Scholarship on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) has typically focused on this New Deal housing agency’s invention of redlining, with dire effects from this legacy of racial, ethnic, and class bias for the trajectories of urban, and especially African American neighborhoods. However, HOLC did not embark on its now infamous mapping project until after it had issued all its emergency refinancing loans to the nation’s struggling homeowners. We examine the racial logic of HOLC’s local operations and its lending record to black applicants during the agency’s initial 1933-1935 “rescue” phase, finding black access to its loans to have been far more extensive than anyone has assumed. Yet, even though HOLC did loan to African Americans, it did so in ways that reinforced racial segregation—and with the objective of replenishing the working capital of the overwhelmingly white-owned building and loans that held the mortgages on most black-owned homes.

New estimates from the 2019 Elder IndexTM highlight the risk of economic insecurity experienced by older adults, a risk that is especially high for persons of color. The Gerontology Institute compares the household incomes for adults age 65 and above living in one- and two-person households to the 2019 Elder Index for each state and Washington, DC to calculate Elder Economic Insecurity Rates (EEIRs), the percentage of independent older adults age 65 or older living in households with annual incomes that do not support economic security. National averages suggest that among people living alone, 48% of older people who are White, 59% of those who are Asian, 64% of older people who are Black, and 72% of those who are Latino have annual incomes below the Elder Index.1 The risk of economic insecurity is lower among couples than among singles, but is still substantially higher for persons of color than for Whites.2 These estimates suggest that nationally, at least 11 million adults age 65 or older struggle to make ends meet, facing financial challenges in their efforts to age in place and in community. In comparison to older Whites, disparities in economic security are especially high for Blacks and Latinos.

Objective: To examine the relationship between Breast Cancer Screening (BCS) and Moderate Psychological Distress (MPD). Also, to assess the effect of aggregating women with No Psychological Distress (NPD) and MPD into one group, as done in prior studies when evaluating the relationship between BCS and Psychological Distress (PD). Methods: The study population comprised of 34,565 women aged 50-74 years who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 2013 to 2017. The Kessler-6 PD index score (0-24) was dichotomized (0-12: NPD; > 13: Severe Psychological Distress SPD) and trichotomized (0-5: NPD; 5-12: MPD; > 13 SPD). Two multivariate logistic regressions were conducted for the dichotomous and trichotomous PD categories. Andersen's Behavioral Model of Health Services Use guided the choice of covariates. Data analysis was conducted using SAS version 9.4. Results: Our study showed 4.6% had SPD, and 17.9% had MPD. The latter group (MPD) was included in the NPD group in the dichotomous analysis. In the dichotomous analysis, women with SPD (adjusted Odds Ratio (aOR) = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.63, 0.81, p < .00001) were less likely to have received a mammogram than those with NPD. In the trichotomous model, women with SPD (aOR = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.67, 0.87, p = .0001) and MPD (aOR = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.78, 0.91, p < .00001) were both less likely to have had a mammogram than those with NPD. Conclusions: Prior studies that included individuals with MPD among those with NPD overestimated the effect of SPD on mammography and minimized the importance of targeting women with MPD along with those that have SPD to enhance the uptake of mammography.

Purpose This article examines the impact on veteran employment of the U.S. government’s pension benefit provisions for Union soldiers following the Civil War. Methods To do so, it draws on both Union army pension records and U.S. census returns as well as information derived from the Union army samples designed by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago (“CPE”) and census samples from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (“IPUMS”). Results We find that, although twentieth-century Progressive reformers contended otherwise, these nineteenth-century Americans wanted what their twenty-first-century counterparts want—work at a meaningful occupation. Conclusions Our findings evidence the complex and contradictory impact on occupational rehabilitation and employment resulting from the public–private partnerships established for Union army veterans. These partnerships were based on substantially different notions of disability needs and rights than those underlying the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and its central accommodation principle.

The migration of the qualified Mexican population, understood as that which has with at least the bachelor's degree completed, has been equated to an elite migration or privileged woman who travels the world offering her work to the highest bidder; this has relegated their study and left out of the discussions their participation in the main phenomena and dynamics population. This work shows the particular characteristics of the skilled Mexican migrant population in the United States, at the same time that it analyzes the factors associated with the achieving their access to health for the sake of contribute to the generation of knowledge in this unexplored field.

