We study the intergenerational health consequences of forced displacement and incarceration of Japanese Americans in the US during WWII. Incarcerated mothers had babies who were less healthy at birth. This decrease in health represents a shift in the entire birthweight distribution due to exposure to prison camps. Imprisoned individuals were less likely to have children with fathers of other ethnic groups but were more likely to receive prenatal care, invest in education, and participate in the labor market. To the extent human capital effects mitigate the full negative effects of incarceration on intergenerational health, our results are a lower bound.

US homeowners receive income tax deductions for mortgage interest payments and state and local property taxes, pay no income tax on their home's imputed rental income, and may exclude most of the capital gains earned from a home sale. This paper characterizes the geographic distribution of the tax expenditures from these tax preferences using a new method that exploits household-level microdata from the 2019 Census Public Use Microdata Sample to simulate homeownership tax expenditures at the Public Use Microdata Area level. I estimate that in the 2018 tax year, $226.05 billion in taxable revenue was lost to the mortgage interest deduction ($28.20 billion), the property tax deduction ($9.51 billion), the exclusion of net imputed rental income ($134.82 billion), and the partial exclusion of housing-related capital gains ($53.52 billion). Large metropolitan areas and neighborhoods with high housing prices receive subsidies in excess of the cost of funding homeowner tax preferences, while the burden of homeowner tax preferences falls heavily on rural areas. If federal income tax law reverted to what existed just prior to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, these geographic disparities would be exacerbated.

This paper examines the effect of the 1990 Immigration Act on the size and nationalorigin composition of immigration to the United States as well as its effects on both the level and composition of U.S. innovation. We exploit a change in immigration law that more than doubled the number of permanent visas for high-skilled immigrants beginning in 1992 and expanded temporary work visas for similar workers to show that this law benefited mainly college-educated Indian immigrants. We use a Bartikstyle shift-share instrument to show that increased Indian immigration led to more per capita patenting among both ethnically Indian and non-Indian inventors and shifted the composition of patenting towards medicine-related fields. We also analyze how recently-imposed barriers to Indian immigrants may be limiting innovation today. capita patenting among both ethnically Indian and non-Indian inventors and shifted the composition of patenting towards medicine-related fields. We also analyze how recently-imposed barriers to Indian immigrants may be limiting innovation today.

This paper analyses persistence and change in the regional league table of entrepreneurship performance in the United States in comparison with England and Wales and West Germany. It examines whether regional rankings in start-up and self-employment rates in the United States are as sticky over time as in these European countries over approximately century, half-century and 30-year periods, or whether the United States is different. It identifies the types of regions that improve markedly (“leapfroggers”) or decline sharply (“plungers”) in their league table positions and the reasons for these changes and compares the countries on these issues. The paper draws out policy implications on regional levelling-up of entrepreneurship activity. It also sets out an agenda for further research.

This dissertation comprises three chapters relating to how household characteristics can shape the impact of employment shocks and productivity shocks on households’ labor supply at the individual and aggregate level. In each chapter, I analyze household labor data and present empirical results that carry implications for aggregate labor. In the first two chapters, I also use models featuring search and matching between households and firms to explain the empirical results or derive implications. In the first chapter, I show that hourly workers tend to have more cyclically volatile hours per worker than salaried workers. Correlation between pay type and education can therefore partly explain the higher cyclical volatility of non-college graduates’ hours per worker. I use a model that distinguishes between hourly and salaried workers and features bargaining over hours between worker and firm to show how pay type itself can affect the behavior of a worker’s hours over the business cycle. Pay stickiness hinders worker and firm from adjusting hours in response to productivity changes, and a sticky salary is more constraining than a sticky wage. In the second chapter, I document that the cross-correlation in employed spouses’ transitions to unemployment, as well as in unemployed spouses’ transitions to employment, increased from 1976 to 2019. I model a labor market with married couples and correlated employment shocks to find the impact of these correlation increases on married women’s labor force participation rate. The rising overlap in spouses’ unemployment spells causes a decline in the value of a second earner, slightly reducing married women’s labor force participation. In the third chapter, I show that the share of workers in dual-employed households that share an occupation with their spouse rose from 3.5% to 6.8% over 1976 to 2022, nearly doubling, and that convergence of men’s and women’s occupational compositions can explain the majority of the increase. Full gender convergence would lead to a same-occupation rate of about 10%.

