This established historiography on early twentieth-century Puerto Rico is nearly unanimous on one aspect of the impact of the US rule in the aftermath of the 1898 invasion: large-scale, absentee-owned sugar-manufacturing corporations acquired extensive landed estates at the expense of Puerto Rican farmers who lost their land and were gradually converted into a labor force to serve these US-based sugar companies. This narrative has been repeated over and again in nearly every major work in Puerto Rican history and seres as a point of departure for examining a wide range of other themes that have sought to assess the impact of US colonial control over the island. The development of rural landlessness, social stratification, extreme forms of inequality in the countryside, and economic dependence were all closely connected to the accumulation of large plantations by US-owned corporations, or so the story goes...

Spizman (2013) compares earnings estimates using the Census Bureau’s PINC-04 Tables to earnings estimates reported in the publication Full-Time Earnings in the United States. His focus is primarily on whether it is better to use estimates of mean or median earnings to estimate lost earnings in a personal injury or death lawsuit, when the plaintiff has no earnings history. Public-use microdata from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and from the American Community Survey are applied to offer some critiques of the Spizman (2013) study and some extensions of it. Consistent with Spizman (2013), median earnings estimates are significantly lower than mean earnings estimates, leading to the conclusion that median earnings calculated using the ACS are the preferred approach if the goal is to estimate lost earnings for a typical person. This study finds, however, that other concerns Spizman (2013) raises are less justified

Context: Twenty states are pursuing community engagement requirements (“work requirements”) in Medicaid, though legal challenges are ongoing. While most nondisabled low-income individuals work, it is less clear how many engage in the required number of hours of qualifying community engagement activities and what heterogeneity may exist by race/ethnicity, age, and gender. The authors’ objective was to estimate current levels of employment and other community engagement activities among potential Medicaid beneficiaries. Methods: The authors analyzed the US Census Bureau’s national time-use survey data for the years 2015 through 2018. Their main sample consisted of nondisabled adults between 19 and 64 years with family incomes less than 138% of the federal poverty level (N = 2,551). Findings: Nationally, low-income adults who might become subject to Medicaid work requirements already spent an average of 30 hours per week on community engagement activities. However, 22% of the low-income population—particularly women, older adults, and those with less education—would not currently satisfy a 20-hour-per-week requirement. Conclusions: Although the majority of potential Medicaid beneficiaries already meet community engagement requirements or are exempt, 22% would not currently satisfy a 20-hour-perweek requirement and therefore could be at risk for losing coverage.

This paper reexamines the predominant narrative suggesting that urban areas became cleaner, safer, and healthier during the early twentieth century, eliminating the "urban penalty" in mortality by 1920. While canonical narrative holds for crude mortality in select states, we show that in the national panel of counties and cities, or for age-standardized mortality, the urban penalty persists past 1936. We attribute these divergent results to the diierences in population composition by DRA entry and for urban versus rural areas. We then consider why the urban penalty failed to disappear and document two intriguing patterns in respiratory and waterborne-infectious mortality. First, both large and small cities had persistently high waterborne/gastroenteric mortality. Second, large cities struggled with airborne/respiratory deaths, while these respiratory illnesses killed fewer in small cities and rural areas. An interesting caveat to these endings is that tuberculosis mortality quickly converged between urban and rural areas after 1918, suggesting that the 1918 innuenza pandemic may have played a role in narrowing the urban penalty.

The Median Voter Theorem is a key concept in political economy, one that has been tested numerous times in the literature. However, it remains unclear the extent to which legislators respond to the needs of their district on a bill-by-bill basis. This paper seeks to understand the role of ideology and of local economic pressures that a state legislator faces when deciding how to vote on minimum wage legislation. Although some papers have examined legislator voting behavior on specific issues, this paper uses state legislatures and minimum wage bills to innovate on this existing literature in two key ways. First, I capitalize on the fact that the content of minimum wage legislation is relatively consistent throughout time, thus expanding my sample size and allowing me to compare bills across several years and states. Second, results from minimum wage bills at the state level are more generalizable, as they address important issues but are less highprofile than most federal or emergency bills. To test this question, I compile a list of state minimum wage bills that received a floor vote between 2012-2016 and of each legislators’ vote. I then match each legislator with an ideology score from the “The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures,” and a series of economic and demographic variables from the American Community Survey at the district level. I find that minimum wages are an overwhelmingly partisan issue, with Democrats being almost 60 percent more likely to vote in favor of an increase. However, as the number of individuals in a district who would be affected by a minimum wage increase goes up, legislators become less likely to vote in favor of the bill.

