inter-relationships among the sectors are explored. The size of the cultural economies of both regions would be underestimated if confined to for-profit cultural industries. In closing, policy implications for regional policy-makers are drawn out and avenues for further research are suggested.

Preliminary considerations and an initial proposal are made for the harmonisation of different statistical disclosure limitation procedures at European level. Here we present the case of microdata file but the same approach could be successfully applied to other types of releases as well. The proposal is based on two pillars: in the methodological part, contrary to the proposal of Pérez-Duarte (2009), the harmonisation concept is defined by means of a set of minimal requirements on both the input and the output of the anonymisation process. In the organisational part, the burden is shared among actors in the European Statistical System. A proposal for a possible implementation of both the methodological and procedural/organisational framework is sketched. Issues related to the release of multiple files from the same survey i.e. from the same original dataset, are sketched. The release of multiple files is a new feature at European level stemming from the introduction of the public use file (PUF) concept in the new regulation on European statistics. This implies that for the same survey both a public use file and a microdata file for scientific purposes might be available: care must be taken in designing such files in order to avoid incoherence. Finally, the problem of the impact on the coherence of an anonymisation procedure of the release of a system of surveys is briefly explored.

Wage policy can be broadly defined as a set of institutions designed to bolster the wages of workers, especially for those workers who lack negotiating power. This book concentrates on the relationship between wage policy and the distribution of income and the maintenance of a sustainable democracy. Whereas economists have looked at this issue in relation to labour markets, this book aims to reset the balance by focusing on issues such as equality and democratic theory. This book makes an important contribution to the literature of public policy, political philosophy and political economy. Levin-Waldman argues that wage policy is an important component in the maintenance of democratic society and that a reduction in income inequality can have a positive effect both on personal autonomy and empowerment.

This paper measures how much of the gender wage gap over the life cycle is due to the fact that working hours are lower for women than for men. We build a quantitative theory of fertility, labor supply, and human capital accumulation decisions to measure gender differences in human capital investments over the life cycle. We assume that there are no gender differences in the human capital technology and calibrate this technology using wage-age profiles of men. The calibration of females assumes that children involve a forced reduction in hours of work that falls on females rather than on males and that there is an exogenous gender gap in hours of work. We find that our theory accounts for all of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle in the NLSY79 data. The impact of children on the labor supply of females accounts for 56% and 45% of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle among non-college and college individuals, while the rest is due to exogenous gender differences in hours of work. We also find that children play an important role in understanding the variation of the gender wage gap across recent cohorts of women and the slower wage growth faced by black women relative to non-black women in the U.S. economy.

Research has found that season of birth is associated with later health and professional outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. In this paper we consider a new explanation: that children born at different times in the year are conceived by women with different socioeconomic characteristics. We document large seasonal changes in the characteristics of women giving birth throughout the year in the United States. Children born in the winter are disproportionally born to women who are more likely to be teenagers and less likely to be married or have a high school degree. We show that controls for family background characteristics can explain up to half of the relationship between season of birth and adult outcomes. We then discuss the implications of this result for using season of birth as an instrumental variable; our findings suggest that, though popular, season-of-birth instruments may produce inconsistent estimates. Finally, we find that some of the seasonality in maternal characteristics is due to summer weather differentially affecting fertility patterns across socioeconomic groups.

Childhood health can have a signi cant impact on both the amount of schooling a childreceives and the bene ts from that schooling. As a consequence, a negative shock to childhoodhealth can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual, through not justlingering impacts on physical human capital but also the impacts on human capital acquiredthrough formal schooling. This paper traces the evolution of childhood health and educationalattainment through the rst decades of the twentieth century in the United States and quanti esthe relationship between childhood health, proxied by adult height, and educational attainmentover time and across cities. A new dataset of brothers serving in World War II is constructedand used to demonstrate that this correlation is present within families, with taller brothersreceiving signi cantly more education on average than their shorter siblings. The results suggestthat childhood health strongly inuenced educational attainment in the early twentieth century even after controlling for household and environmental characteristics.

Urban analysis in the United States traditionally characterized central cities as ports of entry for new immigrants. Yet, increasingly, immigrants to Americanmetropolitan areas settle in towns and communities that may be many miles from the most proximate central city. This is certainly true of the Chicago metropolitan areas Latinopopulation, whose numerical majority now resides, not in the city of Chicago, but in adjoining Cook County and the six collar counties beyond Cook, a demographic shiftwith major implications for regional policy making. After a brief historical overview, this white paper addresses an emergent regionalist philosophy and associated policy recommendations that have been advanced by leading Chicago-area civic organizations in recent years. The paper goes on to examine demographic, economic, and political indicators that provide a context for interpreting thecontemporary situation of the Latino population in the Chicago metropolitan area. As the Latino presence in the area continues to grow, forward-thinking civic leaders have begun to reconceptualize how metropolitan growth in general can be both promoted and more effectively directed. Chicagos contemporary regionalists typically propose policyinnovations involving multiple governments or public sectorprivate sector collaboration. These initiatives seek to improve the overall economic competitiveness of the Chicago region while reducing local disparities in the quality of public services, enhancing the convenience and sustainability of development patterns, and providing better occupational and residential opportunities for all Chicagoans.Advocates of neo-regionalism recognize that Chicagos Latino population, while currently disadvantaged in some significant respects, represents great economic and civicpotential, which must not be squandered if the region as a whole is to prosper. The paper concludes by proposing future lines of inquiry that will assist policymakers by monitoring Latinos progress in the region.

In this paper, we study the impact of business cycle on the fertility rates in the UnitedStates. More specifically, we explore the relationship between whites and blacks, and investigatewhether the effects of business cycle differ across race groups. Our findings show pro-cyclicalresponses of fertility decisions. In other words, higher birth rates associate with economic boomsand lower birth rates associate with economic downturns. In addition, we find that on average,whites exhibit higher pro-cyclical responses than blacks.