Diabetes and its comorbidities are risk factors for severe, including fatal, COVID-19 disease.1 Diabetes also requires regular monitoring, pharmacologic treatment, and access to medical care, all of which may have been disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. While preliminary data suggested that diabetes-specific mortality in the general population increased in the USA in association with the COVID-19 pandemic,2 population-level data on the rates, circumstances, and causes of death during the pandemic among people with diabetes are scarce.

Recent accessibility research suggests that the relationship between time and distance in the journey to work can produce diverging mobility situations. That is, areas farther away from employment can sometimes have faster commutes than areas closer, and vice versa. This article seeks to advance such research by exploring who is likely to experience which mobility situation. With data from the Census Transportation Planning Products 2012–2016, we examine accessibility in terms of time and distance in the journey to work in New York City to assess the spatial distribution of diverging mobility situations. We conduct a series of binomial logistic regressions and multinomial logistic regression models to assess how socioeconomic characteristics influence the likelihood of experiencing a specific mobility situation while controlling for transportation infrastructure and land-use patterns. The results of our study reveal the diverging mobility patterns across New York City and highlight the importance of socioeconomic characteristics on determining diverging mobility situations.

Essay I: Does rural to urban migration in developing countries improve the opportunities available to children? And does childhood urban exposure increase educational attainment? Using census data for 14 African countries combined with an age-at-move design, I show that childhood exposure to cities significantly raises primary school completion, school attendance, and literacy rates. The increase in educational attainment is robust to the inclusion of household fixed effects, visible in all subgroups and countries, and particularly large for girls. The paper hence provides evidence of a channel through which urbanization can stimulate economic growth in developing countries, even in the absence of structural transformation. Essay II: Despite the large urban-rural income gap across the developing world, it remains unclear to what degree this reflects the causal effect of urban residency. This paper presents new evidence by investigating the effect of urban residency during childhood on economic outcomes in adulthood. Causal identification is obtained from an age-at-move design combined with highquality Brazilian census data. The analysis shows that spending childhood in an environment one log-point denser increases adulthood earnings and wages by 2 - 3 percent. Around half of this effect is due to an increase in educational attainment. The findings suggest that the previous literature, by exclusively focusing on urban exposure during adulthood, has underestimated the causal effect of urban residency on earnings by 50%. Essay III: Despite a large urban-rural education gap in many countries, little attention has been paid to whether cities enjoy a comparative advantage in the production of human capital. Using Dutch administrative data, this paper finds that conditional on family characteristics and highly predictive measures of cognitive ability, children who grow up in urban regions consistently attain higher levels of human capital compared to children in rural regions. The elasticity of university attendance w.r.t. density is 0.07, which is robust across a wide variety of specifications. Hence, the paper highlights an alternative channel to explain the rise of the city. Essay IV (with Niklas Bengtsson and Adrian Poignant): Industrialization is a ubiquitous feature of economic development, but the consequences for workers remain poorly understood. In this paper, we study the effects of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution in the Swedish iron industry. Using linked census data and a novel data source on production, we find that displaced ironworkers were 23 pp more likely to exit the industry, 25 pp more likely to migrate internally and lost 10% of their earnings relative to other workers. While the displacement effects persist over time for workers, we find no evidence of spillovers on their children.

Do foreign students affect the economic outcomes of the natives at places where they attend college? I address this question by examining the local economic impacts of foreign post-secondary student enrollment expansion-induced demand shocks between 2004 and 2016 in the US. By exploiting the spatial variation in the change in foreign student enrollment and using an instrumental variables methodology, I estimate the causal effects on a vector of local economic outcomes. On average, the demand shock leads to a substantial increase in employment, business establishments, and wages in the local economy. Contrary to what standard models of spatial equilibrium suggest, I find no significant effect on rent, potentially because of the elastic housing supply. The findings suggest welfare gains for native workers as employment opportunities and wages increased, while the local cost of living did not. At the same time, I find no evidence of negative spillover effects on neighboring places that do not host college students. I further provide some evidence that the welfare gains for the native workers might be larger in sparsely populated counties in the long run due to higher housing supply elasticity than in densely populated counties. While the multiplier effect of foreign student enrollment on local economic outcomes is sizable, the marginal effect of domestic student enrollment is small.

