This paper examines the effects of the Great Recession on the difference in hourly wages and the rate of return to schooling between whites and blacks in New York. Using the American Community Survey 2000-2015, we find that blacks fare relatively worse than whites during the Great Recession and recovery period. Whites earned more than blacks before the recession, and the white-black hourly wage gap increased during and after the recession. The rate of return to schooling was higher for whites than for blacks before the recession, and the white-black gap in the rate of return to schooling was greater during and after the recession, especially for the group under age 40. For people 40 and older, there was no Great Recession effect on the white-black gap in the rate of return to schooling. The change in the wage structure (i.e. the wage change in high educated and low educated whites and blacks) helps us explain the change of the white-black gap in the rate of return between pre- and post-recession periods.

Economists have observed that growth of workers wages and earnings is rapid early in their careers and then slows and often becomes negative as they near the ends of their careers. We propose a new macroeconomic mechanism for generating concavity in the age-earnings profile based on Daron Acemoglus theory of Directed Technical Change. The mechanism does not depend on changes in the human capital of the individual as proposed by Ben-Porath and Mincer; rather changes in the relative human capital of age cohorts affect the profitability of age-specific technologies, biasing innovation toward improving the productivity of younger workers. Using new data from Tamura, Dwyer, Devereux and Baier, we estimate that on average a worker at the beginning of the career can expect a yearly wage increase of 6.2% while a worker at the end of a career with 40 years of experience can can expect a yearly wage increase of 2.1%. The theory generates maximal earnings at a later age than observed, so it must be taken as supplemental torather than replacinghuman capital-based theories of age-earnings profiles.

Objectives. To examine longitudinal responses to the disability indicator questions that have been adopted as the standard across national surveys sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Methods. Data from the Current Population Survey between 2008 and 2015 were linked to create a longitudinal sample of 721178 individual respondents. Results. Responses to the disability questions fluctuated significantly. Although 17% of all respondents reported a disability at some point, only 3% consistently reported the same set of disabilities. Demographic differences were found between people who always reported a consistent set of disabilities and those whose responses fluctuated. Conclusions. The disability questions capture 2 discrete groups: people who experience a permanent disability and those who experience a temporary disability. Demographic differences between these groups suggest that this is not simply due to measurement error.

I seek in this book to reconsider the foundations of urban theory and to propose a robust concept of the city. These aims revolve around two interrelated tasks. The first is to explain the persistent tendency for durable but diverse clusters of human activity to form on the landscape. The second is to show how this primary urge sets in motion powerful space-sorting crosscurrents that shape and reshape the city as a nexus of interrelated social and economic undertakings. This general argument is filled out in empirical terms by reference to the historical and geographical character of urbanization in the era of capitalism.

The proliferation of the manufacturing industry and creation of manufacturing jobs has been a lasting part of economic development policy for American cities at both the State and local level. The study of economic development policies and changes in manufacturing compare changes among cities or regions and are most often inconclusive or offer mixed results, begging more localized understanding of the industry. This thesis explores how economic development policy specific to the manufacturing sector is created and implemented in New York City. Understanding the state of manufacturing-related policy and its effectiveness requires understanding and influences over a significant time period. The analysis of the research and the findings is developed in three parts in the following sections, a compilation of statistics related to the manufacturing industry and the labor in New York, a survey of legislation and policies enacted in New York City meant to impact industrial activity in New York City, and results of Interviews conducted with experts involved in creating or working with policy related to the manufacturing industry in New York City. Findings from the research are then developed into recommendations for future policy and research.

This paper estimates the effect of social connectedness on crime across U.S. cities from 1970 to 2009. Migration networks among African Americans from the South generated variation across destinations in the concentration of migrants from the same birth town. Using this novel source of variation, we find that social connectedness considerably reduces murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts, with a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness reducing murders by 21 percent and motor vehicle thefts by 20 percent. Social connectedness especially reduces murders of adolescents and young adults committed during gang and drug activity.

We present a model of urban resilience where the pattern of disaster recovery is defined by forcibly evacuating the population of a city and then allowing people to return voluntarily. The model predicts the post-disaster population composition of a city, changes in its income distribution and citizen welfare, and changes in the level of public goods. Plausible ex-ante assumptions about urban characteristics lead to a post-disaster city that is smaller, more skill-intensive, and with higher mean educational attainment. The evolution of income inequality is more complex, even though unskilled wages rise, middle-class flight may cause income distribution to worsen. The analysis of disasters’ long term impact on fiscal structure and on demographic, income, and human capital distribution, illustrates the interplay of major determinants of resilience after a natural disaster. A stylized New Orleans around the time of its 2005 Katrina disaster is incorporated for realism and used as an example throughout. Predicted changes are broadly consistent with observed effects of Katrina on New Orleans.

