From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, the US economy grew rapidly and that growth produced rising wages and household incomes up and down the distribution. Since the late 1970s, by contrast, the United States has been perhaps the paradigm case of non-inclusive growth. Economic growth has remained fairly rapid, but the income from that growth has been distributed very unevenly across households, with a large share going to the top 1 percent. . .

This paper estimates the impact of railroads in the United States between 1850 and 1910 on economic development, fertility, and human capital. A novel identification strategy, which relies on a dynamic instrument, allows me to control for unobservables using county fixed effects. I find that railroads shifted the distribution of occupations and industries, had a large positive effect on human capital levels, and a large negative effect on fertility rates. Further analysis suggests that the impact of railroads was larger in counties that were initially more developed. I examine possible mechanisms that drive the effects and lead to this heterogeneity.

In contrast to the observed convergence in incomes between high- and low-income areas throughout much of the 20th century, recent decades have seen an increased clustering of economic activity that has led to diverging fortunes of different places. This phenomenon has revived interest in place-based policies that seek to revitalize lagging communities. Perhaps due to the widely held perception that high-tech clusters around the United States owe much of their success to neighboring universities, establishing research universities in lagging communities is increasingly being considered as a potential place-based policy. Our policy proposal seeks to shed light on the potential role of research universities as anchor institutions for local economic development. After carefully analyzing data and reviewing the literature, we propose that instead of establishing a new research university, lagging communities should focus on transferring productivity-enhancing knowledge to their local employers from existing research universities near their regions. To help achieve this goal, we propose a regionally targeted expansion of the 1988 Manufacturing Extension Partnership program that would encompass a broader range of sectors.

We establish a novel empirical fact about the black-white wage gap: looking both across and within metropolitan areas, increasing city size or employment density is associated with a larger black-white wage gap. The estimated effects represent between 9 and 18% of recent estimates of the black-white wage gap. Using a variety of techniques, we demonstrate that our within-city relationship is unlikely to be driven by racial differences in unobserved ability. Finally, we present evidence suggestive of a role for race-specific networks in explaining these differences in the black-white wage gap.

The Food Stamp Program (FSP, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) was introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. It provides benefits for eligible low-income households to use to purchase food. Through supplementing food consumption or freeing up income for other purposes, food stamp receipt may impact health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impacts of the introduction of the FSP on various mortality rates. I use the program’s county-level rollout from 1961 to 1975 as a source of variation in access to food stamps in order to examine food stamps’ single-year and multi-year effects on various county- year level mortality rates using fixed effects models. I consider aggregate mortality rates, subgroup rates for sex, race groups, and age groups, and rates for specific causes of death to examine the mechanisms through which food stamps affect health. I draw mixed findings for the entire 1969 to 1978 county sample that indicate small overall effects of access to food stamps on mortality rates. However, among subsamples of poorer counties where the program’s introduction is likely to have a larger impact, I find that food stamps tend to reduce most mortality rates over time.

В данной статье автор анализирует опыт многопоколенной семьи в двух странах: России и США. Автору статьи кажется актуальным исследование не только российского опыта семейных отношений и многопоколенной семьи, но и американского. Во-первых, существует ряд исследований, проведенных в Америке, результаты которых заслуживают внимания, во-вторых, опыт многопоколенной семьи в США свидетельствует о поддержке семейных отношений, несмотря на ряд проблем, с которыми семья сталкивается, в том числе экономического характера. Таким образом, целесообразно исследование опыта американской и российской многопоколенной семьи.

