The recent upward trend in the adult obesity rate is attributable to an energy imbalance, where people consume more calories than they expend. Between 1970 and 2004, Americans increased their daily consumption by an average of 300–500 calories, and the quality of diets changed. The typical American diet today consists of foods and beverages with a greater degree of processing, including more calories consumed from restaurants, sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), and ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat foods. Meanwhile, although physical activity in leisure has increased slightly, physical activity in work, housework, and travel has declined steadily. The complex interaction between diet composition, eating and physical activity behaviors, and human physiology makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact mechanism through which prevalence of obesity has increased.

This paper studies the effects of changes in risk in an equilibrium matching framework with pre-match investment. A prominent economic application is to labor markets where workers can invest in education before matching with firms: at the investment stage, workers are uncertain about how skilled they will turn out and also about the prevailing state of the market at the time of employment. We provide conditions on primitives – on the match output function and risk attitudes – for stochastically better or more variable risks to induce more investment, and show also how this affects equilibrium matching and wages. We then illustrate the usefulness of our framework by studying three economic applications, namely, how changes in (i) risk stemming from skill biased technological change, (ii) wage uncertainty, or (iii) college completion risk affect investment choices and labor market outcomes. For each of them, we provide suggestive evidence from the US that is in line with the predictions of our model.

Michigan has long been home to thousands of immigrants from all over the world. Immigrants in Michigan are neighbors, students, workers and Main Street business owners. They help our state maintain a strong, modern economy and they enrich our communities.

We estimate the effect of grant aid on poor college students' attainment and earnings using student-level administrative data from four-year public colleges in Texas. To identify these effects, we exploit a discontinuity in grant generosity as a function of family income. Eligibility for the maximum Pell Grant significantly increases degree receipt and earnings beginning four years after entry. Within ten years, imputed taxes on eligible students' earnings gains fully recoup total government expenditures generated by initial eligibility. To clarify how these estimates relate to social welfare, we develop a general theoretical model and derive sufficient statistics for the welfare implications of changes in the price of college. Whether additional grant aid increases welfare depends on (1) net externalities from recipients' behavioral responses and (2) a direct effect of mitigating credit constraints or other frictions that inflate students' in-school marginal utility. Calibrating our model using nationally representative consumption data suggests that increasing grant aid for the average college student by $1 could generate negative externalities as high as $0.50 and still improve welfare. Applying our welfare formula and estimated direct effects to our setting and others suggests considerable welfare gains from grants that target low-income students.

Using nationally representative data from nine African countries, we document sectoral employment trends and consider the evolving role of agriculture in Africa’s economic transformation process. We highlight three key findings: a general decline in farming’s share of employment over the past decade; a strong relationship between lagged farm productivity growth and the speed at which the share of the labor force in farming declines; and the moderate potential for agro-processing or other stages of the food system to absorb youth into gainful employment in the coming years. While agro-processing is growing rapidly in percentage terms, its share of overall employment is quite low and hence will not generate nearly as many new jobs as farming. For these reasons, strategies that effectively raise the returns to labor in farming will be critical to fostering successful economic transformation.

Anglers make decisions that have consequences for the fish stocks, ecosystems, and socio-economics with which they interact. Smartphone angling applications (apps), are a potentially less expensive and more comprehensive data source than conventional methods, but their utility has not been evaluated. In this study, I compared results from app and aerial creel survey data from Ontario, Canada. A standard major axis regression found low agreement between effort estimates (n=111, R2=0.20, p=8.2458e-07) and app-based effort was poorly explained by lake characteristics in a random forest analysis (7.66% vs. 29.52% for creels). Explained variation improved when I included more lakes, but province-wide effort prediction did not agree with those based on creel data. I attribute these inconsistent results to low app data volumes and inherent differences between collection and analyses. Until more app data are generated, I recommend using app data to supplement conventional surveys and gain novel insights into angler behavior.

