Summer is the season for weddings in the United States. It is a time for celebrating and bringing together family and friends. Here are some marriage facts to help newlyweds understand more about their new marital status.

Inner city revitalization efforts centered on fostering new business activity are controversial because they assume that the job creating capacity of new businesses is capable of impacting aggregate employment levels in inner city neighborhoods. Given this controversy, this paper examines the link between new business activity and inner city employment growth in Phoenix, Arizona. Analytical results highlight job creation from new business activity but a net negative association between new business activity and employment growth stemming from the loss of jobs from large employers in inner city neighborhoods. This relationship highlights that encouraging new business activity is not necessarily a bad idea for local residents and customers, but should not be viewed as a panacea for all inner city problems. Instead, new business activity should be viewed as one component of multifaceted initiatives to revitalize inner city neighborhoods.

This paper analyzes the long‐term transformations of the occupational structure in 50 provinces of Spain with a view to ascertain the existence and assess the extent of employment polarization. The peculiar characteristics of this country, namely rigid labor markets and the relatively recent transition to democracy, make for an interesting addition to existing studies on this topic. In line with previous literature on other countries, we find a strong association between the decline of “routine” mid‐skill jobs and the expansion of low‐skill service employment as well as differential labor market outcomes by levels of formal education. Results are robust to various controls and instrumental variables that account for long‐term industry specialization. We also find a positive local multiplier effect of high‐skilled workers on the demand for nontradable service jobs.

Following a series of federal policy changes and court rulings in the late 1980s, over 400 casinos owned by Native American tribes were opened throughout the United States, and expanded tribal gaming has transformed the economic development trajectories of many American Indian tribes. While most existing evaluations of tribal gaming's impacts focus on contemporaneous effects, the present paper evaluates whether the advent of tribal casinos affected educational outcomes in the subsequent generation of American Indian children. I assemble data on the adult educational outcomes of 11,647 American Indians across 36 counties who were children when a local casino was opened. I use these data to compare individuals who were relatively young at the time of a casino opening, and therefore had greater exposure to post‐gaming socioeconomic conditions, and individuals who were from the same county but were relatively old at the time of a casino opening, while also exploiting differences in the relative sizes of tribal gaming operations. Using this approach, I estimate that exposure to an average‐sized gaming operation during childhood increased adult educational attainment by .328 years and increased the probability of high school graduation and post‐secondary degree completion by 5 to 14 percent. No substantive improvements in adult educational outcomes are observed among white children from the same counties. The magnitudes of the estimates imply a relationship between family income during childhood and educational achievement that is similar to previous research within other low‐income populations.

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using over 3,000 verbs from more than 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro data from the United States from 1880 to 2000, we find an increase in the employment share of interactive occupations within sectors over time that is larger in metro areas than nonmetro areas. We interpret these findings using a model in which reductions in transport and communication costs induce urban areas to specialize according to their comparative advantage in interactive tasks. We present suggestive evidence relating increases in employment in interactive occupations to improvements in transport and communication technologies. Our findings highlight a change in the nature of agglomeration over time toward an increased emphasis on human interaction.

Almost every state government intervenes in the market for child care services by providing quality ratings. This paper is about the effect of quality ratings children in Minnesota, with a particular focus on how the benefits from the ratings are distributed. Theory suggests an important reason why the impact of product quality ratings on consumers will be heterogeneous. Consumers benefit from quality information only to the extent that the information has a marginal impact on the choices made. The effect of quality ratings thus depends on what choices are available. Using geocoded panel data on Minnesota child care centers, paired with block group level demographics from the American Community Survey, I empirically investigate the effect of Minnesota’s Parent Aware provider quality ratings on the number of children who use high quality providers. I estimate the treatment effect of the ratings separately from endogenous selection of the ratings by using a difference-in-differences style approach that relies on providers who switch ratings status during the data period. In order to minimize the effect of arbitrarily chosen market boundaries I treat all of Minnesota as a single market and include distance in the demand model, so that the extent of competition between particular providers depends in a realistic way on the geographic distribution of households and providers, replacing assumptions about market boundaries with assumptions about the structure of travel costs. I find that consumers respond to the ratings and are significantly more likely to choose a provider that receives the highest possible rating of Four Stars compared to an unrated provider. Estimates of welfare at the block group level suggest that density is the most important factor driving variation in the regional benefits of Parent Aware. Importantly, most low-income block groups are in dense areas with enough variation in locally available providers that the benefits of the ratings are high.

This paper estimates the effect of labor-market concentration on labor compensation across the U.S. private sector since 2000. We distinguish between concentration in local labor markets versus local product markets, guarding against bias from confounded product-market concentration. Analysis extends beyond wages to rates of employment-based health insurance coverage. Estimates suggest negative effects of labor-market concentration on labor compensation. This comes through both reducing the human-capital level of those in the market and reducing pay conditional on human-capital level. Higher product-market concentration exacerbates and higher unionization rates mitigates these effects.

