Background: Although regional socioeconomic (SE) factors have been associated with worse health outcomes, prior studies have not addressed important confounders or work disability. Methods: A national sample of 59 360 workers’ compensation (WC) cases to evaluate impact of regional SE factors on medical costs and length of disability (LOD) in occupational low back pain (LBP). Results: Lower neighborhood median household incomes (MHI) and higher state unemployment rates were associated with longer LOD. Medical costs were lower in states with more workers receiving Social Security Disability, and in areas with lower MHI, but this varied in magnitude and direction among neighborhoods. Medical costs were higher in more urban, more racially diverse, and lower education neighborhoods. Conclusions: Regional SE disparities in medical costs and LOD occur even when health insurance, health care availability, and indemnity benefits are similar. Results suggest opportunities to improve care and disability outcomes through targeted health care and disability interventions.

The identity of the United States as a land of opportunity and a nation of immigrants is once again being contested. As of 2013, income inequality and the foreign-born share of the American population are at levels not seen since the end of the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1914), and intergenerational mobility is at a historical low. These changes have provoked calls for restrictive and selective immigration policies, which are better designed to attract immigrants equipped to “make it in America”. Underlying these calls, however, is an assumption that the outcomes of immigration depend on who migrates rather than what opportunities people encounter or create for themselves after arrival. This dissertation focuses on the difference that place and context make to the lives of people. Broadly, it asks: are intergenerational inequalities in income, education and location mainly driven by individual and family characteristics, or are they driven by people’s access to opportunity and their interaction with places? This dissertation uses cutting-edge techniques and newly available data sources from the Age of Mass Migration to tackle these questions. These data shed light on the problem of people and place by helping to address three crucial questions. First, how do places affect decisions to migrate? Second, is immigrant social mobility mainly driven by family characteristics or opportunities at settlement locations? Third, how do differences in the opportunity structures of places emerge? The following five chapters address these three questions. Chapter 1 provides the conceptual apparatus for understanding how the characteristics of place and people shape inequality in life chances. Chapters 2 and 3 examine these questions using newly assembled data on three generations of Irish American families from 1901 to 1940. Chapter 4 exploits records from the Industrial Removal Office, an organization which helped 40,000 struggling Jewish households leave New York in the early twentieth century, as a natural experiment to study the effect of place on immigrant assimilation. Finally, Chapter 5 studies how long-run development processes have shaped intergenerational mobility outcomes from the Age of Mass Migration to today.

Monitoring neighbourhood change associated with a redevelopment is important for policy-makers, business leaders and residents. It helps evaluate public policy and changes in the needs of residents and businesses. However, using raw data (e.g. census data) to track such changes can be problematic. It does not allow one to distinguish between trends attributable to macro- and micro-scale processes. This paper demonstrates how a novel neighbourhood-level, GIS-based spatial approach using shift-share analysis can help resolve this issue. To illustrate its utility, this technique is used to examine the local socio-economic impact of destination redevelopments in Las Vegas between 1990 and 2010.

We propose that class is inversely related to a propensity of utilizing wise reasoning (recognizing limits of their knowledge, consider world in flux and change, acknowledge and integrate different perspectives) in interpersonal situations, contrary to established class advantage in abstract cognition. Two studies-an on-line survey from regions differing in economic affluence (N=2,145) and a representative in-lab study with stratified sampling of adults from working and middle-class backgrounds (N=299)—tested this proposition, indicating that higher social class consistently related to lower levels of wise reasoning across different levels of analysis, including regional and individual differences, and subjective construal of specific situations. The results held across personal and standardized hypothetical situations, across self-reported and observed wise reasoning, and when controlling for fluid and crystallized cognitive abilities. Consistent with the ecological framework, class differences in wise reasoning were specific to interpersonal (vs. societal) conflicts. These findings suggest that higher social class weighs individuals down by providing the ecological constraints that undermine wise reasoning about interpersonal affairs.

