Racial segregation, and in particular school segregation, likely plays an important role in affecting health outcomes. To examine this connection, this paper explores the relationship between the end of court-ordered school desegregation and preterm births among Blacks using birth certificate information between 1992 and 2002 (n = 183,178). The end of court-ordered oversight has important implications for the level of racial segregation in schools: If residential segregation remains high, neighborhood-based student assignment plans would naturally increase school segregation. A rise in school segregation may lead to worse educational, labor, and health outcomes among Blacks. Using multiple difference-in-differences framework that exploits variation in exposure to schools that declared unitary status, it finds that school districts’ release from court oversight is associated with a 0.8 percentage point increase in preterm births among Black mothers. This paper contributes to literature that finds that the end of court-ordered school desegregation in the 1990s have negative implications for Blacks. More research should be conducted to understand the causal relationship between school segregation and infant health.

We study how machines, embodied in various forms of capital such as ICT capital, software and industrial robots, affect the demand for workers of different education, age and gender. We do so by exploiting differences in the composition of workers across countries, industries and time. Our dataset comprises 10 high-income countries and 30 industries, spanning roughly the entire economy, with annual observations over the period 1982-2005. We find that industries with faster capital growth reduced their demand for middle-educated workers and males, and also some evidence that their demand shifted in favor of middle-age workers. We investigate the robustness of the results across alternative identification strategies, various proxies for the use of machines, and different time periods, including an alternative sample from 2008 to 2015. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that machines lower the demand for workers performing routine tasks, especially in routine-manual occupations. We also find evidence that at least some types of workers have shifted away from such tasks. JEL Classification: J21, J23, O33

In 2016, the majority of full-time employed women in the U.S. earned significantly less than comparable men. The extent to which women were affected by gender inequality in earnings, however, depended greatly on socioeconomic characteristics, such as marital status or educational attainment. In this paper, we analyzed data from the 2016 American Community Survey using a high-dimensional wage regression and applying double lasso to quantify heterogeneity in the gender wage gap. We found that the gap varied substantially across women and was driven primarily by marital status, having children at home, race, occupation, industry, and educational attainment. We recommend that policy makers use these insights to design policies that will reduce discrimination and unequal pay more effectively .

This dissertation consists of three essays in health economics. The first chapter estimates changes in sexually transmitted disease rates for young adults in the United States following the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate; a provision that allows dependents to remain covered under their parents’ health insurance plans until the age of 26. This study is the first to analyze changes in reported chlamydia and gonorrhea rates resulting from the dependent coverage mandate. Utilizing a difference-in-differences framework coupled with administrative data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I find that reported chlamydia rates increased for males and females ages 20-24 relative to comparison groups of males and females ages 15-19 and 25-29 following the mandate. I also find evidence of an increase in gonorrhea rates for females in this age group. I find no evidence that the mandate induced ex ante moral hazard. The second chapter estimates the relationship between state-level factors and the passage of electronic cigarette regulation. E-cigarettes are controversial products. They may help addicted smokers to consume nicotine in a less harmful manner or to quit tobacco cigarettes entirely, but these products may also entice youth into smoking. This controversy complicates e-cigarette regulation as any regulation may lead to health improvements for some populations and health declines for other populations. Using data from 2007 to 2016, we examine factors that are plausibly linked with U.S. . . .

This paper examines the effects of public health insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their criminal activity later in life. Using a panel of the states' 1980-1990 birth cohorts and a simulated eligibility instrumental variables strategy, I find that increases in the fraction of children eligible for public health insurance lead to substantial reductions in criminal activity. Considering the extraordinary costs of crime to victims, public budgets, and offenders, these findings suggest a previously unrecognized substantial benefit to the provision of public health insurance to children.

