College-educated workers entering the labor market in 1940 experienced a 4-fold increase in their labor earnings between the ages of 25 and 55; in contrast, the increase was 2.6-fold for those entering the market in 1980. For workers without a college education these figures are 3.6-fold and 1.5-fold, respectively. Why are earnings profiles flatter for recent cohorts? We build a parsimonious model of schooling and human capital accumulation on the job, and calibrate it to earnings statistics of workers from the 1940 cohort. The model accounts for 99 percent of the flattening of earnings profiles for workers with a college education between the 1940 and the 1980 cohorts (52 percent for workers without a college education). The flattening in our model results from a single exogenous factor: the increasing price of skills. The higher skill price induces (i) higher college enrollment for recent cohorts and thus a change in the educational composition of workers and (ii) higher human capital at the start of work life for college-educated workers in the recent cohorts, which implies lower earnings growth over the life cycle.

This research report was created to support the City of Bothell’s current decisionmaking process in the Wayne Park conversion project. In December 2017, the City of Bothell purchased Wayne Golf Course with the intention of converting the entire 89-acre property to a public city park1 . Bothell funded the purchase with the help of grants and a partnership with King County1,2. The city seeks to develop 4 acres within the front 9 portion of the Wayne Golf Course into an economic engine that will activate the land and offset costs associated with the purchase and maintenance of the 89-acre park. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the economic impact of the city’s purchase of Wayne Golf Course by answering the following research question: Will the conversion of Wayne Golf Course into a City Park have a positive impact on surrounding property values, thereby (partially) offsetting the cost of the project? The City of Bothell is a rapidly developing suburban city experiencing a population boom and this purchase draws attention to a greater question of how we fund conservation in rapidly developing areas. . .

Wisconsin lawmakers must pave the way to economic security for women and families. Rather than supporting policies that undermine economic security and restrict access to reproductive health care, 1 policymakers should promote policies that ensure equal pay for equal work, raise the minimum wage, and allow parents to maintain good jobs and support their children. Women need policies that reflect their roles as providers and caregivers. In Wisconsin, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 76.2 percent of families, and these numbers are higher for some women of color. 2 The following policy recommendations can help support the economic security of women and families in Wisconsin. Promote equal pay for equal work Although federal law prohibits unequal pay for equal work, there is more that can be done to ensure that both women and men across Wisconsin enjoy the fullest protec-tions against discrimination. • Wisconsin women who are full-time, year-round workers earned about 80 cents for every dollar that Wisconsin men earned in 2017; 3 if the wage gap continues to close at its current rate, women will not reach parity in the state until 2067. 4 The wage gap is even larger for black women and Latinas in Wisconsin, who earned 61 cents and 52.8 cents, respectively, for every dollar that white men earned in 2016. 5 • Due to the gender wage gap, each woman in Wisconsin will lose an average of $438,360 over the course of her lifetime. 6

The Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement were two pivotal events experienced by the southern African American population during the 20th Century. Each has received considerable attention by social scientists and historians, and a possible connection between the two phenomena has been speculated. However, no systematic investigation of the effect of migration on protest during the Jim Crow era has been conducted. In this study we use data for 333 southern communities to examine the relationship between youthful black migration between 1950 and 1960 and the occurrence of sit-ins early in 1960. We find a strong positive, non-linear, relationship between net-migration and the likelihood of a sit-in which can be explained by two sets of mediating influences: local demographic conditions and local organizational presence. Our findings offer strong empirical support for an association between southern black migration and protest during Jim Crow and suggest the value of considering the influence of demographic forces on collective action.

