Recent studies predict that climate change will lead to a redistribution of population across the U.S., as people choose to locate in regions less susceptible to extreme climate. However, these studies ignore the fact that migration will be dampened by changes in wage rates and housing prices as a result of migration. In this study, we apply a novel approach of linking a residential sorting model to an inter-regional computable general equilibrium model of the U.S. to capture wage and housing price feedbacks to assess the economic impacts of climate change-induced migration. We find that endogenizing wages significantly dampens migration patterns. However, there are significant positive impacts on gross regional product and consumption in the Northeast, West, and California at the expense of the South and Midwest. In addition, wage effects are found to dominate housing price and climate effects, which results in larger welfare changes.

Background Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with oral TDF/FTC reduces the risk of HIV infection by >90% when taken as prescribed. Trends in prevalence of PrEP use, which account for persons who have stopped PrEP, increased through 2016, but have not been described since. Methods Annual prevalence estimates of unique, TDF/FTC PrEP users (individuals with ≥1 day of PrEP prescribed in a given year) in the United States (US) were generated for 2012-2017 from a national prescription database. A validated algorithm was used to distinguish users of TDF/FTC for HIV or Hepatitis B treatment or post-exposure prophylaxis from PrEP users. We calculated annual prevalence of PrEP use overall and by age, sex and region. We used log-transformation to calculate estimated annual percent change (EAPC) in the prevalence of PrEP use. Results Annual prevalence of PrEP use increased from 3.3/100,000 population in 2012 to 36.7 in 2017 –a 56% annual increase from 2012-2017 (EAPC: +56%). Annual prevalence of PrEP use increased faster among men than among women (EAPC: +68% and +5%, respectively). By age group, annual prevalence of PrEP use increased fastest among 25-34 year olds (EAPC: +61%) and slowest among ≥55 year olds (EAPC: +52%) and ≤24 year olds (EAPC: +51%). By region, in 2017 prevalence PrEP use was lowest in the South (29.8/100,000) and highest in the Northeast (62.3/100,000) Conclusions Despite overall increases in the annual number of TDF/FTC PrEP users in the US from 2012-2017, the growth of absolute PrEP coverage is inconsistent across groups. Efforts to optimize PrEP access are especially needed for women and for those living in the South.

During the U.S. Civil War surgeons performed a vast number of surgeries. Whether surgery increased wounded soldiers’ chances of survival has been debated ever since. I analyze a unique observational data set gathered by Dr. Edmund Andrews, a surgeon with the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. I use Dr. Andrews’s data, model selection tools, and doubly robust estimation methods to estimate treatment effects from surgery. I find that surgery increased wounded soldiers’ chances of survival by 0.09–0.16, depending on the specific model of surgical procedure.

We systematically review the literature linking health to economic activity, particularly education and labor market outcomes, over the lifecycle. In the first part, we review studies that link childhood health to later-life outcomes. The main themes we focus on are in-utero exposures, birthweight, physical health and nutrition, mental health, and the environment. In the second part, we review studies of the impact of health on labor market success for adults. The main themes we focus on are the environment, disability, physical health shocks, within-household spillovers, cancer, and mental health.

While the 20th century was largely a time of rising prosperity for American families, the economic progress of U.S. men has stagnated in recent decades. The labor force participation rate of men ages 25 to 54 peaked at 97 percent in the mid-1960s and has declined by roughly eight percentage points since then, while men’s real median earnings have been flat since the early 1970s.2 These population averages mask larger declines in participation among less educated and non-white men (Juhn and Potter, 2006) as well as substantial increases in wage inequality (Autor, Katz, and Kearney, 2008). A large economic literature has arisen to explore these trends, encompassing demand-side factors like skillbiased technological change (Acemoglu and Autor, 2010) and globalization (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, 2013) as well as supply-side factors such as rising spousal employment, greater use of the Social Security Disability Insurance program (Autor and Duggan, 2003), and rising utility . . .

