From San Francisco’s Chinatown to Virginia Beach’s Little Manila, ethnic enclaves have become staples of Asian immigrant life across the United States. Portes and Wilson (1980) developed the enclave hypothesis, which suggests that enclaves offer unique opportunities to newly-arrived immigrants, through which they will experience relatively better socioeconomic outcomes and high [should be “higher”] returns to capital investment than those who immediately enter the mainstream American economy and can only earn low-paying jobs with little prospect for social mobility. Prior research has focused on enclave effects for the first generation; my project for Honors in Economics contributes to existing literature by focusing on the second generation. Utilizing a 2016 American Community Survey sample in California, I conduct an econometric analysis to determine the impacts of residing in an ethnic enclave on the labor market outcomes of second and beyond generation Asian Americans. My research centers on four specific Asian ethnic groups: Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, and Vietnamese. As a second generation Filipino American myself, I wanted to examine the model minority stereotype that Asians are a homogenous [I see that the online spellcheck accepts this, but I don’t! The word is “homogeneous”group with relatively high incomes. I found that, because different types of enclaves exist, and the factors that impact socioeconomic outcomes affect the Asian ethnic groups differently. Overall, the answer to my original answer is complicated, and I suggest further research should take into consideration how ethnic enclaves differ from one another in the 21st century

Many police departments in the United States have experienced affirmative action litigation designed to increase the shares of nonwhite and female police officers. This paper examines whether court-imposed affirmative action plans have impacted the rates of reported offenses and/or offenses cleared by arrest, seeking to replicate and extend Lott [2000] and McCrary [2007]. Using a series of econometric strategies, including difference-indifferences decomposition and generalized synthetic controls, we do not find a significant effect of court-imposed affirmative action plans on the rates of reported offenses or reported offenses cleared by arrest, a finding consistent with McCrary [2007]. We also consider whether unlitigated agencies change their practices due to the threat of litigation, but, like McCrary [2007], are unable to identify causal evidence of such threat effects. We suggest that future research should seek to identify the specific causal mechanisms linking agency racial composition and public safety outcomes.

This dissertation explores social equity as it applies to public transportation. Transit has long been considered a tool to alleviate inequity by limiting the effects of spatial mismatch and providing access to opportunity to disadvantaged populations. This theory, however, has not been adequately proven empirically. The first chapter of this dissertation tests the theory that spatial mismatch is moderated by quality transit service. We do this by taking a cross section of the largest urban areas in the United States and applying structural equation modeling to identify relationships between exogenous and endogenous factors. We find that higher quality transit service and compactness are associated with lower levels of unemployment, poverty, and income inequality. The second chapter of this dissertation outlines the development of a novel index for objectively measuring social equity in transit service. This methodology improves upon previous efforts to quantify equity in transit by using emerging techniques in geographic information systems (GIS) software and by incorporating a comprehensive set of index components. The third chapter explores how transit agencies plan for providing equitable transit service. We interview transit agency planners to understand the way that agencies consider equity, to determine how equity considerations are shaped by agency and federal policy, and we compare these considerations to themes in the academic literature. We find that while academic efforts have focused primarily on accessibility as the most important facet of equity in transit service, transit agency planners think of equity in a more wholistic manner. The accessibility framework, as we describe it here, is a less nuanced way to think of and plan for equity than how transit agencies are currently operating. Additionally, we attribute part of agencies’ more comprehensive construction of equity to Title VI of the Equal Rights Act of 1964. This legal framework for planning for equity is ubiquitously criticized in the academic literature for being inadequate at measuring the accessibility effects of changes to transit service. Although these claims have merit, the framework considers equity in a way that goes beyond just measuring accessibility and therefore contributes to a broader lens through which transit agencies think about and plan for equity.

