This paper examines the effects of bank deregulation on short term occupational mobility. From the 70s to the 90s, regulations prohibiting intrastate mergers and acquisitions of banks were gradually lifted by individual states at different times. We exploit the staggered nature of this intrastate banking deregulation in order to evaluate the effects of increased access to credit on occupational mobility. We find no statistically significant results when evaluating the entire sample, but we find a significant decrease in mobility of black individuals in the second income quintile and a significant increase in mobility of black individuals in the fourth quintile. We see a general tendency of lower income individuals to be associated with a decrease in their occupational mobility following deregulation while higher income individuals are associated with an increase. This may fit into our access to credit hypothesis if higher income individuals are accessing credit more frequently in order to perform more expensive job switches while lower income individuals remain unable to access credit. In general we find few significant results for the broad sample and acknowledge that further research into more specific demographic categories is needed.

This study examines and compares shared time for same-sex and different-sex coresident couples using large, nationally representative data from the 2003–2016 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). We compare the total time that same-sex couples and different-sex couples spend together; for parents, the time they spend together with children; and for both parents and nonparents, the time they spend together with no one else present and the time they spend with others (excluding children). After we control for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the couples, women in same-sex couples spend more time together, both alone and in total, than individuals in different-sex arrangements and men in same-sex couples, regardless of parenthood status. Women in same-sex relationships also spend a larger percentage of their total available time together than other couples, and the difference in time is not limited to any specific activity

Urbanization results in increasing impervious surfaces with the potential to threaten fragile environments and heighten flood risks. In the United States, research on the social processes driving urbanization has tended to focus on the twenty-first century, but less is known about how temporal trends arose from the spatial layout of developed land upon which this growth was founded. To address this gap, we present a novel interdisciplinary synthesis using neighborhood-level census data in tandem with a satellite-derived annual land cover change time series to assess the role of race, affluence, and socioeconomic status in shaping spatio-temporal urbanization in the Houston metropolitan area from 1997-2016. Results from cross-sectional and temporal regression models indicate that while social dynamics associated with historical versus recent urbanization are related, they are not identical. Thus, while temporal change in urbanization is driven primarily by socioeconomic status, the social dynamics associated with spatial disparities in urbanization relate primarily to race, regardless of socioeconomic status. The results are noteworthy as urbanization in Houston does not fully comport with existing theoretical perspectives or with empirical findings nationally. Instead, we suggest these findings reflect the city's politics and culture surrounding land use. Thus, beyond its important social and environmental implications, this study affirms the utility of fusing socio-demographic data with satellite remote sensing of urban growth, and highlights the value of the socioenvironmental succession framework for characterizing urbanization as a recursive process in space and time.

We show that cities with higher population density specialize in high-skill service jobs that can be done remotely. The urban and industry bias of remote work potential shaped the recent pandemic's economic impact. Many high-skill service workers started to work remotely, withdrawing spending from big-city consumer service industries dependent on their demand. As a result, low-skill service workers in big cities bore most of the recent pandemic's economic impact. Our findings have broader implications for the distributional consequences of the U.S. econ-omy's transition to more remote work.

This paper studies the employment and income effects of a federal proposal in 2016 to expand overtime coverage to additionally cover salaried workers earning between $455 and $913 per week ($23, 660 and $47, 476 per annum). Although the policy was unexpectedly nullified a week before its proposed effective date, using detailed administrative payroll data covering one-sixth of the U.S. workforce, I find clear evidence that firms nevertheless responded to the policy by bunching workers’ earnings at the new $913 exemption threshold. On average, the base salary of directly affected workers who remain employed increased by 1.4%. Meanwhile, for every hundred workers who would have gained coverage under the policy, 10 jobs were reclassified from salaried to hourly. Preliminary analysis also suggests that there may have been negative employment effects. Examining the distribution of these margins of adjustments, I find that the positive income effect accrued entirely to workers who were bunched at the $913 threshold but would otherwise have earned between $720 and $913 per week, whereas the reclassification and negative employment effects were spread across jobs paying within the entire range of newly covered base salaries.

