This dissertation uses changes across space to understand economic inequality. Chapter one examines people’s ties to places. If people are tied to places by family and experiences, then welfare will be less equal across space. It presents evidence that this is the case, with formulae that show how this makes local policies less wasteful in declining areas. Chapter two shows that young adults, ages 25 to 35, who live in the same neighborhoods as their parents experience stronger earnings recoveries after a job displacement than those who live farther away. It presents some evidence that these differences are driven by parental help with grandchildren and perhaps help from parents in identifying new jobs. Chapter three uses changes in housing prices and rents to study inequality in standards of living. It suggests that changes in income inequality since 1930 have caused similar changes in housing expenditures, mostly through changes in the value of particular neighborhoods.

The increase in income inequality has been one of the dening economic trends of the past forty years. The increase in inequality in the United States has been attributed to skill-biased technological change, globalization, and a a changing institutional environment. To what extent can these factors explain rising inequality? I attempt to answer this question by looking at income inequality both within and between immigrant groups in the United States. There is tremendous variation in income inequality between these groups, with Gini coecients ranging from 0.59 for immigrants from the MENA to 0.42 for immigrants from Mexico. There are also large dierences in inequality between dierent enclaves of immigrants from the same source country. For example, MENA immigrants living in Michigan have an income Gini coecient of 0.61 as compared to 0.55 for MENA immigrants living in New Jersey. To what extent are dierences in inequality between immigrant groups driven by observable characteristics that dierentiate these groups? What features of these immigrant enclaves drive dierences in immigrant inequality? In this study, I exploit the variation in income inequality both between and within immigrant groups to estimate the micro level determinants of income inequality using a broad sample of 32 immigrant groups distributed across a wide range of ethnic enclaves derived from ACS data. I utilize a regression decomposition technique from Fields (2003) and nd that most of the inequality between immigrant groups can be explained by observable characteristics like education, leaving little left over for unobservable cultural factors. Within groups, there is some variation in the determinants of inequality. For groups like Iranian immigrants, inequality is driven by educational dierences, suggesting a policy aimed at increasing educational opportunities. For Mexican immigrants, the largest determinant of inequality is gender, suggesting policies aimed at reducing gender disparities in income. Other groups like Vietnamese immigrants see inequality driven by the amount of time in the US, suggesting policies aimed at accelerating assimilation. That the sources of inequality dier across groups implies a more nuanced approach to crafting policies aimed at reducing income inequality.

How do banks respond to asset booms? This paper examines i) how U.S. banks responded to the World War I farmland boom; ii) the impact of regulation; and iii) how bank closures exacerbated the post-war bust. The boom encouraged new bank formation and balance sheet expansion (especially by new banks). Deposit insurance amplified the impact of rising crop prices on bank portfolios, while higher minimum capital requirements dampened the effects. Banks that responded most aggressively to the asset boom had a higher probability of closing in the bust, and counties with more bank closures experienced larger declines in land prices.

This paper offers an explanation for declining internal migration in the United States motivated by a new empirical fact: the mobility decline is driven by locations with typically high rates of population turnover. These "fast" locations were the Sunbelt centers of population growth during the twentieth century. The paper presents evidence that as spatial population growth converged, residents of fast locations were subject to rising levels of preference for home. Using a novel measure of home attachment, the paper develops and estimates a structural model of migration that distinguishes moving frictions from home utility. Simulations quantify the role of multiple explanations of the mobility decline. Rising home attachment accounts for nearly half of the decline, roughly as large as the effect of an aging population, and is consistent with the spatial pattern. The implication is recent declining migration is a long run result of population shifts of the twentieth century.

