At the turn of the 20th century, state and local governments in the United States began to establish public employment offices. These non-profit governmental organizations match job seekers and businesses, one of their main objectives being to protect job seekers from fraudulent activities by private employment agencies. In this paper, I propose a theory that describes the malpractices of private employment agencies as a situation of asymmetric information between job seekers and the private employment agencies, which could cause adverse selection in the labor exchange market. The establishment of public employment offices can be viewed as a policy device to eliminate low-quality private employment agencies committing malpractices. I show that public employment offices helped lower the degree of asymmetric information. The majority of job seekers who used public employment offices were unskilled workers, immigrants, or migrants who were vulnerable to exploitation by private employment agencies. I also find that the role of public employment offices was especially important for interstate migrants who were most lacking in information and networks in their new environment.

In the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century, state and local governments began to establish public employment offices. These non-profit governmental organizations match businesses and job seekers. Their goals were to reduce search and information costs and eliminate fraudulent activities by private employment agencies in the labor exchange. This paper estimates the usage and placements for job seekers through public employment offices in relation to the labor market conditions in order to explore the development of this labor market intermediary. It also estimates the geographical diffusion and the number of offices over time. In addition, it analyzes who used public employment offices. Finally, a theory of public employment offices is proposed to describe the situation which differs from that in today.

Paper estimates local tax burdens for four hypothetical households across Tennessee counties in 2005. Taxes included in study are the local property tax, the local option sales tax, and local wheel taxes. Property taxes are estimated using 2005 ACS dataset for Tennessee, sales taxes are estimated using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and wheel taxes from actual wheel tax rates and car ownership data from 2005 ACS data for Tennessee.

Human capital is now widely recognized to confer numerous benefits, including higher incomes, lower incidence of unemployment, and better health, to those who invest in it. Yet, recent evidence suggests that it also produces larger, social (external)benefits, such as greater aggregate income and productivity as well as lower rates of crime and political corruption. This paper considers whether human capital also delivers external benefits via reduced mortality. That is, after conditioning on various individual-specific characteristics including income and education, do we observe lower rates of mortality in economies with higher average levels of education among the total population? Evidence from a sample of more than 200 U.S. metropolitan areas over the decade of the 1990s suggests that there are significant human capital externalities on health. After conditioning on a variety of city-specific characteristics, the findings suggest that a 5 percentage point decrease in the fraction of college graduates in the population corresponds to a 14 to 40 percent increase in the probability of (all-cause) death, on average. Although I am unable to identify the precise mechanism by which this relationship operates, it is certainly consistent with the idea that interactions with highly educated individuals - who tend to exhibit relatively healthy behaviors - encourage others to adopt similar behaviors. Evidence of a significant inverse relationship between aggregate human capital and smoking, conditional on personal characteristics, in a sample of 226 U.S. metropolitan areas provides additional support for this hypothesis.

In November 2006, Tennesseans voted to amend the state constitution to allow local governments to freeze property taxes (on homesteads) for certain low-income senior citizens. The General Assembly is responsible for setting an income and/or wealth constraint that establishes eligibility to the program, but local governments themselves are responsible for the cost of any locally authorized tax freeze program. As a result, the cost of any local low income senior tax freeze will be financed either by local taxpayers excluded from the program or by local budget cuts, or some combination of the two. The purpose of this report is threefold: using several different household income threshold levels, (1) estimate the number of eligible senior households at each income threshold in each county, (2) estimate the total value of residential assessments accounted for by these eligible senior households (at each income threshold and for each county), and (3) provide preliminary estimates of the impact of the various income thresholds on the property tax base in each Tennessee county. The number of impacted senior households and the value of assessments impacted by the tax freeze were estimated using information made available from the 2005 American Community Survey (U. S. Census); specifically data extracted from the 2005 Public-Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) for Tennessee. This data source provided specific information for twelve counties and general information useful in estimating the needed data for the balance of Tennessee counties. The estimated data produced from the PUMS source was then integrated with known information on the distribution of property assessments in Tennessee counties (residential versus commercial, industrial, and utility assessments) to produce estimates of the percent of overall assessments impacted by a tax freeze program.

