We explore how immigrant legal status affects safety net transfers using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. Exploiting the timing and geographic unevenness in intensity of IRCAs legalization programs, we estimate a sizable effect of permanent residency on Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) transfers. By contrast, we find null but imprecise effects of legal status on food stamp transfers. Fiscal costs are partially offset by increased state income tax revenues due to increased rates of income tax filing. These findings suggest that previous studies have understated the relationship between legal status and total family resources, particularly for families with children, and that legalization redistributes resources toward areas more affected by immigration.

We use experimental and archival evidence to show that people who had low socioeconomic status (SES) as children participate in the U.S. accounting labor market in distinctive and consequential ways. Drawing on life history theory, we predict and show that low SES individuals select into accounting at disproportionately high rates relative to other fields, an effect driven by accounting's relatively high job security. Supplemental tests are consistent with these low SES individuals being a source of high quality human capital for the accounting profession, as low SES individuals selecting into accounting possess desirable attributes at relatively high rates. From a social perspective, we provide theory and evidence consistent with accounting being an important and secure source of upward social mobility in comparison to other fields. However, recessions cause selection into accounting by low SES individuals to decrease at a higher rate than in other fields, compromising these professional and social benefits. For example, our evidence is consistent with the “low SES effect” improving gender diversity among entrants into the accounting labor market during good economic times. However, lower self-selection rates during recessions are particularly pronounced among low SES females, who may thus bear the brunt of lost professional and social benefits.

Over the past 40 years, the share of non-wage benefits in employee compensation grew from 5% to 30%. Using data from Glassdoor, we first document a series of stylized facts about the provision and quality of non-wage benefits and their correlations with firm characteristics. We subsequently test plausible hypotheses explaining the heterogeneity of non-wage benefits quality: (i) tax benefits, (ii) attracting and retaining specific employee groups, and (iii) mitigating the disutility of work. We find empirical evidence in support of all three hypotheses.

The aggregate fertility rate and the agricultural employment share in the U.S. both declined from the late 19th century to the eve of the baby boom. I document two important forces behind this observation: (1) the agricultural sector had a higher fertility rate, so when the share of the agricultural sector declined, the aggregate fertility rate followed; (2) the education reform increased the relative odds that rural youth received an education and moved to the non-farm sector. I build a two-sector overlapping generations model that features endogenous fertility and occupational choice to evaluate the e§ects of the education reform, the technological progress and child-rearing cost. Through counterfactual analysis, I Önd that the education reform accounts for one fourth of the declines in the fertility rate, and that of the agricultural employment share drop, together with more than half of the skill intensity increase in the model. Shutdown quality-quantity tradeo§ channel by exogenously Öxing the fertility rates would reduce 20% of the structural transformation generated in the model.

Market Trends. Housing activity tends to slow in the third quarter. Overall, the third quarter housing indicators for the eight counties are consistent with this and reect little change in the housing market. Vacancy. The quarterly slowdown is reected by the increase in median days on the market, which is up 18% from the second quarter. The decline of 3.7% from this time last year indicates that the market is stable and improving slightly. Rental vacancy rates went down, indicating a slight tightening of the rental market as well. Cost Burden.* More than half of low-income renters and owners were cost burdened in 2014. The percentage of cost burdened renters declined since 2012, while . . .

The thesis consists of three independent chapters on environmental and urban economics. A central theme explored in this thesis is what determines the distribution of economic activities across space. My exploration in this direction begins with the roles of industrial pollution and transportation infrastructure in shaping the spatial distribution of skills, and extends to evaluate the spatial allocation efficiency of renewable energy projects. The first chapter,“The Long Shadow of Industrial Pollution: Environmental Amenities and the Distribution of Skills”, investigates the role of industrial pollution in determining the competitiveness of post-industrial cities, with a focus on their ability to attract skilled workers and shift to a modern service economy. I assemble a rich database at a fine spatial resolution, which allows me to track pollution from the 1970s to the present and to examine its impacts on a whole range of outcomes related to productivity and amenity, including house prices, employment, wages, and crime. I find that census tracts downwind of highly polluted 1970s industrial sites are associated with lower housing prices and a smaller share of skilled employment three decades later, a pattern which became evermore prominent between 1980 and 2000. These findings indicate that pollution in the 1970s affected the ability of parts of cities to attract skills, which in turn drove the process of agglomeration based on modern services. To quantify the contribution of different mechanisms, I build and estimate a multi-sector spatial equilibrium framework that introduces heterogeneity in local productivity and workers’ valuation of local amenities across sectors and allows the initial sorting to be magnified by production and residential externalities. Structural estimation suggests that historical pollution is associated with lower current productivity and amenity; the magnitudes are higher for productivity, more skilled sectors and central tracts. I then use the framework to evaluate the impact of counterfactual pollution cuts in different parts of cities on nationwide welfare and cross-city skill distribution. The second chapter, “Travel Costs and Urban Specialization: Evidence from China’s High Speed Railway” examines how improvements in passenger transportation affect the spatial distribution of skills, exploiting the expansion of high speed railway (HSR) project in China. This natural experiment is unique because as a passenger-dedicated transportation device that aims at improving the speed and . . .

