I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of a very poor population by studying the effects of pensions on the decisions of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were 2 to 5 times as responsive as whites to income transfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independent living arrangements. I argue that blacks' greater poverty explains their responsiveness to pensions. My findings have implications for understanding racial differences in trends in retirement and independent living. I show that the retirement rates of both blacks and whites rose between 1900 and 1930 but that convergence in black and white rates and in living arrangements only occurred between 1930 and 1950. I argue that income effects from the institution of Social Security explain up to half of the convergence in black-white retirement rates and in living arrangements.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic literature. Although blacks and whites today reach similar terminal statures in the United States, nineteenth-century African American statures were consistently shorter than those of whites. Greater insolation (vitamin D production) is documented here to be associated with taller black statures. Black farmers were taller than workers in other occupations, and, ironically, black youth statures increased during the antebellum period and decreased with slavery's elimination.

Research exploring the negative effects of intergenerational educational mobility is very common throughout the social science literature. The primary question driving this research is whether those who exceed the highest level of education attained by either of their parents have less cohesive ties with their parents than those who do not. Most of this research uses a metric of absolute mobility which directly compares the childs education to the education of their mother and father. However, if more people are receiving a college degree in the childs than in the parents generation, it is possible that the childs mobility will be viewed less as an individual achievement and more as a structural phenomenon (Kalmijn 2006). The research presented here contributes to the growing body of research on the effects of educational mobility a new metric of structural mobility (Sorensen 1977), which takes into account the changing trends in educational attainment. The overall purpose of this paper is to analyze how structural educational mobility differs from absolute mobility in its effects on child-parent relationships. I find that absolute mobility does not impact child-parent relationships significantly. However, structural mobility was found to have a negative impact on child-parent relations when an individual is upwardly-mobile. When an individual is downwardly-mobile, structural mobility has a positive impact. Therefore, the effects of structural mobility indeed are more influential than absolute mobility, but not in the ways hypothesized by Kalmijn (2006).

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature, and heights are related with vitamin D. Although African-Americans and whites have the genetic ability to reach similar terminal statures, 19th century blacks were consistently shorter than whites. Greater insolation (vitamin D production), is documented here to be associated with taller black statures. Consistent with the insolation-hypothesis, mulattos were taller than darker pigmented blacks, and most of the mulatto-black stature differential was attributable to age and insolation. Black farmers were taller than workers in other occupations, and black statures increased during the antebellum period and decreased with slavery's elimination, which is observed across the stature distribution.

The variety of financing plans for higher education now includes income contingent repayment plans, pre-paid tuition plans, savings plan trusts, and state college savings bonds. None of these plans hedge against the uncertainty of gaining human capital by investing in a college education. I investigate using a European call option, with income as the underlying asset, to hedge the risk of gaining human capital by investing in a college education. I also discuss how the option can be used to increase access to higher education for minority and disadvantaged groups.

We investigate in this paper the theory and econometrics of optimal matchings with competing criteria. The surplus from a marriage match, for instance, may depend both on the incomes and on the educations of the partners, as well as on characteristics that the analyst does not observe. The social optimum must therefore trade off matching on incomes and matching on educations. Given a flexible specification of the surplus function, we characterize under mild assumptions the properties of the set of feasible matchings and of the socially optimal matching. Then we show how data on the covariation of the types of the partners in observed matches can be used to estimate the parameters that define social preferences over matches. We provide both nonparametric and parametric procedures that are very easy to use in applications.

The dissertation is concerned with the empirical relationship between educational attainment and earnings. Workers with higher education on average have higher wages, however the di erence in earnings can not be entirely attributed to education if workers with higher education also have inherent productive qualities that are not directly observable. The second chapter of the dissertation is an attempt to provide an empirical measure of the contribution of education to a worker's productivity. The estimates suggest that the return to education is about 60% of the observed di erence in earnings.The third chapter further investigates the relative signi cance of two theories that each provide an explanation for the empirical relationships between education, ability and earnings: the human capital theory and the job market signaling theory. It is important to distinguish between these theories since the signaling theory argues that the private return to education (to a worker) is higher than the social return (to the economy), generating potential welfare losses. We develop a hybrid model of educational choice under asymmetric information and provide a quantitative evaluation of the signaling role of education. The results suggest that the return to signaling is signi cant for the low skilled workers constituting about a quarter of the observed di erences in earnings due to education. The fourth chapter concentrates on the earnings growth over the life-cycleand discusses the role of the human capital model in explaining the empirical patterns in the data. In particular, the workers with lower educational attainment experience a slower earnings growth conditional on ability. This empirical fact has been regarded as evidence for the presence of asymmetric information among young workers and employers. We show that a model of life-cycle human capital accumulation is also consistent with this observation if training investment on the job and education are substitutes in the production of human capital. A quantitative evaluation of the model shows that the training investments observed in the data are not signi cant enough for these empirical patterns to be explained by the human capital theory alone.

