More than one in five U.S. adults without access to a vehicle or public transportation missed or skipped a medical appointment last year, according to a report by the Urban Institute. Why it matters: Transportation is a key social driver of health equity. While telehealth has reduced some transportation barriers, it's not accessible to all and can't replace in-person care for all medical needs, Axios' Adriel Bettelheim reports. What they found: Nationwide, 21% of adults without access to a vehicle or public transit said they went without needed medical care in 2022. Though 91% of adults reported they had access to a vehicle, the figure was substantially lower for Black adults (81%), those with low family incomes (78%) or a disability (83%) and for individuals with public health insurance (79%) or no coverage (83%). Zoom in: In the New Orleans metro, 10.2% of households don't have access to a vehicle — and that number almost doubles for Black New Orleanians, per the National Equity Atlas.

In settler societies, upward social mobility by Indigenous people is seen in the growth of successful professional and entrepreneurial classes where both wealth creation and social power are significant resources. Yet, public and academic discourses perpetuate the belief that social mobility impacts negatively on Indigenous people by placing cultural identity in conflict with capitalist business practices. Using data from an international comparison consisting of interviews with 220 Indigenous entrepreneurs in research sites across three countries, this article shows that the belief is unfounded and reveals how this duality creates an impossible tension when Indigenous cultural identity is framed as “at risk” because of social mobility. A discursive colonial mind-set remains a central, enduring and problematic organizing principle of the field of Indigenous social mobility, one that requires a shift in the kinds of research questions that are asked and the ways in which social mobility is ultimately defined.

The Second Gender Revolution thesis argues that as men engage more in household duties, family formation rates among highly educated women will increase. Consistent with this, U.S. college graduates now have the highest marital and fertility rates compared to other educational groups. However, the implication of this demographic shift on gender disparities in the labor market is less understood. This paper examines the stagnation of the gender gaps in the U.S. labor market from the early 1980s to the late 2010s, focusing on college graduates. It investigates how family status— being a parent or married—shapes gender gaps in employment, earnings, and hourly wages. Using a decomposition of change, the study finds that a slower reduction in parenthood among college- educated women has hindered further narrowing of the gender employment gap. Persistent gender disparities in the relationship between family status and labor market outcome have contributed to the slower decrease in gender earnings and hourly wage gaps. A unique pattern emerges among high earners: changes in family status among high-earning women have helped close the gender wage gap. This research underscores the complex implications of demographic shifts for gender equality in the labor market. While increased family formation among educated women may offer more economic stability, it can concurrently slow progress in reducing gender disparities in employment and earnings. These findings highlight the nuanced interplay between family formation, gender, and labor market outcomes, contributing to a deeper understanding of the dynamics underlying gender gaps in contemporary society through the lens of demographic shifts.

Remote work surged during the Covid pandemic but there is disagreement about the extent of the change. To address this question, we field a new, nationally-representative survey: the Remote Life Survey (RLS). We find that in October 2020, 31.6 percent of the continuously employed workforce always worked from home (WFH) and 21.9 percent sometimes or rarely WFH, totaling 53.5 percent. We compare our results with alternative measurement approaches, with a focus on government surveys and provide estimates on the impact of four factors: (a) differences among mail versus web-based survey respondents, (b) differences in the inclusion of self-employed workers, (c) the industry mix of the sample, and (d) the exclusion of people who were already remote pre-pandemic. We find that the last explanation (d) explains the bulk of the difference in estimates between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other measures of remote work. Policymakers and researchers who turn to the BLS-CPS data series for an estimate of remote work prevalence in the American economy should note that it might be underestimating WFH levels by up to 25 percentage points. Under our preferred estimates, we find that about half of the U.S. workforce worked remotely at least one day each week as of December 2020.

More and more millionaires are stepping on the everyman's corner and renting apartments rather than putting down roots and money to become homeowners. Roughly 43 million families across the country currently live in apartments—the highest level in half a century, according to a new report from apartment search site RentCafe. Included in that historic number of renters is a record-high number of millionaire renter households: 3,381, a number that tripled from 2015 to 2020, according to data RentCafe gathered from IPUMS. The share of high-earning renters, categorized in the report as households making $150,000 or more a year, increased by 82% over the last five years, which is the largest jump from any renting income bracket.

