“The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and Reform in Twentieth-Century Chicago” is a political history of urban policing that examines the integral role of crime control in the governance of modern American cities. It does so through a case study of policing and reform in Chicago from the interwar decades through the post-World War II years, a period that saw massive changes including African American migration, immigration, industrialization, and labor unrest. Crime control served as the central political proxy through which city leaders, reformers, and law enforcement officers attempted to achieve urban order, and in so doing, constructed modern social and racial hierarchies. These officials and reformers contributed to the construction of the coercive state, a state apparatus that prioritized social order as the primary mode through which to express state legitimacy and exercise state power. In the context of earlytwentieth-century Chicago, coercive state strategies worked in tandem with Progressive reformers and anti-crime activists to establish and reinforce spatial boundaries and to reify and redefine social hierarchies. Local police discretion represented the primary coercive state tool for addressing urban disorder, as well as one of the most intransigent and opaque modes of state power, especially in the service of defining and reinforcing racial hierarchy. The immediate, discretionary interactions between police and city residents served as one of the primary sites of racial formation in these decades, and elicited investigation, critique, and proposals for reform from myriad urban communities, other state institutions, and municipal reform organizations. Policing, therefore, represented the very intersection of coercive state power, municipal politics, racialization, and efforts for reform.

The relationship between energy access and deforestation in Ghana is examined through this exploratory multivariate analysis. Variables of electrification rate, wood use as cooking fuel, built-up area, population density, cropland area, and education are used to understand the relative influence of energy access on deforestation. This research uses RStudio, GeoDa and SPSS software to perform statistical processes: enter and stepwise multivariate linear regression, cluster analysis, and Bivariate Local Indicators of Spatial Association (BiLISA). The methods conducted at the sub-national scale improve upon on recent research that found wood use as cooking fuel to be a significant driver of deforestation that is being minimized by increasing access to electricity. This research conversely reveals that energy access is in fact influencing an increase in deforestation in Ghana.

This report documents the methodology and results of an analysis of the electric end-use energy efficiency potential in the U.S. single-family detached housing stock. Technical and economic potential estimates inform the role that residential energy efficiency plays in addressing the objectives of reliable, affordable, and clean electricity for residential end uses. The analysis results identify priorities for residential electric energy efficiency initiatives at national, regional, state, and local levels. Technical potential is the theoretical potential savings resulting from energy efficiency upgrades using available technology (Figure ES-1). Economic potential can be defined in different ways; this report defines it as the subset of technical potential for upgrades that meet cost-effectiveness . . .

This is the American story. A wave of immigrants arrives in the U.S. Perhaps they're escaping religious or political persecution. Perhaps a drought or famine has driven them from their homes. Perhaps they simply want to try their luck in the land of opportunity. They face new challenges in America. Often they arrive with few resources. And everything about them sets them apart—their religions, their languages, their cultures, their foods, their appearances. They are not always welcomed. They frequently face discrimination in housing, jobs, education, and more. But over time, they plant their roots in American soil. They become part of the tapestry that is America. And they thrive.

We examine the effect of the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the tasks that workers perform in their jobs, workers’ occupational choices, and the wages that workers of different skill levels earn. Using the text from help wanted ads published between 1960 and 2000, we construct a data set that measures the adoption of 40 ICTs. We find that new technologies are associated with an increase in nonroutine analytic tasks, and a decrease in nonroutine interactive, routine cognitive, and manual tasks. We embed these interactions in a quantitative model of worker sorting across occupations and technology adoption, and evaluate the impact of the arrival of ICTs on the aggregate demand for worker-performed tasks and on earnings inequality. Through the lens of the model, the arrival of ICTs generates a large shift away from routine tasks, and, consequently, an increase in inequality since (i) high wage workers tend to adopt ICTs and (ii) relative to high wage workers, low wage workers have a comparative advantage in performing routine tasks.

Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, referred to as the Fair Housing Act (FHA), gave HUD two main mandates: (1) to stamp out illegal discrimination in real estate transactions (including the rental, purchase, or financing of housing) and (2) to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH). Further acts, including the equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 reinforced these mandates, further prohibiting discrimination in issuing mortgages and against minority neighborhoods.

