The US refugee resettlement program should be a source of immense national pride. The program has saved countless lives, put millions of impoverished persons on a path to work, self-sufficiency, and integration, and advanced US standing in the world. Its beneficiaries have included US leaders in science, medicine, business, the law, government, education, and the arts, as well as countless others who have strengthened the nation’s social fabric through their work, family, faith, and community commitments. Refugees embody the ideals of freedom, endurance, and self-sacrifice, and their presence closes the gap between US ideals and its practices. For these reasons, the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) has enjoyed strong, bipartisan support for nearly 40 years. Yet the current administration has taken aim at this program as part of a broader attack on legal immigration programs. It has treated refugees as a burden and a potential threat to our nation, rather than as a source of strength, renewal, and inspiration. In September 2017, it set an extremely low refugee admissions ceiling (45,000) for 2018, which it had no intention of meeting: the United States is on pace to resettle less than one-half of that number. It has also tightened special clearance procedures for refugees from mostly Muslim-majority states so that virtually . . .

2010 and 2015 to investigate the effect of language skills on women’s economic assimilation who immigrated to the United States as children. The problem of endogenous language acquisition and measurement error in the language variable is addressed utilizing the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an identifying instrument. Two‐stage‐least‐squares estimates suggest that greater English proficiency has a positive effect on a number of indicators of economic assimilation of adult women including several measures of labor supply and earnings. A range of sensitivity tests are undertaken to check the validity of these results.

This paper identifies key drivers of Electric Vehicle adoption to determine policy levers that promote Electric Vehicle purchase and to evaluate the ethical implications of current and future Electric Vehicle policy. The paper’s conclusions are drawn from a regression analysis performed at the ZIP code level, which concludes that the most significant drivers are a population’s commute time, median income, educational attainment, rental stock, and median age. These characteristics are valuable for determining where EV policy would be most effective, but only commute time and median income are identified as viable policy levers.

Twelve U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, have recently enacted measures granting undocumented immigrants access to driving licenses. We exploit the state and temporal variation in the issuing of state driving licenses to undocumented immigrants to estimate its impact on these population’s employment outcomes. Using 2013 through 2017 data from the monthly Current Population Survey and its Outgoing Rotation Groups, we show that likely undocumented women increase their labor supply in response to the availability of driver licenses. Their work propensity rises by 4.2 percentage points, aligning it to that of their male counterparts. In addition, those at work raise their weekly hours of work by 4 percent. Overall, their real hourly wages drop by 3 percent. We find no similar impacts among likely undocumented men –a result consistent with a standard labor supply model predicting a greater response from individuals with a larger elasticity. Additionally, we find no apparent impacts on the labor supply and wages of similarly skilled Hispanic native-born women. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiments are at an all-time high, understanding how these policies impact targeted groups and similarly skilled native populations is crucial for maintaining an informed immigration policy debate.

As an economy undergoes structural change, the focus of innovation changes to different technologies and different industries. Innovation is uneven over time and over places, leading to a tendency for incomes to diverge between innovative places and less innovative places, and to selectivity or turbulence in the pattern of employment and income change from one period to the next. This is the problem of the ``innovation transitions'' of regional economies. The author carries out a detailed comparative study of two regions---Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area---from 1970 forward, exploring why one region was more successful in its innovation transition than the other. He argues that the staples of urban and regional economics and economic geography offer only partial explanations, and that the divergent outcomes observed are better accounted for by different institutional factors that he labels the ``relational infrastructure'' of the two regions.

Follow the Money seeks to explore the historical underpinnings of in-lieu federal payments to western counties, diving into ten federal payment programs and the amount each western county received per year between 1906 and 2015. The research is presented through an interactive piece of digital history, deftly combining an interactive map and explanation to explore the transfer of federal payments to Far Western counties. The core of the project uses an interactive map to explore ten programs and the payments western counties received over time. Readers can interact with this map in multiple ways. The main interaction is to select a payment program (such as Forest Service Revenue Payments) and a year from the timeline, which then provides readers with a choropleth map shaded by the amount of money counties received. Below the map, a line chart displays the median values received under a payment program by all western counties; selecting a county on the map also displays that county’s payment history alongside these overall values....

