The basic neoclassical growth model accounts well for the postwar cyclical behavior of the U.S. economy prior to the 1990s, provided that variations in population growth, depreciation rates, total factor productivity, and taxes are incorporated. For the 1990s, the model predicts a depressed economy, when in fact the U.S. 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 compelling micro and macro evidence for our extension, and the predictions of the theory are in conformity with U.S. national products, incomes, and capital gains. We use the theory to compare current accounting measures for labor productivity and investment with the corresponding measures for the model economy with intangible investment. Our findings show that standard accounting measures greatly understate the boom in productivity and investment.

Economic models of home production predict a tradeoff between a mother's fertility and her labor supply. Recent empirical work suggests that while these outcomes are correlated, the causal impact is negligible when estimated through Instrumental Variables (sex preference, twinning). I find that in Taiwan, intense son preference produces 2SLS estimates of a mother's labor response that are larger than OLS estimates, suggesting that previous IV analyses may focus on mothers with lower than average costs to childbearing. I present a model of a mother's joint determination of fertility and labor supply allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in both the benefits and costs of children. The model predicts that IV estimates will rise in proportion to the intensity of the instrument, and provides a framework for assessing the bias in OLS and IV estimators. Estimation of the structural model predicts that the average causal effect of a third child on a mother's probability of working is -10 percent in Taiwan and -12 percent in the United States for mothers between 34 and 36 years of age. The results imply that the IV estimate for the US (-7 percent) is lower than the average causal effect, but the IV estimate in Taiwan (-11 percent) is slightly larger than the average causal effect. I present a set of simulations to consider how IV estimates derived from simulated data change when the strength of the instrument varies, and find that in both Taiwan and the US, weaker instruments provide estimates lower than the average causal effect, and stronger instruments yield estimates closer to the average causal effect.

How did a frontier nation filled with agricultural and mineral potential become a leader in education? How did a nation born of aversion to taxes and government become a pioneer in using property taxes to pay for much, and eventually most, of its primary schooling? The puzzle is best explained by a combination of relatively little initial poverty, local autonomy, and especially political voice. We present two kinds of evidence: broad contrasts with Europe, and statistical investigation of the differences among U.S. counties in the mid-nineteenth century. Two political voice variables stand out as determinants of schooling among U.S. counties: The extent of local suffrage and the ability of Southern elites to dominate the electorate. Other standard explanations of the demand for primary education need to be revised. Past writers have overemphasized the passage of national and state laws. Contrary to another common view, cities lagged in school attendance, while the Northern countryside led the way, because political voice was more widespread in the small Northern towns.

High sex ratios in China and India have historically concerned researchers (Sen 1990) and their recent increase has alarmed policymakers worldwide. This paper identifies sex selection via infanticide and abortion as the principal explanation for the sex ratio distortion, and rules out competing explanations such as biology (Oster 2005) or differential mortality rates. Consistent with recent work (Jha et al. 2006), I find that the sex ratio of first-order births is close to the natural rate and steeply rising following the birth of low-order daughters, indicating that mothers are practicing pre-natal sex selection or immediate infanticide. Sex ratios are found to be higher among those anticipating lower fertility, such as those under stricter government fertility limits. I present a model of a mother's fertility choice when she has access to a sex-selection technology and faces a mandated fertility limit. By exploiting variation in fines levied in China for unsanctioned births, I demonstrate that higher fine regimes discourage fertility but are associated with higher sex ratios among those who choose to have an additional child. I then estimate a structural model of parental preferences using China's 2000 census data that indicates that a son is worth 2.90 years of income more than a daughter, and the premium is highest among less educated mothers and rural families. I conclude with a set of simulations to model the effect on sex ratios and total fertility of a proposed subsidy to families who fail to have a son, and find that such a policy would reduce sex ratios and lower overall fertility.

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.

