It is now established that mortality and excess mortality from COVID-19 differed across racial and ethnic groups in 2020. Less is known about educational differences in mortality during the pandemic. We examine mortality rates by BA status within sex, age, and race/ethnic groups comparing 2020 with 2019. Mortality rates have increasingly differed by BA status in the US in recent years and there are good reasons to expect the gap to have widened further during the pandemic. Using publicly available provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics we find that mortality rates increased in 2020 over 2019 for those with and without a BA, irrespective of age, sex, or race/ethnicity. Although mortality rates increased by more for those without a BA, the ratio of mortality rates for those with and without a BA changed surprisingly little from 2019 to 2020. The BA was protective against mortality prior to the pandemic, and it was equally protective during the pandemic. Among 60 groups (sex by race/ ethnicity by age) that are available in the data, the ratio of mortality rates of those without a BA to those with a BA fell for more than half of the groups. Our results suggest that differences in the risk of infection were less important in structuring mortality by education than differences in the risk of death conditional on infection.

If gender and race/ethnicity did not privilege some groups and harm others in the labor market, one would expect that groups that do not differ in terms of human capital, geographic location, and other basic characteristics would earn wages around average. However, our counterfactual analysis shows substantial disparities among our 12 gender-race/ethnicity groups. All female groups, except Asians, have conditional wages well below average, especially, Native American, Black, and Hispanic women. Moreover, all female groups have conditional wages below those of any male group (except Asian women, who rank above Black men). Male advantage seems to be concentrated in two races, Asians and Whites; the other male groups have conditional wages either below average (Black men) or around average (Hispanic, Native American, and "other race" men). Our intersectional framework allows delving deeper into the gender and race penalties. White women's gender penalty is much larger than the racial penalty of any male (or female) group. Similarly, Asian women' gender penalty is larger than the racial penalty of any male group except for Blacks. Distinguishing among more than 400 occupational categories, we find that underpayment within occupations harms especially Native American women whereas occupational sorting strongly impacts Black women (even after including controls). Black men's occupational sorting also harms them after controlling for characteristics, a finding that we do not see in any other male group.

Like other urban amenities, parks are unevenly distributed throughout cities, with advantaged groups enjoying better access to better parks than more disadvantaged residents. Although such inequities are well documented, we know less about the mechanisms that shape them. We conduct a case study in Denver that includes a GIS analysis and interviews with local planners and historians. We find that while park funding systems have tended to steer investments into richer neighborhoods, racially discriminatory land use and housing policies that shape where low-income people of color can live have produced some of the deepest and most persistent inequities in access to parks. Recent improvements in park access for low-income people of color are based less on equity-oriented efforts by public agencies and more on residential location choices of affluent white residents.

We study competition over populations (audiences, workers, students, etc.) Understanding how institutions, businesses and technologies offer solutions to diverse populations is increasingly important. We hypothesize a closed-form relationship among the amount of competition, population diversity and quality of solutions offered to populations. Typical homogeneous competition (e.g., in Supply–Demand–Price systems) becomes the special case of competition over populations with infinitesimal diversity, while competition over diverse populations leads to Competition–Diversity–Quality tradeoffs. We formulate this as a conservation-law for competitive systems and demonstrate that quality for population members is a periodic function of competition and diversity there. We consider the competition among movies, restaurants, schools, workers and countries (in world-wide trade).

