Volunteer behavior and participation can be a proxy for social capital accumulation. Using the Census’ Current Population Survey, we test two basic questions: 1. Has social capital accumulation in the form of participating in volunteer organizations increased or decreased over time? What factors influence participation? 2. How does local political culture influence participation and volunteer behavior? We find strong evidence of an Elazar-style breakdown of US political culture in the form of volunteer work. We hypothesize that building social capital through volunteering is more strongly favored and prestigious in moralistic cultures. We find that the moralistic, agricultural Midwest resembles the traditionalistic South in traditional volunteer activities such as Religion because these regions draw their morality from traditional sources such as the Bible. However, in moralistic regions such as New England, the Pacific Northwest, and to a lesser extent the Mountainous Midwest, volunteering New Political Culture issue-specific volunteering is more common than the country as a whole. These regions maintain the strong Puritan tradition of helping others and prestige in volunteering generally, but have moved on from valuing traditional morality like religion to new issues like the environment. We still find that individualistic cultures tend not to volunteer as much, but that Alaska may be actually moralistic in nature and California more individualistic, as opposed to Elazar’s original classifications. We find some evidence that Putnam’s diagnosis of declining civic participation may be partially correct. For every type of organization except environmental, we find that volunteering as increased over the last decade. This is true of most volunteer activities as well. However, the exception of “working with people in your neighborhood to solve a problem” is non-trivial. Participation has increased, all else equal, since the question was originally asked in 2006. “Working with people in your neighborhood” was the question best designed to parse out volunteer activities not done through any organization. An increasing in working with people in your neighborhood while formal organizational activity has decreased suggests that Putnam is correct in that formal organizational membership is declining, but Clark is also correct in that informal organization is stagnant or increasing. The social landscape is simply changing, not weakening.

Using data from the housing market of Los Angeles County, we show that experienced asset flippers earn sizable abnormal performance with respect to both investments in the U.S. stock market and in a passive mutual fund tracking a representative U.S. REIT index. Abnormal performance is positive even after adjusting returns for a conservative estimate of the additional compensation for the specific risks of local real estate investment activities. Experienced flippers outperform their inexperienced competitors when trading comparable houses over the same time frame, but face decreasing returns to the scale of their asset portfolios.

Readily available high resolution data on population distribution is an important resource for monitoring human-environment interactions and for supporting planning and management decisions. Using a grid that approximates population density over the entire country seems like the most practical approach to exploring and distributing detailed population data but instead data based on census aggregation units is still the most widely used method. In this paper we describe the construction of 30 m resolution grid representing the distribution of population in 2010 over the entire conterminous United States. The grid is computed using 2010 U.S. Census block level population counts disaggregated by a dasymetric model that uses land cover (2011 NLCD) and land use (2010 NLUD) as ancillary data. Detailed descriptions of the ancillary data and dasymetric model are given. Methods of computing the grid are presented followed by an extensive assessment of model accuracy. Overall the expected value for relative error of the model is 44% which is at the lower limit of errors reported for other continental-sized, high resolution population grids. We also offer a more specific error estimate for areas with specified value of population density. Using two example areas, one highly urbanized and another rural, we demonstrate the advantages of using the gridded population data over the census block-based data. Our 30 m population grid is available for online exploration and for download from the custom-made GeoWeb application SocScape at http://sil.uc.edu.

Zoning is one of the oldest policy tools for regulating private land use, but its effect on housing change is disputed. We define housing change as the difference over time in the number of housing units in a given jurisdiction. We conducted a cross-jurisdictional study of zoning effects on housing change, comparing zoned and unzoned townships in Michigan, USA (n = 709) after propensity score matching. Four-decade (1970-2010) panel models predicted zoned townships to have on average 2.2% fewer housing units a decade after zoning adoption compared to similar unzoned townships, but this effect was tempered by other variables. Higher-income townships had more housing units a decade after zoning adoption compared to higher-income unzoned townships, whereas lower-income townships with zoning had fewer housing units than similar unzoned townships. This study highlights the heterogeneous effects of zoning on rural and exurban housing change.