Working-age grandparents supply large amounts of child care, an observation that raises the question of how having grandchildren affects grandparents’ own labor supply. Exploiting the unique genealogical design of the PSID and the random variation in the timing when the parents of first-born boys and girls become grandparents, we estimate a structural labor supply model and find a negative effect on employed grandmother’s hours of work of about 30% that is concentrated near the bottom of the hours distribution, i.e., among women less attached to the labor market. Implications for the evaluation of child care and parental leave policies are discussed.

Why are the Twin Cities so segregated? The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area is known for its progressive politics and forward-thinking approach to regional planning, but these features have not prevented the formation of some of the nation’s widest racial disparities and the nation’s worst segregation in a predominantly white area. On measures of educational and residential integration, the Twin Cities region has rapidly diverged from other regions with similar demographics, such as Portland or Seattle. Since the start of the twenty-first century, the number of severely segregated schools in the Twin Cities area has increased more than seven-fold; the population of segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods has tripled. The concentration of black families in low-income areas has grown for over a decade; in Portland and Seattle, it has declined. In 2010, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region had eighty-three schools made up of ninety percent nonwhite students; Portland had two. The following article explains this paradox. In doing so, it broadly describes the history and structure of two growing industry pressure groups within the Twin Cities political scene: the poverty housing industry (PHI) and the poverty education complex (PEC). It shows how these powerful special interests have worked with local, regional, and state government to preserve the segregated status quo and in the process have undermined school integration and sabotaged the nation’s most effective regional housing integration program. Finally, in what should serve as a call to action on civil rights, this article demonstrates how even moderate efforts to achieve racial integration could dramatically reduce regional segregation and the associated racial disparities.

During the period 1929-34 a campaign forcing the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans was carried out in the U.S. by states and local authorities. The claim of politicians at the time was that repatriations would reduce local unemployment and give jobs to Americans, alleviating the local effects of the Great Depression. This paper uses this episode to examine the consequences of Mexican repatriations on labor market outcomes of natives. Analyzing 893 cities using full count decennial Census data in the period 1930-40, we find that repatriation of Mexicans was associated with small decreases in native employment and increases in native unemployment. These results are robust to the inclusion of many controls. We then apply an instrumental variable strategy based on the differential size of Mexican communities in 1930, as well as a matching method, to estimate a causal "average treatment effect." Confirming the OLS regressions, the causal estimates do not support the claim that repatriations had any expansionary effects on native employment, but suggest instead that they had no effect on, or possibly depressed, their employment and wages.

While chattel Negro slavery in the United States ended in 1865, racial inequal- ity between the descendants of Negro slaves and other racial groups, particularly whites, persists. While explanations for the causes of this inequality are many, the extent to which it is a consequence of Negro slavery itself is an empirical question that is relatively underexplored. In this paper, with linked data on males and their fathers in the 1880 - 1930 US Census, we consider the extent to which slavery conditioned the economic mobility and status of males who had fathers born as slaves approximately 65 years after the emancipation of Negro Slaves. Our parameter estimates of the elasticity of son’s economic mobility and status with respect to their father’s slave status suggests that through 1930, being a black male descendant of a black male slave father mattered and was associated with lower economic mobility and status. We also estimate the decay rate associated with the intergenerational effect of slavery, and find that the chains of slavery are quite long in that as of 1930, it would take as long as 175 years, approximately, for the effects of slavery to disappear entirely. The implied counterfactuals of our estimates provide a context and basis for reparations, as they suggest that in the absence of slavery, the economic mobility and status of male slave descen- dants would have been higher. The reduction in economic status/mobility as a result of being a descendant of a male slave can be viewed as the “reparable” intergenerational harm of Negro chattel slavery in the US.

