This paper demonstrates that administrative data may be inferior tosurvey data under particular circumstances. We examine the effectof state laws governing the minimum age of marriage in the UnitedStates. The estimated effects of these laws are much smaller whenbased on retrospective reports from census versus administrativerecords from Vital Statistics data. This discrepancy appears dueto systematic avoidance behavior of two kinds. Some young peoplemarry in states with less restrictive laws; others appear to have misrepresentedtheir age on their marriage certificate. Our results haveimportant implications regarding legal avoidance and the use ofadministrative data.

We pursue two primary tasks in this paper. Our first task is to provide empiricalevidence that controlling for location matters significantly in assessing the degree ofconvergence in earnings over the period from 1940-2000. We use data from the IntegratedPublic Use Micro Samples for the 1940 to 2000 Censuses to explore this question. We find littleevidence of black-white earnings convergence since 1950 in many cites. For instance, we findthat once we condition on education, age, and location, black males earned 35 and 37 percent ofwhat comparable white males made in 1950 in Chicago and New York. By 2000, however, theearnings gap had increased to 45 and 41 percent in Chicago and New York. Our second task isto develop a theoretical model that can help us interpret the evidence we present and provideinsights into important issues of policy with respect to earnings disparities. Not the least of theseis the conclusion that in an environment of significant migration a careful view of the socialwelfare implications of the apparent convergence must go beyond any simple analysis ofchanges in the earnings gap.

Latinos are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the country (50% between 1990 and 2000) and their business ownership increased 31% from 1997 to 2000. However their earnings are much lower than those of white business owners. Many economists believe than Mexican immigrants are facing other issues as a result of their lower income. These include less political representation, evidence of discrimination and overall poverty. So far research into comparing Mexican and White business success is not common. Economists have suggested that ?an important issue for future research is to assess whether there are differences in the success of self-employed Mexican-Hispanics and whites??. In my research I take the personal and business characteristics (such as financial capital and education) of the entrepreneur and attempt to predict their income using regression analysis. The regression will use data from a survey done by Occidental students last year and also sample census data taken from IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) which is a 1% sample of the US Census. The surveys and census data include characteristics that can theoretically be seen as factors of success for an entrepreneur like experience, financial capital, education, English proficiency and others. If these characteristics are found to have a strong effect on earnings then policies could be enacted that are aimed to increase earnings by augmenting these assets.

Most histories that examine the development of social insurance programs in the United States have long focused on the efforts of political action groups or government established programs. These histories and studies have ignored the impact of individual based decision making driven by precautionary savings motives, and the life-cycle theory of savings. By examining critical institutional developments both in the private market and public sector we can redefine our understanding of the economic landscape of the late-nineteenth century United States. Civil War pensions and life insurance are understudied institutions. Elderly men in the United States depended and relied on these two different programs to provide for them in old age in an era without Social Security.

Estimates of local land rents and firm productivity from wage and housing-cost data require incorporating parameters from the housing production function. Across cities, differences in amenity values are capitalized into the sum of local land values and federal-tax payments. Improved modeling is used to predict how amenities affect wages and housing costs, estimate quality-of-life and firm-productivity differences across U.S. cities, and upgrade estimates of public-infrastructure values. Private land values vary mainly from quality-of-life differences, while social land (or total-amenity) values vary mainly from firm-productivity differences. The most valuable cities are generally coastal, sunny, and have large or well-educated populations.

In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely normal. We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of white married couples in the U.S.: when we restrict comparisons to households living in broadly similar locations (e.g., in expensive urban areas, or in rural areas), completed fertility is positively correlated with the husbands income. Two alternative models rationalize the dataone in which children are normal and a second in which the observed pattern emerges solely as a consequence of rational sorting by households. In an effort to sort out causal effects, we undertake a rather specialized empirical exercise to analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid-1970s increase in world energy pricesan exogenous shock that substantially increased men's incomes in the Appalachian coal-mining region. We find that children are indeed normal.

