We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This “equitable access to essentials” approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to “bounce back” from a disruption, but to “bound forward” and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.

The role of technological change in labor market polarization is a debated issue and has been subject to recent critique. This paper finds that RBTC can account for wage and job polarization in the US from the 1980s to the 2010s. It also demonstrates that RBTC is consistent with the timing of labor market polarization in the US, including the stagnation of the 50/10 wage percentile ratio and the slowdown of employment growth in high-wage jobs from the 2000s. The paper does so using a model with two key ingredients: 1) directed search and 2) two-sided multidimensional heterogeneity. Estimation results show that the complementarity between cognitive skill and task increased while that between manual skill and task did not. The model can fully account for the rise and fall of the 90/50 and 50/10 wage percentile ratios respectively. It also generates 72.6 percent of the rise in employment share of high-paying jobs relative to middling jobs and 69 percent of the fall in employment share of middling jobs relative to low-paying jobs. The paper suggests that the stagnation of the 50/10 wage ratio may be due to rank-switching between workers across the wage distribution from the 2000s, while the slowdown of employment growth in high-wage jobs may result from the tradeoff between the returns to applying for high-wage jobs and the likelihood of unemployment.

Using panel data, we find statistically significant results that indicate that Mexican immigrants, on average, earn 15.37% less than their native counterparts. Previous, "old," Mexican immigrant populations also seemed to also benefit from new Mexican immigrants, earning 15.15% more. However, the effect of Mexican immigrants on native worker wages is ambiguous because we did not analyze the unemployment effect on natives. Column 3 of Table 2 reports the results of the gendered effect. The intercept dummy shows that females earn 28.43% less than males at low levels of immigration. However, as the level of immigration increases the gender wage gap narrows given by the coefficient on the interaction term.

Does comparative advantage explain legislators’ support for trade liberalization? We use data on potential crop yields as determined by weather and soil characteristics to derive a new, plausibly exogenous measure of comparative advantage in agriculture for each district in the US. Evidence shows that comparative advantage in agriculture predicts how legislators vote on the ratification of preferential trade agreements in Congress. We show that legislators in districts with high agricultural comparative advantage are more likely to mention that trade agreements are good for agriculture in House floor debates preceding roll-call votes on their ratifications. Individuals living in the same districts are also more likely to support free trade. Our analysis and results contribute to the literature on the political economy of trade and its distributional consequences, and to our understanding of the economic determinants of legislators voting decisions.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first two chapters revisit the link between electrification and the rise in female labor force participation (LFP) during the first half of the 20th century in the United States. Jointly, these two chapters provide theoretical and empirical evidence that one key and previously overlooked way through which electrification led to a rise in female LFP was by increasing market opportunities for skilled women. In the first chapter, I formalize my theory in an overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital accumulation. I find that my mechanism explains one-third of the rise in female LFP during the rollout of electricity in the United States from 1880 to 1960, and helps explain the slow change in female home production hours and work hours during this period. In the second chapter, I present micro evidence that supports my theory using newly digitized data on the electrification of the United States in the 1910s. Consistent with the theory, I find that higher levels of educational attainment increased the response of young women's employment to electrification in this period, particularly for those with post-secondary education, and that electrification raised the educational attainment of subsequent generations of women. In the third chapter, in work joint with Remy Levin, we present evidence for a new channel linking the low rates of individual risk-taking ubiquitous in developing countries, to lifetime experiences of macroeconomic growth and volatility. We combine two panel data sets from Indonesia and Mexico, containing elicited measures of risk aversion, with state-level real GDP growth time series capturing their lifetime macroeconomic experiences. We find that living through periods of increasing macroeconomic volatility increases measured risk aversion, while living through periods of increasing average macroeconomic growth decreases measured risk aversion. However, the aforementioned effects of macroeconomic volatility are 2-4 times larger than those of average macroeconomic growth. These effects are robust to controlling for changes in income, wealth, savings, and exposure to violence and natural disasters. Moreover, these effects are economically significant, translating into changes in outcomes that closely depend on risk attitudes, like borrowing, migration and crop choice.

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces in the Netherlands in the near future. To be able to study demographic behaviour, life courses and family relations need to be reconstructed from the civil certificates. This paper describes the steps that are taken to move from the LINKS database, which contains digitised birth, marriage, and death certificates and relational information between individuals on these certificates, to LINKS-gen, which contains over six hundred thousand life courses, family reconstructions for up to seven generations, and fertility, marital, mortality, and occupational status information, ready for analysis. We present procedures for variable construction and data cleaning. Furthermore, we give a short overview of the LINKS database, discuss quality checks, and give advice on selection of relevant cases necessary to move from LINKS to LINKS-gen. The paper is accompanied by R-scripts to convert and construct the datafiles.