Transit-oriented development has been increasingly implemented at stations of both existing and new fixed transit systems across the U.S. to stimulate local economy and create livable communities. A common belief among planners in favor of transit- oriented development is that the provision of passenger rail systems promotes urban development around rail stations. There is a lack of empirical evidence, however, that supports this presumption. To address the gap in relevant literature, this dissertation examines the impact of passenger rail stations on the four different patterns of firm dynamics in the State of Maryland—firm birth and inward relocation as positive impacts, and firm closure and outward relocation as negative impacts. This dissertation uses both standard and propensity-score-weighted negative binomial regression methods to analyze the dependent variables of firm dynamics constructed from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) panel data of the State of Maryland from 1990 to 2010. By examining both positive and negative impacts of firm dynamics, this dissertation estimates the likelihood of firm retainment and net relocation for areas in proximity of the passenger rail stations, while controlling for a number of potentially confounding factors. Positive and statistically significant relationships are found between proximity to the passenger rail stations and the rates of firm births and inward relocating firms in Maryland, regardless of differences in the level of maturity of stations. From 1990 to 2010, the areas of passenger rail stations in Maryland experienced a wide range of rates of growth in firm density, depending on the year of station opening. The results of the four different patterns of firm dynamics suggest that areas near passenger rail stations gain belated economic benefits, well after the introduction of rail stations, shown by higher likelihood of firm retainment and net relocation around the mature rail stations opened before 1990. In comparison, areas near the less mature stations that opened after 1990 had predominantly lower likelihood of firm retainment and net firm relocation. Planners and policymakers should be proactive in directing development near rail stations by adopting a variety of measures and policies that support or at least consistent with transit-oriented development.

Educational attainment is robustly associated with greater political participation, yet the causal nature of this finding remains contested. To assess this relationship, I leverage a natural experiment in the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s (RSC) anti-hookworm campaign, which exogenously expanded primary and secondary education in the early-twentieth century American South. I evaluate two RSC hookworm interventions: exposure to the campaign and proportion treated. I use genetic matching to control for observable factors that influenced the haphazard dispensing of treatment, and implement new matching methods for continuous campaign interventions. I also use a variety of methods to assess the robustness of the results to a number of alternative accounts. Throughout, I find a consistent positive effect of education on participation, suggesting additional evidence for a causal interpretation of the ‘education effect’.

This paper analyzes an important shock to local labor demand in financial services: firm relocation to Delaware following a Supreme Court ruling and state legislation in the 1980s. Using synthetic controls and bordering states, I find large effects on employment, unemployment, and participation in the first decade. Wage effects, and in many cases employment spillovers to the nontradable sector, appear larger than estimates from shocks to the tradable sector. Effects persist for ten to twenty years after Delaware loses its original policy-induced advantage. The shift towards a low unemployment sector explains this persistence, rather than direct productivity effects or agglomeration.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 capped state and local tax deductions allowing tax filers to claim only up to $10,000 on their federal tax return. We show that this new cap primarily affects households in the top percentile of the income distribution residing in high-tax, high-cost cities. We develop and calibrate a new dynamic spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the impact of this policy change on the distribution of economic activity and aggregate welfare. In the model young households move to cities with high agglomeration externalities to acquire human capital. These cities tend to levy high local taxes and have a high cost of living. As households grow older the human capital benefits become less relevant. Hence, households face strong financial incentives to move to low-tax, low-cost cities. The tax reform reinforces these financial incentives leading to a relocation of high productivity households to low-cost cities. If local agglomeration effects depend significantly on these top-productivity households, the tax reform may generate substantial negative effects on aggregate income.

Coastal wetlands sequester large amounts of carbon in their soils, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and acting as a carbon sink. In this paper, we estimate the economic value of carbon sequestered by wetlands in the Delaware Estuary. We estimate the value of the current stock of wetlands, the value of the historic loss of wetlands, and under a range of different scenarios the expected future loss. We use historical topographic maps and Land Cover inventories of the Delaware Estuary to measure the acreage of tidal wetlands in nine distinct time periods from 1778 to 2011. Using these data, we estimate an annual rate of wetland loss of 1.03 km2. Coupling observed land cover change with exogenous factors including sea-level rise, population pressure, and channel dredging, we estimate changes in tidal wetland area under a range of future scenarios for our expected future economic loss estimates.

This paper assesses the effects of court-ordered school desegregation on biracial births, a measure of racial integration. Using birth certificate data, I present a multiple difference-in-differences approach that exploits variation in the timing of school desegregation in different counties. Among black mothers in non-Southern counties, I find that school desegregation increases biracial births. The results are robust to county fixed effects, cohort fixed effects, and county-specific cohort trends. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of interracial relationships and the importance of school desegregation on demographic outcomes.