Dropout rates have fallen little over the last thirty years and remain disproportionately high among blacks, Hispanics, and children from low-income families. Many states have considered raising the minimum school leaving age as a means to improve on these outcomes. Several states have already raised the school leaving age above 16, although often with exceptions. This paper uses these recent changes to estimate the effects from more compulsory schooling. The results suggest that more restrictive laws would reduce dropout rates, increase college enrollment, and improve career outcomes. Some caution is warranted because focusing on more recent law changes leads to more imprecision. But the consistent findings with previous studies are suggestive that compulsory high school at later ages can benefit disadvantaged youth.

This essay explores various components of a measure of pretax U.S. family income after adjusting for the size of the family in the U.S. in 1975 and 2000. Using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, an important stylized fact is revealed: The rising inequality of property incomes, particularly dividends, interest, and rent, have played the most important role in the increase of overall income inequality. Contrary to popular belief, increasing inequality of labor income plays only a secondary role. For property incomes a simple model shows why this determining role in income inequality should continue for the next decade and, most likely, even further in the future.Keywords: Income distribution, property income, consumer debtJEL Classifications: D31, J30, D10

One of the most robust findings emerging from studies of industrial agglomeration is the rise in productivity that tends to accompany it.What most studies have not addressed, however, is the potential role played by human capital externalities in driving this relationship. This paper seeks to do so using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census covering a collection of 77 (primarily) three-digit manufacturing industries across a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas. The analysis generates two primary results. First, a variety of education- and experience-based measures of average human capital rise significantly as an industrys employment in a metropolitan area increases. Hence, clusters of industry do tend to be characterized by larger stocks of human capital. However, second, even after accounting for the level of human capital in a workers own industry, the overall size of the industry remains strongly associated with wages. Such results cast some doubt on the notion that localization economies emanate from education- or experience-based knowledge spillovers.

The impact of military service on the social status attainment of World War II veterans has been studied since the 1950s; however, the research has failed to come to any consensus with regard to the level of their attainment. Analyses have generally focused on cross-sectional data or longitudinal data without considering the effects of military service over the life course. In this study I argue that World War II veterans had greater social attainment over their lifetimes; that black World War II veterans attained more than white World War II veterans relative to their non-veteran peers; that veterans who served in the latter years of the World War II mobilization attained more than those who served in the earlier years; and that veterans born in cohorts with large proportions of veterans attained more than veterans born to cohorts with smaller proportions of veterans. Social status is measured in terms of education, income, and Duncan Socio-Economic Index. In order to test these hypotheses I use data from the 1950 through 2000 Public Use Microdata Sample. Military service clearly afforded veterans significant advantages through their early and middle working years; however, their non-veteran peers eventually did catch up. Black veterans attained more social status than their non veteran peers throughout their lives. Furthermore, the magnitude of the difference in social status attainment is greater for black veterans relative to their non-veteran peers than the difference for white-veterans relative to their non-veteran peers until very late in the life course. Additionally, peak mobilization phase veterans receive advantage although it is relatively short lived.

While the productivity gains associated with the geographic concentration of industry (i.e., localisation) are by now well-documented, little work has considered how those gains are distributed across individual workers. This article offers evidence on the connection between total employment and the relative wage earnings of high- and low-skill workers (i.e., inequality) within two-digit manufacturing industries across the states, and a collection of metropolitan areas in the U.S. between 1970 and 1990. Using measures of overall, between-education-group and residual inequality, I find that wage dispersion falls significantly as industry employment expands.

This preliminary paper develops a strategy for mapping the 19th century expansion ofthe transportation network in the United States during the nineteenth century using GIS.It focuses in particular on railroads and takes a critical look at work assessing theirimportance to American economic growth and development during this crucial period inour history.

