This article looks at modifying the currently reported CPI by the government to produce a "better" CPI. Comparisons are based on each alternative's ability to produce time series projections in line with measures reflecting consumer behavior. Suggested changes include restricting attention to goods with little change in the consumer experience over time as well as accounting for changes in the housing stock over time. The top performing CPI alternatives produce long run tends in income growth and poverty level reductions that indicate both have been understated by the official CPI. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3403755

This paper estimates the effects of U.S. financial markets’ deregulations on the country’s distribution of income. We find that different reforms have moved inequality in opposite directions. The removal of intra- and inter-state branching restrictions and the elimination of ceilings on interest rates in the 1970s and 1980s decreased inequality. These reforms mostly enhanced the incomes of workers in the lower tail of the in- come distribution. On the contrary, the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act increased inequality. This reform substantially increased incomes of workers in the upper tail of the distribution. To explore the underlying mechanisms, we examine the responses within and across groups of workers, including finance versus non-finance workers. Our findings indicate that models based solely on capital skill complementarities (CSC) are insufficient because they would imply similar responses to all reforms. We construct a model that endogenously generate household heterogeneity in the and choices of financial products and captures the heterogenous income responses to different dereg- ulations. The model naturally explains how the different deregulations impacted the opposite tails of the income distribution.

Objectives Drawing on activity theory of aging, we examined whether solitary activities may be associated with negative wellbeing, as they may reflect social isolation. Using American Time Use Surveys, with information on ‘with whom’ individuals engaged in activities over a 24-hour period, we created measures capturing solitary days and solitary activities to understand their prevalence and associations with wellbeing. Method At the daily level, we examined associations between solitary days and proportion of the day in solitary activities with life satisfaction. At the activity level, we examined associations between engaging in an activity alone versus with others and emotional state during the activity. Results Solitary days and higher proportion of the day spent in solitary activities were associated with lower life satisfaction. These associations were attenuated controlling for individual covariates. Engagement in activities alone was associated with lower levels of happiness and higher levels of sadness and pain during the activity, and association with happiness remained even adjusting for covariates. Discussion A sizable proportion of older adults reported solitary days, and proportion of the day spent in solitary activities increases by age. Examining lived experiences of older adults and presence of others during activities could contribute to research on social isolation.

Two network measures known as the economic complexity index (ECI) and product complexity index (PCI) have provided important insights into patterns of economic development. We show that the ECI and PCI are equivalent to a spectral clustering algorithm that partitions a similarity graph into two parts. The measures are also closely related to various dimensionality reduction methods, such as diffusion maps and correspondence analysis. Our results shed new light on the ECI’s empirical success in explaining cross-country differences in gross domestic product per capita and economic growth, which is often linked to the diversity of country export baskets. In fact, countries with high (low) ECI tend to specialize in high-PCI (low-PCI) products. We also find that the ECI and PCI uncover specialization patterns across U.S. states and U.K. regions.

Evidence concerning the link between park access, use, programming and health has continued to grow. However, government funding for parks and recreation is highly susceptible to the ebbs and flows of the national economy. Given this, the purpose of this study was to test the relationship between county area spending on parks and recreation operations and all-cause mortality in the United States from the years 1980–2010. Using data from 1980 to 2010 collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, we analyzed the relationship between per capita county area spending on parks and recreation and county-level all-cause age-standardized female, male, and overall mortality using county and year fixed effects as well as relevant time-variant controls. The study was conducted during 2017 and 2018. County area spending on parks and recreation was negatively associated with overall and female-specific mortality from 1980 to 2010. According to our models for female and overall all-cause age-standardized mortality, when holding all else equal, a hundred-dollar increase in 2010 dollars in per capita parks and recreation operational expenditures was associated with an average decrease in morality of 3.9 and 3.4 deaths per 100,000, respectively. Although not commonly viewed as a form of healthcare spending, increased government funding for parks and recreation services had a significant association with decreased county level mortality. Our results suggest higher levels of per capita spending on parks and recreation may lead to lower levels of mortality.