Petersburg, Virginia, prospered over two centuries as a center of production and trade. However, the city experienced economic difficulties beginning in the 1980s as a large number of layoffs at production plants in the area coincided with an erosion of retail trade in the city. Prolonged economic decline followed. In contrast, somewhat similar shocks in other moderate-sized cities in Virginia were followed by gradual economic recovery. We examine these differing outcomes and offer an explanation that hinges on the proximity of Petersburg to its larger neighbor, the greater Richmond area. We find evidence suggesting that after the job declines, higher-skilled residents in Petersburg initially commuted to jobs nearer to Richmond, later relocating from Petersburg toward Richmond--an option not readily available in the other Virginia cities considered. We suggest that, as a result, Petersburg suffered a sharp decline in tax revenues and that municipal costs could not be proportionately scaled down, leading to severe fiscal stress.

Using employee-employer matched US Census data, we examine the effect of a successful initial public offering (IPO) on employee departures to startups. Accounting for the endogeneity of a firm's choice to go public, we find strong evidence that going public induces employees to leave for start-ups. Moreover, we document that the increase in turnover following an IPO is driven by employees departing to start-ups; we find no change in the rate of employee departures for established firms. Following an IPO, many employees who received stock grants experience a positive shock to their wealth. Our results suggest that this change in wealth helps employees better tolerate the risks associated with joining a startup or to fund a startup themselves. Our analysis indicates that the IPO is a catalyst for employee reallocation across firm boundaries.

In this paper, I provide empirical evidence linking the decline in the labor share to the replacement of occupations with substantial routine task content. Using cross-industry variation, I show that the overall labor share decline is driven by the replacement of occupations specializing in routine tasks. I further find that the accelerated decline in the labor share since 2000 is associated with the replacement of higher skill occupations with substantial routine task content. Finally, I estimate the effects of increased import competition on the labor share decline and how this relates to the replacement of occupational tasks. While increased import competition plays a significant role in explaining the overall labor share decline and works through replacing routine occupations, it cannot account for the accelerated labor share decline and replacement of higher skill occupations post-2000.

We use new data on the pre- and postmigration wages of immigrants to the United States to measure wage gains at migration. The average immigrant from a middle-income or poor country increases their wage by a factor of two to three upon migration. This wage gain is small relative to the underlying gap in GDP per worker. In a development accounting framework, this finding implies that switching countries accounts for 40% of cross-country income differences, while human capital accounts for 60%. Wage gains decline with education, consistent with imperfect substitution between skill types. We augment our analysis to allow for this possibility and bound the human capital share in development accounting to between one-half and two-thirds. We also provide results on the importance of premigration sector of employment, assimilation, and skill transfer.

Does structural change always promote economic development? This paper examines the long-run impact of cotton agriculture on development in the US South, focusing on a novel aspect of structural change. Exploiting climate-based variation in cotton production, I show that cotton specialization in the late 19th century had a negative impact on local development to this day. The negative relationship, however, arises only from the second half of the 20th century. I argue the change was caused by cotton mechanization which began in the 1950s. Cotton agriculture was strongly dependent on tenant farmers with little human capital. After the mechanization of cotton production, cotton tenants with low human capital were displaced and absorbed by local manufacturing. Using manufacturing data, I find that labor productivity in manufacturing declined in response to the inflow of cotton tenants. The negative impact on manufacturing productivity persisted in the long-run because of directed technical change. Using census data in the recent period, I show that initial cotton specialization reduced the demand for skilled labor in manufacturing in the long-run. These results illustrate that, through the channel of structural change, human capital distribution within agriculture could affect the patterns of technologies and productivity in industrial sectors.

This paper investigated whether a decrease in the prices of household durable goods increases the Female Labour Force Participation (FLFP) in the Philippines. The paper used the theoretical model of Pirani, Leon, and Lugauers (2010), who theorized that a decrease in the prices of household appliances would increase FLFP due to their time being freed up for non-household tasks. To study this, the regression model of Cavalcanti and Tavares (2008) was used to test the hypothesis. The results of this paper were consistent with the theoretical and empirical results from the two models.

