This paper estimates neighborhood effects on adult labor market outcomes using the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment. We propose and implement a new strategy for identifying transitionspecific effects that exploits identification of the unobserved component of a neighborhood choice model. Estimated local average treatment effects (LATEs) are large, result from moves between the first and second deciles of the national distribution of neighborhood quality, and pertain to a subpopulation of nine percent of program participants.

We provide the first nationally representative estimates of sexual minority representation in STEM fields by studying 142,641 men and women in same-sex couples from the 2009-2018 American Community Surveys. These data indicate that men in same-sex couples are 12 percentage points less likely to have completed a bachelor's degree in a STEM field compared to men in different-sex couples; there is no gap observed for women in same-sex couples compared to women in different-sex couples. The STEM gap between men in same-sex and different-sex couples is larger than the STEM gap between white and black men but is smaller than the gender STEM gap. We also document a gap in STEM occupations between men in same-sex and different-sex couples, and we replicate this finding using independently drawn data from the 2013-2018 National Health Interview Surveys. These differences persist after controlling for demographic characteristics, location, and fertility. Our findings further the call for interventions designed at increasing representation of sexual minorities in STEM.

Young workers are vital to the future of California, the fifth-largest economy in the world. Workers between the ages of 18 and 29 make up a quarter of all employees in the state. Young fast food and retail workers played a critical role in California’s organizing campaign to increase the minimum wage to $15, which will raise low-wage workers’ lifetime earnings by over 20% and could increase their retirement incomes by roughly half. Young Californians represent an influential force in shaping current public debates around the future of work, student debt, access to safe, quality schools, immigration reform, and affordable housing.

Research often links gentrification to racial inequality. Nevertheless, scholars know surprisingly little about whether the racial composition of gentrifiers moderates the consequences of gentrification. Few quantitative studies compare the effects of gentrification across different racial groups, and those that do tend to limit their outcome of interest to housing. This paper represents perhaps the first ever large‐scale assessment of the ways in which gentrifiers’ racial composition is associated with local retail development. Using data on retailers in over 500 U.S. cities between 2000 and 2010, the paper shows that retail development was significantly slower in neighborhoods gentrified by Blacks rather than Whites. Put differently, White gentrifiers gained a disproportionate amount of the retail development associated with gentrification. Scholars must acknowledge that the consequences of gentrification vary depending on the racial composition of gentrifiers, which is likely one reason why the field struggles to appropriately operationalize and measure gentrification.

It is rewarding to read a cogent article (Sullivan, 2020) that appropriately stresses the accomplishments of generations of civil servants who administered the decennial counts. As Teresa Sullivan emphasizes, the census is the foundation of our system of representative and democratic government. It is well known that the population count determines the number of people who represent a state in Congress and in the Electoral College. The composition of Congress from 2023 to 2033 will be ascertained by the April 2020 count. The number of electors from each state who will select presidents when they meet in late 2024 and 2028 will be similarly determined. Examining demographic changes since 2010, it is likely that Florida and Texas will gain two seats in this year’s enumeration while Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon will gain one. Nine states—all in the Rust Belt or Northeast except for Alabama—will lose one representative.

The maximum diversified demand is an important factor to consider when utilities design new distribution systems. To estimate the maximum diversified demand, engineers need to make an estimate of the diversity factor (DF). In practice, electricity utility companies usually estimate the DF using DF tables, in which the DF changes with the number of customers. However, besides the number of customers, DF also depends on many other factors, such as customer type, weather, demographics, and socioeconomic conditions. Ignoring these factors, DF tables have limited accuracy. In addition, engineers cannot interpret or understand how various factors affect the DF. In this paper, by leveraging supervised machine learning algorithms, we build comprehensive DF prediction models that take a variety of factors into account. These models show high prediction accuracy and interpretabilty when applied to real-world distribution feeders. Using the interpretation method called SHapley Additive exPlanations, we quantity the importance of different features in determining DFs. Finally, we offer more insights into how various factors affect DFs.

Pharmacists provide a broad spectrum of services depending on their practice setting and scope-of-practice laws within their state. 1 The traditional role of pharmacists is to dispense prescription medications and advise patients and health care practitioners on how to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of prescription medications, including medication safety, drug contraindications and interactions. 2 However, pharmacists are increasingly used in a variety of ways, taking on roles such as medication therapy management, chronic disease management, patient education, health promotion, and disease prevention. 1,3,4 Within some of these roles, pharmacists may work directly with patients to conduct health and wellness screenings, provide flu shots and other immunizations, and counsel patients about stress management, smoking cessation, nutrition, exercise, and chronic disease management. 1,2 In other roles, pharmacists may work with inpatient and outpatient care teams including attending hospital rounds with physicians and the health care team to recommend medications, overseeing the dosage and timing of medication delivery, and providing transition of care. 5,6

We conduct a national study of the causal impact of school spending and local taxes on housing prices by pairing variation induced by school finance reforms with 25 years of national data on housing prices. Our analysis speaks to two classic questions in economics: whether school spending matters and whether it is provided at efficient levels. The results indicate that households highly value school spending and, in particular, spending on the salaries of teachers and staff. Moreover, we find that salary spending is provided at inefficiently low levels throughout much of the United States, as increases in salary spending within a school district funded entirely by local taxes would generally raise house prices. Our analysis points to both the hiring of more teachers and increasing teacher pay as mechanisms for improving the efficiency of the provision of public schooling in the United States.