Over the last several decades, the federal disability rolls grew substantially, though this growth has slowed more recently. Many factors underlie these trends, including changes in demographics, policies, and disability prevalence. In this study, we use nationally representative survey data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to document trends since 1997 in the most commonly disabling chronic conditions and functional limitations. We find that the prevalence of several conditions has increased in the U.S. population – most notably, obesity, endocrine conditions, and neoplasms among adults, and autism, developmental and intellectual disabilities, and skin conditions among children. We also find notable changes in functional limitations. Although hearing and vision limitations declined, adults experienced increases in cognitive, social, and movement limitations, and children experienced an increase in school limitations. These changes in condition prevalence and functional limitations are consistent with some but not all observed changes in the federal disability rolls. An understanding of these trends can be helpful in planning for future demand of disability benefits.

This thesis explores water insecurity, or the idea of it, and examines uncertainty of water for household use both in terms of access and quality. Water is a vital resource for humans; nevertheless, it is one that is under pressure. This thesis examines perspectives on water security as gathered from research conducted in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States in fall 2018. It examines the ways in which an overheated and compressed system defines the intersection of water stories for those residing in Boston and engaging with the water system. The research suggests that water insecurity exists within what Eriksen has referred to as an overheated world and that this feeling of water insecurity increases with excessive globalization to which Eriksen (Eriksen 2016, 2013). This thesis will show that the water stories and water anxieties in Boston are not necessarily an effect of a lack of water access and water quality. People can have ample access to high quality water, enough to meet their needs but still feel anxious. It further suggests that the stories and understanding of the stressors are related to what Harvey has called “time-space compression” (Harvey 1990). This thesis thus argues that the water stories from Boston reflect an intersection of experiences wherein the overheated world and the time-space compression ultimately play out to inform understandings and interactions between the water system and people and their water use. The water stories I examine expand beyond the confines of the city of Boston. I show how mobility contextualizes the water stories people tell and how water stories from elsewhere define the experience of water in Boston. Lastly, the thesis engages concepts such as inequality and trust. Trust is not a completely simple idea as it inherently relates to issues of inequalities and inequities. People do not experience water insecurity in a similar way. It depends on where they are situated. However, relatively water secure people can still find it hard to trust a system that fails parts of the population, these failures adding to their own insecurity. As geographic and time scales clash water insecurity from elsewhere, becomes a felt experience even though from any objective standpoint individuals could be viewed as water secure.

Family formation experiences have shifted over the past several decades. Marriage, for example, has become increasingly postponed while childbearing prior to a marriage has become more common (FP-17-22; FP-17-04). This Family Profile series (companion profile is FP-19-16) examines differences in marriage and parenthood experiences over the past 37 years among women holding different demographic characteristics. The current Family Profile uses the 1979 and 2016 Fertility Supplement of the Current Population Survey to explore trends in the percentage of women who experienced marriage and the share who had a birth by the end of their childbearing years (ages 40-44). This represents the experiences of women born from 1935 to 1939, which we refer to as the Silent Generation, and women born from 1972 to 1976, whom we label Gen-X. These generational terms are used for descriptive purposes to distinguish between the two cohorts of women. Shares are estimated across racial/ethnic and educational attainment groups.

Children of immigrants will make up a critical share of our nation's future workforce, but they are less likely than other children to participate in early education programs known to support school readiness and long-term productivity. This study describes the characteristics and enrollment of children of immigrants using the most current and comprehensive dataset available: the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11. We find that children of immigrants tend to have fewer resources and greater need than children of US-born parents but lower rates of enrollment in center-based preschool. However, programs such as Head Start and state prekindergarten, as well as public kindergarten programs, are making progress in closing gaps in access. These findings suggest that current investments in early education are helping prepare the future workforce for success in 2050 and that expanded investments are warranted.

This dissertation consists of three papers on the economics of justice and gender. The first chapter pertains to the gender wage gap, and the second and third papers study the effects of criminal justice reforms. My first chapter replicates and extends on Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008), which finds that the change in the female labor force composition significantly contributed to the narrowing of the gender wage gap. Their results, however, are obtained using the Current Population Survey (CPS). Therefore, I extend on their work by: (1) replicating their methodology using Census data, which is more representative of the US population, and (2) addressing changing male labor force. participation rates. Overall, my results continue to suggest that changing selection into the female labor force drives the convergence of the gender wage gap. But failing to account for changing male labor force participation rates overestimates convergence. Chapter 2 studies how Alabama’s shift from voluntary to presumptive sentencing guidelines affected sentence length. Using the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP), I find that after the guidelines became presumptive for a subset of property and drug offenses, average sentence length for affected offenders fell, with no statistically significant difference in effects across race. Using quantile regressions, I find that among affected property and drug offenders, the largest changes in total sentence length occur in the upper tail of the sentence length distribution. Chapter 3 presents a descriptive analysis of the differential impacts of AB 109 (or Realignment) and Proposition 47 across California’s counties. In October 2011, California implemented Realignment, which shifted the supervision responsibility for low-level offenders from the state to the county-level. Yet, I do not find a statistically significant relationship between the percent change in the prison and jail incarceration rates following AB 109. Then in November 2014, California implemented Proposition 47, which re-classified low-level felonies as misdemeanors and therefore reduced the jail population. Overall, I find that the fiscal impact of AB 109 may have been the largest for lower-income counties, with little evidence suggesting that Proposition 47 mitigated the fiscal impacts of AB 109 among these low-income counties.

