Using a regression discontinuity framework, this paper documents a previously unnoticed drop of 7%8% in the U.S. suicide rate upon reaching age 62 during 19902014. This decline is concentrated among men, nearly doubled in size over the most recent decade as the income gap between those just older and younger narrowed, and represents the only trend break among ages 4579. These findings, along with the observed timing of retirement and benefit claims and research on how income affects suicide, suggest that the likely explanation is Social Security early retirement benefit eligibility rather than retirement per se.

This paper examines the effect of migrant diversity on households’ expenditure on food products. Using product attribute descriptions from the Nielsen Consumer Panel dataset and mapping it to a corpus of recipes, I calculate a region weighted expenditure share for each household. Exploiting variation in migrant settlement patterns across counties and country of origin, I find that a one percentage point increase in foreign-born share of a particular region is associated with a 0.28 percentage point increase in expenditure share on consumer packaged goods associated with that region. However, a negative relationship is observed among Asian countries. The findings are robust to various means of constructing the dataset, expenditure shares and choice of instruments.

Cultural beliefs of a group, shaped by historical events, can impact a variety of behaviors of future generations with economic implications ranging from labor force participation to political activity. I analyze the extent to which the political participation of blacks can be traced to historical lynchings that took place between 1882 and 1930 in the same counties. Using county-level voter registration data, I show that southern counties that experienced a higher number of historical lynchings have lower voter registration rates of blacks today. This relationship holds after accounting for a variety of historical and contemporary characteristics of counties and strengthen when lynchings are instrumented with historical measures of environmental suitability for growing cotton. Examining individual-level data shows that blacks who reside in counties with more historical lynchings are less likely to vote compared to their white counterparts. Lynchings have no impact on voting differences between other minority groups and whites.

Mexican low-skilled migrants are found to be highly mobile when they face labor demand shocks. This paper examines the role of migration networks in Mexican-born immigrants’ loca- tion choices. We rely on the sizable variation in labor demand declines across states during the Great Recession to identify migration responses to demand shocks and use a novel set of data, the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) data, to construct migration network mea- sures. We find that migration networks indeed play an important part in Mexican migrants’ responsiveness to local demand shocks.In particular, migrants respond to local economic con- ditions and conditions in network-connected locations when making location decisions.

The labor force participation rate has fallen since 2008, partly due to an aging population and despite a more highly educated one. After accounting for aging, those whose highest educational attainment is a high school diploma, some college or an associate degree have primarily driven the participation decrease.

With approximately three million residents, Long Island is home to world-class research, medical, and academic institutions that are fueling a new innovation economy. Despite the regions achievements, the American dream that Long Island was built to fulfill remains out of reach for many residents, particularly Black families in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Equity-just and fair inclusion-is the key to success and prosperity for these families, communities, and the region as a whole. Closing racial income gaps would result in the average Black income increasing by over $22,000. Long Island as a whole stands to gain a great deal from addressing racial inequities-in 2014 alone, the regions economy could have been nearly $24 billion stronger if its racial gaps in income had been closed. To build a sustainable Long Island economy, public, private, and nonprofit leaders across the region must commit to advancing policies and strategies that increase health equity, wealth, and economic resilience of all Long Islanders.

Accurate vital statistics are required to understand the evolution of racial disparities in infant health and the causes of rapid secular decline in infant mortality during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, infant mortality rates prior to 1950 suffer from an upward bias stemming from a severe underregistration of births. At one extreme, African-American births in Southern states went unregistered at the rate of 15 to 25 percent. In this paper, we construct improved estimates of births and infant mortality in the United States for the 1915-1940 period using recently released complete count decennial census microdata combined with the counts of infant deaths from published sources. We check the veracity of our estimates with a major birth registration study completed in conjunction with the 1940 Decennial Census, and that the largest adjustments occur in states with less complete birth registration systems. An additional advantage of our census-based estimation method is the extension back of the birth and infant mortality series for years prior to published estimates of registered births, enabling previously impossible comparisons and estimations. Finally, we show that underregistration can bias effect estimates even in a panel setting with specifications that include location fixed effects and place-specific linear time trends.

We study the labor-market impacts of occupational licensing laws on nursing, an economically important occupation. States adopted licensing of registered and practical nurses at different times, which allows us to estimate the effects of licensing on wages and participation for each nursing profession. We find that licensure raised wages by 5 to 10 percent but there is no evidence that it reduced overall participation. Additionally, we show that licensure equalizes wages within the occupation with minority wages rising faster than nonminority wages; however, licensing had a negative but not statistically significant impact on the participation of minorities in nursing.