Fluctuations in house prices can generate large movements in household expenditure. However, empirical work exploring this relationship must deal with the endogeneity problems associated with using house prices as a regressor. A popular instrumental variables strategy exploits cross-sectional variation in house prices as predicted by the local housing supply elasticities of Saiz (2010). As an alternative, I introduce a Bartik instrument for house prices that consists of the interaction between the pre-existing local supply of housing characteristics and broad changes in the relative demand for those characteristics. I show that the instrument is a strong predictor of house price growth in both the cross-section and through time. I then use household panel data on non-durable expenditures to estimate the elasticity of consumption with respect to local house price growth. I report precise estimates in the range of 0.10 to 0.15, which correspond to marginal propensities to consume out of housing wealth of 1.2 to 1.8 cents in the dollar. These estimates are robust to controls for aggregate fluctuations, local business cycles, and local industry and demographic composition. In contrast, estimates I show that the traditional housing supply elasticity instrument produces inconsistent estimates when confronted with these same controls. Thus, the Bartik instrument succeeds in generating plausibly exogenous variation in house prices when housing supply elasticity instruments may fail. When decomposing variation in the Bartik instrument, I find that the identified consumption response to house prices is largely driven by times and locations where house prices varied the most: during the 2008 recession and in the Western US.

This dissertation consists of three independent papers on health economics. In the first paper, my coauthor and I explore the effects of high school graduation requirements (HSGR) on health behaviors of high school students and finds that an increase in HSGR is a significant deterrent on alcohol consumption among high-school students, particularly minority students. The paper adds to the literature by connecting the stringency of high school graduation requirements with health behaviors of youth for the first time. In the second paper, my coauthor and I examine the spillover effects of recreational marijuana legalization (RML) in Colorado and Washington on marijuana-related arrests in neighboring states. We find that RML causes a sharp increase in marijuana possession arrests in border counties of neighboring states and provide additional evidence that an increase in marijuana use in these states, rather than changes in law enforcement practice, most likely drive this result. I examine the effects of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) implemented in China in recent years on health outcomes of elderly in the third paper. I find modest evidence suggesting that NRPS increased the treatment probability of chronic diseases among males.

Modern business cycle theory focuses on the study of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models that generate aggregate fluctuations similar to those experienced by actual economies. We discuss how this theory has evolved from its roots in the early real business cycle models of the late 1970s through the turmoil of the Great Recession four decades later. We document the strikingly different pattern of comovements of macro aggregates during the Great Recession compared to other postwar recessions, especially the 1982 recession. We then show how two versions of the latest generation of real business cycle models can account, respectively, for the aggregate and the cross-regional fluctuations observed in the Great Recession in the United States.

Despite clear evidence of an income gradient in political participation, research has not been able to isolate the effects of income on voting from other household characteristics. We investigate how exogenous unconditional cash transfers affected voting in US elections across two generations from the same household. The results confirm that there is strong inter-generational correlation in voting across parents and their children. We also show—consistent with theory—that household receipt of unconditional cash transfers has heterogeneous effects on the civic participation of children coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. It increases children’s voting propensity in adulthood among those raised in initially poorer families. However, income transfers have no effect on parents, regardless of initial income levels. These results suggest that family circumstance during childhood—income in particular—plays a role in influencing levels of political participation in the United States. Further, in the absence of outside shocks, income differences are transmitted across generations and likely contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and political inequality.

What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty.

The household income data used most frequently to estimate poverty rates in the United States substantially underreports the value of means-tested transfers. This paper investigates how underreporting affects estimates of the incidence and composition of poverty in the U.S. from 2013 to 2015. Specifically, I apply benefit adjustments for the underreporting of three social transfers to the Current Population Survey (CPS ASEC) to provide more accurate estimates of poverty rates. Diagnostic checks indicate that the imputed benefit adjustments are imperfect, but do provide a more accurate representation of household income than the uncorrected CPS data. In 2015, the benefit adjustments add more than $30 billion of income transfers to the CPS ASEC, primarily concentrated among low-income households with children. I test the effects of the benefit corrections on two conceptualizations of poverty: the U.S. Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and a relative measure of poverty set at 50 percent of federal median income. In 2015, the SPM poverty rate for the total population falls from 14.3 to 12.7 percent, a 1.6 percentage point (11 percent) decline. Among children, the SPM poverty rate falls from 16.1 to 12.8 percent, a 3.3 percentage point (20 percent) decline after adjusting for underreporting. The percent-of-median poverty rate experiences similar declines after applying the benefit imputations. The findings suggest that the uncorrected CPS data meaningfully overestimates the prevalence of poverty in the U.S., particularly among households with children. Documentation for applying the benefit corrections to the CPS is provided for improved estimates in future poverty research.

