Background: Working in the mining industry increases the risk of chronic diseases and mortality. We investigated overall and cause-specific mortality rates among workers employed in the mining sector in the United States. Methods: We pooled 29 years of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) public-use data from 1986 to 2014, with mortality follow-up until 31 December 2015. We grouped respondents into the mining and nonmining sectors based on the responses given at the time of the NHIS interview. We compared the overall and cause-specific mortality rates using standardized mortality ratios (SMR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) adjusted for the competing cause of death. Results: From 1986 to 2014, an estimated 14 million deaths were recorded among subjects eligible for mortality follow-up. Of these, an estimated 50,000 deaths occurred among those working in the mining sector. A significantly higher overall mortality (SMR = 1.26, 95% CI: 1.17-1.36), and mortality from heart diseases (adjusted SMR = 1.56, 95% CI: 1.31-1.83), cancer (adjusted SMR = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.14-1.48) and unintentional injuries (adjusted SMR = 1.41, 95%CI: 1.03-1.85) were observed among those employed in the mining sector. When the analyses were restricted to men, only the SMRs for heart disease and cancer remained statistically significant. No elevated SMR for deaths from chronic lower respiratory disease was observed in the study. Conclusion: Workers employed in the mining sector have a significantly increased total death rate and death rates from heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries.

The gender gap and status of women in the US labor market has been an important and intensively studied topic in Labor Economics. This paper adds to the existing literature by using U.S. state-level labor market data and family planning facility records from 1970 to 2012 in an attempt to establish causality between female labor market outcomes and access to family planning. A robust panel data analysis is run on multiple labor market outcomes with both state and year fixed effects. The states are clustered to control for errors associated with a given time period carrying over into future time periods. The results are statistically significant for important labor market outcomes, and the results retain significance through multiple robustness checks. These results were not heterogeneous, and only white women had significant gains in income and labor market participation. Regressions show that an increase in 1 more facility per 100,000 people (5 for Wyoming, 80 for Virginia etc.) can raise white women's wages by over $2000, and labor force participation by 2 percentage points. The paper then looks at the Hyde Amendment as a case study in abortion access and finds that states that allow public insurance to be used for abortion have increases in female income by over $4800. These effects are again only significant for white women.

Low-skilled immigration has been argued to lower the price of services that are close substitutes for household production, reducing barriers for women to enter the labor market. Therefore, policies that reduce the number of low-skilled immigrants who work predominantly in low-skilled service occupations may have an unintended consequence of lowering women’s participation in the labor market. This article examines the labor supply impact of the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), which led to a large decline of the low-skilled immigrant workforce in the state. The analysis shows no evidence that LAWA statistically significantly affected U.S.-born women’s labor supply in Arizona. This finding is partly explained by an increase of native workers in household service occupations due to LAWA, which offset the decline of immigrants in these occupations and caused the cost of household services to be relatively uninfluenced by the passage of LAWA.

Using restricted administrative data on the voucher program, we examine the experience of voucher holders in metropolitan areas with rising rents. While some of our models suggest that rising rents in metropolitan areas are associated with a slight increase in rent-to-income ratios among voucher holders, poor renters in general see significantly larger increases in rent-to-income ratios. We see little evidence that rising rents push voucher holders to worse neighborhoods, with voucher holders in central cities ending up in lower poverty neighborhoods as rents rise. It appears that vouchers may help low-income households remain in neighborhoods as they gentrify.

In the postwar U.S. economy, labor productivity has been growing faster in the goods sector versus the service sector. This paper argues that this sectoral labor productivity growth gap can largely be explained by the fact that capital intensity also increases faster in the goods sector. I build a two-sector neoclassical growth model in which capital substitutes low-skilled labor but complements high-skilled labor, and the goods sector is more intensive in low-skilled labor relative to the service sector, as observed in the data. As capital becomes more abundant relative to labor along economic growth, low-skilled labor is substituted by capital, leading to faster growth of capital intensity and hence labor productivity in the goods sector. Using a calibrated model, I find that two thirds of the sectoral labor productivity growth gap can be explained by capital accumulation and its interaction with capital-skill complementarity.