The role of trade costs in generating the spatial distribution of wages and em- ployment across regions is a classic question in economic geography. In this paper I make several contributions to the extensive theoretical and empirical literature on this question. First, building on the recent literature I show that for a wide class of economic geography models the positive implications of changes in trade costs are entirely captured by two reduced form elasticities: the elasticities of wages and employment with respect to market access. Second, I develop a novel instrumen- tal variable approach to consistently estimating these elasticities from changes in observed wages and employment using exogenous changes in the incomes of each location’s trading partners. I implement this approach using data on U.S. MSAs be- tween 1990 and 2007 and find that wages and employment are quite sensitive to differences in market access due to trade costs. Counterfactual simulations indi- cate that eliminating trade costs would result in large shifts in employment from the Northeast towards the South and West and a flattening of the city size distribution. More modest reductions in trade costs result in qualitatively similar outcomes that remain quantitatively large.

The black-white differences in marriages in the US are striking. While 83% of white women between ages 25 and 54 were ever married in 2006, only 56% of black women were: a gap of 27 percentage points. Wilson (1987) suggests that the lack of marriageable black men due to incarceration and unemployment is responsible for low marriage rates among the black population. In this paper, we take a dynamic look at the Wilson Hypothesis. We argue that the current incarceration policies and labor market prospects make black men riskier spouses than white men. They are not only more likely to be, but also to become, unemployed or incarcerated than their white counterparts. We develop an equilibrium search model of marriage, divorce and labor supply that takes into account the transitions between employment, unemployment and prison for individuals by race, education, and gender. We estimate model parameters to be consistent with key statistics of the US economy. We then investigate how much of the racial divide in marriage is due to differences in the riskiness of potential spouses. We find that differences in incarceration and employment dynamics between black and white men can account for half of the existing black-white marriage gap in the data.

Two investments stand out for their power to improve economic outcomes: higher education and stocks. Absent public funding, though, both are seen as the preserve of the wealthy. As a result, higher education in particular is, in many countries, heavily subsidized with the explicit aim of promoting equality of opportunity. However, differences in characteristics are likely to affect individuals' capacity to take advantage of investment opportunities and improve their economic well-being. Our goal in this project is therefore to study the effect of access to college and the stock market on individual earnings, wealth, mobility, and inequality using a model that derives empirically-plausible measures of ex-ante heterogeneity in learning ability, initial human capital, and initial wealth. Does the power of college to increase well-being exceed that of stocks, as large subsidies to the former suggest? Perhaps not: we show that college does improve economic outcomes, but only for those whose ability and preparedness poise them for success. Stocks, on the other hand, may improve economic outcomes for those whose endowments make human capital investment a relatively unattractive option.

This paper proposes an extension of the collective model for labor supply developed by Chiappori, Fortin and Lacroix (2002) to an intertemporal setting. We first develop a theoretical model to analyze the intra-household distribution of wealth in a multi-period framework, with a focus on labor supply and marriage markets. The model allows us to derive a sharing rule for non-labor income under a set of testable conditions. Second, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from years 1997 to 2015, we estimate the model using a semi-log parametrization of labor supply. Our empirical results do not reject the restrictions of the model, and point to the validity of the collective framework in an intertemporal setting. We show that wages are positively related to household labor supply, although cross and lagged effects show negative correlates. Furthermore, the ability of wives to negotiate the intra-household allocation of non-labor income is mainly driven by wages, with wives behaving altruistically, and husbands egoistically. Sex ratios appear to be nonsignificant in this relationship, although counteracting effects between labor and marriage markets may influence estimates.