Given the longstanding goal of racial equality in the USA (and elsewhere), there have been many attempts to measure the presence of racial discrimination in the housing market. In this context, racial discrimination is an action whereby nonwhites are treated differently than whites in some aspect of the housing market. Given the complexity of the housing market, racial discrimination can manifest itself in a number of ways. First, suppliers of housing can price discriminate and charge nonwhites more than whites. Second, whites can by force, threat, or collusion prevent nonwhites from living in certain areas. This can include some forms of zoning or racial covenants that can restrict the types of individuals that can purchase houses in certain areas or towns. Third, real estate agents can steer nonwhites away from white neighborhoods and hence deny nonwhites access to these areas. Fourth, nonwhites can be denied mortgages at a higher rate than whites, all else equal. Fifth, lenders can refuse to write loans in certain high minority areas; this is known as redlining. Sixth, lenders can charge higher prices to nonwhites for mortgages by offering higher interest rates or by forcing them to apply for private mortgage insurance. The focus of this chapter is on the fourth of these methods for detecting discrimination in the housing market. Initially, a general framework for detecting discrimination based on the hedonic model of house prices will be established. Then, this framework will be used to evaluate the literature. This paper is limited to an analysis of the U.S. housing market since this is the basis of most of the research on discrimination in the housing market (but see Harrison et. al. (2005) for an analysis of housing discrimination in the European Union). The burst of energy in the 1970s devoted to estimating discrimination and prejudice in the housing market using hedonic house price models has been followed by a relative dearth of such studies in the past twenty-five years. This might be due to a change of focus to other forms of discrimination in the housing market (i.e. forms three through six above). Also, with the advent of estimable forms of the general equilibrium urban model, it is now possible to analyze the impact of racial preferences on residential patterns in urban areas in a general equilibrium framework rather than the inherently partial equilibrium framework that underlies the studies based on hedonic models.3 Another reason is that the data requirements for accurately estimating discrimination using hedonic models are particularly onerous. Given these difficulties, along with other econometric issues that arise in specifying and estimating the hedonic model, it is recommended that the focus should be on trends in racial discrimination in the housing market rather than on point estimates from crosssection data. Of course, this only adds to the data requirements for estimating these trends.

This article considers the role of soft skills in cities and industry clusters. It begins by specifying a model of agglomeration economies where soft skills allow agents to interact more productively. The model exposes two conflicting forces: agglomeration allows opportunities to interact, but it also produces thick, specialized markets, and this specialization can be a substitute for interaction. In order to empirically evaluate the soft skillsagglomeration relationship, the article matches data on the interaction requirements of occupations from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to Census data. The within-industry average level of soft skills is found to be higher in cities but not in industry clusters. Workers at the top of the skill distribution in large cities typically have higher levels of soft skills than in small cities, while the least skilled workers are less skilled in large cities than in small cities. This pattern is reversed for industry clusters.

Previous research has affirmed the efficacy of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as a tool for increasing work participation among low-income workers without creating excessive market distortion. This study moves beyond the general effectiveness of the EITC to examine the effect and efficiency of structural parameters on work participation and weeks worked. Quantitative estimates of the benefits associated with increases in the parameters are taken from probit and tobit models are used to calculate the efficiency of changes to each parameter. Results suggest that increases in the EITC increase employment, decrease weeks worked, and affect single individuals more than married individuals. This study has significant policy impacts for lawmakers responsible for adjusting the EITC and for credit recipients

A tuition tax credit program has been proposed for Missouri to address education inequality among low-income families. The terms of this program would grant Missouri taxpayers a credit on their state income tax bills for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) not-for-profit education groups that are recognized by the state. In turn, SGOs would use these contributions to provide private-school scholarships to grade-school students who meet eligibility criteria set by the Legislature. During the past decade, four states have implemented similar programs.In this study, we show that other states have adopted education tax credit programs in order to help reduce inequality of educational access among low-income families, by making private-school alternatives much more affordable. The fiscal cost of a tuition tax credit program will depend on the number of parents who move their children from public schools to preferred private alternatives. This study assesses how the size of available scholarships would affect state educational spending at various levels of demand. Under the conditions we consider, a tuition tax credit program has the potential to save the state $7 million per year. Savings from a partial tax credit, in which taxpayers receive less than a dollar-fordollar match on their contributions, may be as high as $17 million.For the purposes of this study, we use the parameters set in the most recent Missouri tax credit bill; i.e., it would be capped at $40 million annually and would fund scholarships to students in the Kansas City, Saint Louis, and Wellston school districts who reside in households with incomes lower than or equal to 185 percent of the federal poverty level.1 Approximately 92,700 students in these districts meet the financial eligibility limits, 9.4 percent of whom currently attend private schools.

