Homeownership by race and ethnicity since 1900.

This research examines changes in residential built-environment flood exposure within the current boundaries of the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan statistical area, by estimating the number of housing units that are located within the floodplains of the region. Housing unit data at the block level from the 1990 to 2010 decennial censuses are used to estimate housing unit exposure to floods using a binary dasymetric and proportional allocation method. Three different representations of the 100-year (1 percent annual chance) and 500-year (0.2 percent annual chance) floodplain are employed: the generally more conservative floodplains created using the Federal Emergency Management Agencys Hazus-MH software, the generally more extensive floodplains included in the proprietary Flood Hazard Data product from KatRisk LLC and the regulatory floodplains from the National Flood Insurance Program. The number of housing units within both the 100- and 500-year floodplain increased from 1990 to 2010 throughout the Atlanta region. Housing unit growth within the regulatory 100-year flood zone was slower than growth elsewhere, suggesting that the National Flood Insurance Program may have been marginally effective overall. Results using the KatRisk product reveal both greater overall and a greater increase in housing units at risk within the 100-year floodplain than the regulatory product suggests. The results argue that heightened flood exposure, particularly in areas experiencing new development, is an important factor to consider when addressing the impact of the flood hazard over time.

Immigrants to the United States routinely take jobs below their skill qualifications because of barriers to entering occupations. Policies to assist immigrants in overcoming such barriers are costly, and the benefits have not been evaluated. We quantify the benefits of potential policies to promote US immigrants entry into suitable occupations. To do this, we create a model in which workers search over occupations, and estimate it using representative labor market data on immigrants to the US. Our counterfactual results show that eliminating barriers to occupational entry would lead to only a small earnings increase for the average immigrant in our sample. We do see, however, a substantial earnings increase for highly skilled immigrants, suggesting that this type of policy would only benefit those with the highest skills.

This essay calls for historians leadership in assembling social-science scholarship to clarify the global social crisis of inequality. Its critique of economists focus on income and wealth calls for study of inequality in the social, cultural, health, and climate arenas. It links the crisis of social inequality to that of environmental degradation, arguing that programs of economic growth bring threats of ecological disaster. To document this argument, interdisciplinary research is underway at the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), testing three hypotheses: that inequality arises mainly from social construction (e.g., the building of physical and metaphorical walls), that natural factors add somewhat to inequality, and that inequality is more harmful than beneficial to social welfare. The article enumerates the major technical and interpretive challenges that have so far prevented social scientists from effective analysis of global patterns. Broader collaboration is proposed with the scientific groups studying ecological change and the human genome. Historical and other scholars are urged to contribute by submitting historical data to the CHIA archive through its data submission link, to join in the collaborative analysis that can develop knowledge to be proposed for policy implementation.

In 1862, Alexander Gardner captured some of the best-known photographs of the Civil War at Antietam. Since then his photographs have been part of a varied history cycling from open publicity to obscurity and back again. In recent years, photographers have turned to Gardners photographs for inspiration when creating new photographs of the Civil War: rephotography. David Levene and Sally Mann are two examples that approach rephotography from different directions. Levene and Mann go to Antietam to photograph what the war left behind. The content of the photographs was analyzed to see what was present and what was not. The artists intent was taken into consideration where possible. The photographs represent the Civil War through what is absent, through what is missing. Gardners photographs depict the aftermath of the battle; Levenes highlight what is there no longer; Manns explore the spectral traces that remain. They each commemorate Antietam while making September 17, 1862 more real for modern viewers.

Following the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, many - but not all - states decided to expand their Medicaid program in line with provisions of the new law. Will low-income individuals respond to the incentives of living in a state with better health subsidies by relocating to the state? This paper addresses this question by examining the population growth rate of low-income individuals in Massachusetts following the Massachusetts Health Care Reform (MHCR) of 2006. Like the ACA, the MHCR expanded the Medicaid program, and also provided subsidized health insurance for low-income individuals. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences models and Internal Revenue Service tax return data, we show that the reform did not have a global effect on the movement of low-income individuals across all cities in Massachusetts. However, we also show that the reform did have a local (or border) effect on the movement into border cities of the state, an effect that is relatively large for cities very close to the border but disappears quickly once the distance to border goes beyond 15 miles.

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Linked Representative Samples (IPUMS-LRS) have transformed historical social, demographic, economic, and health research. These public-use samples linking the 1850-1870 and 1900-1930 Censuses to the full-count 1880 Census contain nearly 500,000 individuals observed at multiple points in time and cover many races and subpopulations, including migrants and women. This paper describes the representativeness of the IPUMS-LRS and uses an independent metric to quantify the incidence of incorrect matches. We find weighted IPUMS-LRS data fail to produce representative samples with respect to some variables characteristics, and we outline a simple procedure that—under certain assumptions— allows researchers to create weights customized to specific samples and research questions. We also find that suggestive evidence that errors in linking are very low in the 1880-1900, 1880-1910, 1880-1920, and 1880-1930 IPUMS-LRS, hovering around 1 percent. Although lower than other automated methods, the rate of false links in the pre-1880 IPUMS-LRS may range from 5 to 10 percent. We conclude with simple recommendations of ways to improve inference with these data.