Purpose: A 5-session twice-weekly clear speech protocol with daily home practice was developed to enable Spanish-accented speakers of English to code-switch for increased listener ease of understanding. This study provides preliminary data to test the hypothesis that this protocol results in increased ease of understanding for native English listeners, not in decreased talker accentedness. Method: Using a single-case experimental design, 6 adult native Spanish speakers with English proficiency participated in the protocol. Ease of understanding and accentedness were probed at least 5 times pretraining, at each training session, and once per week for 5 weeks posttraining. Thirty native English–speaking listeners assessed the probes using 7-point scales for each measure. Results: Ease of understanding improved for all participants (mean improvement = 3.5 points; effect size range = 6.98 to 15.33). Accentedness improved for 4 of 6 participants (mean improvement = 2.3 points; effect size range = 4.04 to 10.48). At the outset, most participants expressed concern that this approach would highlight speech errors. Upon follow-up, all participants reported confidence in using the approach and found it helpful in daily communication. Conclusions: Further research should explore the effects of this protocol on intelligibility and acoustic metrics and their relationship to ease of understanding and accentedness.

Using data from the U.S. censuses and American Community Surveys from 1950 to 2010, my dissertation investigates immigrants’ socio-economic integration in the U.S. I aim to study the causes and consequences of immigrants’ integration in the U.S. and to offer insights on policies that could facilitate immigrants in their assimilation process. The first chapter analyzes the increasing native-immigrant wage gaps since the 1980s. The second chapter studies the increasing wage premiums of intermarried immigrants since the 1980s. The third chapter studies why people live in ethnic enclaves. I find that technological change and globalization, which have increased the relative price of U.S.-specific social-communication and managerial skills since the 1980s, are important drivers of the widening wage gaps between natives and immigrants as well as the increasing wage premiums of intermarried immigrants. I also find that ethnic enclaves have a “pulling” effect whereby immigration inflows to cities can simultaneously attract co-ethnic natives already living in the receiving cities to remain and entice co-ethnic natives living outside of the receiving cities to migrate in. I also find that this pulling effect is not due to potential monetary benefits in the labor market but is instead likely due to the lower housing prices and non-monetary benefits such as language convenience and ethnic amenities.

I provide novel evidence on the effectiveness of two vaccination policies – simple non-binding recommendations to vaccinate versus mandates requiring vaccination prior to childcare or kindergarten attendance – in the context of the only disease whose institutional features permit a credible examination of both: hepatitis A. Using provider-verified immunization data I find that recommendations significantly increased hepatitis A vaccination rates among young children by at least 20 percentage points, while mandates increase rates by another 8 percentage points. These policies also significantly reduced population hepatitis A incidence. My results suggest a range of policy options for addressing suboptimally low population vaccination rates.

A case study addresses the questions 1) what social, cultural, economic, and/or political factors influence males (ages 18-30) to become professional librarians in the United States; 2) to what extent technology has influenced males (ages 18-30) decisions to become professional librarians and; 3) what professional stereotypes they encounter.