Exposure to singular or overlapping external shocks may significantly shift gendered power dynamics within households as they cope with associated livelihood and security threats. Despite recognition that women are disproportionately affected by such shocks, no studies have yet assessed the separate and combined impacts of drought, conflict, and COVID-19 on women’s lives. In this study, we examine the impact of these three distinct and overlapping shocks on the lives of women in Burkina Faso. We use the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) data, a complex and spatially-referenced dataset, which was collected in Burkina Faso at three time points between 2019 and 2022. These data contain detailed questions on women’s sociodemographic characteristics, health, migration history, COVID-19 knowledge, and household dynamics. We spatially link these data with external rainfall, conflict, and COVID-19 case data and use longitudinal and spatial regression techniques to examine the impact of extreme events on women’s lives.

Objectives: Compared to other racial and ethnic groups, little to no disaggregated cancer incidence data exist for subgroups of non-Hispanic Blacks (NHBs), despite heterogeneity in sociodemographic characteristics and cancer risk factors within this group. Our objective was to examine age-adjusted cancer incidence by nativity and birthplace among NHB cancer cases diagnosed in New Jersey. Methods: Race, ethnicity, and birthplace data from the New Jersey State Cancer Registry were used to classify NHB cancer cases diagnosed between 2005-2017. Thirteen waves of population estimates (by county, nativity, gender, age-group) were derived from the American Community Survey using Integrated Public-Use Microdata to approximate yearly demographics. Age-adjusted cancer incidence rates (overall and by site) by birthplace were generated using SEER*Stat 8.3.8. Bivariate associations were assessed using chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests. Trend analyses were performed using Joinpoint 4.7. Results: Birthplace was available for 62.3% of the 71,019 NHB cancer cases. Immigrants represented 12.3%, with African-born, Haitian-born, Jamaican-born, ‘other-Caribbean-born’, and ‘other-non-American-born’ accounting for 18.5%, 17.7%, 16.5%, 10.6%, and 36.8%, respectively. Overall, age-adjusted cancer incidence rates were lower for NHB immigrants for all sites combined and for several of the top five cancers, relative to American-born NHBs. Age-adjusted cancer incidence was lower among immigrant than American-born males (271.6 vs. 406.8 per 100,000) and females (191.9 vs. 299.2 per 100,000). Age-adjusted cancer incidence was lower for Jamaican-born (114.6 per 100,000) and other-Caribbean-born females (128.8 per 100,000) than African-born (139.4 per 100,000) and Haitian-born females (149.9 per 100,000). No significant differences in age-adjusted cancer incidence were observed by birthplace among NHB males. Age-adjusted cancer incidence decreased for all sites combined from 2005-2017 among American-born males, immigrant males, and American-born females, while NHB immigrant female rates remained relatively stable. Conclusions: There is variation in age-adjusted cancer incidence rates across NHB subgroups, highlighting the need for more complete birthplace information in population-based registries to facilitate generating disaggregated cancer surveillance statistics by birthplace. This study fills a knowledge gap of critical importance for understanding and ultimately addressing cancer inequities.

We examine the relationship between board diversity and a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in a novel way. The relation between visible forms of board diversity (gender, ethnic, age diversity) and CSR may arise endogenously due to visible diversity management. In contrast, we focus on cultural diversity (based on directors' ancestry), which is less visible. We demonstrate that cultural diversity, unlike visible diversity, is not considered in director replacements, consistent with cultural diversity not being affected by firms signaling their CSR commitment by ‘looking’ diverse. We show that board cultural diversity is positively related to CSR performance. This result holds when we control for visible board diversity, directors' foreignness and diversity in nationalities, and endogeneity. We also show that CSR performance decreases when a firm increases its visible board diversity at the cost of cultural diversity.

Purpose: As US suburbs experience profound demographic shifts, scholars have expressed concern of rising segregation among suburban public schools. We extend this work by examining exposure to poverty by race and racial differences in exposure to economic disadvantage in the wake of the Great Recession across a typology of suburban neighborhoods in the Chicago metropolitan area. Research Methods/Approach: We merge enrollment data from schools with census data on the demographic and economic attributes of residents and examine racial differences in exposure to school poverty. Findings: We find intrasuburban variation, with all racial groups seeing a stark increase in economic school segregation between 2007 and 2018, with Whites experiencing the largest growth in inner suburbs, and Black and Hispanics increasingly disadvantaged in outer suburbs. Implications: Our findings underscore complex forms of suburban disadvantage in rapidly diversifying suburbs.