Employment rates in the United States fell dramatically between February 2020 and April 2020 as the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic reverberated through the labor market. This paper uses data from the CPS Basic Monthly Files to document that the employment decline was particularly severe for immigrants. Historically, immigrant men were more likely to be employed than native men. The COVID-related labor market disruptions eliminated the immigrant employment advantage. By April 2020, immigrant men had lower employment rates than native men. Part of the relative increase in the immigrant rate of job loss arises because immigrants were less likely to work in jobs that could be performed remotely and suffered disparate employment consequences as the lockdown permitted workers with more "remotable" skills to continue their work from home. Undocumented men were particularly hard hit by the pandemic, with their rate of job loss far exceeding the rate of job loss of legal immigrants.

Immigration policy is one of the longest standing debates in United States history. Discussions based on racial, ethical, political, and economic premises have continued to shape and shift immigration policy in various different directions. This paper addresses this issue through an economic lens as it attempts to understand the impact of immigration on the wages of native workers as a whole. It also dives deeper into the discussion as it analyzes the impact immigration has on high- and low-skilled native workers separately in addition to the overall impact. This paper attempts not to simply answer whether immigration is beneficial to the US, but to whom and by how much specifically, if at all. Regression analysis is used to address these questions, and the groups are divided by occupational categories. A high-skilled occupation is defined as one where the average educational attainment is beyond a high school degree. When pooled, native workers are negatively affected by immigration. However, when examined as a group native in high-skilled occupational categories experience a relatively large positive effect. Natives in low-skilled occupations are negatively affected by immigration. It is noted that when divided by individual skill level rather than occupational skill level, low-skilled individuals are also positively affected, though at a relatively low magnitude. The results for all groups are statistically significant.

Among deaths of despair, the individual and community correlates of US suicides have been consistently identified and are well known. However, the suicide rate has been stubbornly unyielding to reduction efforts, promoting calls for novel research directions. Linking levels of influence has been proposed in theory but blocked by data limitations in the United States. Guided by theories on the importance of connectedness and responding to unique data challenges of low base rates, geographical dispersion, and appropriate comparison groups, we attempt a harmonization of the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to match individual and county–level risks. We theorize crosslevel sociodemographic homogeneity between individuals and communities, which we refer to as “social similarity” or “sameness,” focusing on whether having like-others in the community moderates individual suicide risks. While analyses from this new Multilevel Suicide Data for the United States (MSD-US) replicate several individual and contextual findings, considering sameness changes usual understandings of risk in two critical ways. First, high individual risk for suicide among those who are younger, not US born, widowed or married, unemployed, or have physical disabilities is cut substantially with greater sameness. Second, this moderating pattern flips for Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Asians, and Hispanics, as well as among native-born and unmarried individuals, where low individual suicide risk increases significantly with greater social similarity. Results mark the joint influence of social structure and culture, deliver unique insights on the complexity of connectedness in suicide, and offer considerations for policy and practice.

Previous literature has shown that attitudes and preferences are intergenerationally transmitted from parents to their children. We contribute to this literature by analyzing whether gender role attitudes are also transmitted across cultural boundaries, i.e., from immigrants to natives. Focusing on mixed couples, we examine whether the gender role attitudes of foreign-born mothers-in-law can explain the fertility and labor supply decisions of native US women. Our results reveal that women's labor market participation is significantly positively related to the gender role attitudes in her mother-in-law's country of origin. Employing a new identification strategy, we show that this finding is due to the intergenerational transmission of gender norms rather than other unobservable characteristics of the mother-in-law's country of origin. These results suggest that the cultural values held in their source country do not only influence the behavior of immigrants and their descendants, but can also affect the labor force participation of native women. We do, however, not find evidence that intergenerationally transmitted gender role attitudes affect the fertility behavior of native women.

This year marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, which provided American women a constitutional guarantee to the franchise. We assemble data from a variety of sources to document and explore trends in women's political participation, issue preferences, and partisanship since that time. We show that in the early years following enfranchisement, women voted at much lower rates than men and held distinct issue preferences, despite splitting their votes across parties similarly to men. But by the dawn of the twenty-first century, women not only voted more than men, but also voted differently, systematically favoring the Democratic party. We find that the rise in women's relative voter turnout largely reflects cross-cohort changes in voter participation and coincided with increasing rates of high school completion. By contrast, women's relative shift toward the Democratic party permeates all cohorts and appears to owe more to changes in how parties have defined themselves than to changes in issue preferences. The findings suggest that a confluence of factors have led to the unique place women currently occupy in the American electorate, one where they are arguably capable of exerting more political influence than ever before.