Latinos were the larger part of the population residing in the heart of Riverside’s Eastside. However, by the 1960s and into the 1970’s, the Black and Mexican populations were growing at a relative pace. The Great Migration in the early 1900’s sees a large population of Blacks leaving the South and going mostly North, however, a small population does come to the Inland Empire and join the even smaller pre-existing community. Soon, the Black and Latino populations began to swell on the eastside of San Bernardino. Migration of Blacks from the South by Decade During this time, Blacks held a strong sense of entrepreneurial spirit and the rhetoric from the pulpit in Black churches on Sundays often reflected and encouraged this. Many early 20th century migrants were able to purchase property and become homeowners and business owners. Those who came later, would settled and became part of a growing Black community on the Eastside of Riverside. This area, however, would later be among those redlined during housing segregation. Housing Segregation & Redlining Because these migrations led to big cities like Los Angeles, there are clear markers on maps from agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation that show which areas were cut off and redlined thus restricting housing access for Blacks, Latinos and other minority groups. The Inland Empire, however, does not have official redlining maps, yet various informal practices enforced housing restrictions based on race and resulted in unofficial redlining of the area, were still implemented in the region. Some of these restrictions included covenants and gentlemen’s agreements.

Service in the military has meant different things during different eras. As illustrations, veterans of earlier conflicts, such as World War II, were afforded educational access at the end of service that outmatched access among the general population during this time period. In contrast, veterans of the Vietnam War returned home to fewer benefits and fewer accolades for their service. People who served in both eras were more likely to be exposed to risks of combat, including mental and physical wounds, than were those who served during peacetime. These differences may lead to cohort-specific mortality risks and protections for veterans compared to non-veterans. We use 11 years of the National Health Interview Survey (1986–1997) linked to 30 years of prospective mortality status to examine the mortality risks for veteran and non-veteran men across cohorts stretching from before World War II to the post-Vietnam War era. We focus on how these risks are associated with education. In support of our General cohort hypothesis, we find that after controlling for confounding factors, veterans faced heightened risks of mortality compared to non-veterans, particularly those in earlier cohorts. We find conflicting evidence related to turning point narratives of military service, namely that an increased mortality risk among veterans with lower levels of education further widens the veteran/non-veteran mortality gap among cohorts who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century. The conclusions vary somewhat depending on how cohorts are defined. Contrary to expectations, the association is not shaped by educational attainment.

Emigration of young, highly educated individuals may deprive origin countries of entrepreneurs. We identify exogenous variation in emigration from Italy by interacting past diaspora networks and current economic pull factors in destination countries. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the emigration rate generates a 4.8% decline in firms creation in the local labor market of origin. An accounting exercise decomposes the estimated effect into four components: subtraction of individuals with average entrepreneurial propensity, selection of young and college-educated among emigrants, negative spillovers on firm creation and selection on unobservable characteristics positively associated with entrepreneurship.

This article estimates the effect of inequality of opportunity (IOp) on economic growth in European regions by providing an innovative analysis of such a nexus. Using Machine Learning to control for a high-dimensional vector of controls (i.e. human capital, institutions democracy, industrial structure, economic conditions, financial development, demographic aspects, urbanization, labour market conditions, investments, market distortions, public intervention) and mitigate potential endogeneity deriving from omitted confounders, we find a general negative effect of IOp on economic growth. This estimated negative effect persists even when controlling for total income inequality. Differently from previous empirical works, we also provide new evidence on the potential dynamic effect of IOp on economic growth by using local projections and observing our outcome variable over a four-years horizon. Interestingly, we find that the negative effect of IOp on economic growth is not persistent over time with statistically significant coefficients at the first two horizons only.

