We build on prior research on the motherhood wage penalty and consider the longer term impact of childbearing on women‘s careers. We utilize all 35 years of the NLS-YW panel to model patterns of labor force participation, wages and occupational status, across the adult life course as women age from their twenties to their fifties. We find that the motherhood penalty to women‘s careers is strongest when women are in their peak childbearing ages, but declines significantly thereafter. By the time they reach their fifties, mothers and childless women are almost equally likely to be employed; however employed childless women continue to earn significantly higher wages and work in higher status occupations than high parity mothers (but not mothers of only 1 or 2 children).

This paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market. Variation in marriage-market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts: the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race, location, and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics. Using a variety of estimation strategies, including difference and fixed effects models and TSLS models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within-marriage market changes in incarceration, we find evidence that is, on the whole, consistent with the implications of the standard marriage-market model. In particular, higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry, modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry, and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men. The evidence suggests that women in affected markets have increased their schooling and labor supply in response to these changes.

The causal machinery underlying sex determination is directly relevant to many questions relating gender and family composition to social and economic outcomes. In recent work, Oster highlighted a correlation between parental hepatitis B carrier status and sex of the child. One of her analyses went further, speaking directly to causality. That analysis appeared to have answered an important question that had remained unresolved in medical and biological literaturesnamely, does chronic infection with hepatitis B cause male-skewed sex ratios at birth? Osters creative empirical analysis appeared to suggest that it does; however, in this article I reassess the result and present evidence that, at the very least, the question remains open. Further investigation into questions around the causal machinery of sex determination is warranted in the social science literature, as well as in that of biology and medicine. However, my results suggest that it is extremely unlikely that chronic hepatitis B infection plays a biologically significant role.

In attempting to explain state support of public higher education, this study develops a theory-driven, comprehensive conceptualization of the state political system within a larger theoretical framework that consists of state economic and demographic factors and higher education system attributes. Furthermore, although the higher education policy and finance literature has largely ignored the impact of interest groups on state policy and state support of higher education, they play a central role in the model presented here. The inclusion of politics in the explanatory model results in a more robust and pragmatically useful model.

While Income inequality among college graduates is well documented, inequality in occupational status remains largely unexplored. We examine whether and how occupational specificity of college majors is related to college graduates' transition into the labor market and their subsequent occupational trajectories. Analyses of NLSY79 indicate that occupationally specific degrees are beneficial at the point of entry into the labor market but have the lowest growth in occupational status over time. Students earning credentials focusing on general skills, in contrast, begin in jobs with low occupational status but subsequently report the greatest growth. These findings illuminate specific ways in which educational and occupational systems interact and provide a novel approach for understanding inequality in labor market outcomes among college graduates.

Public transfer programs in industrial countries are thought to benefit the elderly through pension and health care programs at the expense of the young and future generations. This intergenerational picture changes, however, if public education is also considered as a transfer program. We calculate the net present value at birth of benefits received minus taxes paid for US generations born 1850 to 2090. Surprisingly, all generations 1950 to 2050 are net gainers, while many current elderly are net losers. Windfall gains from starting Social Security and Medicare partially offset windfall losses from starting public education, roughly consistent with the arguments of Becker and Murphy.

This chapter seeks to set out what Economists have learned about the effects of early childhood influences on later life outcomes, and about ameliorating the effects of negative influences. We begin with a brief overview of the theory which illustrates that evidence of a causal relationship between a shock in early childhood and a future outcome says little about whether the relationship in question biological or immutable. We then survey recent work which shows that events before five years old can have large long term impacts on adult outcomes. Child and family characteristics measured at school entry do as much to explain future outcomes as factors that labor economists have more traditionally focused on, such as years of education. Yet while children can be permanently damaged at this age, an important message is that the damage can often be remediated. We provide a brief overview of evidence regarding the effectiveness of different types of policies to provide remediation. We conclude with a list of some of (the many) outstanding questions for future research.

But the vision of "forty acres and a mule" - the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen - was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. -W.E.B. DuBois1 In January of 1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman authorized freed slaves to establish forty acre farms along parts of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.2 He later provisioned them with broken down military mules. Although rumors of "forty acres and a mule" quickly spread among the South' s newly emancipated slaves, Sherman's order was soon revoked, and the land was largely restored to its Confederate owners.3 Both Reconstruction era policymakers and modern scholars have argued that the large and persistent gap between black and white income and wealth could have been reduced or eliminated if each freed slave family had been allocated "forty acres and a mule" following the Civil War. Other scholars, however, have questioned this conventional wisdom that land alone would have altered the economic conditions of former slaves.4 No previous quantitative investigation of these competing claims exists, primarily because researchers have thought there was little variation in policy toward freed slaves. Without a group of former slaves who were treated with access to free land, the . . .