In this dissertation, I study three key aspects related to the causes and consequences of the onset of the Age of the Masses. I do so by drawing evidence from historical natural experiments and historical data from the early Twentieth Century from the United States and Italy. In the first chapter, I leverage the expansion of radio networks in the United States to identify the impact of access to mass media on cultural homogenization. Exploiting exogenous variation in radio signal reception induced by soil characteristics and stations' tower growth over time, I provide evidence that network access homogenized American culture. Homogenization occurred through the assimilation of white immigrant and black households towards mainstream white native culture. Focusing on names from baseball players, I suggest that aspirational naming is a key mechanism to explain certain features of the results. In the second chapter, I study the impact of World War I on Mussolini's electoral success. I collect military fatalities for the universe of Italian municipalities, which is matched to municipal level voting in the 1924 election. I find that a higher share of fatalities increased the vote share for Fascism. I decompose the effect of the fatalities rate by its intensity to show that the number of fatalities interacted positively with the number of veterans back from the frontline. I interpret this as evidence that Fascist support was driven by municipalities where the high number of fatalities was matched by veterans scarred by the war experience. The last chapter looks at the role of child labor legislation (CLL) in lowering child labor rates in the United States. Turning to the newly-digitized complete count census data from 1880 to 1930, we find large effects of CLLs on child labor. While the laws reduced labor of boys and girls equally, the laws did had differential effects, binding in urban areas and especially in the largest cities and more for the children of foreign-born parents. Children with parents working in manufacturing and textiles were especially affected by the labor restrictions. CLLs had limited effects on the odds of African American boys or girls working.

While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter-century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child-rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child-rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in the association of these events with women's LFP (i.e., behavioral). We use data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys and the US Current Population Survey in Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition models to decompose trends in women's LFPR from 1996 to 2016 across 18 countries by educational attainment, partnership status, and parental status for women aged 20–44. Compositional and behavioral shifts positively contribute to higher LFPR in most countries, but lower rates in several others. Behavioral change is not widely shared across groups of women. Partnered mothers without college degrees are the main contributors to behavioral change and show the greatest variability across countries. We suggest greater research attention to this “missing middle,” as their LFP is key to understanding change during this period.

Increased educational attainment is a sustainable development priority and has been posited to have benefits for other social and environmental issues, including climate change. However, links between education and climate change risks can involve both synergies and trade-offs, and the balance of these effects remains ambiguous. Increases in educational attainment could lead to faster economic growth and therefore higher emissions, more climate change and higher risks. At the same time, improved attainment would be associated with faster fertility decline in many countries, slower population growth and therefore lower emissions, and would also be likely to reduce vulnerability to climate impacts. We employ a multiregion, multisector model of the world economy, driven with country-specific projections of future population by level of education, to test the net effect of education on emissions and on the Human Development Index (HDI), an indicator that correlates with adaptive capacity to climate impacts. We find that improved educational attainment is associated with a modest net increase in emissions but substantial improvement in the HDI values in developing country regions. Avoiding stalled progress in educational attainment and achieving gains at least consistent with historical trends is especially important in reducing future vulnerability.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of answering multi-dimensional range queries under local differential privacy. There are three key technical challenges: capturing the correlations among attributes, avoiding the curse of dimensionality, and dealing with the large domains of attributes. None of the existing approaches satisfactorily deals with all three challenges. Overcoming these three challenges, we first propose an approach called Two-Dimensional Grids (TDG). Its main idea is to carefully use binning to partition the two-dimensional (2-D) domains of all attribute pairs into 2-D grids that can answer all 2-D range queries and then estimate the answer of a higher dimensional range query from the answers of the associated 2-D range queries. However, in order to reduce errors due to noises, coarse granularities are needed for each attribute in 2-D grids, losing fine-grained distribution information for individual attributes. To correct this deficiency, we further propose Hybrid-Dimensional Grids (HDG), which also introduces 1-D grids to capture finer-grained information on distribution of each individual attribute and combines information from 1-D and 2-D grids to answer range queries. To make HDG consistently effective, we provide a guideline for properly choosing granularities of grids based on an analysis of how different sources of errors are impacted by these choices. Extensive experiments conducted on real and synthetic datasets show that HDG can give a significant improvement over the existing approaches.

