Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. We used panel data and a quasi‐experimental impact‐evaluation approach to determine how key economic indicators were related to the percentage of land protected. Specifically, we estimated the impacts of public and private land protection based on local area employment and housing permits data from 5 periods spanning 1990–2015 for all major towns and cities in New England. To generate rigorous impact estimates, we modeled economic outcomes as a function of the percentage of land protected in the prior period, conditional on town fixed effects, metro‐region trends, and controls for period and neighboring protection. Contrary to narratives that conservation depresses economic growth, land protection was associated with a modest increase in the number of people employed and in the labor force and did not affect new housing permits, population, or median income. Public and private protection led to different patterns of positive employment impacts at distances close to and far from cities, indicating the importance of investing in both types of land protection to increase local opportunities. The greatest magnitude of employment impacts was due to protection in more rural areas, where opportunities for both visitation and amenity‐related economic growth may be greatest. Overall, we provide novel evidence that land protection can be compatible with local economic growth and illustrate a method that can be broadly applied to assess the net economic impacts of protection.

Menstrual hygiene management refers to the practice of using clean materials to absorb menstrual blood that can be changed privately, safely, hygienically and as often as needed for the duration of the menstrual cycle In India, menstruation is viewed as something unclean or dirty so it’s often set aside and ignored Cultural taboos and secrecy about menstruation form problems of improper menstrual hygiene related practices Data source: IPUMS PMA 2020

Massey and Denton’s concept of hypersegregation describes how multiple and distinct forms of black-white segregation lead to high levels of black-white stratification. However, numerous studies assessing the association between segregation and racial stratification applied only one or two dimensions of segregation, neglecting how multiple forms of segregation combine to potentially exacerbate socioeconomic disparities between blacks and whites. We address this by using data from the U.S. Census from 1980 to 2010 and data from the American Community Survey from 2012 to 2016 to assess trajectories for black-white disparities in educational attainment, employment, and neighborhood poverty between metropolitan areas with hypersegregation and black-white segregation, as measured by the dissimilarity index. Using a time-varying measure of segregation types, our results indicate that in some cases, hypersegregated metropolitan areas have been associated with larger black-white socioeconomic disparities beyond those found in metropolitan areas that are highly segregated in terms of dissimilarity but are not hypersegregated. However, the contrasts in black-white socioeconomic inequality between hypersegregated metropolitan areas and those with high segregation largely diminish by the 2012 to 2016 observation.

We provide the first estimates of immigrant residential segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan-Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small factory towns and for non-European sources. Early twentieth-century immigrants spatially assimilated at a slow rate, leaving immigrants' lived experience distinct from natives for decades after arrival.

Why did America introduce compulsory schooling laws at a time when financial investments in education and voluntary school attendance were high? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compulsory schooling laws as a nation-building tool to instil civic values to the culturally diverse migrants during the ‘Age of Mass Migration’ between 1850 and 1914. We show the adoption of compulsory schooling laws occurred significantly earlier in states that hosted European migrants with lower exposure to civic values in their home countries. Using cross-county data, we show that these migrants had significantly lower demand for American schooling pre-compulsion.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: A growing number of cities, especially those outside traditional immigrant gateways, have sought to leverage immigrant resources to promote local economic development in recent years. Although some cities have explicitly included immigrant entrepreneurship as a focal area in their plans, we know little about the breadth and depth of such strategies. In this research we explore the current landscape of local small business development policies toward immigrant entrepreneurship. We conduct a detailed review of the program documents of 16 selected welcoming cities and derive 20 specific programs across five broad types: information, language, business service, financial support, and place-based approaches. Their popularity, however, varies among the case cities given the number of adoptions. For example, all 16 cities adopted information hub–related strategies, whereas only 2 considered immigrant-friendly financing programs. In comparing these policies with immigrant entrepreneurs’ needs and barriers, we find their service gaps are addressed to different extents. Takeaway for practice: Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of current local government policies that aim at tapping into immigrants’ entrepreneurial potential for community and economic development and their adoption levels across cities. Existing policies are able to address immigrants’ information and language needs but are less targeted at developing their business skills and facilitating their access to financial capital. Place-based approaches may serve to connect immigrant-owned businesses to customers and market in the mainstream economy and thus expand their scope beyond ethnic neighborhoods. Because these programs require different levels of resources, planners and policymakers considering this agenda can assess their relative fit with local population demand in designing appropriate policies.

