In each of the following chapters, macro models are developed to explore the impact of technological progress on the household. Chapter 1 focuses on the impact of technological progress in transportation on suburbanization. In this chapter, a model of a city is developed in which agents choose both whether or not to own a car, and where to live. Focusing on the period 1910 to 1970, the model is calibrated to match the fall in automobile prices, the rise in real incomes, and the rise in the cost of commuting by public transportation relative to commuting by car. Under the baseline calibration the model predicts both a rise in car-ownership and decentralization. In Chapter 2, a model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain the declining labor-force participation rates of elderly males. Using the Health and Retirement Study, the model is calibrated to cross-sectional data on the labor-force participation rates of elderly US males by age and their average drop . . .

Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of coagglomeration and use data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database from 1972 to 1997 to compute pairwise coagglomeration measurements for U.S. manufacturing industries. Industry attributes are used to construct measures of the relevance of each of Marshall's three theories of industry agglomeration to each industry pair: (1) agglomeration saves transport costs by proximity to input suppliers or final consumers, (2) agglomeration allows for labor market pooling, and (3) agglomeration facilitates intellectual spillovers. We assess the importance of the theories via regressions of coagglomeration indices on these measures. Data on characteristics of corresponding industries in the United Kingdom are used as instruments. We find evidence to support each mechanism. Our results suggest that input-output dependencies are the most important factor, followed by labor pooling.

Social science historians engage in relatively few large, collaborative projects, yet many of their activities, especially data collection and several aspects of analysis, benefit from what economists call economies of scale. Here I briefly review the historical background of big projects, place research by social science historians in perspective relative to other disciplines, and ponder possible explanations for the dearth of collaborative efforts. Large projects are not to everyone's taste, and they demand vision, logistical skills, and fund-raising. In conclusion, I suggest 15 large projects that are interesting and feasible.

The perception that immigration adversely affects crime rates led to legislation in the 1990s that particularly increased punishment of criminal aliens. In fact, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born - on the order of one-fifth the rate of natives. More recently arrived immigrants have the lowest relative incarceration rates, and this difference increased from 1980 to 2000. We examine whether the improvement in immigrants' relative incarceration rates over the last three decades is linked to increased deportation, immigrant self-selection, or deterrence. Our evidence suggests that deportation does not drive the results. Rather, the process of migration selects individuals who either have lower criminal propensities or are more responsive to deterrent effects than the average native. Immigrants who were already in the country reduced their relative institutionalization probability over the decades; and the newly arrived immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s seem to be particularly unlikely to be involved in criminal activity, consistent with increasingly positive selection along this dimension.

The innovative approach to economic history known as the New Comparative Economic History represents a distinct change in the way that many economic historians view their role, do their work, and interact with the broader economics profession. The New Comparative Economic History reflects a belief that economic processes can best be understood by systematically comparing experiences across time, regions, and, above all, countries. It is motivated by current questions that are not nation specific--the sources of economic growth, the importance of institutions, and the impact of globalization--and focuses on long-run trends rather than short-run ups and downs in economic activity. The essays in this volume offer a New Economic Comparative History perspective on a range of topics and are written in honor of Jeffrey G. Williamson, the most distinguished and influential scholar in the field.The contributors, prominent American and European economists, consider such topics as migration, education, and wage convergence; democracy and protectionism in the nineteenth century; trade and immigration policies in labor-scarce economies; and the effect of institutions on European productivity and jobs.

Immigration literature in the United States cites poorer economic performance ofrecent immigrants (arrivals since mid-1980s) than of those who arrived in the past. Massey andBartley (2005) caution researchers by pointing out that immigrants economic performance is afunction of their legal status in the country. In this paper, we analyze the economic performanceof naturalized citizens, who are the most advantaged group of immigrants in terms of civic andeconomic rights, and yet comprise only 40 percent of the immigrant population in the UnitedStates. Data from 2000 census of population are used.Our econometric and descriptive results indicate that 1) naturalized citizens earn higher labourmarket incomes than their non-naturalized counterparts in the United States, 2) a householdheaded by a naturalized citizen remains a source of public funds transfer to the non-immigranthousehold for a long time after arrival into the country, and 3) an immigrant household headed bya non-citizen is a net recipient of public funds transfers from the non-immigrant household.Impacts of several socioeconomic factors on the propensity to naturalize are also analyzed in aneconometric framework.

