Past research has shown that green space may not be equitably distributed throughout urban areas based on socioeconomic status. This study assessed correlations between sociodemographic factors and green stormwater infrastructure placement, specifically green sheets and green roofs, in Portland, Oregon. Green stormwater infrastructure density and sociodemographic factors were compiled at the scale of U.S. Census block groups. Socioeconomic factors examined were income, age, minority percentage, and education level achieved. Significant correlations using all block groups indicated higher green street densities in areas with lower median income, lower median age, higher percentage of minority groups, and fewer people with a bachelor's degree. Examining only block groups that included a stormwater facility, areas with lower median income and lower median age had higher densities of green roofs. These relationships suggest that installing green stormwater infrastructure in Portland may contribute to additional social and economic benefits given its placement throughout the city.

We study heterogeneity in the relationship between temperature and mortality across U.S. climate regions and its implications for climate adaptation. Using exogenous variation in temperature and data on all elderly Medicare beneficiaries from 1992-2011, we show that the mortality effect of hot days is much larger in cool ZIP codes than in warm ones and that the opposite is true for cold days. We attribute this heterogeneity to historical climate adaptation. As one adaptive mechanism, air conditioning penetration explains nearly all of the regional heterogeneity in heat-driven morality but not cold-driven mortality. Combining these results with projected changes in local temperature distributions by the end of the century, we show that failure to incorporate climate heterogeneity in temperature effects can lead to mortality predictions that are wrong in sign for both cool and warm climates. Allowing regions to adapt to future climate according to the degree of climate adaptation currently observed across climates yields mortality impacts of climate change that are much lower than those estimated without allowing for adaptation, and possibly even negative.

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock. Though their unions were not legally recognized, slaves commonly married, fully aware that their marital bonds would be sustained or nullified according to the whims of white masters. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

This paper examines the influence of parental education on children's grade-for-age using a large sample of adoptees drawn from the American Community Survey between 2008 and 2014. The results show that mother's education is not an important determinant of the education of adopted children, despite statistically significant effects for own-birth children. The results for fathers are different. Among adopted white children, the effect of father's education is shown to be a statistically significant determinant of grade retention. However, among black children, adoptive father's education does not appear to have any discernible effect on children's education. A range of sensitivity tests are undertaken to check the validity of these results. The differences in these patterns between white and black students suggest the presence of racial differences in the intergenerational transmission of education.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the recent Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Dependent Mandate (DM) that requires health insurers to extend dependent coverage to the children of their insured, up to age 26. The DM has the potential to free young persons from “job lock,” enabling them to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Using the American Community Survey, the authors analyze the change in self-employment for ages 18-25 relative to the implementation of the DM. Design/methodology/approach - The authors approach the research question in a unique manner and in doing so, extend the literature. Employing national data, the authors focus on young adults impacted by the DM (those under the age of 26 may remain on their parents’ insurance). While the DM is a condition of the ACA, prior to its implementation several states had already passed their own such provision. The authors exploit this state-by-state variation in the methodology. Findings - The authors find no evidence that the ACA has stimulated self-employment among all young adults. However, the authors determine that the DM has a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of students being self-employed. The result is even more pronounced when using a stricter definition of entrepreneurship, an incorporated business. Sub-group analyses show no evidence of a significant effect on entrepreneurship among young adults in other groups. The results remain after conducting various falsification tests. Originality/value - The paper empirically addresses the commonly held belief that the ACA is creating new businesses via reduced job lock. Policy makers may wish to target other explanations of job lock rather than health insurance availability.

Improving access to sexual and reproductive health care for Spanish speakers in Humboldt County is dependent on the implementation of education, outreach and culturally specific information in Spanish. The economic, geopolitical and social dimensions of immigration to a rural county impacts access to health care, and in the current political climate, may further effect access to sexual and reproductive health care for women and youth. This ethnography examines both the experiences of women born in Latin American countries and Spanish speaking youth in Humboldt County, and their experiences with sexual/reproductive health services and sex education. Methods include participant observation in healthcare, educational and community settings, qualitative interviews, and a survey administered with middle school youth. The narratives and observations have been collected in order to better understand the existing structural barriers and how they affect these individuals. This research concludes that fear of deportation, cultural and religious values, language barriers, and institutionalized gender inequality have created systemic barriers to access in this population. In order to mitigate these barriers, it is recommended that programs take time to understand these structural barriers, through education for providers on structural competency and that reproductive health services increase and maintain an intersectional feminist approach. In addition, the development of outreach and advocacy programs for Spanish speaking populations, and mandatory healthy relationships education for youth, assist in lessening these disparities by meeting Spanish speakers where they are at and educating them about services.