This article investigates the causes in the reduction of labor force participation of the old. We argue that the changes in social security policy, in technology and indemography may account for most of the changes in retirement over the second part of the last century in the U.S. economy. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous retirement that embeds social security legislation. The model is able to match very closely the increase in the retirement rate of American males.The model suggests that technological and demographic changes had a strong influence on retirement, so that it would have increased significantly even if the social security rules had not been modified. However, as the latter became much more generous, changes in social security policy account for a sizeable part of the expansion of the aggregate retirement rate (45% of the observed increase). They also explain, together with technology change, most of the variation of the retirement profile by age.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic history literature. Moreover, a number of core findings are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence remains limited. One such example is 19th century African-Americans in the Northern US. Here, we use new data from the Ohio state prison to track heights of Black and White men incarcerated between 1829 and 1913. We corroborate the well-known mid-century height decline among White men. We find that Black men were shorter than White men, throughout the century controlling for a number of characteristics. We also find a pattern of height decline among Black men in mid-century similar to that found for White men.

Considerable attention has been given to the recent growth of the Hispanic population in many new rural destinations outside of traditional gateway cities and states. Although Mexican farm workers have long had a presence in rural America, this group has also been geographically concentrated in the Southwest. Declines in the use of family labor as well as the consolidation of agricultural production have increased the need for hired agricultural workers in regions outside the traditional Fruit Belt. The purpose of this research is to analyze the relationship between agricultural restructuring and the spatial distribution of Mexican farm workers using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for the yeas 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2006 and also data from the 1992, 1997, and 2002 Censuses of Agriculture. This research extends the growing literature on new rural destinations for immigrants by situating agricultural workers within broader patterns of Hispanic spatial deconcentration.

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the declining economic value of children. Empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this value and by endogeneity bias. This paper uses the natural experiment of slave emancipation to overcome these issues. I exploit emancipation in the U.S. South between 1863 and 1865 as a plausibly exogenous changein the value of own children for slaveowning households. I develop a model of household production with own children and slave labor as inputs and use the model to show how the value of own children would have changed after emancipation. I construct a panel dataset of white Southern households between 1860 and 1870 and use this data to measure the fertility response of families to this changing value. Basedon evidence from the historical record, I hypothesize that small slaveowners and owners of young slaves were likely to experience the greatest increase in the value of their own children following emancipation while owners of adult female slaves would have experienced a lower postwar value. Indeed, the results show a strong, positive correlation between this predicted value of children and household fertility rates.By 1870, small slaveowners who had owned young slave children had fertility rates up to 37% greater than the non-slaveowning middle class. Large slaveowners who had owned adult female slaves exhibited a 31% reduction in fertility rates. These same patterns are not present in earlier time periods and do not, therefore, appear to represent unobserved fixed effects in household fertility. The results are consistent with theories of the demographic transition centered on the declining economic value of children.

The relationship between material inequality and health is the subject of considerable debate, and may depend on how the relationship is defined. This paper uses stature as its measure for cumulative health outcomes to illustrate that the 19th century relationship between material inequality and health was negative; greater average state wealth was associated with taller individual statures. The paper also proposes and supports a bio-spatial relationship between the environment and stature.

Newly available census microdata from IPUMS-International are used to assess trends in intergenerational coresidence in 15 developing countries. Contrary to expectations, we find no general decline in intergenerational coresidence over the past several decades. There have been, however, significant changes in the configuration of intergenerational coresidence. Families in which a member of the older generation is household heada configuration consistent with traditional patriarchal forms in which the older generation retains authorityare becoming more common in most of the countries. Intergenerational families headed by a member of the younger generationthe configuration one would expect if intergenerational coresidence were motivated by a need for old-age supportare on the decline in most of the countries. Multivariate analysis reveals that intergenerational families headed by the older generation are positively associated with measures of economic development. These findings are at variance with widely accepted social theory. We hypothesize that housing shortages, economic stress in the younger generation, and old-age pensions may contribute to the change. More broadly, in some developing countries rising incomes may have allowed more people to achieve their preferred family structure of intergenerational coresidence following traditional family forms.