Transit use in the U.S. has been sliding since 2014, well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The largest state, California, was also losing transit riders despite substantial public investment and increased service in the pre-pandemic period. This downturn prompted concern among transit managers and planners interested in service-side interventions to reverse the decline. However, relatively little is known about changes in the demand for public transit and how shifts in demand-side factors have affected patronage. Drawing on California data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys, we quantify demand-side changes as a function of two factors—changes in ridership rates of various classes of transit riders (“rate effects”) and changes in the composition of those rider classes (“composition effects”). Statewide, we find that while shifts in the population composition were in some cases associated with lower levels of ridership, the largest declines in transit patronage were associated with falling ridership rates. Specifically, those with limited automobile access and Hispanic travelers rode transit far less frequently in 2017 compared to 2009. Transit ridership rates and rider composition in the San Francisco Bay Area were relatively stable during the study period, while both rate and compositional changes in the Los Angeles area were associated with much lower levels of total ridership. Overall, our findings demonstrate the important role of demand-side factors in understanding aggregate transit use, and suggest that planners and managers may have limited policy tools at their disposal when seeking to bolster ridership levels.

This article proposes a novel method for data‐driven identification of spatiotemporal homogeneous regions and their dynamics, enabling the exploration of their composition and extents. Using a simple network representation, the method enables temporal regionalization without the need for geographical harmonization. To allow for a transparent corroboration of our method, we use it as a basis for an interactive and intuitive interface for the progressive exploration of the results. The interface guides the user through the original data, enabling both experts and nonexperts to characterize broad patterns of stability and change and identify detailed local processes. The proposed methodology is suitable for any region‐based data, and we validate our method with illustrative scenarios from Chicago and Toronto, with results that match the established literature. The system is publicly available, with demographic data for over forty regions in the USA and Canada between 1970 and 2010.

Privacy preserving is a paramount concern in publishing datasets that contain sensitive information. Preventing privacy disclosure and providing useful information to legitimate users for data analyzing/mining are conflicting goals. Randomized response is a class of techniques that perturbs each sensitive value in a certain way, so that personal privacy is protected while the large-trend of the entire dataset is still recoverable. However, existing randomized response techniques do not allow to flexibly configure the level of privacy protection, support only a few types of aggregate queries, and cannot achieve the best answer accuracy from perturbed data. These drawbacks impair the effectiveness of those techniques. This paper proposes a general framework based on randomized response techniques, which has good flexibility and extensibility, and can improve the effectiveness of randomized response methods. Our approach is validated by extensive experiments and comparison with existing randomized response and generalization methods.

Country-specific business cycle fluctuations are potentially very costly for member states ofcurrency unions because they lack monetary autonomy. The actual costs depend on the extent to which consumption is shielded from these fluctuations and thus on the extent of risk sharing across member states. The literature to date has focused on financial and credit markets as well as on transfer schemes as channels of risk sharing. In this paper, we show how the standard approach to quantify risk sharing can be extended to account for migration as an additional channel of cross-country risk sharing. In theory, migration should play a key role when it comes to insulating per capita consumption from aggregate fluctuations, and our estimates show that it does so indeed for US states, but not for the members of the Euro area (EA). Consistent with these results, we also present survey evidence which shows that migration rates are about 20 times higher in the US. Lastly, we find, in line with earlier work, that risk sharing is generally much more limited across EA members.

This paper promotes the application of a path-independent decomposition scheme. Besides presenting some theoretical arguments supporting this decomposition scheme, this study also illustrates the difference between the path-independent decomposition scheme and a popular sequential decomposition with an empirical application of the two schemes. The empirical application is about identifying a directly unobservable phenomenon, i.e. the changing social gap between people from different educational strata, through its effect on marriages and cohabitations. It exploits census data from four waves between 1977 and 2011 about the American, French, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Romanian societies. For some societies and periods, the outcome of the decomposition is found to be highly sensitive to the choice of the decomposition scheme. These examples illustrate the point that a careful selection of the decomposition scheme is crucial for adequately documenting the dynamics of unobservable factors.

