Arsenic contamination of drinking water has caused a major health emergency in Bangladesh owing to multiple health problems associated with it, which range from skin lesions to various types of cancers. However, it remained largely unknown and became a public knowledge only in 2002 through a nationwide information campaign. We study marriage patterns in Bangladesh and associate them with the information campaign which informed people about harmful health effects of arsenic and marked water sources into safe or unsafe categories. Using difference-indifference we analyse the age at marriage for males and the bride price agreed at the time of marriage and find that both of them reduce in arsenic affected areas in comparison to non-arsenic affected areas in response to information campaign. Our results are indicative of a behavioural change in marriage market found using census data, and have additionally been replicated using precise spatial contamination information contained in Demographic and Health Survey datasets for Bangladesh. We find that age at marriage for males reduces by 3.5 to 10.5 months and bride price also reduces by around 60 percent. JEL Classification: I12 J12 R11

Poor management of chronic diseases, such as hyper-tension and diabetes, particularly among the uninsured, places medical and financial burdens on the healthcare system. Clínica Esperanza/Hope Clinic initiated a chronic disease management program for uninsured residents of Rhode Island (RI) called Bridging the [Health Equity] Gap (BTG), which offers continuity of care, quarterly goal-setting appointments, and healthy lifestyle interventions. Outcomes of the 549 participants from the initial evaluation period are presented here. Over the first 12 months of enrollment, mean hemoglobin A1c decreased from 10.2% to 8.3% (p<0.001), and mean blood glucose of individuals with diabetes decreased by 51 mg/ dL (p<0.01). BTG participants used the local emergency department (ED) 60% less than Medicaid-insured RI residents and had 61% fewer "potentially preventable" ED visits. The positive impact of BTG on chronic disease outcomes and ED usage by uninsured patients suggests that programs like BTG may reduce overall healthcare costs in the state.

I am grateful to Barry Eichengreen for his support in this project. I also thank Dominick Bartelme, Carola Binder, Susan Carter, Brad DeLong, Alex Field, Joel Mokyr, Petra Moser, Alan Olmstead, Martha Olney, Paul Rhode, Daniel Robert, Richard Sutch, Noam Yuchtman, and the Editor and referees for helpful comments and suggestions, as well as participants in the BEHL Economic History Lunch, All‐UC Hundred Flowers conference, and NBER DAE Summer Institute poster session. I am grateful to Richard Sutch for sharing data on hybrid corn diffusion from the USDA Agricultural Statistics. I thank the Berkeley Economic History Lab and All‐UC Group in Economic History for financial support. This research was additionally supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Grant no. DGE‐1106400 and an EHA Graduate Fellowship. The appendices referenced in this article are available online at www.dpgross.com/. All errors are my own.

The allocation of funding toward childcare has historically been debated due to conflicting views on the effect childcare subsidies have on low-income, single mothers. Some suggest that federal, state and local funding could put the money allocated for childcare subsidies to better use – or perhaps that there is no need for additional federal, state and/or local funding. However, there is sufficient evidence that children raised in a family structure with low-income single mothers may face long-term negative consequences not only socially, but also economically. An increase in labor force participation rates as a result of childcare subsidies not only enables these low-income single mothers to potentially earn more than before, but also decreases the burden placed on taxpayers to support welfare programs. This paper observes the effect of childcare subsidies on low-income, single mothers across race.

The Trump administration is developing a rule that would have far-reaching consequences for legal immigrants and their families - those living in the United States as well as prospective immigrants. The expected rule, which could be formally released at any time, could make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain a green card or get their temporary visa extended if they or their dependents - including U.S.-citizen children - use public benefits or tax credits for which they qualify. The draft proposed rule also suggests that the administration may make the use of public benefits by legally present noncitizens grounds for their deportation.

Objective This study investigates how the Return Migration altered racial inequality in poverty in the American South. Methods I disaggregate southern poverty into its separate constituents using household data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for 1970 through 2000. Results The prevalence of poverty declined most dramatically for black southern households and the racial gap in poverty narrowed to the extent that previous substantial regional differences disappeared. A central focus is the contrast between higher poverty and inequality among migrants who returned to their birth state relative to other southern‐born migrants who returned to the South. Conclusions The migration experience is diverse and has conflicting consequences for racial inequality; for some, migration maintained economic vulnerability. Given the complex force of migration, I conclude that a nuanced theoretical approach to migration that gives weight to economic and noneconomic motivations is critical to understand the racial dimensions of migration and the associated changes in racial inequality.

