The rise of economic populism and movements for greater racial, gender, and class equality over the last few years have foregrounded the massive problems of spatial and social inequality in the United States. Academic research focused on these disparities increasingly suggests that a mix of rising economic inequalities across the U.S. urban system, as well as inadequate attention to deep historical economic injustices, have eroded economic mobility for many people and places. Providing concrete solutions to this issue is a thorny problem for social science and policy which requires that we address inter-regional, intra-regional, and inter-personal inequalities, as well as their interconnections. The following chapters argue that a relational perspective of economic development – one that centers how the behaviors, interactions, and organization of economic actors shape economic development – is a fruitful way forward to understanding and mitigating these inequalities. Focusing on how globalization and emerging migration patterns shape and respond to actors’ (e.g. workers, firms, and other collective organizations) economic relations, the three papers in this thesis show how a relational approach to regional economic development can be employed to better understand inequality and opportunity for different people and places across the U.S. urban system.

Key elements of the American Rescue Plan Act would reduce the projected poverty rate for 2021 by more than one-third. In an earlier analysis, we projected that without this legislation or other new supports, but with the relief policies passed in December, the 2021 annual poverty rate would be 13.7 percent. We project that four elements of the American Rescue Plan would reduce that annual poverty rate to 8.7 percent. 1 Other key findings regarding the American Rescue Plan are as follows: The legislation would reduce the projected number of people in poverty in 2021 by about 16 million, from over 44 million to 28 million. The projected 2021 poverty rate for children would be cut by more than half. We project that the poverty rate for individuals in households that experienced a job loss because of the pandemic recession would decline by more than half, while the poverty rate for households that did not experience job loss would decline by almost one-third. Poverty would fall 42 percent for Black, non-Hispanic people and 39 percent for Hispanic people compared with 34 percent for white, non-Hispanic people, thus reducing the disparities in poverty rates for Black, non-Hispanic people and Hispanic people relative to white, non-Hispanic people. The combined policies would reduce the share of people experiencing deep poverty (i.e., those with resources of less than half of the poverty threshold) by one-third. The share of the population with low family income (i.e., income below twice the poverty threshold) would fall from 45 to 38 percent. Our estimates include the effects of the American Rescue Plan Act's (1) extension of pandemic-related unemployment insurance benefits, (2) extension of higher Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, (3) $1,400 recovery rebate payments, and (4) advance portion of the increased child tax credit. We assess the impacts of these provisions on families’ economic well-being using the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

My dissertation's primary contribution is identifying factors that affect differences in labor market outcomes among various demographic groups. In the first chapter, I designed an experiment to examine the effects of stereotype threat, a concept from psychology where people conform or feel at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes about their group, under competition. I found that providing information about performance differences as a stereotype threat changed the subjects’ preferences to favor the tasks that their gender is perceived to perform relatively better in but did not affect performance outcomes. The implication is that even if stereotype threat does not affect one’s ability to perform, it may affect education and career choices that could contribute to group differences in the labor market. The second chapter was written jointly with Dr. David Neumark and published in Demography. This paper analyzed the effects of cohort sizes on the labor force participation and wages of older workers in the United States. Older workers increased their labor force participation as their relative size to the working age population increases, which is contrary to the standard labor supply hypothesis. Additionally, when using a richer model that accounts for the size of older workers relative to younger workers, we found the demand for older workers was high when their cohort size is large relative to prime age workers, suggesting that older workers enter in more flexible working arrangements in their later age. Finally, the last chapter analyzed the effects of expanding public transit infrastructure on labor market outcomes in Los Angeles. I use panel data on tracts, treating route placement as endogenous, which is then instrumented by the distance from the centroid of each tract in LA to a hypothetical Metro route. Overall, I find proximity to Metro stations increases labor force participation and employment for residents, which is robust to using both a binary and continuous measure of distance. Additionally, I find evidence that increased job density in neighborhoods near new transit stations is contributing to the employment increase.

