This dissertation reexamines the economic development of Puerto Rico after annexation by the United States in 1898. I introduce new evidence in four papers exploring complementary aspects of development: public health and the mortality transition, roads and local development, patterns in regional growth, and changes in adult height. The introductory chapter provides a brief overview of recent scholarship. The second chapter examines public health during one of the fastest mortality transitions in history and the first outside of Europe and Western offshoots. Local health departments caused most of the reduction in infant, tuberculosis, and maternal mortality from 1923 to 1945 without significantly increasing public expenditures. I present descriptive evidence that more per capita nurses and midwives, but not sanitary inspectors, correspond to larger declines in infant and maternal mortality. The third chapter assesses the effect of roadbuilding on local economic development and regional inequality by studying the effort to connect all towns with roads. Using newly digitized maps, I show that US investments failed to reduce regional disparities. Early access to roads promoted local economic development and gave rise to path dependence in the location of economic activity, although geographic factors determined the general spatial pattern of development. The fourth chapter describes spatial patterns in population growth from 1765 to 2010. The spatial distribution of population began to resemble the modern distribution after the turn of the 20th century, when municipal population densities diverged. Municipal population growth was positively correlated with crop production in the preindustrial era and was negatively correlated with agricultural employment from 1899 to 1970. Urbanization commenced around 1900, decades before most of the Caribbean and Central America.

This paper investigates the relation between intergenerational coresidence and mortality from Covid-19 in 2020. Using a crosssection of U.S. counties, we show that this association is positive, significant, and robust to the inclusion of several demographic and socio-economic controls. Furthermore, using historical evidence from pre-pandemic years (1980-2019) and the Spanish influenza (1918), we argue that this positive association is specific to the Covid-19 pandemic only

Despite being the longest relationships across the lifespan, the sibling dyad is the most under-studied relationship in the family system. Researchers have documented the harmful and beneficial effects of sibling relationships and family dynamics on individual well-being. Extending this research to middle childhood, the current study examined family functioning, sibling relational dynamics, and self-reported adjustment and internalizing symptoms among 8- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses revealed significant direct effects between conflictual family functioning and children’s psychological well-being. Significant interactions between family functioning and sibling dynamics suggested that congruent relational dynamics at multiple levels of the family system had a cumulative impact on the child’s well-being. Findings from the current study highlight the role of family functioning and the unique contributions of sibling relationships to children’s functioning, suggesting that consideration of sibling relational dynamics may improve treatment planning by pointing out additional targets for intervention and/or potential sources of support.

This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted history of intergenerational Latinx gangs with local neighborhood residents viewing them as a fundamental social problem. Hollenbeck has over 30 active street gangs, each claiming a geographically defined territory, many of which have remained stable during the study period. Over twenty years (1990–2012) of homicide data collected from Hollenbeck’s Homicide Division are utilized to create an empirically rigorous typology of homicide incidents and to test whether or not gang homicides are sufficiently distinct in nature to be a unique category in the latent class analysis.

Climate change is perhaps the most pressing problem facing humanity over the coming century. One proposed solution to climate change is reducing employee work hours which potentially allows for degrowth or the radical restructuring of the economy without greatly increasing unemployment. Using 2007–2013 data from the United States, research by Fitzgerald, Schor, and Jorgenson lent support to this policy option by finding a positive and statistically significant relationship between average work hours and state-level CO2 emissions. We replicated their analyses by including more recent data and confirmed the linkage between the average hours worked in a state and annual overall CO2 emissions. Moreover, we found that this direct relationship is stronger in the most recently added data (2014 to 2017). We conclude this replication exercise by providing additional policy suggestions.

