In the post-industrial world, data science and analytics have gained paramount importance regarding digital data privacy. Improper methods of establishing privacy for accessible datasets can compromise large amounts of user data even if the adversary has a small amount of preliminary knowledge of a user. Many researchers have been developing high-level privacy-preserving mechanisms that also retain the statistical integrity of the data to apply to machine learning. Recent developments of differential privacy, such as the Laplace and Privelet mechanisms, drastically decrease the probability that an adversary can distinguish the elements in a data set and thus extract user information. In this paper, we develop three privacy-preserving mechanisms with the discrete M-band wavelet transform that embed noise into data. The first two methods (LS and LS+) add noise through a Laplace-Sigmoid distribution that multiplies Laplace-distributed values with the sigmoid function, and the third method utilizes pseudo-quantum steganography to embed noise into the data. We then show that our mechanisms successfully retain both differential privacy and learnability through statistical analysis in various machine learning environments.

We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experi- ment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measur- ing decisions before (pre-consultation) and after (post-consultation) meeting their assigned doctor. Subjects select a similar number of preventives in the pre-consultation stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a racially concordant doctor. Our findings suggest black doctors could reduce the black-white male gap in cardiovascu- lar mortality by 19 percent.

In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes in human populations and land use/land cover to shed light on issues of sustainability, human livelihoods, and conservation, and led to practical innovations in agricultural planning, hazard impact analysis, and drought monitoring. Since then, new research opportunities have emerged thanks to the growing variety of remotely sensed data sources, an increasing array of georeferenced social science data, including data from mobile devices, and access to powerful computation cyberinfrastructure. In this article, we outline the key extensions of the People and Pixels foundation since 1998 and highlight several breakthroughs in research on human–environment interactions. We also identify pressing research problems—disaster, famine, drought, war, poverty, climate change—and explore how interdisciplinary approaches integrating people and pixels are being used to address them.

Introduction: This report examines key socioeconomic and demographic trends in New York City and Long Island from 1990 to 2016. Methods: The findings reported here are based on data collected by the Census Bureau IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series), available at http://www.usa.ipums.org for the corresponding years and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Results: The Long Island suburbs have grown significantly more diverse in the early twenty-first century. The total number of non-Hispanic Whites in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties is in steady decline, as is their share of Long Island’s total population. Latinos and Asians, on the other hand, have shown a marked increase in their percentage of Long Island’s total population and in their total numbers. The non-Hispanic Black population, as well, has shown a steady increase in total numbers, though the pace is not as rapid. Latinos and non-Hispanic Blacks remain the lowest income earners, whereas non-Hispanic Whites and Asians boast significantly higher household incomes. Discussion: Once considered a bastion of racial/ethnic homogeneity, New York City’s Long Island suburbs have grown considerably more diverse in the twenty-first century – and this trend seems to be accelerating. Finally, as this report only covers trends in New York City and Long Island, it would be useful to see how these trends compare to other major suburban populations – particularly the nation’s larger metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. Are minority groups penetrating these suburbs in similar numbers? Do traditional economic tiers still persist in these instances as well?

We argue that rising supply of experience not only reduces experienced workers’ relative wages but also their relative labor market participation. From a theoretical model we derive predictions which we quasi-experimentally investigate, using variation across U.S. local labor markets (LLMs) over the last decades and instrumenting experience supply by the LLMs’ age structures a decade earlier. We find that aging substantially reduces experienced workers’ relative wages and employment rates, and also their labor market participation rates. Our results imply that the effect of demographic change on labor markets might be more severe than previously recognized, as it reaches beyond wages.