Asian Americans are “overrepresented” in certain elite schools relative to their numbers in the U.S. population. In pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity, these schools will admit some Asian American applicants but not as many as their academic qualifications would justify. As a case study, I examine three private universities and Asian American enrollment in those universities over time...

Data is being generated, scraped, and integrated at never before seen rates. At the same time, quality control over this data does not measure up. Much of the data is obtained through unreliable sources, such as faulty sensors, software based on heuristics, and overworked humans. Consequently, these massive amounts of data are becoming increasingly dirty. This phenomenon is problematic for any sizeable organization, and is estimated to cost the US economy alone anywhere between millions and trillions of dollars each year. Apart from companies suffering financial losses, dirty data also impacts areas such as data analysis, knowledge discovery from databases, and machine learning. These applications typically rely on large amounts of data, and since said data is often dirty, this can lead to wrong conclusions, faulty models, or false patterns. In this dissertation we focus on erroneous data, in the form of value combinations that violate certain logical rules. These rules are called quality rules, and typically specify what clean data should look like. Throughout the dissertation, we have investigated the problem of discovering such quality rules from different angles. The main challenge here is that, in a typical scenario, the correct rules are unknown. We have tackled this problem by involving a user in the discovery process, and by employing a suitable interestingness measure for discovering violations of quality rules. The techniques used are mostly rooted in the area of pattern mining, a subfield of knowledge discovery from databases, aimed at discovering interesting associations between objects or events.

Urban poverty has become increasingly concentrated in the inner-city. From 1970 to 1990, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods more than doubled (Jargowsky, 1996). In the 1990s, policymakers came to the consensus that the concentration of poor, minority residents in inner city public housing projects were the fundamental dilemma in U.S. cities and to solve the crisis, public housing must be demolished and the residents moved. As housing determines one’s access to transportation, schools, jobs, and community, policymakers have justified the implementation of various housing programs to alleviate the effects of concentrated poverty. Over the last two decades, local housing authorities have demolished and redesigned some of the country’s most distressed public housing. These demolitions and redevelopments were a part of the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) “Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere” (HOPE VI) program. Scholars and policymakers were hopeful that the program would help transform blighted neighborhoods into thriving mixed-income communities by demolishing extremely distressed public housing projects. This thesis project questions whether or not HOPE VI has been an effective policy at deconcentrating area poverty and improving resident life outcomes in Philadelphia. William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) spurred two decades of scholarly debate surrounding the dynamics of poverty in America’s inner-cities. Wilson’s work sparked a large body of research that suggests a range of adverse social, political, and economic effects of concentrated poverty in urban areas. Living in areas of concentrated poverty leads to a variety of negative life outcomes such as lower educational attainment, increased joblessness, lower economic opportunities, physical and psychological health disparities, and criminal delinquency (Briggs, 2010; Crump, 2002; Goetz, 2003; Galster et al., 2008). When looking at the HOPE VI-centric literature, Goetz and a number of other progressive reformers point out many shortcomings of the program. These scholars argue that a stark reduction of hard units forces the program to disperse public housing residents to other areas of disadvantage, through mobility vouchers. They also argue that relocation disrupts valuable community and social networks. On the other hand, many scholars argue that the program injected revitalized value to neighborhood real estate markets, which has stabilized communities from crime and poverty (Turbov & Piper, 2005; Zielenbach, 2005). Residents in these communities report higher levels of perceived safety and overall satisfaction (Clampet-Lundquist, 2010; Popkin et. al, 2009). I hypothesize that HOPE VI, which physically revitalized severely distressed former public housing sites, has and will continue to improve life outcomes at the individual level and positively transform the quality of the neighborhoods around Philadelphia. I expect the transformed physical landscape to spur investment into historically neglected parts of the city, and increase access to more meaningful human capital and local resources. This thesis evaluates HOPE VI’s effectiveness at four public housing cases in Philadelphia: Richard Allen Homes, Schuylkill Falls (now Falls Ridge), Mill Creek Apartments (now Lucien E. Blackwell Homes) and Martin Luther King Plaza. This analysis evaluates both resident outcomes and neighborhood level impacts. At the neighborhood level, the variables include vacancy rates, median home values and contract rental rates, population living below the poverty line, and racial demographics. At the individual level, this thesis illustrates changes in median household incomes, unemployment rates, and access to local amenities and supportive services. Data was collected from Social Explorer, and the National Historical Geographic Information System operated by the University of Minnesota’s Population Center. Data was extracted from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2013, and 2016 at the census tract level across various topics to explain program effectiveness. Through my case study of Philadelphia, communities with HOPE VI redevelopment experienced positive growth at both the individual and neighborhood levels. Real Estate metrics in the tracts containing HOPE VI revitalization sites improved significantly following the completion of the projects. The redevelopment of Schuylkill Falls and MLK plaza appear to be the standout examples of program success. Hildebrandt (2015) suggests these cases experienced the most strategic attention by the city due to their proximity to Center City and Manayunk. Despite the beautiful new facades and green spaces at each site, the PHA still lost more than 7,000 total units under HOPE VI. Because most residents were unable to move back into the redeveloped sites, the HOPE VI program merely dispersed poverty in their deconcentration efforts. Thus, HOPE VI was a successful redevelopment program but failed to adequately address the self-sufficiency goals of PHA residents. My research suggests that public housing with the best access to a city’s central business district are more poised to thrive after HOPE VI redevelopment. There are more resource and community amenities pumped into these projects in hopes to increase downtown foot traffic and commerce. Distressed neighborhoods such as Mill Creek, which are spatially separated from Center City, fare the worst. Future scholarship requires a heightened focus on resident level outcomes, especially among those who relocated with Section 8 vouchers. My analysis was significantly constrained by the inability to evaluate the mover cohort and interview residents. Income-mixing also turned out to be an insignificant factor, as the PHA did not actively track mixed-income variation in their redevelopments. Future scholarship needs to address how mixed-income communities effect residents and neighborhood outcomes.

