One popular hypothesis holds that the increasing appeal of video games over the last decade has led men to reduce working hours. I examine American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data in detail, documenting the extent of the increase in gaming. I note that increasing gaming time is ooset by decreasing time spent watching television, movies, and streaming video. Moreover, I Ind that the observed trend is consistent with an alternative explanation, that a shift in social norms rendered playing video games more acceptable at later ages, particularly for non-employed men. The increase in gaming is concentrated among men living with parents, and is not uniform for all ages of young adults. The data further suggest that men exiting the work force do not exhibit signiicant preferences for gaming leisure. Overall, the evidence suggests that while young men have dramatically increased the amount of time they spend gaming over the past decade and a half, their decreasing levels of employment and labor force participation are more likely to result from changes in labor demand.

Theory predicts that property rights coevolve with value and investment, making empirical identification of causal effects difficult. We identify how uncertain property rights – exogenously generated by railroad land grants – delayed and deterred investment and economic development on the Western frontier. We explore the impact of the Northern Pacific’s land grant in Montana because it encompassed nearly 50 percent of the state while the delayed construction of the NP and a large shift in political sentiment in the interim created significant uncertainty to title for the land grant for at least 15 years. We examine how this uncertainty to title impacted irrigation investment because it exhibits high asset specificity, was central to economic development on the frontier, and has a readily observable date of initial investment thanks to western water law. Using granular spatial data on land patents and water rights, we exploit the random variation of the checkerboarded land grant in a difference-in-differences as well as the arbitrary 100-mile width of the grant in a spatial discontinuity to overcome the empirical challenge that property rights and investment are often endogenously determined. We find that the uncertainty delayed (4.2 years) and deterred (28 percent lower) irrigation development in Montana. We estimate this reduced total farm value by up to 27 percent in Montana, which in annualized terms, accounted for nearly 6 percent of Montana’s total income in 1930.

The VA’s approach differs sharply from the Pentagon’s, which won an exemption for active-duty members of the military.

In 1974, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) federalized cash welfare programs for the aged, blind, and disabled, imposing a national minimum benefit. Because of pre-existing variation in generosity, SSI differentially raised payment levels in states below its benefit floor, but had no effect in states that paid above it. We show that SSI increased disability participation in states with the lowest pre-SSI benefits, but shrank non-disability cash transfer programs. For every four new SSI recipients, three came from other welfare programs. Each dollar of per capita SSI income increased total per capita transfer income by just over 50 cents.

The World Health Organization has recommended sodium reduction as a “best buy” to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD). Despite this, Congress has temporarily blocked the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from implementing voluntary industry targets for sodium reduction in processed foods, the implementation of which could cost the industry around $16 billion over 10 years. We modeled the health and economic impact of meeting the two-year and ten-year FDA targets, from the perspective of people working in the food system itself, over 20 years, from 2017 to 2036. Benefits of implementing the FDA voluntary sodium targets extend to food companies and food system workers, and the value of CVD-related health gains and cost savings are together greater than the government and industry costs of reformulation.

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) allows clients with limited resources to outsource their expensive ML tasks to powerful servers. Despite the huge benefits, current MLaaS solutions still lack strong assurances on: 1) service correctness (i.e., whether the MLaaS works as expected); 2) trustworthy accounting (i.e., whether the bill for the MLaaS resource consumption is correctly accounted); 3) fair payment (i.e., whether a client gets the entire MLaaS result before making the payment). Without these assurances, unfaithful service providers can return improperly-executed ML task results or partiallytrained ML models while asking for over-claimed rewards. Moreover, it is hard to argue for wide adoption of MLaaS to both the client and the service provider, especially in the open market without a trusted third party. In this paper, we present VeriML, a novel and efficient framework to bring integrity assurances and fair payments to MLaaS. With VeriML, clients can be assured that ML tasks are correctly executed on an untrusted server and the resource consumption claimed by the service provider equals to the actual workload. We strategically use succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARK) on randomly-selected iterations during the ML training phase for efficiency with tunable probabilistic assurance. We also develop multiple ML-specific optimizations to the arithmetic circuit required by SNARK. Our system implements six common algorithms: linear regression, logistic regression, neural network, support vector machine, Kmeans and decision tree. The experimental results have validated the practical performance of VeriML

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the most effective anti-poverty programs for working-age households in the U.S.1 It raises incomes for workers with low-wages and advances income and racial equity. In fact, the EITC has helped millions of workers better make ends meet and afford basic needs for themselves and their families, particularly among Black and Latino households.2 In 2000, New Jersey created its own version of the EITC, building upon the federal credit and providing a bigger boost to the state’s working families. Originally, the state credit provided a benefit at 10 percent of the federal credit. Over the years, the value of the state credit has increased – and occasionally decreased – to the point where it now provides a benefit at 40 percent of the federal credit.

