The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial employment losses in the US. To understand how this impact fell on male and female workers unevenly, I empirically investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on the gender inequality in labor markets and analyze the variation in effects across sectors. I find that the COVID-19 pandemic influences all sectors to different degrees, with the tertiary (service) sector hit the hardest. The pandemic has also exacerbated gender inequality in certain sectors, but not all: women working in the tertiary sector are most economically harmed, while sectors that rely mostly on knowledge and technology tend to work remotely and generally have the least impact in working hours from the pandemic. The intersectionality of race, gender, and educational attainment also contributes to the disparities in labor markets across all sectors. Results also show that marriage benefits employment, and that having children under the age of five could slightly disadvantage workers in the labor markets.

By locking in today’s tuition rate for future college attendance, the prepaid tuition program (PTP) is designed to encourage parents to invest in their children’s human capital. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the state PTP on college attainment by using data from the 2011–2013 American Community Survey. By exploiting cross-state variation in the timing of the implementation of the state PTP, I found that the program adoption was associated with a 0.7–1.0 percentage point increase in college enrollment rates and a 0.5–0.7 percentage point increase in college completion rates.

This essay offers a reappraisal of the racial politics of the nineteenth-century Cuban independence struggle through an analysis of the experience, as migrants, of Rafael Serra and other Afro-descendant activists in New York. Serra was the leader of a community that worked with José Martí to create the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC). The author makes use of digital tools for network visualization and mapping to illustrate the evidence of both race-based (diasporic), class-based, and nationalist social networks among Serra’s constituents. These networks, created against a backdrop of highly localized residential segregation, facilitated a range of political strategies including the creation of race-based organizations, alliances with African Americans, and the more famous cross-racial coalitions of the PRC. Such strategies were not mutually exclusive, as has sometimes been presumed, but rather mutually dependent. In presenting this evidence, the author responds to recent work by Putnam on research “in the digital age” and follows Solberg’s call on digital humanities scholars to “give away our game,” presenting a critical self-appraisal of the digital methods, tools, and labor arrangements employed. Following Tufte and Theibault, he concludes that digital visual representations are useful to humanities scholars not because they generate or validate arguments, but because they can effectively illustrate arguments that rest on humanistic systems of analysis and evidence.

The article deals with racial disparities in the distribution of pre-tax wages and salaries for employed individuals in the USA between the ages of 18-65. This study is done for the ten largest metropolitan areas of the USA using the 2019 American Community Survey data. The metropolitan areas included in the study are Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, New York-Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria. Employing well over a quarter of the total employed labour force in the USA, these ten metropolitan areas are also some of the largest industrial worlds. Average pre-tax wages and salaries, the standard deviation of the mean and Gini coefficient by major racial categories are presented for each of these ten metropolitan areas. For each metropolitan area, black employed individuals earned less in pre-tax wages and salaries than white employed individuals. The Gini coefficient of black pre-tax wages and wages is also found to be smaller for each of the metropolitan areas compared to the white counterparts. It suggests a much tighter distribution in pre-tax wages and salaries for blacks compared to whites. Furthermore, employed workers from other races earned less in pre-tax wages and salaries than their white counterparts for each major metro. Except for Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area, black employed workers also earned less pre-tax wages and salaries than members of the other races. The Gini coefficients of pre-tax wages and salaries for various metropolitan areas for different races are found to be broadly comparable and often larger than that of the whites. Together, these results point to the fact that the pre-tax wages and salaries of black workers are lower compared to both whites and other races and more tightly distributed. Lastly, the relative inequality between whites and blacks and others and blacks often point to the relatively broader dispersion in the later group compared to the former.