The increase in detention of immigrants of African descent is, in part, a result of racial profiling, which mirrors the overrepresentation of African Americans in the criminal justice system due to mass incarceration. Failing to pay attention to the nuances of immigration law and policy and its impact on immigrants of African descent is dangerous in that it hinders a comprehensive understanding of how racism has operated in the U.S. legal system and how it continues to operate in many facets of immigration laws. This article examines the nuances at the intersection of race and immigration status. The goal is to examine the impact of recent immigration policies on immigrants of African descent in order to highlight where the law operates in furtherance of the goal preventing the blackening and browning of America. When we examine the history of immigration and its impact on immigrants of African descent, we learn how the law can amplify social norms and create a system that perpetuates tiered personhood—and how permitting discriminatory anti-immigrant laws and policies reinforces dangerous and divisive systems of oppression

Cities with cleaner power plants and lower energy demand have stricter land use restrictions; these restrictions increase housing prices and disin-centivize living in these lower polluting cities. We use a spatial equilibrium model to quantify the effect of land use restrictions on household carbon emissions. Our model features heterogeneous households, cities that vary by power plant technology and the benefits of energy usage, as well as endoge-nous wages and rents. Relaxing restrictions in California to the national median leads to a 2.3% drop in national carbon emissions. The burden of a carbon tax differs substantially across locations. JEL Classification: R13, R31, Q4

Although much attention has been paid to the influence of southern slavery on the secession crisis and subsequent Civil War, far less has been spent analyzing the complexities of how northern communities in the antebellum period addressed questions over the peculiar institution. Northerners were not simply opposed, or perhaps ambivalent, to slavery during this period. Rather, individuals and groups had various responses when confronted with the institution. This study attempts to shed new light on the various reactions to slavery from one antebellum city: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Antebellum Pittsburgh provides an excellent case study for examining diverse northern reactions to slavery, as well as how those reactions developed and changed over time. The presence of various groups, each with their own unique responses when presented with questions over slavery, allows the city to act as a microcosm for the diverse antebellum North. Pittsburgh was home to many prominent white abolitionists and a free black community, both of which contributed significantly to the western operations of the state’s Underground Railroad. Additionally, the city’s geographical location, on the forks of the Ohio River, promoted southern trade. This left many businessmen and entrepreneurs in the growing industrial city sympathetic to the struggles of southern slaveholders. Each of these groups provides a unique component to a larger, more complex, story of slavery in early America. A large quantity of primary and secondary sources demonstrates the diverse reactions to slavery in antebellum Pittsburgh, yet each fails to fit these perspectives into a larger context. To date, no major work seeks to examine these diverse voices in the Pittsburgh area nor analyzes the complex societies within which they collectively existed. This research project is an attempt to do just that. By analyzing the writings of prominent individuals in Pittsburgh, as well as speeches, newspapers, and court cases, a more coherent understanding of the community and their reactions to slavery are outlined. Although this thesis examines slavery debates in only one community, the complexities of reactions and the existence of various groups can, in some ways, reflect the northern half of the antebellum American nation.

The first-quarter 2019 edition of the Oklahoma Economist showed that net domestic migration to Oklahoma has been negative in each of the past three years (2016-18), resulting in the state’s slowest population growth since 1990. It also noted that residents with bachelor’s degrees or higher have accounted for virtually all the recent net outflow. This edition examines the recent “brain drain” from Oklahoma and compares it with past net outflows of college graduates from the state and recent experiences of nearby states. While the data show some concerning trends for Oklahoma, there also may be some silver linings.