The interplay between remarriage and fertility is among the most poorly documented subjects in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), despite remarriage being one of the fundamental aspects of marriage dynamics in this region. We use Demographic and Health Survey data from 34 countries in SSA to document the association between remarriage and fertility during the reproductive years and over the fertility transition. The findings show that in 29 countries, remarried women end up having fewer children than women in intact unions, despite attaining similar or higher levels of fertility at early reproductive ages. However, remarriage is found to have a positive effect on fertility in Sierra Leone. The effects of remarriage on fertility diminish as fertility declines, with smaller effects generally observed in countries that are relatively advanced in their fertility transition and larger effects found elsewhere. These findings shed light on the role that remarriage might play in country-level fertility declines.

Residential income segregation within local political jurisdictions has risen considerably since 1980 in the U.S. Despite this trend, and a growing body of research on wealth inequality and its impact on public sector size, income segregation's own influence over local public choice has not been thoroughly investigated. Using block-group income distributions for the years 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 income segregation is measured for individual U.S. municipalities and school districts, where the spatial distribution of income may carry the most political relevance. Estimates indicate that rising income segregation reduced per-capita spending growth considerably for both municipalities and school districts. These findings are robust to various model specifications and to the use of instrumental variables that adjust for the potential endogeneity of local income segregation. This evidence is consistent with the view that intra-jurisdictional income segregation undermines trust between community members and complicates collective action. However, a-spatial income inequality continues to be positively correlated with local public sector size, as suggested by recent empirical research.

This report provides an updated look at the current and future state of household rental debt during COVID-19. It builds on our October 2020 report (Reed and Divringi, 2020), which simulated income losses for renter households and estimated their resulting rental debt for different stimulus and unemployment insurance (UI) policy scenarios. We add to the October 2020 report in four key ways: We update employment changes through December 2020. We incorporate income lost from involuntary part-time employment. We forecast rental debt through September 2021. We incorporate the economic stimulus payments and enhanced UI benefits enacted in December 2020 and currently being proposed for March 2021. Our results help policymakers better understand current and future levels of rental debt both overall and by household type, how effective different policies have been at reducing rental debt, and where gaps remain that might be filled by alternative policies such as local rental assistance.

 This report estimates return on investment (ROI) — the increase in lifetime earnings minus the costs of college — for nearly 30,000 bachelor’s degrees.  For students who graduate on time, the median bachelor’s degree has a net ROI of $306,000. But some degrees are worth millions of dollars, while others have no net financial value at all.  After accounting for the risk of dropping out, ROI for the median bachelor’s degree drops to $129,000. Over a quarter of programs have negative ROI.  Four in five engineering programs have ROI above $500,000, but the same is true for just 1% of psychology programs.  Elite schools such as Caltech and Penn dominate the list of highest ROI programs. But attending an elite school is not a golden ticket; some Ivy League degrees have negative ROI.

Although increases in the variety of tobacco products available to consumers have led to investigations of dual/polytobacco use patterns, few studies have documented trends in these patterns over time. We used data from the 2014/2015 and 2018/2019 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) and the 2015–2019 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to estimate trends in the following use patterns: exclusive use of cigarettes, electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), other combustibles (cigars/cigarillos/little filtered cigars and traditional pipes/hookah), and smokeless tobacco (four categories); dual use (two product groups) of each product group with cigarettes (three categories); polyuse with cigarettes (all four product groups; one category); and dual/polyuse without cigarettes (one category). We estimated trends in product use patterns overall and by age, sex, and race/ethnicity using two-sample tests for differences in linear proportions. From 2014/2015 to 2018/2019, exclusive ENDS use increased, whereas cigarettes and ENDS dual use decreased. Furthermore, polyuse with cigarettes decreased, whereas dual/polyuse without cigarettes increased, with trends varying by age, sex, and race/ethnicity. Our findings suggest that patterns of dual/polyuse with and without cigarettes have changed in recent years, indicating the need for further surveillance of concurrent tobacco product use patterns.