My first chapter examines whether tacit collusion occurs in the market for BigLaw associates. Many large firms across the U.S. offer the exact same associate salaries despite substantial heterogeneity on both sides of the labor market. I show that empirical market dynamics are dicult to reconcile with competitive labor markets. I then provide evidence for an alternative explanation - tacit collusion. A few firms act as price leaders and set maximum salaries. Some smaller firms are excluded from punishment to maintain cartel stability, and firms strategically communicate compensation decisions to align on decisions. Tacit collusion is facilitated by communication and standardization. Many of these practices originated in historical explicit collusion. This research highlights the potential for collusion in labor markets and the need for further scrutiny of other markets. My second chapter is joint work with Anna Aizer, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Jonathan Vogel, and we study the role of WWII in reducing occupational discrimination against Black men. The 1940s witnessed substantial reductions in the Black-white earnings gap. We show that domestic WWII defense production played an important role. In labor markets with more war production contracts, Black workers were more likely to be upgraded into skilled occupations and receive higher wages. War spending also led to an increase in the high school graduation rate of Black children, suggesting important inter-generational spillovers. These results are attributable to the interaction between tight labor markets and federal prohibition against discrimination for war contractors. Using a structural model, we show that WWII defense production generated substantial improvements in national labor-market outcomes by decreasing discrimination for Black workers. My third chapter looks at how firm acquisitions affect working conditions. I focus on acquisitions in a narrowly defined industry, nursing homes, to allow direct comparison across acquisitions and working conditions. I find that focusing only on the limited average effect on wages would miss more significant effects on benefits (6% decrease) and on workload (3-4% increase). Most importantly, working conditions in the acquired facility quickly converge towards those of the acquiring firm. This dynamic creates substantial heterogeneity in the effect of acquisitions on acquired facilities based on working conditions relative to the acquirer. Finally, I provide suggestive evidence that firm behavioral factors (e.g., managerial inertia) play an important role in the standardization of working conditions.

We investigate the effect of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements on work effort for a particularly disadvantaged subgroup of potential SNAP participants. Individuals age out of SNAP work requirements at age fifty and requirements are occasionally waived in certain areas. We leverage this policy variation in a regression discontinuity research design and find that, for adults with low income and low education, aging out of work requirements decreases employment, hours worked, and the probability of working over twenty hours per week only when requirements are in effect. This drop in work effort is not apparent among low‐income adults in general and is driven by individuals leaving the labor force because they report being unable to work or because they retire. The drop is smaller when states do not provide qualifying work opportunities. Overall, although we find meaningful effects consistent with theory for a subset of low‐income adults, it is not clear that the overall number affected is sufficiently large to translate to noticeable labor market effects among low‐income adults without dependents in general.

Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent–child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in air quality that an individual experienced in the womb increase the likelihood that their children, the second generation, attend college 40-50 years later. Intergenerational transmission appears to arise from greater parental resources and investments, rather than heritable, biological channels. Our findings suggest that within-generation estimates of marginal damages substantially underestimate the total welfare effects of improving environmental quality and point to the empirical relevance of environmental quality as a contributor to economic opportunity in the United States.

Understanding the potential child care needs for parents who work early in the morning, evenings, nights, and weekends has become a growing concern for policymakers trying to make child care more accessible. Families working these nontraditional (NTH) schedules—defined here as anytime outside of 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays—can face extra challenges finding child care, and the types of care they use are less supported by public funds (Adams et al. 2021a–c; Sandstrom 2018). Using data from the 2015– 19 American Community Survey and 2016 Survey of Income and Program Participation, we estimated the potential demand for child care during these nontraditional hours (NTH)

This paper explores the potential externality of enforcements in child support policies on infants’ health outcomes. Exploiting the variations in child support policies across states and over the year and using the universe of birth records in the US (1975-2004), I document that the policies were effective in improving birth outcomes. Infants born to single mothers in states that fully adopt child support policies have on average 38 grams higher birth weight and 99 basis points lower likelihood of being born with low birth weight. These effects hold for a wide range of health outcomes. The marginal impacts are larger for mothers in states above-median changes in child support policies and for mothers who reside in poorer states. The results suggest that a higher quantity of prenatal care and better timing of prenatal care could be possiblemechanisms of impact.This study contributes to the existing literature by providing the first evidence of health externality of child support policies for infants’ health outcomes.

