Online Location, #D150
April 28, 2020, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM
This dissertation explores some of the current issues affecting the female and immigrant portions of the labor force, such as the gender wage gap and the path to legality for undocumented immigrants. Its aim is to shed light into some of the dynamics that are at play in the complex realms of women and immigrants in the workforce; in particular, to look at some of the obstacles that prevent their free and full participation in the U.S. labor force.
Chapter 1 considers the recent trends exhibited by the female labor force participation rates by ethnicity. Labor force participation rates for women increased steadily over the course of the twentieth century, but have declined since the year 2000. This has been the case for all population groups, except for one: Hispanic women. Their participation has increased since then --even through the Great Recession-- while all other groups' participation has declined even more sharply than before. Explanations for the decline of labor force participation rates include work force age, the return to school, and child care issues particularly in the case of women. This chapter finds that a lower reliance on market childcare allowed Hispanic females to remain in the labor force, thus making them "recession-proof".
Chapter 3 analyzes the potential effects of legality on the labor decisions of unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrants have been largely perceived as failing to prosper economically, or as showing poor "market citizenship", and therefore not deserving of citizenship status. Using a new methodology of imputation to generate estimates around the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA), this paper explores that notion, together with the idea of "citizen advantage", to show that the causality is actually reversed: that integrating otherwise unauthorized immigrants into the legal society allows for a less constrained decision optimization process, which in turn results in them pursuing economic prosperity, not only for themselves, but also for their communities.