Understanding vulnerability to the consequences of anthropogenic climate change as well as societies’ adaptive capacity is not only a matter of understanding the atmospheric circumstances under which extreme weather events turn into natural disasters. One also needs to study the factors “on the ground” that co-determine risk. Depending on the type of calamity, these may in large part be geographical, i.e. a matter of where you are, but also social, i.e. a matter of who you are within a society. Research on differential vulnerability to natural disasters suggests a strong heterogeneity in both the spatial and social dimension (Pichler and Striessnig 2013; R. Muttarak and Jiang 2016; Striessnig and Loichinger 2016). In addition to that, sociodemographic factors interact with the spatial dimension and have different effects on the individual, the local community and the societal level (Raya Muttarak, Lutz, and Jiang 2016). Therefore, in order to increase the accuracy of future scenario-based impact assessments, not only with regard to environmental threats, but the propensity and general likelihood of global change more generally, spatial population projections that include relevant sociodemographic characteristics are needed.

Forestlands have been identified as a valuable resource to mitigate climate change due to the biome’s capacity to both sequester greenhouse gases and substitute for fossil fuels. Woody biomass has been proposed as a substitutable input for coalgenerated electricity as economies attempt to transition to renewable power while addressing economic development goals. However, increasing the intensity of forest management for energy production has the potential to result in significant ecological, economic and social consequences at local, regional and global scales. In this context, my dissertation explores the capacity of existing policy frameworks to stimulate and support sustainable power production from forest biomaterials. In Chapter Two, I explore the interactions between shifting goals, actors and institutions in influencing incentives that shape today’s policy mix for woody biopower production in Wisconsin. The study’s results reveal that the state’s shifting focus away from using renewable energy as a means to pursue climate change mitigation and energy security goals combined . . .

México vive una de las encrucijadas más complejas de su historia contemporánea. La mayoría de la población sufre un deterioro de su calidad de vida y la expectativa de un futuro mejor se ve amenazada por el estancamiento y desgaste de la economía, las instituciones, el bienestar social, la práctica de la política y el medio ambiente. La situación apunta a la urgencia de transformaciones estructurales que rompan con esta trayectoria, y que encaminen al país en una senda de desarrollo sostenible e incluyente, que abata la pobreza y la desigualdad y traiga prosperidad a la población. La gravedad de los problemas y la baja efectividad de las soluciones que se han ensayado en las últimas tres décadas deben dar lugar hoy a una estrategia diferente, que ataque los problemas de raíz, que impulse el crecimiento, el empleo y el bienestar social, así como la inversión, la creatividad y la innovación y ofrezca resultados palpables a la población en todas las regiones del país en el corto plazo; pero que también impulse soluciones duraderas y sostenibles en el mediano y largo plazos, que permitan recuperar la confianza, el orgullo y la identidad nacional en la hora global. El proceso electoral y el inicio de una nueva administración de gobierno representan una nueva oportunidad para construir un mejor país. La difícil coyuntura induce a que la esperanza que se renueva cada seis años, hoy se asiente sobre bases más firmes, con una sociedad dispuesta a ser parte activa de la solución y no un mero testigo pasivo o reactivo de decisiones del poder económico y político. Eliminar la corrupción y la impunidad, fortalecer el estado de derecho y las instituciones democráticas, reconstruir el tejido social e implantar un sistema de desarrollo sostenible, incluyente y más justo, con mayor confianza en su futuro, precisa de una ciudadanía empoderada y con capacidad de diálogo eficaz con su gobierno...

Unlike the 1980s, the rapid rise in college wage premium decelerated since 1990s and became much slower after 2000. There are some different explanations for the flattening college wage premium. In this paper, I use a decomposition and counterfactual simulation approach to evaluate three explanations of flattening college wage premium during 2000-2010 and 2000-2015, i.e., demand reversal, polarization and supply change. The simulation results suggest: i. supply change is the most powerful explanation; ii. polarization has explanatory power but not robust; and iii. demand reversal has little efficacy in explaining the fact. By a close look of three explanations, I argue that the "failure" of demand reversal story and the "unstable" impact of polarization story indeed suggest some kinds of weakness of the analytical framework. And there are still some unexplained facts related to the supply change story. A better framework should depend on the endogenous supply of high-skilled workers and heterogenous quality of high-skilled workers.

