The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hardship to both individuals and businesses. Aggregate data indicate large increases in unemployment and bankruptcy since the beginning of the pandemic, but it is unclear which individuals and businesses are the most vulnerable. With “work absence”, “wage employment” and “unemployment” as three competing risks or events, we study the relationships of owner characteristics to self-employment duration during the COVID-19 pandemic (January-December 2020) in the United States with data from 19,174 respondents to the Current Population Survey. We find that several owner characteristics relate significantly to self-employment duration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, young, female, and non-White self-employed individuals face a relatively high risk of unemployment. These and other findings have profound implications for policymakers.

A burgeoning literature, often focused on high-status ethnic groups, ties industrial decline to an exacerbation of ethnic parochialism and accentuation of identity group loyalties. I argue that for marginalized ethnic groups, the deepest intergroup divisions emerge not following industrial decline, but rather in contexts of industrial stability. I develop this theory in reference to migrant groups. When an industry is stable, economic optimism and resources spread through migrant networks concentrated in that industry, bolstering migrants’ confidence in their economic security and dissuading investments in political assimilation. These gains dissipate amid decline, leading migrants to increasingly ally with outside groups promising access to political rents previously out of reach. I apply this theory to the case of European immigrants in the early twentieth century United States. Analyses using linked census records offer support for these intuitions. These findings help extend and refine the literature on industrial decline and identity politics.

Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are contingent on the electoral vulnerability of state lawmakers. We also suggest that advocacy organizations play a critical role in policy adoption. Incorporating data from all 50 states from 1989 to 2018, we investigate the adoption of five types of wrongful conviction reforms: (1) changes to eyewitness identification practices, (2) mandatory recording of interrogations, (3) the preservation of biological evidence, (4) access to postconviction DNA testing, and (5) exoneree compensation. Our results highlight a more nuanced view of how public opinion shapes policy.

As of April 15, 2021, almost 3 million people have died globally from COVID-19, and over half a million people have died in the United States (Dong et al., 2020). The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has caused an unprecedented disruption for American transportation systems, and important infrastructure such as public transportation has faced even more challenges because of public concerns regarding infection in crowded spaces (Hamidi & Hamidi, 2021). With an emphasis on changes in human mobility and public transit ridership, the purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the pandemic on travel behaviors in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) region, which consists of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. The region is of particular interest because several cities in the PNW region (e.g., Seattle, Wash.) were the earliest to report COVID-19 cases and adopted severe measures to curtail community transmission (Brough et al. 2020). Our work drew upon both open-data sources such as the Google Community Mobility Report and conventional data sets from governmental agencies, such as the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). We employed panel regression analysis techniques to quantify the effects of stay-at-home orders and sociodemographic characteristics on travel behaviors. We also built a dashboard to assist in the data collection and COVID-19 visualization in a real-time manner. The report is organized into the following sections: the second chapter comprehensively reviews the literature on human mobility and public transit ridership amid the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the third chapter in which the data and methods are described in detail. The fourth and the fifth chapters present results, and the report concludes with a brief discussion on policy implications and future directions.

Household contact is a significant channel of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).1 Transmission of the virus can occur within the household after infection in the workplace.2 Moreover, racial disparities have been identified as a risk for occupational exposure to COVID-19.3 Identifying those at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 through household and occupational exposure is important for public health awareness and policy, as well as for understanding racial and ethnic disparities in infection rates and outcomes.4 We sought to identify racial/ethnic categories associated with living in a household with someone who continues to work a job with higher risk of COVID-19 infection.

We examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation.

Despite theoretical underpinnings that social influences increase in salience with age, it is currently unclear how relationships with mothers, fathers, and siblings might change during the transition to adulthood and what roles the quality of those relationships play in young adults’ longitudinal adjustment. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was twofold. Firstly, we explored longitudinal growth in positive relationship quality with mothers, fathers, and siblings across the transition to adulthood. Secondly, we assessed comparative associations between positive relationship quality with mothers, fathers, and siblings and young adults’ depressive symptoms and emotionally supportive prosocial behaviors toward strangers and family members from 18 to 20 years. Participants included 402 young adults (51% female; 69.39% White; Mage at T1 = 18.36 years). Mother-youth positive relationship quality slightly increased during the transition to adulthood, while both father and sibling positive relationship quality remained stable. Young adults with more positive relationship quality with mothers reported experiencing fewer depressive symptoms, and young adults with more positive relationship quality with siblings were more likely to engage in emotionally supportive prosocial behaviors toward both strangers and family members. The increasing strength of mother-youth relationships during the transition to adulthood and the comparatively salient role of sibling relationships are highlighted.