This dissertation applies tools developed in labor economics to empirically study questions in labor, development, and urban economics. Each chapter attempts to decompose a problem into competing explanations. The first decomposes racial segregation in US cities. The second decomposes differences in wages between agricultural workers and and non-agricultural workers. And finally, the last decomposes the heterogeneous responses of workers to a new monitoring technology.In the first chapter, I revisit the question of whether residential segregationin US cities emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a consequence of decentralized location choices in combination with white antipathy toward black residents or whether it reflected institutionalized constraints on the availability of neighborhoods that black families could access. The chapter analyzes rich population data from the 1930 and 1940 censuses to disentangle these channels. I first lay out a simple discrete choice model of residential choices by white and black families that depends on the local price of housing and on the fraction of black residents in each neighborhood. I show how the preferences of both race groups can be identified using information on the impacts of exogenous inflows of white and black residents to different neighborhoods. White and black rural inflows constituted a major source of inmigration to major cities during this time period; I construct a pair of novel instrumental variables for these inflows by connecting the distributions of white and black surnames in rural areas to earlier migrants living in different census tracts in 1930. The resulting structural estimates confirm that white families had a relatively high willingness to pay to avoid black neighbors, consistent with an important role for preferences in the evolution of neighborhood segregation. Combining white and black preferences, however, I also find strong evidence that black residents faced supply side constraints on their neighborhood choices. I conclude that about one half of the overall degree of neighborhood segregation observed in 1940 was due to the different preferences of white and black families, while a comparable share was due to implicit or explicit constraints on which neighborhoods black families could move into.While the first chapter interpreted incumbent residents' responses to migrants as reflective of their racial preferences, the second chapter, based on joint work with Marieke Kleemans, Joan Hamory Hicks, and Ted Miguel, directly studies the migrant experience itself. Recent research has pointed to large gaps in labor productivity between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors in low-income countries, as well as between workers in rural and urban areas. Most estimates are based on national accounts or repeated cross-sections of micro-survey data, and as a result typically struggle to account for individual selection between sectors. We use long-run individual-level panel data from two low-income countries (Indonesia and Kenya). Accounting for individual fixed effects leads to much smaller estimated productivity gains from moving into the non-agricultural sector (or urban areas), reducing estimated gaps by over 80%. Estimated productivity gaps do not emerge up to five years after a move between sectors. We evaluate whether these findings imply a re-assessment of the conventional wisdom regarding sectoral gaps, discuss how to reconcile them with existing cross-sectional estimates, and consider implications for the desirability of sectoral reallocation of labor.Finally, the third chapter is based on joint work with Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan, and Laura Schechter and empirically studies models of task assignment within organizations in a developing country context. Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals about how to implement a particular task. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors (middle managers) when ministerial leadership (the principal) introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that, before randomization of treatment, elicited from supervisors which AEAs they believed should be prioritized for treatment. We find that supervisors did have valuable information---they prioritized AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different allocation rules and roll-out scales (i.e., the share of AEAs to receive treatment). We semi-parametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll-out.

Group-randomized trials of communities often rely on the convenience of pre-existing administrative divisions, such as school district boundaries or census entities, to divide the study area into intervention and control sites. However, these boundaries may include substantial heterogeneity between regions, introducing unmeasured confounding variables. This challenge can be addressed by the creation of exchangeable intervention and control territories that are equally weighted by pertinent socio-demographic characteristics. The present study used territory design software as a novel approach to partitioning study areas for The Minnesota Heart Health Program’s “Ask about Aspirin” Initiative. Twenty-four territories were created to be similar in terms of age, sex, and educational attainment, as factors known to modify aspirin use. To promote ease of intervention administration, the shape and spread of the territories were controlled. Means of the variables used in balancing the territories were assessed as well as other factors that were not used in the balancing process. The analysis demonstrated that demographic characteristics did not differ significantly between the intervention and control territories created by the territory design software. The creation of exchangeable territories diminishes geographically based impact on outcomes following community interventions in group-randomized trials. The method used to identify comparable geographical units may be applied to a wide range of population-based health intervention trials.

