There is little research on the gender variation in the crime market. We document a gender gap in criminal activities, based on property crimes, using data from the U.S. National Incident Based Reporting System from 1995 to 2015. We show that there is a gender participation gap, with only 30 percent of the crimes being committed by females. We try to explain the gender participation gap by focusing on incentives to commit crime, such as criminal earnings and probability of arrest. We show that on average females earn 13% less than males while they face a 9% lower likelihood of arrest. We find that males respond more to changes in illegal earnings, with an elasticity of 0.36, while females are less responsive with an elasticity of 0.23. Both genders respond equally to changes in the probability of arrest, with an elasticity around −0.14. Using a Blinder–Oaxaca type decomposition technique, we find that differences in incentives explain about 8 % of the gender participation gap, while differences in responsiveness to changes in incentives, especially illegal earnings, explain about 56% of the gap. The fact that females behave differently than males has implications for the heterogeneity in response to crime control policies.

Changes in climate and land use are two primary drivers of hydrologic adjustment. This study analyzes 40 years of water resources data for 10 watersheds in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to quantify the impact of climate change and urbanization on water yield. The watersheds investigated have experienced varying degrees of land-use change, from relatively little change to rapid and extensive urbanization. Comparing the data trends for different watersheds allows the separation of effects that are due largely to climate change from those due to land-use change. Predominantly rural watersheds show a steady decline in annual water yield, whereas predominantly urban watersheds do not show any similar trend with time. Separating the year into growing versus nongrowing seasons reveals that limited evapotranspiration from urban surfaces during the growing season or the general effects of a leaking water distribution network may mask the reductions in water yield in urban watersheds from changing climate. These analyses provide hydrological evidence for generally enhanced evapotranspiration and complex interactions between concurrent climate change and urbanization within the study area.

The persistent relationship between race and unemployment among young men and women has been among the most vexing problems faced by Black communities in the Post-Civil Rights era. Researchers have tried to identify mechanisms through which racial status continues to bear on employment status by identifying individual attributes that render workers of different racial identities similarly likely to secure employment. When Black and White workers with similar human capital profiles have different odds of employment, we are left to speculate about what is behind those differences. In this paper, I demonstrate that racial differences in the odds of unemployment are greater in some states than in others and suggest that some part of the racial employment gap can be explained by state-level attributes. First, however, we must identify convincing measures of the strength of association between race and employment status across states. I offer four such measures and rank the states on each. We are left with some surprising answers to the question where does race matter most? and empirical foundations for a research agenda that sheds new light on racial employment gaps by treating labor markets rather than labor market participants as the units of observation.

The number of female clergy in the United States has steadily increased over the last 40 years. Several occupational theories suggest that the ratio of males to females within an occupation can affect occupational income inequality. Previous research on clergy has found meaningful gender differences in pay. However, this research has focused on particular denominations and has not captured trends in the national clergy labor market. Using the Current Population Survey, we uncover patterns in occupational gender inequality among clergy at the national level. We find that among clergy, the female income disadvantage has changed from 60 cents on the dollar in 1976 to 93 cents on the dollar in 2016. However, 42 percent of the income gains for female clergy is explained by the slow rates of income growth among male clergy. We conclude by discussing unique features of occupational gender inequality within American congregations.

Limited research on parental well‐being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well‐Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happiness with adolescents relative to younger children, and mothers report more stress and less meaning with adolescents. Controlling for contextual features of parenting including activity type, solo parenting, and restorative time does not fully account for the adolescent disadvantage in fathers' happiness or mothers' stress. This study highlights adolescence as a particularly difficult stage for parental well‐being and shows that mothers shoulder stress that fathers do not, even after accounting for differences in the context of their parenting activities.

