This investigation examines several key factors believed to promote human flourishing, specifically: Factor 1: Age, Education, & Healthcare, Factor 2: Labor Force Participation, Factor 3: Crime, Factor 4: Income, Factor 5: Youth Unemployment and Factor 6: Voting Behavior. Data was examined at the county level, and collected from a variety of US government and non-governmental organizations. Our investigation into the conditions necessary to promote human flourishing uses internal migration within the United States as the indicator of “unhappy” communities. The findings reveal that all factors are important in emigration somewhere, but the factors vary for different counties. As a result, attempts to address the ills of society require an appreciation of geography and context.

In this article, we examine the demographic characteristics of the non-Native American settlers in Payne County, Oklahoma, using the 1890 Territorial Census, which includes information on gender, household size and composition, and birth region. For comparison, we use census data from the 1880 Midwest census region to examine whether the household characteristics of the Payne County settlers were unique or representative of Midwestern families from which they emigrated. We find that US-born individuals were more likely to participate in the land run, but that the number and age of children were not significantly different from the Midwestern region.

This study aims to investigate whether and to what extent income inequality of country of origin modifies the health trajectories of immigrants to the United States (U.S.). Much previous research has found a negative association between income inequality and health across nations. A separate, large literature shows that characteristics of immigrants' countries of origin affect their health status after migration. However, there is no evidence about whether income inequality of countries of origin affects postmigration health trajectories. Merging individual data from the Current Population's Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC CPS) (2013) with macro-level data, I find that income inequality exerts a statistically significant negative effect on immigrants' health trajectories. While immigrants arriving from countries with greater income inequality tend to be healthier than immigrants arriving from countries that are more egalitarian, their health tends to decline at a faster rate over time. The results are consistent with at least two mechanisms. Immigrants from higher-inequality countries may arrive in the U.S. with fewer transferable skills and take up low-paid jobs, with negative consequences for their long-term health. Alternatively, the harmful consequences of early exposure to high-income inequality in home countries before immigration may persist over the life course, damaging individuals' health even after they have left their home nations.

This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed market access and influenced the economic geography of the United States. We compute shipment distances with and without the canal from each US county to each other US county and to key international ports and compute the resulting change in market access. We relate this change to population changes in 20-year intervals from 1880 to 2000. We find that a 1 percent increase in market access led to a total increase of population by around 6 percent. We compute similar elasticities for wages, land values and immigration from out of state. When we decompose the effect by industry, we find that tradable (manufacturing) industries react faster than non-tradable (services), with a fairly similar aggregate effect.

A Google search on "time-crunched parents" returns about 129,000 results, with headlines with titles like "30 Life Tips for Time-Crunched Parents," "Meal Planning Tips for Time-Crunched Parents" and books named Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids.1 The conventional narrative about parents today presents them as desperately juggling the competing responsibilities of work and family while letting go any time for themselves. Seismic changes in families since the 1960s, particularly the increase in single parent and dual-earner couples, have led to more similar work and family roles for mothers and fathers (Bianchi 2011). Cultural support for shared earning and caring is high, particularly among young adults (Gerson 2010). Although on average, women continue to do more housework and child care than men, and men more paid work than women, prior to parent­hood, the gender division of labor is relatively equal (Sayer 2016). Transitions into parenthood, however, move couples toward more gendered roles, with mothers decreasing paid work and increasing housework and child care, and fathers doing the opposite (Grunow, Schulz, and Blossfeld 2012, & Stone 2007). Parenting is a profoundly gendered and gendering experience. The "gender­ing" of parenting is based on cultural beliefs that parental roles are gender specialized: mothering involves tasks and characteristics that society frames as uniquely feminine-like nurturing, good communication, and family devotion-whereas fathering is thought to involve tasks and characteristics...

Declining internal migration in the United States is driven by increasing home attachment in locations with initially high rates of population turnover. These “fast” locations were the population growth destinations of the 20th century, where home attachments were low, but have increased as regional population growth has converged. Using a novel measure of attachment, this paper estimates a structural model of migration that distinguishes moving frictions from home utility. Simulations quantify candidate explanations of the decline. Rising home attachment accounts for most of the decline not attributable to population aging, and its effect is consistent with the observed spatial pattern.

