This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased local revenue and education spending. The quality of white teachers increased, and oil-rich counties were more likely to participate in the Rosenwald school building program for blacks. In addition, student-teacher ratios for black school children declined substantially. However, I do not find increased school enrollment rates for either race.

Our aim is to estimate how local amenities, for example availability of schools or restaurants, and in general the level of happiness of a neighbourhood, affect the housing market. We consider the city of Phoenix, AZ, for which we hold housing transaction data. Our observation unit is the census tract. After having located schools, restaurants and Tweets in order to gain the average mood of the neighbourhood, we add a set of controls to our empirical estimation. We find a strong positive correlation of transaction prices with the average income of a district, as well as a negative correlation with the rate of violent crime.

A number of studies show that young children grow up in families with a wide range of incomes and that differences in family socioeconomic conditions are associated with differences in reading scores in kindergarten and achievement gaps during elementary and secondary school.

PURPOSE: The majority of research efforts centering on injury among older adults focus on fall-related injuries and short-term consequences of injury. Little is known about the long-term consequences of all-cause nonfatal injuries, including minor injuries. Using a recent, large, and nationally representative sample of the U.S. non-institutionalized civilian population, the current study examines whether older adults who sustained a nonfatal injury (serious and minor) have higher risk of long-term morbidity and mortality outcomes compared with noninjured seniors. METHODS: Linked National Health Interview Survey-Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (NHIS-MEPS) data were used to fit logistic and 2-part models to estimate associations between injury incidence and later injury, hospitalization incidence, and length of hospital stay during the 2.5 years following the NHIS interview among 16,109 older adults. Data from the linked National Health Interview Survey-National Death Index (NHIS-NDI) files were used to estimate a Cox proportional hazards model to examine the association between injury incidence and mortality for up to 11 years after the initial interview among 79,504 older adults. RESULTS: Relative to no injury, serious nonfatal injury was significantly associated with increased risk of another injury, hospitalization, and mortality. Minor injuries were significantly related to higher risk of later injury and mortality. IMPLICATIONS: Because even minor injuries are strongly associated with increased risks of later injury and mortality, preventing injury among seniors may be an effective way to improve quality of life and reduce declines in functional capacity.

We study how changes in the distribution of occupations have affected the aggregate non-pecuniary costs and benefits of working. The physical toll of work is smaller now than in 1950, with workers shifting away from occupations in which people report experiencing tiredness and pain. The emotional consequences of the changing occupation distribution vary substantially across demographic groups. Work has become happier and more meaningful for women, but more stressful and less meaningful for men. These changes appear to be concentrated at lower education levels.

The construct of femininity has typically been conceptualized from a Eurocentric perspective as traditional femininity ideology (TFI). This hegemonic femininity construction might not be fully applicable to Black women given their unique history and experiences. Moreover, the strong African American woman ideology (SBWI) which, although formulated during slavery, has become an adaptive and idealized cultural idealization. Both constructs have been associated with stress. The current study sought to investigate the relative strength of the links between TFI versus SBWI and perceived stress among a sample of African American women, and whether these relationships were moderated by feminine gender role stress and racial stress. Participants were 292 African American women recruited via social media and students from a Midwestern university for a web-based survey. As hypothesized, SBWI accounted for unique variance in perceived stress; however, TFI did not explain any of the variance. Results also indicated that gender role stress approached significance in its moderation of the link between TFI and perceived stress, although racial stress did significantly moderate the relationship between SBWI and perceived stress.

Nearly all intergenerational mobility studies focus on fathers and sons. The possibility that the process is more than simply two‐generational (AR(1)) has been difficult to assess because of the lack of the necessary multi‐generational data. We remedy this shortcoming with new data that links grandfathers, fathers and sons in Britain and the US between 1850 and 1910. We find that grandfathers mattered: even controlling for father's occupation, grandfather's occupation significantly influenced the occupation of the grandson. For both Britain and the US in this time period, therefore, assessments based on two‐generation estimates significantly overstate the true amount of social mobility.

Tracing back to Adam Smith, scholars have emphasised the importance of knowledge and its profound implications for prosperity. However, measuring and analysing something as intangible and multifaceted as the knowledge collectively held and used within society has, not surprisingly, proved challenging. This thesis advances quantitative empirical approaches for analysing productive knowledge within socio-economic systems and applies these methodologies to shed new light on (i) long run regional development and structural change (ii) labour market segregation and job switching, and (iii) the transition to the green economy. This thesis shows that across a range of different contexts, from US regional development in the 19th century to modern-day labour markets, what places and people know matters. Measuring the type of knowledge concentrated in US states sheds new light on structural change, the decline of rust-belt states, and the reversal of patterns in income convergence. Similarly, measuring the type of knowledge held by individual workers in different occupations provides new insights on the division of labour, job transitions and future career prospects. Moreover, measuring the type of knowledge embedded within countries turns out to be particularly informative of a nation's likelihood of success in the green economy - and its potential for green diversification in the future. This thesis also reveals distinct segregation in societal knowledge across places and people. Such divisions could matter more than we realise. For example, the segregation of productive knowledge across US states could play a role in undermining the nation's capacity for inclusive growth. The segregation of skills and productive capabilities across the US labour force could exacerbate the distributional consequences of labour market shocks. And moreover, the segregation across nations' capacities to both participate and benefit from the transition to the green economy could slow or even create barriers to progressing one of the most important socio-economic transitions of our time. While this thesis has advanced new ways to identify these divisions in knowledge, further work is required to better understand their implications -- and what can be done. Finally, this thesis suggests that future improvements in what places and people know will need to become less incremental and more transformational, if we are to successfully address the 'twin challenges' of poverty alleviation and climate change in the 21st century. Learning how to both navigate and drive the process of transformational change in productive capabilities could be the type of knowledge that matters more than anything else.