Large parks—including regional parks, state parks, and national forests and parks—have particular health, social, and environmental benefits. Thus, promoting equal access to large parks is increasingly becoming a goal of environmental justice activists, planners, and policymakers. Disadvantaged populations (e.g., low-income people of color) have worse walking access to large parks than more privileged groups and might rely on public transportation to access such parks. But empirical studies on whether access to large parks via public transit is justly distributed are lacking. In this paper, we examine the relationship between a novel measure of public transit access to large parks (the T2P index) and neighborhood-level disadvantage (income, race/ethnicity, and age). Using network analysis with public transit feed data and park location data, we calculate the T2P index for every census block group in the 15 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. West. We find some evidence of environmental injustice. A spatial filtering model shows that T2P access increases when a neighborhood has a larger share of non-Hispanic Whites and a smaller share of older adults, but that median household income is not associated with T2P in the entire sample. We also find that some regions present significant environmental injustices in T2P whereas others have fewer to no injustices. Transit agencies and park planners could use our T2P index and findings to prioritize transit investment for disadvantaged populations and promote healthy living.

This paper investigates the impact of Reconstruction-era amnesty policy on the officeholding and wealth of elites in the postbellum South. Amnesty policy restricted the political and economic rights of Southern elites for nearly three years during Reconstruction. I estimate the effect of being excluded from amnesty on elites' future wealth and political power using a regression discontinuity design that compares individuals just above and below a wealth threshold that determined exclusion from amnesty. Results on a sample of Reconstruction convention delegates show that exclusion from amnesty significantly decreased the likelihood of ex-post officeholding. I find no evidence that exclusion impacted later census wealth for Reconstruction delegates or for a larger sample of known slaveholders who lived in the South in 1860. These findings are in line with previous studies evidencing both changes to the identity of the political elite, and the continuity of economic mobility among the planter elite across the Civil War and Reconstruction.

This study uses acculturation as a context to examine whether language fluency and employment predict citizenship attainment for U.S. immigrants. Given the statistics of migration from nonWestern countries in which English is not the primary language, continued study of language fluency and its influence on acculturation and citizenship attainment is critical. Researchers have explored what it takes to integrate and acculturate successfully into a destination country, how immigrant arrival age is related to education and later employment, and language as a barrier for immigrants who do not speak the language of their destination country. Given the gap in the literature regarding predictive relationships betweenlanguage fluency, employment, and citizenship attainment, the purpose of this study was to answer the following question: Do English language fluency and employment predict citizenship attainment? The current study is a quantitative, correlational study using a random sample. Archival data from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) was utilized for the current study. The dataset included 1 in 100 of all individuals who participated in the 2018 ACS and indicated in their response that they immigrated to the United States, resulting in 362,568 participants. Binomial logistic regression models tested the hypothesis that being employed and fluent in English will predict U.S. citizenship attainment. The model explained 6.0% of the variance in citizenship attainment and correctly classified 62.4% of cases. Although the overall model of evaluation indicated that the predictor is significant, rejecting the null hypothesis, the goodness-of-fit test failed to reject the null hypothesis, indicating that the variables language fluency and employment are not strong predictors of citizenship attainment. However, post hoc analyses show trends towards possible barriers to acculturation and citizenship attainment and suggest a need for continued research to further explore the trends seen in the data analysis of the study. For successful acculturation to occur, immigrants must feel accepted and a part of a community and country where they reside. Programs that focus on the daily struggles and barriers immigrants encounter can assist in finding solutions to those barriers. Assisting communities within the United States in accepting cultural differences can facilitate an open and welcoming country for everyone.

