As Southern California becomes hotter and dryer, wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe. At the same time, the suburbanization of poverty and immigration are making the region increasingly – albeit unevenly - diverse. This paper synthesizes insights from planning and ecology to address the following questions: how do burned areas differ from the rest of the region in terms of poverty, race, and housing values; how has this changed since 1980; and what are the implications for environmental justice? Typically, low-income urban communities of color are disproportionately vulnerable to climate impacts. However, this study finds that the wildland-adjacent neighborhoods most impacted by wildfire have remained predominantly white and affluent, even as Southern California has become increasingly diverse. Moreover, housing in burned areas is increasingly more expensive. These results indicate that home ownership in a fire-prone, wildland-adjacent neighborhood is a profitable investment for those who can afford it. This situation is likely creating perverse incentives for continued development of the wildland-urban interface, leading to both continued ecological disturbance and affluent residents continuing to subject themselves to more physical danger than they have acknowledged.

Private vehicle travel entails costs to society. However, in a world designed around the automobile, adults who lack access to a vehicle for economic reasons may experience a significant handicap due to constrained mobility and accessibility. This paper examines whether private vehicle access is associated with the quantity and quality of out-of-home activities in which low-income individuals participate. We use pooled data from multiple time use surveys drawn from the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and employ Cragg two-part hurdle modeling to determine whether there is an association between household vehicle access and participation in twelve out-of-home activity types. As a robustness check, we also estimate multiple discrete continuous extreme value (MDCEV) models. Further, we examine travel time by mode for those with and without vehicles. Finally, we use American Time Use Survey data and fixed-effects panel models to determine the subjective well-being that is associated with our out-of-home activity types. A lack of private vehicle access is associated with significantly less frequent out-of-home activity participation, both in the aggregate and for seven of the twelve individual activities. Moreover, the activities most likely to be foregone are generally associated with high subjective well-being, suggesting that constrained mobility comes with significant emotional costs. We find a greater “activity penalty” for rural residents and for Canadian residents without vehicle access; urbanites without vehicles in the U.K. are the only geographic group which do not exhibit an activity penalty. Finally, respondents with vehicle access spend more total time traveling, although those without private vehicles partially offset spending less time in them with higher use of alternative modes. Overall, the findings suggest that the lack of a private vehicle is deleterious for quality of life, raising troubling questions about inequity possibly arising when people are denied access to vehicles for economic reasons.

This study explored the cultural, personal, and professional experiences of six Latino elementary principals in three California school districts. By identifying their experiences, supports, and challenges before and after attaining the principalship, their personal narratives illuminate the challenges they have faced and the strategies they used to overcome these challenges. A narrative inquiry approach was used to capture the participants’ personal stories in order to uncover meanings from their experiences. Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) was used to examine the data. Semi-structured, one-onone interviews with six Latino male principals were conducted to capture their voices and allow them to share their understanding and experiences. The findings identified implications for Latinos who aspire to attain principalship positions and recommendations for districts to increase administrative diversity.

Around the world, policymakers and news reports have warned that domestic violence (DV) could increase as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant restrictions on individual mobility and commercial activity. However, both anecdotal accounts and academic research have found inconsistent effects of the pandemic on DV across measures and cities. We use high-frequency, real-time data from Los Angeles on 911 calls, crime incidents, arrests, and calls to a DV hotline to study the effects of COVID-19 shutdowns on DV. We find conflicting effects within that single city and even across measures from the same source. We also find varying effects between the initial shutdown period and the one following the initial re-opening. DV calls to police and to the hotline increased during the initial shutdown, but DV crimes decreased, as did arrests for those crimes. The period following re-opening showed a continued decrease in DV crimes and arrests, as well as decreases in calls to the police and to the hotline. Our results highlight the heterogeneous effects of the pandemic across DV measures and caution against relying on a single data type or source.