This dissertation consists of three essays on modern economic growth and struc- tural transformation, in particular touching on the reallocation of labor across indus- tries, occupations, and employment statuses. The first chapter investigates the quantitative importance of non-employment in the labor market outcomes for the United States. During the last 50 years, pro- duction has shifted from goods to services. In terms of occupations, the routine employment share decreased, giving way to increases in manual and abstract ones. These two patterns are related, and lower non-employment had an important role. A labor allocation model where goods, market services, and home services use different tasks as inputs is used for quantitative exercises. These show that non-employment could significantly slow down polarization and structural transformation, and induce significant displacement within the labor force. The second chapter, coauthored with Bart Hobijn and Todd Schoellman, looks at the demographic structure of structural transformation. More than half of labor re- allocation during structural transformation is due to new cohorts disproportionately entering growing industries. This suggests substantial costs to labor reallocation. A model of overlapping generations with life-cycle career choice under switching costs and structural transformation is studied. Switching costs accelerate structural trans- formation, since forward-looking workers enter growing industries in anticipation of future wage growth. Most of the impact of switching costs shows on relative wages. The third chapter establishes that job polarization is a global phenomenon. The analysis of polarization is extended from a group of developed countries to a sample of 119 economies. At all levels of development, employment shares in routine occu- pations have decreased since the 1980s. This suggests that routine occupations are becoming increasingly obsolete throughout the world, rather than being outsourced to developing countries. A development accounting framework with technical change at the task level is proposed. This allows to quantify and extrapolate task-specific productivity levels. Recent technological change is biased against routine occupations and in favor of manual occupations. This implies that in the following decades, world polarization will continue: employment in routine occupations will decrease, and the reallocation will happen mostly from routine to manual occupations, rather than to abstract ones.

In this paper, we exploit new data to assess gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college educated and highlight how those differences have evolved over time. We highlight new results pertaining to gender differences in the mapping between undergraduate major and subsequent occupational sorting. To perform our analysis, we introduce new indices in potential wage space that measure gender differences in major choice and separately the subsequent occupational sorting conditional on major choice. We highlight that women both choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those majors) and that they then subsequently sort into occupations with lower potential earnings given their major choice. We highlight that these differences have narrowed over time but recent cohorts of women still choose majors and occupations with lower potential earnings. Differences in undergraduate major choice explains a substantive portion of gender wage gaps for the college educated above and beyond simply controlling for occupation. Collectively, our results highlight the importance of understanding gender differences in pre-labor market human capital specialization and the mapping between college major and occupational sorting when studying the evolution of gender differences in labor market outcomes over time.

Future generations of workers can invest in education and avoid the negative consequences of trade openness for low-skilled workers. We exploit variation in exposure to import penetration shocks across space in the United States to show that greater exposure (i) deteriorated labor market conditions for workers without a college education and (ii) increased overall college enrollment, while (iii) the increase in enrollment was entirely driven by students in richer households. To analyze the welfare implications of the effects of trade openness on college enrollment, we propose a dynamic multi-region model of international trade with heterogeneous agents. The model features incomplete credit markets and costly endogenous skill acquisition by new cohorts of workers. We calibrate the model to match trends in aggregate trade data for the United States between the late 1980s and 2010, and differential exposure to import penetration across regions in 1990. A decline in import barriers generates increased college enrollment and positive welfare gains for all workers in the long-run. However, these gains are concentrated on workers with a college education, whose welfare gains are twice as large as those of non-college workers. While all workers in the manufacturing sector lose from grater trade openness, a small number of college educated workers in manufacturing with low wealth experience the greatest losses. Increasing college enrollment for new cohorts over time plays a crucial role in allowing new generation of workers to escape the potential welfare losses form trade. However, low-wealth/low-income generations of households take the longest to acquire skills. They are therefore the last to experience positive gains from trade openness, and in some cases may not realize any gains within a life-time.

