What is the effect of technological change on wage inequality and labor market allocations? In this paper, we explore the relationship between technological advancement, labor alloca- tions across occupations and differential returns to workers of heterogeneous education by building measures of capital-embodied technological change (CETC) at the occupation level. We construct quality-adjusted equipment stocks for each occupation based off of a novel dataset of tools’ requirements linked to NIPA equipment stocks. We document substantial heterogeneity in the bundle of capital goods used by different occupations and in their ex- posure to technological change, as measured by the decay in the quality-adjusted relative price of investment of each occupational bundle. Then we link this exposure to observed patterns of labor reallocation across occupations and the skill-premia through a structural model of occupational choice with heterogeneous workers, capital and occupations. Con- sistently with the narrative in the literature, our results indicate that CETC in computers and communication equipment have been important drivers of the returns to skill in the last 40 years. However, CETC in broader equipment categories including service industry machinery and medical equipment explains the bulk of the increase. At the same time, we show that CETC has had heterogeneous effects in labor reallocation across occupations and education groups. For example, absent CETC, we should have observed raising labor shares in administrative services relative to the loss in employment observed in the data and lower increases in the share of professionals in the population. We argue that this heterogeneity is consistent with occupation-specific elasticities of substitution between capital and labor, which we also estimate from the data.

The climate crisis is an unprecedented threat. We urgently need to design our infrastructure, economic, and agricultural systems and our communities to withstand hazards and reduce risk to address this threat. This dissertation contributes by exploring the potential of data-driven urban planning and through increasing our understanding of how risk and data science can be used to build the resilience of our communities. Central to this thesis is the understanding that risk analysis (the assessment, characterization, communication, and management of risk, along with related policy) can enhance urban planning to better mitigate hazards and protect our communities. To improve risk analysis’s efficacy for use in urban planning, there are a series of necessary advances to the science of risk (i.e., the knowledge, frameworks, and principles that underlie risk analysis). Each chapter of this dissertation contributes to these advances, including how we focus risk analysis for the betterment of people, how we leverage data science to understand the role of urban form in hazard mitigation, how we incorporate spatiotemporal and behavioral feedbacks into risk analysis, and how we capture resilience within the risk concept. The primary aims of the dissertation were to: 1. Explore the potential for risk science to be used to support urban planning 2. Advance methods and understanding of spatiotemporal risk analysis 3. Propose an operational approach to building the resilience of communities to hazards The first chapter identifies how urban planning challenges can develop and motivate developments in risk science. I then advance approaches for conducting risk analysis that captures spatiotemporal and behavioral feedbacks using a coupled complex system model in the second chapter. The third chapter uses machine learning and spatial data to explore how urban characteristics are associated with high temperature, that could lead to higher risk. The next section, chapters four and five, focuses risk analysis on people. I propose that the focus of resilience efforts be on the equitable provision of essential services, such as health care, food, and education. Specifically, we can measure how people’s access to essential services changes due to a hazard and across demographic groups. The framework I propose can be used by decision makers before, during, and after a hazard to improve the social sustainability and reduce the long-term risk of a community. In the final two chapters I argue that we must explicitly consider the dimension of time in risk analysis and that this means that the pillars of resilience can be addressed within the concept of risk. This understanding, coupled with the other work within this dissertation, means that resilience, and resilience analysis, is well within the purview of modern risk analysis.

Study Design.Analysis of National Inpatient Sample (NIS), 2004 to 2015.Objective.Describe recent trends in US rates of lumbar fusion procedures and associated costs, by surgical indication.Summary of Background Data.Spinal fusion is appropriate for spinal deformity and instability, but evidence of effectiveness is limited for primary disc herniation and spinal stenosis without instability. It remains controversial for treatment of axial pain secondary to degenerative disc disease. There are potential non-instability, non-deformity indications for fusion surgery, including but not limited to severe foraminal stenosis and third-Time disc herniation.Methods.Elective lumber fusion trends were reported using Poisson regression, grouped by indication as degenerative scoliosis, degenerative spondylolisthesis, spinal stenosis, disc herniation, and disc degeneration. Generalize linear regression was used to estimate trends in hospital costs, adjusted for age, sex, indication, comorbidity, and inflation.Results.Volume of elective lumbar fusion increased 62.3% (or 32.1% per 100,000 US adults), from 122,679 cases (60.4 per 100,000) in 2004 to 199,140 (79.8 per 100,000) in 2015. Increases were greatest among age 65 or older, increasing 138.7% by volume (73.2% by rate), from 98.3 per 100,000 (95% confidence interval [CI] 97.2, 99.3) in 2004 to 170.3 (95% CI 169.2, 171.5) in 2015. Although the largest increases were for spondylolisthesis (+47,390 operations, 111%) and scoliosis (+16,129 operations, 186.6%), disc degeneration, herniation, and stenosis combined to accounted for 42.3% of total elective lumbar fusions in 2015. Aggregate hospital costs increased 177% during these 12 years, exceeding $10 billion in 2015, and averaging more than $50,000 per admission.Conclusion.While the prevalence of spinal pathologies is not known, the rate of elective lumbar fusion surgery in the United States increased most for spondylolisthesis and scoliosis, indications with relatively good evidence of effectiveness. The proportion of fusions coded for indications with less evidence of effectiveness has slightly decreased in the most recent years.Level of Evidence: 3.