This paper studies the immediate and long-run mortality effects of the first community-based health intervention in the world – the Framingham Health and Tuberculosis Demonstration, 1917-1923. The official evaluation committee and the historical narrative suggest that the demonstration was highly successful in controlling tuberculosis and reducing mortality. Using newly digitized annual cause-of-death data for municipalities in Massachusetts, 1901-1934, and different empirical strategies, we find little evidence to support this positive assessment. In fact, we find that the demonstration did not reduce tuberculosis mortality, all-age mortality, nor infant mortality. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on whether public-health interventions mattered for the decline in (tuberculosis) mortality prior to modern medicine. At a more fundamental level, our study questions this particular type of community-based setup with non-random treatment assignment as a method of evaluating policy interventions.

There is a historical tendency in institutions of power to discredit insurrectionary activity’s possible contributions to social formation and class structure. I apply a market view of political violence to insurrectionary activity and use insider outsider theory to develop a mechanism that understands its potential redistributive effects in labor markets through the defiance of the state’s monopoly on violence. Using geographic data from bombings claimed by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional that took place in the 1970’s, I find empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that insurrectionary activity has redistributive effects. These effects are most evident in employment practices. Proximity to the bombings is associated with a significant decrease in Hispanic unemployment for census tracts that have a Puerto Rican population concentration of at least 20%. The results on possible income effects are inconclusive but suggestive of differential impacts on income per capita that depend on the concentration of Puerto Ricans in the census tract. In general, census tracts with higher concentrations of Puerto Ricans were positively affected by proximity to insurrectionary activity. These census tracts show a decrease in unemployment and in poverty associated with insurrectionary activity. The results demonstrate reduced form effects that do not differentiate between effects in social capital formation and increases in bargaining power.

This dissertation comprises three essays on the historical relationship between capitalist development, state formation and marriage and divorce patterns in the United States. The first examines the effects of liberalizing women’s property rights on divorce. In the late nineteenth century, most American states gave married women new rights to own and control assets and earnings. Using administrative data on most U.S. divorces between 1867 and 1906, I show that rights transfers gave women financial independence from husbands that enabled them to exit undesirable unions at greater rates. However, husbands also filed for more divorces following women’s economic gains, suggesting that the violation of traditional gender norms of household governance also destabilized unions.

In the 1970s, American educational attainment and test scores declined sharply, and steady growth in real wages halted. In the 1980s, the incidence of low birthweight births suddenly reversed trend and began increasing. In 1999, the mortality rate of white Americans at midlife also reversed trend and began to rise. I present evidence that all of these patterns are linked to a decline in health and human capital across American-born cohorts, that began suddenly with those born after 1947. This cross-cohort decline is evident from the estimation of standard age-period-cohort models of: earnings, maternal health as measured by the birth weight of infants, and the mortality rates of men and women. I also implement a novel methodology in which the decline is evident in each outcome as a sharp discontinuity and is confirmed by structural break testing. There is no decline for the foreign-born population, but it is otherwise remarkably widespread across race and geography in the United States. The decline in educational attainment for these cohorts appears too small to directly explain all of the other declines. I present suggestive evidence that the root cause may have been a worsening respiratory health environment when these cohorts were infants.

Recent research has looked at living alone among the elderly both within the context of the developed world and globally from a comparative perspective. To date this research has contributed relatively little to our understanding of patterns of change over time, an issue of major importance for the prediction of future trends. We propose now to look at change over time using a long-term historical perspective on living alone based on rich data from the United States, the country with by far the longest series of micro-census data in the world. Our analysis will be based on available public use manuscript samples of US censuses beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and stretching until the present. It will yield an invaluable long-term perspective, spanning the entire period of economic development and social change that characterized the history of the USA over the past century and one half. Descriptive indicators of the incidence of living alone are interpreted in terms of important societal, cultural, economic and legislative changes over the period under study. Multivariable analytical techniques are applied to these data in order to assess both the micro determinants of living alone and how independent variables such as age, sex, education and marital status change over time. The results of this study enable us to estimate the degree to which change in the United States can be used as a benchmark for patterns of historical change elsewhere, especially when controlling for levels of development.