My dissertation examines the economic links between people’s experiences in early and later-life. It offers new empirical evidence on the effect of income in infancy on later-life outcomes, and investigates the performance and econometric properties of the linking tools often used to create data for these long-term empirical investigations. In my first chapter, I estimate a relationship between family income in infancy and later-life outcomes for children. Eligibility for child-related tax benefits depends on the calendar year in which a child is born. Families with children born in December are eligible for tax benefits a year earlier than families with children born a few days later in January. These differences create a discontinuity in after-tax income in infancy worth on average approximately $2,000 for families in tax year 2016. I use regression discontinuity techniques to calculate the effect of this change in after-tax income on outcomes for children and young adults in Census data. Evidence show that a $1,000 increase in after-tax income in infancy results in a 1.2 percentage point increase in the probability of a student being grade-for-age by high school, a basic indicator of academic achievement and social maturity. Effects of this income shock are larger for children from families that are more likely disadvantaged at a child’s birth, including Black families, and families with low education attainment. After high school, small differences in labor force attachment, earnings and education attainment persist for the adults who experienced the income increase as children. These effects are again pronounced for Black adults and adults born in counties with low average education attainment. In my second and third chapters, I investigate methodological problems that arise when linking data. Linking is often necessary to investigate generational economic links between childhood and adulthood. In the second chapter, my coauthors Martha Bailey, Catherine Massey, Morgan Henderson and I review the literature in historical record linkage in the U.S., and examine the performance of widely-used automated record linking algorithms. Focusing on algorithms in current practice, our findings highlight the important effects of linking methods on data quality. We then extend our analysis to look at the consequences of these differences in data quality on inference by computing intergenerational income elasticities between fathers and sons. Many of the methods produce estimated elasticities that are statistically distinguishable from the estimated intergenerational elasticity with hand-linked data, suggesting that the linking algorithms themselves may bias inference. However, eliminating false matches renders elasticity estimates similar to each other, and statistically indistinguishable from the elasticity estimated with the hand-linked data. In the third chapter, my coauthors Martha Bailey, Catherine Massey and I investigate two complementary strategies to address the issues we highlight in my second chapter. We investigate the use of validation variables to identify higher quality links and a regression-based weighting procedure to increase the representativeness of custom research samples. We demonstrate the potential value of these strategies using the 1850-1930 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Linked Representative Samples (IPUMS-LRS). We show that, while incorrect linking rates appear low in the IPUMSLRS, researchers can reduce error rates further using validation variables. We also show researchers can reweight linked samples to balance observed characteristics in the linked sample with those in a reference population using a simple regression-based procedure.

In the United States, little information is available about the number or characteristics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) immigrants. Using data from the Pew Research Center, the 2017 Gallup Daily Tracking survey, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, this report estimates the number of LGBT-identified undocumented and documented adult immigrants and foreign-born residents who are part of a same-sex couple. It also describes some of their demographic characteristics. This report updates a 2013 Williams Institute report.

Superfund sites could affect life expectancy (LE) via increasing the likelihood of exposure to toxic chemicals. Here, we assess to what extent such presence could alter the LE independently and in the context of sociodemographic determinants. A nationwide geocoded statistical modeling at the census tract level was undertaken to estimate the magnitude of impact. Results showed a significant difference in LE among census tracts with at least one Superfund site and their neighboring tracts with no sites. The presence of a Superfund site could cause a decrease of −0.186 ± 0.027 years in LE. This adverse effect could be as high as −1.22 years in tracts with Superfund sites and high sociodemographic disadvantage. Specific characteristics of Superfund sites such as being prone to flooding and the absence of a cleanup strategy could amplify the adverse effect. Furthermore, the presence of Superfund sites amplifies the negative influence of sociodemographic factors at lower LEs.

Introduction. In a majority of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), levels of child growth failure (CGF) have steadily declined since 2000. However, some countries show a different trend. Despite continued investment from the government of Ethiopia as well as donors, CGF levels are still high in Ethiopia. This study aimed to assess trends in CGF and associated sociodemographic, economic and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) factors from 2000 to 2016 in Ethiopia. Methods. Data were taken from four rounds of the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS). Children aged between 0 to 59 months were included. CGF indicators were categorised based on height-for-age z-score (HAZ) < -2 Standard deviation (SD), weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) < -2 SD and weight-for-height z-score (WHZ) < -2 SD. CGF trends were estimated for predicted probabilities and odds ratios (ORs) between 2000 and 2016. Results. A total sample size of 31978 for HAZ, 32045 for WAZ and 32246 for WHZ were included in the current study. Stunting decreased from an adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.77 (95% CI: 0.67 to 0.88) in 2005 to an AOR = 0.45 (95% CI: 0.39 to 0.53) in 2016 compared with the year 2000. Compared with data in 2000, underweight decreased from an AOR of 0.70 (95% CI: 0.61 to 0.80) in 2005 to an AOR of 0.43 (95% CI: 0.36 to 0.50) in 2016. Wasting declined from an AOR of 0.91 (95% CI: 0.75 to 1.10) in 2005 to an AOR of 0.76 (95% CI: 0.61 to 0.94) in 2016, compared with data in 2000. Conclusions Between 2000 to 2016, there was a decline in CGF levels albeit the levels are still relatively high compared with the World Health Organization (WHO) cut-off levels for public health concern. Observed rates of change varied across sociodemographic, economic and WASH factors which suggest that interventions tailored towards addressing the imbalances across those factors are required.