We build a multi-sector spatial general equilibrium model to account for China’s export surge between 1990 and 2005. We focus on the role of the reductions in tariffs and internal migration costs during that period. Our model generates a closed-form aggregate trade elasticity that can be decomposed into four margins of adjustments. Two are the commonly studied intensive and extensive margins of exports (Chaney, 2008). The remaining two margins are the new-firm margin and the export-regime margin, for which we have found empirical support and used our reduced-form evidence to discipline the structural parameters. Using the calibrated model, we find that the reductions in tariffs and internal migration costs accounted for a third of China’s export growth between 1990 and 2005. Among the four margins, we find that the new-firm margin played an important role in amplifying the effect of these policy changes on export growth.

Protecting species by preserving habitats that are critical to their survival often involves placing land-use constraints, raising concerns regarding job losses. I examine the effects on logging labor markets following the 1990 Endangered Species Act listing of the Northern Spotted Owl as Threatened in California, Oregon, and Washington. Using difference-indifferences , triple-differences, and synthetic control method, I find that employment in the Lumber & Wood sector, during the 1990-2000 period, declined by 25%, representing 40,000 jobs lost in the sector.

Many retirees will not have enough money from conventional retirement programs to maintain their standard of living once they stop working. To help support themselves, they will need to tap their home equity, the major asset for most middle-income older households. Yet tapping home equity is difficult: most people are reluctant to downsize and, even when they do, they rarely reduce their housing expenses. Reverse mortgages are an option, but most households are put off by the enormity of the decision, the complexity of the product, and the high up-front costs. A statewide property tax deferral program overcomes the hurdles to accessing home equity. Property tax deferral does not provide access to as much home equity as a reverse mortgage, but the offsetting advantage is that some of the house value after the repayment of the loan and interest will be available for a bequest. At the household level, the proposed program is revenue-neutral: all taxes owed by a participating household are paid back, with interest sufficient to cover borrowing costs and administrative expenses. But because loans are made well in advance of repayments, the sponsor of the plan must cover start-up costs. In Massachusetts, if the state government simply borrowed money to cover the annual outlays, the state’s ratio of debt-to-GSP would rise from 14.0 percent to 15.1 percent. The alternative is to involve the private sector. This decision would raise the costs to homeowners, but nevertheless it may be necessary to get a broad-based program up and running.

Increasing cigarette taxes has been the cornerstone of tobacco control policy. Recent work has argued that raising cigarette taxes alone may no longer be an effective strategy for lowering smoking rates. We largely confirm these findings but also find that increases in price continue to predict lower smoking participation in most model specifications. We argue that raising cigarette prices via taxation remains an effective public health policy. We discuss the advantages of homogeneous tax environments and minimum price laws for eliminating opportunities for consumers to offset tax increases by searching for lowest taxes.

We propose a new approach to study the structure of occupational labor markets that relies on social network analysis techniques. Highly detailed transition matrices are constructed based on changes in individual workers’ occupations over successive months of the Current Population Survey rotating panels. The resulting short-term transition matrices provide snapshots of all occupational movements in the U.S. labor market at different points in time and for different sociodemographic groups. We find a significant increase in occupational mobility and in the diversity of occupational destinations for working men over the past two decades. The occupational networks for black and Hispanic men exhibit a high overall density of ties resulting from a high probability of movement among a limited set of occupations. Upward status mobility also increased during the time period studied, although there are large differences by race and ethnicity and educational attainment. Finally, factional analysis is proposed as a novel way to explore labor market segmentation. Results reveal a highly segmented occupational network in which movement is concentrated within a limited number of occupations with markedly different levels of occupational status.