This online appendix is organized as follows. Section A.1 presents robustness checks to the main results, while Section A.2 presents supplemental analyses that add context or nuance to the main findings of the paper. Section A.3 gives more information on the regulatory background of bank capital and Section A.4 discusses details of data cleaning and construction.

This dissertation is comprised of two essays. The first essay analyzes the aggregate income shocks absorbing and welfare improving roles of remittances in emerging economies. I develop a model to derive testable implications for aggregate remittance behavior. Using a panel data set of 102 developing countries from 1975 to 2013 and the generalized method of moments estimator, I find that remittances respond to fluctuations in GDP and exchange rates in a manner consistent with income smoothing implications of the model. Using a variance-decomposition framework, I find that remittances, on average, absorb about 3.5 percent of fluctuations in GDP in all 102 countries, but about 6.1 percent of such fluctuations in Africa countries. To assess the welfare gains from remittances, I use a utility-based framework that allows for level-, growth-, and volatility-effects of remittances on income. Using country-level data, I find that the average welfare gains to a representative agent are equivalent to a 1.9 percent increase in consumption. About 15 percent of these gains arise from less volatile income and the rest arises from higher income and growth. Using household data from five countries, I find that the gains for poor households are about eleven-fold larger than the gains for rich households. In the second essay, I examine the effects of immigration on the wages of U.S. native workers at the national level. Following a general equilibrium approach and exploiting the variation in labor supply shifts across industry, education, and experience specific skill-groups of workers, I find that immigrant workers are indeed imperfect substitutes for native workers. Using my estimates of the elasticity of substitution between workers of different skill groups, I find that immigration had much smaller negative effects on the wages of unskilled native workers than what is reported in Borjas (2003) and Ottaviano and Peri (2012). Immigration (1990-2014) reduced the wages of native workers with no high school degree by about 0.3 percent while it increased the wages of average native workers by about 0.6 percent. In thepaper, I document the importance of consideration of industry (occupation) specific skill groups of workers in addition to conventionally used education and experience groups while estimating the substitutability between immigrant and native workers and, thus, evaluating the effects of immigration on wages of native workers.

Afro-Descendants suffer sustained discrimination and invisibility that is proliferated with policies that were once blatantly racist, but are now furtive. This study argues that structural racism is alive and well in liberal institutions such as publicly funded colleges and universities. Thus, structural racism is subtly replicated and reproduced within these institutions and by institutional agents who are Racist without Racism. This study builds on theories from Pierre Bourdieu, Frantz Fanon, Glen Loury and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. The juxtaposition of their theoretical arguments provides a deeper insight into how structural racism becomes a de facto reflexive phenomenon in liberal and progressive institutions such as universities, which are heralded as the epitome of racism-free spaces in colorblind states. Inspired by Lieberman’s nested mixed methods approach, the study examines Afro- Descendants’ sustained discrimination and invisibility in publicly funded universities in New York City and the City of São Paulo. The success of race-based affirmative action is examined quantitatively in New York City and the City of São Paulo. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with Afro-Descendant professors, students and administrators in New York City and the City of São Paulo’s publicly funded liberal university systems. These interviews are conducted to (1) understand the respondents’ experiences in their respective liberal spaces as racial minorities; and (2) determine whether they have benefited or been harmed by a public policy designed to ameliorate their inferior positions. Overall, findings from this study suggest that structural racism exists and persists in New York City and the City of São Paulo. Moreover, Afro-Descendant participants in both cities acknowledge and experience structural racism within their respective liberal university systems.

The presented diploma thesis deals with the issue of American immigration policy, with emphasis on the immigration policies of the two former US presidents – George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and their comparison. The main purpose of this thesis is to answer the question, why their comprehensive immigration reform plans failed.