Appendix A. Human capital accumulation In this appendix, we show that, subject to some weak regularity conditions for the learning function, privately-optimal investments in human capital result in a constant rate of human capital accumulation over time. The learning function b(δ j t ) gives the rate at which human capital increases as a result of investing a share δ j t of time into further education. The worker devotes the remaining share 1 − δ j t of her time to working.Appendix B. Data sources and treatments A replication package that contains all the code and data, except for the restricted-access files with the residence (county) of respondents in the us National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth 1979 (nlsy79) and the restricted-access file with the residence (block group) of households in the 2009 us National Household Travel Survey (nhts), is available from https://diegopuga.org/ data/urbangrowth/. Instructions on how to obtain the additional restricted-access data files and how to run the code with and without them are also provided there.

The declining presence of children in the nation’s dense urban areas has been a matter of concern for years, and this trend has only continued since the 2020 pandemic. In light of this pattern, this report assesses the family-friendliness of more than 200 metro areas across the U.S., using a wide variety of data sources, including the Census Bureau’s 2017–21 American Community Survey. It discusses which places have the most children, where families with children choose to move, and how metros fare on measures of well-being such as educational achievement, social mobility, social capital, and child poverty.An accompanying data tool that I created allows readers to see how well each of these variables correlates with all the others.1 Cost of living emerges as an overwhelming theme of these correlations: the metros that are home to the most children, as well as the metros attracting the most family migration, do not strongly tend to be the ones with, for example, high educational achievement, low child mortality and homicide rates, and strong upward mobility. Some of these correlations are even in the “wrong” direction. Rather, the metros that are objectively attractive to families are the ones with low cost of living, including affordable housing and child care.This report also offers suggestions as to how cities and other levels of government might make urban living more attractive to families with children. The single biggest suggestion is to bring down the cost of housing by increasing supply, which is currently held back by intense zoning regulations. Major metro areas cannot compete directly with the combination of advantages that smaller ones boast—cheaper housing plus more space—but they certainly can make housing more affordable, continue to offer their own cultural and economic advantages (areas where smaller cities cannot compete), and make public spaces more accessible and friendly to children.

The returns to skills and the nature of work differ systematically across labor markets of different sizes. Prior research has pointed to worker interactions, technological innovation, and specialization as key sources of urban productivity gains, but has been limited by the available data in its ability to fully characterize work across geographies. We study the sources of geographic inequality and present new facts about the geography of work using online job ads. We show that the (i) intensity of interactive and analytic tasks, (ii) technological requirements, and (iii) task specialization all increase with city size. The gradient for tasks and technologies exists both across and within occupations. It also steeper for jobs requiring a college degree and for workers employed in non-tradable industries. We document that our new measures help account for a substantial portion of the urban wage premium, both in aggregate and across occupation groups.

Aims We examined relationships between pregnancy-specific alcohol policies and admissions to substance use disorder treatment for pregnant people in the USA. Methods We merged state-level policy and treatment admissions data for 1992–2019. We aggregated data by state-year to examine effects of nine pregnancy-specific alcohol policies on the number of admissions of pregnant women where alcohol was reported as the primary, secondary, or tertiary substance related to the treatment episode (N = 1331). We fit Poisson models that included all policy variables, state-level controls, fixed effects for state and year, state-specific time trends, and an offset variable of the number of pregnancies in the state-year to account for differences in population size and fertility. Results When alcohol was reported as the primary substance, civil commitment [incidence rate ratio (IRR) 1.45, 95% CI: 1.10–1.89] and reporting requirements for assessment and treatment purposes [IRR 1.36, 95% CI: 1.04–1.77] were associated with greater treatment admissions. Findings for alcohol as primary, secondary, or tertiary substance were similar for civil commitment [IRR 1.31, 95% CI: 1.08–1.59] and reporting requirements for assessment and treatment purposes [IRR 1.21, 95% CI: 1.00–1.47], although mandatory warning signs [IRR 0.84, 95% CI: 0.72–0.98] and priority treatment for pregnant women [IRR 0.88, 95% CI: 0.78–0.99] were associated with fewer treatment admissions. Priority treatment findings were not robust in sensitivity analyses. No other policies were associated with treatment admissions. Conclusions Pregnancy-specific alcohol policies related to greater treatment admissions tend to mandate treatment rather than make voluntary treatment more accessible, raising questions of ethics and effectiveness.

