Understanding how regions respond to adverse conditions or policy changes is critical for decision makers to develop timely and helpful policy responses. In this dissertation, I explore how different versions of regions - be it counties, states, or commuting zones - react to changes in job growth, taxation, and unemployment. The first chapter marks how the labor market is characterized by a strong degree of sorting by gender into occupations and industries. Gender sorting implies that men and women are differentially exposed to changes in local labor demand. I study differential responses to these shocks by gender, including migration and labor force participation. Migratory responses are greater for men, while labor supply responses are greater for women, and these effects are larger in rural areas. I provide a decomposition of the labor demand shocks to explore mechanisms, finding that industry sectors comprising most of the identifying variation of a shock vary by both gender and region of analysis. In the second chapter, I estimate the relationship between the economic growth of states and taxes, modeling both the effects of states' own taxes on growth over time and the fiscal spillover effects of taxes in neighboring states on their economic growth. The analysis includes consideration of each of the major state tax revenue sources: income (both personal and corporate), property, and sales taxes. The chapter then extends the model to include spatial spillover effects using a spatial Durbin model in order to determine how neighboring states' taxes may affect a state's economic growth. Results indicate that negative spillover effects are present in some cases, which are then analyzed for policy implications. The last chapter examines how mass-layoffs and internal migration has evolved over the time period after the Great Recession. Labor markets suffer long-lasting changes to employment and the local labor force in response to mass layoff events. After detailing descriptive statistics about internal migration at the county, commuting zone, and region levels, this chapter uses an event study design to examine how mass layoff events effect outcomes at the commuting zone level.

Together, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) serve over 71 million people in the United States. The Medicaid and CHIP Beneficiary Profile provides an overview of the characteristics, health status, access, utilization, expenditures, and experience of the beneficiaries served by Medicaid and CHIP. It is not intended as a comprehensive assessment of Medicaid and CHIP. • The charts in the profile are based on published data sources, using the most recent and reliable data that were publicly available as of publication. • The data sources included in the profile vary in terms of the time frame available and the populations included. Please refer to the sidebar on each chart for notes (including populations excluded from the data), data sources, and links (where available). Please refer to the Appendix for more information on each data source.

Cities are shaped by the strength of agglomeration and dispersion forces. We show that the COVID-19 pandemic has re-introduced disease transmission as a dispersion force in modern cities. We use detailed housing data to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the location demand for housing. We find that the pandemic has led to a greater decline in the demand for housing in neighborhoods with high population density. We further show that the reduced demand for density is partially driven by the diminished need of living close to jobs that are telework compatible and the declining value of access to consumption amenities. Neighborhoods with high pre-COVID-19 home prices also see a greater drop in housing demand. While the national housing market partially recovered in June, we show that the negative effect of the pandemic on the demand for density persists, indicating that the change in the demand for density may last beyond an aggregate recovery of housing demand.

This research establishes the influence of linguistic traits on human behavior. Exploiting variations in the languages spoken by children of migrants with identical ancestral countries of origin, the analysis indicates that the presence of periphrastic future tense and its association with long-term orientation has a significant positive impact on educational attainment, whereas the presence of sex-based grammatical gender, and its association with gender bias, has a significant adverse impact on female educational attainment.

Due to historical racial discrimination and the generational wealth gap, as of 2017, low-income populations are disproportionately made up of people of color. Since manufactured housing is one of the most affordable housing options for low-income populations, it is unclear why whites are more likely to occupy manufactured housing than people of color. Understanding this phenomenon could address the housing needs of households of color, especially during the affordability crisis. County-level data from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates and the 2010 U.S. Census were analyzed to determine associations between Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Non-Hispanic White manufactured housing occupancy and four independent variables: racial disparities in homeownership, the geographic distribution of manufactured homes across rural and urban locations and across census divisions (i.e., regions of the country), and the age of residents using linear regression. Despite significance in the relationships, all were substantively small. The most prominent takeaway from this study is the severity of the racial homeownership gap for Black and Hispanic/Latinx households in comparison to Non-Hispanic Whites. In addition, that Hispanic/Latinx households are less likely to live in mobile homes as they become homeowners and are more likely to live in mobile homes in rural areas. The study concludes with a discussion of policy and planning implications, including ways to eliminate barriers to manufactured housing as an affordable housing opportunity for communities of color.