A guaranteed income could greatly reduce poverty, yet the impact and feasibility depend on several key policy design choices. We empirically compare guarantee designs financed by income taxation and estimate potential labor supply responses to transfer benefits as well as financing or targeting mechanisms. The analysis features a fundamental tax reform converting personal deductions and credits into an income guarantee along with higher marginal tax rates. Additional results consider policies with a flat surtax, benefit phaseout, or welfare reform. We use microsimulation analysis based on the Current Population Survey, and we adjust for underreported income.

Like other major cities, Portland, Oregon, has experienced a surge in crime and disorder over the past three years. But unlike other major cities, Portland is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with this problem, because its police department is uniquely understaffed. With just 1.26 officers per every 1,000 residents, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) ranks 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities for its staffing-to-population ratio. As a result, PPB struggles to provide even basic service, taking up to half an hour to respond to high-priority calls.As this report shows, the staffing crisis has both short-run and long-run causes. In the short run, the city’s particularly harmful riots following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as well as its leadership’s embrace of the “defund the police” movement, dealt a massive blow to police morale, driving mass resignations and retirements, which have continued to hamstring operations. But that shift was just the culmination of years of declining staffing-to-population ratios, driven by challenges in hiring and training that preexist the protests.To their credit, Portland’s civilian leadership has belatedly recognized that increasing PPB staffing is the only way out of the current crisis. To that end, this report recommends a number of steps that Portland can take to address its staffing problems, including:• Increasing officer pay• Civilianizing PPB desk jobs• Increasing the number of employees working on processing job applications• Reducing the length of academy and field training• Conducting PPB training in Portland, rather than in the state facility in Salem• Working to regain the trust of police officers by unambiguously emphasizing support for them and their profession

This paper studies how physical climate risk affects corporations through the labor channel. By quantifying occupational climate exposure, I document that climate-exposed jobs have shorter working hours, lower productivity, and higher employment (especially of part-time workers) as workforce supplements. Firms with more climate-exposed workers adapt to unfavorable climate trends by retaining more employees, increasing insurance, and expanding offshore inputs. However, these firms have more workplace injuries and worse performance during climate surprises, indicating limitations of adaptation. I also explore various incentives and constraints for firms’ labor adaptation strategies and make further causal inferences by studying the implementation of the California Heat Standard.

There are two Americas today: one for the college educated, and one for those without four-year degrees. Workers in these economies are worlds apart—the type of work they do, how they receive their pay, when they start their workday, and the benets they get from employment are night and day. College graduates have double the yearly income, four times the retirement savings, and four times the net worth of working age, non-college Americans. Non-college workers are ve times more likely to be in poverty and lack health insurance, and more likely to move because of economic trouble. There are four times as many working the night shift, and three times as many not working at all.

In 2020-2021, the University of Chicago Library worked with Ithaka S+R, along with 20 peer institutions in North America, on the ‘Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences’ research study. This study involved teams of librarians at each of the participating institutions interviewing faculty in the social sciences to “examine social science instructors’ practices in teaching undergraduates with data in order to understand the resources and services that instructors... need to be successful in their work.” The focus of the study was on undergraduate-level instruction 1 with data, “student engagement with data that is tied to classroom instruction,” and “teaching in which direct student engagement with data is built into the course structure.”2 The goal of the study was to “contribute to the wider field of library and information studies, information literacy pedagogy, and the scholarship of teaching and learning in the social sciences, within the context of the evolving relationship between libraries and undergraduate teaching support.”3 In this report, we cover four primary themes, with an overarching focus on undergraduate pedagogy, including: data discovery and creation, using data for teaching and research, undergraduate course and assignment design, and training and support opportunities. At the University of Chicago Library, librarians engage with faculty, students, and staff about their research, teaching, and learning routinely, and this includes conversations around data. The Ithaka S&R study was, however, an excellent opportunity for us to conduct a deeper dive exploration into teaching data in the social sciences and to do so alongside colleagues at peer institutions. As the University of Chicago Library looks to further its role in data exploration, creation, dissemination, and use in research, teaching, and learning across all disciplines, this study and the insight it provides will help guide current and future strategic thinking and planning.

The number of New York renters who are also worth seven figures has increased exponentially in recent years, a new analysis has found. According to US apartment search site RentCafe, there’s a record number of moneyed denizens in the Big Apple. “Our latest study has uncovered a spectacular surge in the number of millionaire renters in New York City, with this elite group nearly tripling over the last five years to a record,” reads a release for the survey, which was published Monday.

