I use state-level banking deregulation in the U.S. to study the causal impact of credit expansion on unemployment through their effects on the average monthly job-finding and job-losing rates. State-level analysis shows that deregulation increased the average job-finding rate and decreased the job-losing rate, and thus led to a lower unemployment rate. Extending the analysis to industry-state level, I find that banking deregulation increased the job-finding rate similarly across industries, but they decreased job-losing rate only in industries with high external finance dependence. JEL Classification: E24, E44, G21, G28, J64; Tel: (225)578-5211. I thank Doug McMillin and Barton Willage for their valuable comments and suggestions.

It is well‐recognized that both improved nutrition and sanitation infrastructure are important contributors to mortality decline. However, the relative importance of the two factors is difficult to quantify since most studies are limited to testing the effects of specific sanitary improvements. This article uses new historical data regarding total investment in urban infrastructure, measured using the outstanding loan stock, to estimate the extent to which the mortality decline in England and Wales between 1861 and 1900 can be attributed to government expenditure. Fixed effects regressions indicate that infrastructure investment explains approximately 30 per cent of the decline in mortality between 1861 and 1900. Since these specifications may not fully account for the endogeneity between investment and mortality, additional specifications are estimated using lagged investment as an instrument for current investment. These estimates suggest that government investment was the major contributor to mortality decline, explaining up to 60 per cent of the reduction in total urban mortality between 1861 and 1900. Additional results indicate that investment in urban infrastructure led to declines in mortality from both waterborne and airborne diseases.

Despite extensive research on young adult coresidence, little is known about coresidence among older adult parents and their midlife adult children. Using the 1988-2018 Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement, we examine the coresidential status of parents aged 60 and older across three decades. Specifically, we distinguish between households in which parents coreside with an adult child over the age of 40 versus those in which parents do not reside with an adult child. Coresident households provide benefits for both older adults and their adult children and may reflect a coping strategy in the face of economic hardship (Kahn et al., 2013; Moen & Wethington, 1992). In this Family Profile, we explore the varied characteristics of parents in 2018 according to their coresident status. These characteristics include retirement, health, physical and cognitive difficulties, and income. This Family Profile offers insight into the changing living arrangements of older adult parents and their midlife adult children. In 2018, nearly 8% of older adults lived with a midlife adult child. Parent-child coresidence may be a response to health difficulties or financial insecurity.

The rise in the productivity of inexperienced young workers suggests a positive partial equilibrium effect of youth training programs on employment. However, in a general equilibrium context, displacement effects that impact other groups of workers could also arise. We build a directed search model to study the unintended displacement effects of youth training programs. We calibrate the model to match data from the US labor market. The model is then used to simulate a policy experiment that resembles a training program that raises the productivity of a targeted group of low-skilled and inexperienced agents. Our counterfactual analysis shows that the policy indeed triggers displacement effects. Consequently, these unintended displacement effects must be taken into account in the evaluation of youth training programs.

The media and popular business press often invoke narratives that reflect widespread anxiety that robots may be rendering humans obsolete in the workplace. However, upon closer examination, many argue that automation, including robotics and artificial intelligence, is spreading unevenly throughout the labor market, such that middle-skill occupations that do not require a college degree are more likely to be affected adversely because they are easier to automate than high-skill occupations. In this article, the author examines the effect of industrial robots on occupations in the United States in 2010 and 2015. Results from regression models indicate that an increase in industrial robots is associated with increases in high-skill and some middle-skill occupations but not for other types of occupations. These findings may indicate the ushering in of a new era in which robots are more technologically advanced and able to collaborate better with human employees.

Does recent immigrant lineage influence the legislative behavior of members of Congress on immigration policy? We examine the relationship between the immigrant background of legislators (i.e., the generational distance from immigration) and legislative behavior, focusing on roll-call votes for landmark immigration legislation and congressional speech on the floor. Legislators more proximate to the immigrant experience tend to support more permissive immigration legislation. Legislators with recent immigration backgrounds also speak more often about immigration in Congress, though the size of immigrant constituencies in their districts accounts for a larger share of this effect. A regression discontinuity design on close elections, which addresses selection bias concerns and holds district composition constant, confirms that legislators with recent immigrant backgrounds tend to support pro-immigration legislation. Finally, we demonstrate how a common immigrant identity can break down along narrower ethnic lines in cases where restrictive legislation targets specific places of origin. Our findings illustrate the important role of immigrant identity in legislative behavior and help illuminate the legislative dynamics of present-day immigration policy.