This dissertation comprises three chapters that are related to the research topics in Urban and Regional Economics. The first chapter examines whether economic self-interest associated with homeownership motivates homeowners to vote more than renters in U.S. local elections. To control for the self-selection of homeownership, I use national election turnout as the counterfactual outcome. Since policy discussions in national elections are targeted more at the national level, the disparity in political participation between homeowners and renters should be reduced. Results based on election data from three U.S. cities confirm these hypothesis, which suggest that local policies may tend to cater to the tastes of homeowners over renters. The second chapter develops a new method to identify and control for selection when estimating the productivity effects of city size. For single peaked factor return distributions, selecting out low-performing agents has limited effect on modal productivity but reduces the CDF evaluated at the mode. Spillovers from agglomeration have the reverse effect. Estimates based on law firm productivity, wages for married women and wages for full-time men all confirm that selection contributes to urban productivity and that doubling city size causes productivity to increase by 1-2.5 percent. The last chapter uses border discontinuity design to study the long-run effect of British colonial rule on the state building in Africa. British colonial legacy is featured with ethnic segregation and stronger executive constraints, which may have undermined state centralisation. Using micro-data from anglophone and francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we find that anglophone citizens are less likely to identify themselves in national terms (relative to ethnic terms). Evidence on taxation, security and the power of chiefs also suggests weaker state capacity in anglophone countries. These results highlight the legacy of colonial rule on state-building.

Objective: Determine the association between occupational exposure to copper or aluminum and incidence of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Method: Leveraging data from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, we analyzed the association of occupational exposures to copper or aluminum with exposure quantification through a JEM (CANJEM) and incidence of dementia and AD for 4,354 participants. Exposure groups were divided into three categories: low, medium, and high, and compared to an unexposed reference group. Data collection occurred between February 1994 through June 2015. Results: During a median follow up time of 6.4 years, the adjusted hazard ratio (HR) for low, medium, and high copper exposure groups was 1.02 (95% CI: 0.88-1.19), 0.96 (95% CI: 0.79- 1.16), and 1.05 (95% CI: 0.86-1.28) for all-cause dementia, and 1.08 (95% CI: 0.91-1.28), 1.06 (95% CI: 0.86-1.30), 1.05 (95% CI: 0.84-1.31) for AD, respectively. The adjusted HR for low, medium, and high aluminum groups was 1.07 (95% CI: 0.92-1.24), 1.15 (95% CI: 0.95-1.38), 1.12 (95% CI: 0.93-1.35) for all-cause dementia, and 1.05 (95% CI: 0.88-1.24), 1.17 (95% CI: 0.95-1.43), 1.15 (95% CI:0.93-1.42) for AD, respectively. Conclusion: Our results found little evidence that copper or aluminum increase the risk of dementia. However, the results did have wide confidence intervals with more weight above one. This study suffered from the use of a population base cohort that was older at time of entry, which could have resulted in elimination of dementia cases with an onset at younger ages This could have resulted in cases associated to early occupational exposures being excluded in this study.

Objective To assess differences in access to care and healthcare utilization among adults who reported voice problems in 2012. Study Design Cross‐sectional study. Methods The 2012 National Health Interview Survey was utilized to evaluate adults who had a “voice problem in the past 12 months.” Multivariate analyses determined the influence of sociodemographic variables on the prevalence of voice problems in adults and access to care. Results Among 243 million adults in the United States, 17.9 ± 0.05 million adults (7.63% ± 0.21%) report experiencing voice problems. After controlling for age, education, income level, geographic region, and health insurance status, African Americans (odds ratio [OR]: 0.83, P < 0.05), Hispanics (OR: 0.61, P < 0.01), and other minorities (OR: 0.69, P < 0.01) had a lower OR for reporting voice problems in the last year relative to white adults. Among adults with voice problems, Hispanics were more likely to delay care because they could not reach a medical office by telephone (OR: 1.85, P < 0.01) and due to long wait times at the doctor's office (OR: 2.04, P < 0.01) compared to white adults. Adults with voice problems who were a racial minority, low income, or had public health insurance were more likely to postpone care because they lacked a mode of transportation. Conclusion Targeted programs are necessary to address the health disparities and barriers to care among those who suffer from voice problems.