I document the relationship between establishment size and various measures of workers’ health. Workers at larger establishments are more likely to have chronic health conditions, have had a bed disability day in the last 12 months and be obese. They are also less likely to be smokers. Results for other health measures depend on the specification. My results may help in more effectively targeting workplace wellness programs. The results may also inform the design of better public interventions aimed at reducing occupational injuries. I discuss the relevance of my results for the establishment size-wage premium.

We introduce a new query primitive called Function Query (FQ). An FQ operates on a set of math functions and retrieves the functions whose output with a given input satisfies a query condition (e.g., being among top k, within a given range). While FQ finds its natural uses in querying a database of math functions, it can also be applied on a database of discrete values. We show that by interpreting the database as a set of user-defined functions, FQ can achieve the same functionality as existing analytic queries such as top-k query and scalar product query. We address the challenge of efficient execution of FQ. The core of our solution is a novel data structure called Intersection-tree. Our research takes advantage of the fact that 1) the intersections of a set of continuous functions partition their domain into a number of subdomains, and 2) in each subdomain, the functions can be sorted based on their output. We evaluate the performance of the proposed techniques through analysis, prototyping, and experiments using both synthetic and real-world data. When querying a database of functions, our techniques scale well. When applied on a database of discrete values, our techniques are more versatile and outperform existing techniques in query processing costs.

Background Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is the most common blood-borne viral infection in the United States. Previously, we used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to estimate the prevalence of HCV antibodies (anti-HCV) and HCV RNA among all U.S. states. However, demographic differences in HCV burden at the state-level have not been systematically described. This analysis quantified the HCV burden stratified by sex and race (and associated disparities) for each U.S. state. Methods Building on our previous method, we used three publicly available data sources to estimate HCV RNA prevalence among noninstitutionalized adults stratified by sex and race group. We used a small-area estimation approach that included direct standardization of NHANES demographic data with logistic regression modeling of HCV-related mortality data as an adjustment factor to estimate the state-level prevalence and total persons with chronic HCV infection for sex and race groups in all U.S. states. Results Nationally, males had an estimated HCV RNA prevalence of 1.56% (95% CI: 1.37–1.84%) and females had a prevalence of 0.75% (95% CI: 0.63–0.96%). Stratified by race, national estimated prevalence of HCV RNA was highest among non-Hispanic black (2.43, 95% CI: 2.10–2.90%), followed by non-Hispanic white (1.05, 95% CI: 0.90–1.27%) and Hispanic/other (0.74, 95% CI: 0.59–1.04%). Males in most jurisdictions (41/51) have an HCV RNA prevalence that is between 1.5 and 2.5 times higher than their female counterparts. Conclusions HCV infection disparities by sex are mostly consistent across the country. However, race differences in HCV infection differ by state and tailored prevention and treatment efforts specific to the local HCV epidemic are needed to reduce race disparities.

With the recent passage of Medicaid expansion, Virginia is making strides in improving access to health care for working families in the state. However, in order to advance economic security for women and families in Virginia, policymakers should prioritize policies that ensure economic equality and reproductive health care access for all women. Women and families need policies that refect their roles as providers and caregivers; in Virginia, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 66.9 percent of families.1 Tese numbers are higher for some women of color. Te following policy recommendations can help support the economic security of women and families in Virginia.