While popular narratives regarding the destiny of demographics assume Latino interstate migrants will alter destination state politics as Latinos disperse across the states, no studies directly assess the empirical validity of the underlying assumption of migrant's political preferences. Moreover, established theories of domestic migrant preferences suggest a variety of potential individual-level behaviors that often diverge from the underlying assumption of a uniform introduction of more liberal voters. Employing data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, this study presents an analysis on Latino interstate migrant voting behavior, while also overcoming a variety of data limitations in existing studies. Countering some previous findings that homophily, adaptation, or even a static liberal orientation describes migrant voting behavior, the results suggest that Latino interstate migrant preferences vary by the political context of their previous state of residence. The results imply that the destiny of demographics will be conditioned, to some extent, by the migratory patterns of Latinos and the dyad of departure and destination states. When Latinos leave liberal (conservative) states, they bring more liberal (conservative) policies. In short, Latinos seem to pack their politics when moving across state lines.

Adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa hold particular social and economic development potential. This sub-group will grow into future parents, leaders and employers driving the sub-continent forward. However, they face a myriad of challenges not limited to healthcare, education and future employment opportunities. In order to better prepare sub-Saharan Africa for the future needs of these maturing individuals, there is a need to know more about who adolescents are. The purpose of this study is to examine the changing composition, fertility and mortality patterns of adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. Guided by the social determinants of health framework, the study uses demographic and health surveys and census data from six sub-Saharan African countries. Frequency distributions, rates, population pyramids, age-specific fertility and mortality rates and regression models are used to profile adolescents in the region. In all countries, adolescents are highly concentrated in rural areas. Furthermore, the probability of adolescent fertility is higher in rural than urban areas. However, adolescent mortality is higher in urban compared to rural areas. In conclusion, concentrated efforts should be made on addressing the needs of adolescents in rural areas to achieve a healthy and successful transition to adulthood.

Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. The effect is entirely driven by a reduction in internal inflows rather than larger outflows. My estimate is precise and robust to numerous specifications, as well as accounting for local dynamics-and I show how it can reconciled with apparently conflicting results in the literature. On imposing more structure, I attribute about 30 percent of the observed effect to mismeasurement-specifically undercoverage of undocumented migrants. Though labor demand does respond, the burden of adjustment falls mostly on population. These results have important methodological implications for the estimation and interpretation of the impact of immigration, both locally and nationally.

We use matched individual-level CPS data to study the decline in middle-wage routine occupations during the last 40 years, and determine how the associated labor market flows have evolved. The decline in employment in these occupations can be primarily accounted for by changes in transition rates from non-participation and unemployment to routine employment. We study how these transition rates have changed since the mid-1970s, and find that changes are primarily due to the propensity of individuals to make such transitions, whereas relatively little is due to demographic changes. We also find that changes in the propensity to transition into routine occupations account for a substantial proportion of the rise in non-participation observed in the U.S. in recent decades.

We examine whether there is any movement in the employment of native-educated nurses due to the influx of foreign-educated nurses. To avoid conflating the short-and long-term reaction to the entry of newly arrived foreign-educated nurses, we implement a multiple instrumentation procedure. We find that there is no significant effect of foreign-educated nurses on the employment of native nurses in both the short-and long-runs. Our results suggest that relying on foreign-educated nurses to fill gaps in the US health care workforce does not harm the employment of native nurses.