We document that the employment share of high-skilled services is much lower in China than in countries with similar GDP per capita. We build a model of structural change between goods, low-skilled services, and high-skilled services to account for this observation. We find that large distortions limit the size of high-skilled services in China. If they were removed, both high-skilled services and GDP per capita would increase considerably and the effects of technological progress and education on GDP per capita would be considerably larger. This suggests that distortions in high-skilled services importantly hold back the development of China.

Many chemical facilities are located in low‐lying coastal areas and vulnerable to damage from hurricanes, flooding, and erosion, which are increasing with climate change. Extreme weather can trigger industrial disasters, including explosions, fires, and major chemical releases, as well as chronic chemical leakage into air, water, and soil. We identified 872 highly hazardous chemical facilities within 50 miles of the hurricane‐prone U.S. Gulf Coast. Approximately 4,373,800 people, 1,717 schools, and 98 medical facilities were within 1.5 miles of these facilities. Public health risks from co‐located extreme weather, chemical facilities, and vulnerable populations are potentially disastrous and growing under climate change.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has resulted in millions of Americans gaining healthcare coverage, including increased coverage among children primarily through the welcome mat effect. However, the lack of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion in many Southern states may have affected children’s access to care based on the hypothesized, smaller welcome mat effect compared to other regions. Despite the documented coverage gains for children, it is unclear whether the ACA had an effect on access to or utilization of care among children and whether their access to care varied by region. Using National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from 2010-2017, I examine whether the ACA increased access to care for children in the South. Results show no significant effect of the ACA on the access to care among children and specifically, no evidence of regional differences as a result of the policy. Despite the lack of ACA-specific effects, this study has meaningful findings of regional differentials in overall access to care as well as the importance of insurance coverage for children in accessing care. The findings in this paper are consistent with previous literature showing the welcome mat . . .

This dissertation studies the first Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Urban areas in the northern United States. While most existing research has focused on the experiences of the migrants themselves, I am focused on how this influx of rural black migrants impacted outcomes for African Americans who were already living in the north and had already attained a modicum of economic success. Common themes throughout this dissertation involve the use of the complete-count U.S. population census to link records across years. In the first chapter, I linked northern-born blacks from 1910 to 1930 to study how the arrival of new black residents affected the employment outcomes of existing northernborn black residents. I find that southern black migrants served as both competitors and consumers to northern-born blacks in the labor market. In the second chapter, my co-authors and I study the role of segregated housing markets in eroding black wealth during the Great Migration. Building a new sample of matched census addresses from 1930 to 1940, we find that racial transition on a block was associated with both soaring rental prices and declines in the sales value of homes. In other words, black families paid more to rent housing and faced falling values of homes they were able to purchase. Finally, the third chapter compares the rates of intergenerational occupational mobility by both race and region. I find that racial mobility difference in the North was more substantial than it was in the South. However, regional mobility difference for blacks is greater than any gap in intergenerational mobility by race in prewar American. Therefore, the first Great Migration helped blacks successfully translate their geographic mobility into economic mobility

"The report explores how unions make a major impact on the region not just through collective bargaining, but also through community service and policy advocacy. Analyzing Census data, the authors find that union members in Western New York enjoy substantially higher wages, more full-time work, more health insurance coverage, and more pension benefits than non-members. Union impacts radiate out far beyond their members. Research reveals that unions improve wages, job quality, health, and safety, for other workers as well. Unions support community efforts with volunteer hours and donations, and they play a critical role in workforce development and training. Finally, organized labor advocates for high road public policies regarding issues such as civil rights, public health, and responsible economic development."