This paper compares the effectiveness of two alternative property rights regimes to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons. One regime is to distribute access rights under public ownership, as proposed by Samuelson, the other is to sell land to generate private ownership as proposed by Coase. However, as property rights are not randomly allocated, causal evidence on the relative effectiveness of these two regimes is scarce. I exploit a spatial discontinuity generated by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which created 20,000 miles of plausibly exogenous boundaries that separated publicly owned rangeland from open-access rangeland. I combine these boundaries with data on the timing of private-property sales to jointly estimate the effects of public and private ownership on resource exploitation and income in a spatial regression discontinuity design. Using satellite-based vegetation data, I find that both property rights regimes increased vegetation by about 10%, relative to the open-access control. Census-block-level income data reveals that public ownership raised private household income by 13% and decreased poverty rates by 18%. To study mechanisms, I exploit variation in pre-reform police presence and panel data on farm values, and show that legal enforcement through police presence is a necessary condition for the positive and long-lasting effects of both regimes to arise.

In the last ten years transit use in Southern California has fallen significantly. This report investigates that falling transit use. We define Southern California as the six counties that participate in the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) – Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial. We examine patterns of transit service and patronage over time and across the region, and consider an array of explanations for falling transit use: declining transit service levels, eroding transit service quality, rising fares, falling fuel prices, the growth of Lyft and Uber, the migration of frequent transit users to outlying neighborhoods with less transit service, and rising vehicle ownership. While all of these factors probably play some role, we conclude that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.

A growing literature ties in utero conditions to life course outcomes, including education, earnings, and adult health and mortality. A smaller literature has begun to examine the intergenerational impacts of in utero conditions. A link between these two literatures—the impacts of in utero conditions on family formation—has had few examinations but offers a potential set of mechanisms for the intergenerational reach of early conditions. This paper draws from the 1960 US Decennial Census to examine whether individuals exposed in utero to the 1918/19 influenza pandemic had different family formation patterns than adjacent unexposed cohorts. The findings suggest small overall effects on marriage rates, number of children, and several measures of “type” of spouse for men, but moderate effects for women. For example, women with in utero exposure during their first trimester marry men with 0.2 fewer years of schooling than those not exposed. The findings show that exposed individuals have spouses with lower schooling than unexposed counterparts, this effect is particularly large for women, and it increases the likelihood of marrying spouses with very low levels of schooling.

We estimate the effects of temperature shocks on birth rates in the United States between 1931 and 2010. We find that days with a mean temperature above 80°F cause a large decline in birth rates 8 to 10 months later. Unlike prior studies, we demonstrate that the initial decline is followed by a partial rebound in births over the next few months, implying that populations mitigate some of the fertility cost by shifting conception month. This shift helps explain the observed peak in late-summer births in the United States. We also present new evidence that hot weather most likely harms fertility via reproductive health as opposed to sexual activity. Historical evidence suggests that air conditioning could be used to substantially offset the fertility costs of high temperatures.

On September 22, 2018, the Trump Administration announced changes to the “public charge” immigration rules that govern how the use of public benefits affect an immigrant’s legal status.2 These changes are likely to harm millions of immigrant families across the nation, but states with large immigrant populations will disproportionately feel the impact. In this brief, we analyze the effects that the proposed changes will have on healthcare coverage among U.S.-born children in “mixed-status” families in Florida and its major metropolitan areas.3 We find that over 107,000 kids will lose health insurance in Florida and over half of them reside in the Miami metropolitan area.

Cities throughout the United States have adopted historical designations in order to protect the historic architectural resources and promote economic development of areas that carry a cultural significance to their communities. Detroit, a city in steep economic decline from 1970 until 2015, has also attempted to use historical preservation to promote economic development in particular neighborhoods. The role of historic preservation has rarely been considered in a city in steep, ongoing economic decline. The study presents spatial analysis techniques that can help determine the association, if any, of historical district designations with neighborhood rise or fall. By using various approaches to count structures and measure preserved space within census tracts, a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis and an ordinary least squares regression model was developed to test the association of preservation and neighborhood status change from 1970 to 2015. The results indicate that census tracts with a historic designation showed less decline and quicker improvement in neighborhood status when compared to census tracts with no . . .