Under coverture in the United States, a married woman relinquished control of property and wages to her husband. Many U.S. states passed acts between 1850 and 1920 that expanded a married womans right to her market earnings and to own separate property. The former were called married womens earnings acts (MWEAs) and the latter married womens property acts (MWPAs). Interest in the acts effects is growing. Prior literature examined how the acts affected outcomes such as women's wealth-holding and educational attainment. The acts' impact on womens nonmarital birth decisions remains unstudied, however. We postulate that the acts caused women to perceived greater benefits from having children within rather than outside of marriage. We thus expect passage of MWPAs and MWEAs to reduce the likelihood that single women are mothers of young children. We use probit regression to analyze individual data from the U.S. Census for the years 1860 to 1920. We find that the property acts reduced the likelihood that single women have young children. We also find that the de-coverture acts effects were stronger for literate women, U.S.-born women, in states with higher female labor force participation, and in more rural states, consistent with our predictions.

This paper shows that the significant switch of black workers from low- to semiskilled occupations after WWII in the U.S. is causally related to casualties sustained by each state and county during the war. Difference-in-differences regressions estimate that a one standard deviation increase in the casualty rate among semi-skilled whites increases blacks probability of being employed in semi-skilled manufacturing jobs by 7 p.p., and raises the share of blacks in semi-skilled occupations by 1.6 p.p. Using data from the Negro Political Participation Study of 1961 and instrumenting the change in the share of blacks in semi-skilled jobs from 1940 to 1950 with the casualty rate, IV regressions find a significant and positive impact of the skill upgrade of blacks on their social standing and political participation. Individuals living in counties with a stronger casualty induced skill upgrade of blacks have a higher probability for interracial friendships and interracial friendships formed at work, stronger preferences for integration over separation, as well as increased political participation by and reduced repercussions for political activity of blacks.

Previous work shows suicide rates increase during economic recessions, but little research has examined the extent to which the foreclosure crisisa unique aspect of the Great Recession-has contributed to disparities in rising suicide rates by race and sex. We develop and test two competing hypotheses regarding the association between foreclosures and race by sex specific suicide rates. We link foreclosure data (RealtyTrac) and suicide data (CDC) from 174 metropolitan areas from 2005 to 2010 (1044 MSA-year observations) and find that-net of time invariant unobserved between-metro area differences, national time trends, and time-varying confounders-a rise in the foreclosure rate is associated with a marginal increase in suicide, but this main effect masks considerable heterogeneity across groups. The association is particularly strong for white males, and weaker or non-existent for other race by sex groups.

Administrative data on the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for workers reveals that locations with more trade-induced displacements not only shed more of their existing jobs but also create fewer new jobs to absorb these losses. Across locations, one extra TAA trade displaced worker is associated with the employment falling by about two workers: the more trade displaces, the less reallocation takes place. This finding is robust to industry-mix import penetration at the commuting-zone level, suggesting a role for within-industry heterogeneity. A multi-location heterogeneous-firms trade model with variable markups arising from head-to-head foreign competition can endogenize such unequal reallocation across locations. In the medium run following an unexpected trade liberalization, employment and earnings collapse in the least productive locations through both increased trade-induced job losses and reduced job creation. Employment increases in the aggregate despite muted population mobility while inequality in earnings rises and prompts trade adjustment transfers across locations.

To support the Commission’s work, this report seeks to: Assess the area’s employment opportunities as they relate to the qualifications of African Americans with low to moderate incomes. Analyze how employment is related to the population decline of D.C.’s African American community. Identify the impact of the lack of affordable housing on the low- and moderate-income African American community in Washington, D.C. Propose feasible policies to improve the economic well-being of the city’s African American residents. The city must enact policies and support programs that ensure equal economic opportunities for its African American residents. Such steps are essential to properly honoring and building upon the invaluable contributions of African Americans to the culture, social fabric, and civic life of the nation’s capital.