To the extent that pollution and population are spatially correlated, air quality modeling with coarse-resolution horizontal grids may systematically underpredict exposures and disparities in exposure among demographic groups (i.e., environmental injustice). We use InMAP, a reduced-complexity air pollution model, to quantify how estimates of year-2014 fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure in the United States vary with model spatial resolution, for a variable-resolution grid. We test five grids, with population-weighted average grid cell edge lengths ranging from 5.9 to 69 km. We find that model-estimated PM2.5 exposure, and exposure disparities among racial-ethnic groups, are lower with coarse grids than with fine grids: switching from our coarsest- to finest-resolution grid increases the calculated population-weighted average exposure by 27% (from 6.6 to 8.3 μg m–3) and causes the estimated difference in average exposure between minorities and whites to increase substantially (from 0.4 to 1.6 μg m–3). Across all grid resolutions, exposure disparities by race-ethnicity can be detected in every income category. Exposure disparities by income alone remain small relative to disparities by race-ethnicity, irrespective of resolution. These results demonstrate the importance of fine model spatial resolution for identifying and quantifying exposure disparity.

The paper investigates the role of insurance and technological progress on the rising health inequality across income groups and its aggregate output costs for the US. We develop a continuous-time life-cycle model of an economy where individuals decide consumption-hours worked, whether to take up health insurance, when to visit a doctor, how much to invest in their health capital and whether to engage in bad behavior. A simple version of the model is able to explain about 50% of the gap in life-expectancy across income groups observed in data. In our model, consistent with the pattern in data, uninsured individuals, having deferred the treatment aren’t able to reap the benefits of the technological progress, thus resulting in poorer outcomes. The policy simulation with a plausible public health insurance scheme reduces the disparity in health outcomes to half. We use National Longitudinal Mortality Survey (NLMS), Mortality Differentials Across Communities (MDAC) and linked National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)- Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS) data to estimate the parameters of the model. As a cross-validation exercise using National Longitudinal Mortality Survey (NLMS) data, we exploit the state variation in Medicaid eligibility and find that among the working age individuals with low family income, Medicaid reduces the probability of dying by 9%. Using propensity score matching estimator, we find that private insurance reduces the probability of dying by upto 25% when compared to the uninsured.

Despite headline-grabbing accounts of the mancession and childless metropolitan-dwelling women who earn more than men, the gender wage gap remains persistent. However, the spatiality of the gender wage gap has received little attention. I ask whether, where, and how the gender wage gap changed with the Great Recession. Using American Community Survey pooled surveys for 2005–2007 and 2011–2013, I model counterfactual wage distributions for full-time male and female workers in the top one hundred metro areas of the United States, controlling for education, age, experience, and occupation. Gender inequality is polarizing spatially and across the wage distribution, and the recession exacerbates this pattern. Gender gaps decline most in the Rustbelt, but show relative increases in many Western metro areas. Further, declines are mostly among below-median earning workers, whereas increases are likely at the seventy-fifth or ninetieth percentiles. Disproportionate returns to men’s characteristics explain much of these geographic and distributional shifts. The combination of geographic and distributional analysis reveals a more thorough picture of how gender inequality shifted with the recession, since previous patterns of uneven development under economic restructuring are still evident. The analysis also signposts regions of emerging gender inequality where relative equality is often presumed, suggesting critical research directions for feminist and economic geographers.

US housing voucher holders pay their landlord a fraction of household income and the government pays the rest, up to a rent ceiling. We study how two types of changes to the rent ceiling affect landlords and tenants. A policy that makes vouchers more generous across a metro area benefits landlords through increased rents, with minimal impact on neighborhood and unit quality. A second policy that indexes rent ceilings to neighborhood rents leads voucher holders to move into higher quality neighborhoods with lower crime, poverty, and unemployment.

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. These gaps persist despite a strong migratory response, and we attribute this to high persistence in labor demand shocks. These trends generate a "race" between local employment and population: Population always lags behind employment, yielding persistent deviations in employment rates. Methodologically, we argue the employment rate can serve as a sufficient statistic for local well-being; and we model population and employment dynamics using an error correction mechanism, which explicitly allows for disequilibrium.

This paper evaluates an explanation for the unionization of collective bargaining: unions help workers win strikes. I test this hypothesis with data from the U.S. in the early 1880s, when unorganized workers were still responsible for two fifths of all strike activity. Because organized workers might attempt riskier confrontations than the unorganized, I construct an instrument for union intervention in a strike from the location of the assemblies of the Knights of Labor. I estimate that unions raised strikers' success rate by 31 percentage points from a baseline of 40 percent; moreover, they decreased the incidence of job loss by 22 percentage points from a baseline of 56 percent. Although unions increased the probability that employers acceded to strikers' demands, I find no effect on the size of those concessions.

