This study sought to map the changes in land surface temperature (LST) in California from 2000 to 2016 using MODIS LST satellite imagery and also assess the impact of heat vulnerability on hospitalizations related to extreme heat exposure (such as heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat syncope). The study employed principal component analysis (PCA), linear and multiple regression models and geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis in achieving its objectives (n=58). The PCA generated three components: socio-economic (population below the poverty line, outdoor workers and population with less than high school diploma), elderly/disability (population over 64 years and population with disability). These components were used in developing a composite HVI, which was used to predict heat-related hospitalization in California between 2000 and 2016. The HVI was positively associated with heat-related hospitalization at both the global and local level, though the GWR showed statistically significant relationship for only 17 counties. The study also showed that socio-economic vulnerability contributed most to heat-related hospitalizations at the global level whereas both socio-economic and environmental vulnerability account for most of the hospitalizations at the local level. The LST maps showed some degree of variations both spatially and temporally among the various years with 2006 recording the highest temperature range between 52 °F and 163 °F.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, which studies scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buy and do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time. That our time is limited by the number of hours in a day, days in a year, and years in our lives means that we face constraints and thus choices that involve trade-offs. We sleep, eat, have fun, watch TV, and not least we work. How much we dedicate to each, and why we do so, is intriguing and no one is better placed to shed light on similarities and differences than Daniel S. Hamermesh, the leading authority on time-use. Here he explores how people use their time, including across countries, regions, cultures, class, and gender. Americans now work more than people in other rich countries, but as recently as the late 1970s they worked no more than others; and they also work longer into older age. Men and women do different things at different times of the day, which affects how well-off they feel. Both the arrival of children and retirement create major shocks to existing time uses, with differences between the sexes. Higher incomes and higher wage rates lead people to hurry more, both on and off the job, and higher wage rates lead people to cut back on activities that take time away from work. Being stressed for time is central to modern life, and Hamermesh shows who is rushed, and why. With Americans working more than people in France, Germany, the U.K., Japan and other rich countries, the book offers a simple but radical proposal for changing Americans' lives and reducing the stress about time.

This study provides new evidence on the effect of compulsory schooling laws on educational attainment and earnings. First, we re-examine the effect of compulsory schooling laws for cohorts born between 1900 and 1964 ("older cohorts") using newly available data that match administrative earnings records ii-ith the survey data. Second, we provide among the first evidence on cohorts born between 1977 and 1996 ("younger cohorts"). Our findings suggest that compulsory schooling laws increased the educational attainment of older cohorts, but had no economically significant effect on the educational attainment of younger cohorts. We are unable to find consistent evidence that compulsory schooling laws increased the earnings of older cohorts - a finding

Purpose: Screening the general population for ovarian cancer is not recommended by every major medical or public health organization because the harms from screening outweigh the benefit it provides. To improve ovarian cancer detection and survival many are looking at high-risk populations who would benefit from screening. Methods: We train a neural network on readily available personal health data to predict and stratify ovarian cancer risk. We use two different datasets to train our network: The National Health Interview Survey and Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial. Results: Our model has an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.71. We further demonstrate how the model could be used to stratify patients into different risk categories. A simple 3-tier scheme classifies 23.8% of those with cancer and 1.0% of those without as high-risk similar to genetic testing, and 1.1% of those with cancer and 24.4% of those without as low risk. Conclusion: The developed neural network offers a cost-effective and non-invasive way to identify those who could benefit from targeted screening.

Average wage growth is closely related to aggregate productivity growth across countries and within countries over time. The commonality of patterns across OECD countries suggests that common factors are at work. Are productivity-based explanations of wage changes consistent with increasing variance in wages as well as increases in mean wages as suggested by skill-biased technological change or other factors? To answer this, it is necessary to observe education-specific productivity growth. Cross-industry comparisons reveal that industries dominated by highly educated workers experienced higher-than-average productivity growth that is more than sufficient to account for increasing skill differentials.

