Pilgrim Pipeline Holdings, LLC has proposed the construction of a 178-mile dual line pipeline between Albany, NY and Linden, NJ for the purpose of transporting Bakken Crude oil. The company claims that this pipeline will reduce the need for other methods of crude oil transport, such as oil tankers and barges, while also providing a safer and more efficient method of crude oil transport overall. Ever since the company began surveying public and private properties along the proposed route, we have seen a confluence of grassroots activists and elected officials working together to show their opposition to this pipeline and spread awareness about the potential threats associated with the pipeline. This has resulted in the passing of 30 resolutions of opposition to the Pipeline in New York State alone. With so much current national opposition to the construction of pipelines, we wanted to conduct a study of stakeholder perspectives on this topic and produce a list of recommendations based on our findings. Through preliminary research, including the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we found that the pipeline will increase the transport of crude by rail through the state of New York to feed the pipeline, which is a 40-year investment in fossil fuel energy that will have little economic benefit to either New York or New Jersey. Thirteen of our fourteen respondents (the outlier being a representative from Pilgrim Pipeline Holdings LLC) were ardently against the pipeline, primarily due to local or regional concerns for water and environmental quality degradation and the potential for spills. Overall, we found six recurring themes related to respondents’ concerns. Based on these findings, we suggest that the state avoid permitting the Pilgrim Pipeline and instead focus on fixing existing fossil fuel infrastructure and implementing renewable energy technologies in accordance to the New York State Energy Plan for 2030.

To design premium subsidies in a health insurance market it is necessary to estimate consumer demand, cost, and study how different subsidy schemes affect insurers’ incentives. I combine data on household-level enrollment and plan-level claims from the Californian Affordable Care Act insurance exchange with a model of insurance demand and insurers’ competition to assess equilibrium outcomes under alternative subsidy designs. I estimate that younger households are significantly more price sensitive and cheaper to cover. Consequently, counterfactuals show that providing more generous subsidies to this group leads to equilibria where all buyers are better off and per-person public spending is lower.

California is slowly pulling out of a long recession and years of budget turmoil. Social services have been cut and many families have been struggling. In this context, an accurate assessment of the depth, breadth, and location of economic hardship in the state is especially important. To help policymakers and stakeholders determine whether programs aimed at reducing poverty are reaching those in need, we introduce the California Poverty Measure (CPM). A joint project of the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality, the CPM is part of a national effort to measure poverty in a more comprehensive way. It incorporates the changes in costs and standards of living since the official poverty measure was devised in the early 1960s—and accounts for geographic differences in the cost of living across the state. It also factors in tax credits and in-kind assistance that can augment family resources and subtracts medical, commuting, and child care expenses. The CPM illuminates the important role of the social safety net—specifically, CalFresh, CalWORKs, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and other means-tested programs—in moderating poverty. Our findings indicate that the programs included in the CPM—which comprise the bulk of California’s social safety net—cut the state’s poverty rate substantially. But our findings also suggest that the additional resources counted in the CPM are more than offset by necessary expenses (particularly for older adults, who may face high medical bills) and the higher cost of living in the most populous areas of the state. In particular:...

Industrial renewal in the 21st century: evidence from US cities. Regional Studies. Where and why do new industries emerge? Using revisions of official industrial classifications, this paper documents the appearance of new industries in the US economy between 2000 and 2010 stemming directly from technological advances. Examining differences in new industry creation across cities, this paper shows that new industries mainly emerge in human capital abundant places and cities that specialize in industries that demand similar skills. Instrumental variables estimates that exploit the location of 19th-century land-grant colleges as an instrument for contemporary differences in human capital assigns a causal interpretation to these results.

Personal automobile use is commonly recognized as impacting public health, environmental sustainability, land use, and household expense. Car use is closely tied to car ownership rates, and fewer cars per household could indicate greater utilization of alternative modes of transportation. Most car ownership and active transportation research focuses on urban areas. However, much of the United States remains rural, and different factors may impact car ownership in less-densely populated areas. This research examines car ownership trends in rural counties to identify communities with lower than expected rates of car ownership considering demographic factors. 2,285 counties in the continental United States were identified as rural according to guidelines found in the Agriculture Act of 2014. These counties were grouped into five regions based on U.S. Census Bureau definitions. To identify counties of interest, an Ordinary Least Squares regression was created for each region that incorporated data from the 1990 Decennial Census and 2014 5-year American Community Survey. Two counties from each region were selected and studied for policies that may be correlated with car ownership rates: a county with a lower-than-expected car ownership rate change and a county with a typical car ownership rate change to serve as a control. Local professionals were interviewed and relevant policies summarized.