Objectives: To identify diverse pathways to linguistic isolation (LI) and explain the differences in LI for older immigrants from different countries. Method: A demographic decomposition of LI was applied to 18 largest origin subgroups of foreign-born, ages 65 and older, in the 2010–2014 American Community Survey data. Results: LI varied from 12% for older Indians to 68% for older Ukrainians. Decomposition analysis identified 3 components: (a) Limited English proficiency (LEP); (b) Solitary living; and (c) Limited English of co-resident others. The relative contribution of components differed by country of origin, pointing to different pathways to LI. Older Mexicans have the highest LEP, but moderate LI due to infrequent solitary living and the English proficiency of co-resident others. Many Chinese and Vietnamese older adults are LI because they live with other LEP adults. Older Europeans’ common pathway to LI is solitary living. Discussion: Components of LI in ethnic communities can inform communication strategies for older LEP lacking access to critical information.

Purpose To examine the reported mental health outcomes of adolescent foreign-born non-citizens and adolescent foreign-born U.S. citizens compared to adolescent U.S.-born citizens. Methods Using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in the National Health Interview Survey, we compared mental health status of U.S.-born adolescent citizens to foreign-born citizens and non-citizens in the years 2010–2015, and examined how differences in emotional difficulty changed based on time spent in the U.S. Results Results suggest that non-citizen adolescents experience better mental health outcomes than U.S.-born citizens. However, the mental health status of foreign-born citizens is indistinguishable from that of the U.S.-born, after accounting for basic socio-demographic characteristics. The prevalence of emotional difficulty experienced by immigrant adolescents increased with a family’s duration in the U.S. Conclusion Our findings are consistent with a broader health advantage for the foreign-born, but we present new evidence that the mental health advantage of foreign-born adolescents exists only for non-citizens.

We develop a model of migration in the face of geographic information asymmetries. Firms from a given city observe whether or not a local worker is a member of a disadvantaged local community, a negative indicator of productivity, but do not have this information for migrants to this city. With this knowledge, workers must decide whether to migrate and obscure information about their community of origin. Our model generates results consistent with recent trends in intergenerational mobility and internal migration as well as new predictions about the relationship between migrant outcomes and income segregation. We confirm these predictions using data from the U.S. census.

Greek immigration to the United States has witnessed a resurgence following Greece's 2008 recession and the ensuing crisis. While immigration from Greece declined toward the end of the twentieth century, there has been a significant increase in the number of Greeks arriving in the United States during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Greek immigrants to the United States have increased by nearly 11% between 2010 and 2015. This article's main objective is to provide a descriptive analysis of Greek immigrants migrating to the United States after 2010. Using up-to-date individual level data from the American Community Survey (ACS), this study examines recently arrived Greek immigrants' residential, socioeconomic, and family/household status background characteristics compared to longer-term Greek immigrants. The results reveal that recently arrived Greek immigrants have reached higher levels of education and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their longer-term counterparts. Recent Greek immigrant arriv-als' residential settlement patterns are also shown to be more geographically dispersed compared to their longer-term coethnics.

This paper uses linked establishment-firm-employee data to examine the relationship between the scientists and engineers proportion (SEP) of employment, and productivity and labor earnings. We show that: (1) most scientists and engineers in industry are employed in establishments producing goods or services, and do not perform research and development (R&D); (2) productivity is higher in manufacturing establishments with higher SEP, and increases with increases in SEP; (3) employee earnings are higher in manufacturing establishments with higher SEP, and increase substantially for employees who move to establishments with higher SEP, but only modestly for employees within an establishment when SEP increases in the establishment. The results suggest that the work of scientists and engineers in goods and services producing establishments is an important pathway for increasing productivity and earnings, separate and distinct from the work of scientists and engineers who perform R&D.