For the past 80 years, social scientists have been linking historical censuses across time to study economic and geographic mobility. In recent decades, the quantity of historical census record linkage has exploded, owing largely to the advent of new machine-readable data created by genealogical organizations. Investigators are examining economic and geographic mobility across multiple generations, but also engaging many new topics. Several analysts are exploring the effects of early-life socioeconomic conditions, environmental exposures, or natural disasters on family, health and economic outcomes in later life. Other studies exploit natural experiments to gauge the impact of policy interventions such as social welfare programs and educational reforms. The new data sources have led to a proliferation of record linkage methodology, and some widespread approaches inadvertently introduce errors that can lead to false inferences. A new generation of large-scale shared data infrastructure now in preparation will ameliorate weaknesses of current linkage methods.

Foreign-born Blacks have better health outcomes than U.S.-born Blacks. The extent to which the health status of foreign-born Blacks change with increased exposure to the U.S. socio-cultural environment is less known than for other immigrant groups. Two prominent theories used to understand foreign and U.S.-born health disparities are the immigrant health paradox theory and immigrant health assimilation theory. The literature is conclusive that foreign-born Blacks have better health outcomes than U.S.-born Blacks, but this dissertation questions the appropriateness of framing this pattern as an immigrant health paradox due to the better socioeconomic status (SES) of foreign-born Blacks, relative to U.S.-born Blacks in general. The literature has been inconclusive on the extent to which immigrant health assimilation describes the health trajectories of foreign-born Blacks with increased duration of residence of the first generation in the U.S. or in comparing the first generation to subsequent generations. This dissertation interrogates the utility of immigrant health assimilation theory to describe the health trajectories of Black immigrants. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on the health outcomes of body mass index (BMI), obesity, depressive symptoms and depressive disorder. The sample of the dissertation includes foreign and U.S.-born Blacks generally, first generation foreign-born Afro Caribbeans, second and third generation U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans and U.S.-born African Americans. Collectively the three papers of this dissertation confirm a healthy immigrant effect for the health outcomes studied, when comparing the foreign-born to U.S.-born Blacks generally or African Americans specifically. In these comparisons first generation foreign-born Blacks have better socioeconomic status than the U.S.-born or African Americans. There is an immigrant health paradox for the health outcomes studied when comparing foreign born Afro Caribbeans to U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans, where U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans have better SES than the foreign-born. The dissertation does not find support for immigrant health assimilation. For BMI and obesity, the foreign-born Black trajectories compared to U.S.-born Blacks indicates patterns of no convergence or divergence. Intergenerationally, while first generation foreign-born Afro Caribbeans had lower obesity rates than second and third generation U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans, U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans had higher rates of obesity than African Americans. A similar intergenerational pattern was found for depressive disorder. Immigrant health assimilation theory predicts convergence of health outcomes between U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans and African Americans, not worse outcomes. The dissertation uncovers two mechanisms that help to explain the observed health trajectories of foreign-born Blacks. The lower first generation foreign-born Afro Caribbean obesity rates compared to second and third generation U.S.-born Afro Caribbeans is explained by differential rates of return on characteristics: the same characteristics provide more obesity protection for the foreign-born than the U.S.-born. Also perceived discrimination was informative in explaining variations in depression. U.S.-born Blacks reported higher levels of perceived discrimination than the foreign-born and foreign and U.S.-born Black women experienced higher depressive symptoms with increased perceived discrimination than men.

Little research addresses the experiences of students with autism living in multilingual families. This multiple case study project examines the language-development-related knowledge and beliefs of paired mothers and educators of three Somali American boys with autism. Data include serial interviews, observations, and analysis of educational documents. Five distinct themes emerged from this study: (a) individuals with autism benefit from exposure to multiple languages, (b) the belief that multilingualism can be confusing for individuals with autism, (c) families value home language exposure, (d) educators are uncertain about providing language recommendations, and (e) information about students' multilingual context is virtually absent from educational documents and Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings. With these findings in mind, implications for practice are discussed.

From 2005 to 2012, injuries to children under five increased by 10%, possibly because smartphones distract caregivers from supervising children. I exploit the expansion of AT&T's 3G network in both a difference-in-differences and a triple difference framework and find that hospitals experienced a 5% increase in emergency department visits for children ages 0–5, but none for children ages 6–10, after getting 3G. Age-specific injury patterns on playgrounds, from poisoning, and in sports further support the conclusion that smartphones distract caregivers.

Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twentieth century was not strictly driven by urbanization, black migration, or white flight: it resulted from increasing racial sorting at the household level. In all areas-North and South, urban and rural-segregation increased dramatically.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to showcase an advanced methodological approach to model disability and institutional entry. Both of these are important areas to investigate given the on-going aging of the United States population. By 2020, approximately 15% of the population will be 65 years and older. Many of these older adults will experience disability and require formal care. Methods: A probit analysis was employed to determine which disabilities were associated with admission into an institution (i.e. long-term care). Since this framework imposes strong distributional assumptions, misspecification leads to inconsistent estimators. To overcome such a short-coming, this analysis extended the probit framework by employing an advanced semi-nonparamertic maximum likelihood estimation utilizing Hermite polynomial expansions. Results: Specification tests show semi-nonparametric estimation is preferred over probit. In terms of the estimates, semi-nonparametric ratios equal 42 for cognitive difficulty, 64 for independent living, and 111 for self-care disability while probit yields much smaller estimates of 19, 30, and 44, respectively. Conclusions: Public health professionals can use these results to better understand why certain interventions have not shown promise. Equally important, healthcare workers can use this research to evaluate which type of treatment plans may delay institutionalization and improve the quality of life for older adults. Implications for rehabilitation: With on-going global aging, understanding the association between disability and institutional entry is important in devising successful rehabilitation interventions. Semi-nonparametric is preferred to probit and shows ambulatory and cognitive impairments present high risk for institutional entry (long-term care). Informal caregiving and home-based care require further examination as forms of rehabilitation/therapy for certain types of disabilities.

The introduction of immigration quotas in the 1920s fundamentally changed U.S. immigration policy. We exploit this policy change to estimate the economic consequences of immigration restrictions for the U.S. economy. The implementation of the quota system led to a long-lasting relative decline in population growth in areas with larger pre-existing immigrant communities of affected nationalities. This effect was largely driven by the policy-restricted supply of immigrants from quota-affected nationalities and lower fertility of first- and second-generation immigrant women. In the more affected areas labor productivity growth in manufacturing declined substantially and native workers were pushed into lower-wage occupations. While native white workers faced sizable earnings losses, black workers benefited from the quota system and improved their relative economic status within the more affected areas.

The theme that binds together the three papers in this dissertation is the evaluating of public policies and an exploration of whether and how the ex-ante and ex-post public policies affect the economy. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on ex-post policy evaluation. In particular, I study the effects of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or ACA for short) of 2009. This is the most comprehensive health care reform in the U.S. since the creation of Medicare in 1965. The ACA has fundamentally altered healthcare access in the U.S. by insuring 20 million people who were previously uninsured. In my first chapter, I explore how ACA insurance subsidies are affecting the labor market outcomes. Prior literatures has found no evidence to suggest either a decreased probability of employment or decrease in hours worked among low-educated adults in states that expanded Medicaid relative to similar adults but reside in non-expansion states, after the implementation of Medicaid expansion. However, the identification used in the literature depend on the difference between expansion and non-expansion states. However, premium subsidies complicate the interpretation of the findings. Premium subsidies puts a limit on how much households pay in out-of-pocket payments for insurance, rising from 2% of income to 9.5%. Although the adults with income less than 138% Federal Poverty Level are not covered through Medicaid in non-expansion states, they are heavily subsidized if they purchase through health insurance exchanges. One important feature is that undocumented immigrants are excluded from the ACA’s benefits. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I use a nationally representative survey data and difference-in-difference research design to analyze the labor market outcomes among Hispanic high-school dropouts, comparing benefits eligible (citizens) and ineligible (undocumented immigrants) groups, for the pre-ACA period and postACA period. The estimates suggest that the availability of public insurance has reduced number of hours worked and the probability of full-time employment among loweducated Hispanic citizens. The magnitude of this finding is in line with Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predictions. The effect of the ACA on labor markets have important implications for budgeting and policymaking. If the ACA is repealed, future research evaluating this law will still be needed to understand whether and to what extent the ACA affect labor market outcomes. Identification of the economic mechanisms that affect labor market outcomes among low-income individuals is important information for policymakers, as they design and implement effective programs to address the U.S. health insurance market. One essential determinant of health insurance premium is the risk profile of individuals purchasing health insurance through health insurance exchanges (HIX). In the second chapter of this dissertation (co-authored with Dr. Sankar Mukhopadhyay and Dr. Jeanne Wendel), we examine impacts of state-run high-risk pools (HRPs) on premiums for insurance plans offered through the HIX. To the extent that these difference-indifference results represent causal relationships, these results suggest that state HRPs can impact the risk profile of potential HIX buyers to a degree that significantly impacts premiums for relatively inexpensive plans offered on the exchanges. The coefficient magnitudes suggest that closure of a state-run HRP increases premiums by 6%-10%. Households appear to be shielded from these premium impacts, by the federal premium tax credit and cost-sharing reduction (CSR) mechanism. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data on self-reported out-of-pocket payments for medical expenditures, the state policy decisions are not significantly associated with these payments. In my third chapter, I pursue ex-ante policy evaluation. In recent years, more and more developed countries have adopted (or are considering adopting) skill biased immigration policies. For example, Canada now puts 37% weight on educational credentials of prospective immigrants, compared to 17% in 1986. Australia, U.K., and New Zealand (among others) have adopted similar policies. In the U.S., President Trump has recently called for a “merit-based” immigration system citing the Canadian system as an example. In this chapter, we (joint work with Dr. Sankar Mukhopadhyay) explore the relationship between remittance and sponsorship to understand how skill biased immigration policies might affect remittance flow in developing countries. Some researchers have argued that migrants that are more educated tend to bring their immediate family members to the host country, and thus, send less money to the source country in remittances. While there is a large literature, documenting association between education and remittance, whether that is related with sponsorship decision remain underexplored. Using an individual level panel data, we show that sponsoring family members leads to lower remittance. Furthermore, we show that college educated immigrants from high-income families are less likely to sponsor relatives, presumably because of relatively higher opportunity cost of migration of their relatives. Together, these two results suggest a positive association between education and remittances, which is indeed, what we find in the data. Our extended analysis shows that alternative explanations (such as higher income of more educated immigrants, or repaying implicit educational loans) cannot completely explain the positive association between education and remittances. Our results suggest that skill biased immigration policies are likely to result in more remittances; however, it may reduce chain migration.