This thesis focuses on how health care policies affect the labor supply of physicians and beneficiaries. Further, I examine how the labor supply responses of physicians vary based on the level of competition. In the first chapter, I focus on the labor supply response of physicians to two large public health insurance expansions, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These insurance programs have significantly increased the number of patients with public health insurance and the demand for medical services, but it is not clear whether providers will supply additional services for newlyinsured patients. In response to the introduction of SCHIP, my estimates suggest that physicians reallocate their total working hours between patient care and non-patient care activities. The size of the impact was greater in areas with high level of physician concentration prior to the expansion. Physicians in high concentration areas tend to decrease time spent on direct patient care, but increase hours on non-direct patient care. In response to the ACA, physicians’ working hours did not increase, but working hours and the probability of being employed increased for registered nurses. This suggests that physicians might utilize other healthcare providers to accommodate increases in demand for medical services after the expansion. In the second chapter, we analyzed the impact of expanding Medicaid on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes. Expansions of public health insurance have the potential to reduce the uninsured rate, but also to reduce coverage through employersponsored insurance (ESI), reduce labor supply, and increase job mobility. In January 2014, twenty-five states expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act to low-income iv parents and childless adults. We compare the changes in insurance coverage and labor market outcomes over time of adults in states that expanded Medicaid and in states that did not. Our estimates suggest that the recent expansion significantly increased Medicaid coverage with little decrease in ESI. Overall, the expansion did not impact labor market outcomes, including labor force participation, employment, and hours worked. In the third chapter, I examined the impact of competition among dentists on the labor supply of dentists. I focus on how dentists’ working hours will changes when the level of competition increases by examining the effect of the National Health Service Corps (NHSC). The NHSC was created to increase the supply of rural physicians, which might increase the competition in rural areas. I examine the number of dentists (extensive margins of labor supply) and the change in the working hours of dentists (intensive margins of labor supply) in response to the increased level of physician competition. I found that 1 percent increase in NHSC-approved sites increases 5.4% increases in the number of providers and 0.2% of competition in a rural county. In addition, I found that there is a positive relationship between the number of NHSC-approved sites and providers’ working hours. If the competition among dentists increases about 1, then working hours of providers increase about 6 hours per week.

A vast literature studies the optimal design and generosity of unemployment insurance (UI). However, UI is just one of the variety of programs used in developed countries around the world to face the problem of unemployment, though unemployment programs other than UI have been subjected to much less welfare analysis. My paper adds to a small but growing literature by evaluating the welfare implications of a wider range of unemployment programs using an estimated search model that incorporates two empirically-relevant phenomena generally ignored in such studies: private consumption smoothing and fiscal externalities from income taxes. I show that monitoring and job search assistance (JSA) play important roles, with welfare impacts at least as large as that of the UI replacement rate. The optimal combined policy incorporates more short-term insurance as well as increased monitoring of search and expanded provision of JSA. I also find that general and partial equilibrium results are fairly similar, as programs that raise bargained wages also reduce job-creation, with impacts on welfare that nearly offset.

Are people who spend more time with others always happier than those who spend less time in social activities? Across four studies with more than 250,000 participants, we show that social time has declining marginal utility for subjective well-being. In Study 1 (N = 243,075), we use the Gallup World Poll with people from 166 countries, and in Study 2 (N = 10,387) the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), to show that social time has declining returns for well-being. In Study 3a (N = 168) and Study 3b (N = 174), we employ the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to provide initial evidence for both intra-domain (principle of diminishing satisfaction) and inter-domain mechanisms (principle of satisfaction limits). We discuss implications for theory, research methodology, and practice.

How is turnout affected by the decisions of election administrators to move Election Day polling places? We study the behavior of more than 2 million unique eligible voters across three presidential elections (2008-2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. We gather spatial information on the location of nearly every Election Day polling place location and we geolocate each voter relative to their polling place. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting statewide on average, but that this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting. This result obtains whether polling place changes increase or decrease travel costs, but Republican-led changes reduce overall turnout by producing less substitution relative to Democratic-led changes. We interpret our findings as highlighting the importance of early voting and voting primes for mitigating the non-travel costs of polling place changes

This paper offers a new approach to the study of capitalist income. Building on the ‘capital as power’ framework, I propose that capitalists earn their income not from any productive asset, but from the legal right to command a corporate hierarchy. In short, I hypothesize that capitalist income stems from hierarchical power. Based on this thinking, I hypothesize that the capitalist fraction of an individual’s income is a gradient function of hierarchical power (which I define as the number of subordinates under one’s control). Using data from US CEOs, I find evidence that this is true. Furthermore, a hierarchical model of the United States that generalizes this data accurately reproduces many aspects of the US distribution of capitalist income, including the relation between income size and capitalist income fraction. This evidence suggests that the ownership structure of US society is closely linked to the hierarchical structure of firms. This has important implications for the study of income distribution.

