We document that the slowdown in the growth of the immigrant population in the United States since 2000 is the largest observed using Census data since 1870. Non-parametric tests reveal that the sharp decline is similar in magnitude to changes in migration growth rates that followed the two major historical regime changes in U.S. immigration policy. Migration rates are slowing across nearly all age, sex, educational and country of origin categories that we examine. We find that the stock of adult migrants under age 30 is smaller in 2015 than in 2000, a potential precursor to a declining overall stock, as was seen around the introduction of the national quotas regime in 1920. Heterogenous changes have led to slower declines for men than women, and an increase in the relative scarcity of low-skilled labor. Approximately half of the overall decline is due to falling Mexican immigration.

This study examines long-term geographic and demographic changes in food deserts in Ypsilanti, a small city of approximately 19,500 people located in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Because of the small size of Ypsilanti, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that food deserts can emerge in such urban settings and persist for decades. We argue that the persistence and geographic spread over time of food deserts in Ypsilanti are related to suburbanization, the decline of a once thriving auto-manufacturing sector, and changes in the structure of grocery retailing.

This study investigates the effect of perceived discrimination on the mental health of Afghan refugees, and secondly, tests the distress moderating effects of pre-migration traumatic experiences and post-resettlement adjustment factors. In a cross-sectional design, 259 Afghans completed surveys assessing perceived discrimination and a number of other factors using scales developed through inductive techniques. Multivariable analyses consisted of a series of hierarchical regressions testing the effect of perceived discrimination on distress, followed by a sequential analysis of moderator variables. Perceived discrimination was significantly associated with higher distress, and this relationship was stronger among those with a strong intra-ethnic identity and high pre-resettlement traumatic experiences. The expected buffering effects of civic engagement, ethnic orientation (e.g. integration), and social support were not significant. Discrimination is a significant source of stress for Afghan refugees, which may exacerbate stresses associated with other pre- and post-migration stressors. Future research is needed to tailor interventions that can help mitigate the stress associated with discrimination among this highly vulnerable group.

We explore how permanent residency affects the income tax using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. We exploit the timing and geographic unevenness of IRCA's legalization programs alongside newly digitized data on the income tax in California, home to the majority of applicants. Green Cards induced the previously unauthorized to file state income tax returns at rates comparable to other California residents. While the new returns generated little additional revenue through the end of the 1990s, they did raise the earnings of families with children through new claims of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit.

Since the early 1970s, the United States has experienced a dramatic surge in imprisonment , especially among African American men. This paper investigates the causal effects of black male incarceration on black women's marriage and labor market outcomes , as well as its effects on black children's family structure, long-run educational outcomes, and income. To establish causality, I exploit plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policies across states and over years, and construct a simulated instrumental variable for the incarceration rate, using offender-level data on the universe of prisoners admitted to and released from prisons between 1986 and 2009. The instrument characterizes how sentencing policies affect incarceration at both the extensive margin (i.e., whether to incarcerate an arrestee) and the intensive margin (i.e., how long to imprison an inmate). First, I find that high incarceration rates of black men negatively affect black women's marriage outcomes, although they increase the likelihood of employment for those with higher education levels. Second, higher black male incarceration rates hurt black children by increasing the likelihood of out-of-wedlock birth and living in a mother-only family, and decreasing the likelihood of having some college education in the long run. Moreover, for individuals who lived in areas with harsher sentencing policies during childhood, the black-white income gap is wider for men conditional on parental income. Third, black men at either the extensive or intensive margin of incarceration have different impacts on women and children. The results suggest the consequences of the tough-on-crime policies for inequality and racial gaps, which could be taken into account when reforming sentencing policies.

The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a significant fall over time in the extent to which firms share rents with workers. It confirms that companies do share their profits with employees, but at much smaller scale today than they did during the 1980s and 1990s. This is a robust finding, corroborated with industry-level analysis for the US and EU. The decline in rent sharing is coincident with the rise of product market power that has occurred as worker bargaining power has dropped. Although firms with more market power previously shared more of their profits, they experienced a stronger fall in rent sharing after 2000.

I evaluate the local economic impacts of contractions in US military personnel between 1988 and 2000. I propose a novel empirical strategy combining the synthetic control and instrumental variables methods and estimate the causal effects on the equilibrium quantities and prices of local labor, housing, and product markets. Contractions in military personnel substantially reduced local civilian employment; however, local populations adjusted quickly, mainly through reduced in-migration, resulting in small changes in wages and large declines in rental prices. Relating these empirical findings to a simple spatial equilibrium model, I show that the welfare cost for workers is small.