Expansion of Medicaid and establishment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) represent a significant success story in the national effort to guarantee health insurance for children. That success is reflected in the high rates of coverage and health care access achieved for children, including those in low-income families. But significant coverage gaps remain—gaps that have been increasing since 2016 and are likely to accelerate with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the associated recession. Using National Health Interview Survey data, we found that the proportion of uninsured children was 5.5 percent in 2018. Children continue to face coverage interruptions, and Latino, adolescent, and noncitizen children continue to face elevated risks of being uninsured. Although we note the benefits of a universal, federally financed, single-payer approach to coverage, we also offer two possible reform pathways that can take place within the current multipayer system, aimed at ensuring coverage, access, continuity, and comprehensiveness to move the nation closer to the goal of providing the health care that children need to reach their full potential and to reduce racial and economic inequalities.

Obesity is a major public health crisis, affecting every segment of the U.S. population. African American women have higher prevalence of obesity than all other subpopulations and are disproportionately burdened by the disease and its comorbidities. Despite this disparity, African American women are often underrepresented in obesity research. This research examined obesity-related risk factors specific to African American women compared to those for Caucasian women. The design was based on the socioecological model and social cognitive theory, both emphasizing the impact of social factors on health outcomes. The data set included only adult Michigan women from the NHANES study. Multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted for each race (African American and Caucasian), with obesity status as the outcome; area-level factor residence status, the main predictor; and age, education, and income the controlling factors. The results indicated that residence status is a major predictor of obesity for African American women, with renters having an increased (OR= 1.501, p = 0.025) odds relative to homeowners. In contrast, for Caucasian women, income (p = .000), and education (p = .011) were both significant, but residence status was not (p = .237). These results highlight the differences between African American and Caucasian women’s obesity risk factors and emphasize the importance of researching obesity in African American women separately. The positive social impact includes developing obesity interventions and health education programs that address the social factors involved.

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had a large effect on the overall employment rate over this period, but within-age-group declines in employment among young- A nd prime-age adults also have played a central role. Among the factors with effects that we can quantify based on existing evidence, labor demand factors, in particular increased import competition from China and the penetration of robots into the labor market, are the most important drivers of observed within-group declines in employment. Labor supply factors, most notably increased participation in disability insurance programs, have played a less important but not inconsequential role. Increases in the real value of state minimum wages and in the share of individuals with prison records also have contributed modestly to the decline in the aggregate employment rate. In addition to the factors whose effects we roughly quantify, we identify a set of potentially important factors about which the evidence does not yet allow us to draw clear conclusions. These include the challenges associated with arranging child care, improvements in leisure technology, changing social norms, increased use of opioids, the growth in occupational licensing, and declining labor market fluidity. Our evidence-driven ranking of factors should be useful for guiding future discussions about the sources of decline in the aggregate employment-topopulation ratio and consequently the likely efficacy of alternative policy approaches to increasing employment rates. (JEL E24, J64).

This paper compares the creative economies of the US and the UK regions and nations using high-quality administrative microdata spanning the period 2011–13. The creative industries are highly urbanized in both countries. However, important differences are found in the size, density and diversity of creative activity between the two countries, which reflect differences in both urban systems and industrial organization. By testing the ‘Creative Trident’ approach in a comparative international context, the analysis adds to the literature on definition and classification of creative economies, as well as to discussions of regional economic development through the creative economy.

Despite evidence that infants affect families' economic and social behaviors, little is known about how young children influence their parents' political engagement. I show that U.S. women with an infant during an election year are 3.5 percentage points less likely to vote than women without children; men with an infant are 2.3 percentage points less likely to vote. Suggesting that this effect may be causal, I find no significant decreases in turnout the year before parents have an infant. Using a triple-difference approach, I then show that vote-by-mail systems mitigate the negative association between infants and mothers' turnout.