Cities are central to the live of the majority of the human population. While the proportion of people moving to cities has increased steadily, the population living in city centers has decreased in many developing and developed countries. My thesis focuses in understanding what are the causes and consequences of different urban developments. A question I tackle in my research is what are the effects of firm and residential density. In the first chapter of my thesis (The Taller the Better? Agglomeration Determinants and Urban Structure), I estimate the productivity gains of an extreme form of urban density: skyscrapers in cities. In the second chapter of my thesis (Vertical and Horizontal Cities: in Which Direction Should Cities Grow?), I combine both data and theory in order to structurally estimate the effects of different city development on productivity and amenities. I show that cities that are more vertically developed have higher level of amenities. A second strand of my thesis focuses on understanding how people and firms decide to locate inside cities. In particular, in the third chapter of my thesis (Flight from Urban Blight: Lead Poisoning, Crime and Suburbanization), joint with Federico Masera, we provide causal evidence that crime has been an important reason to explain suburbanization of U.S. cities

In the decade of economic expansion following the Second World War, many ordinary Americans travelled abroad for the first time. Those who visited Britain were surprised to find that the people they encountered were not the aristocrats or working-class ciphers they knew from Hollywood movies. Britons' views of Americans were likewise informed by films and by encounters with the American military during the war. Based on over thirty personal accounts of Americans travelling to Britain in the 1950s, Not Like Home examines how direct contact influenced the relationships between these two groups and their attitudes towards each other. Michael John Law explains that prejudice on both sides was replaced by the realities of direct encounters. Painting an evocative portrait of Britain in the 1950s as seen through the eyes of outsiders, Law depicts the characteristics and practices of these American visitors and compares them to their caricatures in British newspapers and magazines. Going to Britain was a transformative experience for most American visitors, providing a link to a shared history and culture. In turn, their arrival influenced British life by providing a reality check on Hollywood's portrayal of American life and through their demands for higher standards in Britain's hotels, restaurants, and trains. Through an engaging narrative incorporating unpublished reports of American visits to Britain, Not Like Home describes the exciting and sometimes confounding mid-century encounters between two very different cultures.

No other nutrition-related disease in American history caused as many deaths as pellagra. The by-product of insufficient niacin consumption, pellagra reached epidemic proportions in the American South, killing roughly 7,000 Southerners annually at its peak in 1928. We document the rise and fall of pellagra in the American South and present three main findings. First, pellagra resulted, in part, from Southern agriculture’s heavy emphasis on cotton, which displaced local food production and effectively raised the price of niacin consumption. Evidence for this proposition derives in part from the arrival of the boll weevil. Although the boll weevil reduced Southern incomes and cotton production, it was also associated with increases in local food production and sharp reductions in pellagra. Second, pellagra was largely eliminated through voluntary fortification of cereal-grain products starting in 1937 and a series of state fortification laws passed in the 1940s. These laws, for the first time in Southern history, broke the strong positive correlation between cotton production and pellagra. Third, exposure to early-life interventions that reduced cotton production and/or increased niacin consumption were associated with improved stature and wages. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the economic history of the American South and economic development in general.

Climate change brings about many changes such as rising temperature, increased frequency and intensity of sudden weather events, the melting of glaciers and sea level rise. It also threatens biodiversity, human health, agriculture, ecosystem, and food security and it forces people to migrate in many parts of the world. Undoubtedly, climate change is a global and multi-dimensional problem in terms of both its causes and impacts. Looking at the human face of climate change requires an in-depth analysis of the people who have had to leave their homeland as a result of all these upheavals. In this context, the aim of this article is to understand how migration movements due to the effects of climate change take place by examining the current empirical studies in the field. Consequently, climate change migration has been examined under two main headings. Migrations as a result of rapid and sudden effects of climate change on the one hand, and migrations due to the slow and gradual effects of climate change on the other. Among the rapid and sudden climate change effects, population movements related to storms, hurricanes and floods; among the slow and gradual climate change effects, movements related to sea level rise, increasing temperatures, drought and desertification, are discussed.