Previous research shows a notably higher degree of economic mobility for men in the 19th century in comparison to today. However, due to data limitations, changes in female economic mobility over time are not well understood. I study intergenerational income mobility of both men and women during the end of the 19th century to early 20th century, providing the first direct estimate for female mobility during this time period. Using a set of marriage certificates from Massachusetts over the period of 1880-1910, I link men and women to their 1880 and 1910 census records to obtain a measure of occupational standing for two generations. I measure intergenerational mobility for men by regressing the sons occupational income score on that of the father. Due to the absence of women in the work force during this period, intergenerational mobility for women is measured by the correlation in husbands occupational income score and the wifes fathers occupational income score. The direct-linked intergenerational elasticity of income for women is lower than for men, meaning that mobility for women is higher than mobility for men during this time period. I find an overall higher mobility level during this time period compared to the modern period.

In 2017, the Greater Chicago Food Depository released a report on food insecurity among adults with disabilities in Cook County. The report found that food insecurity is disproportionately high among adults with disabilities in Cook County, especially among working-age adults; that the risk of food insecurity among adults with disabilities occurs in every Cook County community with hotspots throughout Chicago and the suburbs; that low-income adults with disabilities face many obstacles in getting healthy diets, and current supports are not sufficient to provide for adequate nutrition; and the passing a state budget that adequately funds human services and protecting SNAP and other federal nutrition assistance programs is critical to avoiding a further worsening of food insecurity among this population. The full report proposes program, partnership and policy recommendations to address this growing issue.

A key feature of migration in the late 19th and early 20th century is that many migrants returned to Europe after a few years in the United States. A common view is that most temporary migrants planned, upon entry, to eventually return home, yet there is little direct evidence to support this claim. I collect the first dataset on migrants' intentions to stay or return home from Ellis Island arrival records between 1917 and 1924. I find that fewer migrants planned to return home than actually did; many migrants, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe, left the United States unexpectedly. The high rate of unplanned returns implies that the first few years after arrival were more difficult than expected. However, this high rate of unexpected returns lowered after the 1920s migration quotas, suggesting improved outcomes for those lucky enough to enter.

This project uses gender and sibling dynamics to explore the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship. I find that the transmission of self-employment from fathers to daughters is significantly reduced when there are sons in the family. I interpret this as evidence that the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship is driven at least in part by costly investments by parents, which can be crowded out by brothers. I investigate specific types of parental investments – transfers of money, businesses, and human capital – that potentially underlie this transmission and conclude that sons crowd out human capital acquisition by daughters. If all daughters of self-employed men experienced the “sisters-only” level of transmission, the overall gender gap in self-employment would be reduced by nearly 20 percent.

We argue that a more individualist culture leads to more innovation and to higher growth because of the social status rewards associated with innovation in that culture. We use data on the frequency of particular genes associated with collectivist cultures, as well as a measure of distance in terms of frequencies of blood types, and historic prevalence of pathogens to instrument individualism scores. The relationship between individualism and innovation/growth remains strong even after controlling for institutions and other potentially confounding factors. We also provide evidence consistent with two-way causality between culture and institutions.

Gentrification is a term often associated with displacement and other negative byproducts of affluent in-movers altering the economic and demographic composition of a neighborhood. Empirical research on neighborhood change, however, has not produced any conclusive evidence that incumbent residents are systematically displaced under circumstances of gentrification. This raises the question, do these incumbent residents benefit from the economic and social changes that accompany gentrification? In this paper, we focus on low-income neighborhoods undergoing economic transitions (i.e. gentrification) and test whether or not the potential benefits from these changes stay within the community, in the form of employment opportunities for local residents. We find that employment effects from gentrification are quite localized. Incumbent residents experience meaningful job losses within their home census tract, even while jobs overall increase. In our preferred model, local jobs decline by as much as 63 percent. These job losses are concentrated in service and goods-producing sectors and low- and moderate-wage positions. Proximate job losses, however, are compensated for by larger gains in goods-producing and low-wage jobs slightly farther away. There is some evidence that chain establishments are associated with modest job gains in gentrifying census tracts, and that, outside of NYC, businesses that stay in place around gentrifying neighborhoods are associated with marginal job gains.