The recent trends of suburban migration and the expansion of agro-industry around the United States have contributed to the abandonment of retail food outlets in low-income and low- access urban communities across the country. USDA definitions of food deserts are based on distance from food stores to residential tracts. This definition frames the issue as primarily one of food supply, although empirical evidence suggests that other factors may outweigh distance- based relationships. As a response to these challenges, entrepreneurial efforts in many communities have attempted localized solutions to improving the accessibility and affordability of fresh food, such as community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets. In recent years, many mobile operations have attempted to fill this local grocery niche, but in most cases found only moderate and inconsistent success. This research attempts to uncover these challenges to success and provide a framework that will assist in mobile market location planning and implementation. Toward this, I recruited 15 Muncie, Indiana residents to participate in a five- day study to track their daily mobility and maintain a journal of food provisioning activities. A paper survey was used to identify purchasing considerations while journal entries and Participatory GIS group mapping sessions informed real-world behavior. Data was analyzed using GIS multi-criteria evaluation tools to identify mobile market locations around Muncie, Indiana intended to yield both high community impact and high financial return. I explore how urban food access and purchasing habits may be dependent upon other community features such as neighborhood amenities and access to reliable transportation and advance ideas about the potential use of this framework in other contexts.

This paper examines the impact of manufacturing employment decline on the socio-economic outcomes within and between black and white Americans from 1960 to 2010. Exploiting variation across cities and over time, the analysis shows that manufacturing decline negatively impacted blacks (men, women, and children) in terms of their wages, employment, marriage rates, house values, poverty rates, death rates, single parenthood, teen motherhood, child poverty, and child mortality. In addition, the decline in manufacturing increased inequality within the black community in terms of overall wages and the gaps between education groups in wages, employment, and marriage rates. Many of the same patterns are found for whites, but to a lesser degree leading to larger gaps between whites and blacks in wages, marriage patterns, poverty, single-parenthood, and death rates. The results are robust to the inclusion or exclusion of several control variables, and the use of a "shift-share" instrument for the local manufacturing employment share. Overall, the decline in manufacturing is reducing socio-economic conditions in general while increasing inequality within and between racial groups which is consistent with a stronger general equilibrium effect of the loss of highly-paid, lower-skilled jobs on the less-educated segments of the population.

After adjusting for sample-selection bias, I find a net decline in average stature of 0.64 inches in the birth cohorts of 1832-1860 in the United States. This result supports the veracity of the Antebellum Puzzle--a deterioration of health during early modern economic growth in the United States. However, this adjustment alters the trend in average stature in the same cohort range, validating concerns over bias in the historical heights literature. The adjustment is based on census-linked military height data and uses a two-step semi-parametric sample-selection model to adjust for selection on observables and unobservables.

The United States is experiencing a profound increase in racial and ethnic diversity, although its communities are experiencing the trend differently depending on their size and location. Using census data from 1980 to 2010, we focus on a subset of highly diverse local jurisdictions in which no ethnoracial group makes up more than half of the population. We track the prevalence, emergence, and characteristics of these no-majority places, finding that they are rapidly increasing in number and are home to substantial and growing shares of the Black, Latino, and Asian populations. Transitions in no-majority places varied considerably over time. Older cohorts of places that became no-majority decades ago moved toward Latino or Black majorities, whereas those in recent cohorts tended to persist as no-majority places. Most of these communities continued to diversify in the decades after first becoming no-majority and remain quite diverse today. However, the shift toward nomajority status was often accompanied by large White population declines.

The majority of research on the relationship between video game playing behavior and crime has been conducted by psychologists, has focused only on violent videogames, and suffers from two major shortcomings. First, psychologists have adopted correlational or experimental methodologies that do not in fact assess the empirical relationship between video game playing behavior and crime. Instead, they examine the relationship between video game playing behavior and aggression, and then infer research findings have social implications related to crime. Second, when making such inferences, these studies presume that meso and macro level phenomena are nothing more than the aggregated consequences of micro level events. Recent studies, however, have raised questions surrounding these two components of psychological research, as they have identified negative relationships between video game playing behavior and crime at county and national levels. In this study, we propose that these seemingly contradictory results can be explained using routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979). We contend that video game playing behavior, particularly insofar as it occurs within the home, alters the routine activities of individuals in such a way as to decrease the number of criminal opportunities present within a society. We provide an initial test of this hypothesis using UCR, CPS, and Census data. As predicted by routine activities theory, we find that rates of video game playing behavior in the home are negatively associated with both violent and property crime.