Written for an audience of students, general readers, and economists alike, this volume is a primer on the field of the economics of conflict and peace. It offers a reasonably comprehensive, systematic, and detailed overview – even if in broad strokes – of the field’s orthodox and heterodox history of thought and current theories and evidence. We view this Element as a baseline account on which to build a future, separate and more fully developed, piece on the economics of peace, economic growth, and human development. In terms of process, Brauer and Silwal conceptualized the volume. Anderton, Brauer, Coyne, Dunne, and Silwal contributed draft sections, and all authors then reviewed, critiqued, and constructively commented on each other’s work. Anderton and Silwal wrestled the citations and references into shape, Brauer carried out the final editing for integration, cohesion, and flow, and Silwal led the overall effort to shepherd the volume through to production. Content-wise, Section 1, written by Anderton and Brauer and the only section in Part I, situates the field of conflict and peace economics within the discipline of economics. Part II is a synopsis of the fields’ intellectual history. We start in Section 2 with Coyne’s introduction to the Austrian school of economics and its perhaps surprising relevance for conflict and peace economics today. Marxian, post-Keynesian, and other heterodox economists’ thoughts are reviewed in Section 3, written by Dunne. Arranged by subfield, Section 4, written by Silwal with contributions by Brauer, characterizes the development of the mostly neoclassical and neo-Keynesian post-Second World War literature. From history of thought, the Element moves in Part III to presentations of selected theory and evidence of the contemporary literature. Coyne illustrates in Section 5 how preparing for and engaging in war increases the scale and scope of government in overlooked, and politically and economically often uncomfortable and crucial, ways. In a similar vein, Dunne reviews the literature on the effects of military expenditure and the cost of war on economic development in Section 6, a literature stimulated although by no means dominated by heterodox views. Rounding out Part III, Anderton and Brauer summarize examples of neoclassical-based theories and empirical case studies in Section 7. Section 8, the only section in Part IV, and written in the main by Silwal, then turns to underexplored and altogether missing topics in conflict and peace economics research. Altogether, the Element (a) contextualizes the field of conflict and peace economics, (b) outlines its history of thought, (c) highlights examples of current theoretical and empirical scholarship in the field, and (d) maps trajectories for further research.

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 study contributes to the existing literature by providing the first evidence of health externality of child support policies for infants’ health outcomes.

The extensive literature on minimum wages has found evidence for compression of relative wages and mixed results for employment. This literature has been plagued by a number of problems. The median-minimum wage-ratio has been used as the independent variable. First, the median is endogenous. Second, the minimum wage policies are also endogenous. Third, it is difficult to disentangle (i) compression of relative wages and (ii) truncation due to disem-ployment effects. Fourth, compression combined with an upward sloped labour supply curve implies both negative demand effects for the least skilled workers and positive supply effects for higher types. We offer solutions for all four problems, by using instruments for the mean and the minimum, by using data on personal characteristics, and by a careful specification of the heterogeneity in employment effects. We apply our method to US data starting from 1979, allowing for wide variation in minimum wages.

The percentage of physicians in the United States who are Black has increased only 4% in the past 120 years, and the number of Black male doctors has not changed at all since 1940, according to a new study.

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Asians became the victims of a sudden increase in racial discrimination as public officials repeatedly referred to the virus as the “Chinese virus.” We document that Asian entrepreneurship has been disproportionally hurt after January 2020, particularly among Asian immigrants, declining by 17 percent when compared to non-Hispanic whites. Examining the dynamics of transitions into and out of self-employment, we find a substantial increase in Asian immigrants’ self-employment exits, increased necessity entries, and reductions in opportunity entries – patterns suggestive of customer and employer ‘taste discrimination’. The pandemic has also proven particularly harmful on businesses owned by recently arrived immigrants and by East Asian immigrants. While Asian enclaves help palliate the pandemic’s damaging impact, the latter has reached a broad spectrum of businesses. Gaining a better understanding of how the pandemic has impacted Asian businesses is crucial to inform about the emergence of discriminatory behaviors that widen inequities and endanger a fast recovery.

