We examine whether higher education is a causal determinant of geographic mobility using variation in college attainment induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War. We use national and state-level induction risk to identify both educational attainment and veteran status among cohorts of affected men observed in the 1980 Census. Our 2SLS estimates imply that the additional years of higher education significantly increased the likelihood that affected men resided outside their birth states later in life. Most estimates suggest a causal impact of higher education on migration that is larger in magnitude but not significantly different from OLS. Our large reduced-form estimates for the effect of induction risk on out-of-state migration also imply that the Vietnam War led to substantial geographic churning in the national labor market. We conclude that the causal impact of college completion on subsequent mobility is large and provide evidence on a range of mechanisms that may be responsible for the relationship between college education and mobility.

I use an instrumental-variables identification strategy and historical data from the United States to estimate the long-term economic impact of in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria. My research design matches adults in the 1960 Decennial Census to the malaria death rate in their respective state and year of birth. To address potential omitted-variables bias and measurement-error bias, I use variation in "malaria-ideal" temperatures to instrument for malaria exposure. My estimates indicate that in utero and postnatal exposure to malaria led to considerably lower levels of educational attainment and higher rates of poverty later in life.

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensateothers for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their eort. Such fairnessconsiderations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a focuson income acquisition. However, actual tax-bene?t systems are based on much more information. Weintroduce fairness in a tax-bene?t scheme that is based on several characteristics. The novelty is theintroduction of partial control. Each characteristic diers in terms of the degree of control, i.e., theextent to which it can be changed by exerting eort. Two testable predictions result. First, the tax rateon partially controllable characteristics should be lower compared to the tax rate on non-controllabletags. Second, the total eect of non-controllable characteristics on the post-tax outcome should beequal to zero. We estimate implicit tax rates for dierent characteristics in 26 European countries(using EU-SILC data) and the US (using CPS data). We ?nd a robust tendency in all countries tocompensate more for the uncontrollable composite characteristic (based on sex, age and disabilityin our study) compared to the partially controllable one (based on family composition, immigrationstatus, unemployment and education level). We also estimate the degree of fairness of tax-bene?tschemes in dierent countries. Only the Continental countries France and Luxembourg pass the fairness test, whereas the Baltic and Anglo-Saxon countries (including the US) perform worst.

Women across the United States continue to feel the effects of the recession that began at the end of 2007. For women who live at or below the poverty line 1-especially women with dependents, and without personal savings, work benefits, or family supports-the hardships of the recession could be lessened through greater access to assistance through TANF, food stamps, and publicly provided health insurance. IWPR analysis of American Community Survey (ACS) data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that 15.5 million women live in poverty. 2 The data also show that the number of women who receive help through health coverage, nutritional support, or cash assistance is much smaller than the number of those whose income level suggests they need assistance. Although 10.6 million, slightly more than two thirds, of adult women in poverty have health insurance to help cover costs, another 4.9 million (32 percent) are not covered. For nutritional support, 5.9 million women in poverty are using food stamps, but 9.6 million (62 percent) are not. 3 Meanwhile, fewer than 750,000 poor adult women with children receive cash aid through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), while 5.4 million-a substantial majority of women in poverty with children (88 percent)-do not get that support. 4 As IWPR shows in this briefing paper, the rates of adult women in poverty during the recession who are not receiving assistance vary among different public programs and across the states and regions.

A confining limitation for the occupational sex segregation literature has been the inability to determine how many persons of one sex would have entered an occupation had the other sex not successfully entered instead. Using panel data from all American colleges of veterinary medicine (1976-1995), a fixed-effects model with lagged independent variables finds support for the concurrent effects of many hypothesized feminization mechanisms. Declining relative earnings and policies aimed at increasing production of graduates affect applications from men and women similarly, but feminization is driven by the decline in men's college graduation and their avoidance of fields dominated by women. The findings demonstrate the relative contributions and interdependence of supply and demand to occupational sex composition and the job search process more broadly.

Although it is widely believed that pre-existing social inequalities are amplified by disasters, our understanding of the roles of families and households in mediating this process is poorly understood. Because extended-family households are often formed and maintained for resourcesharing and functional assistance, their intactness is of special interest. The breakup of households from a pilot and follow-up full survey that traces the outcomes respectively 1 and 4 years on for members of a probably-sample of pre-Katrina New Orleans households is comparedto the breakup of households in a national sample over an equivalent period. Breakup of extended-family New Orleans households following Katrina was more than two times higherthan for the national sample after one year. Its impact was amplified by the 50 percent higher prevalence of extended-family households in pre-Katrina New Orleans than nationally, and by the high concentration of poor extended-family households in New Orleans African-American population.