This paper used microdata from the 2013-2015 American Community Survey to examine differences in federal government, state and local government, private sector, and selfemployment among employed veterans and non-veterans. U.S. federal and state governments have hiring preferences to benefit veterans, especially disabled veterans. Other factors may also push veterans toward public sector employment. I found that veteran status substantially increased the likelihood of federal employment, with the largest magnitudes for severely disabled veterans. Differences in state and local government employment were modest and exhibited heterogeneity by disability severity.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009 marked the deepest downturn in economic history since the Great Depression. Although the response of governments was different across countries, at least in advanced economies macroeconomic policy evolved around some common lines. This dissertation identifies three areas of intervention — (i) quantitative easing and forward guidance, (ii) fiscal austerity, and (iii) labor market deregulation — and studies the effects that each of them might have had on selected economic and financial variables. Chapter 2 focuses on the unconventional monetary policies undertaken by the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) in response to the GFC and shows that these have influenced the transmission of shocks across borders. Chapter 3 investigate the medium-term effects of tax-based consolidations on income disparity. The analysis suggests that increases in tax revenues in the aftermath of the GFC most likely did not contribute to increasing inequality. On the contrary, they might have lowered it. Chapter 4 investigates whether episodes of employment protection deregulation have detrimental effects on the distribution of income between labor and capital and find that that is indeed the case. Chapter 5 studies one of the effects of the GFC — namely the great rise in youth unemployment — rather than one of its policy responses. It shows that the response of the unemployment gap (the difference between the unemployment rate and its equilibrium rate) to cyclical demand conditions is generally twice as sensitive to the cycle for the youth as it is for adults, reflecting their more fragile employment conditions.

Terrorism is a growing concern of the 21st century but is it an increasing phenomenon? This study examines the trends in frequency of terrorism events throughout the United States from 1999-2011 compiled in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Drawing on 2000 and 2010 decennial census data and using previous methods from criminology and homicide literature, this research will determine whether certain city-level structural variables are correlated with higher frequencies of terrorism events. This unique approach to analyzing terrorism events introduced a new perspective and found correlations related to criminological literature.

Shrinking cities have undergone rapid demographic changes since World War II, especially as many of these urban centres deindustrialized during the 1970s and onwards. However, not all shrinking cities have experienced the same type of demographic changes. In fact, the shrinking designation may even be considered misleading in some places because not all population segments decrease during periods of overall total population decline. In order to gain a better grasp of these changes and trends over the past two decades, this paper use Franklin's (2014b) demographic shift‐share analysis to explore and compare changes in a series of racial and ethnic population characteristics across a selection of five shrinking cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis) and five growing cities (Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, and Seattle) in the United States during the two intercensal periods of 1990 to 2000 and 2000 to 2010. The list of case studies is hardly exhaustive or necessarily representative but was rather chosen as a set of fairly high‐profile cities in the United States that would be useful in making comparisons with respect to their recent decline or growth. Results show that each of the shrinking cities and growing cities had exceptions among the population segments considered in this paper. For example, shrinking cities generally experienced growth in terms of their Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian, and foreign‐born populations even as their White and Black populations rapidly declined between 1990 and 2010.

The present paper examines claims of a growing cultural divide in the United States. We analyze social change in beliefs about gender over a period of 36 years (from 1974 to 2010) in the United States using data from the nationally representative General Social Survey (GSS). We find evidence of growing gender egalitarianism until the mid-1990s, with a reversal between 1996 and 2000, and a decline in state differences in beliefs about gender over time in our decomposition analysis and multilevel models. Although we find significant differences in gender beliefs among states in the 1970s based on their voting record on the Equal Rights Amendment and based on patterns of family formation and family life associated with the Second Demographic Transition, these differences among states decreased or disappeared entirely by the early years of the twenty-first century. We highlight the implications of our findings for the ongoing public and academic debate surrounding growing cultural differences among states.

At BrainTrust Insights, one of our core values is, “We are cooperative and aware.” When we consider what invites change in government, the single greatest factor is voter participation. Regardless of political or ideological affiliation, encouraging more citizens to become aware of and actively participate/cooperate in the political process is a worthy aim. Why don’t more people register to vote and show up at the voting polls?

This paper analyzes the effect of a change in the status of housing equity as a protected asset for Medicaid long‐term care payment eligibility. A difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences strategy is employed to estimate the effect of the policy on the housing equity holdings of potentially treated individuals. Using a panel of unmarried homeowners, the policy induced treated individuals who were likely to require long‐term care to hold less housing equity by values of 82,000 to 193,000 relative to control individuals. This equates to relative reductions of 12 to 29 percent for treated individuals after the policy change. Similar effects are not observed when considering health measures less predictive of long‐term care services and for a sample of married households who were unlikely affected by the policy. These estimates confirm the importance of the housing asset as a shelter for Medicaid eligibility.