Like many rural communities across the United States, Southwestern Minnesota (hereafter SW Minnesota; see Box 1) has an aging population, evidenced by a growing share of seniors and a declining share of children and young adults, particularly among the non-Hispanic white population.1 As the population ages, it is also becoming more diverse, as racial-ethnic minority population is far younger, on average, than the non-Hispanic white population and contains a disproportionate share of children and young adults. Much of the growth in diversity is driven by an expanding population of immigrants. These residents, typically in their young working-age years, often establish themselves in SW Minnesota and go on to have families of their own. Research on the rural outmigration of the young and working non-Hispanic white population indicates that it is often the most promising youth and young adults who leave and seek opportunities elsewhere.2 At the same time, the aging population puts pressure on scarce resources, and the immigrant populations often face challenges including low education, lack of English language proficiency, and the inability to garner work authorization. It is against this demographic backdrop that we explore challenges and opportunities for youth in SW Minnesota. We analyze data on various demographic, economic, educational, and social indicators to gain a better understanding of the circumstances youth face and the opportunity available in SW Minnesota. Wherever possible, we compare conditions in SW Minnesota to the state as a whole and to the entire nation.

The Farr-Bertillon law states that the mortality rate of single and widowed persons is about three times the rate of married people of same age. This excess mortality can be measured with good accuracy for all ages except for young widowers. The reason is that, at least nowadays, very few people become widowed under the age of 30. Here we show that disability data from census records can also be used as a reliable substitute for mortality rates. In fact excess-disability and excess-mortality go hand in hand. Moreover, as there are about ten times more cases of disability than deaths, the disability variable is able to offer more accurate measurements in all cases where the number of deaths is small. This not only allows a more accurate investigation of the young widower effect; it confirms that, as already suspected from death rate data, there is a huge spike between the ages of 20 and 30. By using disability rates we can also study additional features not accessible using death rate data. For example we can examine the health impact of a change in living place. The observed temporary inflated disability rate confirms what could be expected by invoking the Transient Shock conjecture formulated by the authors in a previous paper.

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the impacts of state and federal mental health parity laws on related labor market outcomes, particularly working time. Implemented in the last two decades, these policies aim to eliminate differences in mental and physical health benefits among group health plans. The mandated benefits for mental health drive up the costs of providing health insurance substantially. In response, employers may avoid hiring more full-time workers, whose compensation includes health insurance, by increasing working time per worker and reliance on part-time employment. Employees may also have an incentive to increase their labor supply to qualify for the benefits. Using individual-level data from the Current Population Survey and exploiting policy variation by state and year, I find state parity laws increase average weeks worked by 1.4 percent. Since self-insured firms are exempt from state regulations, parity is estimated to have nearly twice as large an effect on small firms as it does on large firms. Moreover, I study two federal parity laws and find the more comprehensive one is associated with 1.7 percent more weeks worked. Overall, there is no substantial evidence that parity laws significantly affect hours worked and prevalence of coverage.

The paper examines the effects of skilled immigration on wages that can be credited to immigrants’ contribution to innovation. Using both individual and state-level datasets from the United States, we find a significant and positive effect of immigration on wages that is attributable to skilled immigrants’ contribution to innovation. Our results confirm previous findings that immigrants contribute substantially to the host economy's innovation, which is a major driver of technological progress and productivity growth. When we augment the analysis to an immigration–innovation–wages nexus, the results suggest that as the share of skilled immigrants in a particular skill group increases, the wages of both natives and immigrants in that group also get a positive boost. We also identify evidence in favor of a positive spillover effect of skilled immigrants on a state's wage level of all workers, including those who do not directly contribute to innovation.