In Lincoln’s Mercenaries, renowned Civil War historian William Marvel considers whether poor northern men bore the highest burden of military service during the American Civil War. Examining data on median family wealth from the 1860 United States Census, Marvel reveals the economic conditions of the earliest volunteers from each northern state during the seven major recruitment and conscription periods of the war. The results consistently support the conclusion that the majority of these soldiers came from the poorer half of their respective states’ population, especially during the first year of fighting. Marvel further suggests that the largely forgotten economic depression of 1860 and 1861 contributed in part to the disproportionate participation in the war of men from chronically impoverished occupations. During this fiscal downturn, thousands lost their jobs, leaving them susceptible to the modest emoluments of military pay and community support for soldiers’ families. From newspaper accounts and individual contemporary testimony, he concludes that these early recruits—whom historians have generally regarded as the most patriotic of Lincoln’s soldiers—were motivated just as much by money as those who enlisted later for exorbitant bounties, and that those generous bounties were made necessary partly because war production and labor shortages improved economic conditions on the home front. A fascinating, comprehensive study, Lincoln’s Mercenaries illustrates how an array of social and economic factors drove poor northern men to rely on military wages to support themselves and their families during the war.

The tendency of young people to imitate older members of their social groups could explain the surprising persistence of black-white education gaps in the U.S. over the past five decades. It is difficult to separate these role modeling effects, however, from other factors influencing educational attainment. This paper assesses the influence of role models on young peoples educational choices by examining the impact of a popular 1980s sitcom: The Cosby Show. The show portrayed an upper middle class black family headed by highly educated parents, who frequently discussed the importance of education with their five children. If role model effects exist, black teenagers should have had a stronger response to this message. To test this hypothesis, I relate educational attainment to city-level Cosby Show ratings during the period in which a respondent was aged 16-20. In order to control for the possible endogeneity of Cosby Show popularity, I use Thursday night NBA games as an instrument for ratings. I show that exposure to The Cosby Show significantly increased college attainment among black men, with smaller effects for black women. I estimate that at least 110,000 young black men and women completed college as a result of the show. There is no similar effect among the white sample. The results do not appear to be driven by reduced discrimination, as Cosby Show ratings are not related to changes in either the black-white wage differential or in the return to college for blacks. JEL

Immigrant replenishment may affect assimilation patterns of US-born descendants by maintaining the use and relevance of the language of origin. This study asks, how does Mexican immigrant replenishment affect Spanish language use among adult US-born Mexican descendants? Descendants include members of the second or later generations. I propose that greater exposure to Mexican immigrants will encourage adult US-born Mexican descendants to maintain their ethnic origins, especially language of origin. Therefore, the higher the rate of immigrant replenishment, the more likely respondents will speak Spanish at home. I analyze a five-year cumulative data file of the US American Community Survey (ACS) from 2011 to 2015, which represents 5 percent of the US population. The ACS uses stratified cluster sampling to collect data from 15,637,457 respondents. The sample is limited to US-born Mexican descendants, who were 25 years of age, married, and heads of households or spouses thereof. This limited the analysis to 187,212 respondents. I found that college attendance and higher family income decrease the odds of speaking Spanish at home. I also found that as immigrant replenishment increases, the odds of respondents speaking Spanish at home increases and decreases. As immigrant replenishment increases, respondents with Hispanic spouses are more likely to speak Spanish at home. However, respondents with non-Hispanic spouses are less likely to speak Spanish at home, which may be a result of sharpened intragroup boundaries created by new immigrants. The results confirm that Mexican immigrant replenishment significantly affects speaking Spanish at home for adult US-born Mexican descendants.

The Main Street Organization is a nonprofit focused on commercial corridor revitalization. The National Main Street Center has created a targeted program of revitalization called the Four-Point Approach that is designed to breathe new life into local Main Streets: bolster local businesses, save the historic buildings, and reinstate downtown as a social and cultural hub. There are over 1,600 local Main Street communities, and currently, the Four-Point Approach is employed similarly across all of them. This singular application doesn’t adequately address the distinct needs of different Main Streets. While it is infeasible for the National Main Street Center to develop comprehensive programming for each of its 1,600 members, the Four Point Approach could be significantly improved if it were tailored to address the needs of similar types of communities. A hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward’s Method) was used to group Main Street communities into six statistically similar clusters, based on comparable attributes. It is clear post-analysis that the clusters diverge in key areas: demographics, economics, and housing. With these six groups, the National Main Street Center is poised to develop more targeted programming and education designed for the specific needs of each group