While the majority of scientists agree that artificial intelligence (AI) technology have provided excellent platforms for inventing tools beneficial for enhancing man’s quality of life on earth, there are a host of others who have identified existential and ontological hazards associated with the proliferation of super-intelligent machines (SIM), now utilized for virtually every human endeavor. The Marxian alienation theory was adopted for the study while Creswell’s qualitative and Marilyn’s ex-post facto research design approaches were adopted as viable methodologies for the study. Justifiable grounds by which existentialist scholars continue to promote the ‘extinction risk threat’ and the impending job annihilation theory were identified. Scientists and existentialist scholars are therefore enjoined to urgently identify pathways for aligning the goals of SIM with those of mankind.

One of the justifications for federal involvement in the homeownership market is that it provides one of the few ways that low-income households can accumulate wealth. To date, the evidence on this claim is mixed due to the lack of a framework that allows for an evaluation of the causal impact of homeownership on wealth accumulation. We make up for this deficit by using the 1984–2013 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that allows us to use a household-level fixed effects estimator to focus on how wealth changes for households that shift their tenure status from renting to owning. We find that low-income households that were renters in 1984 and first purchased a home in 1989–1999, a period of relatively stable real house prices, experienced significant gains in wealth as of 2011 compared to households that remained renters. On the other hand, low-income households that were renters in 1999 and first purchased a home in 2001–2007, a period of growth followed by the Great Recession, experienced little or no gains in wealth as of 2013 compared to renter households. At least in part, this was due to the unprecedented nature of this housing downturn and the resulting high foreclosure rate among low-income homeowners. Hence, if the Federal Government wants to support its claim, it should assist low-income homeowners in staying in their homes.

This background paper for MIT’s Work of the Future report (2020) reviews what is known about trends in job skill requirements. The paper reviews issues related to the conceptualization and measurement of job skill requirements and the state of existing data before discussing recent rich cross-sectional data and more variable trend data for both the United States and other OECD countries. In general, the data on current levels of skill demand are at variance with the more extreme views that emphasize the prevalence of high-tech jobs or other kinds of “knowledge work.” Trends are consistently gradual on their face and often flatter in the previous ten to twenty years relative to previous decades—there is no consistent evidence that trends have accelerated markedly since 1980, and the dominant impression is continuity rather than discontinuity. Information technology changes very rapidly, but work roles and the occupational structure change gradually and will likely to continue to do so in the future. The data on current levels of job skill demands and recent trends help provide a frame of reference for evaluating predictions regarding future changes in job skill requirements.

In 2017, Ohio had the second highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States. Current opioid related epidemiologic literature has begun to uncover the environmental level influences on the opioid epidemic and how the end results may ultimately manifest over space and time. This work is still nascent however, with most clustering research conducted at a spatial unit such as county level, which (1) can obscure differences between urban and rural communities, (2) does not consider dynamics that cross county lines, and (3) is difficult to interpret directly into strategic and localized intervention efforts. We address this gap by describing, at the Census block level, the spatial-temporal clustering of opioid related events in rural Ohio. Methods We use the outcome of the administration of naloxone emergency medical service (EMS) calls in rural Ohio Census blocks during 2010-16 in a Poisson model of spatial scan statistics. Results We found that naloxone event clustering in rural Ohio in the recent decade was widely dispersed over time and space, with clusters that average 17 times the risk of having an event compared to areas outside the cluster. Many of the larger spatial clusters crossed administrative boundaries (i.e., county lines) suggesting that opioid misuse may be less responsive to county level policies than to other factors. Discussion Timely identification of localized overdose event clustering can guide affected communities toward rapid interventions aimed at minimizing the morbidity and mortality resulting from contagious opioid misuse.