This paper examines the role of heterogeneity in a real business cycle model, which traditionally has not fully captured the relative volatility of hours to output. Men and women have different cyclical volatilities in hours worked, which is robust to different filtering methods. This empirical regularity is used to motivate a standard RBC model augmented to allow for two different agents following Jaimovich et al. (2013). These two agents have identical utility functions, but face different elasticities of labor demand due to their different complementarities with capital. These estimated elasticities find that women are more complementary to capital. The calibrated model generates the cyclical volatility of work hours by gender and for the total hours worked that matches the U.S. data better than the traditional representative agent model. I then explore other extensions to this model including investigating the stability of the estimated labor demand elasticities and allowing for various Frisch elasticities of labor supply. This paper demonstrates that allowing for even broad levels of heterogeneity in a simple framework can increase the model's tractability with the data. Since gender is important to explain U.S. business cycle dynamics, we need to carefully consider heterogeneity when analyzing counter-cyclical economic policy, as it may not have symmetric effects across assorted groups.

In this thesis, I explore the interactions between human capital and migration in multiple historical contexts. In chapter 1, I examine persistent human capital spillovers in rural China caused by a mass migration policy. Between 1962 and 1980, the Chinese government relocated about 18 million youths from urban to rural areas. The policy increased human capital stock in rural areas as migrants were more educated than the locals. With county-level migration data and an instrumental variable strategy, I find that send-down migration significantly increased the educational attainments in rural areas after the migrants returned to cities. The effects persisted until 2010, although the magnitude weakened over time. I also find that the cohorts who reached school age during the years of send-down policy were more strongly affected. Evidence shows that the persistent human capital spillovers can be explained by increase in capital-labor ratio in farm sector, occupational transition, or emigration out of rural area. In chapter 2, I estimate the effect of immigration on infant mortality rate at the Age of Mass Migration. Specifically, I use a shift-share instrument and town-level panel data from Massachusetts between 1860 and 1915 to estimate the impact over a long period. I find a significant positive effect of immigrant inflows on native infant mortality before 1900, with this effect diminishing after 1900. I also find suggestive evidence that this effect is due to communicable diseases and over-crowding. And the public health investment helped mitigate the negative effect. In chapter 3, I explore the Japanese evacuation program in WWII and its associated impact on West Coast farming. Japanese Americans in the farm sector were highly skilled before WWII. Their presence was associated with high agricultural productivity and significant farm success, particularly on the West Coast. For military purpose, tens of thousands of Japanese farmers and farm laborers were forcefully evacuated from Pacific Coast region in WWII. With a county-level panel data of comparable farm outcomes between 1920 and 1945, I find the evacuated counties losing more Japanese farmers or farm laborers experienced slower growth of farm value. I also find that both land productivity and crops composition were affected in a negative way by the policy in a period when Agriculture was still a very important sector in the US.