Entrepreneurial activity diers substantially across countries. Whilecultural dierences have often been proposed as an explanation, mea-suring a country's cultural characteristics suers from various problems.In this paper, we test the hypothesis that cultural factors inuence en-trepreneurial behavior by looking at dierences in self-employment ratesbetween immigrant groups within the same market. Such an approachallows holding constant factors such as the institutional and economic en-vironment. Using U.S. census data for the year 2000, we nd signicantdierences in the propensity to become self-employed across immigrantswhich is in line with previous ndings. However, previous studies couldnot relate self-employment rates in the U.S. to self-employment shares inthe immigrants' home-countries which rejects cultural explanations. Weimprove over the existing literature by rst using a more reasonable proxyfor self-employment shares. Second, we additionally account for determi-nants of self-employment in the immigrants' home countries. Both of thesemodications reverse the inuence of home-country determinants com-pared with previous ndings. Once we apply our modications, we ndevidence of a signicantly positive relationship between self-employmentrates of immigrants in the U.S. and entrepreneurial activity in their re-spective countries of origin. Our ndings suggest that we cannot rejectculture as a major determinant of entrepreneurial activity.

We use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to investigate racial differences in the amount of time individuals spend traveling to, waiting for, and receiving outpatient healthcare services on a randomly selected survey interview day. Of the 60,674 participants in the 2003–2006 waves of the ATUS, 2.67% (n ¼ 1,621) reported a clinical encounter on their designated day; this proportion did not differ significantly by race. Among those reporting a clinical encounter, blacks reported spending 30 more minutes than whites in receiving services, and this race gap persisted net of socioeconomic, health, and geographic factors. Hispanics also reported significantly longer visits than whites; yet, this difference . . .

Liebler and Zacher examine the relationship between a mixed-heritage persons answer to the census race and ancestry questions on the one hand, and characteristics of their local area on the other. Employing what C. Wright Mills (1959) called a sociological imagination they explore how certain historical factors have contributed to the personal biographies of mixed-heritage people in the United States. They use publicly available census and ACS microdata and multinomial logistic regression to predict the race/ancestry response of people with mixed white-American Indian heritage and of people with mixed black-American Indian heritage. They have found that measures of the history of the area are powerful predictors of the ways in which people report their multiracial heritage, as are measures of the contemporary racial context of the area. These results highlight the previously under-recognized relationship between a persons own racial identity and the history of the area in which they live.

American Community Survey (ACS) data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on September 28, 2010, reveal the impact of the recession on children, particularly young children under the age of 6. For many young children, the likelihood of living in poverty increased significantly since 2007 and 2008. Also striking is the very high rate of young child poverty experienced by those in the rural South: more than three out of ten young children in the rural southern United States are poor, and the poverty rate increased by over two percentage points to 33.3 percent for these children. Nearly 29 percent of young children in rural America . . .

In his rent gap theory, Neil Smith argues that development is most likely to occurin areas where the capitalized land rents differ substantially from the potential ground rents thatcould be obtained if the land were converted to its highest and best use. At the metropolitanscale, the rent gap appears in the form of abberations vis--vis the monotonically decreasingrent gradients of the classic monocentric city. This study utilizes public use microdata sample(PUMS) data for 1990, 2000, and 2006 to test Smiths hypothesis that as capital flows into theseland-value valleys, the rent gradient shifts upward and outward, displacing the land-value valleyfarther from the CBD. It is concluded that from 1990 to 2006 there were two visible land-valuevalleys, and, consistent with Smiths hypothesis, as the first valley closed the second expanded.

Subfamilies--family units residing in someone else's household--are an importantsubject of research, but they have proved difficult to measure. This research documents trends inand dynamics of the Census Bureau's identification of subfamilies by comparing them to highlyrefined and temporally consistent subfamily measures newly available in the Integrated PublicUse Microdata Series (IPUMS). I show that the Census Bureau's measurement of subfamiliesleads to highly unlikely interpretations of family interrelationships and that these apparent errorshave grown worse over time, affecting even the most recent American Community Survey data.Furthermore, errors are particularly high among young adults, nonwhites, and persons without ahigh school diploma--precisely those populations that subfamily researchers are most interestedin. Researchers may wish to consider avoiding the U.S. Census Bureau's subfamily measures infavor of the IPUMS subfamily measures.