Using city-of-birth data from the 100% sample of the 1880 Census merged to city-level fatality counts, I estimate the relationship between early-life yellow fever exposure and adult occupational status. I find that white males with immigrant mothers were less likely to become professionals and more likely to become unskilled laborers or report occupational nonresponse if they were born during yellow fever epidemics. They also reported occupations with lower 1900 occupational income scores. The children of U.S.-born mothers (who were less susceptible to the disease) were relatively unaffected. Furthermore, I find no evidence that epidemics 3 to 4 years after birth affect adult occupational status, and the results are robust to controlling for local trade during an individual's birth year.

Recent studies empirically support the role of the built environment in inducing or hindering violent crime. Particularly, studies of the broken window theory have provided evidence that physical disorder is an environmental correlate of crime. This includes broken windows, vacant/abandoned housings, abandoned cars on street, graffiti, and decayed street lighting, among other things. Current studies are limited by the difficulty involved in collecting fine-scale quantitative environmental data. The conventional environmental audit approach, which aims to assess environmental features, is costly, time-consuming, and burdensome. In this study, we use Google Street View to study the relationship between violent crime and physical features of urban residential environment. More concretely, a Poisson regression model with spatial filtering is used to identify socio-economic correlates of violent crime. Parting from the hypothesis that omission of built environmental factors results in systematic residual pattern, we proceed to analyze the spatial filter to select sites for virtual environmental audits. A series of physical environmental factors are identified using contingency table analysis. The results provide both theoretical and practical implications for several theories of crime and crime prevention efforts.

1. As outlined in our previous report on the subject, school segregation by race has declined since the 1960s, largely because of the increase in the Hispanic school population. That said, white segregation has been more or less flat since the 1990s. 2. The segregation of schools by race remains high, however. Noteworthy is the continued separation of white and black students. This could have various negative consequences, from social isolation to academic outcomes. 3. In this paper, and accompanying online interactive, we investigate the racial composition of schools, compared to the neighborhoods in which they are located. School segregation inevitably reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, neighborhood segregation - especially when enrollment criteria are based on geography. We construct a “racial imbalance measure” for every non-private (including traditional public schools, charter schools and magnet schools) school in the U.S., comparing the racial composition of each school to that of its surrounding neighborhood. (We use a 2-mile radius to match schools to nearby Census blocks within the school’s district; but the findings are largely the same for other distances and approaches).

We construct the first long-term comparison of cross-sectional and panel estimates of immigrant earnings assimilation in the U.S. from a single data source. Unlike Lubotsky (2007), we find that selective outmigration of higher earning immigrants biases downwards cross-sectional estimates for all education groups. Cross-sectional estimates dramatically understate earnings growth for high-skilled foreign-born workers. The bias stems from both selective outmigration and selective employment; among high-skilled immigrants, low earners find employment with a substantial delay while high earners work immediately upon arrival. We present suggestive evidence that the H-1B visa program may play a role in estimated immigrant earnings dynamics.

This article uses data on relative incomes to measure the economic convergence (or lack thereof) of African American men over time, and reviews current research in economic history on the struggle for economic equality for African American men in the United States since the end of the Civil War in 1865. The contents of this paper were originally presented at the University of Stellenbosch Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP) Lecture on 6 December 2016.

Objective: Crossing racial lines provides a unique context for understanding racial patterns in smoking. This research explores whether adults whose unions cross racial lines behave more similarly to their own group or their partner's Design: Using a sample of respondents from the National Health Interview Survey (2001–2011), we compare the likelihood of current smoking and quitting smoking among adults in mixed-race unions to adults in same-race unions. Results: Adults with different-race partners generally mirror their partner's group; people of color with White partners have a higher likelihood of being current smokers, similar to Whites, while Whites partnered with Asians and Latina/os are, like other Asians and Latino/as, less likely to smoke. There are fewer differences in the likelihood of quitting smoking.

Through the coordination of work of a team of analysts in twelve countries for nearly twenty years, the International Social Security (ISS) project has use the vast differences in social security programs across countries as a natural laboratory to study the effects of retirement program provisions on the labor force participation of older persons. This analysis is the seventh phase of the ongoing project, and it is focused on the health capacity to work at older ages.

Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates continue to be below national targets for women and lower in some sexual minorities. HPV is a primary causal agent in cervical cancer, from which members of the lesbian and bisexual community mistakenly believe they are at low risk. This study characterized rates of HPV vaccination in women based on their sexual orientation. Methods: Data were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health Interview Survey 2013-2014. This survey evaluated 5695 women-113 (2%) lesbian, 135 (2.4%) bisexual, and 5446 (95.6%) heterosexual women ages 18-26 in 2006-using logistic regression. A dependent variable of having had HPV vaccination and independent variable of sexual orientation was used. Results: Significant differences were found in vaccine uptake based on sexual orientation. Bisexual women were most likely to be vaccinated, and differed significantly from heterosexual and lesbians which did not differ significantly from each other. The results suggest improvement in sexual minority rates but this finding is tempered by the low rates of vaccination in adult women. Implications: The low vaccination rates in adult women and sexual minorities merit further study. The low rates may be a function of the transition from pediatric to adult care and/or practice barriers perceived by sexual minorities.