Since 1989, significant mortgage finance innovation and federal policies with the intent of increasing homeownership participation particularly amongst minorities were implemented until the 2007 recession. This paper uses the Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze the lasting effectiveness of the mortgage finance innovations and federal policies on owner-occupancy rates leading up to and after the financial recession in 2007 until 2013. The results indicate that policy and macroeconomic factors offer temporary shifts in homeownership participation while household attribute changes have long lasting impact. Trends in the savings patterns of renters work as an effective measure for transitioning into homeownership. Shift-share analysis reinforces the idea that the model coefficients effectively capture household sentiment and macroeconomic conditions. Homeownership participation, especially amongst minorities, improved in 2013 relative to 1989 but the homeownership gap between minorities and white households has grown.

States and localities have rapidly expanded their provision of and participation in full-day kindergarten over the past few decades. This study explores the effect of those full-day kindergarten expansions on academic achievement and provides the first evidence on how these policy changes impact school system performance. Using variation across states and over time in full-day kindergarten, I investigate the impact of expansions on subsequent student achievement, in the third through eighth grades, and on Hispanic-white and black-white test score gaps. Full-day kindergarten contributes to improved overall academic performance in both reading and math in the later grades, but may in fact exacerbate achievement gaps, particularly for black students.

We examine the causal effect of slavery on the formation of African American hu- man capital by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by emancipation. After the end of the Civil War, African Americans of all ages became free for reasons unrelated to their age, which can be seen as their having been exogenously assigned periods of enslavement of different durations. Using linked census data from 1870-1930 to explore the multigenerational effect of slavery, we find that the causal effect of one’s grandfather spending an additional year as a slave reduces the probability of being literate and of being in school by roughly half a percentage point.

Almost all recent literature on Medicaid and labor supply has used Affordable Care Act (ACA)- induced Medicaid eligibility expansions in various states as natural experiments. Estimated effects on employment and earnings differ widely due to differences in the scope of eligibility expansion across states and are potentially subject to biases due to policy endogeneity. Using a Regression Kink Design (RKD) framework, this paper takes a uniquely different approach to the identification of the effect of Medicaid generosity on household income. Both state-level data and March CPS data from 1980–2013 suggest that generous federal funding of state-level Medicaid costs has a negative effect on household income. The negative impact of Medicaid generosity on household income is more pronounced at the lower end of the household income distribution and on the income and earnings of female heads.

This dissertation explores the impact of policy and economic conditions on the current economic crises of crime, substance abuse, and financial exclusion faced domestically and abroad. Although these issues span the income distribution, impoverished regions are disproportionately affected by the highest rates of risky behaviors such as drug abuse and crime. The ability for public policy makers to affect large populations of at-risk individuals can be difficult; oftentimes, these groups operate outside of the public sphere and large-scale interventions can miss the mark. In my first substantive chapter, I investigate the efficacy of state-wide insurance reform aimed at reducing drug dependency by requiring insurance providers to cover rehabilitation and detoxification. Utilizing state-level panel data in a generalized differences-in-differences framework, I find that states which enact laws expanding insurance coverage are successful at encouraging treatments for some types of conditions but are limited in their ability to reach individuals struggling with opiate addiction and, correspondingly, have little impact on deterring accidental overdose deaths. In my second substantive chapter, I question the assumptions made in previous empirical work regarding the relationship between economic conditions and crime. Existing literature finds that property crime rates are positively correlated with the unemployment rate. In this paper, I investigate whether this relationship is evolving over iv time and find that the relationship between property crime rates and unemployment has diminished toward zero. Moreover, I find evidence that there is a non-zero relationship between unemployment and violent crimes during certain periods in time. In my last substantive chapter, we develop a theoretical model illustrating the basic trade-offs in the functioning of financial institutions (Village and Savings Loan Associations) designed to provide financial inclusion to under-served populations in developing countries. We develop a theoretical model which suggests that these groups lack a mechanism to ensure equilibrium in the supply and demand for funds. We test the predictions of this model using experimental data from newly formed groups in Uganda and find that groups operate with excess demand for loans but are often able to generate a high return on savings