Este trabajo eval´ua c´omo una ca´ıda en los costos del divorcio altera las decisiones de educaci´on y edad de matrimonio. Concretamente, me concentro en Estados Unidos durante el siglo XX y busco c´omo la disminuci´on de los per´ıodos m´ınimos establecidos por cada estado para residir en ´el y para declarar deserci´on matrimonial determinan las decisiones de cu´antos a˜nos educarse y a qu´e edad casarse. Los resultados indican que a menores costos de divorcio los individuos se casan m´as tarde, hay un aumento en el nivel educativo y una disminuci´on en la brecha educacional de los esposos. Los resultados var´ıan seg´un cohorte y g´enero. Estos resultados no son consistentes con lo que propone el modelo te´orico en un escenario pareto-´optimo, lo que sugiere la no pareto-optimalidad de las decisiones.

Research on asbestos exposure in Libby, MT, has focused on occupational exposure in vermiculite mining and processing, but less attention has been paid to asbestos-related mortality among community members without vermiculite mining occupational history. Our study reports on asbestos-related mortality in Libby over 33 years (19792011) while controlling for occupational exposure. We calculated sex-specific 33-year standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) for Libby residents who died from 1979 to 2011 with an asbestos-related cause of death. Decedent address at time of death was geocoded to confirm inclusion in the Libby County Division. We controlled for past W.R. Grace employment by including and then removing them from the SMR analysis. Six hundred and ninety-four decedents were identified as having at least one asbestos-related cause of death and residing in our study area boundary. Statistically significant (P<0.05) 33-year SMRs, both before and after controlling for W.R. Grace employment, were found for: male and female non-malignant respiratory diseases, female COPD, and asbestosis for both sexes combined. Eighty-five men and two women were matched to employment records. We observed elevated asbestos-related mortality rates among males and females. SMR results for asbestosis were high for both sexes, even after controlling for past W.R. Grace employment. These results suggest that the general population may be experiencing asbestos-related effects, not just former vermiculite workers. Additional research is needed to determine whether SMRs remain elevated after controlling for secondary exposure, such as living with vermiculite workers.

This report finds that public school teachers in Illinois are highly skilled and are compensated accordingly through competitive salaries. Properly understanding teacher pay is critical to developing an efficient teacher compensation structure.

An extensive literature has studied the spatial sorting of workers by skill since the 1980s. This paper extends the existing literature by using Census microdata to show that geographic sorting is also nativity-biased, and that immigrant workers sort into cities with higher wages and inelastic housing supplies. I use a spatial equilibrium model to predict worker sorting across housing supply elasticity in response to changes in local labor demand. I find that local labor demand shocks are a strong predictor of the observed skill- and nativity-biased sorting when the elasticity of migration for immigrants is greater than for natives.

Using General William Sherman's 1864-65 military march through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina during the American Civil War, this paper studies the eect of capital destruction on short- and long-run local economic activity, and the role of nancial markets in the recovery process. We match an 1865 US War Department map of Sherman's march to county level demographic, agricultural, and manufacturing data from 1850-1920 US Censuses. We show that the capital destruction induced by the March led to a large contraction in agricultural investment, farming asset prices, and manufacturing activity. Elements of the decline in agriculture persisted through 1920. Using information on local banks and access to credit, we argue that the underdevelopment of nancial markets played a role in weakening the recovery.

Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF; "welfare"), the program created by the 1996 welfare reform law, economic relief for low-income families is no longer an entitlement. Instead, it is time-limited and tied to work requirements. State governments also have both formal and informal incentives to keep traditional cash assistance caseloads low. Welfare reform, by linking welfare participation to the low-wage labor market, has been seen by some commentators as emblematic of a larger shift in public policy toward market-based solutions to social problems and the use of social policy to service markets ("neoliberalism"). In this paper, I test the logic underlying this market-based paradigm—that restricted access to cash benefits improves the well-being of low-income households by incentivizing labor market participation. Using quantitative models of the relationship between household food insecurity and state cash assistance coverage from 2001 to 2013, I find that the decline in the accessibility of traditional welfare is associated with an increased risk of material hardship in low-income households with children, particularly those headed by a single female. I generally fail to find evidence that changes in welfare coverage are associated with changes in the probability of a household having an employed adult present, however. In concert, these findings call into question the logic of welfare reform specifically and the blanket implementation of market-based solutions to social problems generally.