This dissertation consists of three chapters examining the important role of firm and coworker characteristics, as well as the use of social networks, in labor markets. The first paper investigates the effect of firm owners and coworkers on hiring patterns and wages. Immigrant-owned firms are more likely to hire immigrant workers. This prevalence is especially strong for Hispanic and Asian workers. We also find that the probability that a new hire is a Hispanic is higher for immigrant firms. On wage differentials, the results illustrate that much of the difference between the log annual wages of immigrants and natives can be explained by immigrants' propensity to work in non-native owned firms, which pay the lowest average wages. Interestingly , though, native workers holding a job in immigrant firms are paid less than immigrant workers. The last section examines the potential mechanisms for these findings. It explores the importance of job referral and use of networks for migrants in labor markets. We consider the theoretical implications of social ties between owners and workers in this context. Firms decide whether to fill their vacancies by posting their offers or by using their current workers' connections.

A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. We analyze this approach in a context in which individuals live and work in different locations (and thus face different housing prices and wages). Our model provides a justification for the traditional approach, but with the important caveat that the regression should include location-specified effects. Empirical analyses of men in U.S. labor markets demonstrate that failure to condition on location causes us to (i) overstate the decline in black-white wage disparity over the past 60 years, and (ii) understate racial and ethnic wage gaps that remain after taking into account measured cognitive skill differences that emerge when workers are young.

Are all immigrants from the same home country best understood as a homogeneous group of foreign-born? Or do they differ in their adaptation and transnational ties depending on when they emigrated and with what lived experiences? Between Castro’s rise to power in 1959 and the early twenty-first century more than a million Cubans immigrated to the United States. While it is widely known that Cuban émigrés have exerted a strong hold on Washington policy toward their homeland, Eckstein uncovers a fascinating paradox: the recent arrivals, although poor and politically weak, have done more to transform their homeland than the influential and prosperous early exiles who have tried for half a century to bring the Castro regime to heel. The impact of the so-called New Cubans is an unintended consequence of the personal ties they maintain with family in Cuba, ties the first arrivals oppose. This historically-grounded, nuanced book offers a rare in-depth analysis of Cuban immigrants’ social, cultural, economic, and political adaptation, their transformation of Miami into the "northern most Latin American city," and their cross-border engagement and homeland impact. Eckstein accordingly provides new insight into the lives of Cuban immigrants, into Cuba in the post Soviet era, and into how Washington’s failed Cuba policy might be improved. She also posits a new theory to deepen the understanding not merely of Cuban but of other immigrant group adaptation.

Since 1970, more than one million individuals from the former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrated to the United States. Using data from the U.S. Census, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Study, we provide the first comprehensive study of the determinants of health in this immigrant group. We find that older FSU-born immigrants report considerably higher levels of disability and poorer overall self-rated health compared to older U.S.-born whites and most other major immigrant groups. Harmful behaviors (smoking, heavy alcohol use), obesity and diagnosed medical conditions do not explain the poorer health of this group relative to U.S.-born whites. Hence, the relatively poor reported levels of health among FSU-born immigrants remain unexplained. Additionally, older U.S. Russian-born immigrants are better off with respect to self-reported disability and health-related behaviors compared to the Russian population, although the immigrant group reports considerably poorer self-rated health compared to their sending population.

Within the last generation, cancer survivors quality of life has improved significantly. As recently as 25 years ago, less than one half of those diagnosed with cancer survived more than five years [1]. Treatments were less precise and more disabling. Misunderstandings about cancer risks and options were common. As a result, cancer survivors experienced substantial problems obtaining and retaining employment [24].

PREVIOUS STUDIES HAVE DEMONSTRATED statistically and economically significant responses to public aid differentials across locations, or welfare migration, by low-income immigrants and natives (Buckley, 1996; Borjas, 1999; Dodson, 2001; McKinnish, 2007). The contributions of this paper are (1) to update the literature examining welfare migration dynamics to the post-1996 welfare reform period, and (2) to illustrate that the original findings based on U.S. Census data that support welfare migration, though persistent, are occupation-specific. Of particular interest, there is no evidence that California is a welfare magnet for occupations hypothesized to have high percentages of illegal immigrants (e.g., agriculture, construction, other labor). This is notable given continuing state level attention to the denial of public services to new illegal immigrants. Documenting the existence (or absence) of welfare migration for different occupational and legal status groups is of both welfare and immigration policy interest and contributes to a better understanding of the effect of state and local public finance on the locational distribution of migrants.

