Hans G. Schwarz
Published: 2022
Total Pages: 0
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This dissertation consists of three essays on labor and demographic economics. The first chapter analyzes the interaction effects between the availability of subsidized childcare and an entitlement to a long job-protected parental leave. My identification strategy exploits the staggered roll-out of a federal expansion in the number of childcare centers for children ages 0-3 in Germany. Using the KiBS household survey and a generalized difference-in-differences approach, I find that an additional daycare center in a locality reduces the duration of maternal leave, which indicates that the two family-friendly policies are substitutes. Interior immigration enforcement in the U.S. has increasingly become the jurisdiction of local and state authorities. In the second chapter I analyze the role of deportation risk in the location decision of potential Mexican migrants between 1998-2013. I first construct a novel measure of deportation risk at the U.S. division level using a representative survey of deported Mexican individuals. I then build a static model of migration that incorporates geographic variation in deportation risk, wages, and presence of ethnic enclaves to perform counterfactual deportation policies. I find that the geographic variation in deportation risk does not seem to have a significant effect on the location decision of Mexican migrants during the period of study. Conditional on migrating to the U.S., the location decision of migrants is primarily driven by the historical ethnic enclave of the migrant's source community and by wage considerations. A rich literature shows that early life conditions shape later life outcomes, including health and migration events. However, analyses of geographic disparities in mortality outcomes focus almost exclusively on contemporaneously measured geographic place (e.g., state of residence at death). The third chapter (coauthored with Jason Fletcher, Michal Engelman, Norman Johnson, Jahn Hakes, and Alberto Palloni) uses the Mortality Disparities in American Communities dataset to show that there are important differences in life expectancy measures calculated based on state of residence compared with state of birth. We show that regional inequality in life expectancy is higher based on life expectancies by state of birth. Finally, we explore how state-specific features of in-migration, out-migration, and non-migration together shape measures of mortality disparities by state (of residence), further demonstrating the difficulty of clearly interpreting these widely used measures.