This paper investigated whether the commonly observed immigrant health advantage persists among undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and provides nationally representative evidence on the health of this vulnerable population. Data were derived from pooled cross-sections of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS, 2000–2018). The legal status of foreign-born NHIS respondents is imputed using a non-parametric machine learning model built based on information from the 2004, 2008 and 2014 cohorts of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that, despite exposure to numerous additional risk factors, the undocumented population experienced a more pronounced Healthy Migrant Effect, with lower odds of reporting fair or poor self-rated health, any physician-diagnosed chronic conditions or being obese. The observed patterns in undocumented health outcomes may be related to the additional challenges and exclusionary policies associated with undocumented migration that could in turn lead to a more pronounced selection of healthy and resilient individuals.

An incisive examination of how growth-at-all-costs planning and policy have exacerbated inequality and racial division in Atlanta. Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them. Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.

COVID-19 vaccines are widely available in wealthy countries, yet many people remain unvaccinated. Understanding the effectiveness -- or lack thereof -- of popular vaccination campaign strategies is therefore critical. In this paper, we report results from two studies that tested strategies central to current vaccination outreach: (1) direct communication by health professionals addressing questions about vaccination and (2) efforts to motivate individuals to promote vaccination within their social networks. Near the peak of the Omicron wave, doctor- and nurse-produced videos were disseminated to 17.8 million Facebook users in the US and 11.5 million in France. In both countries, we cannot reject the null of no effect of any of the interventions on any of the outcome variables (first doses - US and France, second doses and boosters - US). We can reject very small effects on first doses during the interventions in both countries (0.16pp - US, 0.021pp - France). In contrast with similar campaigns earlier in the pandemic to encourage health-preserving behaviors, messaging at this stage of the pandemic -- whether aimed at the unvaccinated or those tasked with encouraging others -- did not change vaccination decisions.

Subcounty housing unit counts are important for studying geo-historical patterns of (sub)urbanization, land-use change, and residential loss and gain. The most commonly used subcounty geographical unit for social research in the United States is the census tract. However, the changing geometries and historically incomplete coverage of tracts present significant obstacles for longitudinal analysis that existing datasets do not sufficiently address. Overcoming these barriers, we provide housing unit estimates in consistent 2010 tract boundaries for every census year from 1940 to 2010 plus 2019 for the entire continental US. Moreover, we develop an “urbanization year” indicator that denotes if and when tracts became “urbanized” during this timeframe. We produce these data by blending existing interpolation techniques with a novel procedure we call “maximum reabsorption.” Conducting out-of-sample validation, we find that our hybrid approach generally produces more reliable estimates than existing alternatives. The final dataset, Historical Housing Unit and Urbanization Database 2010 (HHUUD10), has myriad potential uses for research involving housing, population, and land-use change, as well as (sub)urbanization.

This article describes a comprehensive geographic information system of Third Republic France: the TRF-GIS. It provides annual nomenclatures and shapefiles of administrative constituencies of metropolitan France from 1870 to 1940, encompassing general administrative constituencies (départements, arrondissements, cantons) as well as the most significant special administrative constituencies: military, judicial and penitentiary, electoral, academic, labor inspection, and ecclesiastical constituencies. It further proposes annual nomenclatures at the contemporaneous commune level that map each municipality into its corresponding administrative framework along with its population count. The 901 nomenclatures, 830 shapefiles, and complete reproduction material of the TRF-GIS are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataverse/TRF-GIS.

Although a shortage of affordable rental housing is often framed as an urban-area issue, rural communities also suffer from this problem. On average, rural and urban renters spend similar shares of their income on rent and have comparable rates of housing-cost burden. Years of slow income growth and skyrocketing rents, particularly during the 2000–2010 period, have eroded slack in household budgets that may have gone toward other expenses or toward savings. The coronavirus pandemic likely has exacerbated affordability problems by putting many rural residents out of work. The share of jobs lost in rural New England communities has been large, even though these areas have seen far fewer cases of COVID-19 (relative to their population size and overall) compared with the region’s urban areas. This is in contrast with the experience in much of the rest of the country, where, as of January, rural areas nationally had seen far more COVID-19 cases but had lost a smaller share of jobs. Due to the economic conditions in the region’s rural areas, many renters could find it increasingly difficult to afford their housing costs. Even after the pandemic ends and the negative economic impact subsides, rural New England households likely will still face considerable affordability challenges.

Our estimates indicate that the number of jobs in the Florida labor market will decrease by about 114,000 to 285,000 from September 2021 till September 2026, per our wage elasticity levels. As many as 1.7 % to 5.6% of Florida households may be impacted by the effects of a benefits cliff following the wage increase. Our estimates examine those within the poverty level brackets of varying cutoff points for the respective public assistance programs analyzed throughout the report.