Better documentation and understanding of long-term temporal dynamics of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in watersheds is necessary to support effective water quality management, in part because studies have identified time lags between terrestrial nutrient balances and water quality. We present annual time series data from 1969 to 2012 for terrestrial N and P sources and monthly data from 1972 to 2013 for river N and P for the Willamette River Basin, Oregon, United States. Inputs to the watershed increased by factors of 3 for N and 1.2 for P. Synthetic fertilizer inputs increased in total and relative importance over time, while sewage inputs decreased. For N, increased fertilizer application was not matched by a proportionate increase in crop harvest; N use efficiency decreased from 69% to 38%. P use efficiency increased from 52% to 67%. As nutrient inputs to terrestrial systems increased, river concentrations and loads of total N, total P, and dissolved inorganic P decreased, and annual nutrient loads were strongly related to discharge. The N:P ratio of both sewage and fertilizer doubled over time but there was no similar trend in riverine export; river N:P concentrations declined dramatically during storms. River nutrient export over time was related to hydrology and waste discharge, with relatively little influence of watershed balances, suggesting that accumulation within soils or groundwater over time is mediating watershed export. Simply managing yearly nutrient balances is unlikely to improve water quality; rather, many factors must be considered, including soil and groundwater storage capacity, and gaseous loss pathways.

Less than two weeks before Hurricane Harvey caused extreme flooding in Texas, the Trump administration rescinded a science-based executive order intended to make infrastructure more resilient to future flooding events (Relman 2017). This included infrastructure for Superfund sites, which contain some of the most harmful chemicals known to humankind. Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters compromised the containment of hazardous chemicals at the San Jacinto Waste Pits Superfund site in Houston, Texas (Gebelhoff 2019). The breach of this site potentially exposed nearby communities to dioxins, highly toxic chemical compounds that can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones, and cause cancer.

The location of Black residents in Minneapolis based on the enumeration districts used in the 1920 federal census.

The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a United States territory where the residents have worse health outcomes than residents of the mainland United States. Specifically, Puerto Rico has higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and self-reported poor health than does the mainland United States. Yet Puerto Rico’s health system is under-researched, and the research that exists has produced different theories as to why these health disparities exist. This study explores the role of three factors that make Puerto Rico distinctive and their effects on health outcomes: its distinctive Medicaid block grant funding scheme, its high poverty rates, and its lack of physicians. While these factors are intertwined, in this study, I work to tease out each one’s impact in contributing to Puerto Rico’s poor health outcomes. In order to examine the effect of each of these three factors on chronic diseases, I perform a fixed-effect regression with controls for extraneous variables. The results showed that total Medicaid funding has a significant and inverse relationship with the rates of health conditions. Poverty and physicians supply also do have an association with health outcomes, but their estimated magnitudes are less precise, and therefore their true effects are less certain. Given these results, increased Medicaid funding would greatly benefit Puerto Rico and could be expected to improve the health of the residents. Since, Puerto Rico operates under a block grant system, legislators should consider converting Puerto Rico’s Medicaid structure to that of the other mainland states who do not received capped funding.

Income inequality's growth over recent decades sparked interest in income mobility over the life course. A coherent framework links intragenerational mobility and inequality, showing how movement into different income positions during adulthood tends to equalize incomes in the long term. We expand this framework to incorporate intergenerational mobility. This expansion is crucial for understanding the connection between inequality and mobility, because both intra- and intergenerational mobility tend to equalize incomes in the long term, while income persistence from parents to their adult children maintains inequality in the long term. We use the expanded framework to answer three questions: first, how do intra- and intergenerational mobility dynamics contribute to lifetime income inequality; second, how do they differentially contribute to lifetime occupational inequality versus lifetime income inequality; and third, how have their contributions varied across cohorts. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that mobility dynamics equalize lifetime family income much more than occupational prestige or occupational income. This difference remained remarkably stable across cohorts, because rising income inequality between people was not offset by especially high income mobility over the life course, nor was it matched by rising occupational inequality.

This Economic Commentary studies whether statewide bans on affirmative action in admission to public universities cause students to move to a new state to attend college. Regression results using data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey provide little evidence that affirmative action bans result in migration across state lines to attend college. In addition to being of direct interest, these results provide a check on earlier research that treats different states roughly as separate higher education markets.

