In these essays, I study the effects of prenatal or early life access to public programs on subsequent health outcomes, employing quasi-experimental research settings derived from several exogenous changes in public policies: (1) the Unborn Child Option of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), (2) the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009, and (3) the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the United States. We use data on infectious disease deaths from all reporting U.S. cities to describe regional patterns in the decline of urban infectious mortality from 1900 to 1948. We report three main results. First, urban infectious mortality was higher in the South in every year from 1900 to 1948. Second, infectious mortality declined later in southern cities than in cities in the other regions. Third, comparatively high infectious mortality in southern cities was driven primarily by extremely high infectious mortality among African Americans. From 1906 to 1920, African Americans in cities experienced a rate of death from infectious disease that was greater than what urban whites experienced during the 1918 flu pandemic.

The literature on scal federalism usually argues that policies involving income reallocation should be administered by the highest level of government. This argument , however, neglects a uniformity constraint, which limits regional variation in its tax and welfare policies. Our paper explores the extent to which income support for poor households varies across US states due to the interaction between the federal government's uniformity constraint and regional variations in local economic conditions and the net transfer policies of state governments. Our results are based on a simulation of the combined response of federal and state net transfers to a pre-tax earnings shock. They point to large dierences in the level of insurance against income shocks experienced by households with low incomes in dierent states.

Do Black children have natural disadvantages in school because most are from single-parent homes? Several years ago, before his conviction forsexual assault, comedian and actor. Bill Cosby, chided the “apathy“ he observed among Black parents (Roberts, 2007). He, like many others, believes that the fading presence ofthe Black nuclear family places Black children at a social disadvantage, and creates a burden on society. The link between father absence and community dissonance among Black . . .

In 2006, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed a sweeping health reform into law that offered new consumer protections, subsidies for purchasing health insurance, and expanded access to MassHealth (the Massachusetts Medicaid program). The reform also established individual and employer insurance mandates, requiring that all residents of the state obtain health insurance coverage or face a penalty. Finally, this law created the Massachusetts Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, an independent public agency tasked with creating and maintaining a marketplace for state residents to obtain affordable private insurance plans. The successful implementation of the 2006 Massachusetts health reform led to it serving as the framework for the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). This holistic attempt to extend health insurance coverage to all Commonwealth residents had a large, immediate impact, halving the number of uninsured working adults in one year (Doonan and Tull 2010). Over the past decade, the percentage of uninsured in Massachusetts has declined from just over four percent in 2008 to under three percent in 2017. Importantly, the rate of decrease in uninsurance has slowed, and the number of uninsured increased from 2016 to 2017. While the uninsurance rate in Massachusetts is the lowest in the United States, the recent stagnation in the uninsurance rate suggests the need for novel policy strategies addressing the remaining uninsured.

This study examines the magnitude and sources of regional wage inequality in the United States. The authors find that, as in the nation as a whole, wage inequality has increased in nearly every metropolitan area since the early 1980s, though there is significant variation among places in both the degree of wage inequality and the pace at which it has risen. The most unequal places tend to be large urban areas that have benefited from strong demand for skill and agglomeration economies, with these factors leading to particularly rapid wage growth for high-skilled workers. The least unequal places tend to have seen weak demand for labor, largely as a consequence of technological change and globalization, and this weakness has led to lackluster wage growth across the entire wage distribution— particularly for middle- and lower-skilled workers. These findings suggest that a relatively low level of regional wage inequality is often the result of a weakening local economy, while relatively high regional wage inequality is often a consequence of strong but uneven economic growth.

We briefly review the main motivations behind recent calls for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the United States and the main features of some current UBI proposals. We then argue that a UBI would be extremely expensive and yet do very little to reduce inequality or advance opportunity and social mobility. We argue that instead of a UBI, the federal government should pursue a pro-work strategy of income support, paying wage subsidies to low-wage workers along with targeted transfer benefits consisting of both cash and near-cash types of support paid to the most needy individuals and households.

While adverse local labor market shocks such as those induced by increased exposure of local industries to trade have unambiguously negative effects on workers’ employment prospects, the impact on high school enrollment and completion is ambiguous. Incentives to stay in school increase when employment prospects are weak; yet, public resources for local schools may also shrink, with cutbacks negatively impacting high school degree attainment. How large are the enrollment effects at the high school level? And, does increased time in school translate to high school degree attainment? This paper demonstrates that, while high school enrollment rates increase significantly, high school degree attainment does not show commensurate growth. Diploma counts relative to the population indicate only a modest increase, while the share of young adults with a high school degree in a community does not change. The correspondence between high school enrollment and diploma receipt of young adults reflects important measurement issues, as “outmigration” of young adults and changes in the timing of degree receipt may complicate measurement. Moreover, the negative impact of trade exposure on secondary school resources per student operates in the opposite direction of enrollment demand, likely attenuating gains in attainment and student achievement.