My dissertation focuses on the marriage patterns of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the U.S. I infer which married Mexicans are undocumented in the 2012 American Community Survey 5 year (2008-2012) population estimates and use the mate selection, self-disclosure, and assimilation literatures as the foundations for my main hypothesis expecting endogamy among undocumented Mexicans. That is, I expect the majority of undocumented Mexicans to be married to one another. My analysis shows that my hypothesis is supported in both the data for the males and females. Furthermore, there are two main objectives in my dissertation. First, I identify and provide statistics for the main marriage paths taken by undocumented Mexican men and women. Then, I examine the effects of race, time living in the U.S., and English proficiency on these main marriage paths by estimating multinomial logistic regression models. I find that English proficiency may be the best predictor of the type of spouse an undocumented Mexican is likely to have. English proficiency increases the likelihood that a respondent is married to a nonHispanic white, versus an undocumented Mexican the most. Both race and years lived in the U.S. produce inconsistent results in terms of direction and statistical significance. My research suggest that having an undocumented status affects many aspects of people’s lives, including their intimate life.

We explore whether early childhood human-capital investments are complementary to those made later in life. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differentially exposed to policy-induced changes in pre-school (Head Start) spending and school-finance-reform-induced changes in public K12 school spending during childhood, depending on place and year of birth. Difference-in-difference instrumental variables and siblingdifference estimates indicate that, for poor children, increases in Head Start spending and increases in public K12 spending each individually increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced the likelihood of both poverty and incarceration in adulthood. The benefits of Head Start spending were larger when followed by access to better-funded public K12 schools, and the increases in K12 spending were more efficacious for poor children who were exposed to higher levels of Head Start spending during their preschool years. The findings suggest that early investments in the skills of disadvantaged children that are followed by sustained educational investments over time can effectively break the cycle of poverty.

The proportion of individuals aged 65 and over is growing at an astronomical rate in the United States, and some estimate that this demographic age group will double by the year 2025. Aging adults are primarily dependent on the personal automobile as their main source of transportation. Older adults and adults nearing retirement age also tend to reside in suburban neighborhoods and rely heavily on personal vehicles. Since most of the United States is characterized by automobile dependent suburbanization, where the majority of development is suburban low-density sprawl, this may become problematic for aging populations who may be uncomfortable driving longer distances and making more trips. These trends invite the question of whether the deck is stacked against individuals approaching retirement age (50-64) and aging populations (65 and up). This study examines aging populations’ mobility and determines whether they have different travel patterns than their younger cohorts. Additionally, this investigation explores whether or not travel patterns across age groups result in differential access to particular goods and services, as well as differences in travel environment characteristics in a metropolitan area. This research proposes an approach based on Time Geographic Density Estimation (TGDE) to identify activity spaces across different age cohorts in order to identify differences in the mobility and travel behavior of aging adults. TGDE is an established technique in the literature, which blends the notion of activity spaces with the computation of probabilistic potential path trees along a transportation system. In this way it establishes an ‘extent’ or overall mapping of the activity space of an individual, but is able to further refine that extent to identify the most likely places they are able to visit within that geography. Data on origin and destination trips and travel times are taken from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) Florida add-on for the study area of Orlando Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Transportation is an important consideration in planning for aging populations, and analyzing differences in how older adults travel compared to their younger counterparts can offer insight into the diverse needs of this group.

his paper illustrates how to incorporate forward-looking behavior into empirical spatial equilibrium models with locational heterogeneity. The main insight is that the standard spatial equilibrium already embeds a natural starting point for dynamics: the presence of spatial indifference conditions can dramatically simplify the state space of forward-looking agents. One needs to know how utility evolves with the variables in the system, but not every individual state, effectively side-stepping the curse of dimensionality. Standard numerical rational expectations methods can be applied to derive approximate solutions to the full dynamic specification. The paper uses an example model of landowners exercising real options in construction of housing to show how the approximation's errors are negligibly small, and importantly, much smaller than the differences between dynamic and myopic specifications of the same model.