Over the last three decades, the average retirement age has increased by about three years, to 64.6 for men and 62.3 for women.1 But this trend is not uniform across socioeconomic groups: for example, high school graduates are retiring just a bit later than in the 1990s, leading to a wide gap between them and college graduates. This brief reviews studies by the U.S. Social Security Administration’s Retirement Research Consortium (RRC) and others that examine several potential causes of the unequal increases in retirement ages by education. The discussion proceeds as follows. The frst section quantifes the growing gap in average retirement ages by education. The second section discusses four reasons why the gap may have widened: 1) growing inequality in health and longevity; 2) variations in labor market conditions; 3) the diferential impact of Social Security policy changes; and 4) disimilarities in marital status that afect the joint retirement decision. The fnal section concludes that these factors have increased retirement ages much more for college graduates than for those with less education. This latter group is thus more likely to retire early, putting them at greater risk of inadequate incomes and heavier reliance on the social safety net.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the U.S. We use data on infectious disease deaths from all reporting U.S. cities to describe regional patterns in the decline of urban infectious mortality from 1900 to 1948. We report three main results: First, urban infectious mortality was higher in the South in every year from 1900 to 1948. Second, the timing of the infectious mortality decline was different in southern cities than in cities in the other regions. Third, comparatively high infectious mortality in southern cities was driven overwhelmingly by extremely high infectious mortality among African Americans. From 1906 to 1920, African Americans in cities experienced a rate of death from infectious disease greater than what urban whites experienced during the 1918 flu pandemic.

We analyze whether the intensity of immigration enforcement, measured as apprehensions of undocumented immigrants 1 per thousand people, affects local crime rates and the local labor market opportunities of native workers. 2 Using data across seventeen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") districts over the period 2000-2015, we take advantage of a sudden surge in the apprehension rate from 2007-2011, followed by a decline in 2012-2015. The magnitude of the increase in apprehensions varied significantly across districts, depending on the intensity of local enforcement, and on the size of the local undocumented population. We use the variation created by this surge in difference-indifferences analysis. We do not find any evidence that more apprehensions in a district reduced crime rates, nor do we find evidence that apprehensions improved employment and wages for less educated natives. These findings do not support the rhetoric that deportations remove criminals and/or make more jobs available to natives. †

Prior to the Great Migration, there were small communities of middle-class blacks living in the North. While research has investigated the importance of migration improving the fortunes of southern-born blacks, less is known about the impact of the Great Migration on existing black communities. I build a new panel dataset of black northerners to study how the arrival of new black residents shaped their economic fortunes. I exploit variation in the extent of in-migration across northern counties and instrument for black inflows by interacting pre-existing demographic patterns in the South with earlier black settlement patterns in the North. I find that in-migration resulted in significantly less employment but better occupational attainment for black northerners in 1930. The evidence shows that the effect of southern black in-migration on northern-born black outcomes is nuanced: low status northern-born blacks experienced more competition in the labor market, while high status northern-born blacks benefited more from occupational upgrading opportunities generated by in-migration.

Between 1850 and 1950, the United States saw a massive decrease in the percentage of the workforce employed in agriculture, declining from approximately 45% to under 10%. Long and Ferrie (2015) have shown that rapid exit from the agricultural sector from 1850 through 1880 contributed to an increase in occupational mobility during that time period, although their results suggest that mobility subsequently declined, while Hilger (2017) finds a relationship between both income and equality levels and increases in economic mobility between 1940 and 1970. Hilger’s result is driven largely by the fact that mobility and incomes/equality rose most quickly in the southeast, a region that has traditionally lagged behind the northeast and midwest in economic dynamism for a variety of reasons. This region also lagged behind the rest of the country in experiencing the movement out of agricultural employment that Long and Ferrie document, so it experienced this change . . .

Colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence rates are rising in younger Americans and mortality rates are increasing among younger white Americans. We used New York State Cancer Registry data to examine New York City CRC incidence and mortality trends among adults ages 20–54 years by race from 1976 to 2015. Annual percent change (APC) was considered statistically significant at P less than .05 using a two-sided test. CRC incidence increased among those ages 20–49 years, yet blacks had the largest APC of 2.2% (1993–2015; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.4% to 3.1%) compared with 0.5% in whites (1976–2015; 95% CI = 0.2% to 0.7%). Among those aged 50–54 years, incidence increased among blacks by 0.8% annually (1976–2015; 95% CI = 0.4% to 1.1%), but not among whites. CRC mortality decreased among both age and race groups. These findings emphasize the value of local registry data to understand trends locally, the importance of timely screening, and the need for clinicians to consider CRC among all patients with compatible signs and symptoms.

Coffeehouses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cairo were an urban hub for working- and middle-class men, as well as for a growing number of women, for politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, and journalists, for immigrants and locals, and for people from different ethnic, racial, and religious communities. Indeed, coffeehouses were a fundamental social and cultural, even political, institution. They were embedded in Cairo’s landscape, and in the daily routines of its inhabitants. Their emergence offered new opportunities for socializing to more groups in society, they were a place of leisure and entertainment that supported popular culture, and they were a crucial part of the political public sphere. Using a rich mix of sources, such as spy reports, photographs, memoirs, guides, various descriptions of Cairo and its inhabitants, interviews, census data, and newspapers, this study traces the rich history of Cairo’s coffeehouses roughly from the 1870s to 1919, with an in depth look also at their longue durée history before the late nineteenth century. This study aims to show how the history of coffeehouses as actual places, not merely theorized sites, can shed light on a variety of critical developments. In particular, the history of Cairo’s coffeehouses illuminates many broader histories involving, for example, the construction of social hierarchies, the performance of class and gender, urban and economic development in Cairo, the assertion of colonialism and state-led surveillance, the construction of nationalism and mass politics, and more^

Between 1915 and 1930, during the First Great Migration, more than 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North of the United States, altering the racial proÖle of several northern cities for the Örst time in American history. I ex- ploit this episode to study how an increase in racial heterogeneity a§ects the provision of public goods and city Önances. I predict black in-migration by interacting 1900 set- tlements of southern born blacks across northern cities with variation in outmigration from the South after 1910. I Önd that black ináows had a strong, negative impact on both public spending and tax revenues in northern cities. The decline in tax revenues was not due to citiesídecision to cut tax rates, but was entirely driven by a reduction in property values. These Öndings suggest that the housing market response to black arrivals imposed a negative Öscal externality to receiving cities that, unable or unwill- ing to raise taxes, were forced to cut spending. Consistent with this interpretation, cities did not change the allocation of spending across categories, while the negative e§ects of black in-migration were smaller when controlling for the (predicted) white outáows triggered by black arrivals.

International humanitarian aid is pivotal in the response to natural disasters suffered by low-and middle-income countries. While its allocation has been shown to be influenced by donors’ foreign policy considerations, power relations within recipient countries have not been addressed. This paper is the first to investigate the role of regional and ethnic favoritism in the formation of humanitarian aid flows. We construct a novel dataset combining information on birth regions of political leaders and the geographic distribution of ethnic groups within countries with high numbers of natural disasters building on census (IPUMS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data. Our results suggest that the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) disburses larger amounts of aid when natural disasters affect the birth region of the countries’ leader. We find some evidence that OFDA disburses aid more frequently to leaders’ birth regions as well as when regions hit by disasters are populated by politically powerful or discriminated ethnicities. Our findings imply that humanitarian aid is not given for humanitarian reasons alone, but also serves elite interests within recipient countries.