Fishing people across the globe have experienced a fundamental restructuring of their livelihoods, commw1ities, and economies as the result of shifts to rights-based fisheries management in the past half­cenrury. The ideological underpinnings of this movement are based in neoliberalism, which is a belief system that values individualism, competition, private property, and govemance by the free market. I examine some of the long-term and latem effect of this and other significant historical transitions in the fishery-<lependent Bristol Bay region of Alaska. Relationships between humans and salmon in Bristol Bay evolved over thousands of years and inform the way that many fishing livelihoods are pursued today. In addition to these fow1dational relationships, man}' significant changes have occurred that have shocked and stressed the livelihood "fabric'' woven many interlocking threads (i.e., the sociocultural, economic, knowledge/skill, political, natural, physical building blocks needed to construct a fishing livelihood in the region). lnfonned by literature review and ethnography, I describe in detail four such changes: colonization of Bristol Bay's Indigenous peoples, industrialization of the commercial fishery, implementation of a rights-based access regime (i.e., limited entry pennit program), and the sockeye salmon price crash of the early 2000s. These effects linger today and raise questions for the future of the Bay and its fisheries, with respect to two particular issues: the ,uicertainty around the next generation of fishem1e11, and the severe loss of locally held pennits in the Bay. To address d1e former, I conducted a survey of local students to measure their perceptions of the fishing industry and of community life. The results of this survey suggest that familial fishing ties, experience in die fishery, subsistence fishing activity, and household economic dependence on commercial fishing income are strong predictors of a student's desire to be engaged in commercial fishing as an adult. I examine the second issue-the loss of locally held fishing rights since the implementation of limited entry-through the combined analysis of qualitative ethnographic data and quantitative data on commercial fishery pen11it holdings, subsistence activity, pennit holder age, and new entry trends by community and residence category. The immense loss of limited entry pem1its continues to challenge livelihoods because access to local fisheries is the foundation of not only the region's economy, but also of the shared identity, history, and culture of local people, family and social networks, and the mechanism by which fislting knowledge, skills, values, and ethics are transferred to the next generation. I suggest that policymakers and fishery managers dispense with neoliberal panaceas, and design fisheries policies that reflect the multiplicity ofworldviews held by the policy's target populations by diversifying their own means and methods for understanding fishery systems.

Asian Indians are becoming a larger share of the total U.S. population and represent nearly 20% of the Asian American subgroup. However, they are often understudied in disability research. To overcome this gap, the present paper utilized the 2012–2016 American Community Survey to conduct an exploratory and spatial analysis of disability for older Asian Indians (i.e., 60 + years of age). Results from the logit analyses revealed an increased likelihood for any disability at older ages with an odds ratio of 1.08. Meanwhile, male [OR 0.63–0.81, 95% CI], currently married [OR 0.66–0.88, 95% CI], Medicare recipients [OR 0.39–0.56, 95% CI], individuals with private insurance [OR 0.42–0.58, 95% CI], and those with higher levels of education exhibited a reduced probability for having any disability. Subsequent regression analyses with state-level variables (i.e., California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York) resulted in similar estimates. The analyses with metropolitan-level variables revealed the Illinois region (Chicago-Naperville area) exhibited a greater likelihood while the northern region of California (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and Oakland-Hayward areas) exhibited a lower likelihood for any disability. An additional semi-nonparametric model, which relaxed the assumption of a logistic distribution of the error terms, produced similar results. Further exploratory spatial analyses were conducted for the two statistically significant areas: Illinois and northern California. Results showed a high concentration of disability in the Bloomingdale, Schaumburg, Wayne, and Winfield Townships (Chicago-Naperville metropolitan division) and in Fremont and Union Cities (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara and Oakland-Hayward areas). Results from this study can better inform community health workers about the socio-economic factors related to disability and which areas to target for health and wellness interventions to improve functional mobility.

Since Weber proposed a link between Protestantism and economic growth, scholars have found evidence both for and against his theory. Those that find evidence in support of Weber’s theory explain that Protestantism affects growth through a better work ethic or investment in human capital. In this paper, I study Protestantism’s effect on economic outcomes through these two channels among German Immigrants in the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1920). I construct a sample of 1,097 individuals from the IPUMS Linked Representative Sample and identify their religious identity by region of birth. With this sample, I study the effect of Protestantism on occupational income, social mobility, and educational decisions. I also consider how sample bias and cohort effects may impact my results. In my sample, Protestants and Catholics have similar rates of occupational income growth and social mobility, and this finding is robust across subsamples and to alternative controls. There is also not a measurable difference between education decisions among children of immigrants; children of Protestant immigrants attend school at similar rates as Catholic immigrants. In fact, boys of Protestant immigrants likely attended school less frequently than boys of Catholic immigrants.

U.S. teen birth rates remain high relative to other industrialized countries. Despite extensive literature on teen mothers and their children, almost no research examines the effects of teen fertility on the rest of the mother's family. I address this gap, finding that teen birth negatively affects mothers’ younger siblings. Using several matched control methods, I find that sisters of new teenage mothers experience a 3.8 percentage-point decrease in test scores, a 7.6 percentage-point increase in grade repetition, and a 9.3 percentage-point increase high school dropout, while brothers experience a 9.2 percentage-point increase in juvenile justice system exposure.