In this paper we study the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote for the Republican Party by analyzing county-level data on election outcomes between 1990 and 2010. Our main contribution is to separate the effect of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, by exploiting the different geography and timing of the inflows of these two groups of immigrants. We find that an increase in the first type of immigrants decreases the share of the Republican vote, while an inflow of the second type increases it. These effects are mainly due to the local impact of immigrants on votes of U.S. citizens and they seem independent of the country of origin of immigrants. We also find that the pro-Republican impact of low-skilled immigrants is stronger in low-skilled and non-urban counties. This is consistent with citizens' political preferences shifting towards the Republican Party in places where low-skilled immigrants are more likely to be perceived as competition in the labor market and for public resources.

This paper documents, for the first time, municipality- and occupation-level estimates of income inequality between individuals in a European country in the nineteenth century, using a combination of several detailed data sets for Norway in the late 1860s. Urban incomes were on average 4.5 times higher than rural incomes, and the average city Gini coefficient was twice the average rural municipality Gini. All high- or medium-income occupation groups exhibited substantial within- occupation income inequality. Across municipalities, income inequality is positively associated with manufacturing, average crop, and historical land inequality, and is negatively associated with distance to the nearest city, pastoral agriculture, and fisheries. The income Gini for Norway as a whole is found to have been 0.546, slightly higher than estimates for the UK and US in the same period.

This dissertation examines gender- and immigrant nativity-based inequalities in educational and occupational attainment, earnings and wages. It uses an intersectional theoretical framework. The first chapter asks whether mothers have lower wages than women without children, and whether any disparities vary by mothers’ nativities. The second chapter asks how second-generation immigrants’ educational and occupational attainment and earnings compare to their parents’ generation, and to a group of their nonimmigrant peers. Findings are that both first-generation immigrant and nonimmigrant mothers experience wage gaps. Corrections for additional characteristics that might differ between mothers and nonmothers reduce the sizes of gaps. Corrections for characteristics linked to decisions to immigrate increase gaps for a group of recent immigrants. Within most second-generation pan ethnic Latino and Asian groups and country of origin groups from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, China and India, women’s outcome attainment levels exceed those of their mothers by more than men’s outcome attainment levels do compared to their fathers. However, gender earnings gaps persist, with men having higher earnings than women across pan ethnic groups. Additionally, despite some assimilation across generations, many disparities remain between second- generation immigrants and nonimmigrants.

We present a nonparametric framework to model a short sequence of probability distributions that vary both due to underlying effects of sequential progression and confounding noise. To distinguish between these two types of variation and estimate the sequential-progression effects, our approach leverages an assumption that these effects follow a persistent trend. This work is motivated by the recent rise of single-cell RNA-sequencing experiments over a brief time course, which aim to identify genes relevant to the progression of a particular biological process across diverse cell populations. While classical statistical tools focus on scalar-response regression or order-agnostic differences between distributions, it is desirable in this setting to consider both the full distributions as well as the structure imposed by their ordering. We introduce a new regression model for ordinal covariates where responses are univariate distributions and the underlying relationship reflects consistent changes in the distributions over increasing levels of the covariate. This concept is formalized as a trend in distributions, which we define as an evolution that is linear under the Wasserstein metric. Implemented via a fast alternating projections algorithm, our method exhibits numerous strengths in simulations and analyses of single-cell gene expression data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We examine whether dynastic human capital (DHC) can explain the black-white wage gap. We fit a quantity-quality model to state-level data on fertility, mortality, and schooling but, notably, not earnings. Racial discrimination raised the cost of black schooling, thus depressing DHC not only of the current generation but of future generations via its role in producing human capital. Birth-state DHC helps explain the wage gap among stayers, while current-state DHC helps explain the gap among movers. These findings highlight the role of intergenerational transmission in the persistence of the wage gap and the role of migration in reducing it.

Between 2008 and 2017, Mexican states implemented no-fault unilateral divorce. Using an event-study design, we exploit state-level variation in the timing of the reforms to investigate the consequences of more liberalized divorce laws. Our results suggest that no-fault divorce dramatically increased divorce rates over the short run. We then consider how the reform impacted divorce filings and divorce settlements. We find that no-fault divorce increased individual divorce filings, especially among women. Furthermore , the reform lowered the frequency of spousal alimony payments, but redirected these alimony payments towards children. All results hold when accounting for state-specific time trends. JEL codes: D13, J12, K36, O12