Alternative Work Arrangements (AWAs) are contract forms with lower wages, fewer benefits, and fewer legal protections. Firms using AWAs pay fewer fixed costs, but AWAs continue to account for only 10% of employment. I investigate whether AWAs respond to negative labor demand shocks, and could explain the lack of systematic increase. In a simple conceptual framework where firms can employ a worker in a short-term contract for a lower fixed cost, marginally profitable firms will use AWAs. Negative shocks push AWA-using firms out of business, reducing aggregate AWAs, conditional on employment. I test the effect of two negative labor demand shocks-exogenous decreases in housing wealth and increased competition from China-on workers' marginal probability of being in an AWA. I find that negative housing wealth shocks decreased workers' probability of being in an AWA by 0.25% for every 1% of housing price declines. Direct trade competition reduced workers probability of being in an AWA, however when examining the supply-chain effects of trade, 87% of workers saw a predicted increase. A simple counterfactual suggests that absent housing price declines from the Great Recession, AWAs would have increased by 1.5% since 2005. *

Introduction: This study examines the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on rural and urban health insurance coverage in the Gulf Coast region of the United States, which includes five states: Alabama (AL), Florida (FL), Mississippi (MS), Louisiana (LA), and Texas (TX). Methods: Data from the 2009 and 2015 American Community survey micro-sample was used to examine the effects of ACA policy on health insurance coverage in the Gulf Coast states and the rest of the nation. Health insurance coverage rates were presented before and after the implementation of the ACA for rural and urban areas in the Gulf Coast states region and for the rest of the nation. Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate the likelihood of coverage net of relevant socio-demographic and labor market variables. Results: Our results show the implementation of the ACA increased health insurance coverage nationwide but was still less in the Gulf Coast states than rest of the nation, and less in rural than urban areas. Within the Gulf Coast states region, the increase in coverage varied by state and by rural and urban areas. In Ala-bama and Mississippi, the net increase in rural areas was 26.2% but in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, it was only 0.8%. Coverage increased in urban areas in all of the Gulf Coast (28% for AL and MS, 54% in FL, LA, and TX) but less than the rest of the nation (85%). The health insurance coverage for the rural area compared to urban area after the ACA implementation was higher by 17% in Alabama and Mississippi, yet lower by 23% in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Discussion and Conclusions: Although the Gulf Coast states did not expand their Medicaid programs, each of the states showed some increase in health insurance coverage after the implementation of the ACA. Future research should examine the health insurance area boundaries on insurance coverage and the effects of the Medicaid Waiver program and in each state.

We propose a method that simultaneously identifies where parties take control of Congressional redistricting, and how they use it to win U.S. House races. Our method exploits the discontinuous change in a party’s control of redistricting triggered when its share of seats in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent during redistricting. In the elec- tion before redistricting, parties systematically win narrow majorities in legislatures of states where they have lost recent House races. We use a difference-in-discontinuities es- timator to control for this systematic difference in pre-redistricting U.S. House outcomes. We estimate that whichever party controls the state legislature during redistricting is 11 percentage points more likely to win House races immediately after redistricting. These gains effectively reverse the party’s pre-redistricting losses. Opposition votes are less ef- ficiently converted to seats and, under Republican redistricting, African Americans are more likely to be segregated into overwhelmingly black districts.

The number of foreign-born older adults (aged 65 and older) living in the United States has grown substantially over the past few decades, nearly doubling between 1990 and 2010 (Batalova, 2012). Many have migrated at older ages often to be with their adult children and grandchildren who are already living in the U.S. (Tienda, 2017). Noncitizens are foreign-born residents who do not possess U.S. citizenship, the majority of whom are in the country legally (Pew, 2019). In this Family Profile, we use the 2017 American Community Survey to examine older adults’ living arrangements by gender, citizenship, and poverty status. Our sample includes men and women aged 65 and older who live in the U.S.

This paper investigates the causal effects of agglomeration on hours worked by the self‐employed. Urbanization and localization are instrumented using the minimum distance from the work Public Use Microdata Area centroid to the United States’ coastlines and estimated industry shares in 1930. The 2SLS results demonstrate that urbanization decreases, and localization increases, hours worked of the self‐employed, respectively. These results are mainly from outsourcing and competition, whereas sorting, simultaneity, and agglomeration wage effect are less likely to be influential. Additionally, only small business owners perceive the pressures of competition in localization economies. The young unincorporated self‐employed are more likely to be affected by peer competitors, whereas the elder unincorporated perceive more pressures from large firms.

In this appendix, we use a simple economic model to derive an empirical measure of social connectedness, and we show how the overall effect of social connectedness on crime depends on peer effects and related spillovers. This complements the more intuitive discussion in Section 3.

In recent decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers' time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing value of time raises the cost of commuting and exogenously increases the demand for central locations by high-skilled workers. While change in the value of time has a modest direct effect on gentrification of central cities, the effect is substantially magnified by endogenous amenity improvement driven by the changes in local skill mix.

