Essays in public finance and labor economics

This thesis examines three questions of causality relevant to public finance and labor economics: the effect of racial segregation on city characteristics, the effect of divorce on women's economic outcomes, and the effect of abortion legalization on completed fertility. Chapter one examines the effect of segregation on cities. There is a strikingly negative city-level correlation between residential racial segregation and population outcomes -- particularly for black residents -- but it is widely recognized that this correlation may not be causal. This chapter provides a novel test of the causal relationship between segregation and population outcomes by exploiting the arrangements of railroad tracks in the 19th century to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in a city's susceptibility to segregation. I show that, conditional on miles of railroad track laid, the extent to which track configurations physically subdivided cities strongly predicts the level of segregation that ensued after the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern and western cities in the 20th century. Prior to the Great Migration, however, track configurations were uncorrelated with racial concentration, income, education and population, indicating that reverse causality is unlikely.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Ananat, Elizabeth Oltmans

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan Gruber and David Autor.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34508
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34508

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34508