Arsenic concentrations from 20 450 domestic wells in the U.S. were used to develop a logistic regression model of the probability of having arsenic >10 μg/L ("high arsenic"), which is presented at the county, state, and national scales. Variables representing geologic sources, geochemical, hydrologic, and physical features were among the significant predictors of high arsenic. For U.S. Census blocks, the mean probability of arsenic >10 μg/L was multiplied by the population using domestic wells to estimate the potential high-arsenic domestic-well population. Approximately 44.1 M people in the U.S. use water from domestic wells. The population in the conterminous U.S. using water from domestic wells with predicted arsenic concentration >10 μg/L is 2.1 M people (95% CI is 1.5 to 2.9 M). Although areas of the U.S. were underrepresented with arsenic data, predictive variables available in national data sets were used to estimate high arsenic in unsampled areas. Additionally, by predicting to all of the conterminous U.S., we identify areas of high and low potential exposure in areas of limited arsenic data. These areas may be viewed as potential areas to investigate further or to compare to more detailed local information. Linking predictive modeling to private well use information nationally, despite the uncertainty, is beneficial for broad screening of the population at risk from elevated arsenic in drinking water from private wells.

Studies about the effects of native and immigrant intermarriage on the human capital of children generally ignore disparate impacts by gender, ethnicity, or other attributes. Using 2000 U.S. Census data, we compare the high school dropout rates of 16–17-year-old children of Asian intermarriages and intra-marriages. We study differences between Asian-father and Asian-mother only families, controlling for observable child, parental and residential characteristics, as well as unobservable selection into intermarriage. Despite the higher average education and income levels of intermarried families, the children of Asian-father-native-mother households have higher dropout rates compared to both Asian intra-married and Asian-mother-native-father households. Children of less-educated fathers do worse, relative to children of less-educated mothers, suggesting the importance of intergenerational paternal transmission of education. Racial self-identity is also important: Children identify as “non-Asian” more often when the mother is native, and their families may under-emphasize education bringing them closer to native levels.

Recent estimates that central cities are growing faster than their suburbs in the U.S. have captured the attention of both academics and the popular media. Many commentators have used these numbers to claim that internal migration trends in the U.S. have reached a turning point, in which migrants increasingly prefer urban residences to suburban locales. However, these assertions often rely on problematic definitions of city and suburb, and pay too little attention to demographic variations among migrants. This paper examines whether recent internal migrants in the U.S. are choosing closer-in destinations, drawing from microdata samples from the American Community Survey since 2005. During this period, there is an overall trend of migrants to the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. choosing to migrate closer to the metropolitan core. However, this trend varies significantly among major demographic groups; whereas younger, single, educated, and white-collar migrants show evidence of a return to the core, migrants who are blue-collar, less-educated, older, and with families remain more suburban. In turn, this analysis suggests that overall trends of back to the city migration are producing considerable divergence in the metropolitan destinations of different demographic groups.

This volume investigates the dissonance between the supposed advantage held by educated women and their continued lack of economic and political power. Niemi explains the developments of the so-called "female advantage" and "boy crisis" in American higher education, setting them alongside socioeconomic and racial developments in womens and mens lives throughout the last 40 years. Exploring the relationship between higher education credentials and their utility in creating political, economic, and social success, Degrees of Difference identifies ways in which gender and academic achievement contribute to womens and mens power to shape their lives. This important book brings new light to the issues of power, gender identities, and the role of American higher education in creating gender equity.

The US Supreme Court, many state constitutions, and numerous judicial opinions require that legislative districts be “compact,” a concept assumed so simple that no definition is offered other than “you know it when you see it.” Academics, in contrast, have concluded that the concept is so complex that it has multiple theoretical dimensions requiring large numbers of conflicting empirical measures. We hypothesize that both are correct - that the concept is complex and multidimensional, but one particular unidimensional ordering represents a common understanding of compactness in the law and across people. We develop a survey design to elicit this understanding, without bias in favor of one’s own political views, and with high levels of intracoder and intercoder reliability (in data where the standard paired comparisons approach fails). We then create a statistical model that predicts, with high accuracy and solely from the geometric features of the district, compactness evaluations by 96 sitting judges, justices, and public officials responsible for redistricting (and 102 redistricting consultants, expert witnesses, law professors, law students, graduate students, undergraduates, and Mechanical Turk workers). As a companion to this paper, we offer data on compactness from our validated measure for 18,215 US state legislative and congressional districts, as well as software to compute this measure from any district shape. We also discuss what may be the wider applicability of our general methodological approach to measuring important concepts that you only know when you see.