I came to Halle in 2013 from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock on the premise that my pursuit of the comparative historical regional demography of Europe and beyond would enrich the department’s major agenda of exploring Eurasian unity and variation. One of two crucial assets that I brought with me was my in statu nascendi Habilitation monograph. The project was started in Rostock, but it was completed, formally defended with a veniam legendi and, finally, published in 2015 during my stay in Halle. “Rethinking East Central Europe: Family Systems and Co-residence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” (Szołtysek 2015a)1 reexamines, with the help of a substantial database, the way in which the family-research pioneers formulated European regional pattern differences, how they and later scholars used the proposed regionalization models, and how the initial formulations now appear in light of this project’s findings from household listings and other archival population sources from eighteenth century Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The gravamen of this massive project was that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, there was no such single territory as ‘‘eastern Europe”. The general view of the European continent that was being consolidated as empirical research on European families unfolded during the 1970s was already on the wrong track with paradigms that used terms such as “dual Europe,” employed the “dividing line” metaphor, and speculated about the existence of an “undifferentiated Slavic eastern Europe”.

This paper empirically revisits the impact of birthplace diversity on economic growth. We use panel data on US states over the 1960-2010 period. This rich data set allows us to better deal with endogeneity issues and to conduct a large set of robustness checks. Our results suggest that diversity among college-educated immigrants positively affects economic growth. We provide converging evidence pointing at the existence of skill complementarities between workers trained in different countries. These synergies result in better labor market outcomes for native workers and in higher productivity in the R&D sector. The gains from diversity are maximized when immigrants originate from economically or culturally distant countries (but not both), and when they acquired part of their secondary education abroad and their college education in the US. Overall, a 10% increase in high-skilled diversity raises GDP per capita by about 6%. On the contrary, low-skilled diversity has insignificant effects.

Many government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. We shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA). Exploiting the large differences in OAA programs across states and Census data on the entire US population in 1940, we find that OAA reduced the labor force participation rate among men aged 65-74 by 8.5 percentage points, more than one-half of its 1930-1940 decline, but that OAA's implicit taxation of earnings imposed only small welfare costs on recipients.

Analyzing database access logs is a key part of performance tuning, intrusion detection, benchmark development, and many other database administration tasks. Unfortunately, it is common for production databases to deal with millions or even more queries each day, so these logs must be summarized before they can be used. Designing an appropriate summary encoding requires trading off between conciseness and information content. For example: simple workload sampling may miss rare, but high impact queries. In this paper, we present LogR, a lossy log compression scheme suitable use for many automated log analytics tools, as well as for human inspection. We formalize and analyze the space/fidelity trade-off in the context of a broader family of “pattern” and “pattern mixture” log encodings to which LogR belongs. We show through a series of experiments that LogR compressed encodings can be created efficiently, come with provable information-theoretic bounds on their accuracy, and outperform state-of-art log summarization strategies.

Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government appears to mediate only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsiveness occurs in large part through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.

This thesis collects three papers studying topics related to financial frictions and macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I study how rating agencies affect liquidity and welfare in over-the-counter (OTC) asset markets. My main finding is that when assets are rated matters for welfare and liquidity: When sellers rate the asset prior to matching, then ratings can improve liquidity but their use is fragile. However, a better arrangement is to rate the asset after buyers and sellers meet. Although this arrangement eliminates liquidity distortions and improves welfare, it is difficult to sustain if buyers are not incentivized to follow through with rating the asset. Buyers can overcome this commitment problem by constructing a semi-pooling equilibrium. I use my framework to show that policies that support buyers purchasing ratings can substantially improve market liquidity. In Chapter 2, I propose that an important channel through which financial frictions adversely impact aggregate productivity is by hindering the discovery of productive entrepreneurs. I develop a model where households have imperfect information about the quality of their business idea and show how financial frictions arising from weak contract enforcement systematically reduce access to capital for poor households with good ideas, which undermines their incentive to learn. After calibrating the model to US data, I find that with imperfect information, total factor productivity (TFP) falls by 23% when contract enforcement is lowered to developing country levels, compared to 12% with perfect information. Half of the productivity loss in the economy with imperfect information is due to financial frictions hindering the discovery of good ideas by poor households. I find that these losses can be substantially mitigated by subsidizing young entrepreneurs. In Chapter 3, I present ongoing work with Chaoran Chen and Xiaodong Zhu examining the joint role of financial and managerial frictions in explaining factor misallocation and lower productivity in developing countries. We present a model where weak contract enforcement prevents productive firms from hiring outside managers and expanding production in developing countries, and show that its key features are consistent with cross-country evidence from the IPUMS-International dataset.