In recent years, a number of high-profile policing controversies have led to global indignation over racial disparities in policing and perceived police brutality. This paper explores three different dimensions of race in policing. The first chapter of this dissertation examines whether the presence of female and minority police officers affects the likelihood of police use of force and whether officers are more or less likely to use force against civilians of a different race. Focusing on a subset of 911 calls resulting in arrest, I use an instrumental variables estimation method with dispatch availability by officer race/gender as an instrument for the presence of different officer types. I find that the presence of a female officer significantly reduces the likelihood that force is used. Calls involving white officers and black civilians are significantly more likely to result in use of force. The second chapter uses data on 7.5 million police-civilian interactions made by 1,663 Texas Highway Patrol officers to estimate the impact of five mandatory police trainings on the racial composition of traffic stops and racial disparities in related outcomes. The five trainings considered are (1) Cultural Diversity; (2) Arrest, Search & Seizure; (3) Racial Profiling; (4) Traffic; and (5) Deescalation. We exploit quasi-random variation in the timing of when individual officers receive training and estimate a series of event study models. We find that training has little to no effect on policing behavior in terms of either racial composition or stops or related outcomes. In general, our findings cast serious doubt on the ability of policymakers to use training as an effective intervention for combatting longstanding disparities in law enforcement. The third chapter examines whether externally-imposed affirmative action plans designed to increase the shares of nonwhite and female police officers have impacted the rates of reported offenses and/or offenses cleared by arrest. Using a series of modern econometric strategies including difference-in-differences decomposition and generalized synthetic controls, we do not find a significant effect of court-imposed affirmative action plans on the rates of reported offenses or reported offenses cleared by arrest. We also consider whether unlitigated agencies change their practices due to the threat of litigation but are unable to identify causal evidence of such threat effects.

Objective: To econometrically model an Indiana referendum, held in 1851, on whether to ban African American immigration—the restriction passed easily—with a focus on identifying demographic groups that were less enthusiastic about this law. Methods: Census data for 1850 is used in a fractional response regression model to assess the significant variation in support for this ban across Indiana's 91 counties. Results: Support for the ban fell in counties with few African Americans; a large percentage of adult White males born in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania; Quaker meetinghouses; and Church of the Brethren and Mennonite congregations. Support increased in counties with a high availability of unimproved farmland. Conclusion: White fears of land competition with Blacks may have prompted higher support for the ban. Groups that provided less support were often out of step with dominant Hoosier religious and political mores.

Background: During a pandemic, women may be especially vulnerable to secondary health problems driven by its social and economic effects. We examined the relationship between changes in health-related socioeconomic risks (HRSRs) and mental health. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional survey of 3,200 women aged 18-90 years was conducted in April 2020 using a quota-based sample from a national panel (88% cooperation rate). Patterns of change in HRSRs (food insecurity, housing instability, interpersonal violence, and difficulties with utilities and transportation) were described. Weighted, multivariate logistic regression was used to model the odds of depression, anxiety, and traumatic stress symptoms among those with and without incident or worsening HRSRs. Results: More than 40% of women had one or more prepandemic HRSRs. In the early pandemic phase, 49% of all women, including 29% with no prepandemic HRSRs, had experienced incident or worsening HRSRs. By April 2020, the rates of depression and anxiety were twice that of prepandemic benchmarks (29%); 17% of women had symptoms of traumatic stress. The odds of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms were two to three times higher among women who reported at least one incident or worsening HRSR; this finding was similar for women with and without prepandemic HRSRs. Conclusions: Increased health-related socioeconomic vulnerability among U.S. women early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was prevalent and associated with alarmingly high rates of mental health problems. Pandemic-related mental health needs are likely to be much greater than currently available resources , especially for vulnerable women.

US labor market polarization over the past several decades has occurred alongside substantial demographic changes in the size, gender, and skill levels of the immigrant labor force. Yet few studies have investigated how these demographic changes have affected earnings inequality within and between immigrant and US native populations over time. This paper draws on multiple sources of data to examine trends in earnings inequality among immigrants and US natives and the changing returns to skill for each subpopulation. Using data from the 1994–2019 Current Population Survey, we show that levels of earnings inequality are similar among high-skill immigrants and US natives during the study period; however, inequality among low-skill US natives consistently exceeds that of low-skill immigrants. Furthermore, the returns to skill have remained greater among high-skill immigrants relative to high-skill US natives over time. Second, using longitudinal data from the 1993–1999 and 2003–2010 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), we find that between 1993–1999 earnings among high-skill workers did not differ by nativity. However, between 2003–2010, an earnings gap between high-skill immigrants and US natives emerged, with high-skill immigrants, both men and women, experiencing an earnings advantage over high-skill US natives. Differences in sociodemographic, family, and labor force characteristics explain some, but not all, earnings gaps across nativity and skill groups. These results have important implications for rising economic inequality in the United States.