Tougher immigration enforcement was responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in intensified enforcement to gauge its impact on children’s propensity to live without their parents, or in households headed by single mothers with absentee spouses. Given the negative consequences of being raised without parents or in a single-headed household and the parallel increase in immigration enforcement in the United States, gaining a better understanding of the collateral damage of heightened enforcement on the families to which these children belong is well warranted.

A frequent belief is that the rise of the sharing economy has led to the displacement of workers in a wide range of traditional jobs. This paper examines the impacts of the flagship of the sharing economy-Uber-on workers employed in conventional taxi services. Our analysis exploits the staggered rollout of Uber across U.S. cities, showing that employment of payroll taxi services if anything expanded after the introduction of the Uber platform, accompanied by a marked relative shift towards self-employment. While we find no evidence of adverse employment impacts, our estimates show that hourly earnings declined for wage-employed drivers, which were partly offset by increases in income among self-employed drivers. A triple-difference design that compares earnings and employment changes for taxi drivers relative to bus, delivery, tractor, and truck drivers that were unaffected by the arrival of Uber provides further supporting evidence that while Uber has had no negative employment impacts it has reduced the earnings potential of incumbent drivers in point-to-point transportation services.

Medical marijuana laws are examined as a shock to labor supply. The effects of medical marijuana laws are estimated through a change in an individuals income, usual hours worked per week, weeks worked per year, labor force participation, employment status, and worker availability. Federal and state laws, as well as state level legal decisions are briefly introduced and discussed. Then, medical and economics literature on marijuana are surveyed before my methodology, data, and results are introduced. I find statistically significant effects associated with legal access to marijuana with particularly strong effects for veterans.

Recent research shows that inequality between racial groups is a critical determinant of redistributive policy in the U.S. Using various measures of local and state spending and examining multiple levels of geographical and political jurisdictions, we extend this research to government spending on local public goods. Specifically, we examine (1) whether the extent to which income inequality falls along racial lines dampens local and state government spending on public goods, (2) which types of public goods are most affected by the racial structure of inequality, and (3) whether political variables such as local leaders’ racial identities and party affiliation mediate the relationship between racial inequality and spending on public goods. The findings reaffirm the need to consider racial diversity and inequality jointly as influences on policy.

Schooling is a human capital skill that influences both the migration decisions of immigrants (especially for non-refugees), and the rate at which immigrants assimilate in the host country. Returns to schooling could be correlated with difficult-to-observe factors such as self- selection, and legal status, and these unobservables can affect the economic assimilation of immigrants into the host country differently. The objective of this paper is to investigate the returns to schooling for refugees and other immigrants. Refugees- a subset of immigrants- have different characteristics and face different constraints than other immigrants, and this could affect the evolution of their schooling returns in the destination country. Estimates show that non-refugees receive a much larger crude wage return for schooling at both arrival, and over time. Although educated refugees presumably have greater ability to take advantage of refugees' greater flexibility in seeking more suitable employment matches during the adjustment period, they do not see higher return growth than non-refugees do. The two groups’ returns grow over time, but refugees do not catch up with non-refugees. This suggests that schooling is more strongly correlated with unobserved skills among non-refugees, so it appears that selection into both migration and return-migration are more important factors than the advantage in terms of job search.