In this document we describe a project to link records from the 1940 U.S. Census to records for individuals in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The project is part of a larger effort to conduct parallel linkages to the 1940 Census for respondents to the PSID, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), and the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS). Each study contains sample members who were alive at the time of the 1940 federal census and were thus enumerated (along with their families and household members). These five ongoing longitudinal studies are central components of America’s data infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on aging and the life course; physical and mental health, disability, and well-being; later-life work, economic well-being, and retirement; end-of-life issues, and many other topics. Adding information about sample members from the 1940 Census expands the utility of all five projects and enables important research on the effects of early life social, economic, environmental, contextual, and other factors on subsequent life outcomes. For a longer discussion of the overall linking project, see Warren, Helgertz, and Xu (2020)...

This Chapter discusses a variety of definitions of highly skilled migration and highly skilled migrants. We address a number of inconsistencies in the definitions and conceptual frameworks which are used, and present critical views of these conceptualisations.

Disproving the belief that the pandemic affects us all equally, data collected by New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and a piece published today in the New York Times shows that the novel coronavirus is “hitting low-income neighborhoods the hardest.”[1] In a forthcoming policy brief, we share evidence that this pattern would be the case and provide a solid explanation as to why (Nassif-Pires et al., forthcoming). Moreover, as we argue, the death tolls are also likely to be higher among poor neighborhoods and majority-minority communities. This inequality in health costs is in addition to an unequal distribution of economic costs. In short, poor and minority individuals are disproportionately feeling the impacts of this crisis. A concise version of our evidence is presented here.

Despite the growing literature on the impact of immigration, little is known about the role existing migrant settlements can play for knowledge transmission. We present a case which can illustrate this important mechanism and hypothesize that nineteenth century DanishAmerican communities helped spread knowledge on modern dairying to rural America. From around 1880, Denmark developed rapidly and by 1890 it was a world-leading dairy producer. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, and data taken from the US census and Danish emigration archives, we find that counties with more Danes in 1880 subsequently both specialized in dairying and used more modern practices.

This study examines the job earnings of STEM college graduates in the U.S. over the 2000-2010 decade. Findings show that after controlling for individual and college level characteristics, geographic factors, mainly the college area’s STEM employment concentration and proximity to STEM clusters, are significantly related to STEM graduates’ job earnings, unemployment, and underemployment. Women and Blacks are considerably more disadvantaged when compared to their male and White counterparts; however, gender and racial disparities significantly decrease when the college location’s STEM concentration increases. Through a multi-scalar research design, this study bridges scholarship in STEM education, labor market inequalities, and regional development. It also provides insight on how race, gender, and place interact in shaping STEM labor market outcomes. The findings have significant implications for policy and practice.

Immigration, like any positive labor supply shock, should increase the return to capital and spur business investment. These changes should have a positive impact on business creation and expansion, particularly in areas that receive large immigrant inflows. Despite this clear prediction, there is sparse empirical evidence on the effect of immigration on business dynamics. One reason may be data unavailability since public-access firm-level data are rare. This study examines the impact of immigration on business dynamics and employment by combining U.S. data on immigrant inflows from the Current Population Survey with data on business formation and survival and job creation and destruction from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database for the period 1997 to 2013. The results indicate that immigration increases the business growth rate by boosting business survival and raises employment by reducing job destruction. The effects are largely driven by less-educated immigrants.

Black Americans have been underrepresented in the nation’s creative industries since the end of slavery. This column argues that the implications of that marginalization extend beyond career choices into homes and neighbourhoods, as cities with thriving arts sectors also lead in job creation, innovation, and trade. The authors recommend that financial support for black artists be pursued in a systematic way, with policies that provide emerging black artists with access not only to relevant artistic networks, but also to supply-related organisations such as gallerists and publishers.