The spatial distribution of urban agriculture in cities is not well studied, and scholars have tended to overlook localized effects and physical access issues when contemplating urban agriculture (UA) futures. To address this gap, we ask: what is the current spatial distribution of community gardens in New York City (NYC), and what land-use policies will enable more accessible garden futures? We adopt the concept of the 15-minute city to map the future of community gardens in NYC. We analyze garden distribution in NYC using remote sensing and spatial regression and design an optimization-based spatial planning approach to evaluate the feasibility of turning NYC into a 15-minute garden city. Our results indicate that more than half of the city residents have access to a garden within 15-minute walking distance, and that neighborhoods with lower income, lower rates of white residents, lower rates of owner occupancy, and higher rates of educational attainment have higher rates of access. The most costeffective increases in household access to gardens arise from developing new gardens on vacant parcels, which outperform modeled gardens sited on all other land uses, though a strategy of siting gardens on a range of land uses is required to maximize household access. By mapping gardens, analyzing their distribution, and modeling how to scale-up UA, this paper presents a novel spatial planning approach to expand urban amenities and ecosystem service benefits for a more just, sustainable, and resilient city. This spatial planning approach enables participatory planning processes for UA futures in a variety of urban contexts.

Although structural racism is strongly related to racial health disparities, we are not aware of any composite, multidimensional measure of structural racism at the city level in the United States. However, many of the policies, programs, and institutions that create and maintain structural racism are located at the city level. To expand upon previous research, this paper uses a novel measure to measure structural racism at the city level for the non-Hispanic Black population. We used confirmatory factor analysis to model the latent construct of structural racism for 776 U.S. cities. The model included six indicators across five dimensions: racial segregation, incarceration, educational attainment, employment, and economic status. We generated factor scores that weighted the indicators in order to produce the best model fit. The resulting factor scores represented the level of structural racism in each city. We demonstrated the utility of this measure by demonstrating its strong correlation with Black-White disparities in firearm homicide rates. There were profound differences in the magnitude of structural racism across cities. There were also striking differences in the magnitude of the racial disparity in firearm homicide across cities. Structural racism was a significant predictor of the magnitude of these racial disparities in firearm homicide. Each one standard deviation increase in the structural racism factor score increased the firearm homicide rate ratio by a factor of approximately 1.2 (95% confidence interval, 1.1-1.3). These new measures can be utilized by researchers to relate structural racism to racial health disparities at the city level.

This dissertation investigates the impact of canals on regional economic development, in- dustrialization, and labor market gender gaps in the nineteenth-century United States. In Chapter 1, the causal effect of canals on county-level population growth is examined using various empirical methods, including fixed effects modeling, difference-in-differences, and instrumental variable estimation. The findings reveal that counties with canals experienced significantly higher population growth compared to those without canals between 1820 and 1860. In Chapter 2, the role of canal networks in the transition of the antebellum American economy from agriculture to industrialization is explored. By utilizing variations in canal openings across counties, evidence is found of a canal-induced labor shift from agricul- ture to manufacturing and commercial sectors, between 1820 and 1840. The event study results of patent growth in canal counties suggest that innovations responded to a trans- portation improvement—the acquisition of canal accessibility—during the pre-Civil War period. This finding implies that the increased patent activity in canal counties reflects the region’s heightened innovation and technological progress, contributing to the broader industrialization process. Chapter 3 focuses on the labor market gender gaps during the antebellum period and uses canal accessibility as a measure of early industrial development in a county. The study challenges the notion that living on a farm confined women to household duties of food production during the early stage of industrialization in the American economy. Instead, it highlights that women’s reproductive and child-caring responsibilities played a significant role in explaining the gender gap in labor force participation between regions with different levels of industrialization. The presence of children exacerbates this gender-industrialization gap, while individuals without children experience a narrowing of the disparity. Addition- ally, digitized data from the 1860 Census of Manufacturing (ICPSR 4048) is used to explore the gender wage differences between steam-powered factories and non-steam-powered ones. This dissertation provides valuable insights into the impact of canals on economic de- velopment, industrialization, and gender disparities in labor market during the early years of American history. The research sheds light on the role of nineteenth-century Ameri- can canals, the most important transportation network before the railroad era, in shaping regional economies and social dynamics during this crucial period

The nuclear family structure is in the minority among American households for the first time in U.S. history, according to recent polling by Pew Research Center.