In the past three decades, American central city neighborhoods have experienced an influx of high-income, highly skilled residents and an exodus of low-income, low-skilled residents. This gentrification of central city neighborhoods has reversed decades of decline in urban centers. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that an important driving force behind gentrification is the rise in the value of highly skilled workers' time. To perform the test, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model of neighborhood choice. In the model, workers choose the neighborhood in which they live based on their value of time, commute times, rents, and amenities. I measure the differential growth in the value of time for each occupation by analyzing changes in the cross-sectional relationship between residual earnings and hours worked in Census data. My empirical strategy exploits the variation in the spatial distribution of jobs in different occupations. This allows me to separate the demand for shorter commute times from the demand for local amenities. I find that workers in occupations that experience greater growth in the value of time are more likely to locate in neighborhoods with shorter commute times. The initial shock to demand for central city housing by high-skilled workers creates endogenous amenity improvement in the affected neighborhoods, which furthers gentrification because additional high-skilled workers are attracted by the improved amenities. While the estimates of my model indicate that changes in the value of time are likely an important driving force behind gentrification, the effects are substantially magnified by endogenous amenity improvement. The estimates also imply that the welfare gap between high- and low-skilled workers (which takes into account not just earnings but also the value of time, rents, and amenities) has grown more than the earnings gap between high- and low-skilled workers.

This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of people and places. The essays share a common goal of understanding the long-run consequences of economic and social processes on people, places, and the economy. The essays also share a common approach of combining newly available administrative data with transparent empirical methodologies. The first chapter paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on educational attainment and income. Using confidential Census data linked to county of birth, I relate cross-county variation in the severity of the recession to differences in long-run outcomes between individuals who were younger versus older when the recession began. Individuals who were born in counties with a more severe recession and were children or adolescents during the recession are less likely to obtain a college degree and, as adults, earn less income. My estimates, combined with the large number of potentially affected individuals, suggest that the 1980-1982 recession could depress economic output today. Every U.S. recession since 1973 resembles the 1980-1982 recession in persistently decreasing earnings per capita in negatively affected counties, which suggests that other recessions might also have significant long-run effects. The second chapter, with Evan Taylor, examines the role of social interactions in location decisions. We study over one million long-run location decisions made during two landmark migration episodes by African Americans born in the U.S. South and whites born in the Great Plains. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of social interactions for each receiving and sending location. Social interactions strongly influenced the location decisions of black migrants, but were less important for white migrants. Social interactions were particularly important in providing African American migrants with information about attractive employment opportunities and played a larger role in less costly moves. The third chapter, also with Evan Taylor, estimates the effect of social connectedness on crime across U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We use a new source of variation in social connectedness stemming from social interactions in the migration of millions of African Americans out of the South. Cities with higher social connectedness had considerably fewer murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and larcenies, with a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness reducing the murder rate by 14 percent. As predicted by a simple economic model, effects on city-level crime rates are stronger in cities with a higher African American population share.

A decrease in the supply of immigrants can only increase native wages if immigrants and natives are substitutes for one another; in other words, if they compete for the same jobs. According to the types of his policies, President Trump appears to believe that natives and immigrants compete for both low-skilled and high-skilled jobs. Low-skilled native workers would be helped by the wall as they would face less competition from illegal immigrants. High-skilled workers would face less competition from immigrants who arrive on H-1B visas and who work in high technology jobs.An alternative view supported by much of the academic literature is that natives and immigrants largely take different types of jobs, potentially because they have different comparative advantages, even among less educated workers. If so, then the native wage response to a reduced supply of immigrant workers would not be large if it existed at all. It is not difficult to find examples of occupations that native workers do not enter, such as seasonal farm labor (Clemens 2013). However, those occupations could simply be isolated examples or potentially anecdotal.