This paper provides empirical estimates of the short-run impacts of immigration on the employment opportunities of US-born workers based on a novel sectoral approach. We focus on six economic sectors with low skill requirements and high shares of immigrant workers. Our inference is based on panel data at the metropolitan area-year level of aggregation. We instrument for the sectoral share of immigrants using the share of immigrants in all other sectors of the economy. Our strategy yields conservative estimates of the effects of immigration on native labor outcomes because (i) movement of capital and native labor across metropolitan areas reduces the extent to which intercity comparisons can account for shocks to native employment conditions, and (ii) our instrument for the immigrant share likely remains correlated with sectoral native labor demand shocks, albeit less so than the sectoral immigrant share itself. We find evidence of negative short-run effects of immigration on native earnings in the construction, food service, and personal service sectors. Upper bounds on the annual earnings impact of a 10 percentage point increase in the share of immigrant workers range from-2.9% to-6.6%. Earnings impact estimates in other sectors are generally negative but not always statistically significant. Effects on the native employment rate are negative and significant across all six sectors.

This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays. In the first chapter, I study the labor market impact of documented and undocumented immigration in a search model with non-random hiring that is parameterized based on wage and job finding rate gaps I find in US data. The model predicts that native workers benefit from undocumented immigration due to its strong job creation effect. In the second chapter, we document that immigrants in the US concentrate in large, expensive cities, where their earnings gap to natives is higher, and that they consume less local goods than natives. To explain these facts, we develop a quantitative spatial equilibrium model, in which immigrants consume a fraction of their income at their origin. The model suggests that by moving economic activity to more productive cities, immigration has led to an expansion in output per worker by around 0.3%. In the third chapter, we propose a unified framework that combines the approaches of the wage assimilation and the labor market impact literature by allowing both the accumulation of host country specific skills and general equilibrium effects to affect the relative wages of immigrants. We show that the latter can explain between 31% and 63% of the decline in entry wages experienced by the immigrant cohorts arriving in the US between the 1970s and the 1990s.

CONTEXT Marriage before the age of 18, commonly referred to as child marriage, is legal under varying conditions across the United States. The prevalence of child marriage among recent cohorts is unknown. METHODS American Community Survey data for 2010–2014 were used to estimate the average national and state‐level proportions of children who had ever been married. Prevalence was calculated by gender, race and ethnicity, and birthplace, and the living arrangements of currently married children were examined. RESULTS Approximately 6.2 of every 1,000 children surveyed had ever been married. Prevalence varied from more than 10 per 1,000 in West Virginia, Hawaii and North Dakota to less than four per 1,000 in Maine, Rhode Island and Wyoming. It was higher among girls than among boys (6.8 vs. 5.7 per 1,000), and was lower among white non‐Hispanic children (5.0 per 1,000) than among almost every other racial or ethnic group studied; it was especially high among children of American Indian or Chinese descent (10.3 and 14.2, respectively). Immigrant children were more likely than U.S.‐born children to have been married; prevalence among children from Mexico, Central America and the Middle East was 2–4 times that of children born in the United States. Only 20% of married children . . .

Once the largest self-contained aircraft manufacturing plant of the world, Fort Worth's division of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation was constructed in 1942. The Consolidated Vultee Fort Worth plant had a tremendous impact on the western city of Fort Worth by offering employment and boosting its economy. The plant brought high-tech aircraft development, enlarged the skilled workforce, and lifted the city's economy along with its overall population. Until 1940, the city of Fort Worth was undergoing the process of industrialization as a conventional city, with a population of 177,662. In 1950, Fort Worth had increased its population by more than 50 percent, with 277,047 citizens. The Fort Worth plant is the only government- owned aircraft factory, built for World War II, that has remained in operation to this day, managed by Lockheed Martin. This paper encompasses the political process that Fort Worth civic leaders underwent to obtain the plant, the plant’s bomber production, and its economic impact on the western city of Fort Worth.