Worried about being left behind in the Digital Age, a few hundred municipalities have chosen to construct and operate high-speed Internet networks. Above all else, it is the impacts on the labor market-i.e., the promise of "more jobs"-that form the policy justification for these municipal investments, though evidence of such effects is informal and anecdotal. In this POLICY PAPER, we offer (to our knowledge) the first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-inDifferences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network ("GON") in Chattanooga Tennessee on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city's broadband investments. An automotive plant built in the area is, however, found to substantially increase automobile manufacturing employment. Since Chattanooga's system is an overbuild of multiple private providers, we stress that our findings may not be generalized to areas where broadband services are not available absent the municipal system. Also, our results cannot speak to the benefits of high-speed Internet services generally, since broadband Internet service was and remains available in Chattanooga absent the municipal system.

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting- eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

This report maps the availability of quantitative data on immigrant integration in Ireland. It gives an overview of data collected by the Central Statistics Office in large repeated surveys; administrative data on immigration held by the Department of Justice and Equality; and data held across a range of government departments on ‘mainstreamed’ integration. The analysis does not cover every possible source, but identifies key opportunities, gaps and challenges for the future use and collection of data on integration outcomes.

In 2010, The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in the United States (U.S.). The ACA overhauled the U.S. healthcare system and expanded Medicaid coverage to those with income below 138% of the federal poverty line. However, in 2012 the Supreme Court decided that Medicaid expansion should be voluntary. In 2014 24 states expanded Medicaid creating the opportunity for a natural experiment. This study exploits this natural experiment to evaluate the effect of Medicaid expansion on labor market activity, health insurance coverage, and public assistance receipt among those with disabilities. By employing a difference-in-difference regression model and using the repeated cross-sectional nature of data collected through the American Community Survey, I found that Medicaid expansion has no independent significant effects on labor market activity but is associated with increased health insurance coverage and decreased public assistance for those with disabilities.

While the tension between political equality and economic inequality is as old as democracy itself, a recent wave of scholarship has highlighted its acute relevance for democracy in America today. In contrast to the view that legislative responsiveness favoring the affluent is near to inevitable when income inequality is high, we argue that organized labor can be an effective source of political equality in the US House of Representatives. Our novel dataset combines income-specific estimates of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to 27 roll-call votes with a measure of district-level union strength drawn from administrative records. We find that local unions significantly dampen unequal responsiveness to high incomes: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about 6 to 8 percentage points. We rule out alternative explanations using district fixed effects, interactive and flexible controls accounting for policies and institutions, as well as a novel instrumental variable for unionization based on history and geography. We also show that the impact of unions operates via campaign contributions and partisan selection. Our findings underline calls to bring back organized labor into the analysis of political representation.

Land use regulation may affect housing prices through housing supply and demand, but the empirical literature conflates both effects and finds wide variation in the estimated impact. We disentangle three channels through which regulation may affect housing prices: the production channel through housing supply, the amenity channel through housing demand, and the general equilibrium (GE) channel that captures price feedback effects on location choice. We develop a GE model with households’ choices on consumption and location and with housing developers’ choice on housing production. Our theoretical model delivers a closed-form solution to the equilibrium prices and a simple form of the estimation equations. Using property transaction-assessment data from 1993 to 2017 in California and a regulatory index compiled from the Wharton Residential Land Use Survey (Gyourko, Saiz and Summers, 2008), we structurally estimate and disentangle the supply and demand-side effects. We find that the regulatory impact on housing prices through the production channel is much stronger than the amenity channel (4.38% vs 0.32% if referenced to the average city in California) and is heterogeneous across cities. The relationship still holds, even when the GE effects are included in the two channels (3.24% vs 0.27%). The total effect of regulation will be 4 times larger, if referenced to the average regulation in the US. Our estimations point out the key roles of structural characteristics of housing and macroeconomic conditions in the prediction of housing prices. Estimations without quality adjustment underestimate land regulation’s impact on prices. Additionally, we examine the within-MSA regulatory interdependence and find significant and positive spillover effects of regulation on housing prices. Estimations without spillover consideration underestimate the regulatory impact on prices.

Policies aimed at increasing higher education attainment are central to efforts to eliminate racial gaps in earnings, employment, and labor force participation. We use data from the American Community Survey spanning 2008–2016 to investigate the increases in these labor market outcomes associated with obtaining a bachelor’s degree—what economists term “returns to higher education”—by racial groups with particular attention to the returns realized by American Indian and Alaska Natives (AIs/ANs). We find that AI/AN college graduates reap larger returns in terms of labor force participation and employment but experience smaller gains in earnings than otherwise similar White college graduates. These results suggest that policies promoting higher education are necessary but not sufficient to address White-AI/AN labor market disparities.