How has the number of Ugandan children between 6-59 months of age vaccinated with vitamin A changed from 2006 to 2016? The percentage of children that received the most recent vaccination varied minimally in each region The total number of children vaccinated decreased from 2006 to 2011 before increasing to its peak in 2016 What demographic factors are significant when predicting the likelihood of a child being vaccinated? In each of the three samples, mother’s age as well as the “richer” and “richest” wealth quintiles were significant when determining if a child received the most recent vaccination How effective was the vitamin A vaccine at reducing the percentage of children with a vitamin A deficiency in Uganda from 2006 to 2016? A substantial increase in the prevalence of VAD occurred from 2006 to 2011 followed by a substantial decrease in 2016 Due to complications with the retinol-binding protein method of assessing VAD, the reliability of these measurements may be questionable

This paper uses U.S. time-diary surveys to study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education by immigrants and natives. We develop a simple theoretical framework, which highlights the different constraints and opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives. In line with our theoretical model, the estimates show that immigrants are more likely to engage in informal education and, conditional on participation, they allocate more time to these activities. The investment in informal learning and education activities is likely to boost immigrants’ human and social capital and contribute to socio-economic integration.

Traditional pedestrian and bicyclist safety analyses typically examine crashes, injuries, or fatalities. However, this reactive approach only accounts for the places where people are currently walking or biking and those that are doing so. Would a proactive approach – examining areas where pedestrian and bicyclist activity is being suppressed because of safety concerns – illuminate other previously neglected safety issues? The goal of this work is to compare results from reactive and proactive pedestrian and bicyclist safety analyses. To accomplish this, we focus on child pedestrians and bicyclists in Denver, Colorado because of the structured characteristics of their travel behavior regarding trips to school. We complete a reactive crash cluster analysis and a proactive safety analysis that is based on trip suppression due to traffic safety concerns. A parental perception survey informs the mode choice model we create for the proactive safety analysis. Findings suggest that reactive approaches identify downtown Denver and major corridors as unsafe, while the proactive analysis also identifies neighborhoods in west, east, and northeast Denver. Due to an absence of crashes, the majority of these areas would not normally be considered unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists based on conventional reactive approaches. The fact that they are perceived as unsafe may be limiting usage and thereby limiting the number of crashes. In order to improve safety where children are currently walking and bicycling – as well as where they want to walk or bike – traditional analyses would benefit from augmentation by such a proactive safety approach.

I conducted a descriptive analysis of how disability shapes labor market activity differentially by educational attainment and disability type using the American Community Survey, 2015 (N = 1,504,947) and linear probability models. Having a disability is associated with a decrease in the probability of labor force participation (proportion of those employed or seeking employment; ?=−0.34) and employment (proportion of those in the labor market who are employed; ?=−0.05). When differentiated by disability type, education moderates the relationship between disability and labor force participation for all disability types. However, education only moderates the relationship between disability and employment for those with cognitive-, physical-, and mobility-related disabilities (not sensory or self-care). Having a bachelor’s degree is associated with a 30.68% higher probability of labor force participation and a 26.84% higher probability of employment among those in the labor force than having some college, indicating higher education may be a pivotal intervention point. The relationships between disability and labor force participation and disability and employment vary by disability type, as does the role of education.