This dissertation studies various ways in which federally funded social safety net programs impact low-income households. Over 38 million people in the US live in poverty, and the federal government dedicates nearly one-sixth of its annual budget towards programs designed to reduce the negative consequences of poverty. In this dissertation, I use various empirical techniques and policy settings to explore the causal impact of increasing access to federal assistance benefits on outcomes for those in need. In Chapter 1, I study how reducing the costs of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, previously called Food Stamps) influences program participation and downstream measures of infant health. Incomplete take-up is common in many transfer programs: more than 7 million individuals who were eligible for SNAP benefits in 2017 did not participate in the program. An understanding of the causes and downstream consequences of incomplete take-up is necessary in order to understand whether low take-up of public programs is limiting their effectiveness in reducing economic disparities. In this chapter, I use a unique setting to shed light on the role that participation costs play in determining food assistance take-up, and quantify the effects of increasing take-up on infant health at birth. I do this by studying a reform that made it easier to receive and use food assistance benefits in the US: the adoption of the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) debit card for SNAP benefit disbursement. Prior to the adoption of EBT, SNAP benefits were distributed via food stamp coupons. Thus, the switch to EBT reduced both the time that it took to receive benefits each month and the visibility (or stigma) associated with using benefits at the grocery store. I use the staggered county level rollout of the EBT card in California between 2002 and 2004 to estimate event study regressions of its effect. I find that EBT adoption led to a large and persistent increase in caseloads and applications for the program, as well as higher retailer participation in high poverty neighborhoods. I document that this rise in food stamp benefit take-up led to a meaningful increase in average birth weight for births most likely impacted by the policy, with effects concentrated in the bottom half of the birth weight distribution. These estimates provide new evidence that reducing the barriers to participation in food assistance programs can lead to potentially large gains in health for disadvantaged children. The adverse consequences of childhood poverty are extensive and long-lasting, suggesting an important role for government policies that have direct impacts on early-life outcomes. There is a large literature on the incentive effects of cash tax and transfer programs in the US, yet less is known about how these programs impact the children of recipients. In Chapter 2, I estimate the causal effect of unconditional means-tested cash assistance on outcomes for low-income children by studying the first federally funded cash welfare program in the US: Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a means-tested program implemented as part of the Social Security Act of 1935. Using newly digitized data on the full population of the US in 1940, I leverage discontinuities in ADC benefit generosity across state borders to estimate the effects of cash assistance within contiguous county pairs. I find that a one standard deviation increase in the maximum ADC benefit was associated with a 2.5 percentage point increase in the probability of school enrollment for disadvantaged children, reductions in overcrowded living arrangements, and evidence of substitutions away from work towards schooling for older children. Consistent with the existing literature on the labor supply disincentives of unconditional transfers, I also find that higher benefit generosity is associated with reductions in maternal labor supply. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of geographic access to authorized retailers in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). When determining the optimal design of means-tested transfer programs, policymakers must consider the features of policy design that may unintentionally serve as barriers to limit the effectiveness of the program. Some barriers, such as those discussed in Chapter 1, may prevent eligible people from participating in the program, while others, like those I explore in Chapter 3, may impact how households use their benefits. Given the substantial geographic variation in access to grocery stores authorized to accept SNAP benefits, it is important to understand whether policies to maximize the number of retailers authorized to accept SNAP benefits are needed. Using a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the effect of a food retailer gaining SNAP authorization in a zip code on household grocery spending behavior. I find that when a small grocer or convenience store gains authorization to accept SNAP benefits, eligible households in the area shift some of their food expenditures away from supermarkets and supercenters and towards these smaller SNAP retailers. I find mixed evidence of the impact of SNAP retailer access on the healthfulness of food purchases. Lastly, I examine whether increased access to a SNAP authorized retailer has any effect on intra-month cyclicality in food spending. I find that access to a new SNAP supermarket or super center does reduce the severity of this "SNAP cycle" in food expenditures, with less evidence of any impact for smaller stores. These results suggests that there could be gains to incentivizing increased retailer participation in SNAP.

During most of the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 recession, women have faced higher unemployment rates than men, as the pandemic affected sectors with high shares of female workers, particularly in service professions.* Moreover, the closures of schools and day care centers and the implementation of remote learning have increased child care needs, which disparately affect working mothers. A September McKinsey study (PDF) shows that roughly a third of working mothers were considering taking a leave of absence, dropping out of the work force entirely, cutting their hours, moving to part-time or switching to a less-demanding role. Childcare responsibilities were a primary concern for most of these mothers. This blog post discusses the short-term effects of the pandemic on working mothers, particularly on women of color, as well as the importance of affordable quality child care in preventing a long-term decline of women in the labor force.

Our main source of literature comes from Alina Mariuca Ionescu’s “How does education affect labor market outcomes” in which the author discusses in detail the relationship between education and labor market outcomes. Ionescu talks about numerous topics such as how the level of education attainment impacts the labor market outcomes, the relationship between annual earnings and years of schooling, and how education impacts employment success. With these questions in mind, we set out to examine the effects of education on unemployment. Goal: Utilize data from IPUMS to find a correlation between levels of education and unemployment rate.

An increasing number of researchers pool, harmonize, and analyze survey data from different survey providers for their research questions. They aim to study heterogeneity between groups over a long period or examine smaller subgroups; research questions that can be impossible to answer with a single survey. This combination or pooling of data is known as individual person data (IPD) meta-analysis in medicine and psychology; in sociology, it is understood as part of ex-post survey harmonization (Granda et al 2010). However, in medicine or psychology, most original studies focus on treatment or intervention effect and apply experimental research designs to come to causal conclusions. In contrast, many sociological or economic studies are nonexperimental. In comparison to experimental data, survey-based data is subject to complex . . .