In this paper the impact of various agglomerative forces on employment growth in Ghanaian manufacturing is investigated, using data from two firm censuses, as well as population census and trade data. The study is the first to use nationally representative firm data that covers the formal and informal economy to investigate the impact of agglomerative forces on employment growth in an African economy. African economies are rapidly urbanizing, but this has not been accompanied by growth in manufacturing. A lack of agglomeration economies is one possible explanation for slow manufacturing growth and the attendant premature deindustrialization. The paper follows Combes (2000) in examining the importance of agglomeration economies on employment growth in Ghanaian manufacturing, finding that there is no evidence that population density is associated with faster employment growth. Other agglomeration economies do seem to play a role, although not always in the manner anticipated.

This paper addresses the socioeconomic status of second-generation Middle Eastern North African (MENA) immigrants in the United States. Measurements of educational attainment, salary income, employment status, and occupation are considered. Overall, second-generation MENA immigrants achieve higher levels of education and salary incomes than both non-MENA whites and blacks, but falter on employment outcomes as a whole. Particular ethnic groups, such as Iranians and Yemenis, have accomplished higher educational levels than both whites and blacks, yet unemployment rates are amongst the highest of all. Upward mobility from their first-generation parents is achieved as well. By ethnic group, Egyptian individuals prove to have outpaced their MENA peers on multiple measurements, however not on all. Several ethnic groups stand out in these measurements of socioeconomic status.

Racial disparities in access to health care and health outcomes are well documented.1 One approach to reducing disparities has been to increase the cultural competency of health care professionals.2 Although the cultural competency of US health care professionals has received considerable attention, patients’ views regarding the competency of their health care professionals have not been fully examined.3 To fill this gap, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity sponsored 5 cultural competency questions on the 2017 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS).4 We used these questions to examine patients’ perspectives on the cultural competence of US health care professionals.

A central concern for racial and ethnic minorities is having an equal opportunity to advance group interests via the political process. There remains limited empirical evidence, however, whether democratic policies designed to foster political equality are connected causally to social and economic equality. In this paper, we examine whether and how the expansion of minority voting rights contributes to advances in minorities' economic interests. Specifically, we consider how the political re-enfranchisement of black Americans in the U.S. South, stemming from the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), contributed to improvements in their relative economic status during the 1960s and 1970s. Using spatial and temporal variation arising from the federal enforcement provision of the VRA, we document that counties where voting rights were more strongly protected experienced larger reductions in the black-white wage gap between 1950 and 1980. We then show how the VRA's effect on the relative wages of black Americans operates through two demand-side channels. First, the VRA contributed to the expansion of public employment opportunities for black workers and afforded these workers existing public-sector wage premia. Second, in line with previous work on the importance of civil rights laws, the VRA contributed to and complemented the enforcement of labor market policies such as affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws.

Every month 1.7 million workers in the US are laid off and an additional 3.3 million quit their job voluntarily.1 At the same time more than 5.5 million workers are newly hired every month, accounting for 3.8% of all employees in the US. Constant turnover is a fundamental feature of labor markets not only in the US but across developed economies. At the same time, the causes and consequences of worker mobility and its broader implications for labor market efficiency and welfare are complex and have been widely discussed in both the public debate and the academic literature. This thesis contributes to that discussion in three ways: The first chapter explores the drivers behind the secular decline in worker mobility in the US since the 1980s and puts forward a new explanation that has been overlooked in the literature so far. I argue that the specialization of firms and the outsourcing of non-core activities was a key determinant of declining reallocation rates and had more benign effects in terms of efficiency than conventional explanations suggest. Turning from secular trends to labor market policies, the second and third chapter investigate the role of unemployment insurance policies (UI) in shaping labor markets through their effects on job finding and job separation rates. While the second chapter focuses on the macroeconomic effects of structural reforms to the German UI system in the mid-2000s, the third chapter explores the merits and welfare . . .

I build a stylized investment-and-marriage model to provide a surprising explanation of why in the United States and many other countries women attend college at higher rates but continue to earn lower average incomes than men. Differential fecundity and a general-equilibrium marriage-market effect form the basis of my explanation. The model can also account for the relationship between age at marriage and personal midlife income for men and women as well as the relationship between age at marriage and spousal midlife income for women. Empirical evidence and calibration results support my explanations for these facts.