An abundance of scholarship has examined the racial invariance thesis positing that the causes of violence, especially markers of disadvantage, are similar across racial/ethnic groups. More recently, research has adopted “yardsticks” to provide more meaningful assessments of the thesis, including incorporating Latinos into analyses and using statistical tests to compare disadvantages’ effects across groups. Less attention, however, has been given to the measure of violence the thesis applies to. Although intended to explain offending, criminologists commonly substitute measures of race-/ethnic-specific arrest and victimization. Using 2010–2014 National Incident-Based Reporting System data for 453 census places, we examine whether the relationship between structural disadvantage and race-/ethnic-specific violence varies across measures of offending, arrest, and victimization. Consistent with “lenient interpretations” of the thesis, we find that disadvantage is generally associated with higher rates of viol...

Building on earlier work that shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has a substantial positive effect on maternal labor supply, we show that labor supply effects are concentrated among mothers with children under age three, with only moderate effects of the EITC on the labor supply of mothers with teenagers. These increases in labor supply are coupled with large increases in the use and cost of child care among mothers with children under age three. Results highlight the importance of considering heterogeneous treatment effects of policy and have implications for child care policy and other family policy.

Centralization of public goods with spillovers limits free-riding and increases provision, but general equilibrium household responses to changes in net benefits across space can undermine its value. This paper considers the trade-off for community colleges. After geographic expansions across Texas, communities that joined and their neighbors saw increased aggregate home values and prices, suggesting that more centralization is welfare-enhancing. I estimate a general equilibrium structural model to understand the optimal size of the tax base in Austin, TX. Under centralization, 12 percent more households pay college taxes and average yearly household welfare increases by $29 ($23M for the MSA), or 15 percent of the college’s yearly tax revenue. However, complete centralization is not socially optimal because the services are spatially concentrated, and the resulting household sorting adversely affects the housing market. There are 146 tax base configurations that improve welfare even more; a smaller than centralization tax base raises average welfare by up to an additional $222, mainly reflecting the general equilibrium housing market effects.

This thesis adds to the recent historical development literature within development economics and investigates the long-term impacts of historical events on contemporary development performance, to aid our understanding of underdevelopment in modern Africa. In Chapter 2, I first introduce the theory of ethnicity and the related concepts such as ethnic group and ethnic diversity. I then uncover the influence of ethnic power at the local level in Africa by using multiple waves of the Afrobarometer surveys and reviewing the recent literature that studies the impacts of precolonial ethnic characteristics on contemporary development performance. In the following three chapters (i.e. Chapter 3, 4 and 5), I focus on the impacts of three important historical events in Africa, such as human migration, civil conflict and the slave trade. Specifically, I try to answer the following three questions by taking a historical perspective at the ethnicity level in Africa: (1) the impact of genetic diversity on interpersonal trust, (2) the impact of civil conflict on ethnic identity, and (3) the impact of the slave trade on within-group economic inequality. Using a combination of multiple survey datasets, historical archives, and econometric analysis, this thesis finds that: (1) genetic diversity within ethnic groups has a negative impact on interpersonal trust over the long-term horizon, (2) individuals who are exposed to short-term civil conflict tend to feel a stronger sense of ethnic identity rather than national identity, and (3) ethnic groups with higher levels of the slave trade in the distant past are economically more unequal today. Overall, explaining the link between these historical events and current social, economic and political outcomes has important policy implications and valuable guidances to make the African society moving forward.

Approximately 11 million undocumented individuals live in the United States. At the same time, there are concerns that the presence of undocumented immigrants may contribute to an increase in crime rates. In this article, I examine the institutionalization rate of undocumented immigrants and quantify the change in crime rates attributable to undocumented immigration. The analysis yields a few main results. First, despite possessing characteristics usually associated with crime, undocumented immigrants are 33% less likely to be institutionalized compared to US natives. Second, there is no evidence that undocumented immigrants who have spent more time in the USA are more likely to be institutionalized compared to those who have been in the USA for a shorter time. There is evidence, however, that arriving at a younger age is associated with higher institutionalization rate. Finally, overall property and violent crime rates across US states are not statistically significantly increased by undocumented immigration.

