There has been little discussion in the literature about the consequences of using standardized (versus unstandardized) segregation measures when comparing societies with different demographic compositions. To measure the segregation of a group in a multigroup setting, this paper develops standardized local segregation indices, which show a maximum value of 1 when the group is fully segregated, and links these measures with existing standardized overall segregation measures. Our research not only allows for enhancement of the local segregation approach-offering new measures and evaluating them against basic properties-but also provides a better understanding of existing standardized overall measures. To illustrate its value, this paper offers estimates of the occupational segregation of white women in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas using standardized and unstandardized segregation measures. This permits us to identify metropolitan areas that would have gone unnoticed if only one of these two approaches had been employed.

Over the past 30 years highly educated workers in the United States have become increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of cities. This paper uses qualitative interviews to understand the process by which graduates of elite colleges decide where to live following graduation. It shows that many graduates are indifferent about exactly where they live, and find themselves funneled towards certain cities based on geographically uneven access to two key types of information. Facilitative information eases the job search process, enabling graduates to find and obtain opportunities they want, while formative information helps them determine what they want in the first place. Graduates’ position in social structure—in particular their past experiences and personal networks—affects their exposure to both types of information in ways that strongly influence where they end up and on occasion even overcome their stated location preferences. This geographically uneven access to information supplies one mechanism leading to the spatial concentration . . .

How does a person’s race and ancestry responses link to their choice of spouse and the racial identification of their children? Does the answer to this question vary by context? Does it vary across different mixed-heritage groups? We focus here on comparing various measures of “context” and how each measure speaks to individuals’ self-identification, spouse choice, and child identification. We use the race and ancestry questions within Census data from 1980, 1990, 2000, and the American Community Survey to focus on mixed heritage American Indian/White, Asian/White, and Black/White individuals. We start with “context” as the shared history and culture of contiguous areas and show variation patterns in responses by census division. We then show the same statistics based on a “context” measure that takes into account county population composition (e.g., race and ethnicity, living arrangements, % in poverty), population density, and county race history.

Although nearly 1 in 5 persons in the United States has a physical or mental disability, little is known about the association of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) with health insurance coverage among persons with a disability. Medicaid expansion appeared to be associated with lower uninsurance rates and higher Medicaid and private insurance coverage for persons with a disability. This study’s findings suggest that the reduction in the uninsured rate and gains in Medicaid coverage were greater for persons without a disability than for persons with a disability.

This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent binge drinking on later- life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information on state and year of birth to identify individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence and tracks the evolving impacts into middle age. We find that ZT Laws led to significant improvements in later-life health. Individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence were substantially less likely to suffer from cognitive and physical limitations in their 40s. The health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes. These patterns cannot be attributed to changes in educational attainment or marriage. Instead, we find that affected cohorts were substantially less likely to drink heavily by middle age, suggesting an important role for adolescent initiation and habit-formation in affecting long-term substance use.

In 1972, the Alquist-Priolo Zoning Act provided for the publication of earthquake fault maps in California. I exploit revisions in these official maps over time to estimate the rate of capitalization of seismic risk into property values using a difference-in-differences framework. Using geographically consistent data from 1970 to 2010 at the census tract level, I find that on average property values decline by 6.6 percent after the delineation of the fault zone, while rents decline by around 3.3 percent. I also examine the risk gradient and heterogeneity in willingness to pay using individual sales transactions, assessors' records, and publicly available mortgage data for the City of Los Angeles. The analysis of micro transactions data from 1997 to 2016 reveals that, on average, house prices increase by 1.8 percent for a one-mile increase in distance from the fault zone. The evidence also indicates that holding income and gender constant, Blacks and Hispanics are less willing than Whites to trade other forms of consumption to avoid earthquake risk.

We explore whether fetal and postnatal exposure to tropical cyclones affects education and income in adulthood by using World War I draft records linked to census data. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that white males born in hurricane-prone US states who experienced a hurricane in utero or as infants had 5% lower income. Labor force participation was unaffected, while education and migration account for a small portion of the effects on income. Empirical tests suggest the persistent impact of damage is an unlikely channel. Thus, we attribute the findings to lower health capital stemming from temporary disruption in the aftermath of storms.

This paper examines employment outcomes of immigrant workers in the United States and their variations by the locations of residence and employment. Using data from the Census’s American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), this paper finds that that employed immigrants have improved economic outcomes (as measured by log income) and employment outcomes (occupational-level income) when they work in high-immigrant labor markets (defined as MSA), but not necessarily live in high immigrant census tracts. This work contributes to the literature on immigrant employment outcomes at a national level and aims to shift the conversation from focusing exclusively on residential location, to one in which the relative locations and characteristics of residential and work locations may be jointly considered as important to the success of immigrants in the United States.