The Center for Public Affairs Research collaboratively produces and disseminates high-quality public scholarship about topics that impact the lives on Nebraskans.

Municipal websites serve as central platforms for local governments to share information with the public. They offer authoritative, up-to-date, and free access for researchers to collect city-level data. However, until now, a comprehensive and accurate database of municipal web addresses did not exist. Here, we introduce a complete and manually verified dataset containing information on whether a municipality has an official website and, if so, what its web address is, of all 19,518 municipalities in the United States. With this dataset, researchers can easily conduct systematic searches on municipal official websites for self-defined keywords. The search results are well-suited for text-based analytics. This new data source benefits urban scholars who struggle to access high-quality local data for nationwide studies and contributes to narrowing the data gap.

Hispanics in the United States (US) generally live longer and experience better health than non-Hispanic whites despite their lower socioeconomic status; a phenomenon commonly termed the Hispanic paradox. Yet over the past few decades, rising obesity levels in the US and Mexico have all disproportionately affected the US Hispanic population, and it remains unclear if and how these trends could reshape future health and mortality patterns. Centering different demographic processes and key segments of a growing US Hispanic population, each paper of the dissertation approaches the question of how obesity and related metabolic conditions may impact the Hispanic paradox through a distinct lens informed by methods and perspectives from social demography, population health, and medical sociology. Using a nationally representative sample of adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES), Paper 1 assesses and seeks to explain differences in metabolic syndrome (MetS) risk by race-ethnicity, country of origin, and duration of residence in the US to evaluate whether recent Mexican immigrants continue to exhibit a health advantage in this area. Recent Mexican immigrants were found to hold a metabolic health advantage over US-born whites due to their younger age structure. However, a decomposition analysis further reveals that recent Mexican immigrants would retain a MetS advantage, even after adjusting for age differences, if they were to achieve parity with US-born whites on education, income, and food security. This highlights these as key areas of social policy intervention to protect and preserve the health of newly-arriving Mexican immigrants with increasing time spent in the US. Looking to the future, Paper 2 again leverages data from NHANES and brings in supplemental sources to project the impact of observed, historical patterns in obesity prevalence among non-Hispanic whites and US-born and foreign-born Hispanics on age-40 life expectancy (e40) over three decades, from 2015 to 2045. Somewhat counter to expectations set by historical trends and the few existing studies on this topic, I find that obesity is expected to have a large and comparable effect on mortality for all groups, and thus is unlikely to significantly reshape the existing Hispanic advantage in life expectancy within the foreseeable future. Finally, expanding the focus of the dissertation in terms of life course and geography, Paper 3 combines cross-national data from the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) to explore disparities in metabolic health conditions and attributable mortality risks across first- and later-generation Mexican-origin populations in the US and Mexico as compared to US-born whites. Despite considerable focus on obesity as an emergent threat to Hispanic health and longevity, my findings reveal significant disparities primarily in the distribution of physiological metabolic conditions—particularly, elevated blood glucose levels (i.e., prediabetes/diabetes)—and attributable mortality risks burdening older Mexican-origin populations on both sides of the border relative to US-born whites. Future research should focus on managing diabetes as a key area of preventable mortality that is currently driving disparities between aging foreign-born and US-born Mexican populations relative to US-born whites. Taken together, these studies update current understandings about the Hispanic paradox and highlight emergent areas of vulnerability to guide future interventions as part of a comprehensive strategy to protect and promote the health and longevity of Hispanics living in the US, while also seeking to reduce health inequities across the entire US population.