Between 1970 and 2010, US men and women became increasingly economically self-reliant, depending on their own paid labor for their positions in the income distribution, rather than on their spouses earnings or government supports. Women's self-reliance increased much more than men's, leading to increased gender equality. In this article, we document these trends and trace them to changes in the family (including declining marriage rates and increasing spousal earnings correlations), the labor force (including rising female employment and earnings), and the welfare state (including the growing dependence of government tax- and transfer-based income supports on individuals own labor earnings). We introduce a comprehensive, population-based approach to studying economic self-reliance, expanding on prior work that was limited to married couples labor earnings by incorporating all people and income sources. We use this comprehensive approach to join separate lines of research on the family, labor market, and state in order to reveal how correlated trends in these overlapping domains contributed to trends in economic self-reliance. To do so, we introduce a novel yet straight-forward decomposition of economic self-reliance using data from the Current Population Survey. Our analysis shows that a large portion of the increase in economic self-reliance among US women stems from changes in family structure. Increasing diversity in family forms can play an important role in increasing gender equality in economic self-reliance, in addition to the traditional focus on equalizing husbands and wives income contributions within married couples.

How much are low-income individuals willing to pay for health insurance, and what are the implications for insurance markets? Using administrative data from Massachusetts subsidized insurance exchange, we exploit discontinuities in the subsidy schedule to estimate willingness to pay and costs of insurance among low-income adults. As subsidies decline, insurance take-up falls rapidly, dropping about 25% for each $40 increase in monthly enrollee premiums. Marginal enrollees tend to be lower-cost, consistent with adverse selection into insurance. But across the entire distribution we can observe approximately the bottom 70% of the willingness to pay distribution - enrollee willingness to pay is three to four times below own expected medical costs. As a result, we estimate that take-up will be highly incomplete even with generous subsidies: if enrollee premiums were 25% of insurers average costs, at most half of potential enrollees would buy insurance, and even premiums subsidized down to 10% of average costs would still leave at least 20% uninsured. We briefly consider explanations for this finding which suggests an important role for uncompensated care for the uninsured and explore normative implications for insurance subsidies for low-income individuals.

The foreign born make up a sizable share of workers in 10 of the occupations expected to add the most jobs over the next decade.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed the Distributed Geothermal Market Demand Model (dGeo) as a tool to explore the potential role of geothermal distributed energy resources (DERs) in meeting thermal energy demands in the United States. The dGeo model simulates the potential for deployment of geothermal DERs in the residential and commercial sectors of the continental United States for two specific technologies: ground-source heat pumps (GHP) and geothermal direct use (DU) for district heating. To quantify the opportunity space for these technologies, dGeo leverages a highly resolved geospatial database and robust bottom-up, agent-based modeling framework. This design is consistent with others in the family of Distributed Generation Market Demand models (dGen; Sigrin et al. 2016), including the Distributed Solar Market Demand (dSolar) and Distributed Wind Market Demand (dWind) models. dGeo is intended to serve as a long-term scenario-modeling tool. It has the capability to simulate the technical potential, economic potential, market potential, and technology deployment of GHP and DU through the year 2050 under a variety of user-defined input scenarios. Through these capabilities, dGeo can provide substantial analytical value to various stakeholders interested in exploring the effects of various techno-economic, macroeconomic, financial, and policy factors related to the opportunity for GHP and DU in the United States. This report documents the dGeo modeling design, methodology, assumptions, and capabilities.

This article estimates the impact of local housing and labor market conditions on area homelessness using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD’s) annual point-in-time counts of homelessness from 2007 to 2014. In cross-sectional models, the median rent, the share of households in rental housing, and the poverty rate have strong positive impacts on homelessness. Once area-fixed effects are included, only the median rent remains positive and significant. However, fixed-effect models find a positive relationship between poverty and homelessness in communities that maintain right-to-shelter policies, suggesting constraints in shelter bed supply may limit responses of homelessness to changes in economic conditions.

Environmental hazards created by resource extraction impose numerous risks on rural populations, but have been understudied in quantitative analyses of environmental inequality. This study fills that gap by examining whether neighborhoods with socioeconomic disadvantages are disproportionately proximate to coal impoundments in Appalachia. Coal impoundments are large, hazardous dams that hold billions of gallons of wastewater and slurry, a sludge-like by-product of processing coal. I ground this study in William Freudenburg's double diversion framework, which highlights disproportionalitythe unequal trade-off between economic benefits and environmental costs of certain industries. Disproportionality is evident in Appalachia, where coal mining makes up a small percentage of the region's jobs, but threatens local communities through the creation of environmental hazards. Spatial regression results indicate that neighborhoods closest to impoundments are slightly more likely to have higher rates of poverty and unemployment, even after controlling for rurality, mining-related variables, and spatial dependence. The findings also suggest that a neighborhood's proximity to past mining activity is a stronger predictor of impoundment proximity than current levels of mining employment. This article lays the groundwork for future research on resource-based environmental inequality that considers the uneven spatial distribution of hazards created by resource extraction.