During their grand tour of the United States in 1831-32, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont puzzled on divergent regional economic development, until they traveled down the Ohio River. There, they observed differences on opposite riverbanks, where the environment is similar but the institutions differ. Following their analysis, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border. We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower land values on the slave side. This does not support the view that abolition was a costly constraint for landowners. Indeed, the lower demand for similar, yet cheaper, land presents a different puzzle: why wouldn't the yeomen farmers cross the border to fill up empty land in slave states, as was happening in the free states of the Old Northwest? On this point, we find evidence of higher wages on the slave side, indicating an aversion of free labor to working in a slave society. This evidence of lower systemic productivity in slave areas suggests that the earlier literature on the profitability of plantations was misplaced, or at least incomplete.

It has become common to compare racial inequality in the United States with a "Latin American" pattern of racial inequality in which egalitarian racial ideologies mask stark socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines. However, relatively few comparative studies exist attempting to analyze variations in degrees of racial inequality in the Americas. To stimulate further research in this area, the following study analyzes census data on racial inequality in unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results suggest that while Brazil is similar to the United States in displaying large levels of racial inequality in the areas measured, Cuba and Puerto Rico display significantly lower levels of racial inequality and Colombia falls in between, undermining conceptions of a monolithic Latin American racial system.

Hispanic immigrants have long faced barriers to accessing health care in the U.S., as they are largely excluded from federal programs like Medicaid. Since the 1960s, the federal government has operated a nationwide network of Community Health Centers (CHCs) that serve anyone, regardless of ability to pay or citizenship status. To what extent has this widespread, immigrant-inclusive institution been accessible to Hispanic immigrants? Using novel administrative data joined with Census and American Community Survey data from 1970 to 2017, this study documents spatial variation in population-level proximity to CHCs in relation to changing Hispanic migration patterns. Findings show that health centers, both historically and contemporarily, have been far more spatially proximate to poor and foreign-born Hispanics than to poor whites. In 2017, 56% of poor and foreign-born Hispanics in the U.S. lived within two miles of a CHC compared to 30% of poor whites. While access to CHCs has been consistently greater in established gateways, regardless of urbanicity, growth in new destination safety net infrastructure has increased at a faster rate. The CHC program has been substantially more accessible to the foreign-born than U.S.-born Hispanic and uninsured populations, showing the geographic potential for CHCs to provide care to underserved immigrant communities. This study provides the first descriptive evidence of the programmatic reach of this safety net institution across time and space, highlighting a crucial yet underexplored factor in understanding the health of Hispanic immigrants.

This paper analyzes the impact of local political fragmentation on population, employment, and per capita money income growth in 314 U.S. metropolitan areas. The results are mixed. Smaller central cities and more special district overlap are important for population growth. The findings do not generalize in regard to employment or per capita money income growth. These findings mask important regional variation: political fragmentation is largely unrelated to economic growth in midwestern and western metropolitan areas. These results partially support the hypothesis that governmental fragmentation can enhance local economic growth; however, the overall impact appears muted relative to a metropolitan area’s economic characteristics.

Most scholarship on corporate political activity assumes that market forces wholly motivate firms’ political strategies. However, this conventional wisdom overlooks the role of employee groups in encouraging corporate activism. To evaluate whether employee groups are associated with firm social activism, we gathered all public statements in support of LGBT rights made by the five hundred largest publicly-traded US corporations from 2011 to 2017. In an exploratory observational analysis, we found robust evidence that in highly-educated workforces LGBT employee groups persuade management to take public stances in support of LGBT rights. Our findings suggest that internal pressure promotes activism on LGBT issues, and market, political, or social forces are insufficient to fully explain firm social activism. Although each does play an important role, since employee groups will use political, social, and especially market-based arguments to convince their managers to engage in activism.