The goal of this paper is to investigate access to financial services and prospects for the wealth assimilation of immigrants by studying the financial market behavior of U.S. immigrants, compared to the native-born. Compared to similar natives, immigrants are less likely to own a wide range of financial assets, including savings and checking accounts. We find that lower rates of financial market participation tend to persist even for immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for several years. Our results suggest that a large share of the immigrant-native gap in financial market participation is driven by group differences in education, income, and geographic location. For a given immigrant, the likelihood of financial market participation decreases with higher levels of ethnic concentration in the metropolitan area.

Where the poor live and why has an enormous impact on access to jobs, decent quality schools, and other local attributes that affect a familys ability to rise up out of poverty. Low-income families also rely disproportionately on rental housing for their accommodations. Accordingly, because rental housing support programs affect the location opportunities for the poor, it is important to consider the broader set of factors that drive where poor neighborhoods are found. Failure to do so could undermine the effectiveness of well-intended initiatives. With that in mind, this paper provides a framework and evidence that helps to characterize where poor neighborhoods tend to be found, and why.Results indicate that many neighborhoods exhibit considerable persistence in poverty levels over the 1970 to 2000 period, but many other neighborhoods do not. Persistence is by far the highest among communities with poverty rates below 15 percent: roughly 80 percent of these communities retain their low poverty status between 1970 and 2000. Other neighborhoods however, display much less persistence. Among very high poverty tracts (tracts with over 40 percent poverty), persistence between 1970 and 2000 is just 43 percent. Thus, over half of the highest poverty neighborhoods in 1970 were of lower poverty status thirty years later.What contributes to this variety of experience? Further analysis in the paper suggests that change in local poverty rates arise from four very different mechanisms: access to public transit, the presence of aging housing stocks, local spillover effects arising from social interactions, and the presence of place-based subsidized rental housing (i.e. public and LIHTC housing). Together, these factors explain a considerable portion of the one-decade ahead change in census tract poverty rates. However, on balance, it is still difficult to anticipate where the poor will live several decades out into the future. Yet place-based subsidized housing is both spatially fixed and long lived. For that reason, at least with respect to implications for location opportunities, flexible tenant-based rental housing support programs appear to offer advantages.

We test whether the effect of English proficiency differs between Hispanic and non-Hispanic immigrants. Using 2000 Census microdata on childhood immigrants, we relate labor market, education, marriage and fertility variables to their age at arrival in the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the critical period of language acquisition. We interpret the observed differences as an effect of English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for English proficiency. Immigrants from both groups exhibit lower English proficiency if they arrive after the critical period, but this drop in English skill is larger for Hispanics. The effect of English skill on earnings and education is nevertheless quite similar across groups, while some differences are seen for marriage and fertility outcomes.

Medicare as a Secondary Payer (MSP) legislation requires employer-sponsored health insurance to be a primary payer for Medicare-eligible workers at firms with 20 or more employees. While the legislation was developed to better target Medicare services to individuals without access to employer-sponsored insurance, MSP creates a significant implicit tax on working beyond age 65. This implicit tax is approximately 15-20 percent at age 65 and increases to 45-70 percent by age 80. Eliminating this implicit tax by making Medicare a primary payer for all Medicare-eligible individuals could significantly increase lifetime labor supply due to the high labor supply elasticities of older workers. The extra income tax receipts from such a policy would likely offset a large percentage of the estimated costs of making Medicare a primary payer.

In the first chapter, I study whether sending children to college affects the contemporaneous labor supply of their parents. I use data on the retirement behavior of parents and their childrens college enrollments from the Health and Retirement Survey and show that parents do delay retirement when they are paying for their children to attend college. Mothers and fathers are more likely to be working, less likely to be collecting Social Security benefits, and less likely to report that they are retired if they are currently paying for the college education of a child. For those who continue working, I find little evidence of any impact on work intensity. For fathers, the pattern of effects is consistent with a model of precautionary savings. In the second and third chapters, I study whether the Social Security Notch can be used as a source of exogenous variation in post-retirement incomes. Using a synthetic-cohorts approach, I model Social Security Benefits for people born during 1905-1935, showing what retirement benefits for each cohort would be if changes were due only to differences in benefit calculation formulae. I show that these simulated benefits are very significant predictors of reported benefits and of reported total incomes in very large data sources, such as the Current Population Survey and the Census. However, the cohorts with higher benefits due to law changes are also observed to have higher earnings in retirement. I then examine whether the notch can be used to discern a causal relationship between post-retirement income and health. I replicate the work of Snyder and Evans, showing that people born in 1917 received lower Social Security benefits in retirement than people born in 1916, yet had lower mortality rates after age 65. Using data from the Death Master File on pre-65 mortality rates, however, I find that gap in mortality rates appeared before these cohorts began collecting Social Security benefits. I also find that the difference in mortality rates between these cohorts is similar in magnitude to the gaps between other successive cohorts. These results imply that cohort variability overshadows the effects of this potential instrument.

The Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map will help policy makers, childcare providers, school districts and others meet the demands of quality early childcare by bringing together data on early care and education from state agencies, Head Start, and the private sector. IECAM will also include data on early childhood (birth to 5) programs and community demographic information that could be used consistently by federal, state and local government agencies to inform resources as efficiently as possible while creating a comprehensive early childhood system for the state.

Married African-American women have had significantly higher labor force participation rates since at least the 1960s relative to their white counterparts even after controlling for their husbands income. Conditional on working, their average hours worked have also been significantly higher since the 1970s. Of course, controlling for the husbands income level is insufficient. Divorce rates have been at least 40% higher for black women relative to white women and marriage rates 50% lower since the 1960s. Moreover greater volatility in the employment and income of African-American men relative to white men and lower first-marriage rates may also make a difference. To fully consider how these factors affect labor supply choices, I develop a dynamic discrete choice model with returns to experience. Preliminary estimates using simulated maximum likelihood and the National Longitudinal Survey Mature Womens sample suggest that these differenceshigher divorce rates, lower rates of marriage and remarriage and greater income volatilitycan explain only part of the observed labor supply differences.

At the micro-level (individuals), this paper argues and shows that partisanship is not only shapedby the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income(risk exposure): people tend to identify with the Democratic Party when they are poor, or whenthey face a high degree of risk exposure. The reverse is true for Republican Party identifiers. Thisimplies that rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low riskexposure) are cross-pressured: while their income suggests that they should identify with theRepublican Party, their risk exposure makes them sympathize with the Democrats.This has implications at the macro-level (country). To understand a societys polarization onredistributional issues, it is of interest to know how risk exposure is distributed across the incomescale. It is shown that the U.S. experienced increasing risk exposure at the lower end of the incomedistribution (risk polarization). This could explain increased polarization in the Americansociety.

Homeownership rates equal the number of households that own homes divided by the number of households in the population. Differences in the propensity to form a household, therefore, may contribute to changes in homeownership rates over time in addition to long-standing racial gaps in homeownership. We examine these issues on an age-specific basis using data from the 1970 to 2000 public use microsamples of the decennial census. Results indicate that lower headship rates tend to reduce homeownership rates. This pattern is most notable for individuals in their early and mid 20s. For these individuals, declining headship rates between 1970 and 2000 reduced homeownership rates by three to five percentage points. Moreover, 2000 African American headship rates narrow white-black gaps in homeownership by roughly three percentage points, whereas 2000 Hispanic headship rates widen white-Hispanic gaps in homeownership by two to three percentage points. Thus, controlling for differences in headship behavior, white-black homeownership gaps are somewhat more severe than previously recognized, but the reverse is true for white-Hispanic gaps.

Recent research by Kambourov and Manovskii (2008a) has documented substantial returns to occupational tenure: everything else being constant, five years of occupational experience are associated with an increase in wages of at least 12%. This finding is consistent with human capital being specific to the occupation in which an individual works (e.g., truck driver, accountant, chemical engineer). However, despite the apparent costliness of occupational switching, Kambourov and Manovskii (2008b) found a substantial increase in occupational mobility over the 1969-1997 period among male workers in the United States. This finding poses a set of intriguing questions. Why did the occupational mobility of male workers increase? What happened with the occupational mobility of women? Are the two trends connected? That is, is there a relationship between the well-documented increase in the labor force attachment of women and the change in the occupational mobility of men? In this paper we present new facts that we hope will help guide the search for answers to these questions. In particular, we study changes in the occupational . . .