More than one in five U.S. adolescents resides in a household where neither parent holds a postsecondary degree but at least one parent spent some time in college. We consider how a distinctive combination of cultural and economic resources in college leaver families enables or constrains young adults’ educational pathways. Greater resources in college leaver families explains about half of the advantage in any college enrollment and four‐year college enrollment for young adults in these families compared to those from families where neither parent attended college. But this resource advantage is relatively small compared to families where either parent holds at least a bachelor's degree, and given any enrollment, children from college leaver families are no more likely to finish college than are their peers whose parents never attended. Results are robust to various specifications of parents’ college leaver status. Data are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement and Transition into Adulthood Supplement (N = 2,334).

This paper seeks to understand the role played by immigrant ethnic composition in the process of women’s suffrage in the United States. Any theory of the extension of voting rights to women must explain why native men voted to extend the franchise to women. In this paper, we consider what we call the “ethnic group threat.” To the extent that native males believed that the political preferences of native women were better aligned with theirs than new (primarily male) immigrants, male voters would be willing to grant women voting rights to secure their social and political status. We use a hazard model and immigration data from 1870 to 1920 to investigate the impact of immigrant ethnic composition on women suffrage, we find that states with a higher proportion of immigrants from Italy, Eastern/Southern Europe, and Mexico gave women the the right to vote faster.

This paper aims to examine the effects of the Medicaid expansion on self-employment. The Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has significantly increased the access to health insurance and its coverage for low income households. Previous studies on the ACA Medicaid expansion has mostly focused on labor market outcomes such as employment, hours of worked, wages, full-time/part-time transitions, etc. (e.g. Duggan, Goda, and Jackson 2017; Leung and Mas, 2016; Kaestner et al, 2017). But the ACA Medicaid effect on self-employment and its transition have received little attention, although the growing literature has found the evidence that the increase in access to health insurance may increase self-employment by reducing “entrepreneurship lock” (e.g. Fairlie et al 2010; Bailey 2017). In order to examine the effects of Medicaid expansion on self-employment, I take the advantage of a quasi-experiment created by variation in states’ decisions on expanding Medicaid under the ACA. In 2014, 25 states and DC expanded Medicaid eligibility to all individuals in families with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line (FPL). Since then, additional 7 states have adopted the expansion. By using the geographic and time variations, I apply difference-in-differences with the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), the CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), and the CPS Merged Outgoing Rotation Groups (MORG) from 2010 and 2016. To deal with heterogeneity across states, I also apply contiguous . . .

In recent years, immigration rates have increased dramatically among the most highly skilled workers. How does this inow aect labor market outcomes among highly skilled native-born workers? I estimate a general equilibrium model in which individuals adjust to skilled immigration by changing occupations and investing into human capital dierently. Moreover, I estimate the demand functions for native and immigrant workers and nd that skilled immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes in some occupations and are complements in others. Counter-factual exercises indicate that even large inows of foreign skilled workers have limited impacts on domestic workers. In particular, the skill rental rates for native science and engineering workers would have been approximately 2% higher if rms were not able to hire more foreigners than they did in 1994. On the other hand, had the U.S. workers been constrained to remain in their original occupations, the adverse impacts of foreign labor competition would be more severe. When natives' occupational choices respond to immigration, the negative eects are diused. The extent to which this occupational mobility helps to absorb the immigration shock depends not only on the substitution elasticity in the directly aected occupations, but also on the demand elasticity of native labor in the destination occupations where natives move to.

This paper undertakes a critical theoretical and empirical analysis of the traditional approach to analysing the education-economy relationship: skill bias technological change theory. It argues that while leading skill bias theorists have sought to address some of the anomalies that the theory confronts, there remain key data patterns that the theory cannot address. We suggest an alternative account that takes a broader political economy perspective.