Many subnational economies are facing severe fiscal stress often generated by the devolution of responsibilities that have been accompanied by little devolution of fiscal resources. In 2011, the Illinois state government raised individual and corporate income taxes as one contribution to easing the problem of short term and longer‐term fiscal deficits; opponents of the tax increase were concerned about the impacts on labor mobility and the overall state economy, as well as the policy's effectiveness in addressing the state's financial situation. These concerns provide the foci of the present paper. Comparison of simulation results with and without the tax increase finds that although the policy increases the state government's income, it also negatively impacts the state economy in terms of greater out‐migration, lower employment and Gross Regional Product, and a smaller tax base in the long run. Moreover, simulation results show that the tax increase will expedite the state's debt clearance only if the state government significantly increases its share of income spent on debt payment, at the price of enhanced negative economic impacts. The results provide a cautionary tale for subnational authorities to consider more carefully the implications of unilateral changes in tax rates.

Though the face of CD has changed over the previous decades, it remains a vibrant community with many of the institutions of old enduring. The data from the American Community Survey estimate that just over twenty thousand people from around nine thousand households call CD home. Residents are largely younger adults and predominantly white, with Black residents making up the second most populous group. Though the unemployment rate is fairly low (3.7%), a considerable proportion of the community lives under the federal poverty level (13.1%), and over a third of renters pay a substantial proportion of their income on rent.15 As a community, CD experiences particularly poor health compared to the rest of the city. Data from Public Health – Seattle & King County paints a particularly bleak picture. Life expectancy in CD is estimated to be 76.6-79.7, compared to 83.5-86.2 for the Montlake neighborhood immediately to the north. Additionally, death rates from stroke, diabetes, and cancer are among the highest in the county. As with any area level estimate, it is not clear the extent to which this is influenced by in-and out-migration, but there does appear to be cause for concern.

College major choice is one of the most influential choices individuals could make in their lifetime. College major choice dictates the level of students’ investment in education, post-graduate occupational opportunities, and lifetime earnings. Since expected earnings are essential in the choice of college major (Cannings, Mahseredjian, & Montmarquette, 2002), I hypothesis that the persistence of the gender wage gap adversely affects college major choices of female students. Using the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey data, I analyze the effect of the gender wage gap and average absolute wage levels on college major choices of male and female students. I apply McFadden’s choice model, the alternative-specific conditional logit model, to measure the significance of average wage levels and gender wage gap effects across seven broad major categories. I find that the gender wage gap negatively affects choices of female students significantly while the effect on male students’ college major choice is insignificant. I also find that majors that are associated with occupations that exhibit gender-based pay disparity, such as STEM and business majors, discourage female students from choosing them. I expect that this result would lead to further continuance of the gender wage gap and imperfect alignment between educational system outcomes and the need for increasing high skill participants in the labor market.

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

Previous research has found a strong link between educational attainment and health, where the highly educated live longer and healthier lives than those with lower levels of education. Because such research has relied on samples of the non-institutionalized population, previous research has not explored the association between education and specific chronic and infectious health conditions among the currently incarcerated. Analyzing the relationship between education and health conditions among the incarcerated, who tend to be less healthy and for whom many of the intermediate mechanisms between education and health are held relatively constant in prison, may yield new insights. Using the 2002–2004 National Health Interview Study (N = 74,881), the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (N = 17,553), and interaction terms from logistic regression models, I compared the strength of the association between educational attainment and the presence of chronic and infectious health conditions among the incarcerated and non-incarcerated populations. These models indicated generally stronger negative associations between educational attainment and chronic conditions among the non-incarcerated, while the negative relationship between education and hepatitis was stronger for the incarcerated. These results suggest that while education may play a lesser role for chronic conditions for the incarcerated, it can still important for avoiding risky health behaviors.

INTRODUCTION Despite bicycling being considered ten times more dangerous than driving, the evidence suggests that high-bicycling-mode-share cities are not only safer for bicyclists but for all road users. We look to understand what makes these cities safer. Are the safety differences related to ‘safety-in-numbers’ of bicyclists, or can they be better explained by built environment differences or the people that inhabit them? METHODS Based on thirteen years of data from twelve large U.S. cities, we investigated over 17,000 fatalities and 77,000 severe injuries across nearly 8700 block groups via multilevel, longitudinal, negative binomial regression models. We hypothesize three pathways towards better road safety outcomes: i) travel behavior differences (e.g. ‘safety-in-numbers’ or shifts to ‘safer’ modes); ii) built environment differences (e.g. infrastructure that helps promote safer environments); and iii) socio-demographic/socio-economic differences (e.g. some cities may be populated by those with lower road safety risk). RESULTS The results suggest that more bicyclists is not the reason these cities are safer for all road users. Better safety outcomes are instead associated with a greater prevalence of bike facilities – particularly protected and separated bike facilities – at the block group level and, more strongly so, across the overall city. Higher intersection density, which typically corresponds to more compact and lower-speed built environments, was strongly associated with better road safety outcomes for all road users. The variables representing gentrification also accounted for much of our explainable variation in safety outcomes. CONCLUSIONS This paper provides an evidence-based approach to building safer cities. While the policy implications of this work point to protected and separated bike infrastructure as part of the solution, we need to keep in mind that these approaches are complementary and should not be considered in isolation. Moreover, our results – particularly the safety disparities associated with gentrification – suggest equity issues and the need for future research.