Financial resources to control the tsetse fly, the primary vector of African trypanosomiasis, have declined since the 1970s. This decrease in funding is mainly due to the dissatisfaction of governments and development partners with the limited benefits from large investments in previous control campaigns. This study, therefore, conducts a cost–benefit balance to target the beneficial tsetse control areas regarding the return on investment in mainland Tanzania. The spatiotemporal distribution of the tsetse fly is simulated from 2003 to 2013 via the tsetse ecological distribution model. The tsetse control costs are calculated based on the seasonally constrained fly distribution, termed control reservoirs. With benefits measured as the drop in potential exposure, beneficial control areas are defined as high residential population areas with frequent presence of the tsetse fly; that is, those places with over 52 percent tsetse presence and population densities over 1,000 per square kilometer. The results show a high concentration of beneficial control areas around Lake Victoria, some periurban areas, and national parks. This study improves the cost–benefit equation for future broad tsetse control campaigns and disease management.

We study the effects of the introduction of oral contraception (The Pill) on the household bargaining position of women. We exploit the variation in state obscenity laws based on the Comstock Act of 1879 that limited the availability of the Pill in a set of states. These bans on the sales of the Pill were repealed in 1965 by the Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut which allowed married women to have access to the Pill nationwide. We use data from the Consumer Expenditures Survey in 1960 and 1972, and we consider shares of income spent on various goods as proxies for a womans bargaining power. Across a wide variety of goods, we find evidence that access to oral contraception reduced married womens bargaining power in the household. For example, in states with a ban on contraception, food away spending shares, a common proxy for womens bargaining power, are 0.5 percentage points higher than in states without a ban, an approximately 12.5% increase from the mean share in 1972. Similar effects, consistent with reduced female bargaining power, are present for total food, tobacco, and mens clothing. In 1972, the Supreme Court in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird extended the right to use contraception to all women, married or unmarried. Using the 1980 CEX, we find no evidence that this decision reversed these effects and increased womens bargaining power as predicted by the model of Chiappori and Oreffice (2008).

Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High-profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with calls for dramatic changes in how police agencies operate. However, little systematic research exists to answer questions about which policies should be ended or put in place to reduce these deaths. The authors leverage a large data set of gun deaths by police officers in the United States, combined with agency-level policy data and community demographic data, to examine whether certain policies are associated with lower or higher rates of officer-involved gun deaths. Findings show that one policythe requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fireis associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.

In this article, I show that within a U.S. city there is a significant effect of a permanent shock to employment in the tradable sector on employment in the non-tradable sector. I find that each additional job in the tradable sector will result in between 1.6 and 1.7 new jobs in the non-tradable sector. This result is robust to the specification of sector growth in the regression model. When I split the tradable sector into high-and low-wage workers, I find a larger multiplier of 2.0-2.3 for high-wage workers and no significant multiplier for low-wage workers.

Using micro-data from the Current Population Survey, I analyze the demographics of the involuntary part-time employed and variation in the involuntary part-time employment rate over the business cycle. During the Great Recession, the involuntary part-time employment rate more than doubled from under 2% to over 4%, an increase that dwarfs any changes in the involuntary part-time employment rate over the previous 20 years. To understand the causes of the increase in involuntary part-time employment during the Great Recession, I model the labor force as a discrete-time Markov chain and present a novel method that decomposes changes in the involuntary part-time employment rate into changes in the underlying transition probabilities of individuals across labor force states. This method allows me to construct counter-factual involuntary part-time employment rates and measure the relative contribution of labor market flows to observed changes in the involuntary part-time employment rate. I find that two-thirds of the increase in the involuntary part-time employment rate during the Great Recession is due to workers entering involuntary part-time employment from other labor force states.

In the work, a modification of the method for solving the task of providing data group anonymity is proposed, which implies automated solution selection without expert participation. Modification lies in identifying solutions to the task, in which outliers are detected automatically and don’t match the outliers in the initial distribution of the information about the group of respondents. Thus, automating the solution selection improves data group anonymization efficiency by reducing the time necessary for their analysis for masking sensitive features of the distribution. Testing the developed modification is done by solving the task of masking regional distribution of military personnel in the state of New York. As a result of solving the corresponding group anonymization task, 1,000 solutions were obtained. It is established that only 24 out of 1,000 solutions, or 2.4 % of the total number, are feasible, i. e. the ones in which all the outliers are masked. Automated selection of such a small number of solutions is significantly faster than the manual approach, which speaks in favor of the proposed modification for improving data group anonymization efficiency.