This paper develops practical methods for relaxing the missing at random assumption when estimating models of conditional quantiles with missing outcome data and discrete covariates. We restrict the degree of non-ignorable selection governing the missingness process by imposing bounds on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) distance between the distribution of outcomes among missing observations and the overall (unselected) distribution. Two methods are developed for conducting inference in this environment. The first allows us to perform finite sample inference on the identified set and is well suited to tests of model specification. The second enables us to conduct inference on the parameters of potentially misspecified models. To illustrate our techniques, we revisit the results of Angrist, Chernozhukov, and Fernández-Val (2006) regarding changes across Decennial Censuses in the quantile specific returns to schooling.

This dissertation consists of three essays that study the dynamic relationship between immigration and wages in the United States, the impact of legalization on the economic status of the newly legalized immigrants, and boy-girl discrimination in India. The first essay, “The Dynamics of Immigration and Wages” presents a new approach to the analysis of the relationship between immigration and wages based on a panel vector autoregression (VAR) analysis. I develop a flexible model of the joint dynamics of wages, foreign immigration, and internal migration, allowing for capital mobility. I then implement this model empirically using annual CPS data. The VAR analysis of a 26-year panel of US states shows that immigration does not have a significant effect on wages or internal migration. By contrast, wages do affect immigration. The estimated coefficients imply that a 10 percent increase in wages causes up to a 20 percent increase in the rate of immigrant inflow after 3 years. These estimates hide significant heterogeneity: the effect is strongest for low-skill immigrants while it is small and insignificant for high-skill immigrants. My results suggest that the concerns about immigration lowering native workers’ wages are misplaced. I find no evidence that the influx of immigrants decreases wages, neither for the economy as a whole nor for workers who possess the same level of skill. In the second essay, “Legalization and the Economic Status of Immigrants”, I investigate the impact of legalization on the economic outcomes of the legalized population. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) legalized immigrants who could prove continuous residence in the U.S. after 1982. The arbitrary cutoff date on the eligibility criteria causes a discontinuity in the relationship between the year of immigration and the probability of being legal. I use the IRCA natural experiment to identify the causal impacts of legalization on immigrants’ outcomes. Estimates from regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences models show that the policy had a positive and significant effect on the probability that an immigrant is a naturalized citizen. Legalization is also found to have a positive and significant effect on wages, a negative effect on the probability of working on a traditionally illegal occupation, and no significant effect on geographical mobility. The analysis for different demographic groups confirms such conclusions and shows that the estimated effects of legalization are larger for low-educated Latin American immigrants, the group that was disproportionably affected by the policy. The third essay, “Child Gender and Parental Investments in India: are Boys and Girls Treated Differently?”, co-authored with Leandro Carvalho and Adriana Lleras-Muney, proposes a novel identification strategy to properly identify the effects of child gender on parental investments in the presence of male-preferring stopping rules of childbearing. Using data from a time use survey we document gender differences in childcare time which have not been studied before in the context of developing countries. We find that boys receive on average 10 percent more time than girls, this difference being more than two times larger for households with only one young child. We also find suggestive evidence that the quality of childcare given to boys is higher. Moreover, we find that boys are more likely to be vaccinated, to be breastfed longer and to be given vitamin supplementation. In general we find these inputs to be about 10 percent lower for girls. However we find that the effects for anthropometric measures (which are outcomes, not investments) are equivocal, and sensitive in particular to specific standard chosen. We interpret our results as evidence that families discriminate against girls because they have a preference for sons, because the returns to these investments are higher for boys (e.g., men have higher wage rates than girls) or because families that have girls anticipate having larger families.

We investigate the relationship between inequality and public education fundingin a model of probabilistic voting where the private option is available and votingparticipation diers across income groups. A change in inequality can have oppositeeects at dierent income levels: higher inequality decreases public spending perstudent and increases enrollment in public schools in poor economies, while the op-posite holds in the rich ones. A change in the tax base can also have non-monotoniceects. These theoretical predictions, with support in U.S. school district-leveldata, reconcile previous contradictory results in the political economy literature on redistribution and inequality