This paper offers a novel approach to the nonparametric identification and estimation of a generalized Roy model that includes a non-pecuniary component of utility associated with each choice alternative. The original Roy model (1951) was used as a tool to describe occupational sorting based on only wages, but it has broader applications to many polychotomous choice problems if the non-pecuniary component of utility is included. We begin with a well-known result for the pure Roy model described in Heckman and Honore (1990)-without parametric restrictions or the availability of covariates, all of the useful content of a cross-sectional dataset is absorbed in a restrictive specification of sorting behavior that imposes independence on wage draws. While this is certainly true within the context of the pure Roy model, we demonstrate that it is possible to identify, under relatively innocuous assumptions and without the use of covariates, a common non-pecuniary component of utility associated with each sector. We develop nonparametric estimators corresponding to two alternative assumptions under which we prove identification, derive asymptotic properties, and illustrate small sample properties with a series of Monte Carlo experiments. We demonstrate the usefulness of one of these estimators with an empirical application based on Dahl (2001). Micro data from the 2000 Census are used to calculate the returns to a college education. If high-school and college graduates face different costs of migration, this would be reflected in different degrees of Roy-sorting-induced bias in their observed wage distributions. Correcting for this bias, the observed returns to a college degree are cut in half. We would like to thank Richard Blundell, James Heckman, and seminar participants at SUNY Albany for their helpful comments. All remaining errors and omissions are our own. Correspondence should be directed to all three authors at the

The active opposition to technical change has frequently impeded economic growth. This article examines the widespread resistance to government-led campaigns to use new tuberculin testing technologies to eradicate bovine tuberculosis in the United States. We explore three issues: the political economy of opposition; the role of earlier scientific controversies in the discourse; and the techniques used by the opponents. Over time, the protests shifted from challenging the scientific merits of the testing technology to more nuts-and-bolts distributional and administrative issues.

Scant attention has been paid to the social and economic diversity within the African American community in particular cities at the beginning stage of the Great Migration. This article examines the variation in characteristics of African Americans from different places of birth at the onset of the Great Migration living in one city, Hartford, Connecticut. The article focuses on three major attributes of African Americans with differing geographic backgrounds residing in Hartford during this time period: (a) their socioeconomic status, (b) their settlement patterns within the city, and (c) the extent of their civic participation. The article reveals sizable differences along these three dimensions among African Americans of differing geographic origins.

Does attracting or losing jobs in high paying sectors have important spill-over effects on wages in other sectors? The answer to this question is central to a proper assessment of many trade and industrial policies. In this paper, we explore this question by examining how predictable changes in industrial composition in favor of high paying sectors affect wage determination at the industry-city level. In particular, we use US Census data over the years 1970 to 2000 to quantify the relationship between changes in industry-specific city-level wages and changes in industrial composition. Our finding is that the spill-over (i.e., general equilibrium) effects associated with changes in the fraction of jobs in high paying sectors are very substantial and persistent. Our point estimates indicate that the total effect on average wages of a change in industrial composition that favors high paying sectors is about 3.5 times greater than that obtained from a commonly used composition-adjustment approach which neglects general equilibrium effects. We interpret our results as being most likely driven by a variant of the mechanism recently emphasized in the heterogenous firm literature whereby changes in competitive pressure cause a reallocation of employment toward the most efficient firms.

Most of the policy debate about immigration in the United States is about the appropriate amount of immigration and the appropriate policies toward temporary workers and undocumented workers. These are primarily federal policy issues. But state and local policymakers face a different challenge: that of helping immigrants in their regions adjust to life in the United States, especially economic life. As a basis for state and local immigrant incorporation policy, this report will show how immigrants' economic well-being compares across metropolitan areas.

Schools Betrayed is a history of inner-city schooling in northern U.S. cities between 1900 and 1960. Using both documentary and quantitative evidence, the book evaluates explanations for growing racial disparities in educational outcomes, including post-World War II economic and demographic change, racial discrimination in employment, and racial/ethnic culture, and contends that the problems of inner-city education cannot be understood without inquiry into the institutional development of urban education. The book uses Chicago as a case and, in order to highlight questions of race, compares the educational experiences of African Americans with southern and eastern European immigrant populations. It relies extensively on IPUMS data in order to document educational outcomes as well as economic strategies and the economic rewards of schooling.