Cluster robust models are a kind of statistical models that attempt to estimate parameters considering potential heterogeneity in treatment effects. Absent heterogeneity in treatment effects, the partial and average treatment effect are the same. When heterogeneity in treatment effects occurs, the average treatment effect is a function of the various partial treatment effects and the composition of the population of interest. The first chapter explores the performance of common estimators as a function of the presence of heterogeneity in treatment effects and other characteristics that may influence their performance for estimating average treatment effects. The second chapter examines various approaches to evaluating and improving cluster structures as a way to obtain cluster-robust models. Both chapters are intended to be useful to practitioners as a how-to guide to examine and think about their applications and relevant factors. Empirical examples are provided to illustrate theoretical results, showcase potential tools, and communicate a suggested thought process. The third chapter relates to an open-source statistical software package for the Julia language. The content includes a description for the software functionality and technical elements. In addition, it features a critique and suggestions for statistical software development and the Julia ecosystem. These comments come from my experience throughout the development process of the package and related activities as an open-source and professional software developer. One goal of the paper is to make econometrics more accessible not only through accessibility to functionality, but understanding of the code, mathematics, and transparency in implementations.

In recent years, informal housing in developing countries has received widespread attention, but researchers have largely overlooked informality in developed countries, such as the United States. In fact, many types of informal housing exist in the United States. Recently, some scholars have devoted themselves to the research of informal housing in America, including its definition, types, and causes. However, none of them use quantitative methods to examine the potential causes of informal housing. This research aims to address this issue. In my study, I chose California cities as the unit of analysis due to the large numbers of informal housing units in California. With the definition of informal housing – housing units which are not permitted by local housing regulations or codes – I calculated the share of newly-built informal housing in California cities in the 2000s using previous scholars’ methods. I then used fractional response regression models to examine the potential causes of informal housing produced from 2000 to 2010. The results reveal that informal housing arises both from the demand and the supply side. The variables on the demand side suggest that demographic factors – namely immigrants, Hispanics, and African Americans – play different roles in the production of informal housing. The lack of income on the demand side also results in informal housing. Additionally, on the supply side, the result suggests that the future housing provision and existing housing provision play an important role in the production of informal housing, while existing housing conditions, such as the share of single-family houses, is not related to informal housing production.

We estimate the causal effect of losing a father in the U.S. Civil War on children's long-run socioeconomic outcomes. Linking military records from the 2.2 million Union Army soldiers with the 1860 U.S. population Census, we track soldiers' sons into adulthood. Sons of soldiers who died had a lower a occupational income score in 1880 and were less likely to have a high-or semiskilled job as opposed to being low-skilled or farmers. Our results are robust to instrumenting paternal death with the mortality rate of the father's regiment. Effects are largely driven by the increased downward mobility of the sons of semiskilled fathers, who were more likely to become low-skilled as a result of paternal death. Prewar family wealth is a strong mitigating factor: there is no effect of losing a father in the top quartile of the wealth distribution.

Predicting the binding mode of flexible polypeptides to proteins is an important task that falls outside the domain of applicability of most small molecule and protein−protein docking tools. Here, we test the small molecule flexible ligand docking program Glide on a set of 19 non-α-helical peptides and systematically improve pose prediction accuracy by enhancing Glide sampling for flexible polypeptides. In addition, scoring of the poses was improved by post-processing with physics-based implicit solvent MM- GBSA calculations. Using the best RMSD among the top 10 scoring poses as a metric, the success rate (RMSD ≤ 2.0 Å for the interface backbone atoms) increased from 21% with default Glide SP settings to 58% with the enhanced peptide sampling and scoring protocol in the case of redocking to the native protein structure. This approaches the accuracy of the recently developed Rosetta FlexPepDock method (63% success for these 19 peptides) while being over 100 times faster. Cross-docking was performed for a subset of cases where an unbound receptor structure was available, and in that case, 40% of peptides were docked successfully. We analyze the results and find that the optimized polypeptide protocol is most accurate for extended peptides of limited size and number of formal charges, defining a domain of applicability for this approach.