In this paper, we examine whether the expansion of health insurance coverage brought on by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), led to a decline in absenteeism among overweight and obese individuals. We use data from the National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) to compare absenteeism among overweight and obese workers to absenteeism among normal-weight workers before and after the ACA. Our results suggest that in the post-ACA period, the probability of being absent declined by about 1.3 (1.5) percentage points among obese (overweight) individuals. Disaggregated regressions suggest that the effect is significant among women, but not among men. Furthermore, our estimates (using a Tobit model) indicate that the obese (overweight) workers missed 0.33 (0.46) fewer days after the ACA. Again, the effect is concentrated among women. Our results show that improved health outcomes led to reduced absenteeism. Our results also show that there are no decline in absenteeism among elderly (age>=65) adults (who did not experience any increase in health insurance coverage as a result of the ACA), suggesting that the decline in absenteeism is indeed due to the expansion of health insurance coverage due to the ACA. Our estimates imply that the ACA reduced the cost associated with absenteeism by about $350 million per year.

While these are national problems and national challenges, they also have a distinct regional cast. On many of these dimensions, the Midwest is among the starkest settings for racial disparity or inequality. The result is a jarring juxtaposition: While Midwestern metros (Des Moines, Madison, Minneapolis) typically crowd the “best places to live” lists,10 they are also among the very worst places to live for African-Americans.11 In one recent analysis, ranking the states on an index of racial inequality, the twelve states of the Midwest census region (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) claimed eight of the bottom ten slots and swept the bottom five.12 Simply put, these stark racial disparities—and the patterns of segregation and discrimination which underlie them—create real and lasting barriers for workers and families of color in the Midwest. The consequences—for those directly affected and for our broader aspirations of equity and equal opportunity—are dire.

This dissertation contains three empirical studies in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter discusses two sources of historical data on work stoppages in the United States: the Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1888) and the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1896). It describes a new transcription of the strike tables, which includes all rows for the first time, and provides instructions for users. Four replication exercises illustrate the advantages of the new file. The second chapter uses the the data from the Third Report to test whether labor unions help workers win strikes. Unorganized workers were still responsible for two fifths of all strike activity in the United States in the early 1880s, which allows me to identify the effect of unions on strike outcomes. Because organized workers might attempt riskier confrontations than the unorganized, I construct an instrument for the involvement of a union in a strike from the location of the assemblies of the Knights of Labor. I estimate that unions raised strikers' success rate by 32 percentage points from a baseline of 38 percent; moreover, they decreased the incidence of job loss by 22 percentage points from a baseline of 56 percent. Although unions increased the probability that employers acceded to strikers' demands, I find no evidence of an impact on the size of those concessions. The third chapter evaluates how an increase in the supply of skilled labor affects task assignment within and between occupations. Guided by a simple theoretical framework, Francis Kramarz, Alexis Maitre and I exploit detailed information about individual workers' tasks from multiple surveys to examine the impact of a twofold rise in the share of university graduates in the French workforce between 1991 and 2013. Our identification strategy uses variation in the change in the graduate share across local labor markets. We find that higher average educational attainment is associated with more routine, fewer cognitive and fewer social tasks within occupations and with fewer routine, more cognitive and more social tasks across occupations.

My dissertation deals with topics in finance and innovation. In the first chapter, I study how CEOs affect corporate behaviors and R&D workers. In the second chapter, I propose a simple way to address an endogeneity problem in tax multiplier studies. In the third chapter, I study how property rights affect innovation.