The question of how to tax married couples has remained controversial since the adoption of the federal income tax over a century ago. The appropriate answer to this question depends in part on how sensitive couples are to taxes when deciding to marry. Yet we know surprisingly little about how taxes shape couples’ marriage choices. This Article begins to fill that gap using a natural experiment generated by the halting shift in how the income tax treated married couples in the mid-Twentieth Century. The system moved from taxing married couples as two individuals—in which case marriage largely did not affect taxes—to taxing married couples on their joint income. At the time of this shift, joint taxation lowered couples’ taxes upon marriage. The change to joint taxation, however, came later to some states, creating a natural experiment to study its impact on marriage rates. This Article shows that marriage rates increased in the relevant states after the introduction of joint taxation made marriage tax-advantaged. The data indicate that men affected by the adoption of joint taxation married 3 to 5 months sooner on average. This suggests that at any given time during this period there were tens or hundreds of thousands of married couples in the United States who would not have been married if not for the tax incentives. Couples appear to have been unexpectedly responsive to the tax changes given that unmarried cohabitation was not acceptable under the social mores of the day. If anything, Americans today are likely more sensitive to taxes when deciding whether and when to marry, suggesting that joint taxation continues to affect marriage decisions today. This in turn strengthens the case for returning to individual taxation of marriage if the goal is to avoid distorting people’s marriage decisions. By contrast, if the government wishes to encourage marriage, the results imply that using the tax code may be effective under some circumstances, but further analysis suggests that joint taxation remains a poor choice for doing so.

This dissertation is an exploration of collaborative governance in municipal public administration, and the elements that successful collaborations have in common. For this dissertation, the term “successful” means objectives sought after were achieved. As a foundational underpinning of this dissertation, I define collaborative governance as, “a form of multi-sectoral problem solving that brings together multiple stakeholders from different sectors to do what one sector cannot do on its own” (Pirnejad, 2016). This type of governance is a careful and deliberate process of collaborative problem solving and implementation, attempting to co-create meaningful and sustainable solutions too complex, and considered “wicked”1 civic problems (Rittel, 1973). Wicked problems, in short, are complex problems that go beyond the capacity of any one organization to define or solve; they lend themselves to a process of collaboration among varied stakeholders in multiple sectors. Further, this dissertation provides a historical perspective of how all four sectors – public, private, nonprofit and citizen – have become more receptive to multisectoral collaborations to achieve their goals. I describe how these four sectors align over time, being pre-disposed to this type of partnerships. I utilize current examples and profile extensively about developing advances in technology that are facilitating a growing interest in collaborative governance. This research stems from four formative research papers in the area of collaborative governance. These include the seminal work of Crosby and Bryson (2005), Thomson and Perry (2006), Ansell and Gash (2007) and Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh (2011). Those theoretical models, integrated with the benefit of my professional experience, are the impetus behind my collaborative governance framework. The defense of this framework uses academic sources and professional experience. Said compilation of elements and models, I contend, contribute to successful multi-sector collaborations. Using a survey I designed around the four dimensions of my collaborative governance framework, I look for patterns and frequency in the responses. The survey was administered to award-winning, multi-sector collaborations throughout the nation (as defined in the Methods Chapter). The results converted into a 0-4-point standard format, reviewed for general trends, and organized into tables highlighting the frequency of like responses. Finally, this study offers contributions to the practice of public administration by leveraging my professional experience against my academic explorations and survey findings. The primary deliverables of my work are survey analysis and professional contributions to the practice of public administration. By highlighting areas of my collaborative governance framework, I hope other successful public sector collaborations can learn from these patterns, and apply them to future multi-sectoral partnerships. My hope is this analysis will not only stress the importance of collaborative governance, but also, offer practical suggestions for pursuing this partnership form going forward.

This is the first study on the causal effects of zoning on active living outcomes, and the first study to quantitatively verify the mediation of the built environment for the effect of zoning on active living outcomes. I introduce the causal inference to the literature of the associations among zoning, built environment, and active living outcomes. To solve the endogeneity problem of zoning and built environment, I build two instrumental variables (IVs), which are manufacturing establishment density in 1900 and farmland proportion in 1900. The two IVs represent the conflict between the rapidly-developing manufacturing industry and the traditional agricultural economy in the late 19th century. I show that the conflict gave birth to the American zoning and shaped the built environment by exploring the history and the institution of American zoning. I argue for the validity of the two IVs by investigating the literature and the history of American manufacturing industry and performing statistical analysis. By utilizing IV Probit model and the general method of moments (GMM), I test the endogeneity of zoning and estimate the causal effect of zoning on active living outcomes. In addition, I conduct mediational analysis to verify the mediation of the built environment for the effect of zoning on active living outcomes. The results show that the active living-oriented zoning promotes adult leisure-time physical activity, such as walking, running, and bicycling, and discourages adult leisure-time sedentary behaviors at home, such as TV watching, radio listening, and music listening, partly through shaping the built environment. The data come from five sources. Zoning data originate from the research team at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and are used to construct the independent variable—active living-oriented zoning. NAVTEQ 2011 third quarter GIS data and the American Community Survey (ACS) 2011 1-year estimates were combined to build the county-level independent variable—walkability—which is used to measure built environment. The American Time Use Survey 2010-2015 is used to create the outcome variables of time usage and individual-level control variables. The ACS 2011–2015 5-year estimates are used to construct the county-level control variables. The 1900 census is used to create the two instrumental variables.