This thesis focuses on how the design of public insurance policies entails distributional consequences that impact macroeconomic aggregates, inequality, and welfare. The first chapter assesses the general equilibrium effects of substituting the current U.S. income security system with a Universal Basic Income (UBI) policy. I develop an overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic income risk that incorporates intensive and extensive margins of labor supply, on-the-job learning, and child-bearing costs. I calibrate the model to the U.S. and conduct counterfactual analyses that implement reforms towards a UBI. I find that an expenditure-neutral reform has moderate impacts on agents’ labor supply response but induces aggregate capital and output to grow due to larger precautionary savings. A UBI of $1,000 monthly requires a substantial increase in the tax rate of consumption used to clear the government budget and lead to an overall decrease in the aggregates. In both cases, the economy has more disposable income but less consumption at the bottom of their distributions. The UBI economy constitutes a welfare loss at the transition if expenditure-neutral and results in a gain in the second scenario. Despite relative losses, a majority of newborn households support both UBI reforms. The second chapter develops a heterogeneous agents model with history-dependent U.I. benefits built on stylized facts of the U.S. economy to quantitatively obtain an optimal U.I. program design. We first conduct an empirical analysis using the discontinuity of U.I. rules at state borders and find that a tenure requirement induces a longer employment spell. The monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and has a stronger effect on U.I. applications. The model can recover the sign of the relation between the requirements and the employment outcomes. When the tenure requirement is long, workers tend to accept more low paying jobs to become eligible sooner to U.I. and protect themselves from risk. The monetary requirement has the opposite effect. Due to its impact on moral hazard, the monetary requirement can generate higher levels of welfare than an increase in the length of the tenure requirement. The highest level of welfare is achieved by the optimization of both requirements

Between 1907 and 1914, the “Galveston Movement,” a philanthropic effort spearheaded by Jacob Schiff, fostered the immigration of approximately 10,000 Russian Jews through the Port of Galveston, Texas. Upon arrival, households were given train tickets to pre-selected locations west of the Mississippi River where a job awaited. Despite the program's stated purpose to locate new Russian Jewish immigrants to the Western part of the U.S., we find that roughly 85 to 90 percent of the prime-age male participants ultimately moved east of the Mississippi, typically to large Northeastern and Midwestern cities. We use a standard framework for modeling location decisions to show destination assignments made cities more desirable, but this effect was overwhelmed by the attraction of religious and country of origin enclaves. Economic conditions appear to be of secondary importance to our ethnic measures, even for participants at the top of the skill distribution.

In this paper, we analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. We exploit a novel data set covering all Census Block Groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes, street infrastructure, as well as population and workforce characteristics. To deal with concerns of omitted variable bias, we apply commuting zone fixed effects and construct instruments based on historic city planning. The results suggest that variation in street network density may explain regional innovation differentials beyond the traditional location externalities found in the literature.

Objectives Ethnic enclaves are ethnically, spatially, and socially distinct communities that may promote health through access to culturally appropriate resources and reduced exposure to discrimination. This study examined ethnic enclave residence and pregnancy outcomes among Asian/Pacific Islander (API) women in the USA. Design We examined 9206 API births in the Consortium on Safe Labor (2002–2008). Ethnic enclaves were defined as hospital regions with high percentage of API residents (> 4%), high dissimilarity index (> 0.41; distribution of API and white residents within a geographic area), and high isolation index (> 0.03; interaction between API and white residents in an area). Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), preterm birth (PTB), small for gestational age (SGA), and smoking and alcohol use during pregnancy were reported in medical records supplemented with ICD-9 codes. Hierarchical logistic regression models estimated associations between ethnic enclaves and pregnancy outcomes, adjusted for maternal factors, area-level poverty, and air pollution. Results Women in enclaves had lower odds of GDM (OR 0.61; 95%CI 0.45, 0.82), PTB (OR 0.74; 95%CI 0.56, 0.99), and SGA (OR 0.68; 95%CI 0.52, 0.89) compared with women in non-enclaves. Prenatal smoking and alcohol use appeared less likely in enclaves, but estimates were imprecise. Within enclaves, about 10.5% of homes speak an API language, compared with 6.0% in non-enclaves. The mean percent of foreign-born API populations was 67.4% in enclaves and 68.8% in non-enclaves. Conclusions API women residing in ethnic enclaves had better pregnancy outcomes than API women residing in non-enclave areas. Access to culturally appropriate social supports and resources may be important for health promotion among API populations.