The first chapter examines how women's local labor supply decisions affect the national gender wage gap. The national wage is the sum of weighted local wages, which combines local wages and local employment weights. Here, I emphasize the role of local employment weights, especially for women, which can reflect worker's labor supply decisions across locations. I show that, only for highly-educated women, there is a significant negative relationship between employment-to-population ratio and average log wage across locations. This relationship is stronger for married women with children. Since fewer highly-educated women are working in high-wage cities while more highly-educated women are working in low-wage cities (i.e. different employment weights), I argue that the national-level gender wage gap would be overstated. To test this hypothesis, I use two empirical strategies. First, I conduct a counterfactual gender wage gap analysis by replacing women's local employment weights with men's and show that the log wage difference between men and women with an advanced degree can be reduced by 2 percent. Second, I estimate the college-educated gender wage gap with location controls, which is 5 percent less than the gap without location controls. In the second chapter, I study how occupational characteristics can affect women's timing of fertility and how women's labor supply after childbirth changes depending on the timing of fertility and their occupations. By considering occupational characteristics of time constraints and human capital depreciation among skilled occupations in the US, I find that college-educated women who work in high-hours occupations tend to delay their fertility. Moreover, I observe that a similar pattern of delaying fertility arises in occupations with interpersonal relationships, autonomy, and competitiveness. Finally, I show that women in high-hours occupations who delay fertility tend to decrease their labor supply after childbirth, mainly by reducing working hours or dropping out of the labor force rather than switching occupations.

Increased automation, globalization, and longevity demand new thinking by employers and employees regarding productivity. Throughout the lifespan, fuller engagement in education and paid and unpaid productive activities can generate a wealth of benefits, including better health and well-being, greater financial security, and a more vital society. We review challenges and opportunities to advance long, healthy, and productive lives. When possible, we review inequities by gender, race, ethnicity, and other social determinants of health to reveal heterogeneity within the growing U.S. population and workforce. We conclude with implications for research, social policy, advocacy, education, and practice.

Time constraints parents face can affect whether infant children are vaccinated on time. Using the National Immunization Survey, we employ a synthetic control difference-in-difference estimation technique to establish a causal relationship arising from California's implementation of Paid Parental Leave Program as a natural experiment. We find California Paid Family Leave reduced late vaccinations by up to 5 percentage points or approximately 10% for children born to parents in California after the policy was implemented. Further, the policy had a stronger impact on families below the poverty line. Thus access to paid family leave can improve on-time immunization of infants.

In the U.S., Black and white households with identical incomes live in neighborhoods characterized by vastly different economic resources. This racial neighborhood inequality is present in every major metropolitan area and at all points of the income distribution. We document these patterns using neighborhood income as a summary measure of economic resources and highlight where this form of racial inequality is especially severe. We then examine a series of potential explanatory mechanisms for neighborhood inequality, including decentralized racial sorting, housing discrimination, and racial differences in wealth and home ownership. We conclude with a discussion of how the separate and unequal geography of the American housing market contributes to intergenerational mobility and the speed of racial economic convergence in the United States.

The Filipino Americans living in Hampton Roads, Virginia have comprised of almost 2% of the region’s overall population, and 5.3% of the population in Virginia Beach, Virginia (United States Census Bureau, 2019) (Greater Hampton Roads Connects, 2021). Filipino Americans in Hampton Roads, like the rest of the population, are equally vulnerable to experiencing flooding when commuting to and from work or simply traveling around town, but previous research and surveys from the Hampton Roads Region have failed in their ability to capture this cultural diversity within perception of flood risk. In this paper, a qualitative research design was used to conduct a survey of Filipino American residents in Virginia Beach regarding their flood risk perceptions and experiences. The results of the survey were then compared to existing flood risk research and to results of previous surveys of Hampton Roads residents. The results are useful for understanding the baseline perception of flooding within Virginia Beach’s Filipino American community and how they compare against the total Hampton Roads’ population. The results indicate that despite most survey results came from a younger age group than previous research and not fully representative of the overall Filipino population, the collected Filipino American’s flood experiences and flood risk perceptions were generally similar, with some varying differences, to existing survey collection in the Hampton Roads region. Therefore, regardless of racial identity, the overall cultural experiences are based more closely with shared geographic location and perceptions are developed by these experiences and personal knowledge regarding causes and impacts of flooding in Virginia Beach, Virginia.