Past studies find that high school athletes are much less likely to experience a teenage birth. We find that this correlation depends on the additional controls included in the model. We exploit the rapid expansion of sports participation among girls created by Title IX and find that overall just the opposite is true. We find that a 10 percentage point increase in the fraction of girls playing sports in a state increases the teen birth rate by 0.3 percentage points (about a 10% increase). However, there are racial differences in the effect of sports participation. The increase in the teen birth rate is most pronounced for white young women with some suggestive evidence that sports decrease teen birth rates among black young women.

At least as much as other innovative and creative problem-solving sectors of the economy, software development takes place in an extraordinary range of different sorts of organizations thus forming a patchwork or "confederacy" of institutional forms. We suggest one explanation that may begin to account for this heterogeneity: workers have different intrinsic tastes or preferences for different institutional regimes. We present field experimental evidence to show that software workers who are sorted into either a cooperative or competitive regime, depending on their tastes, exerted on the order of double the effort than those in a group of randomly-assigned workers (controlling for their skills). These results suggest that sorting on the basis of institutional tastes and preferences to different types of organizations may have large efficiency implications. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Eric Lonstein for his assistance throughout this research project. We are grateful to

The research in this paper investigates whether state and local public employees are overpaid at the expense of taxpayers. This research is timely. Thirty-seven states are struggling with substantial budget deficits. Several governors have identified excessive public employee compensation as a major cause of their states' fiscal duress. The remedies they propose include public employee pay freezes, benefits reductions, privatization, major revisions to the rules of collective bargaining, and constitutional amendments to limit pay increases, each as a necessary antidote to the supposed public employee overpayment malady. The data analysis in this paper, however, indicate that public employees, both state and local government, are not overpaid. Comparisons controlling for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity and disability, reveal no significant overpayment but a slight undercompensation of public employees when compared to private employee compensation costs on a per hour basis. On average, full-time state and local employees are undercompensated by 3.7%, in comparison to otherwise similar private-sector workers. The public employee compensation penalty is smaller for local government employees (1.8%) than state government workers (7.6%).

Most studies of the impact of increases in womens employment on earnings inequality ignore associated declines in the amount of time women devote to unpaid work. In this paper, we link estimates of time devoted to unpaid work among partnered couples ages 25-59 from the Harmonized European Time Use Survey and the American Time Use Survey to estimates of household earnings for similar couples for whom we have microdata in the LIS database. Our results demonstrate the equalizing impact of unpaid work hours in nine countries, as well as the equalizing impact of the imputed value of unpaid work based on replacement cost estimates using national minimum wages as a lower bound and median wages for men and women as an upper bound.

Several versions of racial and ethnic triangulation among different groups in the United States are examined. Racial triangulation is a form of racial or ethnic stratificationadvanced by Kim (1999) that occurs when a least favored group is juxtaposed to a most favored group, with a third group being triangulated between the two. I argue thistriangulation can include specific ethnic groups as well. Stratification occurs when the most favored group seeks to retain an economic advantage over the others; thetriangulated relationship is established (and enforced) when public policies pit the third group against the least favored group while retaining economic dominance for thefavored group. I also examine the role of policy entrepreneurs ("PEs") in the creation of said triangulated relationships. PEs serve as active proponents of racial and ethnic policies which favor the most advantaged group; as members of this group, they have a vested interest in maintaining its economic advantage. Using a Model of Racial/Ethnic Policy I developed, I examine (a) initial racial/ethnic triangulation at Time A, (b) theactions of policy entrepreneurs in facilitating new (or maintaining existing) triangulated relationships via policy promulgation in the State of California, (c) descriptive outcomes of PE activity, (d) regimes produced as a consequence of policy promulgation and the new phenomenon, and (e) the triangulated relationship created at Time B in the wake of three phenomenon: (1) the emancipation of Native Americans in 1867 via passage of the Federal Anti-Peonage Act, (2) passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and (3)creation of the 1942 Bracero program.

This study focuses on women entrepreneurs' underperformance, specifically addressing the question of whether the presence of children and a spouse impact self-employed men and women's wages differently. 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.

Several previous empirical studies show that workers are more productive and make higher wages in cities with a large concentration of human capital. These studies attribute the higher productivity of workers in cities rich in human capital to knowledge externalities that arise when the presence of educated workers makes other workers more productive. All the work today has considered the effect of human-capital externalities on male wages only or a sample of both genders combined. In the present study, we examine the effect of human-capital externalities separately for women and men in the United States on the basis of data from the 2000 Census of Population.

Massive job losses in the United States, over eight million since the onset of the Great Recession, call for job creation measures through fiscal expansion. In this paper we analyze the job creation potential of social service-delivery sectors - early childhood development and home-based health care - as compared to other proposed alternatives in infrastructure construction and energy. Our microsimulation results suggest that investing in the care sector creates more jobs in total, at double the rate of infrastructure investment. The second finding is that these jobs are more effective in reaching disadvantaged workers - those from poor households and with lower levels of educational attainment. Job creation in these sectors can easily be rolled out. States already have mechanisms and implementation capacity in place. All that is required is policy recalibration to allow funds to be channeled into sectors that deliver jobs both more efficiently and more equitably.

