In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states have adopted stay-at-home orders, rendering a large segment of the workforce unable to continue doing their jobs. These policies have distributional consequences, as workers in some occupations may be better able to continue their work from home. I identify the segments of the U.S. workforce that can plausibly work from home by linking occupation data from O*NET to the American Community Survey. I find that lower-wage workers are up to three times less likely to be able to work from home than higher-wage workers. Those with lower levels of education, younger adults, ethnic minorities, and immigrants are also concentrated in occupations that are less likely to be performed from home.

This paper examines whether the intensity of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic has differentially impacted the public sector labor market outcomes. This extends the analysis of the already documented negative economic consequences from COVID-19 and their dissimilarities with a typical economic crisis. To capture the intensity of the NPIs, we build a novel index (COVINDEX) using daily information on NPIs merged with state level data on out of home mobility (Google data) to show that among individuals living in a typical state, the NPIs enforcement during the COVID-19 reduces the likelihood of being employed (at work) by 5% with respect to the pre-COVID period and the hours worked by 1.3% using data on labor market outcomes from the monthly Current Population Survey and differencein-difference models. This is a sizable amount representing the sector with the higher job security during the pandemic. Public sector workers in a typical state are 4 percentage points more likely to be at work than salaried workers in the private sector and 7 percentage points more likely than self-employed workers (the worst so far). Our results are robust to endogeneity of the NPIs measures and present empirical evidence of heterogeneity in the response to the NPIs with those in the local employment being the hardest hit.

This study evaluates the health and economic consequences of state laws that required children to be vaccinated against smallpox to attend school in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Utilizing a novel dataset of vaccination legislation, I first show that school vaccination mandates substantially reduced smallpox rates. Next, leveraging the staggered roll-out of mandates within a difference-indifferences framework, I demonstrate that childhood exposure to school vaccination improved long-run adult occupational status by increasing average annual incomes by approximately three percent. Event studies confirm the causal nature of this relationship by illustrating that benefits only appeared for those who were of schooling age and younger when a mandate was passed. I attribute these benefits to vaccination incentivizing human capital investment. As evidence, difference-indifferences results show that vaccination laws increased school enrollment and decreased labor market participation of teens. Lastly, I demonstrate that anti-vaccination beliefs muted the benefits of vaccination. Children of German immigrants, who were known for their anti-vaccination beliefs, benefited significantly less from vaccination laws in the short-and long-run. This serves as both a falsification test for my results as well as evidence anti-vaccination beliefs may temper the impact of vaccination policies. These findings speak to the importance of childhood vaccination for both health and human capital development. Moreover, they shed new light on the cost of American institutions that struggled to widely promote school vaccination mandates in the fight against smallpox.

Beginning in 1951, the Conference Board constructed a monthly job vacancy index by counting the number of help-wanted ads published in local newspapers in 51 metropolitan areas. We use this Help-Wanted Index (HWI) to document how immigration changes the number of job vacancies in the affected labor markets. Our analysis revisits the Mariel episode. The data reveal a sizable drop in Miami's HWI relative to comparable cities in the first 4 or 5 years after Mariel, followed by recovery afterwards. We also examine the text of the help-wanted ads published in a number of newspapers and document a significant post-Mariel decline in the relative number of low-skill vacancies advertised in the Miami Herald. The post-Mariel trends are consistent with the observed relation between immigration and the HWI across all metropolitan areas in the 1970-2000 period: the spatial correlation suggests that more immigration reduces the number of job vacancies. We explore some of the macroeconomic implications and show that Miami's Beveridge curve shifted inwards by the mid-1980s, suggesting a more efficient local labor market, in contrast to the outward nationwide shift coincident with the 1981-1982 recession.

The naturalization of immigrants has significant economic and politi- cal implications for the United States. An estimated 9.3 million otherwise eligible immigrants in the U.S. have not yet become citizens, and natural- ization rates for legal permanent residents vary widely by country of origin. In this paper, I identify the causal effect of English language skills on the probability that an immigrant naturalizes using the age-at-arrival instru- mental variable strategy proposed by Bleakley and Chin. I find strong, positive, significant effects of English language skills on naturalization. I find suggestive evidence that this effect is mediated by the effect of lan- guage skills on educational attainment. My results hold across a number of robustness checks designed at addressing concerns about undocumented immigrants.