As part of a New Deal initiative to minimize home foreclosure, federal government officials and local real estate professionals graded each neighborhood in America’s largest cities on its perceived credit risk. Using recently digitized maps that precisely show neighborhoods marked with red ink (highest risk) or yellow ink (slightly lower risk), I document that surveyors disproportionately assigned the most restrictive credit rating to neighborhoods with black residents. Nearly 90 percent of African Americans in 1940 lived in a census tract marked for credit redlining. Comparing credit-restricted "redlined" census tracts to adjacent "yellow-lined" tracts, I estimate the long-run effects of redlining on housing and neighborhood outcomes. Between 1940 and 1970, redlining was associated with large differential declines in housing supply and population density; homeownership rates and racial composition did not change differentially from their 1940 baseline though. Once discriminatory lending was outlawed during the mid-1970s, there was moderate convergence in homeownership rates and racial composition. However, housing supply and population density remain persistently lower in formerly credit-restricted census tracts relative to their credit-favored neighbors.

Wage and job polarization are two defining phenomena that have characterized the US labor market from the 1980s to the late 2000s. Polarization has also differed distinctly between demographic subgroups, such as men and women. In addition, sorting patterns between workers and firms have changed over this period. This paper finds that technological change can account for a substantial part of these phenomena. It does so by constructing a structural model with two key ingredients: 1) directed search and 2) two-sided multidimensional heterogeneity. Estimation results show that the complementarity between cognitive skills and tasks increased relative to that between both interpersonal and manual skills and tasks. Complementarity between manual skills and tasks decreased substantially. This change in production technology induces polarization in the model and also generates improvement in sorting between workers and firms in the cognitive dimension relative to other dimensions, in line with the data. The model also accounts for a large part of the gender differences in polarization. Lastly, in this novel framework of directed search with multidimensional heterogeneity, I develop a definition of assortative matching and examine the conditions under which it is obtained.

The study of intergenerational mobility was once traditionally viewed as a quintessentially sociological topic that was widely investigated using occupational mobility tables. However, the popularity of occupational mobility tables seems to be rapidly dwindling due to their various shortcomings. The first limitation is contextual nature of occupation which provides an increasingly imprecise indicator of the individual’s earnings or other socioeconomic outcomes. The second limitation is the lack of focus on long-term earnings and the continued reliance on cross-sectional data in an era of increased labor market volatility. The third limitation is the dubious practice of partitioning mobility into structural-mobility versus circulation-mobility and focusing on primarily the latter to make generalizations about the level of opportunity and social fluidity in society. The fourth limitation is the failure of occupational models to discern important empirical trends (such as rising earnings inequality and the Great Gatsby Curve). Most sociologists are now abandoning occupational mobility tables—despite their once great popularity—in favor of economic models which are not encumbered by any of these limitations.

The prevalence and consequences of eviction have transformed the lived experience of urban poverty in America, yet little is known about why some families avoid eviction while others do not. Applying discrete hazard models to a unique dataset of renters, this study empirically evaluates individual, neighborhood, and social network characteristics that explain disparities in displacement from housing. Family size, job loss, neighborhood crime and eviction rates, and network disadvantage are identified as significant and robust predictors of eviction, net of missed rental payments and other relevant factors. This study advances urban sociology and inequality research and informs policy interventions designed to prevent eviction and stem its consequences.

We examine the distance and relations between the distributions of wages for two exogenously identified groups (black and white women here). The literature commonly employs decomposition methods for the conditional means, to propose explanations for observed wage differentials, as structural components, attributable to difference in market structures, and the composition components, attributable to difference in characteristics and skills. Estimation of these components is often hampered by restrictive wage structure assumptions, and sample selection issues (wages are only observed for those working). We address these issues by first utilizing modern strategies in the treatment effects literature to identify the entire distributions of wages and counterfactual wages among working women, which afford a separation of composition and market effects. We avoid restrictive wage structure modeling by nonparametric inverse probability weighting methods. This approach allows for decomposition beyond the gap at the mean, and can deliver distributional statistics of interest, such as inequalities and target quantiles. Accounting for selection, we extend the basic framework to provide a computationally convenient way to identify bounds on the decomposed components for the whole population. We employ these methods to understand the sources and dynamics of the racial gap in the U.S. Our analysis reveals that what may be learned about racial gap is impacted by labor force participation, and is also sensitive to the choice of population of interest. Our results question what may be gleaned from the commonly reported point estimates when sample selection is neglected.

