Talent is the most valuable resource in our modern, knowledge-intensive economy, and the global distribution of talent shapes the competitiveness of firms, the strength of our economy, and the social fabric of our communities. This chapter describes the movement of talent and the policies that shape these people flows, which are among the most important decisions countries make. While America has benefitted substantially from inflows of global talent since the 1970s, this lure has often been because of the economic or social features of our country, rather than a particularly effective policy environment. US leaders have an opportunity to design a better immigration system that will improve US competitiveness in the decades to come. Most of this chapter focuses on employment-based migration for skilled work. Employment-based migration is a modest share of immigration to America, with family-based migration accounting for the majority of green cards granted each year. While many migrants entering through family-based channels work hard and pursue the “American Dream”, the policy objectives and potential reforms to family- vs. employment-based categories are quite different, and respondents to public opinion polls have divergent feelings regarding the categories. I thus focus primarily on potential changes to employment-based migration policy, touching upon comprehensive immigration reform at the end of the chapter. Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, America faces challenging immigration policy issues that have been building up for more than two decades. The rhetoric around immigration is far more caustic than it was before 2016, and it may become far worse as the COVID-19 pandemic plays out and politicians ascribe blame during the election cycle. But, beyond the headlines, most of the issues described in this chapter are about outdated features of the US policy structure that don’t fit well with the modern economy. As the world becomes more competitive and attractive for global talent, each missed opportunity to update our system makes us less competitive in the future.

This first two essays of this collection investigate the relationship between the firm-size distribution and the city-size wage premium. The third essay investigates the effect of a shock to the steady-state rate of inflation on the wealth distribution. The first chapter, co-authored with Clara Santamaria and Charly Porcher, investigates the role of establishment size composition in explaining the city-size earnings premium. Using administrative data from Spain, we first document a strong positive correlation between city size and establishment size, measured as the number of co-workers. We then decompose the city-size earnings premium into two components: the increase in earnings explained by the increase in establishment size and the within establishment-size premium. The second chapter seeks to explain three key components of the growing regional disparities in the U.S. since 1980, referred to as the Great Divergence by Moretti (2012). Namely, big cities saw a larger increase in the relative wages of skilled workers, a larger increase in the relative supply of skilled workers, and a smaller decline in business dynamism. These trends can be explained by differences across cities in the extent to which firms adopt new skill-biased technologies. In response to the introduction of a new skill-biased, high fixed cost but low marginal cost technology, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers and cities that are more productive in using high-skilled labor. The third chapter, co-authored with Ben Pugsley, develops an incomplete markets economy to quantify the distribution of welfare gains and losses of the US “Volcker” disinflation. Even with perfectly flexible prices, welfare costs from a disinflation may be significant for households with nominal liabilities. The burden of wealth redistribution, the benefits of a reduced inflation tax, and exposure to general equilibrium effects on the real interest rate all vary across households. When calibrated to match the micro and macro moments of the early 1980s high inflation environment, almost half iii of all borrowers (14 percent of all households) would prefer to avoid the redistribution and equilibrium effects of the disinflation.

Introduction: This report investigates where all Latinos lived in the New York City Metropolitan area, including the Northern Suburbs, Long Island, and selected New Jersey counties. The six largest Latino nationalities are mapped by census tract for a very precise visualization of the data. Methods: This report uses one-year sample data for 2018 from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and the 2014 – 2018 five-year sample data at the census-census tract level. The ACS dataset is reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota and is available at IPUMS USA (https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V10.0) and IPMS NHGIS (http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V14.0). The five-year sample data from the ACS 2014-2018 has recently been released by IPUMS. However, this report was written prior to the release of these data. In this report ancestry is defined by the respondent’s self-reported ancestry and Latino group. Discussion: In 1960, 86% of all Latinos lived in New York City. Showing the same pattern as that of European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, Latinos first settled in the City and then moved to the surrounding counties as economic conditions improved. By 2018, 50% of Latinos lived in the City and the rest in the neighboring areas, 26% in New Jersey contiguous counties close to the City; 13% in Northern Suburban counties including Fairfield County, Connecticut; and 11% in Long Island. The Puerto Rican population was the largest in all of the counties, although Dominicans accounted for the greatest share of the City’s Latino population. Mexicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and Salvadorans were the next largest nationalities in that order.