This article investigates the information seeking behavior of undergraduate economics students to determine their effectiveness in locating data sets for a multiple regression analysis assignment and seeks to discover how students pursue the process of learning to find and use data. A study was conducted in fall and spring 2015 to find out (1) what influences affect students’ ways of seeking data sets; and (2) what changes occur over the course of students’ data search. The findings say that while only about 10% of students started with the library, either a library database or a librarian, nearly half eventually used the library in some form for this course project. The conclusion reached as a result of the survey was that undergraduates have widely varying data search concepts, that more of the students look for personal interest data than business discipline data, and that the searching part of economics students’ first regression project can add a noticeable amount of time to the assignment before they can even get started working on the regression itself. Included are ideas for further research and ways to reach students before data searching gets frustrating, as well as thoughts on how to structure data search learning and how to use insights into student behaviors to overcome the reluctance of some faculty.

Medicaid expansion has a substantial effect on Montana’s economy. Each year, expansion brings over $600 million into Montana that would not otherwise be here. This money ripples through Montana’s economy, generating between 5,900 and 7,500, jobs and between $350-$385 million in personal income each year between 2018 and 2020. These results are consistent with the observed change in economic activity in other expansion states that experienced changes in Medicaid coverage and uninsurance similar to Montana. In addition to generating economic activity, Medicaid expansion appears to improve a variety of other outcomes—reducing crime, improving health, lowering debt, and creating a more robust health care sector. While the state pays a nominal amount for these benefits, the costs to the state budget are more than offset by the savings created by Medicaid expansion and by the revenues associated with increased economic activity.

BACKGROUND Socio-economic and demographic determinants of child growth at ages 0–5 years in developing countries are well documented. However, Precision Public Health interventions and population targeting require more finely grained knowledge about the existence and character of temporal changes in child growth associations. METHODS We evaluated the temporal stability of associations between height-for-age z-score (HAZ) of children aged 0–59 months and child, parental, household, and community and infrastructure factors by following 25 countries over time (1991–2014) in repeated cross-sections of 91 Demographic and Health Surveys using random effect models and Wald tests. RESULTS We found that child growth displayed relatively more time stable associations with child, parental, and household factors than with community and infrastructure factors. Among the unstable associations, there was no uniform geographical pattern in terms of where they consistently increased or decreased over time. There were differences between countries in the extent of temporal instability but there was no apparent regional grouping or geographic pattern. The instability was positively and significantly correlated with annual changes in HAZ. CONCLUSIONS These findings inform about the generalizability of results stemming from cross-sectional studies that do not consider time variation – results regarding effects of child, parental, and household factors on HAZ do not necessarily need to be re-evaluated over time whereas results regarding the effects of infrastructure and community variables need to be monitored more frequently as they are expected to change. In addition, the study may improve the Precision Public Health population targeting of interventions in different regions and times – whereas the temporal dimension seems to be important for precision targeting of community and infrastructure factors, it is not the case for child, parental, and household factors. In general, the existence of temporal instability and the direction of change varies across countries with no apparent regional pattern.

Surface soil contamination has been long recognized as an important pathway of human lead exposure, and is now a worldwide health concern. This study estimates the causal effects of exposure to lead in topsoil on cognitive ability among 5-year-old children. We draw on individual level data from the 2000 U.S. Census, and USGS data on lead in topsoil covering a broad set of counties across the United States. Using an instrumental variable approach relying on the 1944 Interstate Highway System Plan, we find that higher lead in topsoil increases considerably the probability of 5-year-old boys experiencing cognitive difficulties such as learning, remembering, concentrating, or making decisions. Living in counties with topsoil lead concentration above the national median roughly doubles the probability of 5-year-old boys having cognitive difficulties. Nevertheless, it does not seem to affect 5-year-old girls, consistent with previous studies. Importantly, the adverse effects of lead exposure on boys are found even in counties with levels of topsoil lead concentration considered low by the guidelines from the U.S. EPA and state agencies. These findings are concerning because they suggest that legacy lead may continue to impair cognition today, both in the United States and in other countries that have considerable lead deposition in topsoil.

Reducing chronic absence goes hand in hand with cultivating positive conditions for learning. When schools provide engaging, supportive, welcoming and culturally responsive environments, families are inclined to help their children get to school, and students are motivated to attend, even when there are hurdles to getting there. Likewise, when students attend class consistently, positive conditions for learning — from supportive relationships with teachers to substantive, meaningful educational experiences — are more likely to occur.