The population of metropolitan Chicago is poised to increase more from 2015 to 2030 than it did from 2000 to 2015. Latino, Asian American, and multiracial people will account for all that growth as the white and African American populations decline.1 These racial and ethnic dynamics, overlain on the momentum of growth from the past 15 years, are likely to play out in ways that (1) continue to drive down segregation between African Americans and whites, (2) sustain segregation between Latinos and whites, and (3) reduce economic segregation. Even so, the region will remain highly segregated in 2030. Further efforts to foster inclusion and equity could yield higher levels of integration throughout metropolitan Chicago and deliver further benefits in income, education, safety, and health.

PURPOSE The current study investigates the application of risk terrain modeling (RTM) to forecast gang violence. RTM is routinely utilized to predict future criminal events in micro-units (i.e., city blocks) based upon features of the physical environment. The particular focus of the current study is RTM's ability to separately predict future gang assaults and gang homicides in the Los Angeles Police Department's (LAPD) Hollenbeck Community Policing Area. METHOD Guided by the existing gang literature and knowledge of the region, 22 environmental risk factors are anticipated to spatially influence gang assaults and gang homicides. An RTM is established for 2009 gang assaults and 2009–2011 gang homicides. The RTM is then used to predict 2012 gang assaults and 2012 gang homicides respectively. RESULTS Places most at risk of experiencing a gang assault are in close proximity to where gang members are frequently observed loitering by police and Metro rail stops while also contending with residential concentrations of local gang members. Areas most at risk of experiencing a gang homicide cope with residential concentrations of local gang members and gang set space. The ability for RTM to successfully forecast future gang violence may be limited. CONCLUSIONS RTM is able to successfully identify and evaluate meaningful environment risk factors that spatially influence gang assaults and gang violence. However, the ability for RTM to successfully forecast future gang violence may be limited.

This study analyses how the daily activities of children and adolescents differ by parents' work schedules, using data from the ‘2009–10 Spanish Time Use Survey’ (N = 913). Spain is an interesting institutional context for its widespread evening-work culture, combined with inflexible and gendered work-family arrangements. Results imply that parents' time availability, family resources, and gender roles significantly influence children's daily activities. Multivariate linear regression models reveal that parental evening work is detrimental for children's developmental time use, but in ways that differ remarkably across parent's gender and social background. On a given weekday, children with evening-work mothers spend 35 minutes less on educational and social activities with parents and 26 minutes more on unsupervised screen-based activities (TV, mobile devices, computers), compared to children with standard-work mothers. Yet, such effects are confined to evening-work mothers with lower levels of education. By contrast, children with highly educated mothers actively engage in educational activities, reducing screen-based time. Fathers' work schedules do not affect children's time use, while their education levels produce mixed results. Analyses for weekends show a clear ‘compensatory’ behaviour: on weekends, children whose mothers work evening hours during weekdays substantially increase their time spent in educational activities and parent-child socializing.

In this study of the early US Congress (First through Nineteenth: 1789–1827), we assess the impact of slavery on the electoral competitiveness of House elections. Slavery and other forms of labor repressive agriculture have long been known to undermine democracy. Using district-level measures of electoral competitiveness and slavery, we find that a higher percentage of slaves in a district negatively impacts competition, even when we limit our models to Southern elections. Our findings indicate that from the nation's founding up to the age of Andrew Jackson, slavery strongly accounts for a pronounced disparity in the competitiveness of House elections.

We propose that pay inequality hurts corporate innovation and inventor productivity, and we identify such effects using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level pay secrecy laws that enhance pay equality. Specifically, we find significant increases in the quantity, quality, and value of patents produced by firms headquartered in states that have adopted such laws. Moreover, these increases are more pronounced for firms in states with greater pay gaps with respect to gender and ethnicity. Further channel tests suggest that the passage of pay secrecy laws promotes innovation by reducing pay gaps in ways that motivate minority inventors and also encourage workplace collaboration. Abstract We propose that pay inequality hurts corporate innovation and inventor productivity, and we identify such effects using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level pay secrecy laws that enhance pay equality. Specifically, we find significant increases in the quantity, quality, and value of patents produced by firms headquartered in states that have adopted such laws. Moreover, these increases are more pronounced for firms in states with greater pay gaps with respect to gender and ethnicity. Further channel tests suggest that the passage of pay secrecy laws promotes innovation by reducing pay gaps in ways that motivate minority inventors and also encourage workplace collaboration.