The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the fragility of the US economy and the ever-present financial instability of American workers. Prior to this health and economic crisis, headline economic measures including historically low unemployment rates masked the reality for millions of working people who held jobs but suffered from persistently low wages and inadequate access to fundamental benefits, such as sick time or paid family leave. Viewing Mississippi as a vital case study, this report explores the perpetual economic hardship faced by low-wage workers across the state and within selected regions. Because the Mississippi economy mirrors the national economy in key ways, including the fact that many of its industries depend on a low-wage workforce, this report demonstrates how Mississippi reflects—and drives—broader trends in the US. This report utilizes labor market data and an occupational crowding analysis to illustrate who is largely excluded from the most-desirable, best-paying occupations and crowded into occupations with the lowest wages and least stability. We show that race and gender determine the types of jobs that Mississippians have access to in the labor market.

Background: A growing body of literature has reported widening educational health disparities across birth cohorts or time periods in the United States, but research has paid little attention to the implication of mortality selection on the cohort trend in health disparities. Objective: This study investigates how changes in the variance of unobserved frailty over time may complicate the interpretation of cohort trends in health disparities and life expectancy. Methods: We use the microsimulation method to test the effect of mortality selection and further propose a counterfactual simulation procedure to estimate its contribution. Data used in the simulations are based on Panel Studies of Income Dynamics 1968–2013, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data 1999‒2012, and National Health Interview Survey data 1986‒2011. Results: Simulation shows that mortality selection may generate seemingly contradictory trends in health disparities and life expectancy across birth cohorts at the group and individual level. Life expectancy can change even when the individual mortality curve is fixed. In the absence of a change in the causal effect of education on mortality at the individual level, an educational life expectancy gap can change across cohorts as a result of the change in frailty variance. Empirical analysis shows that mortality selection accounts for a sizeable amount of contribution to the widening educational life expectancy gap from the 1950s to 1960s birth cohorts in the United States. Contribution: We demonstrate how mortality selection can complicate the cohort trend in health disparities and life expectancy and propose a counterfactual simulation method to evaluate its contribution.

Using 2009 to 2015 American Community Survey (ACS) data, this article estimates the effect of the prevalence of long hours and short hours of work in a husband’s field of work, as defined by his undergraduate degree field, on the labor market outcomes of skilled married women. When individuals work in fields that require longer hours of work, their spouses experience spillover effects. The labor market outcomes of female spouses are more negatively affected than are those of male spouses. Specifically, female spouses face lower total earnings, hourly wages, employment options, and hours of work for married women with children relative to married men with children or married women without children. Little evidence supports the idea that the rate of short hours of work in a spouse’s degree field differentially affects married women with children.

We investigate the wage return to studying economics by leveraging a policy that prevented students with low introductory grades from declaring the major. Students who barely met the GPA threshold to major in economics earned $22,000 (46%) higher annual early-career wages than they would have with their second-choice majors. Access to the economics major shifts students' preferences toward business/finance careers, and about half of the wage return is explained by economics majors working in higher-paying industries. The causal return to majoring in economics is very similar to observational earnings differences in nationally representative data.