Using newly licensed individual-level data from Gallup between 2008 and 2017, this paper provides microeconomic evidence that sentiments about economic activity played an important role in amplifying and propagating the Great Recession. First, after controlling for aggregate shocks, a 1pp rise in county employment and housing price growth is associated with a 0.30sd and 0.67sd rise in perceptions about the current state of the economy and a 0.12pp and 0.27pp rise in perceptions the economy is improving. Second, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the 2016 Presidential election, consumption of non-durable goods grew by 4.2%, concentrated with a 10-12% rise among conservatives. The causal effect of sentiment on consumption is robust to three separate instrumental variables strategies: a state Bartik-like measure of gasoline price shocks, county fluctuations in daily temperature, and exposure to different housing price shocks through social networks. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the decline in sentiment can account for 34-68% of the decline in consumption during the Great Recession and an additional 14-43 months of delayed recovery.

Most convicted criminals are sentenced to probation and allowed to return home. On proba- tion, however, a technical rule violation such as not paying fees can result in incarceration. Rule violations account for more than 30% of all prison spells in many states and are significantly more common among black offenders. I test whether technical rules are effective tools for identifying likely reoffenders and deterring crime and examine their disparate racial impacts using adminis- trative data from North Carolina. Analysis of a 2011 reform eliminating prison punishments for technical violations reveals that 40% of rule breakers would go on to commit crimes if their vio- lations were ignored. The same reform also closed a 33% black-white gap in incarceration rates without substantially increasing the black-white reoffending gap. These effects combined imply that technical rules target riskier probationers overall, but disproportionately affect low-risk black offenders. To justify black probationers’ higher violation rate on efficiency grounds, their crimes must be roughly twice as socially costly as that of white probationers. Exploiting the repeat-spell nature of the North Carolina data, I estimate a semi-parametric competing risks model that allows me to distinguish the effects of particular types of technical rules from unobserved probationer het- erogeneity. The estimates reveal that the deterrent effects of harsh punishments for rule breaking are negligible. Rules related to the payment of fees and fines, which are common in many states, are ineffective in tagging likely reoffenders and drive differential impacts by race. These findings illus- trate the potentially large influence of facially race-neutral policies on racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes.

Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms-when expected returns are low-and sell after a bust-when expected returns are high. Although time-varying expected returns are a robust empirical fact, theories are ambiguous on whether poorer or richer households engage in such cyclical trading patterns. I estimate the trading patterns for households across wealth levels, in the US housing market for 1988-2013. I interact housing ownership patterns from deeds records with household-level wealth, which I infer from merging owners' surnames with their name-based income in the 1940 full Census. The estimated dispersion in expected returns from this "buy-high-sell-low" channel is large: The interquartile-range difference is 60 basis points per year. The channel predicts that geographies with historically higher volatility will feature more wealth inequality than income inequality: I verify this implication in the data. These results suggest that a government policy intended to boost poorer households' wealth via homeownership can backfire if it ignores the status of house prices. * I am extremely grateful to my committee chair Amir Sufi and members Marianne Bertrand, Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales for their continuous guidance and support. I also thank

“The Lost Tribe of Magruder” tells the story of a predominately Black community, Magruder, that had been forcibly relocated in 1942 for the creation of Camp Peary, a World War II training ground. This dissertation furthers our understanding of dispossession. Dispossession disempowers those who experience it. An adequate understanding of dispossession and how this understanding can be beneficial to this particular descendant community in Williamsburg contributes to strengthening dispossessed Blacks throughout African diasporas. Scholars primarily define dispossession according to the legal definition of the loss of land; a dearth of scholars have examined additional components of dispossession: material, racial, spatial and bodily. Dispossession is much more than the loss of land and entails multiple components coming together into a “matrix.” This new matrix consists of five elements: material, psychological, political, existential and spiritual, creating what I call the “matrix of dispossession.” The predominantly Black community from Magruder has experienced this matrix of dispossession. The dispossession of Magruder in 1942 links back to more than five hundred years of Europeans dispossessing Africans and African diasporic peoples. The first dispossessed Africans who forcefully had migrated to Tsenacommacah area predates the “first twenty Negroes” by close to a century. These are the ancestors of Magruder. They also have kinship networks that trace back to the 17th century and spread around the United States. These networks played an integral role during slavery, post emancipation and after the dispossession of Magruder in 1942. The Black community of Magruder reveals how Blacks experience multiple dispossessions and form new diasporas. They travel and learn how to read, write and communicate during slavery. Magruder forms into a tight knit communication with two churches, farming, oystering, education and love. While the Navy’s dispossession of Magruder disrupts and wipes Magruder off the map, this story still needs to be told. Overwhelmingly, the descendant community states they want this story to be told and they have guided me in understanding the way they want it to be told.