Black men born in the Cotton South during the turn of the twentieth century attended school for three and half fewer years relative to their white counterparts. In this article, I examine whether economic fluctuations contributed to blacks receiving 50 percent less schooling than whites. Using US Census data, I find a positive correlation between black school attendance and cotton production. The attendance rates of white children are unaffected by changes in cotton production. Using features of the Southern agricultural economy, I show credit constraints drives the positive correlation between school attendance and cotton production for black households.

Purpose Because segregation may shield blacks from discrimination as well as increase their exposure to concentrated poverty, its net impact on the mental well-being of black Americans is unclear. We investigated the intersection between segregation, neighborhood poverty, race, and psychological well-being. Methods Using data from the nationally representative 2008–2013 National Health Interview Survey merged with U.S. Census data, we examined the association between black–white metropolitan segregation (D-index and P-index) and psychological distress (a binary indicator based on the Kessler 6 score ≥ 13) for blacks and whites. Furthermore, we assessed whether neighborhood poverty explains and/or modifies the association. Logistic regression models were estimated separately for blacks and whites as well as for each segregation index. Results Higher D- and P-indices were associated with higher odds of psychological distress for blacks. Neighborhood poverty explained some, but not all, of the association. In models that allowed for the impact of metropolitan segregation to vary by neighborhood poverty, higher segregation was found to be detrimental for blacks who resided in high poverty neighborhoods but not for those living in low poverty neighborhoods. We found no evidence that segregation impacts the mental health of whites—either detrimentally or beneficially—regardless of neighborhood poverty level. Conclusions The impact of segregation differs by neighborhood poverty and race. The psychological harm of structural racism, resulting in segregation and concentrated poverty, is not additive but multiplicative, reflecting a “triple jeopardy” for blacks, whereby their mental health is detrimentally impacted by the compounded effects of both neighborhood distress and racial segregation.

A blog post using NHGIS data to illuminate a family diary.

Over the past two years, the Trump administration has taken steps to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for  nearly all of the 318,000 immigrants that the program protects. These immigrants’ futures—as well as those of their families—are in limbo as legal challenges to the termination make their way through the courts. The vast majority—94 percent—of these immigrants . . .

Why do freeways affect the spatial organization of the economy? We identify freeway disamenities in urban areas and quantify their effects. First, freeways had negative effects on central neighborhoods but positive effects on suburban neighborhoods. These diverging patterns identify freeway disamenities in a theory where disamenities outweigh minimal access benefits near downtown, but superior access benefits outweigh disamenities on the periphery. Second, in a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model, the welfare costs of freeway disamenities are large, and one-third of the causal effect of freeways on central-city decline can be attributed to quality of life effects. Third, barrier effects are significant and a major factor in the disamenity value of living near a freeway. Disamenities from freeways, as opposed to their regional accessibility benefits, had large effects on the spatial structure of cities, suburbanization, and welfare.

Modern medical research requires access to patient-level data of significant detail and volume. In this context, privacy concerns and legal requirements demand careful consideration. Data anonymization, which means that data is transformed to reduce privacy risks, is an important building block of data protection concepts. However, common methods of data anonymization often fail to protect data against inference of sensitive attribute values (also called attribute disclosure). Measures against such attacks have been developed, but it has been argued that they are of little practical relevance, as they involve significant data transformations which reduce output data utility to an unacceptable degree. In this article, we present an experimental study of the degree of protection and impact on data utility provided by different approaches for protecting biomedical data from attribute disclosure. We quantified the utility and privacy risks of datasets that have been protected using different anonymization methods and parameterizations. We put the results into relation with trivial baseline approaches, visualized them in the form of risk-utility curves and analyzed basic statistical properties of the sensitive attributes (e.g. the skewness of their distribution). Our results confirm that it is difficult to protect data from attribute disclosure, but they also indicate that it can be possible to achieve reasonable degrees of protection when appropriate methods are chosen based on data characteristics. While it is hard to give general recommendations, the approach presented in this article and the tools that we have used can be helpful for deciding how a given dataset can best be protected in a specific usage scenario.