This dissertation presents three chapters that studies the regional evolution over time and how the local markets adapt to the changing environment. The first chapter focuses on the regional convergence or divergence debate. Current studies have provided conflicting evidences. The regression analysis study (Barro & Sala-i-Martin, 1992) finds evidence supporting regional convergence theory. While the distributional dynamic study (Quah, 1996) provides evidence to support club convergence theory. In this chapter, the finite mixture model is introduced as a new exploratory method to study the regional growth issue. This study finds the emergence of convergence clubs in the United States since the 1980s. The finite mixture normal model is used to identify the clubs based on the per capita personal income dataset for 700 U.S. labor market areas from 1969 to 2009. The results reveal that the collection of high income areas, termed the "rich places club," was formed in the 1980s, and the share of the rich places club stabilized at around 10-12% of total labor market areas for the 1990s and 2000s. We also find that the gap between the rich places club and the "everywhere else club" has been increasing since the 1990s. To better understand what is driving the formation of the convergence clubs found in chapter one, chapter two studies how expected labor demand shifter and natural amenities impact the local market. Traditionally, the local labor market literature focuses on price signals (wage and housing rent) and operates under a spatial equilibrium assumption, while the local economic development literature focuses on job creation, migration and operates under a spatial disequilibrium assumption. In this chapter, a united local economy framework is presented that links the local labor market and local economic development literatures and explores four aspects of local economy: wages, housing rent, job growth, and population growth. In the empirical iii section of this paper, two key factors, an expected labor demand shifter and appreciation of natural amenity, are investigated to show how they impact the four featured aspects of the local economy. From a local price perspective, as the expected labor demand increase, both wages and housing rents increase. The natural amenities do not significantly impact inter-regional wage difference, but natural amenities are a significant factor for inter-regional rent levels. From a job growth and a population growth perspective, a one unit job increase in expected labor demand growth will create more than one additional jobs (1.367-1.392). For every one unit increase of expected labor demand shifter, population will increase 0.8. Regions with higher amenities not only attract new population, they are also places where more jobs are created. This chapter provides evidence that the expected labor demand shifters (ELDS) and natural amenities could significantly impact local market outcome. Therefore, public policies can be draw up for different types of regions (type 1 high ELDS high amenities, type 2 high ELDS and low amenities, type 3 low ELDS and high amenities, type 4 low ELDS and low amenities). For type 1 regions, special attention should be paid to housing rent affordability, because both high ELDS and high natural amenities could drive up the housing rent. For type 2 region, human capital retention could be a challenging issue. For type 3 regions, public policy could focus on how to translate their desirable natural amenities into local, economic and social development. And for type 4 regions, while these regions are likely going to decline, it is very important to evaluate whether public policy should focus on bringing jobs to these regions or help people move out of these regions. The “rich places club” found in chapter one are usually places with larger population. Therefore, chapter three looks directly into the question: Why do people living in urban areas, iv especially large urban areas, receive higher wages? Based on the theory on agglomeration economies, labor market matching and knowledge spillover are considered to be two of the primary micro-foundations. Most empirical literature has found sizeable positive effects from labor market matching (Heuermann et al., 2010; Melo et al., 2009). However, there is far less consensus on the existence of knowledge spillovers. The reason for that is the difficulty in identifying knowledge spillover effects. The identification challenge comes from three directions: direction of causality (Duranton, 2006), the inability to distinguish imperfect substitution from externalities (Moretti, 2004), and sorting (Wheeler, 2001). Corresponding strategies are developed to ease the estimation biases. This study presents three major findings: first, from 2000 to 2011, the contribution of human capital externalities to productivity growth is at least three times the contribution of the labor market matching effect; secondly, this paper finds that higher skill groups experience higher human capital externality effects; third, the human capital externalities observed for the low skill group are more likely to be a migration sorting effect. This study also finds that younger workers are more likely to benefit from the labor market matching effect while older workers are more likely to benefit from the human capital externalities effect. Among younger workers, the group without a high school degree shows no gain from either human capital externalities or labor market matching effects. This group of low-skilled young adults should be the central focus for human capital policy. Meanwhile, older and highly educated workers seems to gain large benefits from both human capital externalities and labor market matching effects. This group of workers should be encouraged to work longer (Munnell & Sass, 2009). Further research should further examine the low-skilled young adult group. Is there a strong inflow of immigrants that could be impacting this group? Are white and non-white, lowskilled younger adult labor market performance similar or different? Is there a gender performance difference in the low-skilled young adult group? Looking deeper into these issues can help form better policy to help this segment of the labor market.

Historically in the United States, the public sector has served as an equalizing institution through the expansion of job opportunities for minority workers. This study examines whether the public sector continues to serve as an equalizing institution in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using data from the Current Population Survey, I investigate changes in public sector employment between 2003 and 2013. My results point to a post-recession double disadvantage for black public sector workers: they are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are more likely than white and Hispanic public sector workers to experience job loss. These two trends are a historical break for the public sector labor market. I find that race and ethnicity gaps in public sector employment cannot be explained by differences in education, occupation, or any of the other measurable factors that are typically associated with employment. Among unemployed workers who most recently worked for the public sector, black women are the least likely to transition into private sector employment.

This study examines the self-reported health of 180,291 married non-Hispanic blacks and whites in interracial versus endogamous marriages. Data are from the National Health Interview Survey pooled over the period 1997-2013. The results from ordinal logistic regressions show that non-Hispanic whites intermarried with non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites intermarried with non-Hispanic other races, and non-Hispanic white women with Hispanic husbands report significantly poorer health than their endogamous counterparts. Furthermore, non-Hispanic whites with non-Hispanic black spouses also fare worse than their interracially married peers with Hispanic spouses. In contrast, the self-reported health of married non-Hispanic blacks shows no significant difference between the interracially and the endogamously married. Our findings highlight the theoretical significance of spousal characteristics and couple-level contexts in the household production of health.

