Microfoundations of institutions are central to constructing place – the interplay of location, meaning, and material form. Since only a few institutional studies bring materiality to the fore to examine the processes of place-making, how material forms interact with people to institutionalize or de-institutionalize the meaning of place remains a black box. Through an inductive and historical study of Boston’s North End neighborhood, the authors show how material practices shaped place-making and institutionalized, or de-institutionalized, the meaning of the North End. When material practices symbolically encoded meanings of diverse audiences into the church, it created resonance and enabled the building’s meanings to withstand environmental change and become institutionalized as part of the North End’s meaning as a place. In contrast, when the material practices restricted meaning to a specific audience, it limited resonance when the environment changed, was more likely to be demolished and, thus, erased rather than institutionalized into the meaning of the North End as a place.

Recent literature on economic inequality has focused a great deal of attention on the estimation of income concentration measures (e.g., the share of total income held by a small, rich segment of the population). One of the key findings of this new stream of literature is that estimates of income concentrations as derived from tax-administrative sources are generally higher and show a stronger positive trend than what is estimated via household survey data, especially for very high-end income groups. Differences can be quite large at the very top, but relatively small as we move further down the income pyramid. Figure 1 depicts the existing gap between top income shares in the US as estimated from IRS tax data versus data from the household survey from the Current Population Survey (CPS).

Why do high-income black households live in neighborhoods with characteristics similar to those of low-income white households? We find that neighborhood sorting by income and race cannot be explained by financial constraints: High-income, high-wealth black households live in similar-quality neighborhoods as low-income, low-wealth white households. We provide evi- dence that black households sort across neighborhoods according to some non-pecuniary factor(s) correlated with the racial composition of neighborhoods. Black households sorting into black neigh- borhoods can explain the racial gap in neighborhood quality at all income levels. The supply of high-quality black neighborhoods drives the neighborhood quality of black households.

Popular culture portrays accounting as a miserable job. Accounting research evaluating the boring “beancounter stereotype” argues that it is wrong and costly because it reduces the appeal of accounting to high quality students and exacts a psychological toll on accountants who are thus stereotyped. In this study, we empirically test the basic question: is accounting a miserable job? We use data from a variety of sources that enable us to measure workplace misery and model it as a function of work tasks and personal characteristics of workers across occupations. We find that accounting work is particularly sedentary, rigid, repetitive, constrained, and rules-centric; characteristics that are consistent with the accounting stereotype and that prior work outside of accounting has shown are associated with workplace misery. However, we find that accounting is not a miserable job. In univariate and multivariate tests, we find that accounting has misery values that are either near the average or are better than average for comparison jobs. This apparent paradox could be a positive consequence of accounting stereotypes, which may facilitate the matching of potentially miserable work with people who are most prepared to tolerate it. Indeed, we present longitudinal evidence suggesting that accounting attracts people with personalities suited to repetitive and rules-centric work and who have psychosocial histories that make them robust to stress. Workplace misery is costly to workers, employers, and society and accounting stereotypes have value if they facilitate informed career selection.

Black incarceration rates in the U.S. grew relative to white incarceration rates throughout the first half of the 20th century despite substantial convergence in education levels and wages between the two groups. This paper considers the First Great Migration prior to 1940 as a factor which increased black male incarceration rates. I construct an individual-level dataset of all Southern-born male prisoners and non-prisoners in the 1940 US Census; both groups are matched to their childhood household in the 1920 Census in order to control for across-household selection using household fixed effects. I estimate that migrating to the North roughly doubled an individual's chance of being incarcerated, increasing the probability of incarceration by 2 percentage points. I estimate that the Great Migration was responsible for about 6% of the sharp increase in black incarceration rates between 1920 and 1940.

Existing research has established that minority banks and depository institutions are concentrated in minority-populated areas, tend to serve the interests, and ensure the economic viability of the minority populations, primarily through cultural affinity. However, this research has mostly focused on African American banks. In this paper, we attempt to understand the characteristics of Asian American Owned Banks (AAOBs) and how they differ from mainstream banks. Our results show that AAOBs generally tend to perform better than mainstream banks. A closer look at the ethnic breakdown of AAOBs reveals that Indian American banks perform better as they tend to serve a financially better off Indian American population. On the other hand, Korean American banks tend to take on more risk. Overall, AAOBs are more risk averse than mainstream banks. These unique characteristics of AAOBs have regulatory and governance implications.