This dissertation is composed of three essays focus on intergroup marriage and female-headed households. I am motivated by recognizing systemic or structural factors affecting marriage outcomes in China and Chinese Americans in the United States. The first essay, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Interethnic Marriage? -- Evidence from Western China”, estimates economic returns from interethnic marriages in China. Until now, interethnic marriage has not been tested as a possibility for overcoming the Han-ethnic Minzu earnings disparity. I employ an instrumental variable approach to estimate returns from Han-Minzu intermarriages. The estimates indicate that ethnic Minzu do not gain statistically significant benefits by marrying Han. Furthermore, the returns for Han and ethnic Minzu members from intermarriage are different once controlling the unobserved correlation between intermarriage and earnings. The second essay, “Linking the Supply of Marriageable Males and Female-Headed Families: the case of China”, measures the linkage between supply of marriageable males to the formation of female headship. Focusing on the economic desirability of unmarried men, rather than just quantity of men, I propose a new male marriageability measure. My measure presents a sizeable and negative relationship between male marriageability and female headship for ethnic Minzu, but an insignificant, minimal relation for Han. The demonstrated ethnic differences relate to potential employment inequality faced by Minorities/Minzu men and the disparate marriage market for ethnic Minzu women in China. The third essay, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Chinese Exclusion Acts and Interracial Marriages of Chinese Americans between 1880 and 1940”, examines impacts from U.S. anti-miscegenation laws on interracial marriages for Chinese Americans. U.S. Not every state had an Anti-Miscegenation Law, and not every state excluded Chinese from marrying whites. Using the U.S. Decennial Census data from 1880 to 1940 and employing the difference-in-difference estimator, my results show no statistically significant impact from Chinese anti-miscegenation laws on both Chinese males’ and females’ interracial marriages. This finding is robust to an event history analysis and a synthetic cohort method. The historical ban on Chinese interracial marriages establishes the backdrop of high incidence of Chinese interracial marriages in the 21st century.

Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this ``superstar model'' in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experiment in scale-related technological change. The resulting inequality changes are consistent with superstar theory: the launch of a local TV station skews the entertainer wage distribution sharply to the right, with the biggest impact at the very top of the distribution, while negatively impacting workers below the star level. The findings provide evidence of superstar effects and distinguish such effects from popular alternative models.

The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those majors) and subsequently sort into occupations with lower potential earnings given their major choice. These differences have narrowed over time, but recent cohorts of women still choose majors and occupations with lower potential earnings. Differences in undergraduate major choice explain a substantive portion of gender wage gaps for the college-educated above and beyond simply controlling for occupation. Collectively, our results highlight the importance of understanding gender differences in the mapping between college major and occupational sorting when studying the evolution of gender differences in labor market outcomes over time.

The Hamilton Project seeks to advance America's promise of opportunity, prosperity, and growth. We believe that today's increasingly competitive global economy demands public policy ideas commensurate with the challenges of the 21st Century. The Project's economic strategy reflects a judgment that long-term prosperity is best achieved by fostering economic growth and broad participation in that growth, by enhancing individual economic security, and by embracing a role for effective government in making needed public investments. Our strategy calls for combining public investment, a secure social safety net, and fiscal discipline. In that framework, the Project puts forward innovative proposals from leading economic thinkers-based on credible evidence and experience, not ideology or doctrine-to introduce new and effective policy options into the national debate. The Project is named after Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Treasury Secretary, who laid the foundation for the modern American economy. Hamilton stood for sound fiscal policy, believed that broad-based opportunity for advancement would drive American economic growth, and recognized that "prudent aids and encouragements on the part of government" are necessary to enhance and guide market forces. The guiding principles of the Project remain consistent with these views.