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most commonly occurring type of primary liver cancer, has been increasing in incidence worldwide. Vitamin D, acquired from sunlight exposure, diet, and dietary supplements, has been hypothesized to impact hepatocarcinogenesis. However, previous epidemiologic studies examining the associations between dietary and serum vitamin D reported mixed results. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between ambient ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure and HCC risk in the U.S. Methods: The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database provided information on HCC cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2014 from 16 population-based cancer registries across the U.S. Ambient UV exposure was estimated by linking the SEER county with a spatiotemporal UV exposure model using a geographic information system. Poisson regression with robust variance estimation was used to calculate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between ambient UV exposure per interquartile range (IQR) increase (32.4 mW/m2) and HCC risk adjusting for age at diagnosis, sex, race, year of diagnosis, SEER registry, and county-level information on prevalence of health conditions, lifestyle, socioeconomic, and environmental factors. Results: Higher levels of ambient UV exposure were associated with statistically significant lower HCC risk (n = 56,245 cases; adjusted IRR per IQR increase: 0.83, 95% CI 0.77, 0.90; p < 0.01). A statistically significant inverse association between ambient UV and HCC risk was observed among males (p for interaction = 0.01) and whites (p for interaction = 0.01). Conclusions: Higher ambient UV exposure was associated with a decreased risk of HCC in the U.S. UV exposure may be a potential modifiable risk factor for HCC that should be explored in future research.

We estimate the costs of occupational mobility and quantify the relative importance of differences in task content as a component of total mobility costs. We use a novel approach based on a model of occupational choice that delivers a gravity equation linking worker flows to occupation characteristics and transition costs. Using data from the Current Population Survey and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles we find that task-specific costs account for no more than 15% of the total transition cost across most occupation pairs. Transition costs vary widely across occupations and, while increasing with the dissimilarity in the mix of tasks performed, are mostly accounted for by task-independent occupation-specific factors. The fraction of transition costs that can be attributed to task-related variables appears fairly stable over the 1994–2013 period.

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone, most of them involving fathers and heads of household. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in intensified enforcement to gauge its impact on children’s propensity to reside in households singly-headed by mothers with absentee spouses, or without their parents in households headed by relatives or friends. Given the emotional, cognitive and long-run socioeconomic costs of being raised in single-headed households or without parents, gaining a better understanding of the collateral damage of heightened enforcement on the families to which these children belong is warranted.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: In this study I investigate whether zoning has traditionally protected communities of color from the dangers of heavy commercial and industrial use to the extent that it has protected White communities. I evaluate whether upzonings—changes from less intensive uses to more intensive heavy commercial and industrial uses—disproportionately occurred in African-American and low-income neighborhoods in Durham (NC) from 1945 to 2014, and I evaluate the comparative impact of downzonings. I use the contemporary demographics of the census tracts where these rezonings occurred and qualitative evidence from public hearings, plans, and other relevant primary materials. I find that before 1985, the pattern of rezonings in Durham had negative implications for African-American areas in particular. Environmental justice efforts in the 1980s, followed by gentrification, caused the city’s planners and local elected officials to change course. Takeaway for practice: Planners have an ethical obligation to promote equity, and their ability to do so depends on understanding sources of social injustice. In Durham, race historically played a role in upzonings and downzonings involving heavy commercial and industrial uses. The city also demonstrates that planners and local elected officials can successfully intervene to end disparities in zoning practice across communities of different racial characteristics. Assessing past zoning practices in other cities may reveal similar records of bias and help planners to present cases for corrective action.

Recent scholarship has focused extensively on the rise of diverse neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Nevertheless, the theoretical frameworks we have for describing residential settlement patterns generally treat diversity as an unstable and transitory period that is the product of a unidirectional pressure towards segregation. In our analysis of six diverse neighborhoods in Southeast Seattle, we find evidence of processes at multiple scales that not only maintain diversity, but actually reinforce it. From individual decisions about property ownership to broader patterns of regional disinvestment, we find empirical evidence that indicates a need for a more complex theorization of the processes that create and sustain diverse neighborhoods. In our preliminary theorization of these conditions, we call for a conceptualization of residential settlement patterns that is explicitly multiscalar and recognizes a wider range of cultural, economic, and political relations as central to the production of observed patterns of neighborhood settlement.

This study developed a new approach to determine whether college graduates are employed in good-fit jobs. I used three large data sets: the long form samples from the 1980 and 2000 US censuses and the 2014 American Community Survey. Each of these data sets has at least 1 million observations of people currently working with their corresponding demographic, educational, occupational, and earnings information. Further, the coding of all three surveys has been synchronized by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota. For each of the three years (1980, 2000, and 2014), I evaluated up to 449 occupations to see if they were good-fit jobs for someone with a college degree (appendix B provides a more detailed discussion of sources and methods).