The paper examines the relationship between education and type 2 diabetes prevalence among four cohorts at ages 60-64 (born 1935-39, 1940-44, 1945-49, and 1950-54). The analysis involves logistic regressions and Fairlie decomposition analysis to measure the effect changing educational composition across these cohorts. First, results indicate a stable effect of education on diabetes prevalence across cohorts, that is, the education gradient did not change. Persons with higher levels of education (a bachelor degree) were less likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than persons with lower levels of education, for each cohort. Second, a changing educational composition, that is, increases from one cohort to the next, affected the level of diabetes prevalence. Later cohorts experienced greater levels of educational attainment, and these higher attainments resulted in lower diabetes prevalence than would have been the case if there had been no educational expansion.

Cities play a central role in human civilization. The idea of a “metropolitan area” is a concept of geographically adjacent cites forming an economy which is larger than the political boundaries of cities. In later discussions, a “city” denotes a ”metropolitan area” instead of a “city” in conventional ideas. This study focuses on 283 major metropolitan areas in the United States in 2011 and investigates the local quality of business, life, and wider implications of the two measures in this country based on the model of Albouy (2008), Chen and Rosenthal (2018), and Gabriel and Rosenthal (2004). This research is also an update to previous literature ranking city amenities from 1970 to 1994. The result suggests emerging metropolitan areas, such as Northern New Jersey, San Jose, Ventura-Oxnard-Simi Valley, etc., located in outskirts of super cities like New York City and San Francisco, having been preferred by businesses, have now developed to be big cities which provide extraordinary consumption and productive business amenities at the same time. In addition, the study fnds out that in the latest decade, individuals, regardless their ages, would mostly prefer to move to cities with higher qualities of life. In terms of education and marital status, the result indicates that there are specifcally more “power couples” (Costa and Kahn, 2008), preferring to migrate to cities with better life quality than “non-power couples”.

This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child-, mother-, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework that may be used in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these five countries—comparable, in size, to the effects of mother’s illiteracy and a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and logistic regressions predict stunting as accurately (out-of-sample) as machine learning methods that are not interpretable. Taken together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a datadriven approach may contribute to the design of policies that mitigate the impact of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

This dissertation explores questions in political economy and in development economics. I ask and answer two research questions.First, I look at whether peaceful or violent protests are more effective atsteering policy change. I study this question in the context of the US CivilRights Era, and evaluate the effects of protests on legislator votes in theUS House. I use a fixed-effects specification, and find that peaceful protestscaused a liberal shift and therefore were effective from the point of view ofthe Civil Rights Movement but violent protests caused a conservative shiftand therefore backfired.Second, I look at whether the structure of social networks in rural West-ern Kenya is affected by a large development intervention. In joint work with Robert Garlick and Kate Orkin, we evaluate the effects of a large unconditional cash transfer and a psychological intervention. We cross-randomize villages into these two interventions, and measure household interactions infour types of networks: talking about goals, talking about challenges, givingmoney or goods, and receiving money or goods. We estimate effects on total link counts, measures of homophily, and measures of link intensity

For most households in the United States a car is vital not only for physical mobility but also for economic mobility. Car access improves families’ economic outcomes in a variety of ways. In the short term, having a car provides access to more and better job opportunities and expanded affordable housing options. In the long term, research has shown shorter commute times, which are often possible only with a car, to be one of the strongest factors in helping families escape poverty.1 Transportation has a stronger role in social mobility than other community characteristics, including elementary school test scores, percentage of two-parent families, or crime.2 In addition to shorter commute times, access to a car often means access to childhood extracurricular opportunities, better food options, and medical care in most areas of the country. Given the importance of cars, it is deeply concerning that a number of analyses have shown that the costs of buying, financing, and using a car vary based on the consumer’s race or ethnicity. These studies have shown . . .

Using new estimates of state-level public opinion, I explore the relationship between support for increased education spending and statewide per-pupil expenditures from 1986 to 2013. In the 1980s, there was a modest, positive relationship between public opinion and actual spending: States with greater support for increased education spending tended to have slightly higher per pupil expenditures. Over the next three decades, this relationship reversed. States with relatively low per-pupil expenditures tended to increase their spending at a slower rate despite steady growth in support for more spending. As a result, public opinion and education spending became inversely related. By the end of the time series, states with greater support for increased education spending tended to spend less per pupil. The changing distribution of local, state, and federal sources of education spending partially explains this pattern. As federal education expenditures rose, some states spent proportionally less from state and local sources, resulting in smaller overall spending increases in those states.

Many of the positive economic trends coming out of the Civil Rights Era for black men stagnated or reversed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These changes were concurrent with a rapid rise in import competition from Japan. We assess the impact of this trade shock on racial disparities using commuting zone level variation in exposure. We find it decreased black manufacturing employment, labor force participation, and median earnings, and increased public assistance recipiency. However these manufacturing losses for blacks were offset by increased white manufacturing employment. This compositional shift appears to have been caused by skill upgrading in the manufacturing sector. Losses were concentrated among black high school dropouts and gains among college educated whites. We also see a shifting of manufacturing employment towards professionals, engineers, and college educated production workers. We find no evidence the heterogeneous effects of import competition can be explained by unionization, prejudice, or changes in spatial mismatch. Our results can explain 66-86% of the relative decrease in black manufacturing employment, 17-23% of the relative rise in black non-labor force participation, and 34-44% of the relative decline in black median male earnings from 1970-1990.

