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Title: Three Essays on the Appalachian Region
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Baumann, Robert William |
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Three Essays on the Appalachian Region Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2003. DAI-A 65/02, p. 636, Aug 2004 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Discrimination, Racial/Ethnic; Economics of Discrimination; Economics, Regional; Human Capital; Migration; Poverty; Racial Differences; Wage Levels The literature has largely ignored white poverty, perhaps because discrimination, particularly institutionalized discrimination, is not a factor driving the process. White poverty is also more easily ignored because it is rarely concentrated to the same extent as central city black poverty. The major exception to the diffusion of white poverty is Appalachia, a region that for decades has experienced the greatest concentration of white poverty in the U.S. My goal is to evaluate the role played by differences in human capital and economic opportunity on the outcomes of both Appalachian and non-Appalachian poor whites. I argue that a main determinant in the Appalachia's relative economic deprivation is lower levels of overall human capital and economic opportunity than the rest of the U.S. The above analysis will be divided into three essays. In the first essay, I estimate a three-stage wage equation model with two additional endogenous regressors, migration and employment, to determine how much of the Appalachian wage gap can be explained by the effects of human capital and local conditions and to estimate returns to migration using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, 1979. I find differences in human capital and economic opportunity account for all of the differences in employment and most of the difference in wages. Migration offers small absolute returns for Appalachians, but does not raise wages to the level of poor white non-Appalachians. The second essay uses the same data and model but simultaneously estimates the parameters using Maximum Simulated Likelihood (MSL) to achieve higher efficiency than the multi-step method. Human capital differences again explain almost all of the wage and employment gaps. Migration offers no return using MSL in this setting. The final essay decomposes the wage gap between Appalachia and the rest of the country into quantities and prices of human capital and industry and occupation shares, Data are taken from the Integrated Micro Public Use (IPUMS) census data project. The large increases in the wage gap during the 1980s were largely caused by changes in income inequality and skill prices unfavorable to Appalachians. |
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Bibliography Citation
Baumann, Robert William. Three Essays on the Appalachian Region. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2003. DAI-A 65/02, p. 636, Aug 2004. |