We study the impact of the 2005-2015 international student boom in US universities on local housing markets. By constructing a sample of American college towns characterizing rarely studied local markets in small urban areas, we show that international students exogenously sustained demand for rentals and residential investment, representing countercyclical shocks during the Great Recession. Exploiting the historical distribution of foreign enrollment across college towns and country-of-origin networks, we find that international students increased rents by 1.3% and home prices by 2.5% relative to the housing boom peak, translating into home equity gains of $4,000. An analysis exploiting within-city dynamics reveals that neighborhoods near campus absorbed international inflows by replacing single-family homes with apartment rentals.

A hot topic these days is how COVID-19 and the ensuing recession have affected retirement. The surprising answer may be “not very much.” On the benefit side, Social Security payments continue to go out each month, and 401(k) balances appear relatively unaffected. On the income side, the impact on Social Security’s finances has been minimal, and employee and employer 401(k) contributions remain relatively steady. In terms of the labor market, recessions inevi- tably increase unemployment, but this recession has not hurt older workers more than other groups. The conclusion that COVID is not primarily a retirement story does not mean that all is right with the world. The problems confronting the retirement system before the pandemic remain. Social Security continues to face a 75-year deficit and the depletion of the trust fund in the mid-2030s. Employer plans con- tinue to face inadequate balances, a major coverage gap, no decumulation mechanism, and low interest rates. And older workers continue to face difficul- ties in finding new jobs, causing many to retire too early. Most important, the reason for COVID’s lack of impact on retirement is that people who have the least have borne the brunt of the downturn.

Local governments are facing large losses in revenues and increased expenditures because of the COVID-19 crisis. We document a causal relationship between fiscal pressures induced by COVID-19 and the layoffs of state and local government workers. States that depend more on sales tax as a source of revenue laid off significantly more workers than other states. The CARES Act's provision of $150 billion in aid to state and local governments reduced the fiscal pressures they faced. Exploiting a kink in the formula for allocation of funding across states, we estimate that without this funding state and local governments would have laid off an additional 401,000 workers in April 2020, 40 percent more than realized. State rainy day fund balances limit the sensitivity of employment to these revenue shocks, revealing that balanced budget requirements for state and local governments increase the procyclicality of public service provision.

In recent decades, states with Right-To-Work (RTW) laws have experienced higher employment and population growth than states without such laws. We investigate the extent to which these patterns, and other related labor market phenomena, are causally explained by these laws and closely related policies. Using border-pair differences, we find RTW laws are associated with a 3.2 percentage point increase in the manufacturing share of employment. This increase in manufacturing does not merely crowd out other economic activity; we find that people who live in RTW regions have 1.6 percentage points higher employment, 1.4 percentage points higher labor force participation, and 0.34 percentage points lower disability receipt than residents of similar non-RTW areas. However, wages and labor compensation do not appear to be lower on average. In turn, these differences appear to influence both individual residence and workplace location choice. Since their passage, locations with RTW laws have seen higher population growth, and on net attract commuters from non-RTW locations. These labor market effects also spill over into socioeconomic outcomes; RTW laws are also associated with lower childhood poverty rates and greater upward mobility. In particular, children at the 25th percentile of the parental income distribution during childhood have a 1.7 percentage point higher probability of reaching the top income quintile during adulthood if they grew up in a RTW location. These differences in outcomes were not present prior to the passage of RTW laws, persist after controlling for other major policy differences between states, and do not appear primarily attributable to local substitution. Together, this provides evidence that these patterns are substantially caused by RTW laws. * Harvard University: matthewlilley@g.harvard.edu. We are grateful for comments and suggestions from