In this dissertation, I present three distinct essays in health and public economics. In chapter 2, using Vital Statistics data from National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and a Difference in Difference methodology, I investigate the impact of the Paid Family Leave (PFL) of California on birth delay, infant health, and labor market outcomes of mothers after first childbirth. I find that PFL of California reduces birth delay by encouraging women to have their first child earlier. Results are more pronounced for older women who are over the age of 35. This policy also improves infant health by reducing incidence of low birth weight (<2500 grams), premature (<37 weeks of gestation), and cesarean-born infants of older mothers. Furthermore, results show that PFL policy improves labor market attachment by increasing the likelihood of employment after childbirth for college educated women who are more likely to exit the labor force after childbirth. Chapter 3, investigates the impact of the biggest oil spill in the U.S. history in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 on air quality and health outcomes of newborns. Using Vital Statistics data from National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), air quality data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a Difference in Difference methodology, I find that oil spill of 2010 reduces air quality and increases the incidence of low birth weight and premature newborns. Heterogeneity effects show higher adverse health impacts for black mothers, less educated mothers, unmarried, and mothers less than 20 years old. Chapter 4 examines whether the party affiliation of governors (Democrat or Republican) has an impact on the allocation of state expenditures. Exploiting gubernatorial election results from 1960 to 2012 and a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), we find that Democratic governors allocate a larger share of their budget to health/hospitals and education sectors. We find no significant impact of the political party of governors on total spending, only on the allocation of funds. The results are robust to a wide range of controls and model specifications.

In demographic datasets, researchers frequently want to identify how members of a household are related. In 1995, IPUMS constructed family interrelationship variables indicating the line numbers (or "location") of each person's co-resident parents and spouse. These variables enabled researchers to examine household and family structure in a new way, including attaching the characteristics of a persons spouse or parents as new variables. However, the original IPUMS family interrelationship variables have become outdated because of changing family structure and changes in how families are enumerated in datasets. In this study, develop a new method of estimating parental and spousal relationships using data on fertility patterns and family interrelationships. The improved method includes cohabiting and same-sex couples and is comparable across all modern US IPUMS data projects. A detailed variable indicates how the relationship was inferred and the level of ambiguity around that inference. The new IPUMS family interrelationship variables are very accurate, matching self-reported spouse/partner location for 99.99% and parent location for over 99.00% of respondents. Among those identified as same-sex couples, we match self-reported spouse/partner location for 100% of respondents, 87.57% of whom self-identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. We further demonstrate that the new family interrelationship variables closely track temporal variation in teenage fertility.

In a seminal paper, Basmann (1985) introduced a serial correlation structure based on an intertemporal adjustment mechanism. Basmann’s 1985 paper of course was built on his previous pioneering work on estimation and identifiability in structural equations leading to 2SLS (Basmann, 1957, 1960). In this paper, we follow a similar path. We derive a non-standard unit root serial correlation formulation for intertemporal adjustments in the labor force participation rate. This leads to a tractable three-error component model, which in contrast to other models embeds heterogeneity into the error structure. Unlike in the typical i.i.d. three-error component two-tier stochastic frontier model, our equation’s error components are independent but not identically distributed. This leads to a complex nonlinear likelihood function requiring identification through a two-step estimation procedure, which we estimate using Current Population Survey (CPS) data. By transforming the basic equation linking labor force participation to the working age population, this paper devises a new method which can be used to identify labor market joiners and leavers. The method’s advantage is its parsimonious data requirements, especially alleviating the need for survey based longitudinal data.

We examine the empirical applicability of differential institutional engagement in explaining the youth age structure effect on neighborhood homicide. Using the National Neighborhood Crime Study and Census data, we conduct a multilevel spatial analysis of homicides in 8,307 census tracts. We find support for three indicators of differential institutional engagement (disengaged youth, educational engagement, employment engagement). An additional dimension of institutional engagement (familial engagement) operates in the expected direction but is not statistically significant. We argue that previous cross-sectional studies reporting a null or negative relationship between percentage of young and homicide are due to omitting measures of institutional youth (dis)engagement.

This paper examines how a reduction in the cost of college for undocumented students affects college enrollment and adolescent risky behaviors. Prior to 2001, undocumented students in the United States faced high out-of-state tuition costs at public colleges and universities. From 2001 to 2014, twenty-one states passed in-state tuition policies, reducing the average cost of college by more than half for these students. To the extent that teens are forward-looking and aware that lower tuition increases the likelihood of attending college, this price reduction should decrease the incidence of risky behavior during adolescence among the undocumented. Exploiting the variation in timing of in-state tuition policies across states and using Mexican foreign-born non-citizenship as a proxy for undocumented status, I find that these policies increase college enrollment by about 1.2 percentage points (12% of the sample mean), decrease high school dropout incidence by about 5 percentage points for female youth (27% of the sample mean), and decrease the likelihood of first birth before age 20 by 2 percentage points (9% of the sample mean).