Chapter 1 of this thesis explores the effect of increasing income inequality on the rates of urban sprawl and income segregation. Namely, we are interested in studying how an increase in income inequality would affect the size of an urban structure and what what would happen to residential segregation by income: would there be a higher level of residential mixing between the rich and the poor or would they form more segregated communities. We used a mixed logit model from random utility theory and built a theoretical framework to examine how these three phenomena are related. We found that the effect of rising income inequality on urban sprawl and income segregation depends on the preference characteristics of workers in an urban area.f First, cities with either high values of elasticity of choice probability with respect to commuting times or a higher degree of preference heterogeneity among residents will have less geographic sprawl and a lesser degree of income segregation when income inequality rises. High values of elasticity of choice probability with respect to commuting times are likely to be observed in cities with a wide range of public transportation alternatives. In other words, it is likely that those cities with better public transportation infrastructure expand less and suffer from less income segregation than cities dominated by a single mode of transportation like driving. Second, depending on the initial residential location of the rich, an increase in income inequality may either aggravate an existing level of income segregation between the city and the suburbs, or invert this trend. In this chapter we discuss two simulation scenarios that show both outcomes. Chapter 2 recognizes the importance of income inequality in pricing traffic congestion. In reality, drivers deviate from each other in their values of time. Since the value of time depends on workers’ income, those with higher earnings will bear heavier losses from traffic congestion. While the urban literature generally recognizes the importance of the value of time in the theory of congestion pricing, there are few papers that quantify the difference in welfare benefits between income-attentive Pigouvian pricing and the quasi-Pigouvian tolling, which is levied under an assumption of the average value of time. We find a superiority of an income-attentive tolling scheme over the quasi-Pigouvian tolling. Our results suggest that tolling traffic congestion under the assumption of a constant value of time results in a loss of about 2.04 percent of welfare on a per capita basis compared to the first-best road pricing. Furthermore, income-attentive tolling reduces the level of residential income segregation between the city and the suburb by 2.12 percent more than the quasi-Pigouvian tolling. This may be considered as an additional source of benefit if one believes that residential segregation by income serves no good for society. On the other hand, income attentive tolling leads to a lower reduction in the average travel time and the annual per capita travel delay. This happens because a more congested central city has a lower average income than a less congested suburb. Levying a tax that recognizes these income differences leads to a lower congestion toll for the city drivers and a higher congestion toll for the suburban drivers. However, since the lion’s share of the traffic congestion occurs on the city roads, a reduction in the average travel delay will be smaller when implementing such an income-attentive pricing scheme. Higher values of either the value of time or the exponent of the BPR congestion function only enhance all aforementioned results. At the same time, a higher level of the idiosyncratic tastes over the population of workers could decrease a bulk of welfare superiority obtained by income attentive tolling. This could also happen when the earnings of the central city drivers decline, raising an income gap between the city and the suburb. The objective of Chapter 3 is to shed light on how income inequality affects residential segregation. Specifically, we are asking whether there is a racial cause underlying residential segregation, or whether it is primarily motivated by disparities in income and socio-economic status. To conduct this analysis, we build a multinomial logit model from discrete choice theory and examine residential location decisions of individual households that reside in the Greater Los Angeles Area, taking their places of work as given. We picked Greater Los Angeles as our study area due to its diversity, which allows our analysis to recognize the multiracial composition of the United States. The resulting parameter estimates describe how households of various personal characteristics consisting of ethnicity, age, education and income level value socio-demographic and economic characteristics of the neighborhoods that they live in.

In this paper, we examine the causal impact of enforceable covenants not to compete (CNCs) on labor market matching and the technological dynamism of regions. Exploiting the fact that the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act (MARA) of 1985 inadvertently repealed Michigan' s prohibition on CNC enforcement, we show that technical professionals in Michigan became increasingly likely to switch industry relative to similar workers in other U.S. states after prohibition. Workers switching industries after the introduction of MARA also earned lower wages, implying that they shifted into technical fields where their skills from previous employment were less productive. Estimates further show that the technological dynamism of Michigan declined in tandem, as fewer workers shifted into new types of jobs associated with recent technological advances. These findings are consistent with the view that skilled professionals that are subject to CNCs are more likely to leave their field of work postemployment to avoid lawsuits.

Lawn dissidents are people who violate norms of turfgrass yards often found in North American suburbs. This paper uses qualitative methods and engages a performance view of landscape to examine how these subjects sustainability-oriented lawn alternatives work unintentionally to create exclusionary landscapes. As capitalism adopts environmentalism as a sustainability fix, niche green capitalist markets allow lawn dissidents to cultivate subject positions within sustainability that ignore social justice concerns. Alongside their environmentalist concerns, lawn dissidents continue to approach land through frames that treat it as a commodity and as a signifier of cultural distinction, particularly within an elite cosmopolitan subcategory of whiteness. Nonetheless, inasmuch as lawn dissidents enact social scripts and cultivate landscapes that perform white bourgeois sensibilities around urban sustainability, the exclusionary effect of this practice is neither inevitable nor necessary. By viewing the landscapes that lawn dissidents create through the theory of the interstice, we posit an alternative direction in which sharing economies offer a more inclusive vision of sustainability in urban residential landscapes.