This research examines the uneven spatial-demographic distribution of population loss in one US “shrinking” city, Birmingham, Alabama, and analyzes the city’s planning role in and response to population loss. It examines the connections between Birmingham’s historic racial zoning law and urban renewal practices and the resulting patterns of depopulation and demographic change, and its present-day use of creative class planning – an approach critiqued for perpetuating inequalities – to revitalize neighborhoods and reverse depopulation. Using a novel methodological approach, this research describes the characteristics of Birmingham’s population loss from 1970 to 2010 and examines the city’s planning response to this population loss. Findings demonstrate that the variables associated with depopulation change over time and space. By linking these spatialized demographic trends to the city’s current planning approach, we problematize creative class and residential attractiveness-based planning logics, while highlighting the importance of addressing inequality in the planning of shrinking cities.

This paper addresses the uneven employment effects on older Americans (Boomers and Genxers, ages 50-75) of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on monthly CPS data from January through December 2020 (IPUMS) with an intersectional approach, we first chart shifts in employment and non-employment for population subgroups defined by age, gender and race/ethnicity, including explanations for not working (unemployment, retired, disabled, not in the workforce for other reasons – NILF-other). We then examine uneven transitions --monthly individual-level shifts out of and into paid work for population subgroups, considering also disparities by educational level. We find increases in proportions unemployed, especially for women in their 50s, as well as increases in the proportions reporting they are NILF-Other, especially for Asian and Hispanic women, with small increases for Asian and Hispanic men as well. There is little change in age-graded reports of being retired, regardless of gender or race/ethnicity, though there are education-level effects.

Before President Johnson's Executive Order 11241 in August 1965, married men received lower draft priority for military service. As the Vietnam War escalated in the summer of 1965, anecdotal evidence suggests draft-eligible men sought marriage to lower their likelihood of serving. This paper quantifies the effects of these Vietnam-era policies on marriage and finds that they significantly reduced the age at first marriage and altered the choice of spouse. However, younger marriages induced by the war were less likely to result in divorce 15 years later. Evidence also suggests that these younger marriages had little effect on long-term outcomes.

In this paper, we examine if there are gender differences in total bankcard limits by utilizing a data set that links mortgage applicant information with individual-level credit bureau data from 2006 to 2016. We document that after controlling for credit score, income, and demographic characteristics, male borrowers on average have higher total bankcard limits than female borrowers. Using a standard Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we find that 87 percent of the gap is explained by differences in the effect of observed characteristics between male and female borrowers, while approximately 10 percent of the difference can be explained by differences in the levels of observed characteristics. Using a quantile decomposition strategy to analyze the gender gap along the entire bankcard credit limit distribution, we show that gender differences in bankcard limits favor female borrowers at smaller limits and favor male borrowers at larger limits. The primary factors that drive this gap have changed over time and vary across the distribution of credit limits.