We document a robust negative relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours within that occupation. We develop a unified model of occupational choice and labor supply that features heterogeneity across occupations in the return to working additional hours and show that it can match the key features of the data both qualitatively and quantitatively. We use the model to shed light on gender differences in labor market outcomes that arise because of gender asymmetries in home production responsibilities. Our model generates large gender gaps in hours of work, occupational choices, and wages. In particular, an exogenous difference in time devoted to home production of ten hours per week increases the observed gender wage gap by roughly eleven percentage points and decreases the share of females in high hours occupations by fourteen percentage points. The implied misallocation of talent across occupations has significant aggregate effects on productivity and welfare.

Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the “hybridity” of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed “binary” relationship between “city” and “nature” that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city-nature boundaries have been understudied. Many explanations position accelerating urbanization or changes in global political economy as driving the decline of the city-nature binary. This paper proposes that this transformation is bound up in the changing cultural and spatial dynamics of “race” between the nineteenth century and the present. Drawing on research on urban parks in Chicago, I consider the production of park space at three important historical moments: (1) the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when large picturesque spaces were built; (2) the post-World War II period, which was marked by the development of recreation facilities; and (3) the contemporary period, where linear parks like Chicago’s 606 (which I term “imbricated spaces”) bring together built and natural environments in new ways. Through this analysis, I argue that the social construction of city and nature, as spatialized through urban park development, was co-produced with racialized spaces and symbols and contributed to the creation of metropolitan racial boundaries. Further, I argue that historical shifts in these racialized spaces and symbols have been implicated in the weakening of the city-nature binary and the rise of the hybrid city-nature relationship.

We document that, since 2011, mortgage lenders reduced credit to middle-class households by 15% and increased credit to wealthy households by 21%. Credit to low-income households was unaffected. Results hold at the individual-loan level and zip-code level, and at the intensive margin and extensive margin. The redistribution increased monotonically with the size of the lender. The collapse of the private-label securitization market, banks' risk-management concerns, wealth polarization, post-crisis policies of GSEs, or pre-crisis indebtment are unlikely to explain the results. The results appear consistent with large banks reacting more to the increased costs of origination imposed by financial regulation.

Community gardens have been shown to increase food security as well as develop social capital in an urban setting. Several socioeconomic factors (including age, education, annual household income, and more) have been demonstrated to substantially affect perceptions of benefits from participating in community gardens as well as actual participation levels in community gardens. As many individuals, either by choice or necessity, have chosen to eat food that is more sustainable, accessible, and healthy, this research explored different demographic and neighborhood factors that determined who participated in local community gardens and why. With the local food movement growing more and more popular in cities across the country—as a response to the debates around food security, the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and chemicals in agriculture, rising food prices, and the ecological costs of growing and transporting food—the different functions of community gardens have been increasingly examined. This research answered the following question, “What factors determine community garden participation in Salt Lake City?” The goal was to provide Wasatch Community Gardens with maps, survey results, and a summary that helped their organization, and also assisted local urban planners, in better understanding the current state of community gardening participation in Salt Lake City, Utah.

An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of noted refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and post-Soviet refugees to Israel. We show that conflicting findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a sudden change in the race composition of the Current Population Survey extracts in 1980, specific to Miami but unrelated to the Boatlift. We also show that conflicting findings on the labor-market effects of other important refugee waves can be produced by spurious correlation between the instrument and the endogenous variable introduced by applying a common divisor to both. As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school.

The first-time emigration of nearly five million African Americans from the American South between 1940 and 1970 is among the most transformative demographic events in US history. Knowledge of the economic incentives and social mechanisms that drove this migration is incomplete and only infrequently considered in context with other historical US migrations. This study examines the economic and social assimilation of black migrants into the North in light of what is known about the assimilation of earlier European migrants to the region. Using a two-period mixed model with difference-indifferences estimators, I find evidence that even in the 1965-1970 period, as the migration wave waned, black Southern men and women experienced a positive income return to migration. This contrasts with findings in past literature on the period. Estimates also indicate the existence of a marriage premium for black Southern women who continue to work after marriage. Men do not show evidence of a general marriage premium, but there is consistent evidence of complementarity between migration and intermarriage with a Northern-born spouse. Women do not appear to experience this complementarity. Two candidate explanations, a social capital hypothesis and an unobserved input hypothesis, are proposed.