Consumption externalities have a non-linear association with fertility rates according to an empirical analysis of US micro-level data and panel data estimations for developed economies. In light of this evidence, we incorporate consumption externalities into the fertility-choice model and provide an analytical explanation for the patterns observed in the evolution of fertility. Speciically, accounting for consumption externalities helps explain the steep decline in fertility rates during the demographic transition and the recent stabilisation and reversal of the decline in fertility. Simulations based on the calibrated model closely replicate the observed crosscountry fertility patterns for developed economies. The endings connrm that consumption externalities are an important factor driving the evolution of fertility.

Are women living in urban areas more likely to use contraceptive methods than women living in rural areas?

h i g h l i g h t s • Fluctuations in wage dispersion are independent of the business cycle. • Residual wage dispersion is procyclical. • This procyclicality arises from the upper half of the residual wage distribution. a b s t r a c t In this paper, I provide robust evidence that fluctuations in wage dispersion are independent of the business cycle, while residual wage dispersion, i.e. dispersion of wages within narrowly defined demographic and skill groups of workers, increases during booms and lessens during recessions. Moreover, I show that the procyclical fluctuations in residual wage dispersion are mainly generated by cyclical changes in the upper half of the residual wage distribution.

In 2017, Weekendavisen published an article in connection with my doctoral dissertation with the title: "Learn the language, move, marry the others". With this, the journalist sought to extract the essence of a main theme in the thesis, namely how the integration process has progressed over the 4-5 generations that have passed since the Scandinavian emigrants in large numbers sought America.

English skills are highly valuable for today’s immigrants, but has this always been the case? I estimate the premium for English fluency and the rate of language acquisition in the early 20th century US using new linked data on over two hundred thousand immigrants. Few early 20th century immigrants arrived with English proficiency, yet many acquired language skills rapidly after arrival. Based on individual fixed effects, acquiring English fluency was associated with a small upgrade in occupational income. The results suggest that English fluency was less important for economic assimilation in the early 20th century than in recent decades.

How does pregnancy affect domestic violence in Mali? Mali suffers from multiple social problems, including a high level of gender inequality. Mali does not have any laws that prohibit domestic violence and polygamy is legal. Mali is a large source, transit, and destination country for human and sex trafficking.

The Problem. Meta-science, that is, science about science, is an application of scientific method to explain and control the methods and enterprise of science. The field of inquiry of meta-science emerged originally in reaction to problems with reproducibility and replicability of seemingly settled science. These same problems could affect research evidence conducted by human resource development (HRD) researchers and, as a result, could limit the applicability of HRD research outcomes to HRD practice. The Solution. Discussed in this article are examples of meta-scientific issues and solutions that ultimately affect the transition of knowledge derived through research to practice in the field of HRD. Problems with the reproducibility and replication of research conducted in the field are detailed as are meta-scientific issues involved in judging the quality of scientific work, methodology-agnostic applications of meta-scientific inquiry, requirements for sharing data and code, and the need to let theory guide research. The Stakeholders. Researchers would benefit from the considerations of meta-scientific concerns in the design, conduct, and reporting of research to improve the replicability and reproducibility of research outcomes. Knowledge of meta-scientific principles and cautions by adopters of research outcomes would inject healthy skepticism into decisions about whether research outcomes are worthy for application in practice or to guide future research.

The study of intergenerational mobility was once viewed as a quintessentially sociological topic that was widely investigated using occupational mobility tables. However, the popularity of occupational mobility tables seems to be rapidly dwindling. This change is associated with the increasing popularity of the economic approach to modeling intergenerational mobility which is not encumbered by the shortcomings of occupational mobility tables. The first limitation of the latter is the contextual nature of occupation which provides an increasingly imprecise indicator of the individual’s earnings or other socioeconomic outcomes. The second limitation is the lack of focus on long-term earnings and the continued reliance on cross-sectional data in an era of increased labor market volatility. The third limitation is the dubious practice of partitioning mobility into structural-mobility versus circulation-mobility and focusing on primarily the latter to make generalizations about the level of social fluidity in society. The fourth limitation is the failure of occupational models to discern important empirical trends (such as rising earnings inequality and the Great Gatsby Curve). The fifth limitation is that, defined as categories of primary job duties, occupation is an inaccurate indicator of non-pecuniary job rewards and compensating differentials. Younger sociologists are abandoning occupational mobility tables—despite their once great popularity—in favor of economic models which are not significantly compromised by these limitations.

Naturalization bestows economic benefits to immigrants, their families, and communities through greater access to employment opportunities, higher earnings, and homeownership. It is the cornerstone of immigrant assimilation in the United States. Yet fewer than 720,000 of the estimated 8.5 million legal permanent residents eligible to naturalize do so on a yearly basis. Using data from the 2008–2016 American Community Survey, we analyze how the expansion of interior immigration enforcement affects naturalization patterns. We find that the intensification of interior enforcement curtails naturalization and, among those choosing to naturalize, delays it. Understanding how immigration policy influences naturalization decisions is important given its crucial role in migrant assimilation and its documented benefits.