Not every city in the U.S. has Chicago’s rich history of Black middle class neighborhoods. But as places in the city have become increasingly unequal, Black middle class neighborhoods have come to feel like an endangered species. The current pandemic is likely to make the challenges even more difficult. This article analyzes data on key aspects of the changes that have taken place in the last few decades in traditionally middle-income/middle class minority neighborhoods of Chicago. We find that while Black middle class neighborhoods on the South and West sides of Chicago have been in decline, they differ in terms of the economic hardship facing their populations. We also report on a variety of interventions that are helping to make these places neighborhoods of choice and opportunity. These strategies include businesses, nonprofits, and others investing in local talent and local assets to tell new stories about their neighborhoods; residents, by way of grassroots efforts, advocating to create more responsive systems for safety and economic development; local intermediaries working with city and county government to support healthy housing markets; and a public sector committing to long-term investments in both the physical and commercial environment.

We examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation.

The first chapter examines the importance of college and labor market options associated with childhood location in shaping educational and labor market outcomes experienced by a person later in life. I estimate a dynamic model that considers post-high school choices of whether and where to attend college and where to work, subject to home preferences, mobility costs, and spatial search frictions. The estimated model suggests that spatial gaps in local college and labor market options in the United States give rise to a 6 percentage point gap in the college attendance rate and an 11% gap in the wage rate at 10 years of experience between the 90th and 10th percentiles of across-county variation in each outcome. The second chapter suggests how the difference between linear IV and OLS coefficients can be interpreted and empirically decomposed when the treatment effect is nonlinear and heterogeneous in the true causal relationship. I show that the IV-OLS coefficient gap consists of three components: the difference in weights on treatment levels, the difference in weights on observables, and the difference in identified marginal effects. Using my framework, I revisit return to schooling estimates with compulsory schooling and college availability instruments. The third chapter investigates equilibrium impacts of federal policies such as free-college proposals, taking into account that human capital production is cumulative and that state governments have resource constraints. In the model, a state government cares about household welfare and aggregate educational attainment. Realizing that household choices vary with its decisions, the government chooses income tax rates, per-student expenditure levels on public K-12 and college education, college tuition and the provision of other public goods, subject to its budget constraint. We estimate the model using data from the U.S. Using counterfactual simulations, we find that free-public-college policies, mandatory or subsidized, would decrease state expenditure on and hence the quality of public education. More students would obtain college degrees due to increased enrollment. Over 86% of all households would lose while about 60% of the lowest income quintile would gain from such policies.

In the past decade, most states have banned or considered banning the use of credit checks in hiring decisions, a screening tool that is widely used by employers. Using new Equifax data on employer credit checks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax data, and the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment data, we show that these bans shifted employment to people residing in census tracts with the lowest average risk score. We do this using both employment outcomes and changes in worker commuting patterns, which allow us to control for business cycle effects at very refined geographies. The largest shifts occurred in higher paying jobs and in the government sector. At the same time, using a large database of online job postings, we show that employers in low-credit municipalities subject to the ban differentially increased their demand for other signals of applicants’ job performance, like education and experience. On net, the changes induced by these bans generate relatively worse outcomes for those with mediocre risk scores, for those under 22 years of age, and for blacks—groups commonly thought to benefit from such legislation, but which may suffer from statistical discrimination.

We update past work on the democratic deficit, defined as incongruence between majority public preference and public policy in the American states. We reconsider public opinion and state policy on seven issues related to immigration and health questions. Using original data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey as well as new data on state policy and other predictors, we show that these seven issues have distinct qualities from Lax and Phillips’s larger basket of 39 policy questions in different issue areas. From 2008 to 2014, the democratic deficit on these issues diminished somewhat in the presence of a heightened level of issue salience.

