Essays in Applied Microeconomics

This dissertation concerns families, women, and community, with a particular focus on East Asia and Asian-Americans. The first chapter, “Internal Migration and Ethnic Reconcentration of Chinese-Americans after 1965,” examines the development of Chinese ethnic communities in the state of California in the late twentieth century. I estimate the impact of a dramatic increase in Chinese immigration after 1965 on the internal migration decisions of Chinese-Americans. To this end I utilize a triple-difference strategy, comparing differences in migration behavior before and after the immigration reform and between Chinese-Americans and a plausible control group, Japanese-Americans. I find that Chinese-Americans were 2.5- 2.9 times more likely than Japanese-Americans to move to California, the state attracting a plurality of immigrants from China after 1965. Additionally, Chinese-Americans living in California after 1965 enjoyed a larger income premium relative to California residents of Japanese descent during the same period. Taken together, these results provide evidence of ethnic reconcentration of Chinese-Americans in California and positive economic returns to living and working within the ethnic community, leading to the establishment of communities of ethnic Chinese that have grown and flourished into the present day.

The second chapter, “Gender Discrimination Reform and Women’s Employment in Taiwan,” documents the impacts of a legal ban on gender discrimination in the workplace on women’s employment and wages in Taiwan. The Gender Equality in Employment Act of 2002 outlawed hiring and firing decisions based on gender and required employers to offer maternity benefits, among other provisions. This project draws on previous work on the effect of legislative mandates regarding female labor force outcomes and applies it to the case of Taiwan, a small industrialized economy in East Asia. Using the Taiwanese Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) from 2000-2008, I use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate changes in Taiwanese women’s labor market decisions in light of this law. I find that the enactment of the GEEA increased the employment-to-population ratio by 8.3 percentage points for women under age 40 and by 9.5 percentage points for single women, but had no effect on the employment-to-population ratios of married women or women with children. The GEEA also raised monthly salaries of single women by 7.2 percent but reduced salaries of married women and women with children by 6.9-7.1 percent. Thus, the Gender Equality in Employment Act improved employment outcomes for only a subset of women who were not the traditional targets of gendered employment discrimination.

The third chapter of the dissertation, “Fame and Family: the Wives and Children of US Presidential Candidates,” studies the impact of an individual’s high-stress profession on his family’s health, namely the impact of US presidential service on the expected lifespans of his wife and children. We constructed a new dataset on the lifespans of presidents’ family members to test the hypothesis that family members of the president share in the loss of life experienced by the president. As the counterfactual, we use the lifespans of family members of the runners-up in presidential elections. We find no significant differences in life expectancy following the election between the groups. While the sample sizes are too small to conclusively determine the change in longevity, point estimates suggest that First Ladies survive fewer years than wives of losing candidates following elections, while presidents’ children enjoy more years of life relative to children of losing candidates.