We document a long-lasting association between a common societal phenomenon, early-life family disruption, and investment behavior. Fund managers who experienced the death or divorce of their parents during childhood take lower risk and are more likely to sell their holdings following risk-increasing firm events. They make smaller tracking errors, hold fewer lottery stocks, and show a stronger disposition effect. The results strengthen as treatment intensifies, i.e., when disruption occurred during formative years, when bereaved families had less social support, and after (unexpected) parental deaths. The evidence adds to our understanding of the role of social factors and “nurture” in finance.

Assess the relationship between pneumococcal vaccine levels in Ethiopian children and analyze multiple variables that affect these levels. Understand the variations in vaccination rates and the significant variables involved in the variation in order to identify areas that can be improved to increase vaccination coverage.

Prior studies have examined the impact of immigration on native-born wages. These studies have relied upon education-experience groups to define labor markets and identify the wage elasticity of supply of immigrants. However, evidence suggests that immigrants’ educational attainment is treated differently in the labor market and constructing labor markets based upon this characteristic leads to potentially biased conclusions. We utilize O*NET occupational characteristics to form a different set of labor markets. Our analysis finds higher partial equilibrium effects on native born wages than prior work, as expected. These larger effects, however, are shown to be concentrated on the least skilled natives. Estimates of the total wage effect along the distribution of occupational skills confirm that the negative wage effect is concentrated on native workers in the bottom tail of the distribution. Natives in the upper tail of the distribution experience wage gains as a result of immigration.

The 1996 welfare reforms imposed major changes on the nation’s means-tested benefits, including a requirement that states place at least half of their cash welfare caseload in work or related activities. Congress also increased both cash and in-kind subsidies for low-income working families. Between the mid-1990s and 2000, work and wages among low-income women increased and poverty declined. The recessions of 2001 and 2007–2009 caused rising employment to falter, but after 2014, women’s employment rose again, and poverty declined. The impacts of welfare reform on these outcomes have been disputed, with many on the Left charging that states have used welfare funds inappropriately and many on the Right arguing that welfare reform played a major role in the improvements in work, wages, and poverty. We review reforms that have been proposed by one or both parties in recent years, including focusing spending on benefits and work. We conclude with lessons of these reform experiences for future reforms of entitlement programs.

This dissertation contains three essays in History and Spatial Economics with Big Data. As a part of my dissertation, I develop a modern machine-learning based approach to connect large datasets. Merging several massive databases and matching the records within them presents challenges — some straightforward and others more complex. I employ artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to link and then analyze massive amounts of historical US federal census, Department of Labor, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The transformation of the US economy during this period was remarkable, from a rural economy at the beginning of the 19th century to an industrial nation by the end. More strikingly, after lagging behind the technological frontier for most of the nineteenth century, the United States entered the twenty-first century as the global technological leader and the richest nation in the world. Results from this dissertation reveal how people lived and how the business operated. It tells us the past that led us to where we are now in terms of people, geography, prices and wages, wealth, revenue, output, capital, numbers, and types of workers, urbanization, migration, and industrialization. As a part of this endeavor, the first chapter studies how the benefits of improving urban mass transit infrastructures in cities are shared across workers with different skills. It exploits a unique historical setting to estimate the impact of urban transportation infrastructure: the introduction of mass-public transit infrastructure in the late nineteenth and twentieth- century New York City. I linked individual-level US census data to investigate how urban transit infrastructure differentially affects the welfare of workers with heterogenous skill. My second chapter measures immigrations’ role in US rise as an economic power. Es- pecially, this chapter focuses on a potential mechanism by which immigrants might have spurred economic prosperity: the transfer of new knowledge. This is the first project to use advances in quantitative spatial theory along with advanced big-data techniques to un- derstand the contribution of immigrants to the process of U.S. economic growth. The key benefit of this approach is to link modern theory with massive amounts of microeconomic data about individual immigrants—their locations and occupations—to address questions that are extremely difficult to assess otherwise. Specifically, the dataset will help the re- searchers understand the extent to which the novel ideas and expertise immigrants brought to U.S. shores drove the nation’s emergence as an industrial and technological powerhouse. My third chapter exploits advances in data digitization and machine learning to study intergenerational mobility in the United States before World War II. Using machine learning techniques, I construct a massive database for multiple generations of fathers and sons. This allows us to identify “land of opportunities": locations and times in American history where kids had chances to move up in the income ladder. I find that intergenerational mobility elasticities were relatively stable during 1880-1940; there are regional disparities in terms of giving kids opportunities to move up, and; the geographic disparities of intergenerational mobility have evolved over time.