The first chapter is joint with Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade. We investigate the consequences of the 1994 rent-control expansion in San Francisco on tenants, landlords, and equilibrium outcomes in the rental market. Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply drove up market rents in the long run by 5.1%, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. Using a dynamic, neighborhood choice model, we find rent control o↵ered large benefits to covered tenants. Welfare losses from decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against rent increases were provided as government social insurance, instead of a regulated landlord mandate. The second chapter consists of my job-market paper, joint with Rose Tan. We investigate the consequences of high-skilled firm entry on nearby a↵ected neighborhoods and incumbent residents living in those neighborhoods. To study this, we construct a dataset of 391 such entries in the U.S. from 1990–2010. We follow incumbent residents over 13 years using rich micro-data on individual address histories, property characteristics, and financial records. First, we estimate the e↵ects of the firm entry on incumbent residents’ consumption, finances, and mobility. To do so, we compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away, while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites. Next, we decompose welfare from changes in wages, rents, and amenities for incumbent residents using a model of individual home and work location choice. Taken together, our results show high-skilled incumbents, especially homeowners, benefit. Low-skilled owners benefit less than high-skilled owners. Low-skilled renters are harmed. In the medium to long run, they incur an annual welfare loss that is equivalent to a 0.2 percent decline in their wages one year prior to the entry. While the typical high-skilled firm entry has moderate welfare consequences on a per capita basis, the negative welfare consequences for low-skilled renters could be large for some more extreme firm entries. Housing assistance in the form of a↵ordable housing and rental insurance, as well as property tax scheme could be used to mitigate the negative distributional consequences of high-skilled firm entries. iv The third chapter is joint with Haaris Mateen and Ye Zhang. We study the microstructure of the U.S. housing market using a novel data set comprising housing search and bargaining behavior for millions of interactions between sellers and buyers. We first establish a number of stylized facts, the most prominent being a nearly 50–50 split between houses that sold below final listing price and those that sold above final listing price. Second, we compare observed behavior with predictions from a large theoretical housing literature. Many predictions on the relationship between sales price, time on the market, listing price and atypicality are borne out in the data. However, existing models do not adequately explain the spread of the sales price around the final listing price. Using a modeling strategy that treats listing price changes as revisions of expectations about the sales price, we find sellers under-react to information shocks in estimating the sales price. Last, we find that the bargaining outcomes are influenced by previously undocumented buyers’ bid characteristics, e.g., financing contingencies and escalation clauses, that signal a buyer’s ability to complete or expedite the transaction. This suggests an important role for buyer bid characteristics, which are not explained by existing theories, in a↵ecting bargaining power and surplus allocation in bilateral bargaining in housing transactions.

In the northeastern United States, widespread deforestation occurred during the 17–19th centuries as a result of Euro-American agricultural activity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of this agricultural landscape was reforested as the region experienced industrialization and farmland became abandoned. Many previous studies have addressed these landscape changes, but the primary method for estimating the amount and distribution of cleared and forested land during this time period has been using archival records. This study estimates areas of cleared and forested land using historical land use features extracted from airborne LiDAR data and compares these estimates to those from 19th century archival maps and agricultural census records for several towns in Massachusetts, a state in the northeastern United States. Results expand on previous studies in adjacent areas, and demonstrate that features representative of historical deforestation identified in LiDAR data can be reliably used as a proxy to estimate the spatial extents and area of cleared and forested land in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the northeastern United States. Results also demonstrate limitations to this methodology which can be mitigated through an understanding of the surficial geology of the region as well as sources of error in archival materials.

America’s longest economic expansion on record1 came to an abrupt and dramatic end with the arrival of a novel coronavirus in the United States. The first confirmed U.S. case of the new coronavirus disease—COVID-19— occurred in late January 2020. By March, major portions of the American economy had been shut down to prevent the spread of the disease.2 A historically low quarterly Black unemployment rate of 5.6% at the end of 2019 shot up to a very high 16.3% rate in the second quarter of 2020 (Figure 2). Such a large and rapid increase in the Black unemployment rate is unprecedented. What is not uncommon, however, is for African Americans to be hard hit by a recession. While the specifics of the recession are extraordinary, policymakers already have the tools needed to mitigate the damage the recession will cause to Black workers—if they can put aside partisan politics.

Latinos make up the nation’s largest ethnic minority group. The majority of Latinos are U.S. born, making the progress and well-being of Latinos no longer just a question of immigrant assimilation but also of the effectiveness of U.S. educational institutions and labor markets in equipping young Latinos to move out of the working class and into the middle class. One significant headwind to progress among Latinos is recessions. Economic outcomes of Latinos are far more sensitive to the business cycle than are outcomes for non-Hispanic whites. Latinos also have higher poverty rates than whites, although the gap had been falling prior to the pandemic. Deep holes in the pandemic safety net further imperiled Latino progress in 2020 and almost surely will in 2021 as well. Policies that would help working-class and poor Latinos include immigration reform and education reform and broader access to affordable health care.