Public finance economics is often concerned with the "unintended consequences" of government policies, as an evaluation of these unintended effects is required to obtain a complete picture of the efficacy of a given policy. In my dissertation, I study three government policies, along with their potential unintended effects. I find that, in general, the potential unintended effects that I study are economically small. These findings suggest that policymakers in these areas can focus relatively more on the direct, intended effects of these policies when evaluating their costs and benefits. In the first chapter, I study an expansion of Medicaid which occurred in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act. Because this expansion was only taken up by approximately half of all U.S. states, migration across state lines is a potential unintended consequence of these reforms. I analyze data from the American Community Survey and find that this migration response was not large: I estimate that migration could have increased Medicaid rolls in expansion states by no more than 2 percent. In the second chapter, Chris Boone, Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and I study extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) in the U.S. during the Great Recession. The "moral hazard" effect of UI on individual search effort has been well-studied. In this chapter, we broaden these potential unintended effects to include all potential effects (positive and negative) on aggregate employment at the county level. Again, we find little effect: we can rule out negative effects of the extensions in excess of -0.3 percentage points of the employment-to-population ratio. Finally, in the third chapter, I use . . .

This paper shows that the wage path of the typical individual does not decline smoothly in the years before retirement, as implied by the popular hump-shaped specification. Instead, wages are flat for full-time workers, and wage drops are only observed for those who transit into part-time work before fully withdrawing from the labor force. The paper tests the implications of three alternative models of retirement that can generate the observed wage profile. The results of these tests are used to characterize the offered wage profile at older ages and the forces driving retirement transitions.

Recent advancements in data science and high-performance computing are making it easier to run millions of building simulations, but meaningful visual-ization of such large datasets remains a challenge. This paper presents a new tool developed to view the results ulations on Amazon EC2 cloud computing (Macumber, Ball, and Long 2014). Problem statement ResStock analysis of the approximately 80 million single-family detached homes in the United States has typically of large-scale OpenStudio O R simulations of national, used a set of 350,000 building archetypes, or approxi-regional, or local building stocks. The tool processes millions of simulations to calculate measure savings, utility bills, carbon emissions, primary energy, and cost-effectiveness metrics at a high geographic resolution. Interactive visualizations of the building characteristics, consumption, and measure savings data include proportional symbol maps and histogram plots and can be filtered by any building characteristic.

Understanding the differences between rich and poor places is complicated by the fact that places differ from each other in numerous ways. In this paper, we show how a dimension reduction algorithm can unveil hidden patterns in US census data and consistently yield useful insights into the type of economic activities that separate rich and poor states over 160 years of development history. Moreover, we find this approach has a unique ability to shed light on the dynamics of evolving landscapes and changes in relevance of particular types of activities, such as the shift from manufacturing to high skill services that occurred in the US over the last 40 years. Our results have important implications for the decline of the rustbelt and the reversal of US regional income convergence from 1980 onwards.

This project re-investigates the hookworm eradication efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Sanitary Commission (RSC) in the American South during the Progressive Era. The RSC worked to eradicate hookworm across 11 southern states between 1911 and 1915, efforts that have been linked to dramatic short- and long-term increases in human capital and labor productivity. Although useful from an identification standpoint, these single-shot interventions, in the absence of cooperative efforts to improve underlying conditions, have a mixed record of long-term effectiveness across public health research. The efficacy of deworming campaigns in particular has come under extensive scrutiny. The experience of the American South had stood as example of how a single-shot hookworm eradication program has improved outcomes; however, the robustness of this result has also recently come into question. A replication of the Bleakley (2007) seminal work investigating hookworm eradication finds faults with the robustness and interpretations of the results (Roodman 2017), and an investigation into the activities of the RSC has determined them unevenly distributed across hookworm-affected areas (Elman et. al 2013). Perhaps not coincidentally, the RSC’s hookworm eradication program was not the only public health intervention that occurred in the rural South during the Progressive Era. Rural public health centers spread throughout the American South . . .

