This chapter discusses the advantage of the availability of Western Canada sources in digital format and incorporates them into new approaches and methodologies. It focuses on the timing and the movement of the frontier of settlement through the analysis of the expansion of the postal and railroad networks from the 1850s to 1900. It describes sources, methodologies and the use of geographical information systems (GIS) in spatial historical analysis. The chapter discusses the influence of the postal and railroad systems in the building of the Canadian state, with emphasis on Western Canada expansion. The use of GIS in economic historical analyses is enhancing the scope and broadening historical inquiries across disciplines. The formation of the Canadian modern state from the 1850s to Confederation in 1867 and from 1867 to 1900 marked a radical spatial transformation. The Canadian pacific railway published its own maps reflecting the extension of the rail network or the proposed extension.

Now is the time for social scientists to focus an analytical lens on the new third generation to see what their experiences reveal about post‐1965 assimilation. This paper is a first step. We compare the household characteristics of post‐1965, second‐generation Latino and Asian children in 1980 to a “new third generation” in 2010. Today's new third generation is growing up in households headed by parents who have higher socioeconomic attainment; that are more likely to be headed by intermarried parents; that are less likely to contain extended family; and that, when living with intermarried parents, are more likely to have children identified with a Hispanic or Asian label compared to second‐generation children growing in 1980. We use these findings to inform a larger research agenda for studying the new third generation.

We analyze excess emissions from industrial facilities in Texas using data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Emissions are characterized as excess if they are beyond a facility’s permitted levels and if they occur during startups, shutdowns, or malfunctions. We provide summary data on both the pollutants most often emitted as excess emissions and the industrial sectors and facilities responsible for those emissions. Excess emissions often represent a substantial share of a facility’s routine (or permitted) emissions. We find that while excess emissions events are frequent, the majority of excess emissions are emitted by the largest events. That is, the sum of emissions in the 96–100th percentile is often several orders of magnitude larger than the remaining excess emissions (i.e., the sum of emissions below the 95th percentile). Thus, the majority of events emit a small amount of pollution relative to the total amount emitted. In addition, a small group of high emitting facilities in the most polluting industrial sectors are responsible for the vast majority of excess emissions. Using an integrated assessment model, we estimate that the health damages in Texas from excess emissions are approximately $150 million annually.

Objectives. (1) Characterize the US population aged 65 years with self-reported voice problems, (2) describe voice treatment characteristics in this group, and (3) identify factors associated with self-reported voice improvement. Study Design. Retrospective cohort study. Setting. Population-based cross-sectional US national survey sample. Subjects and Methods. We identified a cohort of adults aged 65 years from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey, a population-based US national survey. Descriptive and multivariable regression analyses were performed. Results. The prevalence of self-reported voice problems in this cohort was 10%. Of those, 44% reported voice problems for .1 month. The strongest predictor of reporting voice improvement was receipt of voice treatment (odds ratio, 3.50; 95% confidence interval, 1.36-9.00), after adjusting for sex, age, race, education, and health status. Eleven percent reported voice treatment, which included 20% of those with moderate or worse voice problem severity. Female sex and worse health status were associated with reporting voice treatment. Among those with voice treatment, 38% reported ‘‘better,’’ 33% ‘‘same,’’ and 29% ‘‘worse’’ voice symptoms over the past year, compared to 17%, 67%, and 16%, respectively, among those without treatment. Health status influenced likelihood of reporting voice improvement but not universally. Conclusions. We observed a significant self-reported burden of voice problems in the US population aged 65 years. Most are untreated and thus not well represented in the current literature. Vocal improvement was strongly associated with treatment. Further investigation is needed to clarify patient and treatment characteristics most associated with vocal improvement.

We analyze the effects of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts (EAs) on divorce rates in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. We find that the property acts increased divorce rates, which is consistent with the predicted outcome, in household extensive bargaining models, of an increase in the married woman’s relative bargaining power. We also find some evidence that the EAs had a positive effect on divorce rates, though it is not statistically significant after accounting for the possibility that divorce rates changed prior to the enactment of an EA. To support our causal argument, we control for regional trends in the divorce rate and account for the timing of the laws’ effects. We also assess alternative explanations for the rise in divorce rates during the late nineteenth century, including age structure, divorce law, urbanization, economic development, and foreign immigration, and we find that only age structure and urbanization positively affected divorce rates along with the property acts. Finally, we provide support for our argument from court cases in which the acts were used to defend a woman’s property rights against claims from her ex-husband.