I n recent years, the aging of the population and the increasing preference for “aging in place” have combined to generate explosive growth in demand for home care workers. In New York State, the number of home health aide and personal care aide jobs is projected to rise from 440,000 in 2018 to over 700,000 by 2028, driven by employment in home care agencies, private households, and public programs like the Medicaid Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP). High turnover adds to the problem: employers across the state need to recruit an average of 26,510 new aides each year simply to keep up with the growing demand for care, as well as an additional 71,680 workers each year to replace the thousands of aides who leave these occupations or exit the labor force entirely. In total, over the ten-year period 2018-2028, nearly 1,000,000 job positions must be filled to meet the demand for aides. The demand for home care workers—aides who work in private homes—already exceeds the supply. A 2018–2019 statewide survey of home care agencies found that, on average, 17 percent of home care positions were left unfilled due to staff shortages. Because home care work is typically poorly paid, as well as physically and emotionally stressful, it is difficult to recruit new workers and retain existing ones. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for home care even more, while further depressing the labor supply. In a Fall 2020 survey, 85 percent of participating New York State home care agencies reported worsening staff shortages. As a result of these staff shortages, many individuals with unmet home care needs experience hospitalizations that might otherwise be unnecessary, and many enter nursing homes, a costly alternative to in-home care that became especially dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic. This report explores one potential solution to the home care labor shortage: substantially raising wages for New York State’s home care workers. The analysis presents detailed projections, based on the best available data, of the economic effects of such an intervention, estimating the costs and benefits that would result. We find that public funding for wage increases and health insurance coverage for the State’s home care workers would require significant resources, but those costs would be more than offset by the resulting savings, tax revenues, and economic spillover effects.

Inspired by a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights six-day hearing in San Antonio that introduced the Mexican American people to the rest of the nation, this book is an examination of the social change of Mexican Americans of Texas over the past half century. The San Antonio hearing included 1,502 pages of testimony, given by more than seventy witnesses, which became the baseline twenty experts used to launch their research on Mexican American civil rights issues during the following fifty years. These experts explored the changes in demographics and policies with regard to immigration, voting rights, education, employment, economic security, housing, health, and criminal justice. While there are a number of anecdotal historical accounts of Mexican Americans in Texas, this book adds an evidence-based examination of racial and ethnic inequalities and changes over the past half century. The contributors trace the litigation on behalf of Latinos and other minorities in state and federal courts and the legislative changes that followed, offering public policy recommendations for the future. The fact that this study is grounded in Texas is significant, as it was the birthplace of a majority of Chicano civil rights efforts and is at the heart of Mexican American growth and talent, producing the first Mexican American in Congress, the first Mexican American federal judge, and the first Mexican American candidate for president. As the largest ethnic group in the state, Latinos will continue to play a major role in the future of Texas.

We investigate the sources of heterogeneity in the levels and cyclical sensitivity of unemployment rates across demographic groups. We develop a new methodology to decompose cyclical and level differences in unemployment rates between groups into flows between three states (employment, unemployment, and out-of-the-labor-force). We find that increases in unemployment rates during recessions for young, non-white, and less-educated groups of workers are primarily driven by reductions in the job-finding rates, which can explain more than 60% of cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate across demographic groups, compared with under 20% driven by separations. However, separations are the most important factor in explaining the persistent gap in unemployment rates between each disadvantaged group and their respective counterpart group, with important differences between groups. For less-educated workers, separation rates explain most of the unemployment gap, with 75% of the separation rate attributable to industry and occupation. Less-educated workers also spend less time searching. For younger workers, we find separation rates explain all of the unemployment gap, while industry and occupation explain only 60% of their elevated separation rates. For non-white workers, hiring explains almost half of the unemployment gap. Non-white workers search more intensely for work than other groups, but spend less time interviewing per search time, suggesting that labor market discrimination contributes to non-white workers’ persistently high unemployment rates.

We present the updated 2021 projections by key characteristics, examine how much government benefits reduce the poverty rate, and consider reasons why some subgroups of people may be more likely than others to have their incomes raised above the poverty threshold by government benefits.

Drug overdose is a leading cause of unintentional death in the United States and has contributed significantly to a decline in life expectancy from 2015 to 2018. Overdose deaths, especially from opioids, have also been recognized in recent years as a significant public health issue. To address this public health problem, this study sought to identify neighborhood-level (e.g., block group) factors associated with drug overdose and develop a spatial model using machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict the likelihood or risk of drug overdoses across South Carolina. This study included block group level sociodemographic factors and drug use variables which may influence the incidence of drug overdose. In particular, this study developed a new index of access to measure spatial access to treatment facilities and incorporated these variables to assess the relationship between drug overdose and accessibility to the treatment centers. We explored different ML algorithms (e.g., XGBoost, Random Forest) to identify optimum predictors in each category. The categories were combined into a final ensemble predictive model that addressed spatial dependency. An evaluation was conducted to validate that the final model generalized well across the different datasets and geographical areas. Results of the study identified strong neighborhood-level predictors of a drug overdose, pinpointing the most critical neighborhood-level factor(s) that place a community at risk and protect communities from developing such problems. These factors included proportion of households receiving food stamps, households with income less than $35,000, high opioid prescription rates, smoking accessories expenditures, and low accessibility to opioid