Using county level data from 1969-200 and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that increases in local per capita earnings and employment lowers voter turnout in gubernatorial and Senate elections but has not effect on Presidential turnout. We present a model in which risk-averse agents vote only if sufficiently informed about political candidates. When agents work more, as they do in periods of high local wages and employment, they devote less time to information acquisition, are less informed and thus vote less. This negative effect should be smaller in elections, such as that for the President, where information is so ubiquitous that reductions in political attentiveness have little effect on uncertainty. Consistent with the models predictions, we find using individual data from several waves of the American National Election Study (ANES) we find that: less informed voters, and especially political moderates, are less likely to vote; uncertainty is smaller in Presidential as opposed to other elections; and that, voters' accessing of media, political knowledge and interest in politics vary negatively with changes in employment.

In the last three decades over a million abortions are performed annually in the United States. Empirical studies such as Donohue and Levitt (2001) and Gruber, Levine and Staiger (1999) assess the impact of legalization of abortions on crime and living conditions of children. They argue that legalization of abortions provides better living conditions and human capital endowments to surviving children. This paper takes seriously the hypothesis that the improved living conditions of children due to legalized abortion will alter their labor market outcomes. The main question of the paper is what are the aggregate implications of abortions for income inequality and intergen-erational transmission of income? A model of fertility, human capital transmission, contraception and abortion decisions is built to answer this question quantitatively. JEL Classi…cations: E24, D31, J13, J17, J62.

How does the experience of living in an ethnic enclave during formative years influence the propensity to be self-employed? This study examines the intergenerational influence of exposure to self-employed, co-ethnic neighbors on the likelihood that racial or ethnic minorities will become self-employed. The paper develops a model of factors that influence self-employment likelihood, including intergenerational co-ethnic predictors, and tests them through an analysis of respondents to the 2000 U.S. Census long-form survey (i.e., IPUMS). Results show that higher levels of exposure to entrepreneurial co-ethnics in the parent's generation have a strong impact on self-employment likelihood. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.

For the 1990s, the basic neoclassical growth model predicts a depressed economy, when in fact the US economy boomed. We extend the base model by introducing intangible investment and non-neutral technology change with respect to producing intangible investment goods and find that the 1990s are not puzzling in light of this new theory. There is microeconomic and macroeconomic evidence motivating our extension, and the theory's predictions are in conformity with US national accounts and capital gains. We compare accounting measures with corresponding measures for our model economy and find that standard accounting measures greatly understate the 1990s boom.

Skill biased technological change (SBTC) has generally been regarded as an important factor driving the increasing wage inequality in the US over the past three decades. Such an explanation is consistent with the increasing residual wage inequality, the inequality in wages between observably similar workers, in the commonly used March supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS). A recent nding however, that residual inequality in the Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (MORG) supplement of the CPS has been relatively stable since the mid 1980s, is at odds with a SBTC theory of increasing wage inequality. In this paper I investigate whether the dierence in residual inequality between the March and MORG CPS samples is due to the inclusion of performance-based payments (bonuses, tips, or commissions) in wage measures of the March CPS. Using income information provided by the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) I show that including performance pay in wages leads to an increase in residual inequality that matches the discrepancy in residual inequality between the March and MORG CPS samples. Furthermore, using a matched sample constructed by combining all three samples, I nd that performance pay is positively related to the dierence in wages reported in the March and MORG CPS samples, and accounts for almost one-fth of the variation in this measure.

This thesis focuses on women entrepreneurs’ underperformance in terms of business performance, specifically addressing the question of whether the presence of children and a spouse impact self-employed men and women’s wages differently. This study investigates the female underperformance hypothesis and examines the causes for female underperformance beyond traditional economic measures and views women in the context of their family lives. The basic proposition is that marriage and children pose a different set of challenges to men and women entrepreneurs. By acknowledging the overlap of gender, family, and business we are able to observe how the institution of marriage as well as the presence of children impacts women’s self-employment wages differently from men’s. For the overall self-employed population, marriage and children both served as a positive influence on hourly wages. However, when observing the interaction of women and children as well as women and marriage on wage, both overlaps seem to have a negative impact on wage. This supports the proposition that marriage and children pose a different set of challenges to female . . .