Natural disasters uncover deep inequities and vulnerabilities in societies, but they also create possibilities for important change. The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a triple crisis of a public health catastrophe, an economic shutdown, and a racial inequality backlash, an acute confluence of challenges for Los Angeles County, California, and the United States. This multicrisis has revealed not only that racial health inequities are widespread but also that Brown and Black workers are especially vulnerable to income and job loss. In addition, discriminatory federal government policies deny COVID-19 relief and resources to undocumented workers and their family members, which include US citizens and legal permanent residents. The federal government treats these workers as disposable while considering most of them essential to economic recovery. In this report, we show that the COVID-19 crisis exposes not only deep underlying health and social inequities but also government responses to the pandemic that are worsening these inequities and undercutting economic recovery. Modeling the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis reveals how this vicious cycle of systemic discrimination can be reversed by policies that lead to a more racially equitable and economically sustainable recovery. No group has been affected more by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis than undocumented workers and their mixed-status families. This report finds that despite being the demographic group most concentrated in employment sectors determined by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to be “essential and critical” to the economy, undocumented immigrants receive the lowest wages, are most concentrated in jobs with high risk of exposure to the virus, and face the highest unemployment rates in the country. Although undocumented workers and their mixed-status families are disproportionately vulnerable, the Trump administration, Congress, and state legislatures have systemically excluded them from most government relief packages. As a new wave of the coronavirus hits most of the United States, forcing governments to pause or reverse reopening plans, this report advocates for broad benefits that include undocumented workers and their families in any future relief and stimulus packages. First, we establish that undocumented immigrants are fundamental to the economy by providing estimates of the economic contributions of undocumented workers and their families to gross domestic product (GDP), employment, and taxes in the United States, California, and Los Angeles. Second, we show how the COVID-19 recession has disproportionately affected the employment and earnings of undocumented workers while denying them access to unemployment and pandemic relief, exacerbating Latinx vulnerability while slowing down economic recovery. Third, we provide estimates of the likely positive economic spillovers that would result from making undocumented workers eligible for relief policies at the federal and state levels.

Disparities in epilepsy treatment have previously been reported. In the current study, we examine the role of socioeconomic status, health insurance, place of residence, and sociodemographic characteristics in past-year visit to a neurology or epilepsy provider and current use of antiseizure medications. Multiple years of data were compiled from the National Health Interview Surveys, Sample Adult Epilepsy Modules. The sample (n = 1655) included individuals 18 years and older who have been told by a doctor to have epilepsy or seizures. Independent variables included number of seizures in the past year, health insurance, poverty status, education, region, race/ethnicity, foreign-born status, age, and sex/gender. Two sets of weighted hierarchical logistic regression models were estimated predicting past-year epilepsy visit and current medication use. Accounting for recent seizure activity and other factors, uninsured and people residing outside of the Northeast were less likely to see an epilepsy provider, and people living in poverty were less likely to use medications, relative to their comparison groups. However, no racial/ethnic and nativity-based differences in specialty service or medication use were observed. Further research, including longitudinal studies of care trajectories and outcomes, are warranted to better understand healthcare needs of people with epilepsy, in particular treatment-resistant seizures, and to develop appropriate interventions at the policy, public health, and health system levels.

I test whether the implementation of the California Paid Family Leave Act increased young women's human capital investment, specifically college enrollment. Using a synthetic control approach , I estimate that the policy increased the probability that women enroll in college by about 2 percentage points. This effect is statistically significant at the 5% level and persists for at least several years. I present a simple human capital model of women's schooling choices that characterizes these results as the effect of an expected decrease in the effects of motherhood on labor supply. Finally, I present evidence from survey data and Internet searches that provides support to the hypothesized mechanism: women are more likely to enroll in college because they expect that the policy will increase their future labor supply.

This dissertation consists of studies within the topics of economic mobility and educational attainment. The main groups under study are immigrants and African Americans within the U.S. Each of the three chapters use a combination of historical linked Census records, administrative, and other publicly available data. The first chapter studies the impact of ethnic capital during childhood on the future economic outcomes of immigrant males. The second chapter makes use of a combined dataset of linked census records and lynchings to analyze the effects of exposure to county-level lynchings during childhood on the economic and labor outcomes of African American males. The third chapter focuses on elementary students in a Midwestern county and investigates how wintry weather affects the Black-White disparity in unexcused absences.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a promising branch of the Internet of Things. IoV simulates a large variety of crowdsourcing applications such as Waze, Uber, and Amazon Mechanical Turk, etc. Users of these applications report the real-time traffic information to the cloud server which trains a machine learning model based on traffic information reported by users for intelligent traffic management. However, crowdsourcing application owners can easily infer users' location information, which raises severe location privacy concerns of the users. In addition, as the number of vehicles increases, the frequent communication between vehicles and the cloud server incurs unexpected amount of communication cost. To avoid the privacy threat and reduce the communication cost, in this paper, we propose to integrate federated learning and local differential privacy (LDP) to facilitate the crowdsourcing applications to achieve the machine learning model. Specifically, we propose four LDP mechanisms to perturb gradients generated by vehicles. The Three-Outputs mechanism is proposed which introduces three different output possibilities to deliver a high accuracy when the privacy budget is small. The output possibilities of Three-Outputs can be encoded with two bits to reduce the communication cost. Besides, to maximize the performance when the privacy budget is large, an optimal piecewise mechanism (PM-OPT) is proposed. We further propose a suboptimal mechanism (PM-SUB) with a simple formula and comparable utility to PM-OPT. Then, we build a novel hybrid mechanism by combining Three-Outputs and PM-SUB.