In 2017, the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) Office of Labor Policy & Standards (OLPS) released its first annual report, The State of Workers’ Rights in New York City, which detailed findings from OLPS’s first public hearing. In its continuous efforts to align the office’s work to the needs and critical concerns of workers, OLPS organized a second public hearing on the state of workers’ rights on July 17, 2018 at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, in collaboration with the NYC Commission on Human Rights (the Commission) and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). July’s hearing featured oral and written testimony from 40 workers and organizations. In testimony, workers and worker advocates vividly depicted a wide array of labor rights violations: ? The issue of wage theft, including for independent contractors, permeated the testimonies of immigrant and non-immigrant workers alike. ? Some workers, particularly in the construction and nail salon industries, expressed concerns about physical health due to inadequate workplace safety standards. ? Inadequate job security, discrimination, fraud, and waning workplace protections—all were recounted as a source of physical and emotional strain. Participants also highlighted the unique challenges for immigrant workers in both learning about and acting on their rights, including new rights under NYC’s expanded Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law and Fair Workweek Law...

This paper considers the rural mortality transition over 1900 to 1930. While previous work has extensively documented urban mortality transition over this period (Armstrong et al., 1999; Haines, 2001; Cutler and Miller, 2005), declines in U.S. rural mortality have been understudied. This article fills this gap in the literature by first establishing the size of the mortality decline in rural areas, and second, examining the determinants of the decline. Contributing factors considered include the role of data aggregation, urban mortality spillovers, child health improvements, as well as the hypotheses proposed in Higgs (1973). The findings suggest that half of the aggregate rural mortality decline disappears in the balanced subsample of counties. The remainder of the mortality transition is explained the combination of declining child mortality and the changing age-composition of counties.

The debate over school choice generally neglects the effects of school choice on student and household travel, and additional work is needed to understand how transportation policies foster educational equity or exacerbate inequity in large urban school districts. This study examines how school choice affects household travel behavior in Philadelphia. School choice creates access to better neighborhoods and schools, but at a cost of increased and inefficient travel. We offer direction for how education administrators and transportation planners can use disparate sources of data to estimate school policy effects and call for improved data collection by local and regional planners.

Desde la década de 1970, la llamada reestructuración económica ha producido un deterioro sostenido de las condiciones laborales. La desregulación y la flexibilidad, rasgos característicos de esta transformación, han fomentado la inestabilidad, la desprotección y la indefensión de los trabajadores, en particular de los migrantes. Un aspecto poco estudiado en América Latina son los efectos de estos factores en la salud mental de la fuerza laboral en países como Estados Unidos, cuyo mercado se nutre permanentemente de inmigrantes. Este libro constata que ciertos grupos inmigrantes latinoamericanos tienen mayor riesgo de desarrollar una enfermedad mental severa que la población anglosajona (nativos blancos no hispanos), y que carecer de un empleo estable y de tiempo completo impacta de manera negativa en la salud mental tanto de los inmigrantes como de los nativos.

This paper measures the impacts of the world's largest modern agricultural export expansion-that of Indonesian palm oil since 2000-on poverty and consumption in producing communities. Identification exploits external demand growth and geographic differences in cultivation suitability. The median expansion led to 2.7 percentage points faster poverty reduction and 4 percent faster consumption growth. My estimates suggest that growth in the palm oil sector lifted around 2.6 million rural Indonesians from poverty this century. Results can be explained by rising returns to labor and land, and indirect effects through household investment, local government revenue, and rural economic and social infrastructure.

Using survey data from 2015 to 2018, this article analyses the occupational licensing wage premium in the United States. The estimates show a robust 4–6 per cent wage differential for licensed workers. This premium is robust to careful control for location/local labour market effects and occupation effects. The premium is also positive for the majority of individual occupations and groups of occupations estimated. Similar results are found using additional techniques, including a matching estimator and an analysis of border metropolitan statistical areas.

We argue word embedding models are a useful tool for the study of culture using a historical analysis of shared understandings of social class as an empirical case. Word embeddings represent semantic relations between words as relationships between vectors in a high-dimensional space, specifying a relational model of meaning consistent with contemporary theories of culture. Dimensions induced by word differences (rich – poor) in these spaces correspond to dimensions of cultural meaning, and the projection of words onto these dimensions reflects widely shared associations, which we validate with surveys. Analyzing text from millions of books published over 100 years, we show that the markers of class continuously shifted amidst the economic transformations of the twentieth century, yet the basic cultural dimensions of class remained remarkably stable. The notable exception is education, which became tightly linked to affluence independent of its association with cultivated taste.