Using time-diary data from the U.S. and six wealthy European countries, I demonstrate that non-partnered mothers spend slightly less time performing childcare, but much less time in other household activities than partnered mothers. Unpartnered mothers’ total work time—paid work and household production—is slightly less than partnered women’s. In the U.S. but not elsewhere they watch more television and engage in fewer other leisure activities. These differences are independent of any differences in age, race/ethnicity, ages and numbers of children, and household incomes. Non-partnered mothers feel slightly more pressured for time and much less satisfied with their lives. Analyses using the NLSY79 show that mothers whose partners left the home in the past two years became more depressed than those whose marriages remained intact. Coupled with evidence that husbands spend substantial time in childcare and with their children, the results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers receive much less parental care—perhaps 40 percent less—than other children; and most of what they receive is from mothers who are less satisfied with their lives.

In this paper, the dissolution of the silos between geography and business faculty to form a teaching partnership with a common set of questions and goals and how that partnership changed their academic perspectives will be explored. Faculty deepened the challenges for students, re-thought pedagogical models, and re-thought grading and evaluation. Business provides a wide range of messy or “wicked” problems where many decisions are unclear or uncertain for the actors. Quantitative methods and GIS help in their own way and often leave different aspects of uncertainty on the table for students. Integrating geography and business in teaching and student research, and exploring some of the early “academic territoriality” that gave way to build experiences for students is discussed. This evolution of teaching methods within the partnership moved to a more problem-based approach that evolved to affect courses outside the partnership. These changes eventually led the faculty to develop Course-embedded Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) to pose messy, unstructured projects to students. Many of these projects resulted in external student conference presentations. Another outcome was a re-framing of grading and development of assessment that focuses on students engaging in the work. Finally, we identify the artificiality of our disciplinary divisions.

This thesis contains three essays related to the measurement and origins of inequality. The first two essays consider the Chicago public schools during the early 20th century. In the first essay, I evaluate the impact of school quality on child outcomes. Then I consider the impact of racial turnover on school funding. In the third and last chapter, I show how to adjust for effort when estimating latent skills from measures of academic performance.