Small towns and cities outside of national parks, scenic public lands, and other natural amenities throughout the western United States are becoming increasingly popular places to live and visit. As a result, many of these gateway communities appear to be experiencing a range of pressures and challenges. In this study we draw on the results of in-depth interviews with 33 public officials and a survey of more than 300 public officials to shed light on the planning and development concerns across western gateway communities. Our results indicate that gateway communities throughout the western United States are experiencing a range of planning and development challenges, many of which seem atypical for small rural communities, such as challenges associated with housing affordability, cost of living, and congestion. These challenges seem to be more related to population growth than increasing tourism and stand out in stark contrast against the fact that these communities strongly value and identify with their small-town character. Our findings suggest gateway communities are doing a variety of things, some quite innovative, to address their planning and development challenges but often feel overwhelmed, behind the curve, and in need of additional capacity and planning support.

New York City has lost more lives from COVID-19 than any other American city. Our paper examines variation in COVID-19 deaths across neighborhoods as it relates to the spatial variation in the racial, ethnic, and nativity-status composition of neighborhoods. This topic has received little scholarly attention and is imperative to explore, given the absence of racial and ethnic specific COVID-19 mortality rates by neighborhood. New York City is a racially and ethnically segregated city and a longstanding destination of immigrants, making some neighborhoods more susceptible to greater levels of COVID-19 mortality than others. Using ZCTA-level data on COVID-19 deaths and demographic data from the American Community Survey, our mapping analysis reveals that a racial, ethnic, and nativity-status hierarchy exists in the geographic distribution of COVID-19 mortality. Implications of these findings are discussed as they relate to residential segregation and persistent spatial inequalities faced by communities of color.

I examined how dual-earner households manage the often-competing demands of work and family life through an in-depth analysis of time allocated to housework and child care while testing the theories of gender display and economic dependency. I developed new measures for occupational nurturance and authority and applied these measures to the housework and child care literature by conducting a series of replication studies. My work supports the relationship between employment characteristics and remaining gender inequalities in unpaid household labor. I was able to shed light on how dual-earner households attempt to manage the complicated work-family time bind, while adding to the field of replication studies in quantitative sociology. I constructed new measures for occupational nurturance and authority to offer alternative ways to assess occupational traits that were not mutually exclusive or dichotomous. I conducted year fixed effects multilevel models of General Social Survey (GSS) respondents nested within occupations. Using these models, I constructed empirical Bayes (EB) estimates of the occupational effects and aggregated the data set at the occupation-level for easy merging to any data set using Census occupation codes. I showed the utility of my new measures by merging them to the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for further analysis. I found overwhelming support for gender conventionality for married men and women working in gender atypical occupations who displayed less stereotypical gendered behavior at home. However, separate from occupational sex composition, my findings also provided support for the influence of gender ideology on married men and women’s gendered display of housework at home. For child care, I found consistent and overwhelming support for fathers’ and mothers’ time spent with children and economic dependency’s time availability perspective. These results illuminated the “time crunch” that dual-earners face as they juggle work and family obligations. Across both studies of unpaid household labor, the overall findings suggest a gendered picture. Married women completed more housework than married men, and mothers completed more child care than fathers. The housework findings were further supported by gender ideology, or that those with more traditional views on housework and family life completed more traditionally gendered housework tasks. Although, my findings also suggested more nuanced housework for those in gender atypical workplaces in support of gender conventionality. Finally, even though I found strong support for economic dependency’s time availability perspective for time spent with children in dualearner households, mothers still completed more child care than fathers regardless of all other factors further highlighting a stalled revolution for working mothers. Women made strides in the workplace, but still faced gendered unpaid household labor at home. Throughout my studies, I added new measures to the field and I built on the great work of leaders in the field of housework and child care through replication. I conducted robustness and generalizability checks of prior work and made a case for replication studies in quantitative sociology.

This study explores couples' fertility outcomes for different levels of female education and varying levels of spousal education inequality. We retrieved individual-level data from the IPUMS-CPS database for birth cohorts between 1923 and 1982. Following a repeated cross-section analysis, we show that the female education effect on fertility ranges from negative to positive. The most detrimental one was found in hypogamous couples (women more educated than men) with the highest spousal education gap. A positive correlation emerged solely in homogamous couples (equally educated spouses) of advanced levels of education. Given that hypogamy has the potential to dominate in future forms of educational pairing, the results of this study could provide valuable insights for policymakers in planning more effective fertility policies.