There is a growing body of literature documenting effects of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion on demand and supply of health care. This study examines the spillover effects of Medicaid expansion on participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the Food Stamp program, with a focus on uncovering any rural-urban differential. I find a small and statistically insignificant increase in SNAP participation. However, this increase may be decomposed into a downward trend in rural areas and an upward trend in urban areas, resulting in a statistically significant negative rural-urban differential.

Objective: To determine whether exogenously reduced psychological distress reduces reported low-back pain (LBP) and is associated with reduced medical visits for LBP. Data Sources: National Health Interview Survey, National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, 1998-2004. Study Design: We estimate a fuzzy regression discontinuity model in which a discontinuity in the prevalence of psychological distress is identified by exogenous national events. We examine whether this discontinuity induced a corresponding discontinuity in the prevalence of LBP. We additionally estimate a regression discontinuity model to determine associated changes in medical visits with LBP as the primary complaint. Principal Findings: The prevalence of LBP was discontinuously reduced by one-fifth due to the exogenous national discontinuous reduction in psychological distress. This discontinuity in LBP cannot be explained by discontinuities in employment, insurance, injuries/poisoning, general health status, or other factors. We find an associated three-fifth discontinuous reduction in medical visits with LBP as the primary complaint. Conclusions: On a monthly basis, 2.1 million (P <.01) adults ceased to suffer LBP due to the national reduction in psychological distress, and associated medical visits with LBP as the primary complaint declined by 685 000 (P <.01).

We study the distributional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic’s impacts on employment. Using CPS data on stocks and flows, we show that the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. Although employment losses have been widespread, they have been substantially larger in lower-paying occupations and industries. Individuals from disadvantaged groups, such as Hispanics, younger workers, those with lower levels of education, and women, have suffered both larger increases in job losses and larger decreases in hiring rates. Occupational and industry affiliation can explain only part of the increased job losses among these groups.

Recent research has ignited a debate in social science history over whether and how to draw conclusions for whole populations from sources that describe only select subsets of these populations. The idiosyncratic availability and survival of historical sources create a threat of sample-selection bias--an error that arises when there are systematic differences between the observed sample and the population of interest. This danger is common in studying trends in health as measured by average stature--scholars can often observe these trends only for soldiers and other similar groups; but whether these patterns are representative of those of the broader population is unclear. This article illustrates what simple patterns in a potentially selected sample can be used to recognize the presence of sample-selection bias in a source, and to understand how such bias might affect conclusions drawn from this source. Applying this intuition to the use of military data to describe stature in the antebellum United States, I present several simple empirical exercises based on these patterns. Finally, I use the results of these exercises to describe how sample-selection bias might affect the use of these data in testing for differences in average stature between the Northeast and the Midwest.

13.0% of middle-aged adults (age 35- 64) live alone in rural (non-metropolitan) counties vs. 12.3% in urban counties. Of the 50 counties with the highest percentage of middle-aged adults living alone, 37 are rural. Health care providers in these counties identified several characteristics related to high rates of middle-aged adults living alone, including socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., income, marital status, age distribution), lack of social support, personal choice, housing issues, and health status. Practical challenges for middle-aged adults living alone in rural counties included limited resources, transportation, accessing health care, loneliness, substance use, and difficulty with self-care. While many individuals live alone by choice and thrive in doing so, some people experience unique barriers to health and well-being when living alone. These barriers play out uniquely in rural areas and require tailored interventions to support these individuals.