We focus on the timing of labor supplied during the day and its interaction with home care responsibilities. Using the American Time Use Survey, we measure the incidence of household care activities between 8 AM and 5 PM (the prime time of the day). Women experience more work interruptions during that time. These work interruptions imply wages that are about 9 percent lower. This result is consistent with occupations offering more flexibility but also a lower wage. We offer suggestive evidence that missing work due to household demands has a larger penalty in occupations with more coordinated work schedules.

In November of 2016, the City of Stonecrest was carved out of Atlanta’s suburban Black Mecca. The hope was that the new city’s “brand” might bring development and increased wealth to an area which has borne the brunt of uneven development, racialized urban secession, and racial capitalism for many decades. The case of Stonecrest points to several interesting tensions, contradictions, and necessary reckonings around race, class, and neoliberal urban space in Atlanta. We reconsider the historical politics of the Black Mecca alongside contradictory geographies of racialized housing policy, arriving at an analysis of Stonecrest as a project of White democracy that fails to challenge the material and ideological conditions of its own subordination. We build from this analysis to argue that abolition democracy in Atlanta must work to transcend not only the particulars of its own history (and that of Atlanta more broadly) but the hegemony of neoliberal racial capitalism as well.

We use databases we have created from the records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by pre-Famine Irish immigrants and their children to serve Famine era immigrants, to study the social mobility of bank customers and, by extension, Irish immigrants more generally. We infer that New York’s Famine Irish had a greater range of employment opportunities open to them than perhaps commonly acknowledged, and that the majority were eventually able to move a rung or two up the American socioeconomic ladder, supporting the conviction of many Famine immigrants that the U.S. was indeed “the best country in the world.”

We evaluate the effects of unemployment insurance variations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model of entrepreneurship. We establish that the occupational flow from unemployment to entrepreneurship is remarkably sensitive to unemployment insurance generosity, corroborating our empirical findings. Beyond direct effects on unemployment , we find large reallocations between employment and entrepreneurship relative to changes in generosity. They contribute to an empirically consistent stable aggregate employment rate, despite increasing unemployment. We show that an insurance coverage effect, i.e. a change in the relative riskiness between occupations with respect to generosity, is a key driver of our results.

Daily commuting of workers is a complex phenomenon that has attracted research attention for many years and, despite the significant literature acknowledging differences between morning and evening commuting, commuting to and from work are considered symmetric trips in much of the prior research. We explore the asymmetries in time spent commuting to and from work, in seven countries, using detailed time use records from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). We focus on the duration, mode of transport, and timing of commuting trips, and we provide evidence on what socio-demographic characteristics are related to such asymmetries. We find that commutes to work (usually in the morning) last longer than commutes from work (usually in the afternoon or evening), although there are quantitative differences among countries. The timing of commuting also differs across countries, although commutes to work are more concentrated at certain hours in the morning than commutes from work. Our results may serve for a better design of public policies that take this heterogeneity into account in the commuting behavior of different population groups.

This paper estimates the contribution of human capital, measured using both educational attainment and test performance, to the Black-white earnings gap in three separate samples of men spanning 1966 through 2017. There are three main findings. First, the magnitude of reductions in the Black-white earnings gap that occur after controlling for human capital have become much larger over time, suggesting a growing contribution of human capital to Blackwhite earnings disparities. Second, these increases are almost entirely due to growth in the returns to human capital, rather than changing racial gaps in the human capital traits themselves. Finally, growth in the explanatory power of human capital has been primarily due to increases in the association between human capital and the likelihood of non-work, with no clear increases in the extent to which human capital explains Black-white differences in hourly wages or other intensive margins. These findings highlight how apparently race-neutral structural developments in the US labor market, such as increasing skill prices and falling labor force participation rates among less skilled men, have had large impacts on the dynamics of racial inequality.