Despite many workers being regularly exposed to outdoor temperatures as part of their jobs, little is known about the effect of temperature on occupational health. This study assembles and analyzes two data sets that link occupational health outcomes and temperature. Using a data set that consists of daily occupational injury and illness rates constructed from Texas workers’ compensation claims data, I find that a day with a high temperature over 100 degrees F increases same-day claim rates by 7.6 to 8.2 percent and three-day claim rates by 3.5 to 3.7 percent. A day with high temperatures below 35 degrees F increases three-day claim rates by 3.4 to 5.8 percent. To consider how the effects of temperature vary across climates, I construct a data set with daily injury rates from mining sites around the United States. The results indicate that sites in warmer climates experience worse effects of high temperatures than sites in cooler climates, suggesting that avoiding the adverse effects of higher temperatures may be easier for workers when there are fewer hot days. Using data from the monthly Current Population Survey, I show that high temperatures reduce hours worked of temperature-exposed workers more in cooler climates than in warmer climates, while low temperatures reduce hours worked more in warmer climates than in cooler climates. While research on the effect of temperature on mortality finds substantial capacity for adaptation with current technology, the results presented in this paper highlight that the ease of adaptation varies across contexts. In some important settings, the effects of high temperatures may intensify as the earth warms.

Recent debates about the future of jobs have mainly focused on whether or not they are at risk of automation (Arntz et. al., 2016; Frey and Osborne, 2017; McKinsey, 2017; PwC, 2017). Studies have generally minimised the potential effects of automation on job creation, and have tended to ignore other relevant trends, including globalisation, population ageing, urbanisation, and the rise of the green economy. In this study we use a novel and comprehensive method to map out how employment is likely to change, and the implications for skills. We show both what we can expect, and where we should be uncertain. We also show likely dynamics in different parts of the labour market — from sectors like food and health to manufacturing. We find that education, health care, and wider public sector occupations are likely to grow. We also explain why some low-skilled jobs, in fields like construction and agriculture, are less likely to suffer poor labour market outcomes than has been assumed in the past. More generally, we shine a light on the skills that are likely to be in greater demand, including interpersonal skills, higher-order cognitive skills, and systems skills. Unlike other recent studies, the method also makes it possible to predict with some confidence what kinds of new jobs may come into existence. The study challenges the false alarmism that contributes to a culture of risk aversion and holds back technology adoption, innovation, and growth; this matters particularly to countries like the US and the UK, which already face structural productivity problems (Atkinson and Wu, 2017; Shiller, 2017). Crucially, through the report, we point to the actions that educators, policymakers and individuals can take to better prepare themselves for the future.

The proportion of Americans that are 65 years of age and older will be about 20 percent, or a total of 84 million persons, by 2050 (Ortman, Velkoff, & Hogan, 2014). This rapidly growing population of older adults, coupled with increasing life expectancy and disease dynamics, foretell rises in the prevalence of chronic physical health illnesses. Complicating these matters is the fact that, often, chronic physical health conditions are accompanied by psychological conditions such as serious psychological distress, depression, and dementia. The high prevalence of comorbid conditions in such a large segment of the population suggests impacts on health care utilization that may threaten both the public and financial health of the United States. Although the health care utilization consequences of comorbid chronic physical illnesses and common psychological conditions are important, this specific research area has not garnered sufficient attention in aging research. Furthermore, studies have not directly examined whether associations between comorbid conditions and the utilization of health services vary by gender or racial and ethnic composition. This dissertation addresses this topic using national representative samples from the Integrated Health Interview Series conducted in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. The study focuses on associations between comorbid conditions and the use of health services among middle-aged and older Americans. Two measures of health care services utilization are explored: visits to general providers and visits to mental health professionals. Results from logistic regressions suggest that serious psychological distress is more strongly associated with visits to general physicians when accompanied by chronic physical conditions. But it has a weaker association with visits to mental health providers when accompanied by chronic physical conditions. The association between serious psychological distress comorbidity and visits to general providers is stronger for all other races than for Hispanic/Latino(s). In addition, the association between serious psychological distress comorbidity and visits to mental health professionals is stronger for males than for females. However, associations between depression and visits to providers are independent of whether chronic physical conditions are also present. Similarly, associations between dementia and visits to providers are independent of whether chronic physical conditions are also present.