HOW DO COUNTIES, CITIES, or regions respond to adverse economic shocks? How quickly does an area recover and through which adjustment mechanisms? These questions touch on many different areas of social science and economics and are relevant to our understanding of economic growth, income gaps across regions (for example, North and South in the United States or Italy), and the plight of individual laid-off workers and their families. In this paper we undertake a study of one of the biggest negative shocks to affect the U.S. economy in the past fifty years, namely, the massive loss of steel- and auto-related jobs in the early 1980s, which we refer to collectively as the Rust Belt shock. In the decade between 1977 and 1987 the United States shed about 500,000 jobs in the auto industry and 350,000 jobs in the steel industry, far outstripping any other job losses in recent U.S. history. These job losses were concentrated in roughly 140 of the 3,000 counties in the United States. Kahn as well as Black, McKinnish, and Sanders discuss the size of the manufacturing shocks and accompanying job losses. For the first section of our paper, we assemble total employment, industry level employment, population, labor force participation, and income data at the level of the county and the metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Our basic approach is to regress short- and long-run changes in outcomes on the size of...

This paper considers the educational consequences of the increased ability of young women to delay childbearing as a result of the birth control pill. In order to identify the effects of the pill, I utilize quasi-experimental variation in U.S. state laws governing access to contraception amongfemale adolescents during the 1960s and 1970s. Inference based on these laws indicates that unconstrained access to the pill increased female college enrollment rates by over 2 percentage points and reduced the dropout rate by over 5 percentage points. Further, early pill access led to a rise in college completion of approximately three quarters of a percentage point among women over the age of thirty. Finally, I analyze the outcomes of men in relation to the contraceptive laws, finding evidence that male educational opportunities also improved due to reductions in undesiredearly fertility among their female partners.

This paper quantitatively tests how much of the post-WWII evolution in employment and average wages by gender can be explained by a model where changing labor demand requirements are the driving forces. I argue that a big fraction of the original female employment and wage gaps in mid-century, and the subsequent shrinking of both gaps, are explained by labor reallocation from brawn-intensive to brain-intensive jobs favoring women's comparative advantages in brain over brawn. I analyze the effects of an exogenous "brain-biased" technical change, increasing the relative productivity of brain-intensive to brawn-intensive production processes, on aggregate employment and wage gap trends. Initial results suggest the mechanism to be able to explain 37 to 67 percent of the rise in married female labor force participation, about 89 percent of the rise in single female labor force participation and about 53 to 62 percent of the closing wage gap, with an initially slower growth rate in average female to male wages due to selection bias. Moreover, the model, similar to the data, generates fairly steady married and single men's labor force participation over time.

We use a household projection model to construct future scenarios for the United States designed to reflect a wide but plausible range of outcomes, including a new set of scenarios for union formation and dissolution rates based on past trends, experience in other countries, and current theory. The period covered is from 2000 to 2100. We find that the percentage of people living in households headed by the elderly may climb from 11 percent in 2000 to 20-31 percent in 2050 and 20-39 percent in 2100, while the average size of households could plausibly be as low as 2.0 or as high as 3.1 by the second half of the century. We assess the sensitivity of household size and structure to various demographic events, and show that outcomes are most sensitive to changes in fertility rates and rates of union formation and dissolution. They are less sensitive to the timing of marriage and childbearing and to changes in life expectancy

We perform a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of the observed increase in the average weight of American adults during the last 40 years. Data suggests that this increase in weight can be attributed to a dramatic rise in the consumption of foods prepared away from home, which resulted in higher caloric intake. We study the quantitative implications of two different hypotheses that may help explain the increased consumption of foods prepared away from home: technological advancements in the production of processed food that lowered its price, and higher opportunity cost of cooking at home driven by lower taxes and gender wage gap. According to our model, actual trends in the gender wage gap and income taxes alone can account for almost all of the observed changes in calorie consumption, expenditure in food away from home, ingredients for cooking at home, consumption of non-food items, investment, and GDP. When taxes and the gender wage gap are held constant, technological advancements in the production of foods prepared away from home can only account for half of the food expenditure patterns in the data, and deliver counterfactual implications for key macroeconomic variables.

U.S. educational and occupational wage differentials were exceptionally high at the dawn of the twentiethcentury and then decreased in several stages over the next eight decades. But starting in the early 1980sthe labor market premium to skill rose sharply and by 2005 the college wage premium was back atits 1915 level. The twentieth century contains two inequality tales: one declining and one rising. Weuse a supply-demand-institutions framework to understand the factors that produced these changesfrom 1890 to 2005. We find that strong secular growth in the relative demand for more educated workerscombined with fluctuations in the growth of relative skill supplies go far to explain the long-run evolutionof U.S. educational wage differentials. An increase in the rate of growth of the relative supply of skillsassociated with the high school movement starting around 1910 played a key role in narrowing educationalwage differentials from 1915 to 1980. The slowdown in the growth of the relative supply of collegeworkers starting around 1980 was a major reason for the surge in the college wage premium from1980 to 2005. Institutional factors were important at various junctures, especially during the 1940sand the late 1970s.

