College educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas. These areas were home to 32 percent of all college educated couples in 1940, 39 percent in 1970, and 50 percent in 1990. We investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity of the colocation problem. We argue that the latter explanation is the primary one. Smaller cities may therefore experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and thus become poorer.
We argue that over the past 300 years human physiology has been undergoing profound environmentally induced changes made possible by numerous advances in technology. These changes, which we call technophysio evolution, increased body size by over 50%, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems. Because technophysio evolution is still ongoing, it is relevant to forecasts of longevity and morbidity and, therefore, to forecasts of the size of the elderly population and pension and health care costs.
Abstract"Nudges" are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that the popular electricity conservation "nudge" of providing feedback to households on own and peers' home electricity usage in a home electricity report is two to four times more effective with political liberals than with conservatives. Political conservatives are more likely than liberals to opt out of receiving the home electricity report and to report disliking the report. Our results suggest that energy conservation nudges need to be targeted to be most effective. (JEL: Q41, D03, D72)
We thank Maximilian Auffhammer, the participants at the 2010 POWER Conference, and seminar participants at Princeton and the University of Illinois for comments. We thank the UCLA Ziman Real Estate Center for funding. We thank the editors and five reviewers for their comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
In the United States and in other OECD countries of the twenty-first century, women are likely to be active participants in the labor force, holding the full range of unskilled, professional and managerial jobs. Widespread work for pay outside of the home and work in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of for the women of a century ago. In the United States, only 20 percent of all women worked for pay in 1900. Less than 6 percent of all married women older than 15 labored for pay. Those who did work came from predominately working-class families. By the century's end, the labor force participation of all women older than 16 had risen to 60 percent, participation of all married women older than 16 had risen to 62 percent, and participation rates were higher among college educated women than among those with a high school education or less.This dramatic change in women's social and economic status can only be understood by looking to the past. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the "factory girl" set the stage for the unmarried "office girl." The unmarried office girl paved the way for the entry of married women into the labor force in the late 1950s, even though this entry was primarily in dead-end jobs in the clerical sector. In turn, the married women in the labor force paved the way for the rise of the modern career woman, doing work that requires a lengthy period of training and that offers genuine opportunities for promotion. As late as 1970, only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees were awarded to women, only 8 percent of all students enrolled in law schools were women, and only 8 percent of all medical school graduates were women. By the end of the 1990s, women earned 40 percent of all doctoral degrees and represented over 40 percent of all graduates from medical and law schools
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