This dissertation exams topics on the human capital and the distribution of income. The first chapter investigates the insurance value of progressive taxation with heterogeneous risk aversion. The Investment in human capital is lower when the returns to it are subject to unin-surable risk. Progressive income taxation offers a degree of insurance against such risk. Offsetting this effect are the two well-known distortions imposed by progressive taxation: lower expected net-of-tax returns to human-capital acquisition and distortion of the labor-supply decision. The net efficiency effect of progressive income taxation is therefore ambiguous, but there is a presumption that some degree of progressivity can be welfare-improving for risk-averse individuals. To derive the degree of progressivity that may be desirable on efficiency grounds, I construct a general-equilibrium model of an economy with two sectors, calibrated to approximate the U.S. labor market, that differ in terms of the productivity of human capital and the variability of lifetime earnings. Individuals, who differ only in terms of their risk aversion, sort themselves into the two sectors. The simple version of this model, which ignores the labor-leisure choice, suggests that a relatively high degree of income-tax progressivity maximizes aggregate welfare as measured by workers willingness to pay for the insurance being provided. When each workers supply of labor is allowed to vary in response to marginal tax rates, the efficient degree of progressivity is similar to that of the U.S. tax code. The second chapter exams the worker quality and education premium in the United States. The education premium in the U.S. has been increasing since the 1980s, but the rate of increase has slowed. One explanation for the slowdown is the decrease in the quality of workers who attended some college relative to the quality of workers who obtained a high school diploma. This paper develops a measure of worker quality to estimate the impact of college and high school graduates quality on wages and the education premium. The measure of worker quality uses a weighted average of an . . .

In an earlier post, I described the state of bilingualism in the United States (see here). The U.S. Census Bureau does not keep track of those who use two or more languages in their everyday lives, but since 1980 it does ask three language questions: Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English (very well, well, not well, not at all)? These questions were first asked in the census every 10 years, but are now part of the annual American Community Survey (ACS). The data that we now have cover 1980, 1990, and every year since 2000 until 2016. Even though children under age five were left out, as were people who use a second or third language in their everyday lives but only English at home, they give us an idea of the number of bilinguals in the US and how the numbers have evolved since 1980.

Declines in migration across labor markets have prompted concerns that the U.S. economy is becoming less dynamic. In this study, we examine the relationship between residential migration and employer-to-employer transitions in the United States, using both survey and administrative records data. We first note strong disagreement between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other migration statistics on the timing and severity of any decline in U.S. interstate migration. Despite these divergent patterns for overall residential migration, we find consistent evidence of a substantial decline in economic migration between 2000 and 2010. We find that composition and the returns to migration have limited ability to explain recent changes in interstate migration.

This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating.

Wie organisierten sich transatlantische MigrantInnen aus Österreich-Ungarn in den USA? Welche Spuren haben sie hinterlassen? Was sagen quantitative Quellen über die MigrantInnen aus? Kann man rekonstruieren, wie sie sich identifizierten? Wenn ja, wie? Und wenn nein, was können wir dann über Identifikationsprozesse der Vergangenheit sagen? Dieser Aufsatz beruht auf Forschungen für das Projekt ‚Understanding the Migration Experience: The Austrian-American Connection, 1870–1914‘. Der Aufsatz legt einige strategische Entscheidungen des Projektteams dar, erklärt die methodische Herangehensweise des Projektes, um dann die südslavisch-sprachige migrantische Öffentlichkeit in den USA vorzustellen und schließlich anhand eines bestimmten Bereiches (Heiratsmanagement) zu zeigen, wie diese Öffentlichkeit funktionierte. Dabei können wir zwar nicht zur authentischen ‚Stimme‘ der MigrantInnen vordringen. Aber wir können sehen, dass kollektive migrantische Akteure politisch wirkten und damit eine relativ lange Zeit relativ erfolgreich waren, wenn wir uns auf das Studium der Diskurse und Infrastrukturen migrantischer Eliten einlassen, aber auch die Analyse der Statistiken des Zensus nicht vernachlässigen.