Geographies of militarism seeks to both broaden and deepen the traditional purview of military geography, examining times and locations distant from battlefields, and delving into the emplaced, embodied experiences of individual soldiers. Combining this framework with other geographical theory about the mutually constitutive relationship of individuals and places, my dissertation brings these two strands of critical military geography together to argue that militaristic ideologies and practices act not only at the scale of the individual soldier but through him. The particularities of an individual’s military service predict not only of his own outcomes, but also influence broader trends that register in demographic metrics, popular rhetoric and spatial structures. Focusing on rural American veterans of the First World War (an understudied subpopulation of an understudied conflict), I conceptualize these individuals as existing at the crossroads of home and front and use quantitative methodologies inspired by life course analysis and population geography to examine how these rhetorically dichotomous places were connected through the medium of individuals’ movements and social relationships. Specifically, I employ North Dakota’s WWI military roster, the 1930 US Census and a novel linked dataset that knits these two sources into quasi-longitudinal, military civilian observations. Combining these individual data with county-level summaries, I analyze how the experience of particular military and civilian places predicted postwar social and spatial mobility and marital status, and how veteran status in concert with other characteristics predicted postwar population patterns. I chart the shifting articulation of military and civilian space through the aggregation of individuals at particular times and locations, and show how individual soldiers’ stories both met in places and helped to compose the character of those places. I conduct these analyses with logistic and regular regressions, spatial statistics, maps and visualizations. My findings suggest the importance of the interaction of factors, and argue that the complexity and nuance of place-based, multi-scalar relationships cannot be read from dominant narratives of WWI based in the better studied European context. By drawing on geography and placing the soldier at the heart, my dissertation contributes a different and complementary perspective to WWI historiography while advancing geographies of militarism.

To report findings of the 2015 DHS survey regarding feelings and attitudes towards teachers and students with HIV/AIDS To determine if there is a correlation between age, wealth, and education level of the women who participated in this survey and their feelings and attitudes towards teachers and students with HIV/AIDS

Parenting is emotionally demanding and highly gendered. We use data from the American Time Use Survey to examine mothers’ and fathers’ momentary affect during childcare activities. We observe a gender imbalance in the emotional rewards of childcare: Fathers report more happiness, less stress, and less tiredness than mothers. We introduce the “care context”—defined as the type of childcare activity, when and where it takes place, who is present, and how much care is involved—as an explanation for these gender differences in parents’ affect. The analysis reveals that most dimensions of the care context vary between mothers and fathers. We also find that the care context fully accounts for differences in mothers’ and fathers’ happiness, partially explains differences in stress, and does little to explain differences in tiredness. Thus, the gender imbalance in the emotional rewards of childcare is partially due to parents’ highly gendered engagement with their children.

What is the macroeconomic implications of inequality caused by technological progress? Using a standard over-lapping-generations model with skill heterogeneity and the Roy-type occupational choice, this paper examines how routine-biased technological change impacts income distribution and aggregate demand. It finds that the relatively rapid labor productivity increase in the manufacturing sector compared to the service sector can explain job and wage polarization and about two-thirds of the decline in the real interest rate in the US from the 1980’s to 2010’s. It also documents the potential contribution of that biased technological change to the stagnation of aggregate output.

This paper augments our understanding of the geography of work and opportunity in the United States, examining employment projections for a set of occupations deemed to have a particularly ‘bright outlook’ in the coming decade. Drawing labour and feminist geography insights into regional studies, this paper combines several sources of socioeconomic data to examine critically, first, the regional patterns of projected employment; and, second, how good these jobs really are. It finds that access to these jobs will be highly uneven across the United States; many of these jobs pay well below average, often not paying regional living wages; and patterned disadvantages are likely to hamper improved pay and conditions. It is argued that the mismatch between the optimistic rhetoric and the actual empirics shows that deep changes must be made for there to be a bright outlook for US employment futures. The paper concludes with suggestions on regional policy avenues that could improve this outlook.

This paper estimates, first, how local governments finance federal mandates and, second, how much value local residents place on mandated local spending using a change in federal rules on municipal infrastructure following the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). I leverage the role of river networks in distributing pollutants across cities, combined with pre-CWA state regulatory intensity, to account for the endogeneity of municipal infrastructure adoption decisions, and to predict ex ante compliance with the CWA infrastructure mandate. Cities under the burden of compliance experienced substantial improvements to local ambient water quality as well as a two-fold increase in resident fees. Public spending on non- mandated items did not change, indicating that mandates are unlikely to displace local funding of other goods and services. The simultaneous increases to water quality and local costs resulted in taste-based sorting. However, I find that resident value of mandate compliance depends upon the complementarity of surface water quality to pre-existing local features, as well as exposure to upstream polluters. These results imply that mandates may reduce inefficiencies to local public goods provision that are valued no less than their cost to local residents.