Private-sector unionization rates have fallen precipitously in the United States over the past half century, from 25% in 1973 to only 7% in 2018. We take a skill-based approach to studying this decline, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific task requirements from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the Occupational Information Network. We find that for both men and women, private sector unionized jobs became higherskilled by requiring more non-routine, cognitive skills and fewer manual or routine skills. We further show that union, non-union skill differences have polarized, with unionized worker occupations becoming relatively more intensive in non-routine, cognitive skills and in manual/routine skills. These changes have been more pronounced for women than for men. Next, we decompose these skill changes into three parts: (1) changes in skills within an occupation, (2) changes in worker concentration across existing occupations, and (3) changes to the occupational mix from both entry and exit. Most of the skill changes we document are driven by the second two forces. The third part of the analysis estimates union wage premiums that account for changing skill mix. We find that accounting for skills has a small effect on the union wage premium and that the premium remains high at over 20% for both men and women. Finally, we show how this evidence can be reconciled with a model of skill-biased technological change that explicitly accounts for the institutional framework surrounding collective bargaining.

In the first chapter, I provide a theory that links automation to the top income inequality. I construct a model in which managing labor is harder than managing capital. Hence, an improvement in automation enables entrepreneurs to scale up their production. This leads highly productive entrepreneurs to capture a larger fraction of the market and hence this increases top income inequality. I show that the shape parameter of the Pareto distribution that characterizes the right tail of income distribution is inversely related to the automation parameter. Using cross-industry and cross-country data, I provide empirical support for the model’s prediction. In the second chapter, I quantitatively analyze the impact of improvements in automation technology on top wealth shares. I incorporate the production function that I consider in the first chapter into an Aiyagari model with entrepreneurs and a financial friction. An improvement in automation technology impacts wealth concentration through two channels: first, it increases the return to entrepreneurial skill; second, it increases dispersion to return to capital. I calibrate the model to the 1968 US economy and increased the automation parameter to the 2016 value. Comparing the two steady-states, the model generates one-fourth of the observed increase in wealth share of the top 1% and explains 10% of the observed increase in the top 0.1%. In consumption equivalence terms, workers’ welfare increases by 5%, and entrepreneurs’ welfare increases by 8%. The third chapter examines the strong positive correlation between job-tojob transition rates and nominal wage growth in the U.S. First, using time series regressions, structural monetary policy shocks, and survey data on search effort we provide evidence that inflationary shocks cause higher job-to-job transitions in the subsequent years. Second, we build a model with aggregate shocks and competitive on-the-job search in which wages react sluggishly to inflation. Third, we calibrate the model to the U.S. economy and find that the output response to inflation shock is nonmonotonic. The monetary authority can stimulate productivity with an inflationary shock through job-to-job transitions.

In Career and Family, Claudia Goldin builds on decades of complex research to examine the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. Goldin argues that although recent public and private discourse has brought these concerns to light, the actions taken-such as a single company slapped on the wrist or a few progressive leaders going on paternity leave-are the economic equivalent of tossing a band-aid to someone with cancer. These solutions, Goldin writes, treat the symptoms and not the disease of gender inequality in the workplace and economy. Goldin points to data that reveals how the pay gap widens further down the line in women's careers, about 10 to 15 years out, as opposed to those beginning careers after college. She examines five distinct groups of women over the course of the twentieth century: cohorts of women who differ in terms of career, job, marriage, and children, in approximated years of graduation-1900s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s-based on various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. The book argues that our entire economy is trapped in an old way of doing business; work structures have not adapted as more women enter the workforce. Gender equality in pay and equity in home and childcare labor are flip sides of the same issue, and Goldin frames both in the context of a serious empirical exploration that has not yet been put in a long-run historical context. Career and Family offers a deep look into census data, rich information about individual college graduates over their lifetimes, and various records and new sources of material to offer a new model to restructure the home and school systems that contribute to the gender pay gap and the quest for both family and career.