This paper sheds new light on the desirability of the minimum wage in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax. Using a search-and-matching framework, I derive a novel condition that links the desirability of the minimum wage to three sufficient statistics: (1) the macro or general equilibrium labor force participation response to the minimum wage by low-skilled individuals; (2) the macro employment response to the minimum wage for low-skilled individuals; and (3) the welfare weight on low-skilled workers. This condition shows that the minimum wage is welfare improving if it pushes the labor market tightness – the ratio of the aggregate number of vacancies to low-skilled job seekers – closer to its efficient level. Guided by the theory, I estimate the first two sufficient statistics using an event study design, as well as state and federal minimum wage variation between 1979-2014. I estimate a macro participation elasticity of -0.24 and a macro employment elasticity of -0.32. The former represents new evidence on a previously overlooked margin of the minimum wage. With these estimates in hand, I simulate the total welfare gains from introducing a minimum wage beginning from the optimal income tax allocation. The simulations show that the minimum wage is welfare improving only if the government has very strong redistributive tastes.

Computers hold the potential to draw legislative districts in a neutral way. Existing approaches to automated redistricting may introduce bias and encounter difficulties when drawing districts of large and even medium-sized jurisdictions. We present a new algorithm that can neutrally generate legislative districts without indications of bias that are contiguous, balanced and relatively compact. The algorithm does not show the kinds of bias found in prior algorithms and is an advance over previously published algorithms for redistricting because it is computationally more efficient. We use the new algorithm to draw 10,000 maps of congressional districts in Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas. We find that it is unlikely that the number of majority-minority districts we observe in the Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas congressional maps of these states would happen through a neutral redistricting process.

This dissertation consists of four chapters in public economics. The first three study questions in policing and crime, and the final chapter studies the effect of K-12 school construction on student and district outcomes. A theme throughout these four chapters is using empirical analysis to evaluate various public policies. The first chapter, co-authored with Steve Mello, estimates the degree to which individual police officers practice racial discrimination. Using a bunching estimation design and data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we show that minorities are less likely to receive a reduced charge on their speeding tickets than white drivers. We further find that 40\% of officers explain the entirety of the aggregate discrimination. Using our estimates of officer-level discrimination, we explore various policies aimed at mitigating the aggregate disparity. The second chapter, also co-authored with Steve Mello, estimates the causal effect of harsher speeding punishments on future driving behavior of cited drivers. Our empirical design instruments for a driver's punishment using the stopping officer's average propensity to give his drivers a discounted ticket. Compared with those receiving a higher fine, drivers receiving the lenient fine are over 25\% more likely to receive an additional speeding ticket and about 14\% more likely to be involved in a car accident in the following year. The third chapter explores whether police unions affect the salaries, employment, and misconduct of officers. I exploit the rollout of unionization in Florida police departments from 1975 to the present and compare elections where unions won and failed. While unionization leads to no change in department size, earnings of officers increase after unionization. Contrary to popular opinion, unionization has no long-run effect on misconduct. The fourth chapter studies an ongoing state-subsidized program of rebuilding Ohio' s K-12 public schools and investigates the effect of improved facility quality on student and school district outcomes. The completion of a project increases public school enrollment and district property values. Test scores do not measurably improve upon completion and suffer significant reductions during construction. I therefore find little evidence that the program reduced disparities in student outcomes.

The first chapter of this dissertation examines the phenomenon of labor reallocation at the level of industry during periods of recession and recovery. Whether permanent shifts of industries’ labor demand curves contribute to cyclical unemployment remains a highly controversial issue. With a focus on the timing of recessions and recoveries, I evaluate the empirical support for two competing explanations of cyclical unemployment: the pure sectoral-shifts hypothesis and the pure aggregate disturbances hypothesis. Although recessions are considered times of low aggregate demand, they also coincide with remarkably large permanent changes to the sectoral distribution of labor demand. Strikingly, I show that, for declining sectors, the majority of jobs destroyed during a recession are lost permanently and do not reemerged during the subsequent economic recovery. This fact contradicts the idea that recessions are solely periods of weak aggregate demand. In addition, the observation that employment gains in expanding sectors tend to concentrate during economic recoveries casts doubt on a pure sectoral-shifts story. The findings suggest that, on their own, these two hypotheses provide incomplete explanations for the relatively high unemployment observed after business cycle downturns. The second chapter builds on the idea of the first by studying the impact of changes in local industry labor demand on unemployment transitions. Most research examining the relationship between local labor market conditions and unemployment summarize these conditions in the form of Bartik's (1991) index. Such studies overlook an important component of local demand conditions, namely, the fortunes in workers' prior industries. If labor is perfectly mobile between sectors, the performance of an unemployed person's prior industry should not . . .