The pivotal role played by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in the shaping of the state of West Virginia is critical to the examination of the intersection between business, community, and government, as the weight of the B&O on the fulcrum of sectionalism in West Virginia was a powerful influence on the political views of communities and state-makers. This influence of a growing American ideology of empire based on industrial expansion was waged by the B&O at the local, state, and national levels and was a current running beneath the multitude of reasons that West Virginians vowed to remain in the Union and separate from Virginia. The history of West Virginia’s separation from Virginia has been examined by historians over the years, as the process that cleaved the state in two is unmatched in the history of the United States.1 West Virginia historians have laid important groundwork on the broad sectional issues of political and social alliances, and have addressed the fact that West Virginians were less vested in the slave economy that characterized the Confederacy and were less frequently tied to family histories that shaped the Old Dominion.2 While economic issues have been considered in each of these valuable studies, this article seeks to highlight the specific impact that the B&O exerted on the formation of West Virginia to highlight the way that industry, state-making, and empire building coalesced in the Civil War period.

Was there a tradeoff between family size and education during the demographic transition in the United States? Exploiting the occurrence of twin births as a source of exogenous variation in family size, I find that an additional sibling reduces the likelihood of attending school by 1 to 2 percentage points. To evaluate the persistence of family size effects, I create a linked sample of boys between 1920–1940. Individuals raised in larger families accumulate less human capital by adulthood. However, the impact of family size is quantitatively small relative to the average level of education in the population.

This study uses worker-level data on industry, occupation, and place of work to explore differences in the spatial properties of production, administrative, and R&D occupation groups within industries. To measure differences, we calculate location quotients at the local labor market level and the Duranton and Overman (2005) agglomeration index for each group. We find appreciable differences in the spatial distribution of occupation groups within most manufacturing industries, with R&D occupations consistently exhibiting the highest degree of spatial concentration. Our results are consistent with the core theoretical and empirical results in the agglomeration literature.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the distinguished properties of by-names as forms differentfrom official ones, to analyze their structural and semantic features and to search for their historicalevidence. By-names of Chinese places should not be defined as unusual and informal, since actually in many cases by-names are formal and very common in China nowadays. By-names are generally bestowed on important places (mostly cities) that win the public interest. Most of them have twostructural parts, the front specific parts are determiners / qualifiers and the back ones are generics.The generics generally are: cheng 城 ‘town / city’, du 都 ‘capital’, jiang 江 ‘river’, shan 山 ‘mountain’, dao 岛 ‘island’ etc. The lexical meanings of lexical items forming specific parts of by-namesmainly refer to animals, plants, minerals, local manufactured products, climate and natural scenery,geographical location, humans, areas, etc. Chinese contemporary by-names, used on various occasions, vary in frequency and stability. The by-names discussed in the paper only account for a smallproportion and are listed just due to their relatively high frequency, stability and acceptability.

This Commentary describes how the mix of occupations in which people have been employed in the United States has evolved over time. After 100 years of dramatic change, the mix of occupations has been more stable since 1970. This trend adds occupational structure to the growing list of ways our nation’s economy has become less dynamic in recent decades.

The California Dream has appeal well beyond the state's borders. In the mid-20th century, many new Californians came from states in the Midwest and South. By the 1990's, immigrants from Latin America and Asia dominated new arrivals.

During the 1910’s, twelve states passed and implemented the first minimum-wage laws in the history of the United States. These laws were applying to specific industries and only to female employees. This paper studies the employment impact of these gender-specific minimum-wage laws, using full count Census data from 1880 to 1930. We apply a triple-difference strategy exploiting variation across states, industries, and time, to both the full sample of U.S. counties and to the restricted group of contiguous county pairs. We estimate separate models for male and female adults, and find that these laws led to a decrease in female employment and an increase in the employment of adult men. Guided by a simple labor demand setting, we estimate the average elasticity of substitution between male and female labor, and show that the two inputs were, on average, gross substitutes. We provide suggestive evidence of a long-run impact of gender-specific minimum-wage laws on female labor force participation, after the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This paper considers the past and future of the journal Geographical Analysis (GA), as well as the broader field of spatial analysis. From my experiences as a former editor of GA, I first identify three external trends that I feel will provide the backdrop for the future evolution of spatial analysis. These surround the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science as disciplines. The paper also considers the structural changes that are occurring in the organization of science, and the trend toward democratization of spatial analysis and spatial data. I identify critical areas for methodological advances along with some opportunities for the rebranding of GA in the new era of data science.