Between the years 2001 and 2015, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia implemented a policy providing mandatory and free college admission exams (ACT or SAT) to all public high school juniors. As such, the policy reduced to zero out of pocket expenses for exam fees, and likely reduced out-of-pocket expenses for exam preparation, because schools might have been induced to provide such a service in-house. The policy also reduced the time cost of test taking because the test is administered during class time and at a student’s school. Because the mandatory exam is administered during the junior year, the policy may also have increased the amount of information a student has about her college prospects earlier on in her decision making process. In this paper I hypothesize that the decreased costs and increased information may induce more students to apply to and enroll in college. I use both college-level longitudinal data (IPEDS) along with cross-sectional student-level data (ACS) to test these predictions. Specifically, I exploit the fact that not all states implemented the policy and that those which did so implemented the policy at different points in time. In the college-level analysis, I find that the average college saw an increase in about 88 enrolled students and 460 applications from the policy without any effect on their graduation rates. In the individual-level analysis, I find that treated individuals have approximately 1.03 times the odds of untreated individuals of attending college. In the appendix I propose a model for the decision to apply, enroll, and complete college.

Research on evictions highlights the hardships that low-income families face through structural constraints of stagnant wages failing to meet monthly rent. This area of study expands our understanding of the reproduction of urban poverty and improves urban sociological scholarship by examining households that do not move by choice, but are forced out. While this field of research has focused mostly on household-level dynamics, there has not been an extensive ecological evaluation on the broader metropolitan and neighborhood-level effects that contribute to the geographic concentration of evictions. This dissertation bridges that gap by analyzing neighborhood ethnoracial compositions, socioeconomics, and housing market dynamics related to evictions in King County, WA. Results show that neighborhood racial diversity, higher poverty, affordable housing, and market demand predict higher rates of evictions. Nearby neighborhood effects, such as lowrent and low-poverty, has a large impact on local eviction rates. Furthermore, neighborhoods that saw increases in Black and Latino populations and declines in education and new movers over time also see higher rates of eviction. This study highlights how place-based racial and economic inequality is shaped by the history of the political economy of the region, segregation, and housing exclusion that produced the contemporary eviction concentrations we see today.

Lessons derived from the urban experience of bicycling may not be broadly supportive of bicycling in rural, small, and low-density (RSLD) places because of differences in built environment, social, and political contexts. In this study, the hypothesis that bicycling was primarily an urban activity was investigated. Binary logistic regression was used to compare the frequency of bicycling and the population characteristics of bicyclists across urban and RSLD places. Multiple operational definitions of urban–rural continua were used to examine whether the results were sensitive to how RSLD places were defined. The data for bicycling were from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, which was designed to represent the population of the United States. Bicycling was found to be primarily, but not exclusively, an urban activity. Moreover, women and youths were more likely to bicycle in RSLD places compared with urban places. These findings suggest that an urban perspective on bicycling could limit the success of initiatives aiming to increase the diversity of populations that bicycle. Developing a base of empirical knowledge of bicycling in RSLD places is a necessary step toward developing more inclusive and effective multimodal transportation strategies.

I exploit exogenous variation in the marriage market across the US caused by World War II casualties to provide causal evidence on how opportunity cost influences women’s entrepreneurship decisions. I show that marriage is an important form of opportunity cost hindering women from starting new businesses. World War II casualties affected the local marriage market for single women and access to capital for war widows. Using novel business registration and individual-level census data, I find that single women are more active in starting new businesses when they face worse prospects in the marriage market. As a result, US counties with heavier casualties had a higher female share of entrepreneurs. This difference persists to this day. Evidence in favor of the marriage-market channel suggests that reducing opportunity cost is more effective in encouraging female entrepreneurship than merely providing financial subsidies.

Although many studies have examined associations between family structure and child outcomes, few have considered how the increase in single-parent households since the 1960s may have affected child mortality rates. We examined state-level changes in the percentage of children living with single parents between 1968 and 2010 and state-level trends in mortality among children and youth (age 19 or younger) in the United States. Regression models with state and year fixed effects revealed that increases in single parenthood were associated with small increments in accidental deaths and homicides.