Previous research supports the effectiveness of preschool in various contexts, yet there is limited evidence whether universal-type preschool policies induce changes in enrollment. While certain states have enacted universal preschool policies, some have also considered bilingual preschool mandates, either as a supplementary or stand-alone policy, requiring schools to open up bilingual classrooms for children from non-English speaking families. The question of whether bilingual preschool policies can induce enrollment and close achievement gaps between English learners and English speakers is particularly important today for urban cities and states with large immigrant populations. In this study, I exploit exogenous variation from the first bilingual prekindergarten mandate in Illinois to estimate the causal effects on preschool enrollment and maternal labour supply of recently immigrated and Hispanic families. Utilizing a difference-indifferences strategy, estimates suggest significant effects on preschool enrollment between 18% and 20% and no effects of increasing maternal labour supply in Illinois. Estimates are robust to various specifications, control groups, and timeframes. I use the analysis to further discuss whether universal preschool policies are designed sufficiently for access and inclusion of various student types, and contribute to our understanding on the effectiveness of using childcare subsidies to increase the welfare of low-income families.

We investigate partial identification of causal relative and attributable risk---the ratio of two counterfactual proportions and the difference between them---in case-control and case-population studies. The odds ratio is shown to be a sharp upper bound on causal relative risk under the monotone treatment response and monotone treatment selection assumptions, without resorting to strong ignorability, nor to the rare-disease assumption. Sharp bounds on causal attributable risk are also obtained under the same assumptions. Paying special attention to the (conditional) odds ratio, we propose a semiparametrically efficient estimator of the aggregated (log) odds ratio. Further, we develop easy-to-implement causal inference procedures for relative and attributable risk. Finally, we showcase our methodology by applying it to two unique datasets in the literature. We find that attending private school may have little effect on entering a very selective university in Pakistan and that dropping out of school could substantially increase relative and attributable risk of joining a criminal gang in Brazil.

We examine the impact of industrial robots on US labor markets between 2005 and 2016. Analyzing the 5-year intervals within this period, we find that robot exposure reduces employment in the earlier periods but augments employment in the more recent periods. Similarly, the effect of robot exposure on the average wage is initially negative but gradually becomes positive in more recent years. The evolving impact of robots is primarily driven by robot-intensive sectors, consistent with robot deepening and the increasing adoption of collaborative robots. We also find evidence of spillover effects on industries outside of manufacturing.

We leverage variation in the timing of women’s colleges’ transitions to coeducation throughout the 1960s-2000s to study how exposure to a gendered social environment affects women’s human capital investments. Applying event study and synthetic control analyses to newly collected historical data, we find that the share of women majoring in STEM at newly coeducational colleges declined by 2.0 percentage points (24%) after ten years of coeducation. Coeducation induced a large increase in the male share of the student body, but did not measurably influence the male share of faculty, capacity constraints or the ability composition of female students. A simple extrapolation of our main estimate suggests that gendered peer effects can account for 34% of the gender gap in STEM majoring. These findings support the hypothesis that non-pecuniary factors, related to social norms and gender roles, shape gender gaps in major choice.

Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos.

The United States government spends billions on public health insurance and has funded a number of programs to build health care facilities. However, the government runs these two types of programs separately: in different places, at different times, and for different populations. We explore whether access to both health insurance and hospitals can improve health outcomes and access to health care. We analyze a coal mining union health insurance program in 1950s Appalachia with and without a complementary hospital construction program. Our results show that the union insurance alone increased hospital births and reduced infant mortality. Once the union hospitals opened, however, the insurance and the hospitals together substantially increased the net amount of hospital beds and health care employees, with limited crowd-out of existing private hospitals. Our results suggest that hospitals can complement health insurance in underserved areas.

Pain is a major health problem among U.S. adults. Surprisingly little, however, is known about educational disparities in pain, especially among the nonelderly. In this study, we analyze disparities in pain across levels of educational attainment. Using data from the 2010 to 2017 National Health Interview Survey among adults aged 30 to 49 (N = 74,051), we estimate logistic regression models of pain prevalence using a dichotomous summary pain index and its 5 constituent pain sites (low back, joint, neck, headache/migraine, and facial/jaw). We find a significant and steep pain gradient: greater levels of educational attainment are associated with less pain, with 2 important exceptions. First, adults with a high-school equivalency diploma (GED) and those with "some college" have significantly higher pain levels than high school graduates despite having an equivalent or higher attainment, respectively. Second, the education-pain gradient is absent for Hispanic adults. After taking into account important covariates including employment, economic resources, health behaviors, physical health conditions, and psychological wellbeing, educational disparities in pain are no longer statistically significant except for the GED and "some college" categories, which still show significantly higher pain levels than high school graduates. We thus document the overall education-pain gradient in most younger U.S. adult populations, and identify groups where pain is higher than expected (certain educational categories) or lower than expected (eg, less-educated Hispanics). Understanding the causes of these anomalous findings could clarify factors shaping pain prevalence and disparities therein. Perspective Over 50% of U.S. adults age 30 to 49 report pain. Overall, more educated Americans report substantially less pain than the less educated. However, adults with a GED and "some college" report more pain than other groups. Understanding the causes could help illuminate the mechanisms through which social factors influence pain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced vastly disproportionate deaths for communities of color in the United States. Minnesota seemingly stands out as an exception to this national pattern, with white Minnesotans accounting for 80% of the population and 82% of COVID-19 deaths. We examine confirmed COVID mortality alongside deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic-'excess mortality'-in Minnesota. This analysis reveals profound racial disparities: age-adjusted excess mortality rates for whites are exceeded by a factor of 2.8-5.3 for all other racial groups, with the highest rates among Black, Latino, and Native Minnesotans. The seemingly small disparities in COVID deaths in Minnesota reflect the interaction of three factors: the natural history of the disease whose early toll was heavily concentrated in nursing homes; an exceptionally divergent age distribution in the state; and a greatly different proportion of excess mortality captured in confirmed-COVID rates for white Minnesotans compared with most other groups.