An aging economy is widely believed to increase the recipients of Social Security and thus increase the fiscal burden. However, since the health condition of the elderly today is better than before and may continue to improve in the future, the number of elderly workers may increase. This paper studies the quantitative role of old workers in the sustainability of Social Security in an aging economy by developing a computable overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in a general equilibrium framework. The distinctive feature of the model is the incorporation of health status linked to survival probability, medical expenditures, and disutility of labor. The model simulation shows that old workers play a significant role in mitigating the fiscal cost and the effect remains pronounced when Social Security reform is implemented. It also highlights the crucial role of the projected future health status of the population in quantifying the fiscal cost.

Worktime has declined since the end of the Industrial Revolution, and this combined with increasing lifespans has resulted in large increases in the amount of total leisure the average individual can expect to enjoy over their lifetime. In recent decades, however, declines in worktime for employed individuals have slowed or stopped in the U.S. even as work hours in many other high-income countries have declined. The average American worker went from working a few hundred hours less than the average French or German worker to a few hundred hours more in the span of a few decades. • The working time gap between the U.S. and Europe is explained by both a higher number of vacation weeks in Europe and a longer workweek in the U.S. The U.S is the only OECD country with no statutory minimum level of annual leave, and the vacation time offered by many U.S. employers falls below the minimum level of leave offered in many other countries. Many Scandinavian and Western European countries have obtained shorter standard workweeks through legislation or collective bargaining. • The stability of average work hours combined with the increasing proportion of couples who are dual earners means that families are collectively putting in more work hours now than in the recent past. The fraction of couples who are dual earners has risen from about half to 70% over the last four decades. The largest increase within this category has been among couples in which both the mother and the father work full-time. The average middle-class married couple with children now works a combined 3,446 hours annually, an increase of more than 600 hours—or 15 additional weeks of full-time work—since 1975. • The overwhelming majority of middle-class income growth over this period was due to increases in women’s labor force attachment, work hours, and hourly earnings. In the process of addressing a perceived money squeeze, many middle-class families now face a time squeeze. But because there is an upper limit on hours worked, 3 further improvements in middle class incomes may be limited unless the adults in these families can earn more per hour. • Work and family responsibilities tend to peak between the ages of 30 and 44, putting young and middle-aged adults under particular time pressure. Time in nonmarket (household) work has declined for women and increased for men since the 1960s, though women still perform much more work in the household. Both mothers and fathers have increased their time spent caring for children since the 1960s. Together, fulltime dual-earners spend a combined 139 hours per week in total work—defined as market work, home production, childcare, and adult care—compared to 125 hours per week among couples with a fulltime employed father and stay-at-home mother. • Policies and practices surrounding work and family life have not kept pace with changes in women’s economic roles. Individuals are expected to work most intensively at the age when they have the greatest family responsibilities, with limited options to take time off for family care or retraining. The expense of childcare is high relative to middle-class incomes and school hours are not well aligned to typical work hours, making it challenging for many parents, particularly mothers, to work full-time. Paid family leave and flexible work arrangements, such as the ability to work from home, are still unavailable to many workers. • In response to these developments, we suggest a number of new policies: o Reductions in the standard work week or work year o More paid leave o Mid-career breaks for family care or life-long learning o Later retirement o Subsidized childcare o Better alignment of school and work hours o More telecommuting and investments in transit infrastructure

The traditional role of physical therapists is to prescribe exercises and provide hands-on care to help patients develop, maintain, and restore functional ability that may be limited by injuries, aging, and chronic or progressive diseases. 1-3 For example, physical therapists prescribe range-of-motion and muscle-strengthening exercises after orthopedic surgery, assist patients in regaining coordination and balance after a stroke or brain injury through exercises aimed at relearning specific tasks, and develop treatment plans for athletes after sports-related injuries and surgeries. Physical therapists may also provide preventive care, rehabilitation, education, and treatment for those with chronic conditions including scoliosis, arthritis, obesity, amputations, and cerebral palsy. 1,2 Physical therapists practice in a broad range of settings. Figure 1 shows the distribution of practice locations for physical therapists according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: 33% work in physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and audiology clinics, 26% in hospital settings, 11% in home health care services, 7% in nursing and residential care facilities, and 5% are self-employed. 1 The remaining 18% work in academic, educational and research centers; health insurance, health policy and health care administration; sports training facilities; on professional sports teams; and in school settings. 1-3