The papers encompassing this dissertation examine the interaction of public policy and military personnel, their families, and veterans. Hiring selection, retention decisions, residency choices, and labor market participation are studied in the context of Veteran Preference in the federal civil service, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, the Military Spouse Residency Relief Act, and the Nurse Licensure Compact. The first paper examines how mutual reciprocity of state occupational licensing reduces barriers to employment using a sample of active duty military spouses who do not have the luxury of making relocation decisions based on license transferability. Results indicate significant reductions in departures from the labor force, identifying the labor market inefficiencies created by single-state professional licensing. The second paper uses defense manpower data to evaluate the take-up rate of tax protection among servicemembers with respect to geographic differences in income tax rates. Although active utilization of protections afforded under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act are low, income tax avoidance appears to be a determining factor for domicile claims. Following the completion of military service, veterans have historically been granted preferential consideration for federal jobs. The final paper uses propensity score matching to evaluate how this affirmative action policy reshapes the composition of the federal civil service. Results indicate the policy runs counter to the idea of a representative bureaucracy and equal employment opportunity goals as women are most frequently displaced by veteran preference eligible job candidates. While these studies utilize samples of current and former military members, the results have implications regarding the influence of government polices on occupational licensing, tax policies, and equal opportunity employment that extend to the general population.

During the second half of the 20th century DC’s African American population migrated rapidly eastward, including beyond the city’s boundaries into Maryland. Now, eight decades later, the African American population lives farther east, centered in southeast DC and western Prince George’s County. The distribution of African Americans across the region has changed sharply from the checkerboard pattern in the early half of the 1900s to the geographic concentration of today. We discuss three time periods characterized by different residential locations of the African American population: The Wake of the New Deal from 1930-1950, The Rise of Chocolate City and Urban Growth from 1950-1990, and White Flight Reversal from 1990-2010.

My first chapter investigates the effect of high-skilled immigration on the wages of US-born college graduates. Descriptive evidence suggests that workers with different college majors compete in separate labor markets. I adapt a standard labor market model, allowing for the imperfect substitutability of workers with different college majors. Because immigrants are more likely than natives to study STEM fields, the model predicts that the relative wages of native STEM majors should fall as skilled immigration increases. Using an IV strategy that leverages large changes in the cap of H-1B visas and controls for major- and age-specific unobservable characteristics, I find that workers most exposed to increased competition from immigration have lower wages than you would expect. A 10 percentage point increase in a skill group’s immigrant-native ratio decreases their relative wages by 1.2 percent. Overall, I estimate that the STEM wage premium decreased 4–12 percentage points because of immigration from 1990–2010. In my second chapter, I extend the welfare magnets literature by using the 2014 expansion of Medicaid to test for welfare migration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandated the expansion of Medicaid. However, a Supreme Court decision overturned this provision and allowed states to opt-out. As a result, childless adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level are eligible for Medicaid in states that have expanded coverage and are not eligible at any income level in the majority of states that opted to not expand. Using a difference-in-differences strategy which compares the log estimated low-income population of expansion and non-expansion states, before and after Medicaid expansion, I find that the low-income population increased by 1% in expansion states after 2012 relative to what one would expect given pre-existing trends and post-decision population changes in non-expansion states. This result is robust to the use of state-level synthetic control. I also find that Medicaid take-up in expansion states increased more along the border of the state relative to the interior, which is driven by portions of the state that neighbor non-expansion states.