The new rules of the college and career game confirm that education level matters, and that more education is generally better when it comes to earnings potential.2 What is less well known is that program of study and major matter even more to potential earnings than education level. As a result, less education can often be worth more. In fact, some certificate holders can earn more than those with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, and some associate’s degree holders can earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. In other words, certificates and associate’s degrees—credentials on the middle-skills pathway—can be viable routes to economic opportunity.

Houston is known for its lack of Euclidean-style zoning, but the city still has various ordinances that control land use. In 1998, Houston reformed its subdivision rules to allow for parcels smaller than five thousand square feet citywide. In this paper, we discuss the unique land-use rules in place in Houston prior to reform and the circumstances that led to reform, including the “opt out” provisions, which mediated homeowner opposition to substantial increases in housing density. We then analyze the effects of reform. After relief from large lot requirements, post-reform development activity was heavily concentrated in middle-income, less dense, underbuilt neighborhoods.

Improving farmers’ market accessibility is increasingly being used as a mechanism to promote healthy food consumption. Previous studies about farmers’ markets largely focused on describing either the demographics of market patrons or the impact of market participation on fruit and vegetable intake. Thus, little empirical research has examined how market accessibility impacts nearby communities. The goal of this study is to assess whether consumers value farmers’ market accessibility by exploiting preferences revealed through housing purchases. Using residential sales data from 2007 to 2012 in five Central Maryland counties, we tested whether farmers’ market accessibility is associated with housing prices by estimating hedonic models with temporal and neighborhood fixed effects. The results suggest an inverse association between housing prices and distance to the closest farmers’ market, a relationship that remains statistically significant when using matching and instrumental variables estimators. The results also suggest that the association between market accessibility and housing prices is stronger in areas with poor-quality food environments. The findings are important to policy makers and planners because they suggest that farmers’ market accessibility is valued by consumers in nearby communities and that consumers with limited access to food stores are willing to pay a premium for houses with access to farmers’ markets. Assessing the mechanisms driving this association is an important area for future research.

Internal migration in the US has been declining since the 1990s and research has mostly focused on labor market dynamics and aging population to explain the migration trends. This paper analyzes migration patterns of foreign-born groups in the US from 2000 to 2019. Along with the migration determinants such as education and employment, the paper focuses on population concentration as a factor that shapes foreign-born decisions to relocate in the US. Population concertation is defined to be a measure of how geographically concentrated each foreign-born group is across the US. I find that the likelihood of migrating to another state decreases with higher population concentration of the same foreign-born group at the current state of residence. I further examine what determines population concentration and emphasize on the role of risk aversion. Empirical analysis shows that higher risk aversion leads to higher population concentration in the current state of residence. A theoretical model of migration is built to demonstrate their relationship, and the results show the two variables are interrelated.

Using recent innovations in linking historical U.S. Census data, we study the economic impacts of immigration on natives, including their geographic migration response. We find that the arrival of foreign immigrants significantly increases both native out-migration and in-migration. Accounting for this selective geographic migration, we find smaller economic impacts of immigration for native workers than previous work, including no positive impact on worker incomes. We present evidence of significant “losers” from increased immigration, namely workers who appear to be displaced by immigrant labor and move out of their local labor market, whereas the workers who remain see significant benefits. We also find that younger and lowerskilled workers are “losers” from increased immigration, whereas older and higher-skilled workers are “winners.”

In this paper we estimate the push and pull factors involved in the outmigration of Jews facing persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941 when migration was banned. Our empirical investigation makes use of a unique individual-level dataset that records the migration history of almost the entire universe of Jews living in Germany over the period. Our analysis highlights new channels, specific to violent contexts, through which social networks affect the decision to flee. We first estimate a structural model of migration where individuals base their own migration decision on the observation of persecution and migration among their peers. Identification rests on exogenous variations in push and pull factors across peers who live in different cities of residence. Then we perform various counterfactual policy experiments in order to quantify how migration restrictions in destination countries affected the fate of Jews. For example, removing work restrictions for refugees after the Nuremberg Laws (in 1935) would have led to 27% increase in Jewish migration out of Germany.