This paper makes an empirical contribution in unraveling the argument that immigration is eitherthe sole or even the most important factor behind the U.S. poverty. While this argument isunderstandable, the blame is misplaced. Using data from the Current Population Survey, weshow that between 1994 and 2008 the national poverty rate of immigrants fell three times fasterthan that of natives (5.4 compared to 1.8 percentage points). The poverty rate of recentimmigrants (those in the United States for less than 10 years) fell even faster at almost six timesfaster than that of natives (10.7 compared to 1.8 percentage points). The empirical analysis ofthis paper shows that the odds of experiencing poverty for both natives and immigrants dependon micro factors such as individual characteristics and macro factors such as business cycle inthe U.S. economy.

Though hundreds of thousands of immigrants served the U.S. military since its inception, this study is the first to examine socioeconomic outcomes of immigrant veterans outside of a historical context. An analysis of the 2006 American Communities Survey examines the earnings and employment status of immigrants with previous U.S. military experience (veterans) and those without (non-veterans). This study provides limited support for predictions from human capital theory gains for immigrant veterans. Immigrant veteran employment odds do not differ from non-veteran peers. However, immigrant veterans have greater earnings than non-veteran immigrants after controlling for race/ethnicity, age and human capital factors such as education, work disability, years in the U.S. and English ability. Veteran status benefits the earnings of immigrants. Further analyses demonstrate that working for the public sector mediates the effect of veteran status on earnings, indicating that veterans' preference laws and job-specific human capital gains may underlie the advantage.

We investigate the educational attainment of American Indian and Alaska Native youth within aunique framework hypothesizing that local tribal affiliation and reservation proximity provideaccess to tribal benefits and services in a given area that may impact the likelihood of graduatingfrom high school or earning a GED. We use propensity score matching to determine the causalimpact of being an American Indian and/or Alaska Native youth who does not live in a state withhis/her tribal lands and does not live near a reservation on graduating from high school orearning a GED. The data used in this analysis comes from the 2000 Census Integrated PublicUse Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA) 5% sample, and we construct a sample of American Indianand Alaska Native individuals from Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington.We find a large and significant impact of not being affiliated with the state tribe and not livingnear a reservation: youth with no local tribal affiliation and reservation proximity were 26.5%less likely to have earned a high school diploma or GED compared to if these youth had lived ina state with their tribal lands and near or on a reservation. We will be presenting the results ofthis study, which is a work in progress, at the 2010 AERA Annual Meeting at a RoundtableSession titled, Social Justice, Factors for Graduation and Success with Indigenous Students.

This paper examines how primitive skills associated with occupations are formed and rewarded in the labor market over the careers of men. The objective task complexity measurement from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles enables a more direct look into the primitive skills of workers. I show that the optimal choice of task complexity is a linear function of unobserved skills, worker characteristics, and preference shocks, which implies that the observed task complexity is a noisy signal of underlying skills. Using career histories from the NLSY79, the growth of cognitive and motor skills as well as structural parameters are estimated by the Kalman filter. The results indicate that both cognitive and motor skills account for a considerable amount of cross-sectional wage variation. I also find that cognitive skills grow over careers and are the main source of wage growth; this pattern is particularly pronounced for the highly educated. In contrast, motor skills grow and contribute to wage growth substantially only for high school dropouts.

State compulsory schooling and child labor laws had signi cant impacts on theschooling of children in the United States between 1900 and 1920, increasing part timeschool attendance of 7 to 13 year olds by 4 to 7 percent and full time school attendanceby 2 to 14 percent. State legislation also had signi cant impacts on the employmentof children, helping to decrease child labor by between 2 and 4 percent. The impactof law varied by age, race, urban status, nativity, gender, and region. In the South we nd a larger e ect for rural children than for urban, while in the North we nd largerurban e ects. Also in the South, between 1900 and 1910, while laws had little e ecton school attendance they helped remove black children from the workforce. Boysand older teenagers were more likely to be inuenced by laws than girls and youngerteenagers. We nd the largest di erences between immigrant and native children in theNorth, where laws helped increase the attendance of immigrant children much morethan native children.