The industrial revolution marked a turning point in mankind as it not only initiated an economic turn from predominantly agricultural to industrialized societies but also shaped the need for an education revolution. This was the period when most industrialized societies implemented compulsory schooling systems and created the opportunity for universal access to basic education and later medium and higher education levels. However, this did not occur at the same speed everywhere, generating divergence between countries, and subsocieties within countries, whether it was at the level of residence, gender, generation, or class. Based on a dataset developed at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital reconstructing levels of education in 5-year steps by age (5-year age groups) and sex for a large number of countries in the world, we look at the education transition from 1900 to 2015 to uncover different patterns and pathways of educational improvements that might explain the differences in the level of human capital today.

Multiple global change drivers are increasing the present and future novelty of environments and ecological communities. However, most assessments of environmental novelty have focused only on future climate and were conducted at scales too broad to be useful for land management or conservation. Here, using historical county‐level data sets of agricultural land use, forest composition, and climate, we conduct a regional‐scale assessment of environmental novelty for Wisconsin landscapes from ca. 1890 to 2012. Agricultural land‐use data include six cropland types, livestock densities for four livestock species, and human populations. Forestry data comprise biomass‐weighted relative abundances for 15 tree genera. Climate data comprise seasonal means for temperature and precipitation. We found that forestry and land use are the strongest cause of environmental novelty (NoveltyForest = 3.66, NoveltyAg = 2.83, NoveltyClimate = 1.60, with Wisconsin's forests transformed by early 20th‐century logging and its legacies and multiple waves of agricultural innovation and obsolescence. Climate change is the smallest contributor to contemporary novelty, with precipitation signals stronger than temperature. Magnitudes and causes of environmental novelty are strongly spatially patterned, with novelty in southern Wisconsin roughly twice that in northern Wisconsin. Forestry is the most important cause of novelty in the north, land use and climate change are jointly important in the southwestern Wisconsin, and land use and forest composition are most important in central and eastern Wisconsin. Areas of high regional novelty tend also to be areas of high local change, but local change has not pushed all counties beyond regional baselines. Seven counties serve as the best historical analogues for over one‐half of contemporary Wisconsin counties (40/72), and so can offer useful historical counterparts for contemporary systems and help managers coordinate to tackle similar environmental challenges. Multi‐dimensional environmental novelty analyses, like those presented here, can help identify the best historical analogues for contemporary ecosystems, places where new management rules and practices may be needed because novelty is already high, and the main causes of novelty. Separating regional novelty clearly from local change and measuring both across many dimensions and at multiple scales thus helps advance ecology and sustainability science alike.

High-growth industrial clusters can be engines of economic growth through the development of human capital, knowledge spillovers, and early-stage investment. For the past 50 years, Stanford University has been a catalyst in developing Silicon Valley as a global center for technology innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ohio University now has the opportunity to leverage the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) and Russ Research Center (RRC) to play a similar role in producing an industrial cluster centered around emerging technologies in aerospace and defense in the greater Dayton, Ohio area. A significant gift from noted alumni Fritz and Dolores Russ provided Ohio University with the RRC in Southwest Ohio, and Ohio University’s usage of this facility could result in significant financial and social return on investment for the University and the State of Ohio. This work looks to explore the structures and components of industrial clusters, the economy of the greater Dayton region and Ohio University’s potential role in the Dayton ecosystem through the RRC. The overall objective is to provide decisionmakers at Ohio University with a comprehensive foundation to facilitate discussion surrounding utilization of the RRC.

In September 2018, we released a paper, Changes in Health Insurance Coverage 2013–2016: Medicaid Expansion States Lead the Way, that provided national data on changes in coverage from the year immediately preceding the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) main coverage reforms.1 We simultaneously released fact sheets on coverage changes for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In this brief, we summarize the state variation in coverage changes using a typology that groups states according to their pre-ACA uninsurance levels and their subsequent policy decisions around Medicaid expansion and efforts to encourage marketplace enrollment. Data from 2017 are now available, and we use them here to examine changes in coverage between 2013 and 2017. This incorporates the 2013–16 period of expanding coverage resulting from the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, income-related tax credits, and individual mandate. It also includes the small decline in coverage that occurred between 2016 and 2017.