This dissertation comprises three essays contributing to the literatures on labor economics, the economics of immigration and the family, and economic history. The first chapter explores the socioeconomic causes and consequences of marriage among immigrants in the United States. The second chapter is a commentary on literature that attempts to quantify a causal impact of intermarriage on economic outcomes of immigrants. The third chapter serves as a guide for practitioners using supervised record linkage techniques for the imputation of missing data. The first and main chapter of this dissertation studies the United States in the early 20th century at a time of charged debates on immigration. Public opinion turned against immigrants who were perceived as low-skilled or not able or willing to assimilate. The debate culminated in drastic changes in immigration policy which restricted immigration into the country. In some respects, the political climates at the beginning of the last century and today resemble each other. I hope that the historical evidence presented in the first chapter can invite readers to reflect on issues of the present through the lens of the past and that this work can motivate other scholars to pursue reasearch that will shed greater light on the effects of immigration policies and family institutions on the behavior and life outcomes of individuals. I hope that this will bring broader per- spective and deeper understanding into issues at the forefront of the current intellectual and political debate such as family-based immigration and assimilation, income inequality and intergenerational mobility, and the influence of the family on women’s work and career choices. Chapter 1. Marital Segregation and the Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrants Descriptive evidence shows that while immigrants tend to marry endogamously, the ones who intermarry tend to have better economic outcomes. Although a small body of literature has examined this issue, there is still little understanding of the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, I investigate the relationship between marital segregation and the labor market outcomes of immigrants. I propose a Beckerian model of marriage which rationalizes an incentive to marry within one’s ethnic group by incorporating a tradeoff between ethnic similarity and socioeconomic status among potential spouses. The model bears four sets of hypotheses shedding light on patterns of selection into exogamous marriage, sorting in the marriage market, the intermarriage income gap, and comparative statics with respect to marriage market conditions, specifically the immigrant gender imbalance. I test the hypotheses from the model using complete count US census data from the first half of the twentieth century, leveraging the uniqueness of this historical setting in terms of richness of available data and quasi-random variation in marriage market conditions. The findings highlight that resolving the nature of the relationship between segregation in marital choices and individuals’ economic outcomes can have important implications for the study of inequality and the analysis and evaluation of family-based migration policies. Chapter 2. Intermarriage and Assimilation: Some Cautionary Remarks Does intermarriage improve economic outcomes of immigrants? A strand of the literature in labor economics has examined this question by employing instrumental variables research designs which exploit variation in marriage market conditions to control for endogeneity of individuals’ marital choices. In this paper, I discuss this literature and investigate whether the methodologies used in these studies can identify a causal effect of intermarriage on the economic assimilation of immigrants. I conclude that the empirical findings of this body of work should be interpreted with caution. I also point to promising research avenues building on the literature. Chapter 3. Supervised Learning Methods for Historical Record Linkage Scholars in various fields often need to link records from different datasets based on quasi- identifying information. In this article, I draw on a matching procedure based on a method of supervised classification suggested by Feigenbaum (2016). I suggest that the supervised technique can be formally mapped to a classical framework for data combination of fuzzy matching with im- perfect identifiers. I apply the procedure to link immigrant records in the 1930 and 1940 complete count US census databases. The article provides a hands-on guide for practitioners interested in applying surpervised learning methods for the execution and validation of their data matching task.

Young adults often co-reside with their parents in response to economic distress (Furstenberg, 2010; Settersten & Ray, 2010), although for some, it is their preferred living arrangement. Not all young adults who co-reside with a parent are single some are cohabiting or married. By using the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) detailed information on both marital and cohabiting partners (which are not available in either the Decennial Census or the American Community Survey), we produce detailed information on young adult parental co-residence by relationship status from 2007 through 2018. We define parental coresidence as living with one’s own parent(s) or a partners/spouse’s parent(s).