The tax code helps set the rules for how our economy works and how wealth and power are distributed. Low taxes on the wealthy and corporations result in fewer revenues, which lead policymakers to constrain investments in programs and benefits important to women. A powerful but lesser-known effect is how these low taxes also incent or enable behaviors that have negative downstream effects on women’s economic well-being, stability, and opportunity.

This research evaluates the performance of areal interpolation coupled with dasymetric refinement to estimate different demographic attributes, namely population sub-groups based on race, age structure and urban residence, within consistent census tract boundaries from 1990 to 2010 in Massachusetts. The creation of such consistent estimates facilitates the study of the nuanced micro-scale evolution of different aspects of population, which is impossible using temporally incompatible small-area census geographies from different points in time. Various unexplored ancillary variables, including the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), the National Land-Cover Database (NLCD), parcels, building footprints and the proprietary ZTRAX® dataset are utilized for dasymetric refinement prior to areal interpolation to examine their effectiveness in improving the accuracy of multi-temporal population estimates. Different areal interpolation methods including Areal Weighting (AW), Target Density Weighting (TDW), Expectation Maximization (EM) and its data-extended approach are coupled with different dasymetric refinement scenarios based on these ancillary variables. The resulting consistent small area estimates of white and black subpopulations, people of age 18–65 and urban population show that dasymetrically refined areal interpolation is particularly effective when the analysis spans a longer time period (1990–2010 instead of 2000–2010) and the enumerated population is sufficiently large (e.g., counts of white vs. black). The results also demonstrate that current census-defined urban areas overestimate the spatial distribution of urban population and dasymetrically refined areal interpolation improves estimates of urban population. Refined TDW using building footprints or the ZTRAX® dataset outperforms all other methods. The implementation of areal interpolation enriched by dasymetric refinement represents a promising strategy to create more reliable multi-temporal and consistent estimates of different population subgroups and thus demographic compositions. This methodological foundation has the potential to advance micro-scale modeling of various subpopulations, particularly urban population to inform studies of urbanization and population change over time as well as future population projections.

In the United States, housing is most commonly considered unaffordable when a household spends more than 30% of income on housing and utilities. Although easy to calculate, it fails to account for how other categories of essential expenses affect income available to spend on housing. This article compares the ratio-based approach with shelter poverty, a measure that accounts for these elements, evaluating differences in results between the two methods among renters in Ohio. Shelter poverty identifies a higher rate of households in economic distress due to housing market conditions. Further, the average “affordability gap” is four times higher using the shelter poverty than with the 30% threshold. Relative to shelter poverty, the ratio method underestimates the unaffordability of rental housing in economically distressed areas, as measured by median household income, and modestly overestimates it in high-income areas.

This thesis explores nationalism, state identity and community through the lens of one Southern planter family. The Crenshaw family are traced from their origins in Virginia, to South Carolina and thence to Alabama Territory during the first wave of migration between 1816 and 1819. Establishing a strong kinship community upon migration, they fostered an identity with their new state which superseded that of American or Confederate identity. Employing genealogy as a research methodology to enhance the understanding of kinship networks, within the framework of a detailed analysis of the Crenshaw family’s archive, this research demonstrates how familial power dynamics created and redefined their identity as Alabamians, Southerners and Americans. Employing the framework of national vs. local identity, this project reflects on the relative importance of localism over and above national loyalty and the possibilities for localism superseding national identity prior to the Civil War and beyond. Planters, lawyers and politicians, the Crenshaws belonged to the planter elite and as such accrued significant land and wealth, including a large community of enslaved people. Settling finally in Butler County, the core years addressed here examine their lives their 1817-1819 migration to the state through to the end of Reconstruction, tracing community establishment, education and the approach of the Civil War. The fortunes of the family in such a location were undeniably changed forever by their personal experiences of Civil War and Reconstruction. Re-Appraising the established and current literature against a vast archive of newly discovered primary material, this thesis demonstrates, in contrast to some established beliefs, that family networks and community identity were an essential element in the success of family amidst this turbulent period in the 19th century United States. In the process, this project emphasizes the importance of local history in illuminating and enhancing broader historical processes.