This dissertation studies spillovers in urban and housing markets. The first chapter studies the micro-structure of segmented local housing markets. With housing transactions data on 188 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2015, this chapter builds a workhorse model to study house price dynamics that includes supply side differences across cities. I show that heterogeneity in supply responses cross-sectionally is key to explain price changes overtime in an assignment model framework. The market clearing process in the assignment model operates in a vertically ranked order and matches the joint distributions of households and houses, generating two countervailing forces where demand spills upwards and supply is added from the top down. These two forces result in mismatch in demand and supply at some segments which causes general equilibrium spillovers to prices in other segments. I structurally estimate the spillovers, show they drive house price segmentation, and account for 8% of variation in prices on average. These findings provide new insights on within-market G E spillovers across price ranks in local housing markets, and help us understand how supply side housing policies could have substantial amplification effects beyond their targeted segments through this mechanism. The second chapter studies telecommunications infrastructure and productivity. Broadband Internet is considered an important determinant of economic and population growth. I estimate the effect of Internet infrastructure on the population and employment growth of U.S. cities over 20 years period after the Internet became widely available in the 1990s. I employ an instrumental variables strategy which uses AT&T Long Lines of 1960 to address the concerns that the location of Internet network is not random. I find that a 10% increase in a city’s Internet infrastructure causes about 1.7% increase in its population and 2.4% increase in its service sector employment.

The elderly overwhelmingly desire to age in place (not live in a nursing home), and the workforce supporting aging in place has a relatively high share of low-skill immigrants. This paper examines the impact of low-skill immigration on elderly living arrangements using individual-level data from the 1980-2000 Censuses. Exploiting the tendency of new immigrants to migrate to existing settlements of immigrants from the same birthplace, I use a two-stage least squares (2SLS) strategy to identify the causal effect of immigration on the living arrangements of native elderly. A 1 percentage-point increase in low-skilled immigration increases the probability that an elderly native will age in place by 0.04 percentage points and increases the probability of supported aging in place (aging in place with assistance from someone other than a spouse) by 0.30 percentage points. Consistent with a migration-induced cost reduction in aging in place, a 1 percentage point increase in low-skilled immigration also reduces the wages of all low-skilled workers in private households by 1.03%. My results suggest that low-skilled immigration is an effective way to increase aging in place which may improve quality of life and lower total healthcare costs.

Wilson argued that race differences in the frequency of marriage in the 1970s and 1980s resulted from a shortage of marriageable men in the African American community. Most assessments of this hypothesis conclude that only part of the race difference in marriage can be ascribed to differences in marriageable men. I assess the impact of male income, occupation, employment status, and institutional residence on race differences in first marriage rates among men in the period from 1960 to 2019. I develop new measures of first marriage rates and apply them to U.S. Census microdata for the 1960-1980 period. I construct closely comparable measures from American Community Survey data for the period 2008 through 2019. I apply classic components analysis to assess the impact of population composition on race differences in male first marriage rates over the entire 1960-2019 period. The analysis shows that in the mid-to-late 20th century, race differences in economic composition fully explain race differences in first marriage rates; among men in similar circumstances in 1960 and 1970, Blacks married more often than did Whites. With the decline of the male-breadwinner family in the 21st century, the effects of male economic circumstances on race differences in marriage rates has diminished but remains substantial. Based on novel measures of first marriage rates, the components analysis provides strong support for Wilson’s argument in the 1960-1980 period. The results also document a substantial decline in the effects of male economic circumstances on first marriage rates over the past six decades.

Despite remarkable educational gains of minorities, ethnoracial wage inequality persists and has even expanded among highly educated workers. Conventional explanations for this inequality are primarily derived from comparing workers across different educational levels and are less salient for understanding inequalities within the highly educated workforce. This study examines a previously overlooked source of ethnoracial inequality among highly educated workers: vertical mismatch between workers’ educational level and the education requirements for their occupation. Using a longitudinal sample of college graduates from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we find that vertical mismatch accounts for a large part of racial/ethnic and nativity wage inequality. Specifically, highly educated minorities (especially blacks and Hispanics) and immigrants (especially those holding a foreign degree) are disproportionately channeled into mismatched jobs and subsequently consigned to such positions. Also, highly educated Hispanics and Asians, as well as foreign-educated immigrants, face greater wage penalties of vertical mismatch. The findings offer new insights into a key source of ethnoracial and nativity stratification.