Risk aversion may drive some individuals to choose dual work—part-time employment parallel to an entrepreneurial venture—to insure against variable firm income. In two chapters, this dissertation analyzes the importance of dual work as a stepping-stone to entrepreneurship. In Chapter 1 I take a structural approach and build my analysis on a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework. In Chapter 2 I take a reduced form approach and estimate a nonlinear conditional probability model to analyze transitions into entrepreneurship. Both chapters rely on data from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation for calibration and estimation. Chapter 1 analyzes the effects of two compensation frictions: (i) non-linear labor remuneration that penalizes part-time work relative to full-time, particularly in the form of lower benefits; and (ii) rigid employment contracts that restrict access to the dual sector. The results suggest that both frictions have similar effects on occupational mobility. A decrease in the compensation penalty to part-time work, or an increase in employment flexibility, increases entrepreneurial undertakings in the economy, increases aggregate welfare, reduces wealth inequality, and shifts the wealth distribution to the right. Chapter 2 analyzes the transition probabilities into self-employment across different occupational categories. I estimate several dynamic binary response models, using a probit link function, and include controls for time and individual effects as well as occupation based on the standard occupational classification (SOC) codes. Measures are taken to remediate issues with incidental parameters stemming from using a small number of periods relative to the number of individuals as well as the initial conditions problem resulting from the dynamic structure. The results suggest that dual workers are more likely than employees to transition into self-employment. Increased household wealth results in a decreased likelihood to become self-employed among dual workers, suggesting that low wealth individuals are more likely pursuing dual work for risk mitigation. Furthermore, increased monthly income results in a decreased likelihood to become self-employed among dual workers. This can be interpreted to mean that a low current income represents a lower opportunity cost for switching into self-employment.

Although more rapid development is a primary motivation behind city–county consolidations, few empirical studies explore the impact of consolidation on economic development. No studies look at government consolidation in the United States using modern causal inference methods. We use the synthetic control method to examine the long-term impact of city–county consolidations on per capita income, population, and employment. The results from the three cases explored indicate that consolidation does not guarantee development and actually can have negative effects. Additionally, consolidation can deepen the urban-rural divide by accelerating the decline of rural populations relative to those of urban areas. The effects vary based upon the county, time horizon and development measure. The results are robust to placebo test simulations and counterfactuals constructed only from counties with earlier failed consolidation attempts. Our results highlight how public choice considerations surrounding the implementation of governmental consolidations are crucial to outcomes and can help inform any subsequent city–county consolidation attempts.

Deportation has become more commonplace in the United States since the mid-2000s. Latin American noncitizens—encompassing undocumented and documented immigrants—are targeted for deportation. Deportation’s threat also reaches naturalized and US-born citizens of Latino descent who are largely immune to deportation but whose loved ones or communities are deportable. Drawing on 6 y of data from the National Survey of Latinos, this article examines whether and how Latinos’ deportation fears vary by citizenship and legal status and over time. Compared with Latino noncitizens, Latino US citizens report lower average deportation fears. However, a more complex story emerges when examining this divide over time: Deportation fears are high but stable among Latino noncitizens, whereas deportation fears have increased substantially among Latino US citizens. These trends reflect a growing national awareness of—rather than observable changes to—deportation policy and practice since the 2016 US presidential election. The article highlights how deportation or its consequences affects a racial group that the US immigration regime targets disproportionately.

2020 will mark a year to remember for the ages for not only the pandemic, but also for the impossibility of hiding from an exhausting and divisive political season. The much-awaited change in voter composition is here and by the population trends, it will continue to change.

The unequal spatial distribution of ambient nitrogen dioxide (NO2), an air pollutant related to traffic, leads to higher exposure for minority and low socioeconomic status communities. We exploit the unprecedented drop in urban activity during the COVID-19 pandemic and use high-resolution, remotely-sensed NO2 observations to investigate disparities in NO2 levels across different demographic subgroups in the United States. We show that COVID-19 lockdowns reduced, but did not eliminate, the overall racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic NO2 disparities. Prior to the pandemic, satellite-observed NO2 levels in the least white census tracts of the United States were double NO2 levels in the most white tracts. During the pandemic, the largest lockdown-related NO2 reductions occurred in urban neighborhoods that have 30% fewer white residents and 111% more Hispanic residents than neighborhoods with the smallest reductions, likely driven by the greater density of highways and interstates in these racially and ethnically diverse areas. However, the least white tracts still experienced ≥50% higher NO2 levels during the lockdowns than the most white tracts experienced prior to the pandemic. Future policies aimed at eliminating pollution disparities will need to look beyond reducing emissions from only passenger traffic and also consider other collocated sources of emissions such as heavy-duty trucks, power plants, and industrial facilities.