Recent research examining New Hampshire English has demonstrated that the traditional Eastern New England features are dissipating among New Hampshirites (Nagy, 2001; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005; Nagy & Irwin, 2010; Stanford, Leddy-Cecere, & Baclawski, 2012; Stanford, Severance, & Baclawski, 2014; Stanford, 2019). The most salient feature of the Eastern New England dialect is nonrhoticity, and the aim of this dissertation is to empirically and systematically address the “evaluation problem” (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968) of nonrhoticity in New Hampshire. The process of an evaluative response is broken into three steps: noticing, classifying, and imbuing (Preston, 2010a). Three studies were conducted to examine each step in the evaluative process individually, paying particular attention to variation in the evaluative process. The first study in this dissertation addresses noticing using a seven-step continuum of rhoticity. The purpose of this study was to determine the proximity of F2 and F3 necessary for a listener to notice the speech signal as rhotic. New Hampshirites were compared to Washingtonians to determine if the perception of rhoticity was dependent on the speech community an individual is from. The findings from the noticing study suggest that the majority of participants tend to perceive rhoticity when the distance between F2 and F3 is 980 Hertz, with F3 lowering to 2520 Hz, and F2 raising to 1540 Hz. Further, participants tend to perceive the signal as nonrhotic when the distance between F2 and F3 is 1501 Hz. This proximity was constant between New Hampshirites and Washingtonians, suggesting the task of noticing rhoticity is not influenced by regional factors of the listener. The second study addresses classifying, utilizing a geographic open-ended classification task. The guises for classification consisted of a three-step continuum between rhoticity and nonrhoticity. The purpose of this study was to determine where New Hampshirites associate rhoticity and nonrhoticity. The results from this study demonstrate that those with lower socioeconomic status scores and those with higher regionality scores (Chambers & Heisler, 1999; Chambers, 2000) are more likely to view nonrhoticity as a widespread New England feature, whereas those with lower regionality scores and those with higher socioeconomic status scores are more likely to view nonrhoticity as a feature of Boston. This suggests that the step of classifying is influenced by social factors of the listener. The third study addresses imbuing, using an online implementation of the draw-a-map task (Preston, 1986). The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which New Hampshirites evaluate the pleasantness, correctness and similarity of English in Boston and other areas of New England. New Hampshire participants were asked to draw regions in New England that have a distinct or identifiable way of speaking, and then rate the regions that they drew in terms of pleasantness, correctness, and similarity. Results from this study demonstrate that the evaluations of Boston are not monolithic, but instead, the rating of pleasantness depends on a person’s regionality score (Chambers & Heisler, 1999; Chambers, 2000): those with higher regionality scores rate Boston higher for pleasantness than those with lower regionality scores. The results from these studies contribute to the literature surrounding New Hampshirites’ perception of nonrhoticity and evaluations of Boston. Further, taken together, these results contribute to the understanding of language regard, addressing the evaluation problem of linguistic change. Finally, the results from this dissertation provide evidence for the structured heterogeneity of evaluations of a linguistic variant.

Alcohol-related mortality rates in the U.S. have risen since 2000, though how trends vary across socioeconomic status is unclear. This analysis combines data from vital statistics and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to estimate alcohol-related mortality rates at four levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school/GED, some college/associate's degree, 4-year degree, or more) over the period 2000-2017. The analysis includes a comprehensive set of 48 alcohol-related causes of death, including causes which are indirectly influenced by alcohol use. I consider period and cohort patterns in inequality using the relative index of inequality (RII). Results indicate that alcohol-related mortality rates increased over the study period, at all levels of educational attainment. Relative increases were larger for females than males at nearly all ages and levels of educational attainment, and were largest among 45-59-year-old women. Male and female members of the 1950-1959 birth cohort exhibited elevated rates of alcohol-related mortality relative to neighboring cohorts. Despite widespread increases in alcohol-related mortality, educational inequalities present at the beginning of the analysis persisted and exceeded those in all-cause mortality. Disparities were typically greatest among younger adults aged 30-44, though inequality in this age group declined over time. Inequality increased among females aged 60-74, as well as among males aged 45-74. While interventions targeting these groups may reduce educational disparities, care should also be taken to stem the increasing prevalence of alcohol-related deaths at all levels of educational attainment.