Study objective: We assess whether the expansion of Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) results in changes in emergency department (ED) visits or ED payer mix. We also test whether the size of the change in ED visits depends on the change in the size of the Medicaid population. Methods: Using all-capture, longitudinal, state data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Fast Stats program, we implemented a difference-in-difference analysis, which compared changes in ED visits per capita and the share of ED visits by payer (Medicaid, uninsured, and private insurance) in 14 states that did and 11 states that did not expand Medicaid in 2014. Analyses controlled for state-level demographic and economic characteristics. Results: We found that total ED use per 1,000 population increased by 2.5 visits more in Medicaid expansion states than in nonexpansion states after 2014 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.1 to 3.9). Among the visit types that could be measured, increases in ED visits were largest for injury-related visits and for states with the largest changes in Medicaid enrollment. Compared with nonexpansion states, in expansion states the share of ED visits covered by Medicaid increased 8.8 percentage points (95% CI 5.0 to 12.6), whereas the uninsured share decreased by 5.3 percentage points (95% CI –1.7 to –8.9). Conclusion: The ACA’s Medicaid expansion has resulted in changes in payer mix. Contrary to other studies of the ACA’s effect on ED visits, our study found that the expansion also increased use of the ED, consistent with polls of emergency physicians.

This paper studies the effect of bank branch closures on local lending in the Digital Ages. I use the mergers between big banks as an exogenous shock to create a quasi-random experiment. Combining the difference-in-differences and the instrumental variable methods, I find that the closure of each physical branch causes a 20% decrease in the total number and the volume of small business lending, even in the areas with sufficient alternative local branches. It indicates that relationship lending plays an important role in small business loaning due to the informational asymmetries in assessing the creditworthiness of local small firms and the difficulties in translating the soft information into hard information.

Through mixed-methods research, this dissertation details the regionally variegated and place-specific software production processes in three second-tier US software regions. I focus on the relationship between different industrial, firm, and worker production configurations and broad-based economic development, prosperity, and inequality. I develop four main empirical findings. First, I argue for a periodization of software production that tracks with changes in software laboring activity, software technologies, and wage-employment relationships. Through a GIS-based method, I use the IPUMS-USA to extensively measure the amount and type of software labor in industries across the US between 1970 and 2015. I map the uneven geography of software labor that produces different clusters of various software occupations. Second, I argue that between each software period, locational windows provide an opportunity for second-tier software regions to challenge Silicon Valley. I combine the IPUMS-USA dataset with interviews of software workers to analyze forms of regionally specific modes of production in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas. I trace how software production in these three cities evolves between each software period, taking on different spatial configurations, firm strategies, labor practices, and technological characteristics. Third, I argue that software labor is hyper-sensitive to deskilling because of software production activity produces software. I combine occupation classifications and interviews with software workers to interrogate the ever-present need for software workers to learn the newest development practices and software languages as firms seek to automate software production. I define five key moments since the 1970s that exemplify software labor market dualization and segmentation. Using interviews, and conference observations, I find that community-based organizations and labor market intermediaries locally mitigate the structural tendencies toward labor market dualization and segmentation. I argue that without intervention, the layered and bifurcated labor market for software production reproduces existing inequalities. Further, the organizational, technological, and spatial changes in software production reduce the potential for equitable wealth production. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for the importance of labor organizing in software, contributing empirical and theoretical work in a lineage of regional-based industrial restructuring literature. The regional and industrial geographies produced by and out of software production are significant forces in the economy at regional and national scales. I connect this process to the feminization of other industries, noting how the technical nature of software production structurally genders and racializes the labor force. Leveraging a labor feminization framework highlights the flexibilization of labor and the rift between the pace of software skill building and technological development. Both software production and regional economies are necessary entry points to understand new capitalist relations. Understanding these new relations thus requires examining how configurations of software production differ across regions, how they impact industry and regional economic development outcomes, and how they weaken or strengthen actions of local workers, local organizations, and local firms. These processes offer a glimpse into how the contemporary moment of production differs from other moments of production. Armed with this understanding, this research will be able to connect industry and regional economic-development outcomes to regionally specific modes of production, answering relevant software-based economic-development policy questions.