A large body of evidence suggests that intergenerational mobility in the United States has declined over the past 150 years. However, research that finds high relative mobility in America's past is based on data with few or no black families, and therefore does not account for the limited opportunities available for African Americans. Moreover, historical studies often measure the father's economic status with error, which biases estimates towards greater mobility. Using new early 20 th century data, I show that the persistence of economic status from father to son is over twice as strong after accounting for racial disparities and for measurement error. After addressing these two issues, I estimate that relative mobility has increased over the 20 th century. The results imply that there is greater equality of opportunity today than in the early 20 th century, mostly because opportunity was never that equal.. Thanks to Katherine Eriksson for providing help for testing the robustness to alternative linking methods, and to Lee Alston for helping me to gain access to the historical census files. All errors are my own.

In this study, the analysis examines how variations in parental influence shape private school enrollment among children in blended families. The results show that investment in private schooling for children is higher in families with notable parental income differences than in families with parents with similar incomes. Net of these factors, however, parents in nuclear families are more likely to invest in the provision of private schooling compared to parents in blended families. In blended families, the analysis underscores the significance of two dimensions of biological relatedness for developing nuanced understandings of inequalities among children. On average, parents in these families make greater investments in the provision of private schooling for their shared biological children than for their stepchildren, broadly defined. Disaggregating stepchildren based on their own biological ties with parents, however, reveals substantially higher investments in private schooling for stepchildren biologically related to household heads than for either shared biological children or other stepchildren. The advantage of stepchildren with biological ties to household heads is more pronounced in families where household heads earn more than their spouses. However, it remains statistically significant even when the opposite is true.

Over the past 50 years, occupational segregation by gender has markedly declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the decennial censuses and the National Longitudinal Surveys from 1967 to 2013 to explore how trends over time in the occupational gender composition of women’s jobs vary according to educational attainment. The paper also examines the relative contributions of inter-generational and intra-generational occupational mobility to changes in occupational gender composition over time for high school educated women and women with a bachelor’s degree. The findings indicate that for women with a bachelor’s degree, declines in the likelihood of working in a female dominated occupation are primarily due to changes across cohorts. High school educated women experience smaller changes across cohorts but are more likely than women with a bachelor’s degree to move to gender integrated occupations over the course of their careers. Fixed effects models show that the changes over the life course reflect changes in the gender composition of individual women’s occupations rather than changes in the composition of the labor force. Both occupational mobility across and within broad groups of occupations contribute to changes in the occupational gender composition for high school educated women; for women with a bachelor’s degree, mobility across broad groups of occupations is most important.

Changes to malpractice liability laws intended to decrease the liability of physicians and other medical providers have an ambiguous potential effect on overall health care spending (and the federal budget). Some providers may respond by performing fewer procedures that were undertaken mainly to avoid liability, whereas other providers may pursue more risky procedures and patients. This paper reviews the recent literature on the effect of changes in traditional liability laws on health care spending and presents new analyses of how such changes affect Medicare, Medicaid, and other spending. The available evidence indicates that such changes have an uncertain effect on Medicare spending, and they decrease by a small amount the spending of privately insured patients and some Medicaid patients. The Congressional Budget Office is incorporating those assessments into its updated modeling of the budgetary effects of changes in traditional liability laws.

The commentary provides a set of considerations and some examples for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) programmes that wish to use geospatial data. Monitoring RMNCAH data trends or change over time and estimating disease burden remain major challenges due to limited reliable geolocated data sources, inconsistent spatial denominators and technical capacity needs. Increased availability of spatial data, such as satellite imagery and geolocated survey and facility data, coupled with recent methodological refinements, has created new opportunities for use of geographic information systems to achieve spatial disaggregation of RMNCAH data and highlights subnational monitoring among vulnerable populations. More refined geospatial analyses can help to close the gap for countries with high maternity-related deaths and suffering.