This paper examines factors that are associated with area-level benefit awards for Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) as well as the work activity of DI and SSI beneficiaries. Although the Social Security Administration (SSA) cannot directly affect state policies or local economic conditions, there is value in understanding the extent to which these policies and conditions might correlate with application rates, benefit receipt, and beneficiary return-to-work rates. We conducted our analysis at the level of Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), which are geographic units created by the U.S. Census for statistical purposes. PUMAs are within-state geographies that have a population of at least 100,000 people and are large enough to produce statistics on low-occurrence events such as beneficiary suspensions and terminations for work. We aggregated data from the Social Security Administration’s Disability Analysis File, the American Community Survey, and other national sources. We assess the variation across PUMAs in the rate of new benefit awards and beneficiary work outcomes in 2017. We also consider the association between area-level demographic, economic, health, and health services availability and those beneficiary outcomes from 2005 through 2017. We find that: • Award rates in both DI and SSI were highest in 2017 in Appalachia (particularly where Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia meet) and southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama. They were also relatively high in western states such as New Mexico and Washington. We found that these patterns were relatively consistent across the years of our analysis. • In a multivariate framework, new benefit awards from 2005 through 2017 were higher in areas with higher shares of the population that were female, did not have a college degree, had a disability, received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or were in poverty and in areas with a higher cost of living (as proxied by wages, rent, and housing values). Most other factors we considered were only weakly associated with new benefit awards. • Among both DI and SSI beneficiaries, the shares with positive earnings and with cash benefits forgone because of substantial work activity in 2017 were highest in the Great Plains region—with especially high shares of beneficiaries who work in the eastern parts of North Dakota and South Dakota, the southern and western parts of Minnesota, and the northern part of Iowa. This general pattern held in earlier years of our analysis as well. • In a multivariate framework, the shares of beneficiaries with positive earnings from 2005 through 2017 were higher in areas with higher concentrations of the population over age 65 and in manual labor or service sector jobs, with a higher employment rates of people with disabilities, and with higher obesity rates. The share with positive earnings in those years was lower in areas where a larger share of the population was female, childless, had a disability, received SNAP, or in poverty and in areas that had higher cost of living. The associations between these factors and beneficiaries whose DI and SSI cash benefits were forgone for substantial work activity generally were in the same direction. Other factors were less strongly associated with beneficiary work outcomes. The policy implications of the findings are: • SSA does not directly control policy levers to affect the demographic, economic, health, and health services factors we considered. Nonetheless, knowing which area factors are correlated with better or worse work outcomes among beneficiaries may help targeting mailings for the Ticket to Work program or devoting resources to programs like the Work Incentives Planning and Assistance program to certain areas. Our cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses painted a consistent picture that areas with lower levels of economic opportunity—and areas with reductions in “affluence” over time—might be advantageous areas to target. Using trend data may help predict areas of opportunity before waiting to observe new awards or beneficiary outcomes. • It is important to note that our analysis is descriptive and we cannot and do not ascribe a causal relationship to observed factors. Ultimately, the intent of our analysis was to shed light on factors that SSA may want to use to target supports or outreach to potential applicants or current beneficiaries. For that purpose, associations between factors may be sufficient.

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage points in majority Black neighborhoods.

Objectives: Health equity is crucial to population health. To achieve this aim, extensive monitoring efforts beyond traditional disparities research are required. This analysis assesses trends in health equity for children from 1997 to 2018. Methods: Health equity in a given year is calculated using a previously developed measure as the mean weighted departure of individual health from the best achievable level of health. This criterion is defined as the median health of the most socially privileged identifiable group: white, non-Latinx boys in upper-income households. Using more than 20 years of data from the National Health Interview Survey, we apply this methodology to six measures of child health: parent-reported health status, school days missed due to illness or injury in the past year, a strength and difficulties questionnaire score, emotional difficulties, a toddler mental health indicator score, and toddler depression. We separately calculate racial/ethnic and income disparities. Monte Carlo simulation is used to assess whether trends are statistically significant. Results: Health equity among children increased gradually over the past 2 decades, with five of the six measures demonstrating upward trends. Improvements in health equity are stronger among younger children (age 0–3 and 4–7). Unlike previous work examining adults, both types of disparities narrowed over the study period. Conclusions for Practice: Progress on health equity requires accountability to an objective metric. This analysis suggests some improvement over the past two decades, although these gains are under threat from potential decreases in government spending on programs affecting children and the COVID-19 pandemic.

To overcome poverty, strengthening human development is crucial. However, today 250 million children younger than 5 years in low-income and middle-income countries are likely not to attain their full development potential. To overcome the obstacles to optimal human development, this dissertation examines the effect of determinants on the child, parent, school, or country level that determine child development. The first essay questions the robustness of parental preferences as the main determinants of the height gap between children in India and sub-Saharan Africa as Jayachandran & Pande (2017) [J+P] claim. In this replication and extension, we conduct a sensitivity analysis of J+P’s model considering more recent data, weights, and additional controls: macro-determinants such as female education, household prosperity, open defecation, and the consumption of animal sourced foods. We show that the birth order gradient is shallower and can only explain a small share of the height difference using data from around 2015 or weights. The additional macro-determinants contribute to explaining the height gap. The second essay poses the question if timing and duration of the use of fortified foods in school lunches determine child development. This essay presents the results of a follow-up study to a randomized controlled trial of a nutrition intervention that provides double-fortified salt [DFS] to government schools in Bihar. We find that children who receive DFS for almost 4 years have higher hemoglobin levels. Children with DFS exposure only in early childhood have also increased hemoglobin levels and reduced likelihood of suffering from moderate or severe anemia than children who only receive DFS briefly for 4 months in later childhood. The results show that a public nutrition intervention can determine child health outcomes. The third essay investigates how market returns to investments and parentsâ perception thereof interacted with child endowments determine parental investments in children in India. Though research has examined the effects and causes of son preference in India widely, studies fail to cleanly identify the underlying reasons for lower parental investments in daughters. Our lab-in-the-field experiment reveals that parents react to different market settings: parents invest almost 10 percent less of the initial endowment in their children under competition. Further, parentsâ investments decrease by more than a quarter of the initial endowment once their own child competes against a boy. Market returns determine parental investments in children and so child development.