This paper documents a number of key facts about the evolution of mortgage debt, homeownership, debt burden, and subsequent delinquency during the recent housing boom and Great Recession. We show that the mortgage expansion was shared across the entire income distribution; that is, the flow and stock of debt rose across all income groups (except for the top 5%). The mortgage expansion was especially pronounced in areas with increased house prices, and the speed at which houses turned over (churn) in these areas went up significantly. However, the average loan-to-value ratios (LTV) at origination did not increase over the boom period. While homeownership rates increased for the middle- and upper-income households, there was no increase in homeownership for the lowest income groups. Finally, default rates postcrisis went up predominantly in areas with large house price drops, especially for high-income and high-FICO borrowers. These results are consistent with a view that the run-up in mortgage debt over the precrisis period was driven by rising home values and expectations of increasing prices.

Accessibility is the well stablished concept in theories of urban planning and spatial structure. This dissertation measured access to opportunities that incorporate major destinations as well as all jobs for three modes. The study used the most updated transportation network to measure access to opportunities by gravity equation that account for distance and mode. It also used Principal Component Analysis to make the opportunity scores out of several related destinations and to make overall score by incorporating all the opportunities. The developed access to opportunity scores were applied to evaluate the location efficiencies of major affordable housing units in DFW. I found that most of affordable housing units are located in least location efficient places by walking and transit. However, among them, HCV and LIHTC affordable programs presented a better performance than other ones. The new score was used to determined areas with the high and low access chances for DFW. Based on the analysis for this research, the residents had poor access to opportunities by walking and transit and good access to opportunities by driving. I also used the developed scores to examine the spatial distribution of new development projects in areas of opportunities. I found that most of the projects are happening in areas that have low access to opportunities by walking and transit, but they have good access by car. Moreover, the relation to housing value is the topic of large volume of the studies. However, currently, there have been some changes in household travel behavior. Households are reported to commute less to access jobs due to the advances in communication and information technologies. In addition, they travel more to access the destinations other than jobs. Moreover, US families showed the demand to use more active mode of transportation such as biking and walking for commuting to work. These new trends might have the reflection on housing value. This study attempted to examine the topic by developing two models to compare the impact of access to job with the impact of access to the destinations other than job. The result of this study showed that housing market is still influenced by job accessibility.

This paper explores the link between education and the decision to start smoking as well as the decision to quit smoking. Data is gathered from IPUMS CPS and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Probit analysis (with the use of probability weight and robust standard error) indicates that every additional year of education will reduce the 2.3 percentage point of the smoking probability and will add 3.53 percentage point in quitting likelihood, holding home restriction, public restriction, cigarette price, family income, age, gender, race, and ethnicity constant. I believe that tobacco epidemic is a serious global issue that may be mitigated by using careful regulations on smoking restriction and education.

Racial and ethnic diversity in the United States is on the rise, as the country is projected to no longer have a racial majority by the mid-2040s. Much of this diversity is found in the United States large metropolitan areas, where it manifests itself unevenly. While some metropolitan neighbourhoods are growing highly diverse, others remain segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper introduces a framework for exploring the geography of neighbourhood diversity in US metropolitan areas, and defines the diversity gradient, a visual representation of how diversity varies with distance from the urban core. Analysis of the geography of metropolitan diversity from 1990 to 2010 reveals that the greatest increases in diversity are found in the suburbs and outlying areas, where diversity now peaks in many large metropolitan areas. Additional spatial analyses of neighbourhood diversity in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth show that clustering of highly diverse neighbourhoods has shifted to the suburbs from close-in urban areas, where many segregated and low-diversity neighbourhoods persist.

Over the past two decades immigration enforcement has grown exponentially in the United States. Using data from the 2005 through 2011 American Community Survey, we exploit the geographical and temporal variation in a novel index of the intensity of immigration enforcement to show how the average yearly increase in interior immigration enforcement over that period raised the likelihood of living in poverty of households with U.S. born children by 4%. The effect is robust to a number of identification tests accounting for the potential endogeneity of enforcement policies and residential location of immigrants, and is primarily driven by police-based immigration enforcement measures adopted at the local level, such as 287(g) agreements.