Married mothers who relocate are less likely to be employed after an interstate move than married childless women and nonmobile mothers. Here, we ask whether moving to a state with more expensive childcare is associated with lower odds of maternal employment among mothers who had been employed prior to relocation. We use hierarchical binomial logistic regression models, combining data from the 2015 American Community Survey five-year sample and state-level childcare costs to assess married mothers' employment following an interstate move, controlling for states' economic conditions. We show that employment odds for married mothers were about 42% lower than those for childless married women in the year following a move. Married mothers who moved to more expensive childcare states had odds of employment that were 18% lower than those of married mothers who moved to less expensive childcare states, showing that childcare accessibility shapes mothers' employment decisions even among those with stronger labor force attachment. Moving back to respondents' or their spouses' state of birth and moving to states with more favorable economic conditions improved odds of employment as well. Overall, we show that moving to states with fewer childcare barriers is associated with higher levels of maternal employment, partly mitigating the negative labor market effects of interstate migration.

This Commentary examines the extent to which disparities exist between Blacks and whites in labor market outcomes such as levels of labor force participation, unemployment rates, and earnings. To gauge whether disparities have narrowed or widened since 2000, national trends in these outcomes during the past two decades are compared to the trends in three states: Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Finally, to assess the current state of economic inclusion as reflected in the labor market, gaps in Black and white outcomes are compared across US states in 2020.

We estimate the effects of the unprecedented decline in Mexican net migration from 2006 to 2012 on labor markets in Mexico. We employ an instrumental variable strategy that isolates demand for Mexican labor in the U.S. and relies on historical migration patterns. We find that lower educated groups are more affected by the labor supply shock and remittance decline. The labor supply shock also generated declines in self-employment and increases in salaried work for lower and highly educated groups, indicating impacts beyond the would-be migrant group. Our findings are relevant in a global context where migration restrictions are more prevalent.

Substantial racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality have been observed at the state and national levels. However, less is known about how race and ethnicity and neighborhood-level disadvantage may intersect to contribute to both COVID-19 mortality and excess mortality during the pandemic. To assess this potential interaction of race and ethnicity with neighborhood disadvantage, we link death certificate data from Minnesota from the period 2017–20 to the Area Deprivation Index to examine hyperlocal disparities in mortality. Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) standardized COVID-19 mortality was 459 deaths per 100,000 population in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods compared with 126 per 100,000 in the most advantaged. Total mortality increased in 2020 by 14 percent for non-Hispanic White people and 41 percent for BIPOC. Statistical decompositions show that most of this growth in racial and ethnic disparity is associated with mortality gaps between White people and communities of color within the same levels of area disadvantage, rather than with the fact that White people live in more advantaged areas. Policy interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality must consider neighborhood context.

Objectives: To estimate trends in and projections of annual HIV testing and condom use at last higher-risk sex and to calculate the probability of reaching key United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS)'s target. Design: We included 114 nationally-representative datasets in 38 African countries from Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys with 1 456 224 sexually active adults age 15-49 from 2003 to 2018. Methods: We applied Bayesian mixed effect models to estimate the coverage of annual HIV testing and condom use at last higher-risk sex for every country and year to 2030 and the probability of reaching UNAIDS testing and condom use targets of 95% coverage by 2030. Results: Seven countries saw downward trends in annual HIV testing and four saw decreases in condom use at higher-risk sex, whereas most countries have upward trends in both indicators. The highest coverage of testing in 2030 is predicted in Swaziland with 92.6% (95% credible interval: 74.5-98.1%), Uganda with 90.5% (72.2-97.2%), and Lesotho with 90.5% (69.4%-97.6%). Meanwhile, Swaziland, Lesotho, and Namibia will have the highest proportion of condom use in 2030 at 85.0% (57.8-96.1%), 75.6% (42.3-93.6%), and 75.5% (42.4-93.2%). The probabilities of reaching targets were very low for both HIV testing (0-28.5%) and condom use (0-12.1%). Conclusions: We observed limited progress on annual HIV testing and condom use at last higher-risk sex in Africa and little prospect of reaching global targets for HIV/AIDS elimination. Although some funding agencies are considering withdrawal from supporting Africa, more attention to funding and expanding testing and treatment is needed in this region.