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining US wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backwards and forwards. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers. Increased educational wage differentials explain 75 percent of the rise of U.S. wage inequality from 1980 to 2000 as compared to 38 percent for 2000 to 2017.

This study empirically investigates the impact of US agricultural exports on farm and nonfarm employment and tests how individuals adjust to agricultural export shocks. Based on the data from 1991 to 2017 and a Bartik-style instrument that exploits cross-regional variation in agricultural export exposure stemming from initial differences in agricultural specialization and temporal variation in predicted US exports from exogenous tariff reductions, we find that a 1% increase in agricultural exports increases farm employment by 0.302% and has no statistically significant impact on nonfarm employment. The individual-level analysis shows that, in response to positive agricultural export demand shocks, natives with a college degree are more likely to become self-employed and start farm activities and while non-natives without a college degree are more likely to become hired farmworkers. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the estimates of agricultural trade elasticities of employment shows that on balance, job gains due to US agricultural exports are slightly larger than job loss due to agricultural imports, resulting in a net gain of around 0.24 million farm jobs over 1991–2017.

During the early 1900s, the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) covered nearly 37 million hectares of land in the Southern United States relative to the current area of only 1.7 million hectares. Given the immense loss of area under the longleaf pine ecosystem, restoring longleaf pine has become a priority among multiple agencies. In this context, it is essential to understand the economics of longleaf pine at various scales for increasing the efficacy of longleaf pine restoration efforts. The first chapter compares the land expectation values (LEVs) of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), slash pine (Pinus elliottii), and longleaf pine stands based on incomes obtained from forest products, net stored carbon, and net water yield in the Lower Coastal Plain region of South Georgia. The second chapter examines the impact of the gradual adoption of longleaf pine by landowners on the total wood procurement cost of a pulp mill at a landscape level using the hybrid simulation-optimization method. The third chapter develops a clustered point process model for determining the effects of socioeconomic, topographic, ecological, and distance variables on the spatial density of longleaf pine plantations supported by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in South Georgia. The results of the first chapter show that the income from pine straw is significant in determining the profitability of longleaf pine plantation. Longleaf pine is not as profitable as other southern pines but has a lower financial risk. The results of the second chapter show no significant difference in total procurement cost between the landscape with longleaf and loblolly pines and the landscape with only loblolly pine only after 35 years of pulp mill operation. The total wood procurement cost was higher when loblolly pine stands are replaced with longleaf pine at the landscape level. The results of the third chapter show that the spatial density of longleaf pine plantations is negatively associated with the distance from cropland and pasture land but positively associated with land capability classes and distance from the sawmills. Longleaf pine restoration efforts should focus on those croplands or pasture lands, which are closer to existing longleaf pine plantations, have lower soil capability, and are far from wood consuming mills. This dissertation directly feeds into the current initiatives for restoring longleaf pine in the Southern United States. The research will support new policy initiatives for increasing the acreage under longleaf pine in the Southern United States.

In this dissertation, I study the effects of the Affordable Care Act advance premium tax credits, or ACA “subsidy”, on labor supply for households that are not offered employer-sponsored health insurance using premium data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation linked to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey from 2010 to 2017. Due to a sharp decrease to zero in the subsidy for households above 400 percent of the poverty line, households near this cutoff have a financial incentive to reduce their income by decreasing their labor supply at the intensive and/or extensive margins. Thus, I calculate the “potential lost subsidy” (PLS) for households near the cutoff as the subsidy they would receive at exactly 400 percent of the poverty line but may lose if earning just above it. On average, the PLS equals $100 a month for younger workers but is four to six times larger for older workers and greatly varies by geographic location and family size. Using OLS and probit regressions with interaction terms to capture the relevant households, I estimate the impacts of the discontinuity in subsidy on labor supply. I find that income and hours of work do not statistically decrease from one year to another in response to the PLS. Moreover, there is no evidence that the probability one of the household members stops working increases as the PLS gets larger. This null effect is a moderately precise zero and suggests

In this paper, I estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on the racial wage and earnings gaps between black and white workers in the United States, during the years 2000 to 2004. Using fixed-effects and a state-year trend model, I find that an increase to the minimum wage is associated with a 3.6% increase in black workers’ wages, almost double the increase experienced by white men, suggesting a narrowing of the racial wage gap. Conversely, white workers’ overall earnings increased by 1.1%, compared to only 0.78% for black workers. This result suggests that the minimum wage does not reduce overall racial economic disparities. I conclude that the overall benefits workers may receive from minimum wage increases are likely to be concentrated among white men.