This report was written by participants in Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Applied Political Research Lab in the Department of Political Science. It is published by the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership. The goal of the report is to provide objective analyses of the processes related to, and impacts of, gender and racial diversification in Colorado’s 2018 state legislative elections and the 2019 state legislative session. The research was conducted during the spring of 2020, and the focus on the 2019 legislative session avoids the unique nature of the 2020 session. The findings shed light on the role of diversification, the potential impact of redistricting, and the degree to which female legislators and legislators of color are represented and influence policymaking in what was the most diverse legislative setting in Colorado’s history

This article maintains that in spite of their seeming progress, Mexican-origin students in the US continue to face barriers that are typical of the complex challenges endured in public schools by minoritized and racialised peoples in the American context. It begins with a brief overview of the current-day demographics of the Mexican-origin population, with selected historical information for readers not familiar with the American context, and with a description of visions for a better life that motivate Mexican migration to the United States. It then focuses on the effects on this population of ‘language borderization processes,’ that is, of stated-sanctioned mechanisms and procedures used to identify and categorise children as required by school accountability mandates. An argument is made that although these mechanisms are intended to provide tailored support for immigrant-origin children’s perceived English language limitations, they can result instead in directly limiting future educational opportunities.

Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has become less generous, and what remains more often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change parallels others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups are "deserving" and "undeserving." This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? This study examines the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare between 2001 and 2015 and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance was associated with increases in both forms of hardship.

We examine the role of school closures in contributing to the negative labor market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect detailed daily information on school closures at the school-district level, which we merge to individual level data on various employment and socio- demographic characteristics from the monthly Current Population Survey from January 2019 through May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, we gauge how the intensity of school closures affects the labor supply of mothers and fathers of young school-age children. We find evidence of non-negligible labor supply reductions, particularly among mothers. These impacts prove robust to endogeneity checks and persist after accounting for other social-distancing measures in place.

Economic theory suggests that workers’ pay is mainly determined by their marginal product and that industry wage differentials may result either from the structure of the industry (demand type factors) or human capital characteristics of the employed labour force (supply type factors). This study uses a major data set from the US that allows the investigation of the effects of these demand and supply type factors on average earnings across industries. Importantly, this paper shows that aggregate demand relevant to the particular industry has a strong positive effect on the industry’s average earnings in addition to the previously established results regarding the significance of the effects of worker and firm characteristics. Consequently, labour market policies crafted without due consideration of macroeconomic demand may be ineffective as a solution to the proliferation of low pay employment.

Over 150 million Americans receive health insurance benefits from an employer as a form of compensation. In recent years, health care costs have grown rapidly, raising concerns that increased health care spending crowds-out wage increases. We leverage geographic variation in health care price growth caused by changes in hospital market structure, and in particular, mergers, to test the impact of health care prices on wages and benefit design. We find that hospital mergers lead to a $521 increase in hospital prices, a $579 increase in hospital spending among the privately insured population and a similar, $638 reduction in wages. Both the hospital price and spending increases and the reduction in wages are driven by mergers that occur within hospital markets, rather than cross-market hospital mergers. Our results imply that consumers bear the price effects of hospital mergers in the form of reduced wages. We also find evidence of changes in benefit design structure and adoption of high-deductible health plans. Overall, our results show how rising health care costs caused by provider concentration are passed to workers in the form of lower wages and less generous benefits

For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for partial representation of the marginalized and unenfranchised? We address these questions by analyzing the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), an original endeavor tracking virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. Our analyses document how (1) two important groups of unenfranchised constituents—Native Americans and women—petitioned regularly and (2) Congress's initial treatment of Natives' and women's petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence highlighting the petition's role as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.

How persistent are economic gaps across ethnicities? The convergence of ethnic gaps through the third generation of immigrants is difficult to measure because few datasets include grandparental birthplace. I overcome this limitation with a new three-generational dataset that links immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940. I find that the persistence of ethnic gaps in occupational income is 2.5 times stronger than predicted by a standard grandfather-grandson elasticity. While part of the discrepancy is due to measurement error attenuating the grandfather-grandson elasticity, mechanisms related to geography also partially explain the stronger persistence of ethnic occupational differentials.