We show that Covid-19 illnesses and related work absences persistently reduce labor supply. Using an event study, we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons. Our estimates suggest Covid-19 absences have reduced the U.S. labor force by approximately 500,000 people (0.2 percent of adults) and imply an average labor supply loss per Covid-19 absence equivalent to $9,000 in forgone earnings, about 90 percent of which reflects losses beyond the initial absence week.

High-income renters are making a mark on the North Texas rental market, with Dallas-Fort Worth boasting the third highest number in the state and sitting 12th nationally. That’s according to a new report from RentCafe, an apartment search website that helps renters find resident-rated rental communities. What are high-income renters? They’re people who earn $150,000 a year or more and who rent homes rather than buy them. That choice may be fueled by home prices growing by 54%, prompting a whetted appetite for rentals. Not surprisingly, RentCafe’s list of top millionaire renter hotspots was led by New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

To avoid electric-infrastructure-induced wildfires, millions of Californians have had their power cut for hours to days at a time. We show that rooftop solar-plus-battery-storage systems increased in zip codes with the longest power outages. Rooftop solar panels alone will not help a household avert outages, but a solar-plus-battery-storage system will. Using this fact, we obtain a revealed-preference estimate of the willingness to pay for electricity reliability, the Value of Lost Load, a key parameter for electricity market design. Our estimate, of around $4,300/MWh, suggests California's wildfire-prevention outages resulted in losses from foregone consumption of $322 million to residential electricity consumers.

Over the last thirty years, studentification has emerged as a subset form of gentrification that has dramatically transformed the socio-economic landscape of the American Rust Belt Region. However, the impacts of this process have widely remained understudied outside of economic impacts alone. Therefore, this study takes an in-depth examination on the residential geographies and demographic impacts of studentification within the Rust Belt cities of Binghamton and Johnson City, NY, over the past two decades using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Binghamton University’s Department of Geography. With direct knowledge of the specific locations of HE students, this thesis found that many of the spatial and temporal aspects of studentification have taken form within each municipality, while also uniquely concentrating within neighborhoods experiencing growing rates of racial diversity. Thus, this thesis highlights the contextual importance of HEIs in the Rust Belt, in addition to the racialized landscape of studentification

This dissertation studies the welfare generated by outdoor recreation. Chapters 1 and 2 study a high-profile form of recreation: U.S. national park visitation. Chapter 3 uses innovative data to study a classic topic: the value of water quality. All three chapters apply a two-stage estimation procedure that exploits panel variation in visitation and resource quality within a random utility maximization (RUM) travel cost model, the field’s “workhorse” model. In Chapter 1, I conduct the most comprehensive analysis of demand for the U.S. National Park System to date. I create a versatile and unified framework to analyze demand for 140 national parks throughout the contiguous United States. Combining nationally representative surveys, park- level visitor counts, and a statistical atlas of park attributes, I estimate a RUM model of visitation from 2005 through 2019. The model produces estimates of park awesomeness and explains awesomeness using detailed park attribute data. Iconic parks like Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon all rank among the most awesome parks. Visitors prefer parks with charismatic wildlife, like bison, and bald eagles, wide-ranging elevation, and coastline. My second chapter applies the data infrastructure and model from Chapter 1 to analyze how climate change will impact the welfare generated by national park visitation. I estimate visitor preferences for long-run average temperatures and short-run temperature deviations, and I use these preferences to simulate visitor welfare under future climate conditions. Visitors prefer temperatures between 70°F and 85°F, and on average, they dislike cold more than they dislike extreme heat. Assuming limited changes to park resources, I find climate change will likely increase the welfare generated by national park visitation. The overall gains are driven by large benefits in cooler seasons that outweigh the losses from extreme heat in the summer. Chapter 3, co-authored with Hyunjung Kim, blends the modeling and estimation techniques from Chapters 1 and 2 with a high-frequency, administrative park visitation dataset. We quantify the losses from water quality-induced beach closures at Lake St. Clair Metropark in southeast Michigan. Our park visitation data include the residential ZIP code and exact minute of park entry for the universe of visits to the Huron-Clinton Metropark system. Our preferred model estimates a daily panel of park fixed effects and regresses the fixed effects on a beach closure indicator in a second stage. We estimate that the 2022 beach closures caused welfare losses of around $70,000