Since the mid-1970s, the United States (US) South has been a net destination for African American migrants. We analyzed data from 1976 to 2015 to highlight major characteristics of migrants to the US South at the Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA) level. Grounded in neoclassical and social network migration theory, we propose there are concurrent streams of migrants—those searching for economic opportunity and those returning to homeplaces. Here, we show that the overall percentage of migrants moving to rural areas has declined from 30 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 2015. Our results suggest the stream of migrants moving for economic opportunity has always been larger and has grown proportionally larger with time. Along with a decrease in rural-bound migration, we demonstrate an overall decrease in migration, a concentration of migrants in a shrinking number of urban centers, and an unexpected increase in the human capital of rural migrants. Our findings have forced us to reckon with assumptions that professionals leaving cities for rural communities is a uniquely white phenomenon, challenged us to consider the importance of social ties to urban areas, and raised questions about the role of technology as a deterrent to moving home.

This brief focuses on immigrants in Washington, DC, to help the Executive Office of Mayor Muriel Bowser and its partners better understand and serve DC's immigrant community. 1 It highlights immigrants from Latin America, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Caribbean, who collectively represent 3 out of 4 immigrants living in DC (figure 1). The Mayor's Office of Community Affairs (MOCA) in the Executive Office of the Mayor has dedicated offices to serve immigrant communities to achieve its mandate of "helping to improve the quality of life for residents of the District of Columbia by collaborating with neighborhood organizations and other city agencies to address community issues." 2 Three of the four immigrant communities addressed in this brief are represented by separate offices within the Executive Office of the Mayor, which provide support and work to improve the quality of life for their respective communities (box 1). In preparing this brief, we compiled data from national sources, reviewed reports and documents, and interviewed the staff from each of these offices and from nonprofit service providers serving these communities to gain insights into the supports available to and challenges facing immigrants in DC.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants to the United States have, to a larger degree than the larger population, tried their hand at starting their own businesses. While the Latinos who began entering the United States in greater numbers in the 1990s and 2000s do not self-employ as much as did immigrants from central and eastern Europe in the 1880s or immigrants from Korea in the 1970s, an estimated 1.54 million Latinos are self-employed in unincorporated businesses, while the 2012 national Survey of Business Owners counted 3.3 million Latino-owned firms, with a total of $474 million in annual sales or receipts. This entrepreneurship is all the more remarkable given that Latinos traditionally begin their businesses with lower levels of personal capital and have historically had more difficulty obtaining formal startup capital from . . .

In an education system that draws students from residentially based attendance zones, schools are local institutions that reflect the racial composition of their surrounding communities. However, with opportunities to opt out of the zoned public school system, the social and economic contexts of neighborhoods may affect the demographic link between neighborhoods and their public neighborhood schools. Using spatial data on school attendance zones, we estimate the associations between the racial composition of elementary schools and their local neighborhoods, and we investigate how neighborhood factors shape the loose or tight demographic coupling of these parallel social contexts. The results show that greater social distance among residents within neighborhoods, as well as the availability of educational exit options, results in neighborhood public schools that are less reflective of their surrounding communities. In addition, we show that suburban schools are more demographically similar to their neighborhood attendance zones than are urban schools.

In this study, we document the effect of food stamp access on adult health care utilization. While the Food Stamp Program provides one of the largest safety nets in the United States today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental analysis. To circumvent this, we use variation in documented immigrants’ eligibility for food stamps across states and over time due to welfare reform in 1996. Our estimates indicate that access to food stamps reduced physician visits. Additionally, we find that for single women, food stamps increased the affordability of specialty health care. These findings have important implications for cost-benefit analyses of the Food Stamp Program, as reductions in health care utilization because of food stamps may offset some of the program’s impact on the overall government budget owing to the existence of government-provided health insurance programs such as Medicaid.