We develop a theory of career paths and earnings in an economy in which agents organize in production hierarchies. Agents climb these organizational hierarchies as they learn stochastically from other individuals. We study the resulting career paths for agents with different schooling levels. Earnings grow over time as agents acquire knowledge and occupy positions with larger numbers of subordinates. The cross-sectional variance of earnings also increase with experience. We contrast these and other implications of the theory with U.S. census data for the period 1990 to 2010. The increase in wage inequality over this period, and other concurring phenomena, can be rationalized with a shift in the distribution of the complexity and profitability of technologies relative to the distribution of knowledge in the population.

As early as the 1920's Marshall suggested that firms co-locate in cities to reduce the costs of moving goods, people, and ideas. These 'forces of agglomeration' have given rise, for example, to the high tech clusters of San Francisco and Boston, and the automobile cluster in Detroit. Yet, despite its importance for city planners and industrial policy-makers, until recently there has been little success in estimating the relative importance of each Marshallian channel to the location decisions of firms. Here we explore a burgeoning literature that aims to exploit the co-location patterns of industries in cities in order to disentangle the relationship between industry co-agglomeration and customer/supplier, labour and idea sharing. Building on previous approaches that focus on across- and between-industry estimates, we propose a network-based method to estimate the relative importance of each Marshallian channel at a meso scale. Specifically, we use a community detection technique to construct a hierarchical decomposition of the full set of industries into clusters based on co-agglomeration patterns, and show that these industry clusters exhibit distinct patterns in terms of their relative reliance on individual Marshallian channels.

Background: The mortality benefits of meeting the US federal guidelines for physical activity, which includes recommendations for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities, have never been examined among smokers. Our aim was to investigate the association between reporting to meet the guidelines and all-cause, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory disease mortality among smokers. Methods: We pooled data from the 1998–2009 National Health Interview Survey, which were linked to records in the National Death Index (n = 68,706). Hazard ratios (HR) were computed to estimate the effect of meeting the physical activity guidelines on mortality. Results: Smokers who reported meeting the guidelines for physical activity had 29% lower risk of all-cause mortality (HR: 0.71; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.62–0.81), 46% lower risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease (HR: 0.54; 95% CI, 0.39–0.76), and 26% lower risk of mortality from cancer (HR: 0.74; 95% CI, 0.59–0.93), compared with those who reported meeting neither the aerobic nor the muscle-strengthening recommendations of the guidelines. Meeting the aerobic recommendation of the guidelines was associated with a 42% decline in that risk (HR: 0.58; 95% CI, 0.44–0.77). Conclusion: Smokers who adhere to physical activity guidelines show a significant reduction in mortality.

There were nearly 60 million Latinos in the United States in 2017, accounting for approximately 18% of the total U.S. population. In 1980, with a population of 14.8 million, Hispanics made up just 6.5% of the total U.S. population. For more, read the accompanying blog post, “Key facts about U.S. Hispanics and their diverse heritage.” For facts on the foreign-born population in the United States, see our profile on U.S. immigrants.

I consider a continuous-time career concerns model. As in Holmstro ̈m (1999), there is symmetric uncertainty about a worker’s ability. Also, the worker has private information about her conscientiousness (cost of effort). The sequence of observed outputs allows learning about both attributes of the worker. As in the career concerns literature, incentives to exert effort are driven in part by a signal-jamming motive, i.e., the desire to manipulate the market’s beliefs about the worker’s ability. In line with prior results, this motive is present throughout the worker’s lifetime, but its im- pact on the worker’s effort gradually decreases over time as the market learns the worker’s ability. In contrast, the motive to signal conscientiousness is more nuanced and changes sign as time progresses. I find that early in her career, cost uncertainty pushes the agent to work harder to signal that she is conscientious. During her mid- dle and late career, the agent has an incentive to signal that she is lazy. In the second phase of her career, the agent lowers her effort to seem lazy. During her late career, the agent, surprisingly, increases her effort in order to convince the market of her lazi- ness. This result, in which the impact of cost uncertainty on effort choice changes sign twice is used to explain the patterns of residuals in the relation between earnings and work experience specified in Mincer (1974) and noted in Murphy & Welch (1990).