We perform a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of the observed increase in the average weight of American adults during the last 40 years. Data suggests higher weights can be attributed to increased consumption of food prepared away from home, which resulted in higher caloric intake. We examine the quantitative implications of a decline in the relative monetary and time cost of food prepared away from home on the caloric intake of American households. Two channels that lower this relative cost are considered. First, productivity improvements in the production of food prepared away from home. We find that this channel is qualitatively consistent with expenditure trends in food items, but falls short of accounting for the magnitude of the observed changes. We then consider actual declines in income taxes and in the gender wage gap, which increase the cost of preparing food at home from scratch. Our model accounts for three quarters of the observed changes in calorie consumption, and is consistent with trends in aggregate food expenditures, time use, and key macroeconomic variables. Our results indicate that changes in the relative cost of food prepared away from home play an important role in our understanding of the increased weight of the American population during the last 40 years.

This thesis examines the adoption of no-fault divorce laws through sociology of lawfunctionalist and conflict/feminist perspectives. Previous research on the adoption of nofaultdivorce laws has focused primarily on the after math, but little attention has beenpaid to those factors influencing which states' adopted these laws. This paper will look atthe discord between written laws and laws in action and the gendered opportunitystructures in each state to determine what relationship exists between these factors andthe adoption of two types of no-fault divorce. The results indicate states that adopted apure no-fault divorce system, one that eliminates fault from divorce and alimonydecisions, were more likely to have a greater dissonance between their written laws andthe laws' actual application compared with those states that retained the use of fault inalimony allotments. States that adopted a pure no-fault system also had more opengendered opportunity structures than those that retained fault in alimony.

Drawing on political opportunity theory, the theory of legislative logic, and political mediation theory, we hypothesize differential effects of the political environment on the actions of challengers (suffragists) and state actors (legislators) in the women's suffrage movement. We use sequential logistic regression to assess the effects of explanatory variables on two intermediate stages of mobilization and policy change. In the case of challengers, we estimate the likelihood a state-level organization is present in any given legislative year. In the case of state actors, we estimate the likelihood a bill passes one legislative house given the presence of a state-level suffrage organization and that a bill has been introduced Mixed signals are apparent in that challengers and legislators respond to the same environmental factors differently. Challengers respond to perceived opportunities far change. Legislators seek to enhance their political careers and are responsive to the demands of challengers when they perceive challengers as politically powerful or when social and cultural change signals a demand for policy reform. Legislators, in the end, are much more conservative in their response to the political context.

We develop an index of segregation based on two premises: (1) a measure of segregation should disaggregate to the level of individuals, and (2) an individual is more segregated the more segregated are the agents with whom she interacts. We present an index that satisfies (1) and (2) and that is based on agents' social interactions: the extent to which blacks interact with blacks, whites with whites, etc. We use the index to measure school and residential segregation. Using detailed data on friendship networks, we calculate levels of within-school racial segregation in a sample of U. S. schools. We also calculate residential segregation across major U. S. cities, using block-level data from the 2000 U. S. Census.

This article targets the role of intermediaries, such as refugee resettlement programs, in altering the geography of the foreign-born. It argues that, under such intermediaries, destination choice within the United States is largely determined not by economic mechanisms but instead by information-related factors such as friction of distance, migration chains, labor procurement, and resettlement intermediaries. Metropolitan statistical area (MSA) destinations are grouped into four profiles based on their mix of foreign-born. The result is sets of MSAs differentiated by the era of immigration, immigrant origins, geographic pattern, and place characteristics that draw migrants. To evaluate intermediary impacts, monies allocated to states by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, refugee resettlement by state, and refugee movements to MSAs are expressed as a Refugee Resettlement Index and linked to MSA profiles. We conclude that although refugees constitute only a portion of total immigration, their effects are disproportionately large in terms of changing the foreign-born profiles of MSAs and other communities, changing the fabric of society, and changing the geography of the foreign-born in all its ramifications.