The transition towards renewable energy is likely to be uneven across social and spatial dimensions. To ensure this transition is equitable and just, energy injustice has become the key framework for analyzing and interpreting the distribution of energy infrastructure. Wind energy development has experienced a significant gap between broad public support for increased development but persistent localized opposition to proposed projects, indicating that wind represents a locally unwanted land use. We present the theoretical argument that although the negative impacts of wind energy infrastructure are less extreme than those posed by other, more toxic, unwanted land uses, their status as a locally unwanted land use will produce similar distributional injustices as have been found throughout the environmental injustice literature. Using data from both the American Community Survey, the U.S. Wind Turbine Database, and the National Renewable Energy Lab we use logistic and Poisson regressions, fixed effects, and temporal lags to evaluate the current landscape of wind energy injustice along the social dimensions of income, race and ethnicity, age, education, labor force participation, and rurality at three spatial scales: between all counties within the contiguous United States, between counties within states with wind energy, and between census tracts within counties with wind energy. We do not find strong evidence of distributional injustice along the lines of race, ethnicity, or low-income. However, we do find evidence of injustice for populations which are younger, less educated, have lower labor force participation, and are more rural.

Despite increasing evidence of a contemporary legacy of slavery in the US South, scholars do not have a clear empirical understanding of the ways in which demographic forces can alter local connections to racial histories. In this study, we examine the influence of long-run trends in population change on the relationship between historical slave concentration and contemporary black-white poverty inequality in the American South. We combine one century and a half of county-level population data, including estimates of the slave and total populations in 1860, estimates of black and white population change starting in 1880, and black-white poverty disparities from the 2011–2015 American Community Survey. Our results offer new empirical evidence regarding the enduring influence of racial histories over time, and suggest that white population increase between 1880 and 1910 was particularly influential in understanding the local connection between slave concentration and black-white inequality. Moreover, rather than disrupting the transmission of the legacy of slavery, results indicate that white population increase may have helped spread this legacy of racial inequality to other counties through diffusion processes. We find that while local historical legacies are persistent, they are not permanent, and population trends are a critical force shaping local racial inequality.

Objective: Evaluate how the use of a Section 1115 waiver in Arkansas was associated with health insurance coverage compared to Medicaid expansion states that did not use a waiver. Methods: Difference in difference analysis was conducted of 1,320,790 adults aged 19-64 with family incomes at or below 138% of the federal poverty level from the 2010-2017 American Community Survey. Arkansas was compared to states that expanded without a waiver in calendar year 2014. States that expanded Medicaid with an approved Section 1115 waiver during the study period or expanded without a waiver after 2014 or did not expand Medicaid were excluded from the analysis. The outcome measures were no health insurance coverage, Medicaid coverage, employer sponsored private insurance, and non-group direct purchase private insurance. Results: Arkansas's use of a waiver to expand Medicaid was associated with a lower uninsured rate (-3.7%, p< 0.001), a higher Medicaid coverage rate (2.0%, p< 0.001), and a higher non-group, direct purchase private insurance coverage rate (2.9%, p< 0.001) compared to states that expanded Medicaid in 2014 without a waiver. Conclusion: Compared to states that implemented traditional Medicaid expansion, we found that Arkansas's waiver was associated with increases in health insurance coverage rates.