With billions in public and private investments in the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and Governor Cuomos historic Buffalo Billion investment in economic development, the city of Buffalo is poised for resurgence. Yet persistent racial inequities in health, wealth, and economic opportunity inhibit the citys growth. Without a change in course, these inequities will take a heavy toll on the city as immigrants and communities of color grow as a share of its population and workforce. Equity-just and fair inclusion-is the key to sustainable economic recovery and growth in the Queen City. To build a Buffalo economy that works for all, city and regional leaders must commit to putting all residents on the path to good health and economic security, through protections and policies that enable existing residents to stay in the city and connect to jobs and opportunities, and ensure that they benefit from new development.

The labor market attachment of females has increased dramatically over the last half century, converging to a pattern similar to that of males. Human capital theory predicts an associated increase in human capital investment by females and a convergence in the life-cycle human capital investment profiles of males and females. This paper explores wage-based and job-skills-based approaches to measuring the increased supply of efficiency units of human capital by females over the last four decades. Results suggest that the magnitude of the contribution of the increased human capital of women to post-war economic growth is substantially under-estimated by conventional methods of measuring human capital and labor inputs. A complete picture of the evolution of the human capital of women requires new approaches to measuring their human capital.

This paper examines whether Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which banned sex discrimination in admissions, was successful in reducing gender disparity in graduate education. I find a sharp convergence of female and male graduate-degree fields coincident with Title IX's passage. This distributional change occurred as women moved into male-dominated fields and does not seem to be driven by gender-specific preferences. Alternative explanations including the end of the Vietnam War Draft, increased access to the pill, abortion legalization, changing female attitudes, and the strengthening of anti-discrimination labor laws are also considered but do not explain the discontinuity.

The past two decades have witnessed a rapid increase of immigrant population in U.S. schools. Little is known, however, about factors that promote crosscultural experiences, academic achievement, and/or challenges of Black African immigrant youth, which is particularly significant today in the midst of the current social and political discourse over the influence of immigration in U.S. schools. Sixty Ghanaian-born immigrant students were recruited and interviewed. Analyses, which draw from in-depth interviews and observations, revealed that resilience to succeed, teacher and parent support, positive school environment, past histories including educational experiences, and challenging factors of racism, classism, xenophobia, acculturative stress, changes in curriculum, language, and cultural discrimination emerged as the major factors that largely influenced academic achievement of these learners. This article discusses the implications of these findings for educators who are tasked to render better educational settings for Black African immigrantstudents to succeed in U.S. schools.

This guide is designed to provide a demographic snapshot of Georgia’s colleges at the outset of the 2017-2018 school year, with insight into the forces that shape Georgia’s approach to higher education policy. This booklet documents the various needs filled by Georgia’s colleges, from urban research universities to rural technical schools. You’ll find it is rich with facts and figures to help you better understand the students enrolled in Georgia’s colleges, how Georgia funds higher education, as well as barriers to graduation.

I study the connection between the invention of new technologies and the rise and incumbency of leaders within an industry. I focus on the rise of Midwestern breweries in the US after the invention of pasteurization in the late nineteenth century. Pasteurization reduced the marginal cost of shipping beer for breweries willing to build bottling plants. Using a brewery-level dataset that I constructed, I show that the endogenous adoption of bottling allowed for the early expansion of breweries that later became leaders in the industry. These breweries were located in the Midwest because of their low transportation costs to nearby markets with weak competitors that were mostly isolated before pasteurization was invented. In the Northeast, breweries were unlikely to adopt bottling and focused on their home markets instead. The early expansion of Midwestern breweries occurred mainly through shipments within the Midwest, as opposed to shipments from the Midwest to the Northeast. My results are consistent with an extension of the endogenous sunk cost framework developed in Sutton (1991, 1997).

EVERY MORNING, when we open our front door, whether we drive or bike to work, take our kids to school, take the bus or train, or go to the farmer’s market, we begin our trip on a city street or county road. But these are challenging times due to increased demand and unreliable funding. In California, there is a significant focus on climate change and building sustainable communities, yet sustainable communities cannot function without a wellmaintained local street and road system. The need for multi-modal opportunities on the local system has never been more essential. Every component of California’s transportation system is critical to providing a seamless, interconnected system that supports the traveling public and economic vitality throughout the state. Most of us are unaware that cities and . . .