My dissertation contributes towards our understanding of effects that convict labor has on economic outcomes. It consists of three chapters. The first, ``Economic Consequences of the U.S. Convict Labor System'' studies the economic externalities of U.S. convict labor on local labor markets. Using newly collected panel data on U.S. prisons and convict-labor camps from 1886 to 1940, I show that competition from cheap prison-made goods led to higher unemployment, lower labor-force participation, and reduced wages (particularly for women) in counties that housed competing manufacturing industries. At the same time, affected industries had higher patenting rates. I find that the introduction of convict labor accounts for 16% slower growth in U.S. manufacturing wages. The introduction of convict labor also induced technical changes and innovations that account for 6% of growth in U.S. patenting in affected industries. In my second chapter, ``U.S. Convict Labor System and Racial Discrimination'' I document that after the demise of the slavery and rise of crime after the end of the Civil War, convict labor system evolved in the United States in order to finance state penitentiary institutions. It provided monetary incentives to the police to arrest more people. Black and other minorities became an easy target for a police that used a variety of minor crime laws to increase the supply of coerced labor. Using the geographical variation of convict labor camps in the United States in 1886 I show that counties exposed to a more severe exploitation of convict labor experienced higher rates of incarceration among minorities in 1920, and 1930. Moreover, after the abolishment of the old convict labor system in 1941, the racial discrimination in policing remained: the same variation of convict labor camps predicts excessive arrests of Black and Hispanic for non-violent crimes (drugs and vagrancy). To show that the results are causal I use the exogenous shock of first massive expansion of the U.S. convict labor system in 1870 that had happened when the National Prison Association was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. I use distance to Cincinnati as an instrument for the value of goods produced by convict labor. It correlates with the likelihood of attending the Congress by the wardens of prisons, and cost of getting information about the profitability of convict labor. I perform a series of sensitivity checks and placebo tests to ensure that results are indeed causal. In the third and last chapter, using historical distribution of the prison and convict labor camps in the United States, I study the long-run effect of convict labor on equality of opportunities. Convict labor negatively affected wages of low-skilled workers and had positive effects on firms in affected industries. I document that this reallocation of welfare from wage earners to capital owners had a long-lasting effect on equality of opportunities: intergenerational mobility of the bottom income quintile got worse, while it improved for the other quintiles.

US cities have made large investments in light rail transit in recent years. Arguments in favour of light rail construction typically focus on enhancing workers’ access to job opportunities. I analyse the labour market e↵ects of light rail construction in four US metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2013. I propose a new instrumental variable to overcome endogeneity in transit station location. An inclination among transportation planners to extend light rail to the airport introduces a source of quasi-random neighbourhood assignment, enabling causal identification of neighbourhood e↵ects. I find that light rail improves local employment outcomes. Local amenities cause workers to sort within a city, meaning that neighbourhood e↵ects could be the result of endogenous sorting. To estimate distributional consequences and welfare e↵ects, I propose and estimate a structural model of neighbourhood choice. The model is estimated with novel Google navigation data. I find that light rail systems fail to raise aggregate metropolitan employment because induced rent increases repel low skilled workers, displacing them to inaccessible locations.

We test whether income inequality undermines female and male life expectancy in the United States. We employ data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia and two-way fixed effects to model state-level average life expectancy as a function of multiple income inequality measures and time-varying characteristics. We find that state-level income inequality is inversely associated with female and male life expectancy. We observe this general pattern across four measures of income inequality and under the rigorous conditions of state-specific and year-specific fixed effects. If income inequality undermines life expectancy, redistribution policies could actually improve the health of states.

In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group in a host country. We approach this case in three parts. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the US and the making of a new ethnic community. We then provide a quantitative analysis of socioeconomic mobility among Vietnamese refugees using American Community Survey data from 1980 to 2015 and survey data. We examine how this ethnic population has changed over time by focusing on key socioeconomic indicators, such as poverty rates and levels of education, occupation, and income. Third, we seek to explain what enables Vietnamese refugees and their children to overcome initial disadvantage and move up in society based on our own work over the span of 20 years with in-depth qualitative data. We consider how policies, institutions (government, civil society, and ethnic), and patterns of social relations in the Vietnamese American community have interacted with individual agency to shape mobility.

The concepts of vulnerability and resilience have been gaining attention in the realm of hazards and climate change adaptation in the past couple decades, with a variety of approaches and definitions utilized in their assessment. In recent years, more efforts have been made to link these concepts under the umbrella of sustainability science, and adaptive capacity has emerged as a common factor that holds particular relevance in the context of climate adaptation and management/governance of social-environmental, or socio-environmental, systems (Engle, 2011; Turner et. al., 2003).

Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility—family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital—can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.

Who has which job? When this answer differs by race group or sex, inefficiencies such as labor market discrimination or suboptimal investment in education may be impeding productivity and sustaining inequities. We use US Census data to analyze the occupational structure of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) workers relative to non-Hispanic white workers. Relative to white workers, AI/AN workers are generally overrepresented in low-skilled occupations and underrepresented in high-skilled occupations, especially men and single-race AI/AN workers. AI/AN occupational dissimilarity does not appear to have declined substantially since 1980. Sex-specific multivariate analyses do not remove the significant inequalities in observed occupational outcomes.

Each year, the Nobel Prize is awarded to outstanding individuals in the fields of Economics, Physics, Medicine or Physiology, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace. Unlike in prior years, in 2018, none of the American winners were foreign-born individuals who immigrated to the United States or who were working at a U.S. institution at the time they won. But the United States did play an important role in their formation; nine of the twelve 2018 Nobel Laureates were either students, teachers, or research fellows at U.S. institutions of higher education at some point in their lives, even if they were not born in the United States. Three of the 2018 Nobel Laureates were foreign-born academics who spent considerable time at U.S. institutions. Originally from Canada, Dr. Donna Strickland was on staff at Princeton University and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after earning her doctoral degree at the University of Rochester. Her fellow 2018 Laureate in Physics, French-born Dr. Gerard Mourou, was also at the University of Rochester. Finally, Japanese-born immunologist Dr. Tasuku Honjo was a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and then the U.S. National Institutes of Health for seven years, and was later elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a foreign associate. Their stories are the stories of dozens of foreign-born Nobel Prize Laureates and other gifted scientists who came to the United States to follow their dreams of knowledge and of genuine contribution to the wellbeing of humankind.

With ever advancing technologies becoming more integrated in our everyday lives, we must adapt and learn to utilize these new technologies in order to maintain a presence in society. One group that struggles to adopt and learn the processes involved with advancing technologies is the older adult population. Previous literature suggests that older adults tend to encounter multiple barriers when attempting to adopt technology including cost, technology fluency, purpose of use, and concerns over privacy and safety. Using data from the 2015 Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplement, different demographic factors are analyzed for influences on age cohorts and their use of technologies. Age cohorts are broken down into: Generation Y, Generation X, and the Baby Boomer/Silent Generation. The overall goal is to see if additional factors, besides age, affect a person's adoption and use of technology. Findings indicate that older adults use less technology than younger people, but that occupation and location factors have the greatest influence on the adoption of technology.

Time use surveys are the main source of information for estimates of production, consumption and transfer of unpaid work. Currently, 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have some measure of time use. Brazil is the only one in this list of countries that has only the information of hours normally dedicated per week to housework, available in the National Household Survey. Preliminary analyzes of this information identified underreporting in the number of hours devoted to childcare. In addition, to estimate consumption, housework should be disaggregated at least in general household activities and care activities, since childcare is only consumed by children. Therefore, it is proposed a methodology for calculating the production, consumption and transfers based on this single information on hours of housework per week. We chose the 2012-2013 National Time Use Survey from Colombia, a country that holds socio-demographic, economic and cultural similarities with Brazil. I used indirect standardization, borrowing from the Colombia data the ratio between the average number of daily hours of childcare performed for each hour of other domestic activities to estimate time of childcare for Brazil. From the corrected data, it was possible to estimate, for the first time, all the age profiles of production, consumption and transfer of housework for Brazil. The estimates evidence gender inequality in intergenerational transfers of houserwork time. The results show that women, after childhood, spend virtually the entire life-course producing more housework than consuming, with significant differences between income levels. Men at all income levels and at all ages are net consumers of domestic work, consuming more than they produce. Applying the specialist replacement method for pricing household production, the total value of labour devoted to home production of the nonmarket services represents 10.4% of GDP in 2013. Combining production in the labor market with domestic production, I also show that at all ages women contributed as much as men to the economy.