We provide evidence, by combining Occupational Information Network (O*NET) data with monthly Current Population Survey data from 1990 to 2015, that occupations characterized by high cognitive and people skill requirements are less sensitive to recessions, conditional on educational attainment, industry, and individual characteristics. These results are driven by urban areas, particularly noncollege educated people in urban areas, and vary with city size. Finally, we provide the first evidence that metropolitan areas’ recovery from economic downturns depends upon initial skill composition of occupations in the area.

Citizenship acquisition is often promoted as one factor that can facilitate the economic integration of immigrants. However, not all individuals and groups experience positive benefits to naturalization. This article argues that social distance from the native-born is an important factor that influences who does and does not benefit from citizenship acquisition. Specifically, I create a new continuous measure of social distance for immigrants during the age of mass migration. I show that the relationship between social distance and the economic returns to citizenship takes an inverted U-shape. Those considered closest and furthest away in social distance to the native-born report little to no advantages to citizenship while those in the middle report larger returns. I then focus on the Mexican population in the historical southwest and take advantage of a unique enumeration in the complete count 1930 US census that coded Mexicans as either white or Mexican. Mexicans coded as white report economic differences between citizenship statuses while Mexicans coded as nonwhite report no difference between citizenship statuses. The results suggest citizenship may not be beneficial to all individuals and groups depending on where they fall in the ethnoracial hierarchy.

The dramatic rise in import competition from developing countries since the 1990s has given new urgency to explain political responses in the United States and other advanced economies. While recent scholarship has demonstrated multiple effects of trade shocks, far less attention has been paid to unbundling the mechanisms through which import competition affects political responses on compensatory and trade policies. In this paper, we assess the possibility that an important part of the political effect works through local economic institutions – labor unions – that shape the relative strength of workers in the policymaking process. We study the US House of Representatives to untangle this institutional channel from other channels. In our empirical analysis we leverage two distinct sources of exogenous variation: an instrument for import competition drawn from the literature and a novel instrument for district-level union membership based on history and geography. We use them in a new semi-parametric approach to disentangle causal mechanisms. We find that (i) import competition lowers district-level unionization, (ii) weaker unions lead to less legislative support for compensating economic losers as well as less opposition to trade deregulation, and (iii) the union channel represents a large fraction of the overall effect of import exposure on legislative votes. We show that results are robust under alternative specifications and when accounting for possible local violations of exclusion restrictions. These findings have important implications for the political economy of globalization. They suggest that the political impact of globalization is broad with lasting consequences for civil society and democratic politics.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), established in the US during the Great Depression to provide relief to a failing housing market, had a lasting effect through institutionalising the segregationist practice of denying mortgages to communities of colour. Over subsequent decades, ‘redlining’ funnelled billions of US dollars away from minority neighbourhoods and shaped segregation patterns – constituting perhaps the most influential example of institutional intervention in the hierarchy of places. This history of racialised exclusion via the process of ‘spatial marking’ is reflected in contemporary housing inequality, which remains one of the most severe sites of racial stratification. This article combines newly-digitised archival data with data describing recent mortgage outcomes to investigate the role of institutional classification of place in the persistence of housing finance inequality. I show that borrowers in the 21st century were at a severe disadvantage when pursuing mortgages in neighbourhoods redlined by HOLC appraisers in the early 20th century. Such applicants were more likely to be denied loans and to receive subprime loans net of measures of selection and ecological disadvantage. This article shows that the geographical patterns of exclusion and exploitation are remarkably stable, and highlights the role of persistent institutional marginalisation in replicating racial and spatial inequalities.

We study the effects of a massive temporary U.S. paid sick leave (PSL) mandate that became effective April 1st, 2020 on self-quarantining, proxied by physical mobility behaviors gleaned from cellular devices. Such behaviors are critical for containment of infectious diseases. The national PSL policy was implemented in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and mandated two weeks of fully compensated paid leave. We study the impact of this policy using difference-indifferences methods, leveraging pre-policy county-level differences in the share of 'nonessential' workers likely eligible for paid sick leave benefits. We find robust evidence that the policy increased the average number of hours at home and reduced the share of the individuals likely at work. Comparing the county with the lowest to highest policy exposure, we find that the average hours per day not at home, and at work decreased by 8.9% and 6.9% post-policy.