The persistence and severity of the gap between black and white wealth, and the role of housing discrimination in creating and sustaining this gap are both well documented. But given the chronological and spatial limits of national data sets, we have little direct empirical evidence about the local mechanisms shaping race, housing and wealth in the era when most of the damage was done. We employ the newly available 1940 full count census and the archival records of the St. Louis Assessors office to traced housing values, tenure, and disposition for a sample of 1940 owners and addresses. We show that sustained residential segregation carved the City into zones with very different trajectories of housing opportunity, and trapped African-American homeowners into long tenures of ownership in distressed and depreciating neighbourhoods.

Length scales for spatial variability of air pollution concentrations depend on the pollutant and the location. In this paper, we develop a readily scalable algorithm based on “spatial-increment”, to decompose the air pollution concentration into four spatial components: long-range, mid-range, neighborhood, and near-source. We apply the algorithm to annual-average concentrations of outdoor nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) for all census blocks in the contiguous US. For NO2, “neighborhood” and “mid-range” components dominate both within-city and between-city concentration differences (both components are ~5-fold larger in large urbanized areas than rural areas). For PM2.5, the “long-range” component dominates; this component varies by region (e.g., is three times greater in the Midwest [7 μg/m3] than in the West [2.3 μg/m3]), whereas variation by urban area size is relatively minor. Our study provides the first nation-level fine-scale decomposed pollution surfaces to date; this dataset is publicly available. Results can be used to estimate, at least to a zeroth order, the contribution of sources at different distances from the receptor to the annual average pollution in a location of interest.

Does education change people's lives in a way that delays mortality? Or is education primarily a proxy for unobserved endowments that promote longevity? Most scholars conclude that the former is true, but recent evidence based on Danish twin data calls this conclusion into question. Unfortunately, these potentially field-changing findings-that obtaining additional schooling has no independent effect on survival net of other hard-to-observe characteristics-have not yet been subject to replication outside Scandinavia. In this article, we produce the first U.S.-based estimates of the effects of education on mortality using a representative panel of male twin pairs drawn from linked complete-count census and death records. For comparison purposes, and to shed additional light on the roles that neighborhood, family, and genetic factors play in confounding associations between education and mortality, we also produce parallel estimates of the education-mortality relationship using data on (1) unrelated males who lived in different neighborhoods during childhood, (2) unrelated males who shared the same neighborhood growing up, and (3) non-twin siblings who shared the same family environment but whose genetic endowments vary to a greater degree. We find robust associations between education and mortality across all four samples, although estimates are modestly attenuated among twins and non-twin siblings. These findings-coupled with several robustness checks and sensitivity analyses-support a causal interpretation of the association between education and mortality for cohorts of boys born in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.

This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in Italy and the United States. The chapters are ordered chronologically, based on the period of interest. In the first chapter, I investigate the causes and consequences of public spending on primary education in post-unitary Italy. In a context of restricted suffrage, I identify political incentives that contributed to expenditure decisions, and I study the effects on school attendance and literacy. The second and third chapters present studies on early-twentieth-century United States. In the second chapter, my co-author Michael Poyker and I study the economics of genderspecific minimum-wage regulations passed by selected states starting in the 1910s. We examine the impact of these laws on earnings and employment, with an additional focus on the mechanisms of substitution between covered and uncovered workers. In the third chapter, I study the labor market outcomes of former prisoners, considering the role played by convict labor. Using Census data spanning from 1920 to 1940, I study the labor-market penalty suffered by ex-prisoners, the determinants of convict labor, and its consequences in terms of postrelease labor-market outcomes.

The Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015 was enacted in order to better identify and mitigate race-based and identity-based bias in policing. The law requires California police departments to record data on stops made by police officers, including fields such as perceived identity and demographics, reasoning for stops and searches, and the outcome of each encounter. RIPA does not explicitly distinguish between vehicle or pedestrian stops. In December of 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) RIPA Board (the Board) requested that Dr. Emily Owens of the California Policy Lab (CPL) conduct an analysis of the RIPA data and provide a report to the Board, in order to better understand any patterns that the data revealed. The following report provides a place-based analysis of all stops made by the LAPD from July 2018 – October 2019.