The first chapter of this dissertation addresses the impacts of monetary policy shocks on bank lending behavior in the United States and the role recessions play through a risk taking transmission mechanism. I employ a vector autoregression (VAR) identified with sign and zero restrictions to simulate a monetary policy shock implemented by the Federal Reserve consistent with the economic theory suggesting unconventional monetary policy measures. I find that banks respond to expansionary monetary policy shocks by taking additional risk through lowering lending standards, however banks still experience a compression in lending margins, indicating little success in their efforts to stabilize reductions in profits. I also include a number of counterfactual interest rates to allow Fed policy rates to reflect negative interest rate policies to compare monetary policy shocks across the conventional and unconventional monetary policy regimes in a consistent manner. I find that banks take less risk in the unconventional monetary policy regime relative to the conventional regime, however they experience a larger reduction in lending margins relative to the pre-Financial Crisis period. Use of a forecast error variance decomposition indicates the risk channel played a larger role in the post-Financial Crisis period, carrying implications for Fed policy in considering this particular transmission mechanism in unconventional monetary policy measures. The second chapter of this dissertation addresses the foreign central bank responses of 12 advanced economies and 12 emerging market economies to United States unconventional monetary policy shocks identified by a combination of sign and zero restrictions in a global vector autoregression (GVAR) framework. I find foreign central banks follow in kind with United States unconventional monetary policy measures, such as Quantitative Easing, in order to offset undesirable spillover effects. My results also indicate that United States Quantitative Easing plays a more substantial role in determining monetary easing conditions in emerging markets than in advanced economies. Additionally, I find foreign central banks with inflation targeting or floating exchange rate policies tend to follow a United States Quantitative Easing shock with more stable monetary policy responses, with larger increases in output than non-inflation targeting or managed exchange rate regimes. My results are robust to various changes in the specifications and identifying restrictions. The third chapter was written with Dr. Robert F. Tamura. We introduce a novel data set to empirically test a dynamic, dynastic human capital model developed by Tamura, Simon, and Murphy (2016), yielding predictions of the relative efficiency of school for black and white students during the Jim Crow era. By providing measures developed within the data set, we can test the parametrizations of key variables with respect to access to education calibrated within the model. Our results suggest that the model accurately describes the key educational values generated by the model, and confirms the results of the theoretical framework developed by Tamura, Simon, and Murphy (2016) in that blacks faced substantially higher marginal costs of education relative to whites as a result of the lack of equal per-pupil expenditures allocated at the state level during segregation, lower levels of human capital accumulation of African American parents relative to white parents, and the disparity of income across both races. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting a novel data set regarding expenditures per pupil for white and African American students for the years 1890-1960, and also confirming the fit of the model developed by Tamura, Simon, and Murphy (2016).

Over 1.5 million new jobs need to be filled by 2026 for medical assistants, nursing aides, and home care aides, many of which will work in the long-term services and supports (LTSS) sector. Using 16 years of data from the American Time Use Survey, we examined the financial vulnerability of high-skill and low-skill LTSS workers in comparison with other health care workers, while providing insight into their well-being by measuring time spent on work and nonwork activities. We found that, regardless of skill status, working in LTSS was associated with lower wages and an increased likelihood of experiencing poverty compared with other health care workers. Results from time diary data indicated that the LTSS workforce spent a greater share of their time working and commuting to work. Low-skill LTSS workers were hardest hit, spending more time on paid and unpaid activities, such as household and child care responsibilities.

This paper describes a method to reconstruct birth histories for women in the 1900 and 1910 U. S. census IPUMS samples. The method is an extension of an earlier method developed by Luther and Cho (1988). The basic method relies on the number of children ever born, number of children surviving, number of children coresident in the household and age-specific fertility rates for the population to probabilistically assign an “age” to deceased and unmatched children. Modifications include the addition of an iterative Poisson regression model to fine-tune age-specific fertility inputs. The potential of birth histories for the study of the U.S. fertility transition is illustrated with a few examples.

Transportation planning today requires an understanding of how income and near-rail residence jointly influence household travel behavior. This article fills a gap in the literature by showing how vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and transit trips taken (TT) vary with income and rail transit access by neighborhood type. Results indicate that, when comparing households with similar incomes and examining how the “near-rail” versus “far from rail” VMT and TT gap varies by income, the cross-sectional reduction in nominal VMT and the increase in TT on a percentage basis is generally larger for higher-income households (>$50,000), and particularly so in neighborhoods dense with both jobs and population. These findings offer support for the notion that near-transit housing targeting higher-income households can have both sustainability and transit use benefits. We note, though, that equity considerations are a strong reason to include low-income housing near rail transit, and argue that policies focusing overly singly on either low-income or high-income housing near rail transit will not be as impactful as a robust focus on mixed-income housing developments in rail transit-oriented developments (TODs).