Surprisingly little is known about the types of frictions that impede trade. Economists typically focus on freight costs and tariffs as comprising the bulk of trade frictions; however, recent reviews of the literature have demonstrated these frictions do not adequately explain observed patterns of trade (Anderson and van Wincoop 2004, Head and Mayer 2013a, Head and Mayer 2013b). This dissertation examines how traditionally under-analyzed trade frictions shape price and export behaviors. In the first chapter, I build an arbitrage model to show freight costs, information lags, and storage costs uniquely impact cross-city price behaviors at the trend, cycle, and seasonal frequencies, respectively. In the second chapter, I empirically estimate the impact of information frictions by exploiting the spread of the telegraph across the United States as an historical experiment that exogenously decreased news lags across markets. In the third chapter, I explore how the deflation of the Great Depression worsened Smoot-Hawley tariffs that were legislated in nominal terms. In all of these chapters, my data consist of price and trade volumes for highly disaggregated goods, and I focus on historical settings because they provide substantial variation in the trade frictions of interest.

Housing assistance policies may lead to improved mental health for children and adolescents by improving housing quality, stability, and affordability. We use a unique data linkage of the National Health Interview Survey and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development administrative data to examine the impact of housing assistance on parent-reported mental health outcomes for children ages 2 to 17 (N = 1,967). We account for selection into housing assistance using a pseudo-waitlist method that compares children receiving assistance to those who will enter housing assistance within two years of their interview. Compared to those in the pseudo-waitlist group, we find that children living in public housing have better mental health outcomes. We do not find similar benefits for children receiving vouchers. Our results suggest that housing assistance policies can have a positive impact on mental health among disadvantaged children.

This study was commissioned by the Duluth Seaway Port Authority (DSPA), who engaged the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) to complete the study. ICIC is nationally recognized for its research on equitable economic development and was the lead consultant on the 2012 Industrial Strategy for the City of Saint Paul, which was prepared for the Saint Paul Port Authority.

In this paper we investigate the evolution of income inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2016. We find the drivers to be threefold: changes in the labor force composition, changes in household composition, and changes in market return to skills, with the latter two influences dominating this trend. We show that individual real wages grew from 1980 to 2016 throughout the entire wage distribution, indicating that the increase in wage income inequality does not stem from lower real wages at the bottom of the distribution but rather from relatively faster growth in compensation rates of high earners compared to the average earner. We apply a Mata-Machado decomposition to separately identify the contributions of changes in characteristics of workers in the US labor force and changes in returns to these characteristics. The results demonstrate that increasing education levels among the US population as well as increasing returns to education have played a significant role in the growth of wage income inequality, with the role of increasing returns to education dominating. Finally, the paper highlights several common omissions from previous inequality analyses that bias results upward, in particular nonwage compensation and dynamic behavioral responses to taxation incentives.

Place-based classifications can create long-standing influences on neighborhood fortunes. Redlining is a classic example of these unintended effects. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board developed housing appraisal standards subsequently codified in Residential Security Maps. By georeferencing the 1937 map of Pittsburgh, we evaluated the spatial legacies of neighborhood appraisals. We identify persistent neighborhood conditions by comparing neighborhood evaluations with normalized census data from 1970 to 2000. Contemporary conditions correspond with security grades from the 1937 map. Concentrations of poverty, people of color, and vacancy persist in historically redlined areas. Concentrations of high incomes, home values, and homeownership persist elsewhere.

Over the past two centuries, the U.S. has witnessed dramatic changes in fertility rates and childbearing. This chapter describes shifts in childbearing and family size from 1800 to 2010 and describes the role of different factors in this evolution. Demand factors such as industrialization, urbanization, rising family incomes, public health improvements, and the growth in women’s wages generally reduced the benefits and raised the costs of having many children. Supply factors such as increases in infant and child survival and improvements in the technology of birth control and abortion have also altered parents’ decisions about their childbearing. This chapter begins by summarizing the long-run trends in U.S. fertility rates and completed childbearing, both overall and how these patterns varied by mothers’ race/ethnicity and across geographic space. For the purposes of exposition, two hundred years are grouped into three broad periods: the 1800 to 1930 decline in fertility rates, the 1930 to 1960 stabilization in fertility rates followed by the baby boom, and the post-1960 decline and subsequent stabilization in fertility rates. The chapter next summarizes evidence on the determinants of childbearing in each period, including both economic and demographic explanations for these patterns. A final section weighs the evidence supporting the existence of two fertility transitions: a first transition driven by shifts in the demand for children and a second transition catalyzed by changes in supply side factors.