In this study, we analyze the relationship between the development of occupational structure and income inequality in Brazil and the U.S. While both Brazil and the U.S. face high levels of inequality, low socioeconomic development in Brazil notably reduces the proportion of total income that accrues in the bottom two quintiles of the income distribution. In the U.S., inequality is mostly due to unobserved differences within occupations and has grown in large part because of higher earnings among highskilled workers. Our results highlight that the effects of occupational structure are generally more pronounced at lower levels of economic development. At the higher level of economic development found in the U.S., inequality appears to increase largely due to rising inequality among high-skilled employees, which may be a function of unobserved organizational variables such as firm productivity and market advantage.

Extended input–output models require careful estimation of disaggregated consumption by households and comparable sources of labor income by sector. The latter components most often have to be estimated. The primary focus of this paper is to produce labor demand disaggregated by workers’ age. The results are evaluated through considerations of its consistency with a static labor demand model restricted with theoretical requirements. A Bayesian approach is used for more straightforward imposition of regularity conditions. The Bayesian model confirms elastic labor demand for youth workers, which is consistent with what past studies find. Additionally, to explore the effects of changes in age structure on a regional economy, the estimated age-group-specific labor demand model is integrated into a regional input–output model. The integrated model suggests that ceteris paribus ageing population contributes to lowering aggregate economic multipliers due to the rapidly growing number of elderly workers who earn less than younger workers.

This paper employs a boundary-discontinuity research design to estimate land-use regulations' causal impact on residential value per student within Massachusetts municipalities. Zoning restrictions hostile toward small dwellings are found to actually reduce residential value per student. This is because small dwellings, although valued less than larger dwellings, house disproportionally fewer school-aged residents than larger dwellings do. It is then shown that restrictive zoning policies, through their mitigating effect on the local stock of smaller dwellings, force municipalities to rely on higher effective property tax rates to self-fund a particular level of per-student education expenditure, holding all else equal.

We introduce an index of urban amenities based on hotel night stays that can rank most US metros for the years 1990 through 2015. This naive index can be used on its own to study changes in amenity level or with other measures to reduce omitted variable bias. Researchers can also use the index to create panel datasets from more sophisticated cross‐sectional indexes. Empirical testing shows the bundle of amenities associated with hotel stays has substantial effects on variation in housing prices across cities and time, validating our proxy variable approach. Testing for an association with wages is inconclusive.

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine search frictions within the macroeconomy. In the first chapter, I construct a model of simultaneous search to propose a novel contributor to the twin effects of labor force participation decline and rising wage inequality. An algorithm for solving the pairwise-stable matching in a macro environment is provided and incorporated into a dynamic, general equilibrium model. Falling search costs will generate falling labor force participation—as the lowest ranked workers are crowded out of the market—and rising wage inequality—as the competition for desired skills increases. An empirical tests corroborates the effects of cheap search on falling participation. Chapter 2 assesses the contribution of aggregate vs. sectoral shocks to output volatility by building a real business cycle model calibrated to match realistic structure in the market for all three major inputs to production---material inputs, capital goods and labor. While the former two inputs are standard, this paper innovates on previous methods by first expounding the structure of sectoral labor reallocation and then calibrating a model to match its features. A common-factor estimation procedure attributes approximately half of aggregate output volatility to sectoral shocks. In Chapter 3, I explore the implications of lower search costs for product markets by building a micro-founded model of shopping within an industry that features realistic product search frictions. I show via a precise characterization that either increasing or decreasing prices in response to cheaper search can be consistent with competitive equilibrium, depending on the distribution of consumer tastes. This distributiondependence further dictates whether firms and varieties enter or exit the marketplace.

This paper investigates the impact of the 2014 Medicaid expansions on marital behavior. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) encouraged states to expand Medicaid and thereby reduce the number of uninsured individuals. We test whether the Medicaid expansions led to a decrease in marriage and an increase in divorce in expansion states. We add to earlier work on how marital behavior is influenced by the availability of insurance options outside of spousal coverage. Using data from the Current Population Survey from 2010 to 2018 and estimating difference-indifferences models, we find evidence that individuals living in states that expanded their Medicaid programs in 2014 were 2.13 percent less likely to be married and 3.82 percent more likely to be divorced, with the effects being larger for low-educated people. We believe the effect to be a combination of a decrease in reliance on spousal health insurance coverage and a response to incentives of meeting eligibility restrictions to qualify for Medicaid.