With urban populations worldwide expected to witness substantial growth over the next decades, pressure on urban land and resources is projected to increase in response. For policy-makers to adequately meet the challenges brought about by changes in the dynamics of urban areas, it is important to clearly identify and communicate their causes. Floods in Douala (the most densely populated city in the central African sub-region), are being associated chiefly with changing rainfall patterns, resulting from climate change in major policy circles. We investigate this contention using statistical analysis of daily rainfall time-series data covering the period 1951–2008, and tools of geographic information systems. Using attributes such as rainfall anomalies, trends in the rainfall time series, daily rainfall maxima and rainfall intensity–duration–frequency, we find no explanation for the attribution of an increase in the occurrences and severity of floods to changing rainfall patterns. The culprit seems to be the massive increase in the population of Douala, in association with poor planning and investment in the city's infrastructure. These demographic changes and poor planning have occurred within a physical geography setting that is conducive for the inducement of floods. Failed urban planning in Cameroon since independence set the city up for a flood-prone land colonization. This today translates to a situation in which large portions of the city's surface area and the populations they harbor are vulnerable to the city's habitual annual floods. While climate change stands to render the city even more vulnerable to floods, there is no evidence that current floods can be attributed to the changes in patterns of rainfall being reported in policy and news domains.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, diverse anti-slavery efforts transformed the geography of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world. Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Upper Canada, Mexico, the newly independent South American nations, and the British West Indies all became havens of free soil, where emancipation laws either immediately or gradually freed enslaved populations. This dissertation argues that these “free-soil havens” had a powerful influence on American anti-slavery culture between 1813 and 1863. As abolitionists battled slaveholders to sway public opinion toward the anti-slavery cause, free-soil havens provided concrete geopolitical spaces through which American slaves, free people, and anti-slavery advocates could imagine alternative possibilities to slavery and racism in the United States. Reading across the rich print culture produced by nineteenth-century politicians, activists, migrants, missionaries, travelers, and newspaper editors, this study . . .

Macroeconomics has changed in light of both developments in the world and its internal intellectual evolution. This article explores ways in which legal scholarship can help inform macroeconomic research and macroeconomic policymaking in light of three important developments: (i) limitations on conventional monetary policy in a world with lower equilibrium interest rates; (ii) labor markets not clearing as evidenced by persistent declines in labor force participation; and (iii) the potential for microeconomic competition policies to have major macroeconomic efforts.

Background: In individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) comorbidities and quality of life (QOL) may be affected by tobacco use. Objective: To evaluate the associations between smoking status, in particular quit attempts, and comorbidities among individuals with MS. Methods: We used a web-based survey to obtain cross-sectional data from 335 individuals with MS who were members of the Gateway Chapter of the National MS Society email registry. We then examined the associations between smoking variables (current use, frequency, and quit attempts) and comorbidities. Results: The prevalence of participants who ever smoked was 50%, which is greater than that reported for the general population; 20% were current smokers. Migraine headaches were associated with current use and everyday smoking, and those with recent failed quit attempts had a higher prevalence of depression than those who were current smokers but who did not attempt to quit or had successfully quit in the past year. Conclusion: Given the associations between smoking and comorbidities in individuals with MS, health care providers should both (1) assess smoking history and quit attempts, and (2) encourage individuals with MS who smoke to become non-smokers and refer for treatment, as indicated. In order to increase the chances that individuals will be successful in becoming non-smokers, clinicians would do well to also assess and treat depression in their patients who smoke and are also depressed.

This study examines the relationship between light rail transit (LRT) stations and changes in neighborhood characteristics associated with gentrification using spatial regression analyses with longitudinal data across 14 US urbanized areas (UAs). Overall, we do not find evidence of prevalent gentrification in LRT station areas. An analysis of UA-specific impacts shows heterogeneous outcomes across different UAs, particularly: strong transit-oriented development (TOD) effects accompanied by gentrification in San Francisco and TOD with countergentrification in Portland. Our results highlight that different local and regional planning efforts can lead to different types of changes in transit station neighborhoods.

Child care is a necessity for working women with young children. Yet, the costs of high-quality center-based child care in the United States—particularly for children under age five—are prohibitively high for many families. In this proposal, I describe a multifaceted approach to child-care policy that reduces the financial burden of child care, encourages maternal employment, and supports child development. I propose to replace existing federal child-care tax policies with a single refundable federal child-care tax credit that is more generous to lower-income families and families with children under the age of five. To address child care quality, I propose investments in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems and in expansion of universal preschool for four-year-olds. State and local governments could pursue these investments on their own or with federal assistance.