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed - since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of the change. However, we document that standards for degree receipt may explain some of the change in graduation rates.

This thesis determines that the Alabama Black Belt evolved differently than other regions in Alabama during the post-cotton era 1910-2010. This thesis first quantifies the extent of Alabama Black Belt during the ante-bellum era and the cotton credit system era. It then analysis the population histories of counties inside the Alabama Black Belt relative to other Alabama counties with similar economic characteristics during the Post-Cotton era 1910-2010. The analysis uses population processes of migration, natality and mortality to determine that rural Black Belt counties despite having significantly higher birth rate lost 56% of their population during the post cotton period, while the population of similar rural counties outside the Black Belt increased by 8%. Analysis of mixed and urban counties showed similar differences. The thesis then uses two measures of population distribution taken at decadal intervals to determine if the hierarchical market system within the Black Belt evolved differently than the market system in similar counties outside the Black Belt. This analysis uses a graph of the Pareto coefficient for xii rank-size distribution of settlements within each group of counties as one measure. Rural population density is a second measure. Together these two measures are proxies for employment and by extension the relative health of the regional economy. The results indicate the Black Belt counties, especially rural counties experienced centralizing markets with downgrading of market levels and a contracting economy in four of ten decades, while rural counties outside the Black Belt experienced decentralizing markets with upgrading market levels and an expanding economy in two decades. Similarly, mixed Black Belt counties experienced negative growth in two decades and strong growth in only one decade, while mixed counties outside the Black Belt experienced strong growth and upgrading markets in five decades. Comparative population analysis and measures of population distribution confirmed that the Alabama Black Belt counties evolved differently due to demographic differences, economic opportunities, and governance.

Nonprofit community health centers (CHCs) are the largest subset of safety net clinics in the United States and, in many vulnerable and underserved areas, act as the only provider of vital health services in the community. The expansion of Medicaid provision under the Affordable Care Act of 2010 led to a fundamental change in the core client demographics of CHCs, with higher income thresholds and single childless individuals now eligible for Medicaid. This expansion of the Medicaid population creates both opportunities and threats that may impact CHCs’ long term financial sustainability. Accumulating reserves through positive net margins is a managerial tactic that nonprofits can utilize to buffer against environmental uncertainty. This study utilizes data from IRS Form 990s, American Community Survey, HRSA grantee lists, and the Area Resource File to model the differences in net margins between CHCs in early Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states from 2008–2012. Results show higher margins for CHCs in early expansion states compared to non-expansion states, even after accounting for organizational and environmental covariates. CHCs who are HRSA grantees are associated with positive margins whereas those relying more heavily on program revenue show negative margins. Further, CHCs located in counties with higher percentages of persons in poverty also demonstrate reduced margins. This exploratory study contributes to the nonprofit finance literature by highlighting the importance of incorporating contextual variables to deepen our understanding of changes in nonprofit financial health.

In this paper, I attempt to show a correlation between socioeconomic factors and the production of waste. The increasing amounts of waste (garbage) produced impacts the environment and can create challenges for safe, efficient and effective disposal. This paper looks at waste and socioeconomic data from the United States, the Buffalo, New York Region (USA) and the United Kingdom to find socioeconomic factors that are a predictor of waste generation.

Collusion is widely condemned for its negative effects on consumer welfare and market efficiency. In this paper, I show that collusion may also in some cases facilitate the creation of unexpected new sources of value. I bring this possibility into focus through the lens of a historical episode from the 19th century, when colluding railroads in the U.S. South converted 13,000 miles of railroad track to standard gauge over the course of two days in 1886, integrating the South into the national transportation network. Route-level freight traffic data reveal that the gauge change caused a large shift in market share from steamships to railroads, but did not affect total shipments or prices on these routes. Guided by these results, I develop a model of compatibility choice in a collusive market and argue that collusion may have enabled the gauge change to take place as it did, while also tempering the effects on prices and total shipments.