Scholars who study immigrant economic progress often point to the success of Southern and Eastern Europeans who entered the United States in the early 20th century and draw inferences about whether today’s immigrants will follow a similar trajectory. However, little is known about the mechanisms that allowed for European upward advancement. This article begins to fill this gap by analyzing how naturalization policies influenced the economic success of immigrants across generations. Specifically, the author creates new panel data sets that follow immigrants and their children across complete-count U.S. censuses to understand the economic consequences of citizenship attainment. The author finds that naturalization raised occupational attainment for the first generation that then allowed children to have greater educational attainment and labor market success. He argues that economic progress was conditioned by political statuses for European-origin groups during the first half of the 20th century.

During the Great Recession, policymakers and advocates for the poor raised concerns that the foreclosure crisis, which forced millions from their homes, was causally linked to the concurrent rise in homelessness. Despite these warnings—and the widespread consequences of the economic collapse on the housing market—no national-level research has evaluated the connection between foreclosures and homelessness. In this study, I combine homelessness data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with foreclosure data from RealtyTrac to analyze changes over time in both phenomena on the metropolitan level. I find that foreclosures within a given year are significantly correlated with homelessness in the following year net of controls for demographic, housing, and economic characteristics, regional time trends, and metropolitan area fixed effects. This relationship is strongest among single homeless individuals (compared with families) and the unsheltered population. These descriptive findings carry important implications for our understanding of the Great Recession’s consequences and demonstrate the need for expanded data collection on homeless populations, with which we can better understand whether and how foreclosure leads to homelessness.

High resolution remotely sensed (RS) data products remain of interest in disease mapping studies. However, previous usage of such satellite-derived products had been limited by high costs. There is also unprecedented space activity characterized by prolific satellite launches for various purposes, the chief of which being land cover observation. Therefore, there is need for information availability on the type of data products obtainable from the captured satellite images in order to facilitate access and utilization. Clearly, the remote sensing landscape is changing with the advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle/drones and spatially explicit images being captured at relatively low costs. We conducted a review to find out which RS data products were accessible for disease mapping and epidemiology. Our aim was to document RS data products for disease mapping and to propose other such products that could be incorporated in disease mapping and epidemiology studies. In view of the fact that RS data products are rapidly evolving, image data of higher spatial and temporal resolutions in near-real time are already available to aid disease mapping. We presented a catalogue of indices from ecological studies that could be used as variables in disease mapping and epidemiology. Remotely sensed data products related to climate, meteorology, land use/cover, cartography and urban mapping are explored as potential indices for disease mapping. There remains a substantial amount of work to be conducted on the evaluation and validation of some of the indices presented in this study. Conversely, synergies between remote sensing experts and epidemiologists could be useful in the uptake and testing of some of the proposed RS data products presented in this work.

We examine whether Medicaid expansions to working-age adults as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased Medicaid participation by low-income older adults. While many published studies have examined so-called "welcome mat" effects in other populations, they have not explicitly considered persons dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. A potential explanation for welcome mat effects in our setting is a dynamic process that is unique to older adults; specifically, Medicaid expansions that occur when an individual is under age 65 could increase Medicaid participation when they become age eligible for Medicare. We estimate models of Medicaid participation using 2010-2016 data from the American Community Survey and state variation in ACA-related Medicaid expansions. We find that Medicaid expansions to working-age adults increased Medicaid participation among low-income older adults by 1.9 percentage points, or 4.7%. We also find evidence of a dynamic welcome mat effect: low-income older adults in expansion states who were young enough to be age-eligible for Medicaid expansions in 2014 were 4 percentage points, or 9.5%, more likely to be dually enrolled in Medicaid when they turned age 65 in 2015 or 2016 than similar age adults.

Before 1998, Texas was the only state that greatly restricted home equity loans and cash-out refinancing for non-housing consumption. Such borrowing was authorized in Texas, for the first time, through a constitutional amendment in 1998. Using state-level panel data and recently developed synthetic control methods based on machine learning we find that the Texas’ constitutional amendments relaxing credit constraints had an insignificant impact on GDP growth. Our findings have important policy implications for the stimulative effect of easier home equity access on GDP growth.

Combining case-level data on all consumer bankruptcies in the last decade with changes in states' homestead exemption levels, we estimate how exemption changes affect the number and composition of bankruptcy filers. When exemptions become more debtor- friendly, there is an immediate and persistent increase in Chapter 7 filings by debtors with home equity. The new filers have more home equity but similar non-housing wealth and lower incomes than the average filer with home equity. Thus, raising exemptions draws wealthier, but lower-income households into bankruptcy. Moreover, the additional bankruptcies are filed by households whose home equity becomes completely protected by the exemption increase, indicating that having even a small amount of non-exempt equity is a significant deterrent to filing.

Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, we explore the rise and fall of pellagra (a disease caused by inadequate niacin consumption) in the American South. We first consider the hypothesis that the South’s monoculture in cotton undermined nutrition by displacing local food production. Consistent with this hypothesis, a difference in differences estimation shows that after the arrival of the boll weevil, food production in affected counties rose while cotton production and pellagra rates fell. The results also suggest that after 1937 improved medical understanding and state fortification laws helped eliminate pellagra.

This study seeks to examine the consequences of “keeping up with the Joneses” on household fertility outcomes. “Envy” is introduced in a simple “quality-quantity” trade-off type of fertility model, where the trade-off is induced by the fact that being out of the labor market due to child-bearing is more expensive for people with higher human capital levels. The effect of introducing upward-looking “envy” in the model is that households, notably low-income ones, reduce fertility in an attempt to emulate consumption levels of their high-income neighbors. This effect is stronger the larger the reference consumption—that is, in areas with higher income inequality, which are characterized by longer right tails of income distributions. It follows that if households indeed tend to “keep up with the Joneses,” one should expect lower fertility rates in areas with higher income inequality compared to more equal areas. The empirical analysis using the American Community Survey confirms that indeed, households residing in more unequal metropolitan areas tend to have fewer children than households residing in more equal metropolitan areas.

The importance of educational attainment for an individual's health and the importance of mass education for population health has been documented in numerous countries. Education is so crucial, in fact, that ensuring inclusive and quality education for all by the year 2030 is one of the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The present study contributes to the existing literature on routinization and employment by capturing within-occupation task changes over the period 1980-2010. The main contributions are the measurement of such changes and the combination of two data sources on occupational task content for the United States: the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the Occupational Information Network. We show that within-occupation task change: i) accounts for 1/3 of the decline in routine-task use; ii) accelerates in the 1990s, decelerates in the 2000s but with significant catching-up; iii) is associated with educational upgrading in several dimensions and iv) allows one to escape the employment decline conditional on initial routine-task intensity.

This paper analyzes how the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. affected same-sex couples in the labor market by using data from the American Community Survey. Access to marriage led to amendments in tax, health insurance, and adoption laws that could have encouraged some same-sex partners to specialize in household production and decrease their labor supply. Nevertheless, estimates from a difference-in-difference model show that the individual and joint probabilities of being employed increased among same-sex couples. Additional evidence suggests that these changes in employment were driven by improvements in attitudes and lower discrimination against sexual minorities following the introduction of marriage equality.

Do consumers value data privacy? How much? In a survey of 2,416 Americans, we find that the median consumer is willing to pay just $5 per month to maintain data privacy (along specified dimensions), but would demand $80 to allow access to personal data. This is a “superendowment effect,” much higher than the 1:2 ratio often found between willingness to pay and willingness to accept. In addition, people demand significantly more money to allow access to personal data when primed that such data includes health-related data than when primed that such data includes demographic data. We analyze reasons for these disparities and offer some notations on their implications for theory and practice. A general theme is that because of a lack of information and behavioural biases, both willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures are highly unreliable guides to the welfare effects of retaining or giving up data privacy. Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California may hold for consumer valuations of data privacy: “There is no there there.” For guidance, policymakers should give little or no attention to either of those conventional measures of economic value, at least when steps are not taken to overcome deficits in information and behavioural biases.

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing decline in the aggregate skill premium of 30 percent between 1970 and 1990, with only a modest recovery in the next couple of decades. In contrast, the US skill premium rose by around 24 percent over those four decades. A theory that equalizes wages with marginal products can rationalize these disparate outcomes when we replace commonly used measures of total labor supplies by private sector employment. The dramatic decline of the skill premium in Sweden is the result of an expanding public sector that has disproportionately hired unskilled labor.

Through an amendment to its Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration waiver, Oklahoma is seeking federal permission to impose work reporting rules on very low-income parents and caregivers age 19-50 receiving health coverage through Medicaid. Parents of children below age six would be exempt. Under the proposal, which would be phased in, these beneficiaries would have to document that they are working at least 20 hours a week or participating in job-training or volunteer activities or lose their SoonerCare coverage. Because Oklahoma has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the only adults affected are parents whose incomes are at or below 45 percent of the federal poverty level, which is the equivalent of $779 per month for a family of three. An estimated 4,000 to 13,000 of Oklahoma’s poorest parents could lose health coverage if the federal government approves the state’s request to impose new work reporting rules on parents and caregivers receiving Medicaid. The coverage losses would predominately affect Oklahoma’s poorest mothers. The impact would likely hit hardest in the state’s small towns and rural communities, where families are more likely to be insured through Medicaid and where jobs are harder to find.