This paper aims to analyze changes in the non-labor force participation of the 20-24 age group inMassachusetts, focusing on variations since the COVID pandemic and the factors influencing laborforce entry. Building on the work of Melnik et al. (2016), which used IPUMS data to highlight aMassachusetts decline in 20-24 year old labor force participation and increased racial disparities,our study employs the same methodology. We use Census-designated person weights in IPUMS forweighted mean testing and employ Z-scores to assess statistical significance. Primarily, we studystatewide and Boston versus non-Boston trends as sample size allows.Since the pandemic, our research highlights four key findings: 1) Labor force participation hasprimarily remained steady post-COVID. 2) Individuals identifying as Asian have shifted from thenot in labor force category to employment. 3) The share of Black-identifying individuals withinthe not in labor force group has increased. 4) While family incomes for those not in the labor forcehave generally risen, those in Boston have seen incomes decline toward the poverty line. Theseresults highlight significant racial and income shifts within the labor force.In our analysis using logistic regression on the 2012-2022 sample, we evaluated factors thatimpact an individual’s decision to join the labor force. Similar to the findings of Melnik et al. (2016),our study indicates that racial minorities and individuals with lower incomes are less inclined tojoin the labor force. Holding a bachelor’s degree positively influences labor force participation,whereas being male or a recent migrant correlates with a lower likelihood of joining. Further, whenincluding sub-state controls and regional indicators, we observe that individuals in Boston, GreaterBoston, and Western Massachusetts are more likely to participate in the labor force than those inCentral, Northeast, and Southeast Massachusetts.

Nearly four decades ago, Congress passed the Social Security Amendments of 1983. The changes were significant, and they pressured people to delay retirement. In this thesis, I use individual-level data from the Annual and Social Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and the Health Retirement Study to analyze the effects of the amendments. The amendments affect individuals at the same age, but across different years. Year of birth determines treatment by the amendments. I control for year of birth and age effects in a difference-in-difference model and interact treatment with age to identify the effects of the amendments on employment status, alcohol consumption, and depression. I find ambiguous evidence of the effects of the amendments on employment status, no evidence of an effect of the amendments on alcohol consumption, and questionable evidence of an effect on depression.

These essays attempt to explore how technological change, technology diffusion and economic distortions interact with other factors and shape the aggregate economy. The first chapter empirically documents that wage inequality within the group of skilled workers in the U.S. has significantly widened since 2000 and that the changing trend of wage inequality was entirely driven by the non-routine analytic occupation. The model I build demonstrates that the task allocation induced by investmentspecific technical change can widen the within-group wage inequality because of the “composition effect”. The quantitative results provide a well-matched timing and magnitude of the non-linear expansion path in wage inequality that is observed in the data. In chapter two I explore the role human capital plays in the convergence of Asian growth miracles. I incorporate the idea that education could facilitate technology diffusion into a growth framework by developing a model of human capital investment, adding a role for human capital in the convergence of productivities towards the technology frontier. I then calibrate my model to the South Korea between 1960 and 2019. My model can remarkably match the ‘S Shaped’ convergence trajectory in South Korea well. More importantly, the quantitative exercises demonstrate that a significant extent of the externality is required to match the transition path of output in South Korea. A series of quantitative experiments suggest that if the externality is removed from the model, then it cannot quantitatively match South Korea’s convergence pattern well. Chapter three documents a fact that that firms in developing economies face both financing constraints and face size-dependent distortions. The two distortions, however, affect firms in opposite ways. I build a model showing that the adverse effects associated with size-dependent distortions drastically reduce, and may even i reverse, if firms also face financing constraints. This occurs because the misallocation effects of the two may offset each other. The quantitative analysis shows that sizedependent distortions estimated from data lead to up to 25 percent of output drop if they are implemented alone, but have virtually no effect on aggregate output in the presence of empirically relevant capital financing constraints.

John Rooney’s (1969) seminal geographical work on the origins of U.S. college football players showed how a comprehensive examination of player origins could be analyzed and presented. This study utilizes Rooney’s findings to compare changes in the origin and migration patterns 50 years after his work. The hometowns of 14,937 elite high school football players recruited to play for “Power 5” schools between 2010 and 2020 are analyzed. The findings reveal that substantially more elite players now originate in the southern states and migrate into areas that underproduced elite talent. The methods and results of this study contribute to the merging research fields of sports management and sports geography on geographic patterns and the migration of athletes and how they can change over periods of time.