Using a dataset which allows students to be linked to their teachers, this paper examines how educators with an immigrant background affect the academic achievements of secondary school students in the United States. To account for the possibility that immigrant and native teachers may be assigned to different types of schools, and even within schools, to different types of students, two estimation strategies are employed. The first estimates the immigrant teacher impact by comparing the achievements of students with immigrant teachers to the achievements of observationally similar students with native teachers, within schools. The second compares the achievement of a student with an immigrant teacher in one subject to the achievement of the same student with a native teacher in another subject. Contrary to popular perception, the results suggest that, overall, immigrant teachers do not have a negative impact on the educational achievements of native students.

Introduction Time to facility is a crucial element in emergency medicine (EM). Fine-scale geospatial units such as census block groups (CBG) and publicly available population datasets offer a low-cost and accurate approach to modeling geographic access to and utilization of emergency departments (ED). These methods are relevant to the emergency physician in evaluating patient utilization patterns, emergency medical services protocols, and opportunities for improved patient outcomes and cost utilization. We describe the practical application of geographic information system (GIS) and fine-scale analysis for EM using Ohio ED access as a case study. Methods Ohio ED locations (n=198), CBGs (n=9,238) and 2015 United States Census five-year American Community Survey (ACS) socioeconomic data were collected July—August 2016. We estimated drive time and distance between population-weighted CBGs and nearest ED using ArcGIS and 2010 CBG shapefiles. We examined drive times vs. ACS characteristics using multinomial regression and mapping. Results We categorized CBGs by centroid-ED travel time in minutes: <10 (73.4%; n=6,774), 10–30 (25.1%; n=2,315), and >30 (1.5%; n=141). CBGs with increased median age, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black population, and college graduation rates had significantly decreased travel time. CBGs with increased low-income populations (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] [1.03], 95% confidence interval [CI] [1.01–1.04]) and vacant housing (AOR [1.06], 95% CI [1.05–1.08]) had increased odds of >30 minute travel time. Conclusion Use of fine-scale geographic analysis and population data can be used to evaluate geographic accessibility and utilization of EDs. Methods described offer guidance to approaching questions of geographic accessibility and have numerous ED and pre-hospital applications.

In recent decades, cohabitation has become an increasingly important relationship context for U.S. adults and their children, a union status characterized by high levels of instability. To understand why some cohabiting couples marry but others separate, researchers have drawn on theories emphasizing the benefits of specialization, the persistence of the male breadwinner norm, low income as a source of stress and conflict, and rising economic standards associated with marriage (the marriage bar). Because of conflicting evidence and data constraints, however, important theoretical questions remain. This study uses survival analysis with prospective monthly data from nationally representative panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 1996–2013 to test alternative theories of how money and work affect whether cohabiting couples marry or separate. Analyses indicate that the economic foundations of cohabiting couples’ union transitions do not lie in economic specialization or only men’s ability to be good providers. Instead, results for marriage support marriage bar theory: adjusting for couples’ absolute earnings, increases in wealth and couples’ earnings relative to a standard associated with marriage strongly predict marriage. For dissolution, couples with higher and more equal earnings are significantly less likely to separate. Findings demonstrate that within-couple earnings equality promotes stability, and between-couple inequalities in economic resources are critical in producing inequalities in couples’ relationship outcomes.

Immediately after the Detroit violence of July 1967, President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission and ordered it to determine what had happened, why, and what could be done to prevent urban riots. This analysis focuses on racial change in metropolitan Detroit. Progress has been made in racially integrating the suburban ring closed to African Americans at the time of the violence. Evidence indicates social integration in that interracial marriage is more common and blacks are more represented in prestigious occupations. However, on key economic measures, African Americans are now further behind whites than they were in 1967. This can be attributed to fundamental changes in employment and the failure of the educational system to provide the training needed for jobs in the new economy.

In this paper, we study the evolution of US divorce rates across states, from 1956 to 2014, using a cluster algorithm. This methodology allows us to determine the existence of divorce convergence among the US states. Our findings indicate that there are four patterns of divorce behavior in the US. We explore whether the divorce convergence is due to the liberalization of the divorce laws. Supplementary analysis of the factors related to the club classification reveals that, in the pre‐reform period, geographical variables are important, but in the post‐reform period marital patterns appear to be associated with the club classification.