Female family headship has strong implications for endemic poverty in the United States. Consequently, it is imperative to explore the chief factors that contribute to this problem. Departing from prior literature that places significant weight on welfare-incentive effects, our study highlights the role of male marriageability in explaining the prevalence of never-married female family headship for blacks and whites. Specifically, we examine racial differences in the effect of male marriageability on never-married female headship from 1980 to 2010. By exploiting data from IPUMS-USA ( N = 4,958,722) and exogenous variation from state-level sentencing reforms, the study finds that the decline in the relative supply of marriageable males significantly increases the incidence of never-married female family headship for blacks but not for whites.

Critical geographers, historians, and journalists have described the mid-century construction of urban Interstate highways as a deliberate effort to spatially marginalize or depopulate poor and racially diverse neighborhoods. But such claims have not been supported by quantitative evidence on highways’ overall effect. We offer the first national-level estimates of highways’ effects on population and housing stock in central cities. Combining an original highway database created from historical road atlases with historical Census and neighborhood assessments conducted for the Federal Housing Administration, we show that Interstate highways built before 1970 reduced population and housing stock by about 15 percent on average since 1960, through these effects varied and have attenuated in recent years. Highways’ effects were felt most in the “redlined" neighborhoods that disproportionately suffered highway construction. Our results show that Interstates were instruments of urban renewal, but their adverse effects largely compounded ongoing losses in central cities.

The government is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers, especially in information technology and cyber security jobs. The conventional wisdom in branches of policy and public administration is that the shortage is driven by low salaries that are not competitive for attracting top talent. Using longitudinal data on high skilled workers between 1993 and 2013, this paper shows that, if anything, government employees earn more than their private sector counterparts. Although government workers tend to earn less in the raw data, these differences are driven by the correlation between unobserved ability and selection into private sector jobs. These results are robust to additional data from the Census Bureau between 2005 and 2016. Instead, this paper shows that a more plausible culprit behind the worker shortage in government is a lack of development opportunities and poor management. The paper represents only the views of the author and not those of any affiliated institutions or the United States.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which history matters in shaping population distribution across space. In the wake of the current literature, the idea is to model individual location preferences by focusing on selected local determinants (neighborhood, education, income, amenities and distance from the CBD), while also taking into account temporal and spatial dependence in location choices. Our preliminary results revel the importance of segregation factors in shaping recent population density distribution.

Scholars have long questioned why average educational attainments among children of immigrants vary greatly by country of origin. Immigrants’ children from the same country share similar contexts of exit and reception and often similar school and family contexts. What is the relative importance of these factors in explaining ethnic differences in educational attainment? Using cross-classified multi-level models, this study shows that family contexts and immigrant group educational selectivity, but not school contexts, help explain ethnic differences. Immigrant selectivity is more decisive in shaping the second-generation’s educational attainment than other group characteristics related to immigrants’ contexts of exit and reception. While school socioeconomic status (SES) only influences the attainment of immigrants’ children from high-SES families, immigrant group selectivity matters regardless of the SES of the family or school, thus shedding light on why members of some national-origin groups tend to complete more education than others despite similar family and school contexts.

We use American Community Survey data extracted from the IPUMS system to develop a database of household partners and then analyze the impact of individual and partner employment types on the probability of a birth in the last 12 months. Using a variety of controls for both individual and partner we find that when the individual (woman) is self employed, partnerships have lower fertility rates regardless of the employment classification of the partner when compared to the situation of individual and partner both wage-employed.

Recent studies of immigrant health have focused on an apparent paradox in which some new immigrants arrive healthier than expected but exhibit poorer health outcomes with duration of residence. Although a variety of explanations have been put forth for this epidemiological pattern, questions remain about the socio-historical generalizability of the empirical findings and accompanying theoretical explanations. By examining childhood mortality patterns of European immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century, this study tests hypotheses from current immigrant health literature in a previous era of immigration. In contrast with post-1965 immigrant groups, European arrivals did not have better outcomes than their U.S.-born white counterparts. Rather, their rates corresponded to a “middle tier” status in between U.S.-born black and white populations. Analysis of post-migration trajectories returned mixed results that similarly differ from contemporary patterns. Many new immigrant groups had higher rates of excess childhood mortality than their U.S-born counterparts, but outcomes appear to have improved with duration of residence or among the second generation. These findings suggest socio-historical variation in the context of reception may act as a “fundamental cause” of immigrant health and mortality outcomes.