Parents spend a significant amount of time and income on raising chil- dren. Existing literature shows that parental unemployment has detrimental long-term effects on child development. My study focuses on the short-term impact of unemployed parents in their time investment. Using an instru- mental variable approach and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I study if individuals who were laid-off or have been unemployed reallocate the time that was spent at work by spending more time with their children. I find that when unemployed, parents spend more time with their children than looking for new employment opportunities in the short-run. The short- run effects of unemployment are opposite of long-run effects and favorable for children. This behavior is consistent among all races and sexes.

The 1862 Homestead Act provided free land conditional on five years of residency and cultivation to settlers of the American West. In total, the Act granted 10% of the land in the United States to 1.6 million individuals. This study examines the impact of the Act on long-run development. Using spatial regression discontinuity and instrumental variable designs, we find that areas with greater historical exposure to homesteading are poorer and more rural today. The impact on development is not only driven through differences in the urban share of the population; cities in homesteading areas are less developed and non-agricultural sectors are less productive. Using newly geo-referenced historical census data, we document the path of divergence starting from the initial settlement. We find that homesteading regions were slower to transition out of agriculture. The historical and empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the transitory distortions caused by the Act’s residency and cultivation requirements induced selection on settlers’ comparative advantage in agriculture. This, in turn, inhibited the development of non-agricultural sectors and the subsequent benefits of agglomeration.

Foster families constitute a crucial input into foster care services. In this paper, a household choice model is built to examine why households choose to be foster parents. The model is motivated by the inability of classical altruism models to explain important facts about foster families and children. In the model, children are costly and foster families get value from taking care of foster children through the human capital of the foster child. The model links a household's decision to foster to their own fertility and wage and makes predictions about which households have the highest willingness to foster based on these factors. The model's predictions find strong support in the data through instrumental variable strategies and the model is able to rationalize many of the motivating facts. A simple form of the model is jointly estimated to more directly compare and quantify the mechanisms. Sending the price of biological children to infinity induces four times more foster families while sending the time cost of foster children to 0 induces 50% more families families. The model and data suggest that foster children are not perfect substitutes for biological children. Alternative theories are discussed in the context of the data and empirical results.

We propose a historical tour around Digital Humanities, from its early steps in the fifties decade to our days, that is to say, its past, present and future: the milestones and prominent aspects that have marked its evolution, whose more important event has been the Digital Humanities Manifest, subscribed in Paris in 2013, and the challenges and difficulties it must confront, especially in the hispanic world. We analyze its meeting points with the Geographical Information System, and provide relevant examples able to favor and interpret the origin of the Press in the Early Modern Age. The Rome Gaceta, pressed in Valencia in Felipe Mey's printing press, between 1618 and 1620, is the reference point -as a truly serial and transnational publication- that will allow to obtain a new pan-european interpretation picture in order to make possible a future cartographical and digital representation of networks, flows, nodes and the dissemination of news in Early Modern Age.

We study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20–45 in the USA, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete-choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring first birth is significantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC (Women, Infants & Children) food benefits during pregnancy, prepregnancy obesity, and the mother working in “education, training, and library” occupations; whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certificate, all our findings are muted. A summer first birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the USA. Among married women aged 20–45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade-off 560 grams of birth weight in the normal range to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp (percentage points) increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth.

We use a new dataset on 29,416 households residing in public housing as of the 1940 Census to analyze demographic and socioeconomic variation between African American- and white-headed households at the national and regional level of the US. Nationally, African American-headed households had a lower median income and a higher proportion of employed heads than white-headed households. Educational attainment was mixed, with a higher proportion of African American householders having less than an 8th grade and more than a high school education than white householders. Regional patterns of employment and educational attainment mirror national patterns. Median income for African American-headed households, however, was higher in the Northeast and lower in the Midwest and South than white-headed households. These results suggest that African Americans had to meet a higher bar, especially with respect to employment and, to a lesser degree, educational attainment, than whites to be selected for public housing.

in the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides?

Health insurance coverage expanded substantially in the United States after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014; between 2013 and 2016, the number of uninsured people fell by 18.5 million (Skopec, Holahan, and Elmendorf 2018). Those gains in coverage are distributed unevenly across states, depending in part on states’ decisions to expand Medicaid. Beginning in 2017, however, coverage gains have stalled, and recent evidence finds a slight increase in the number of uninsured nationally (Skopec, Holahan, and Elmendorf 2019). Policymakers in New Mexico, like those in many other states, are looking for ways to build on the ACA to stabilize and increase coverage for their constituents. To help with those efforts, we examine the characteristics of uninsured New Mexicans, highlighting populations that could benefit from targeted policies.