While homeownership provides consumption benefits to owner-occupiers, residential real estate is also risky. This paper documents evidence that homeowners are compensated for bearing housing risk. Our sample includes monthly zip code-level housing returns in more than 9,000 zip codes across 135 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), representing almost 80% of U.S. population. We find that in more than 70% of the MSAs, at least one source of risk carries a significant positive price of risk. The types of risk that are priced are mostly local; MSA-specific housing risk and idiosyncratic housing risk are the two most important risk factors. Our results indicate that housing returns display investment-good properties, even for individual owner-occupiers.

Anecdotes that Millennials fundamentally differ from prior generations are numerous in the popular press. One claim is that Millennials, happy to rely on public transit or ride-hailing, are less likely to own vehicles and travel less in personal vehicles than previous generations. However, in this discussion it is unclear whether these perceived differences are driven by changes in preferences or the impact of forces beyond the control of Millennials, such as the Great Recession. We empirically test whether Millennials' vehicle ownership and use preferences differ from those of previous generations using data from the US National Household Travel Survey, Census, and American Community Survey. We estimate both regression and nearest-neighbor matching models to control for the confounding effect of demographic and macroeconomic variables. We find little difference in preferences for vehicle ownership between Millennials and prior generations once we control for confounding variables. In contrast to the anecdotes, we find higher usage in terms of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) compared to Baby Boomers. Next we test whether Millennials are altering endogenous life choices that may, themselves, affect vehicles ownership and use. We find that Millennials are more likely to live in urban settings and less likely to marry by age 35, but tend to have larger families, controlling for age. On net, these other choices have a small effect on vehicle ownership, reducing the number of vehicles per household by less than one percent.

The Nelson Act of 1889 established the allotment of American Indian lands for American Indians in Minnesota; subsequent changes allowed land to be sold to non-Indians. Allotment was intended to provide private land ownership for American Indians during this period where none had previously existed on reservation lands. This dramatic shift in land tenure occurred throughout the USA for many reservations. In this analysis, I examine two different Minnesota reservations over time: one that was allotted and another that was not allotted. I find a dramatic reduction in home ownership and an increase in household size for households that were treated to the land-titling program as compared to those households that were not treated. I also document a noticeable effect on wage sector employment; there is a large movement from self-employment in farming to the wage sector.

An estimated 2.1 million Hispanics of Dominican origin lived in the United States in 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Dominicans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Dominican origin; this includes immigrants from Dominican Republic and those who trace their family ancestry to Dominican Republic. Dominicans are the fifth-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 4% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2017. Since 2000, the Dominican-origin population has increased 159%, growing from 797,000 to 2.1 million over the period. At the same time, the Dominican foreign-born population living in the U.S. grew by 106%, from 543,800 in 2000 to 1.1 million in 2017. By comparison, Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 36.6 million, or 62%, of the Hispanic population in 2017.

Historical geographic data are essential for a variety of studies of cancer and environmental epidemiology, urbanization, and landscape ecology. However, existing data sources typically contain only contemporary information. Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information at various times in the past. Yet, finding relevant maps is difficult, and the map content is not machine-readable. This chapter presents the challenges and trends in building a map processing, modeling, linking, and publishing framework. The framework will enable querying historical map collections as a unified and structured spatiotemporal source in which individual geographic phenomena (extracted from maps) are modeled (described) with semantic descriptions and linked to other data sources (e.g., DBpedia). This framework will allow making use of historical geographic datasets from a variety of maps, efficiently, over large geographic extents. Realizing such a framework poses significant research challenges in multiple fields in computer science including digital map processing, data integration, and the Semantic Web technologies, and other disciplines such as spatial, social, and health sciences. Tackling these challenges will not only advance research in computer science and geographic information science but also present a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary research.