Lesbian and gay workers hold different occupations than straight workers, partly reflecting lesbian and gay workers’ tendency to avoid same-gender-dominated occupations. Previous studies have grappled with significant data limitations, obscuring patterns for bisexual workers and potentially biasing estimates of occupational segregation by sexual orientation. In this study the author addresses these limitations using large-scale, nationally representative data from the 2013–2018 National Health Interview Survey. Occupational segregation by sexual orientation is stronger among men than women. Within gender, lesbian/gay and bisexual workers are as segregated from each other as they are from straight workers. These differences are structured by both occupational gender composition and education: occupational segregation by sexual orientation is greatest among less educated workers and when correlated with occupational gender composition. These findings contribute to a more detailed empirical description of labor market inequalities by sexual orientation and offer some empirical puzzles for further theoretical development.

Unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico have endeavored treacherous journeys to enter the United States for many decades. In recent years, there has been an influx of unaccompanied minors fleeing their native country and arriving at the United States border as a result of poverty, violence, limited prospects and to reunify with their parents. Unaccompanied minors have witnessed and faced adversities, sometimes causing various mental health problems. Providing services to a vulnerable population like unaccompanied minors from Latin America can be challenging. This study explores Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) social workers’ perceived confidence in working with unaccompanied minors. This study employs an exploratory design and compile qualitative data by interviewing DCFS social workers. The researcher evaluated perceived level of confidence among social workers utilizing thematic analysis. Research findings were compelling and will have significant implications for social work literature, social work programs and policies impacting unaccompanied minors

Across the United States, there is a shortage of physicians providing care in rural areas. This shortage means patients living in rural communities must travel further with fewer care options. The purpose of this study is to ultimately fill the gap in rural workforce outcomes by identifying students that are likely to practice in rural areas once they complete medical school and residency/fellowship programs. These students may be identified through use of predictive analytics techniques. By identifying these students, we can provide informational material and optional programs to further foster interest in rural care. Through techniques such as feature extraction, resampling, and data imputation, we prepare data for various machine learning classifiers. These models allow us to identify features common to urban providers and rural providers. Seventy percent of rural providers were correctly identified as practicing in rural areas, while 25% of their urban counterparts were classified as rural. One characteristic difference between the groups shows rural providers have high average scores through medical school courses, while urban providers have higher standardized test scores.

The southern United States has been labeled a “sacrifice zone” for the rest of the nation's toxic waste. In the early days of the environmental justice movement, researchers found that the south contained a disproportionate number of toxic sites, including garbage dumps, landfills, and waste incinerators. These initial studies used different data sources and methodologies, but arrived at the same conclusion: America was dumping in Dixie, a predominantly poor African American region of the country. Since then, researchers have mainly confirmed or called into question the existence of environmental racism within the south. However, none have investigated the south’s environmental burdening relative to other regions in the U.S. Drawing on county-level U.S. census data and the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, this study assesses the spatial and social distribution of toxic releases across the U.S. from 1987 to 2017. The primary purpose of this study is to use a standard measure of environmental risk to determine if the American south is (still) the nation’s “sacrifice zone.” Additionally, this study assesses whether patterns of environmental racism that were present in the early stages of the environmental justice movement are still present today.

Pennsylvania has a long history of oil and gas extraction. When the production period ends, many wells are left behind and some remain unplugged. Unplugged wells impose serious environmental costs, including explosion hazard and risk of water, atmosphere, and soil contamination. This paper quantifies these costs by estimating the effect of unplugged wells on housing prices. I use rich data on oil and gas drilling, housing market transactions, and lease agreements to conduct difference-in-differences and instrumental variable analyses. I show that well abandonment reduces house prices. Old wells, left behind by oil and gas operators, affect house prices more than active, producing ones. However, this depreciation is reversible: if well site clean-up is completed, house prices recover almost entirely. I show that the benefits of proper well plugging are larger than the costs. This motivates environmental policies aimed at creating incentives for oil and gas producers to plug wells. These policies may include higher bankruptcy insurance requirements or environmental taxes.