The first essay of the dissertation investigates whether earnings inequality prevailing within a narrowly defined occupation helps predict how hard a person will work on a random day on his job. To the degree that inequality within occupation is found to influence work effort, I also investigate the possible asymmetry in the effects of earnings inequality on work effort. I document that more unequally paying occupations motivate workers to work harder on the job. I also find that, in line with predictions of tournament model, it is the inequality above, rather than below, the median of the earnings distribution that helps motivate the average salaried worker to expend greater work effort. The second essay documents that men and women respond differently to competitive-based incentives in the form of potential earnings prospects. I find that whereas a male worker’s effort is driven by potentially better earnings prospects in the form of greater upper-half inequality within his occupation, the average salaried female worker is motivated to work harder when she faces potentially inferior earnings prospects in the form of wider lower-tail inequality in her occupation. I also revisit the sources of unexplained racial gaps in work effort documented by Hamermesh et al. (2017) and find that a minority male worker underinvests in work effort because he does not respond to the labor market competitive incentives prevailing in his occupation at par with the average majority male worker. Had the average minority worker responded to better earnings prospects in the form of upper-tail inequality and greater expected earnings within his occupation similarly to majority male workers, there would be no such gap observed. The third essay evaluates the effectiveness of public schooling funds use over time and across states. I exploit variations in the state-level effectiveness scores and educational outcomes to document that statewide policies such as statewide requirements for public school teacher certification and greater opportunity of school choice are positively associated with the greater effectiveness of public school funds. I also find that states with more unequal distribution of public school funds are less efficient in achieving greater student outcomes.

Purpose This paper aims to identify the diffusion patterns, especially the communication channels, in the diffusion and adoption of research data management services (RDMS) among libraries. Design/methodology/approach Literature about the RDMS in individual libraries was gathered and analyzed. Data relevant to the research questions were extracted and analyzed. Findings Early adopters conduct much original research to create RDMS and they often serve as change agents in diffusing their RDMS and related innovations to other libraries. In contrast, late adopters usually learn from early adopters and use their innovations for establishing their own RDMS. Communication channels used in diffusing RDMS deviate slightly from those reported in general diffusion of innovations (DOI) theories. Research limitations/implications Gathered literature provides incomplete and uneven information for RDMS adopters. This makes it difficult to identify adopter categories and test many generalizations in DOI theories. To overcome these limitations, surveys and interviews will be conducted in the future. Originality/value Findings from this project contribute to general DOI theories because RDMS is unique compared with many other innovations. The diffusion of RDMS is a decentralized process that involves a high-degree of reinvention and it involves the generation and diffusion of many relevant innovations. The project also identified scholarly communication and inter-organization networks as new types of communication channels that are not well accounted for in existing DOI theories.

Income and wealth inequality in the United States, especially across racial and ethnic groups, is dramatic and persistent. While income is often used by researchers, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers to describe local economic conditions and drive policy decisions, it also increasingly is recognized as an inadequate indicator of economic well-being, mobility, and security. Wealth is generally less volatile than income, and it provides a store of resources that gives families security during emergencies and allows them to secure advantages that foster the well-being of the next generation. The findings in this report from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey reveal major disparities in wealth accumulation and income across various racial and ethnic groups in metropolitan Miami. The NASCC survey was developed to fill a void in existing national data sets that rarely collect data disaggregated by specific national origin in a localized context. The NASCC survey collects detailed data on assets and debts among subpopulations, according to race, ethnicity, and country of origin. The NASCC instrument measures the range and extent of asset and debt holdings, not just by broadly defined groups (e.g. whites, blacks, Latinxs and Asians), but by racial and ethnic groups partitioned by more refined categories of ancestral origin (e.g. whites, U.S. descendant blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, South Americans, and other Latinxs). This type of disaggregation allows for a more specific examination of variations in asset holdings both across and within broadly defined racial and . . .

I use the Survey of Earned Doctorates to study effects of two ``American Competitiveness Acts'' on foreign doctoral recipients' job relatedness. The Acts resulted in the increase in the working-visa cap, and the creation of an uncapped visa category for non-profit organizations (e.g., universities). Results suggest visa policy changes under American Competitiveness Acts increased foreign doctoral recipients' job relatedness, which was further associated with the rise in university employment among foreign doctorates. The main findings are robust to changes to specification or sample, and other possible mechanisms (e.g., selection on the field of study) are unlikely to explain the findings.