The City of Fresno has recently completed a series of planning efforts that are geared toward the revitalization of the Downtown core and the neighborhoods surrounding Downtown. Since these plans were adopted several projects, including the reopening of Fulton Street and the awarding of state Transformative Climate Communities funds for Downtown Fresno neighborhoods, have occurred. The City has heard and responded to numerous concerns that increased development in Downtown may result in the displacement of existing low income households and small businesses. Although property owners often experience a benefit of increased investment and development in the form of increased property values, renters (both residential and commercial) can experience a negative impact in the form of increased rents. This report, using an expansive definition of Downtown (i.e. the downtown core and surrounding neighborhoods together), examines indicators of potential displacement in Downtown and Fresno outside of Downtown. This report will inform the Anti- Displacement Task Force and interested members of the public. This report looks at the potential for displacement within Downtown. Although early scholarly work presented downtown decline as a natural or inevitable process, drivers of neighborhood decline are now known to not be “natural” but instead a complicated mix of government policy and investment, changes in the economy, demographic and migration shifts and the lingering effects of past discriminatory actions. This report looks at mid-century decline of Fresno’s greater Downtown within this framework. From there the report examines known indicators of displacement including rental rates, vacancy rates, and rent burden for residential displacement and lease rates and retail vacancy for commercial displacement and contrasts Downtown with Fresno outside of Downtown. Quantitative sources include U.S. decennial census data, American Community Survey data, and private commercial real estate data

I develop a new method to predict the impacts of any technology on occupations. I use the overlap between the text of job task descriptions and the text of patents to construct a measure of the exposure of tasks to automation. I first apply the method to historical cases such as software and industrial robots. I establish that occupations I measure as highly exposed to previous automation technologies saw declines in employment and wages over the relevant periods. I use the fitted parameters from the case studies to predict the impacts of artificial intelligence. I find that, in contrast to software and robots, AI is directed at high-skilled tasks. Under the assumption that historical patterns of long-run substitution will continue, I estimate that AI will reduce 90:10 wage inequality, but will not affect the top 1%.

I study the economic externalities of U.S. convict labor on local labor markets. Using newly collected panel data on U.S. prisons and convict-labor camps from 1886 to 1940, I show that competition from cheap prison-made goods led to higher unemployment, lower labor-force participation, and reduced wages (particularly for women) in counties that housed competing man- ufacturing industries. At the same time, affected industries had higher patenting rates. I find that the introduction of convict labor accounts for 16% slower growth in U.S. manufacturing wages. The introduction of convict labor also induced technical changes and innovations that account for 6% of growth in U.S. patenting in affected industries.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of marriage regulation on the migratory behavior of individuals using the history of the liberalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. Because the approval of same-sex marriage allows homosexuals access to legal rights and social benefits, marriage becomes more attractive relative to singlehood or other forms of partnership. The differences in the value of other forms of relationship status relative to marriage can affect the migration decisions of individuals, to the extent that those states approving same-sex marriage can be considered less discriminatory. Results show that that legal reform permanently increased the migration flow of homosexuals moving to tolerant states (i.e., those that have legalized same-sex marriage). The physical distance among states does not appear to be driving our estimates since the migration flow of homosexuals is not limited to border or close states. Supplemental analysis, developed to explore whether the migration flow is translated to a significant effect to the stock of homosexuals by state, suggests that that stock increased after the approval of same-sex marriage but that it was transitory, pointing to a 'no effect' on the spatial distribution of homosexuals as times went by. The liberalization of marriage for homosexuals also has an effect on the migration behavior of those individuals originating from countries in which same-sex sexual activity is illegal, for whom we observe an outflow migration from those states with same sex marriage, pointing to dissimilarities in cultural aspects related to homosexuality as important factors in migration decisions.