Education is Special Students who are supposed to be “gifted” get first-rate classrooms with bright motivational and educational posters on the walls, live examples to supplement instruction, current textbooks with colorful illustrations, and teachers with advanced degrees. Students who are supposed to be “learning challenged” get dilapidated classrooms, no stimulation beyond basic instruction and behavior management, and dated worksheets instead of textbooks. If a student is already gifted, why do they need extra stuff to support their education? If a student has learning challenges, why don’t we supplement and enrich, instead of compromising, their . . .

The unprecedented availability of geospatial data and technologies is driving innovation and discovery but not without the risk of losing focus on the geographic foundations of space and place in this vast “cyber sea” of data and technology. There is a pressing need to educate a new generation of scientists and citizens who understand how space and place matter in the real world and who understand and can keep pace with technological advancements in the computational world. We define cyberliteracy for GIScience (cyberGIScience literacy) and outline eight core areas that serve as a framework for establishing the essential abilities and foundational knowledge necessary to navigate and thrive in this new technologically rich world. The core areas are arranged to provide multiple dimensions of learning ranging from a technological focus to a problem solving focus or a focus on GIScience or computational science. We establish a competency matrix as a means of assessing and evaluating levels of cyberGIScience literacy across the eight core areas. We outline plans to catalyze the collaborative development and sharing of instructional materials to embed cyberGIScience literacy in the classroom and begin to realize a cyberliterate citizenry and academe.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the association between alcohol consumption and mortality risk and what impact the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act (NMDAA) had on the mortality risk for the cohorts pre-1963 and post-1963. Methods: Descriptive and logistic regression analyses were conducted using data (analytic sample: 505,662) from the public-use NHIS-LMF, 2001 - 2009. Mortality status is treated as a binary outcome variable, and the main predictor variable is alcohol consumption behavior. Results: Results indicate that individuals who had drinking habits (former and heavy drinkers) in the earlier cohort had increased risk of death in the follow-up period compared to the later cohort with similar levels of alcohol consumption. Conclusion: The enactment of NMDAA in 1984 showed lowered mortality risk for adults coming of age after its implementation. Reinforcement of NMDAA and other evidence-based prevention efforts are instrumental to reduce alcohol consumption related mortality risks.

Objective/Study Question To examine changes in uninsurance rates among U.S. adolescents ages 12‐17 and assess whether trends over time differed by citizenship status, Latino ethnicity, and household language. Data Sources/Study Setting 2007‐2016 National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS). Study Design Multivariable logistic regression and postestimation marginal effects were used to assess changes in the current uninsured rate. Logistic regression models were used to determine significant trends over time for each demographic group and compare them to trends in the broader adolescent population. Marginal effects were employed to calculate adjusted outcome probabilities for each year. Principal Findings Across all 12‐ to 17‐year‐olds, the unadjusted uninsured rate dropped significantly between 2007 and 2016, from 10.2 percent to 6.0 percent. For noncitizen youth, the probability of being uninsured increased from 26.6 percent in 2007 to 28.4 percent in 2016, after controlling for covariates. Latino youth and those in Spanish‐speaking households saw declines in their adjusted uninsurance rate that was proportional to non‐Latino and English‐speaking youth. Conclusions Most adolescents saw significant improvements in health insurance coverage between 2007 and 2016; however, disparities remain among Spanish‐speaking and Latino adolescents and no improvements were seen among noncitizen youth. This suggests a need for equity‐focused eligibility, outreach, and enrollment policies that expand insurance options for these populations.

This article provides a rich longitudinal portrait of the financial and social resources available in the school districts of high- and low-income students in the United States from 1990 to 2014. Combining multiple publicly available data sources for most school districts in the United States, we document levels and gaps in school district financial resources—total per-pupil expenditures—and social resources—local rates of adult educational attainment, family structure, and adult unemployment—available to the average public school student at a variety of income levels over time. In addition to using eligibility for the National School Lunch Program as a blunt measure of student income, we estimate resource inequalities between income deciles to analyze resource gaps between affluent and poor children. We then examine the relationship between income segregation and resource gaps between the school districts of high- and low-income children. In previous work, the social context of schooling has been a theoretical but unmeasured mechanism through which income segregation may operate to create unequal opportunities for children. Our results show large and, in some cases, growing social resource gaps in the districts of high- and low-income students nationally and provide evidence that these gaps are exacerbated by income segregation. Conversely, per-pupil funding became more compensatory between high- and low-income students’ school districts over this period, especially in highly segregated states. However, there are early signs of reversal in this trend. The results provide evidence that school finance reforms have been somewhat effective in reducing the consequences of income segregation on funding inequities, while inequalities in the social context of schooling continue to grow.