It is standard practice in empirical work to allow for clustering in the error covariance matrix if theexplanatory variables of interest vary at a more aggregate level than the units of observation. Often,however, the structure of the error covariance matrix is more complex, with correlations varying inmagnitude within clusters, and not vanishing between clusters. Here we explore the implications ofsuch correlations for the actual and estimated precision of least squares estimators. We show thatwith equal sized clusters, if the covariate of interest is randomly assigned at the cluster level, onlyaccounting for non-zero covariances at the cluster level, and ignoring correlations between clusters,leads to valid standard errors and confidence intervals. However, in many cases this may not suffice.For example, state policies exhibit substantial spatial correlations. As a result, ignoring spatial correlationsin outcomes beyond that accounted for by the clustering at the state level, may well bias standard errors.We illustrate our findings using the 5% public use census data. Based on these results we recommendresearchers assess the extent of spatial correlations in explanatory variables beyond state level clustering,and if such correlations are present, take into account spatial correlations beyond the clustering correlationstypically accounted for.

Segregation by race, ethnicity and income is a persistent feature of US cities and communities, and ethnic enclaves have formed ever since immigration became more diverse. For low-skilled immigrants in particular, settling in an ethnic enclave may offer important opportunities and facilitate coping with the new environment. However, immigrant enclaves may also foster occupational segregation and retard assimilation, with the willingness to invest in language acquisition playing a key role. This paper expands on earlier work focusing on the linkage between spatial segregation and language acquisition. Using data from the 2000 US Census, the study stratifies immigrants by their location in one of four metropolitan areas by educational attainment and national origin in order to determine the effect of these individual characteristics on English proficiency. The probability of speaking English was found to vary across the four locales and educational attainment. Language acquisition was highest in the metropolitan area where the immigrant share is smallest, and is increasing in educational attainment.

Continental Europe has seen a smaller rise in formal female employment compared with the United States or the Nordic countries. Additionally, Continental Europe has a substantially smaller service sector. These facts coincide with job requirements shifting from physical strength to intellectual capacity. Given empirical evidence, this paper develops a model of endogenous technical change, where new 'technologies' can be invented to increase the productivity of brain-inputs. Two inputs, brain and brawn, are combined through CES production functions into services and industrial goods, with the production sector for goods requiring more brawn than brain. Households allocate time to working at home or the labor market, choose consumption of services and goods, and invest in new technologies. The key is households can produce a substitute for market services and women have, on average, less brawn than men, giving them a comparative advantage with respect to staying home and working in the service sector. Therefore, an economy that does not facilitate the movement of women into the labor market, by imposing high taxes, causes service production to remain at home. This reduces technological innovation, pushing an economy into a self-reinforcing loop, where a small service sector feeds back into low total hours worked by women (and men), further depressing the service sector.

During the 1940s, the diversion of 55% of the workforce to wartime production, the induction of over 10 million young men into the armed forces, and the entry of millions of female, young, and elderly workers into the workplace subjected the labor force to large shocks. Also during the 1940s, the wage distribution compressed sharply and the returns to education fell. This paper uses wage changes between occupations to link wartime labor market shocks to the decline in the return to education and the decline in wage inequality. Wartime production favoring semi-skilled labor and the occupation-biased nature of the draft combined to compress both the lower and upper tails of the male wage distribution and the upper portion of the female wage distribution.

A number of studies have examined whether education has a causal impact on health, with some finding a positive effect and others no significant effect. Evidence on the relationship between education and health in the Canadian context is however scarce. The first two chapters in this thesis address this gap by presenting econometric analyses of the effect of education on health using Canadian Census data. Chapter 1 uses data on changes to the compulsory schooling laws in Canada as instruments for educational attainment. Using the Canadian Census master dataset for the ten provinces, the results in Chapter 1 indicate that education does indeed have a causal impact on mortality (a robust indicator for health). Increasing pre-tertiary education by an additional year reduces the 5-year adult mortality rate by between 2% and 3.5%. These findings suggest that traditional methods of evaluating the benefits of education may in fact understate its true importance. In Chapter 2, the instrument used . . .