he overall influence of urbanization on how flows of different frequency might change over time, while important in hydrologic design, remains imprecisely known. In this study, we investigate the effects of urbanization on flow duration curves (FDCs) and flow variability through a case study of eight watersheds that underwent different amounts of growth, in the Puget Sound region in Western Washington State, United States. We computed annual FDCs from flow records spanning 1960-2010 and, after accounting for the effects of precipitation, we conducted statistical trend analyses on flow metrics to quantify how key FDC percentiles changed with time in response to urbanization. In the urban watersheds, the entire FDC tended to increase in magnitude of flow, especially the 95th-99th percentile of the daily mean flow series, which increased by an average of 43%. Stream flashiness in urban watersheds was found to increase by an average of 70%. The increases in FDC magnitude and flashiness in urbanizing watersheds are most likely a result of increasing watershed imperviousness and altered hydrologic routing. Rural watersheds were found to have decreasing FDC magnitude over the same time period, which is possibly due to anthropogenic extractions of groundwater, and increasing stream flashiness, which is likely a result of reductions in base flow and increasing precipitation intensity and variability.

Children from wealthier families are more likely to have health insurance than children from poorer families on average. However, the relationship between family income and health insurance is non-linear, as children near the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) are less likely to be insured than children from both wealthier families (who obtain health insurance from the private market) and poorer families (who obtain government-funded health insurance). This health insurance dip has persisted even as Medicaid has been expanded to cover those above the FPL. One explanation for this is that families who are far below the poverty line are better connected to the welfare system, and consequently, are more likely to enroll in Medicaid. This study uses data from the 20012013 Current Population Surveys and finds that (1) controlling for many of the determinants of eligibility, those on other forms of government assistance are more likely to have health insurance, and (2) the relationship between family income and children's health insurance status is strictly increasing after controlling for enrollment in other welfare programs.

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. Public bus service represents a standardized output for benchmarking the cost of local government service provision. Among the top twenty largest cities, there exists significant dispersion in the operating cost per bus mile with the highest being more than three times as high as the lowest. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Our analysis suggests that fully privatizing all bus transit would generate cost savings of approximately $5.7 billion, or 30% of total U.S. bus transit operating expenses. The corresponding increased use of public transit from this cost reduction would lead to a gain in social welfare of $524 million, at minimum, and at least 26,000 additional transit jobs.

I assess the impact of an aging labor force on business dynamism, labor market fluidity and economic growth. The analysis embeds endogenous growth through creative destruction in an equilibrium job ladder model, highlighting feedback between the extent of mismatch in the labor market and incentives to innovate. I calibrate the model to aggregate reallocation rates and show that the theory replicates life cycle firm and worker dynamics in the data. The model implies that labor force aging over the last 30 years in the US explains 40–50 percent of the decline in job and worker reallocation and has reduced annual economic growth by 0.3 percentage points. Using cross-state variation and instrumenting for the incidence of aging using lagged age shares, I find additional empirical support for the prediction of large effects of aging on dynamism and growth.

Cette étude s’intéresse à la vulnérabilité aux changements climatiques et à leurs impacts sur l’eau dans le bassin versant de l’Artibonite en Haïti. L’étude a adopté une approche intégrée qui a permis d’analyser la question sous différents angles. D’une part, un angle plus subjectif, qui tient compte des perceptions des principaux acteurs concernés par les changements en question, c’est-à-dire les ménages; et un angle plus objectif qui tient compte des données du dernier recensement général de la population Haïtienne. D’autre part, l’approche a permis de faire une analyse à une échelle locale (micro) et une autre à une échelle macro. Les résultats obtenus montrent que les changements climatiques, pris en tant que tel, ne font pas partie des priorités des ménages du bassin versant de l’Artibonite, ou du moins, ils ne considèrent pas les changements climatiques comme la cause des changements qui ont lieu dans leur environnement et qui influencent leurs activités de subsistance. Mais quand le lien est établi, ils s’estiment vulnérables. Les résultats issus tant des entrevues que des données du recensement indiquent que les principaux facteurs de vulnérabilité sont le statut socio-économique, le fait de vivre en milieu rural, le faible accès à certains biens et services tels que l’éducation, le marché, le crédit etc.

We explore the relationship between access to affordable health insurance and self-employment using exogenous variation from the introduction of Medicare Part D that reduced the out-of-pocket cost of prescription drugs and improved health outcomes in a difference-in-differences model using the American Community Survey. We find that our treatment group of individuals aged 65-69 were 0.5 percentage points (or 5%) more likely to be self-employed in relation to a control group aged 60-64.