Changes in childbearing affect almost every aspect of human existence. Over the last fifty years, American women have experienced dramatic changes in the ease and convenience of timing and limiting childbearing, ranging from the introduction of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion to more recent availability of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). This chapter chronicles these changes, provides descriptive evidence regarding trends in the use of contraception and abortion, and reviews the literature linking them to changes in childbearing and women’s economic outcomes. It concludes by discussing the recent surge in LARC use, which seems to be one of the most pressing areas in need of further research.

Economic reasoning suggests that agricultural land endowments should contribute positively to long-run economic growth, but in countries colonized by European powers this has not always been the case. Productive land attracted colonization, which disrupted indigenous institutions in ways that can stunt development. American Indian reservations provide a powerful example. Where land quality was high, the federal government more aggressively facilitated land titling and non-Indian settlement through the Allotment Act over 1887 to 1934. As a result, historic land quality does not correlate positively with modern per capita income on some reservations. Instead, our data reveal a U-shape between American Indian income per capita (over 1970 to 2010) and the share of prime agricultural land (compared to a positive relationship across US counties) that has become more pronounced over time. We provide evidence that the downward slope of the U is due to ownership fractionation resulting from incomplete land privatization under the Allotment Act that disproportionately affected reservations with mid-quality land and now requires colonial-like federal administration of land rights. After controlling for fractionation, the effects of prime land on reservation incomes is positive, implying that poor institutions and poor land have both contributed to poverty.

This paper studies a spatial pattern and a possible channel of local labor market inequality change. That is, large cities have the greater losses in the declining industries and greater gains in the growing industries. When the declining and growing industries are low-skilled and high-skilled intensive respectively, and the growing industries are skill intensive, the losses and gains of industries lead to a greater increase in the local labor market inequality of those first larger cities. The empirical results show that, one standard deviation change in initial city size accounts for 71.3% to 80.5% of one standard deviation change in industrial composition where the industrial composition change refers the losses in manufacturings (NAICS 31-33, low-skilled worker intensive) and gains in professional services (NAICS 52, 54, and 62, high-skilled worker intensive) here. One standard deviation change in the industrial composition change accounts for 79.5% to 89.8% of one standard deviation change in the local labor market inequality. And overall, the one standard deviation change in initial city size accounts for 62.1% to 65.1% of one standard deviation change in the local labor market via the industrial

Routine-biased technological change (RBTC), whereby routine-task jobs are replaced by machines and overseas labor, shifts demand toward high- and low-skill jobs, resulting in job polarization of the U.S. labor market. We test whether recessions accelerate this process. Exploiting a new database containing the near-universe of electronic job vacancy postings and cross-sectional variation in the MSA-level employment shock generated by the Great Recession, we estimates changes in skill requirements within occupations and rms. We find that postings in hard-hit metro areas have substantially larger increases in education, experience, cognitive, and computer skill requirements in 2010, relative to 2007, and that these increases persist through the end of our sample in 2015. We find important roles for both within-firm changes in skill demand and upskilling in firms that did not post in 2007. We also show that among publicly-traded firms in our data, those that upskill more also increase capital stock by more over the same time period. We argue that upskilling is driven primarily by firm restructuring of production toward more-skilled workers. Our result is unlikely to be driven by firms' opportunistically seeking to hire more-skilled workers in a slack labor market, and we rule out other cyclical explanations. We thus present the first direct evidence that the Great Recession precipitated new technological adoption.

According to the most recent surveillance data, 4% of the reported cases of chronic hepatitis C were among Latinos–between 2013 and 2016. This is of concern when compared to the relatively high rates of hepatitis C-related deaths among Latinos. In 2016, the rate of hepatitis C-related deaths for Latinos was 5.69, higher than the overall national rate of 4.45.2. The statistics point to an overlooked health disparity and a need for equitable public health services. Additionally, we find a need for interventions focused on awareness, hepatitis screening and allocation of resources to address the impact of hepatitis in the United States, Puerto Rico and other U.S. Territories.