Does temperature affect real economic activity? Using the annual Current Population Survey between 1963 and 2015, we show that there is no association between temperature and earnings, hours, or output after controlling for time-invariant spatial heterogeneity and timevarying demographic factors. These results are robust to five separate sources of micro-data, different sampling horizons, functional forms, spatial measures of temperature, and and subsets of the data. This paper studies the relationship between temperature and productivity across space and time. Motivated by these null results, we develop a spatial equilibrium model where temperature can affect not only firm productivity, but also individual locational choice. After calibrating the model, we use it to disentangle the role of reallocation versus actual productivity losses in the U.S. economy between 1980 and 2015. Nearly all of the variation is driven by reallocation. We subsequently use the model to evaluate a counterfactual climate scenario and recover a new spatial equilibrium for the U.S. economy by 2050.

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 possible mechanisms of impact.

This dissertation examines the origins, functions, and effects of precarious schedules— characterized by unpredictable timing or hours of work—in the US labor market. I focus on the retail sector, which has drawn scrutiny for unstable scheduling practices, such as on-call shifts and variable part-time hours, that compound more familiar problems of low wages and inadequate benefits for retail workers. My dissertation advances sociological understanding of this topic by theorizing schedules as risk governance arrangements, reconceptualizing precarity in terms of frustrated expectations, and conducting novel analyses of the causal effects of specific types of schedules. I evaluate the thesis that unstable scheduling provides advantages for employers in the short term, but can be counterproductive in the longer term by undermining commitment and skill formation in the employment relationship. I develop a model of work as an option that formalizes and refines the notion of risk shifting from employers to workers through unstable scheduling. Unlike a secular process of externalizing risks, unstable schedules function as a call option, allowing employers to realize potential gains while avoiding anticipated losses to transacting for available labor. This contingent and asymmetric arrangement gives employers flexibility but precludes mutual commitment to a consistent schedule. I argue that commitment and consistency promote the formation of human and social capital that can improve performance and well-being at work. I conceive of the trade-off between optionality and commitment in the scheduling process as a reflection of the dual character of labor as a cost of production and a productive asset. The dissertation comprises three empirical studies. The first study analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort to identify compensation penalties for unpredictable and unstable schedules. The second study traces the emergence of a precarious retail labor force through historical documents, statistics, and secondary research spanning 1900–2019. The third study exploits a field experiment and high-frequency administrative data from the Stable Scheduling Study to analyze the relationship between consistency and labor productivity in twentyeight clothing stores. I find mixed results that nonetheless shed light on the governance of risk in the scheduling process. Workers with precarious schedules generally fare worse in the labor market than otherwise comparable workers with more stable schedules. But modest changes in scheduling stability among treatment stores did not significantly affect store performance as measured by quarterly sales per labor hour.

This paper investigates national and state-level trends in the adjusted marriage rate in the United States spanning nearly 140 years. While dramatic shifts in American family throughout the 20th century is a widely touted phrase, the trends in the geographic variation in marriage rates remains unknown. Using data from numerous Government publications we present visual representations of the adjusted marriage rate in the U.S. over a long historical time span (1880-2019) disaggregating the marriage rate by state. Our goal is to highlight both spatial (at the state-level) and temporal variation in marriage patterns in the U.S.