We study changes in economic incentives to slave-ownership by analyzing one of the central aspects of the evolution of slavery in the US South: the Westward territorial expansion. While at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Southern states developed around the Atlantic shore, in the following decades, the Westward expansion shifted the epicenter of production toward the Mississippi valley. At the same time, about one million slaves were forcibly moved throughout the South, profoundly transforming its economic landscape. This paper examines the impact of the Westward expansion on slave relocation and emphasizes a link between economic incentives to slave-ownership, and the political support for the institution of slavery. Our results show how the Westward expansion polarized the productive, political and social system in the US South, eventually determining the geographical distribution of the support for the secession. Our strategy exploits two elements. First, the fact that the Westward expansion, between 1810 and 1860, implied a significant variation in the amount and type of agricultural land, inducing local changes in the incentives to crop production. Second, the fact that no more slaves could be introduced into the US after 1808. The abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1808) implied that any change in the local number of slaves resulted from relocation within the US South.2 We leverage these facts to compute changes in the county-level comparative advantage for the production of cotton relative to wheat and predict slave relocation. To establish a relationship between the comparative advantage in the production of cotton (vs. wheat) and the use of slaves (vs. free labor), we rely on the well-known empirical association in the US South between the intensity of cotton production and the use of slave labor (Wright, 1979; Fogel and Engerman, 1977) and provide evidence in favor of a specialization of slave labor in the production of cotton relative to wheat.3 We measure changes in comparative advantage in the following way. First, we use information on soil characteristics at the county level (FAO-GAEZ, 2002) to estimate the relative productivity of cotton with respect to wheat.4 Second, we compute, for each decade, the changes in each county’s position in the distribution of relative productivity determined by the addition of land due to the Westward expansion. The size of the change in the distribution depends on the relative productivity of each county compared to the newly established counties in the West. These heterogeneous changes capture the level of exposure of a county to the competition generated by the newly available land. We expect a larger drop in the distribution of relative productivity to be associated with larger changes in both the crop mix and the use of slave labor: an increase in wheat and a decrease in cotton production; a reduction in slaves.5 We then show that these changes not only affected crop production decisions and local reliance on slave labor but also caused broader political and ideological transformation. Finally, we provide a quantification of the potential channels and rule out migration as the main mechanism. This shows that our results are at least partially due to changes in preferences and social norms. The key identifying assumption behind our econometric model is the absence of unobservable county-specific and time-varying characteristics that affect the use of slave labor and are correlated with changes in the position of a county in the relative productivity distribution. To ensure and assess the validity of our identification, we take several steps. First, we control for county fixed effects, thereby absorbing all the time-invariant county characteristics that could potentially affect the number of slaves in a county and census year. Second, we include year fixed effects, which capture common changes brought by the Westward expansion. In this way, we only exploit the differential effect that the Westward expansion had on counties with different relative productivity of cotton with respect to wheat. We always control for the distance to the northern border (non-slave states) interacted with year fixed effects, and Census region fixed effect interacted with year fixed effects. Therefore, in our analysis, we always compare counties that are at the same distance from the North and in the same Census region but that differ in the extent to which the Westward expansion affected their agricultural comparative advantage. This specification allows us to net out potential effects derived from the evolution of the cultural and institutional environment that depend on counties’ geographical position. For example, counties closer to the Northern border might be influenced by the changing northern ideological environment more than counties further away. We then estimate a series of alternative specifications. First, we compute changes in comparative advantage by exploiting national changes in the prices of labor inputs (wages and slave price) and agricultural outputs (cotton and wheat prices) as a source of time variation. We show that as the cost of producing cotton increased, counties with lower relative productivity adjusted crop production and decreased their share of slaves. Second, we include sugar, tobacco, and corn in our analysis, the other main cash crop of the Antebellum south. Third, we exploit the fact that the timing of the effect of the Westward expansion was not the same for all crops. We then show that our estimates are robust to restricting the analysis to the sample of counties belonging to the US in 1810 and also only to counties formed during the Westward expansion. Finally, we allow for different trends depending on the share of slaves before the end of the Atlantic slave trade (1808), when the amount of slave labor available was not restricted. In the first set of empirical results, we look at the effect of agricultural shocks on slave relocation and production decisions. We find that when a county loses comparative advantage in the production of cotton, it reduces the use of slave labor. A county that in 1810 had a median relative productivity experienced a substantial loss in comparative advantage between 1810 and 1860. Over this period, almost 1 million squared kilometers of land with higher relative productivity was added. Due to the competition generated by the new land, this county experienced a 10.7 percentage points reduction in the share of the enslaved population. This reduction is substantial when taking into account that the average share of the enslaved population was 28%. Overall, our estimates imply that between 1810 and 1860, almost 800,000 slaves were relocated due to the competitive forces generated by the Westward expansion.