We use matched panels from the Current Population Survey along with a grouping instrumental variables estimator to provide new estimates of the elasticity of taxable income. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that federal and state tax reforms over the past three decades have differentially affected cohorts across states and over time. We find that the elasticity is in the range of 0.4–0.55. The implication of our new estimates for tax policy is that the revenue‐maximising tax rate is nearly 30 percentage points lower than that obtained when we use the typical identification strategy in the literature.

In February 1944 Clara Mays, an African American federal government employee, purchased a three-story rowhouse in the Bloomingdale neighborhood, just north of Florida Avenue, close to Howard University. 1 The South Carolina native and her large family had been forced to seek a new home when the place they had been renting was sold. In the interim, the Mays family broke up the household, put their furniture in storage, and rented rooms in different locations while they house-hunted. Mays finally settled on 2213 First Street NW, part of an elegant Bloomingdale row built in 1904. Warned that she would be taking a risk in buying the house because a racially restrictive covenant barred its sale to African Americans, Mays went ahead anyway because she lacked . . .

We investigate the effects of human capital mobility on venture capital (VC) investment and outcomes. To establish causality, we use a difference-in-differences approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variations generated by states' staggered recognition of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD). We _find that a reduction in human capital mobility reduces VCs' investment propensity and successful exit. Further analysis shows that the effects are more pronounced in industries with more high-skilled workers, in industries with higher patenting intensity, and in earlier-stage VC investment. To mitigate the adverse effect of the IDD, VCs stage finance startups more and are more likely to syndicate with other VCs. Finally, we show that the IDD reduces the mobility of inventors, which contributes to a reduction in startups' patenting and successful exit. Our paper sheds new light on the effects of an important but underexplored determinant of VC investment -- the human capital of startups.

We assess the role of ethnic ties in the diffusion of technical knowledge using a database of patents filed by US-resident inventors of foreign origin, identified by name analysis. We consider 10 leading source countries, both Asian and European, of highly skilled migration to the USA and test whether foreign inventors patents are disproportionately cited by (i) co-ethnic migrants (diaspora effect), and (ii) inventors residing in their country of origin (brain gain effect). We find evidence of the diaspora effect for the Asian but not the European countries, with the exception of Russia. A diaspora effect does not necessarily translate into a brain gain effect, most notably for India where no such effect is detected. Neither does a brain gain effect occur solely in conjunction with a diaspora effect. Overall, diaspora and brain gain effects carry less weight than other channels of knowledge transmission, most notably co-invention networks and multinational companies.

The current study makes several contributions to the extant literature on the relationship between immigration and neighborhood crime. I review classical and contemporary theories and argue that these theories make contradictory predictions regarding the moderating effects of ethnic heterogeneity on the immigration and crime relationship. Previous immigration and crime studies cannot help adjudicate between these positions because they have only considered diversity as a mediator or a control variable. I use multiple measures of diversity to conduct the first comprehensive study of the moderating effects of ethnic heterogeneity on the immigration and violent crime relationship at the neighborhood level. The results indicate that greater diversity strengthens the protective effect of immigrant residential concentration. These findings contradict the assumptions of classical theories and support the more recent immigration and crime perspectives.