We examine racial disparities in key labor market outcomes for men and women over the past four decades, with a special emphasis on their evolution over the business cycle. Blacks have substantially higher and more cyclical unemployment rates than whites, and observable characteristics can explain very little of this differential, which is importantly driven by a comparatively higher risk of job loss. In contrast, the Hispanic-white unemployment rate gap is comparatively small and is largely explained by lower educational attainment of (mostly foreign-born) Hispanics. Regarding labor force participation, the remarkably low participation rate of black men is largely unexplained by observables, is mostly driven by high labor force exit rates from employment, and has shown little improvement over the last 40 years. Furthermore, even among those who work, blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to work part-time schedules despite wanting to work additional hours, and the racial gaps in this involuntary part-time employment are large even after controlling for observable characteristics. Our findings also suggest that the robust recovery of the labor market in the last few years has contributed significantly to reducing the gaps that had widened dramatically as a result of the Great Recession; however, the disparities remain substantial.

This paper examines labor reallocation across industries triggered by a sectoral technology shock. Job destruction in the manufacturing industry during the 2001 and 2008 recessions reflected progress in labor-saving production technology, rather than cyclical fluctuation. The shock directly implied a slow recovery in aggregate employment and provoked massive labor reallocation. By using CPS data, I show that technologically unemployed workers initiated a chain of one-step downward transitions on a submarket ladder sorted by wage. Many unemployed workers from the manufacturing industry moved to construction, construction workers moved to retail trade, and retail trade workers moved to the food service industry. In addition, the unemployment rate from each industry sequentially reached its peak and recovery points like a domino chain. The observed labor reallocation patterns are more consistent with a model with vertical sorting and search friction. I extend Shimer and Smith’s (2000) model to illustrate that a recession can accelerate technology adoption under a capital adjustment cost, which results in lower outside options of jobless workers and pickier reservation levels for low-type recruiting firms. Although technological progress gives benefits to the entire economy in the long run, the model predicts that the sectoral shock ripples through the bottom half of labor market in the short run. Middle unemployed workers should lower their job market standard, and bottom unemployed workers end up experiencing longer unemployment duration, until total employment recovers.

Chapter 1: The Impact of College Education on Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects. With a newly constructed dataset that links the 2000 U.S. Census long-form to Social Security Administration records, I estimate the effect of college education on mortality. Using the proximity to college from birthplace as an instrument, I estimate the marginal treatment effect (MTE) of college education on 10-year mortality rate for adults aged 60-99 in the United States from 2000- 2010. The OLS results show a strong association between college education and lower mortality, consistent with the previous findings in the literature. The MTE results show that individuals that have unobserved characteristics that make them least likely to attend college have the largest effects of education in reducing mortality. This suggests that the individuals who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of health are those do not attend college. The positive effects on reducing mortality are solely concentrated among men. For women, I find no evidence of an effect of education on old-age mortality. The MTE results, combined with evidence from the literature, also provide suggestive evidence that income is not the mechanism through which education reduces mortality for men. Chapter 2: Social Interactions and Location Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Mass Migration. (with Bryan Stuart) This paper estimates the strength through which social interactions influenced location decisions during two large scale migrations in the United States during early to mid 1900s. We examine the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the Southern United States and the Dust Bowl Migration of whites out of the Midwestern U.S. Using long-run data on migration patterns from the Social Security NUMIDENT file linked to Medicare Part B records for individuals born 1916- 1936, we estimate the effect of social interactions on influencing where individuals decided to migrate. We find that social interactions were very important for blacks during the Great Migration in affecting location decisions. Our results suggest that 47-69 percent of blacks chose their destination city in the North because of influence from other people that were from their hometown. For whites, we estimate much smaller effects; only 14-24 percent of whites chose their destination city because of social interactions. For blacks, social interactions played a large role in influencing migration to destinations with large shares of manufacturing employment, suggesting the importance of access to information and labor demand conditions in facilitating social influence. Chapter 3: The Effect of Social Migration on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration. (with Bryan Stuart) Using results from the second chapter of the dissertation, which shows that social interactions were very influential in guiding migration patterns during the Great Migration, this paper estimates the effect these patterns had on crime in U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We document the large variations in the connectedness of migrants from the South that moved to different Northern cities. For example, some cities received almost one-third of their migrants from only one origin town in the South, where other comparable cities received no more than 3% of migrants from any one place. We find that, controlling for other economic characteristics, cities which received more connected migrants had lower crime rates from 1970-2000, which suggests an important role of social connectedness on crime during these periods. The results are largely driven by cities with a high population share of African Americans, and through crime increases among black juveniles. Cities that had more connected migrants had smaller increases in crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s.