Urban expansion is one of the most dramatic forms of land transformation in the world and it is one of the greatest challenges in achieving sustainable development in the 21st century. Previous studies analyzed urbanization patterns in areas with rapid urban expansion while urban areas with low to moderate expansion have been overlooked, especially in developed countries. In this study, we examined the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban expansion patterns in South Florida, United States (US) over the last 25 years (1992–2016) using Remote Sensing and GIS techniques. The main goal of this paper was to investigate the degree and spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion at different administrative level in the study area and how spatiotemporal variance in different explanatory factors influence urban expansion in this region. More specifically, this research quantifies the rates, types, intensity, and landscape metrics of urban expansion in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area (Miami MSA) which is the 7th largest MSA and 4th largest urbanized area in the US using remote sensing (satellite imageries) data from National Land Cover Datasets (NLCD) and Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) at 30 m spatial resolution. We further investigated the urban growth patterns at the county and city areas that are located within this MSA to portray the local ‘picture’ of urban growth in this region. Urban expansion in this region can be divided into two time periods: pre-2001 and post-2001 where the former experienced rapid urban expansion and the later had comparatively slow urban expansion. Results suggest that infilling was the dominant type of urban expansion followed by edge-expansion and outlying. Results from landscape metrics represent that newly developed urban lands became more aggregated and simplified in form as the time progressed in the study region. Also, new urban lands were generated away from the east coast and historic cities which eventually created new urban cores. We also used correlation analysis and multiple linear stepwise regression to address major explanatory factors of spatiotemporal change in urban expansion during the study period. Although the influence of factors on urban expansion varied temporally, Population and Distance to Coast were the strongest variables followed by Distance to Roads and Median Income that influence overall urban expansion in the study area.

Background: The 2020 US Census will use a novel approach to disclosure avoidance to protect respondents’ data, called TopDown. This TopDown algorithm was applied to the 2018 end-to-end (E2E) test of the decennial census. The computer code used for this test as well as accompanying exposition has recently been released publicly by the Census Bureau.

Objective This study examined the amount of time married couples share together in a new "encore adult" life course stage around the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Also investigated was the relationship between shared time and experienced well-being for this age group. Method Time diary and survey data were used from nationally representative 2003-2014 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 26,303 adults aged 50-79 years. Analyses examined amount of total and exclusive shared couple time and experiences of happiness and stress when together using multivariate models. Results Shared time was positively associated with couples living on their own, conjoint employment/nonemployment, and age. Encore women and men reported feeling happier and less stressed when with their spouses. Men seemed to find time with spouses more enjoyable if both partners or just their wives were working. Discussion Encore adults are living longer as couples; results suggest couple relationships may occupy most of their days, with potentially positive implications for emotional well-being. Men and women are happier during time with a spouse when the woman works, with men reporting even higher levels of happiness than women. This is important as contemporary couples navigate increasingly complex work/retirement transitions in gendered ways.

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of public housing units in the United States grew nearly sixfold, and the percentage of births to unmarried women almost tripled. We provide the first estimates of the effect of public housing on single motherhood, using individual-level data to assess whether young women living near higher concentrations of public housing were more likely to have children out of wedlock. We find a strong and positive relationship between public housing and single motherhood for black high school dropouts. This link is larger when we use lagged measures of public housing, which suggests that exposure during childhood may be driving the result.

More than 50 bikeshare programs have been launched in the U.S. since 2010. In this paper, I estimate the effects of bikeshare programs on the prevalence of obesity at the county level. To do so, I merge bikeshare system data with obesity data released by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and construct a county-level panel covering the period of 2007–2013. I employ a difference-in-differences empirical framework, in which I compare the obesity rate before and after the introduction of the bikeshare programs in counties that have ever launched bikeshare programs, and use counties that have never introduced bikeshare programs as the control group. Difference-in-differences estimates suggest the significant public health effect of bikeshare programs: the introduction of the bikeshare programs leads to moderate declines in obesity rates; a possible mechanism is its impacts on leisure-time physical activities. I also conduct various additional tests to check the robustness of the above findings. These tests show that the conclusion of this paper is robust to changes to samples and empirical models.