A nascent body of research suggests that economic freedom is positively associated with entrepreneurial activity. Most of this literature is based on crosscountries analyses, although there is significant regional heterogeneity in entrepreneurial activity and the institutional and policy context within countries. The literature also largely overlooks the potential for the entrepreneurial-inducing effects of economic freedom to drive less efficient firms out of the market. Additionally, economic freedom is a multi-dimensional construct comprised of numerous underlying aspects of the institutional and policy environment, but most studies have employed a composite economic freedom measure to assess its impact on entrepreneurial activity. I contribute to these shortcomings in the literature by decomposing the recently developed Metropolitan Economic Freedom Index into its underlying institutional indicators to explore their potential impact on the firm entry and firm exit rates for a sample of nearly 300 U.S. cities over the period 1972-2012.

BACKGROUND Reducing domestic violence and increasing contraceptive use are two ways to improve women’s health in developing countries. Social scientists debate whether women’s experiences of intimate partner violence influence contraceptive use. The empirical evidence evaluating the relationship yields inconsistent results. These contradictory findings might be due to specific regional conditions that moderate the relationship. METHODS Using 30 panels of DHS data from 17 developing countries, this study examines the relationship between intimate partner violence and contraceptive use in a cross-national comparison and assesses whether this relationship is moderated by macro contextual factors, including the presence or absence of legal regulations against domestic violence and the national level of female empowerment. RESULTS Experience of either physical or sexual violence is associated with an increase in contraceptive use, and is statistically significant in a cross-national setting. The magnitude of the positive relationship between physical and sexual violence and contraceptive use decreases in the presence of legal regulations against domestic violence. The positive association of sexual violence with contraceptive use decreases in contexts with higher levels of women’s empowerment. However, there is no change in the positive association between physical violence and contraceptive use in contexts with higher levels of women’s empowerment. These results are robust to additional sensitivity tests.

Immigration to Europe and the US has met with a heated political backlash in recent decades, but the long-term impact of immigration on political ideology not well understood. This column focuses on the migration of millions of Europeans to the US between 1900 and 1930, and finds that the historical presence of European immigrants encouraged a more liberal political ideology and stronger preferences for redistribution among the native-born population. The difference is due in part to inter-group contact, which allows for the transmission (or ‘melting’) of immigrants’ experiences and ideas.

When did spouses begin to strongly match on economic ability? Many believe it is a modern development, a consequence of rising female employment and education levels. Using a large new dataset from Quebec, I find that marriage in Quebec was highly assortative as far back as the early 19th century. Moreover, assortment was not merely matching between similar families, but instead depended on the human capital of both men and women as individuals. Finally, I show that the abilities of women mattered as much as that of their husbands for the outcomes of their children. Strongly assortative marriage had always been important because the human capital of women mattered as much as that of men for marriage and mobility.

This paper exploits new oil and gas activity generated by recent technological advancements to understand the effect of localized boom and busts on self-employment. We find a positive and contemporaneous impact on self-employment in non-mining sectors, mainly stemming from unincorporated self-employed individuals. The impact is short-lived, i.e. once the boom subsides, the self-employment adjusts closer to pre-boom levels. Point estimates suggest that a large part of the employment adjustment comes from unincorporated self-employed individuals-a group that makes up about 6% of total employment.

Some economists have argued that assortative mating between men and women has increased over the last several decades. Sociologists have argued that educational homogamy has increased. The two are conceptually distinct but often confused. We clarify the relation between the two and, using both the Current Population Surveys and the decennial Censuses/American Community Survey, show that neither conclusion is correct. Both are sensitive to how educational categories are chosen. The former is based on the use of inappropriate statistical techniques.

This research examines the association between economic insecurity and imprisonment rates in the United States. Building on Garland’s thesis about punishment and late modernity, it is hypothesized that rising economic insecurity in a population is associated with an increase in the imprisonment rate. This hypothesis is tested with state-level data for the years 1986–2013. Results indicate a robust association between changes in economic insecurity, measured as the percentage of households in a state losing a quarter or more of their income in a single year, and changes in imprisonment rates. This finding suggests that economic insecurity is not only relevant for explaining large-scale shifts in penal philosophy and practice, as prior sociological theory has argued. It also explains some of the year-to-year variation in imprisonment rates and points to another way in which inequality is associated with punishment.

Donna’s Law would allow individuals who fear suicide to prevent their own impulsive gun purchases. Research shows that many people would sign up, and versions of Donna’s Law have passed in Washington State and Virginia. This study is the first to assess public support for enacting Donna’s Law. We find broad support overall, including majority support among Republicans and gun owners. There is room for consensus around this voluntary measure to reduce gun suicide.

Rural economies in many developing countries are characterized by a lean season in the months preceding harvest, when farmers have depleted their cash and grain savings from the previous year. To identify the impacts of liquidity during the lean season, we offered subsidized loans in randomly selected villages in rural Zambia. Ninety-eight percent of households took up the loan. Loan eligibility led to increases in on-farm labor and agricultural output, driving up wages in local labor markets. Larger effects for poorer households suggest that liquidity constraints contribute to inequality in rural economies.