The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs-including many STEM occupations-shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers "trade tasks" to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid-1980s and 1990s.

The three chapters of this dissertation examine the spatial organization of eco- nomic activities on a micro scale in a growing historical city, and on a national scale in contemporary India. The first chapter focuses on firms, investigating the question why small family firms were so prevalent in historical cities. I test whether this phe- nomenon is caused by a lack of technological capability to move goods and people. I exploit the natural experiment that Boston quickly electrified its previous horse-drawn streetcar system between 1889 and 1896. Analyzing new data transcribed from Boston business records from 1885 to 1905, I find that rail-connected locations experienced a 5.3-percentage point relative drop in the share of sole proprietorship establishments after the streetcar electrification, indicating that improved market access leads to an increase in average firm size. The second chapter focuses on individuals, investigating the question whether immigrants stay in ethnic enclaves due to a lack of information about outside communities within the same city. Based on individual records linked between city directories and the decennial census in Boston from 1885 to 1900, I track within-city migrations of immigrants in response to the same transport upgrade event in Boston. I find that immigrant enclave residents who worked within 25 meters of the streetcar rails in 1885 were much more likely to move to a less segregated neighborhood in 1900, compared to enclave residents who worked between 25 and 50 meters away from the rails. Evidence suggests interactions in workplace had an impact on the choices of the residential locations fifteen years after. In the third chapter, my coauthors and I perform a large scale classification of satellite imagery into “built-up” or “not built-up” areas to measure the urbanization process in India, using a reliable and comprehensive ground-truth data set we construct and a cloud-based computational platform - Google Earth Engine (GEE). Our methodology yields a classification accuracy rate between 70% and 85%, and can easily be applied to other countries and regions.

This dissertation examines how the expansion of formal education, so often hailed as a road to opportunity, gave rise to a new form of social inequality in the modern United States. Using quantitative data analysis and qualitative archival sources, it traces the transformation from workplace-based training for employment in the nineteenth century to school-based training in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the city of Boston, a city that pioneered many developments in American education and was home to a heterogeneous population and diversified economy. Prior interpreters have applied competing frameworks to the relationship between education and work: “human capital” by economists, “credentialism” by sociologists, and “skill-formation regimes” by political scientists. By delving deeply into the history of this transformation, I show how an expanding landscape of schools facilitated social mobility for some, especially women and second-generation immigrants, but also encouraged “professional” strategies of job control based on exclusionary educational credentials that overwhelmingly benefited an educated, white, male, elite. My dissertation reorients the focus of contemporary inequality scholarship from the “turning point” of the 1970s to the profound transformation of paths to work a century earlier.

We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depend on their human capital, which is produced from parental time and human capital. We first show that as returns to human capital increase, couples at the top of the income distribution should spend more time on children. This in turn should reinforce assortative matching, in a sense we precisely define. We then embed the model into a Transferable Utility matching framework with random preferences a` la Choo and Siow (2006) which we estimate on US marriage data for individuals born between 1943 and 1972. We find that the preference for assortative matching by education has significantly increased for the white population, particularly for highly educated individuals; but not for blacks. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the marital college-plus premium has increased for women but not for men.