Researchers have a long-standing interest in understanding the causes and consequences of inequality. One approach to analyzing inequality is to compare average economic choices from a classical theoretical framework. Another approach considers the impact of the formation of society, through statutes and institutions, on average economic outcomes. Curtis Jr uses applied econometrics, applied labor economics, applied theory and empirical data to provide results that we cannot reject the existence of a negatively bounded correlation between the duration of time from zero wage labor constraints and the magnitude of unexplained differences in wealth. Furthermore, Curtis Jr promotes a concept of entrepreneurial education in economics.

The authors applied a text string search algorithm to ascertain suspect farm tractor or agricultural machinery-related injuries in data sources available for 2000-2014 in the State of Arkansas. The occurrence of farm tractor or other agricultural machinery -related injuries were compared with figures available at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI). In death certificates assigned external causes of death, we included those coded as related to “agricultural machinery”, selecting in records with strings in the boxes for occupation and industry and the description of how the injury occurred likely to be farm tractor or other agricultural machinery-related injuries, and then inspected each one, removing those likely unrelated. The approach significantly increased the ascertainment of suspect fatal farm tractor or other agricultural machinery-related injuries by 7.8 times the number reported to CFOI and there was only a 17% not statistically significant increase compared to the NCHS. All hospital records with any discharge diagnosis coded as related to “agricultural machinery” were selected. The descriptive analysis of the fatalities and hospital records showed a significantly increased risk among men above retirement age, peaks during the summer, and an increased risk in the Mississippi Delta area. About one-third of the fatal farm agricultural machinery-related injuries were due to over-turns. The use of the algorithm can improve ascertainment of fatal agricultural machinery -related injuries in the State. The death records were found to be rich in data on the circumstances of the occurrence of the injury, which can be used to screen for farm tractor- related fatalities and if confirmed, translated into action to improve the safety of the Arkansan farmers.

Income inequality is a hot topic. There is no public data on the income share of the top 1% of households; those percentages are estimates. Those estimates vary from 5% to 40%. They are based on different data using different definitions and different models. This paper studies a common model: the log-normal distribution. This paper shows six things for any log-normal distribution. (1) The mean-median ratio determines the shape of the distribution, the income share of the top 1%, and the Gini coefficient. (2) The log-normal model is a fairly good fit to the actual distribution of 2016 US household incomes. (3) If the distribution of subjects by income is log-normal, then the distribution of total income by household income will also be log-normal. (4) The percentage of subjects that have below-average incomes always equals the percentage of total income that is earned by those with above-average income. (5) These below/above percentages can be used to measure income inequality in a way that is more accessible than the Gini coefficient. (6) The product of a normal and a log-normal can be modeled as the product of two log-normal distributions. Including the log-normal distribution in a statistical literacy class helps decision makers focus on essentials.

This paper asks how local governments finance federal mandates and whether mandated spending brings value to local residents using a change in federal rules on municipal infrastructure following the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). To account for the endogeneity of municipal infrastructure adoption decisions, I leverage the role of river networks in distributing pollutants across cities 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 twofold 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. These 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 water quality improvements 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 paper describes the dynamics of racial desegregation over forty years in 51 large US metropolitan areas, examining how the initial racial compositions of neighborhoods affect the later racial composition of the neighborhood and overall metropolitan area desegregation. After documenting integration arising from the increasing dispersion of black households across neighborhoods that were entirely, or disproportionately, non-black, we identify a stark exception: non-blacks do not move to neighborhoods that are over-90% black. The surprise is that, while the mean proportions of metropolitan black populations residing in such highly segregated neighborhoods decreased, the numbers of such neighborhoods actually increased in most metropolitan areas. The expansions of black neighborhoods, even as segregation decreases, pose challenges for local development and for continued racial integration.

In this paper, we explore the relationship between state-level household income inequality and macroeconomic uncertainty in the United States. Using a novel large-scale macroeconometric model, we shed light on regional disparities of inequality responses to a national uncertainty shock. The results suggest that income inequality decreases in most states, with a pronounced degree of heterogeneity in terms of shapes and magnitudes of the dynamic responses. By contrast, some few states, mostly located in the West and South census region, display increasing levels of income inequality over time. We find that this directional pattern in responses is mainly driven by the income composition and labor market fundamentals. In addition, forecast error variance decompositions allow for a quantitative assessment of the importance of uncertainty shocks in explaining income inequality. The findings highlight that volatility shocks account for a considerable fraction of forecast error variance for most states considered. Finally, a regression-based analysis sheds light on the driving forces behind differences in state-specific inequality responses.