A large body of recent research claims that diversity hinders general trust, but these studies suffer from omitted variables bias by excluding the institutional context of intergroup relations, specifically segregation. This article re-examines the issue by considering how the residential isolation of minorities alters general trust, prejudicial attitudes, and volunteering in cities. The results strongly suggest that both metropolitan-level integration increases social capital and trust. The results are robust to a variety of specifications. The use of historic metropolitan and state characteristics, such as experiences with slavery, improves the fit between segregation and distrust. Further evidence finds that segregation and racial homogeneity decreases inter-group trust by intensifying racial prejudice against minorities. Results also indicate that segregation limits within-group trust, or at least cooperative informal transactions measured by volunteer rates. High levels of trust have been identified as a source of good governance and economic performance; integration is likely to enhance these attributes under republican institutions, regardless of the level of diversity.

We explore whether the growing labor force attachment of married women has increased the importance of the wifes characteristics in determining the household migration decision. To the contrary, we find that surprisinglylittle changed between 1960 and 2000. Wives were a weak determinant of family migration over the entire period. Our results suggest that it is difficult to balance two careers simultaneously, with households finding it optimal to focusprimarily on the husbands career rather than settling for significantly inferior labor market outcomes for each spouse.

Comprising two independent empirical analyses, this dissertation leverages the data and methodology of the happiness research program to address issues in tort and employment discrimination. The first piece of the dissertation uses domain-specific measures of well-being – financial satisfaction and perceived relative income – to gain insight on potential differences in the way that individuals of different demographic groups assess their income. Insofar as it reflects or impacts the economic incentive structures facing workers of different demographic groups, the subjective assessment of income has far-reaching implications in a variety of civil rights contexts, where the expansion of economic opportunity among historically disadvantaged groups is a first-order goal. The results of the study indicate that different race/gender pairs do respond to income differently: for both financial satisfaction and perceived relative income, white females, black females and black males all have lower returns to personal income than do white males. White males, in other words, appear to reap more “bang for the buck” in terms of both of the outcome variables, even after a host of control variables are introduced. The results are germane to ongoing debates about claiming behavior, filing deadlines, and race/gender clustering in the employment context. The second chapter employs survey data on subjective well-being and a battery of self-assessed health measures to estimate the hedonic impact of emotional health, as decoupled from its physical counterpart. The analysis is done with an eye toward tort law, which has historically drawn a distinction between physical and emotional harms, limiting recovery on the latter through various common law doctrines. After offering a cautious defense of the use of subjective well-being as a proxy for injury in the tort context, the paper shows that a range of potentially inactionable emotional conditions, including “stand alone” emotional conditions with no concomitant physical manifestations, exert a significant negative impact on subjective wellbeing. To the extent that subjective well-being, or happiness, captures something meaningful about what it means to be “made whole” as an aggrieved tort litigant, the results of this paper suggest that the limitations on recovery for stand-alone emotional harms may be misguided.

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 6 percentage points in the college premium. We show that although a standard demand and supply framework can qualitatively account for the trend in the college and age premia over this period, substantial quantitative adjustments still need to be made to account for changes in quality.

Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates in order to comply with Title IX. This paper examines the causal implications of this expansion by using variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX to instrument for change in girls' athletic participation. Analysis of differences in outcomes across states in changes between pre- and postcohorts reveals that a 10 percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation.

The coordinators of this workshop have asked me to review available data on people in U.S. science and technology. This is a mainly a matter of demography. Sources like biographies or even novels can be useful for this work, but no examination that fails to consider simple demographic facts is likely to adequately describe the entire STEM workforce. To assess data on people in these professions ("Science, Technology, Engineering, Math," for those who may be looking at this report who haven't seen the term "STEM" before), one can begin by establishing standards for good sources. No one source of STEM workforce data addresses all of the questions that the users of such information have posed. We do have at least one source that works well for most of them. For those seeking information on specific STEM occupations, professional societies can be very good sources of data. Large associations like IEEE-USA and the American Chemical Society have impressive statistical archives, including excellent time series, on their own people. These sources meet good academic standards. STEM has many of these associations, and while they vary considerably in their propensities to collect data, their membership records alone can be valuable, as can information on their sections (for example, IEEE is organized into nearly 40 sub-associations, such as its Computer Society). Other large professional organizations include ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) and major engineering groups like ASME (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers), ASCE (the American Society of Civil Engineers), and NSPE (the National Society of Professional Engineers, an organization for those who have become licensed PEs). The most recent Directory of Engineering and Scientific Societies includes well over two thousand entries (copies may still be available from its publisher, AAES (the American Association of Engineering Societies at http://www.aaes.org). These sources may yield good information on particular kinds of STEM people. However, comparisons of different STEM occupations or measures of trends in the entire STEM workforce require more general sources.