This paper quantifies the effect of individual social distancing on the spread of the Novel Coronavirus with data on individual time spent on activities that would potentially expose them to crowds from the American Time Use Survey linked with state-level data on positive tests from the COVID Tracking Project. We estimate count data specifications of Novel Coronavirus infections at the state level as a function of control demographic variables, and a measure of social distance that captures the amount of time individuals across the states spend in activities that potentially expose them to crowds. Parameter estimates reveal that the number of state-level Novel Coronavirus infections decrease with respect to our measure of individual social distance. From a practical perspective, our parameter estimates suggest that if the typical individual in a US state were to spend 8 hours away from crowds completely, this would translate into approximately 480,000 less COVID-19 infections across the states. Our results suggest that, at least in the United States, social distancing policies are effective in slowing the spread of the Novel Coronavirus. The estimated parameters on some of our demographic controls may also be instructive for Novel Coronavirus mitigation policies, as they reveal that the number of Novel Coronavirus infections increase with the percentage of a state's population that is African American, foreign born, self-employed, and living in metropolitan areas/cities. JEL Classification: C25, C29, H12, I12, I18, J29

The organization of employment in the U.S. has changed dramatically since the 1970s, causing decreased power and security for workers across many dimensions of the employment relationship. Multidimensional employment-quality (EQ) measures can be used to capture these changes and test their association with health. However, most public-health EQ studies have used cross-sectional, unidimensional data. We addressed these limitations using a longitudinal, multidimensional EQ measure and data on 2779 1985–2017 Panel Study of Income Dynamics respondents. First, using a multichannel sequence-analysis approach, we identified gender-specific clusters of mid-career (ages 29–50) EQ trajectories based on respondents’ employment stability, material rewards, working-time arrangements, collective organization, and power relations. Next, we examined cross-cluster variation in respondent characteristics. Finally, we estimated the gender-specific associations between cluster-membership and post-sequence-analysis-period prevalence of poor/fair self-rated health (SRH) and moderate mental illness (Kessler-K6≥5). We identified five clusters among women and seven among men. Respondents in poor-EQ clusters were disproportionately people of color and less-educated; they also tended to report worse health. For example, among women, the prevalence of poor/fair SRH and moderate mental illness was lowest among standard-employment-relationship-like-non-union workers and the becoming self-employed, and greatest among minimally-attached, returning-to-the-labor-force, and precariously-employed workers. Meanwhile, among men, the prevalence of the outcomes was lowest among stably-high-wage workers and the wealthy self-employed, and greatest among exiting-the-labor-force and precariously-employed workers. Given the potential role of EQ in health inequities, researchers and practitioners should consider EQ in their work.

Evictions are a serious risk for households facing job loss and economic upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic, and temporary policies put in place to protect renters are beginning to expire. To understand how the crisis is affecting evictions, we measured eviction filing activity across 44 cities and counties. As of July 7, 2020, eviction filings have almost returned to their prepandemic levels in places where local bans have expired or where they were never enacted. We find that eviction filings tend to surge after temporary policies expire much more in places that enacted both filing bans and hearing bans than those that enacted just hearing bans while allowing filings to continue. As federal stimulus supplements for the unemployed expire, evictions are likely to increase for households that have lost work because of the crisis unless there is material improvement in the economy (Mervosh 2020).

In recent years, the United States has witnessed a resurgence in the use of overt references to race and identity by politicians. This increase is surprising since previous studies in political communication and racial priming suggest that citizens reject explicit references to race. My dissertation examines why this change has occurred. I propose and find that when members of a dominant group feel threatened by a minority group, they are more likely to be receptive to denigrations of that minority group as their prejudice is activated in order to maintain their group position. Racially, when whites feel that their group's status on top of the racial hierarchy is threatened, they are more willing to tolerate overtly negative denigrations of African Americans and other racial minority groups. I use survey experiments, observational survey data, and analyses of congressional race television advertisements to evaluate and support my claims.

What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low. In this article, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940, constructing a large linked sample of twin brothers to account for differences in unobserved ability and family background. We find that each additional year of schooling increased labor earnings by approximately 4 percent, about half the return found for more recent cohorts in twins studies. These returns were evident both within and across occupations and were higher for sons from lower socio-economic status families.

The objective of this study was to identify and describe the number of sexual minority and heterosexual young adults who will be impacted by the new “Tobacco 21” law signed by President Trump in December 2019. Data came from the 2015 to 2018 National Health Interview Survey. We used descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression to identify key risk factors for tobacco use among adults aged 18–20 years by sexual orientation. Sexual minority tobacco users were more likely to be women, have a high school degree or less, and not living with a parent. Sexual minority tobacco users share similarities with heterosexual tobacco users, but they may remain a hard-to-reach population for tobacco cessation interventions.