Recent work from Thomas Piketty and others has shed new light on the causes and effects of inequality on society. But how can taking a spatial perspective help us to better understand inequality and its effects? In new research, Jurgen Essletzbichler finds that in cities with the highest shares of the 1 percent of income earners, the bottom 90 percent are not necessarily better off because the potential ‘trickle down’ benefits are eroded by higher living costs. He argues that policymakers should keep in mind that any attempt to redistribute incomes to those on low incomes will have significant geographic effects.

This paper presents evidence that since 1980, relative to native-born Americans and other immigrants, the earnings of Taiwanese immigrants have grown rapidly as they assimilate into the U.S. economy. Consistent with the existing U.S. evidence, I show that most of the immigrant–native earnings gaps can be explained by endowments, and the importance of endowments continues to increase. The estimates indicate that the improved endowments from education and U.S. experience, along with rising returns to both factors, largely explain Taiwanese immigrants’ economic assimilation experience. I show that more recently arrival cohorts of Taiwanese immigrants have earned more than the older ones since 1980.

Introduction Motivation The 2015-2016 Aliso Canyon/Porter Ranch natural gas well blowout emitted approximately 100,000 tonnes of natural gas (mostly methane, CH 4) over four months. The blowout impacted thousands of nearby residents, who were displaced from their homes. The high visibility of the event has led to increased scrutiny of the safety of natural gas storage at the Aliso Canyon facility, as well as broader concern for natural gas storage integrity throughout the country. Federal Review of Well Integrity In April of 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) through the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), announced the formation of a new Interagency Task Force on Natural Gas Storage Safety. The Task Force enlisted a group of scientists and engineers at the DOE National Laboratories to review the state of well integrity in natural gas storage in the U.S. The overarching objective of the review is to gather, analyze, catalogue, and disseminate information and findings that can lead to improved natural gas storage safety and security and thus reduce the risk of future events. The “Protecting our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing . . .

We assess the extent to which manufacturing decline and local housing booms contributed to changes in labor market outcomes during the 2000s. Using a local labor markets design, we estimate that manufacturing decline significantly reduced employment between 2000 and 2006, while local housing booms increased employment by roughly the same magnitude. The effects of manufacturing decline persist through 2012, but we find no persistent employment effects of local housing booms, likely because housing booms were associated with subsequent busts of similar magnitude. These results suggest that housing booms masked negative employment growth that would have otherwise occurred earlier in the absence of the booms. This masking was strongest for low-skilled men and women, although high-skilled men and women were affected, as well; additionally, masking occurred both within and between cities during this time period. Applying our local labor market estimates to the national labor market, we find that roughly 40 percent of the reduction in employment during the 2000s can be attributed to manufacturing decline and that these negative effects would have appeared in aggregate employment statistics earlier had it not been for the large, temporary increases in housing demand.

Hookah use may be increasing among adults in the US. Information on the prevalence and correlates of hookah use in the adult population is relatively limited. Objectives: To determine the prevalence of current (past 30-day) and lifetime use of hookah among adults ages 1840 in the US and to investigate the socio-demographic characteristics associated with lifetime use. Methods: Data were drawn from the Tobacco Use Supplement of the Current Population Survey data from May 2010, August 2010, and January 2011 (n = 85,545). Logistic regression was used to examine various demographic correlates of lifetime hookah use. Results: Among 1840 year olds, the past month prevalence rate of hookah use was 0.6% and the lifetime prevalence rate of hookah use was 3.9%. Being male, non-Hispanic white, having higher levels of educational attainment, having never been married, not having any children, earning less than $20,000 annually, residing in the Midwest or western US, being a student, and being a cigarette smoker were associated with increased likelihood of lifetime hookah use. The prevalence of hookah use among current, cigarette smokers was 7.9%, more than double that of the general adult population. Conclusions: Hookah use is significantly more common among cigarette smokers and among various demographic subgroups among general adult population. Given the risks associated with hookah and poly-tobacco use, targeted public health efforts are recommended. Additionally, health-care providers may consider expanding screening tests to include hookah use. Hookah use may be increasing among adults in the US. Information on the prevalence and correlates of hookah use in the adult population is relatively limited. Objectives: To determine the prevalence of current (past 30-day) and lifetime use of hookah among adults ages 1840 in the US and to investigate the socio-demographic characteristics associated with lifetime use. Methods: Data were drawn from the Tobacco Use Supplement of the Current Population Survey data from May 2010, August 2010, and January 2011 (n = 85,545). Logistic regression was used to examine various demographic correlates of lifetime hookah use. Results: Among 1840 year olds, the past month prevalence rate of hookah use was 0.6% and the lifetime prevalence rate of hookah use was 3.9%. Being male, non-Hispanic white, having higher levels of educational attainment, having never been married, not having any children, earning less than $20,000 annually, residing in the Midwest or western US, being a student, and being a cigarette smoker were associated with increased likelihood of lifetime hookah use. The prevalence of hookah use among current, cigarette smokers was 7.9%, more than double that of the general adult population. Conclusions: Hookah use is significantly more common among cigarette smokers and among various demographic subgroups among general adult population. Given the risks associated with hookah and poly-tobacco use, targeted public health efforts are recommended. Additionally, health-care providers may consider expanding screening tests to include hookah use.

We exploit the exogenous variation in regional credit market contestability brought on by banking deregulation in the United States to study the narrowing of the gender gap in local labor markets. We find that deregulation reduced the gender gap in labor force participation, as the subsequent increase in the demand for labor induced non-working women to enter the labor force. Deregulation also reduced wage inequality as women became more likely to work in the private sector, to enter high-paid "male" jobs, and to acquire higher education. Tests of contiguous MSAs sharing a state border corroborate a genuine deregulation effect.

Little is understood about displacement in urban contexts. While some of the difficulties are methodological, the more serious problem is conceptual. Outside of the rent gap hypothesis or the philosophy of property rights, there has been little theoretical inquiry into the causal dynamics of displacement. In this article, I present a study of evictions in Los Angeles that addresses these conceptual and empirical shortcomings. A spatial analysis of more than 70,000 georeferenced evictions between 1994 and 1999 documents the existence of four distinct geographies of displacement, each produced by separate types of causal circumstances. Gentrification explains only one of the four displacement geographies, while the other three are nongentrifying or pre-gentrifying contexts and more appropriately described through growth machine models, global city theory, and financial restructuring. The extent of displacement in pre- and nongentrifying areas reinforces Mark Davidsons emphasis on Lefebvres production of space as a crucial framework for understanding displacement processes.

Matching methods such as propensity score matching are commonly used to construct artificial treatment and control groups from observational data, to determine the causal effect of treatment. However, propensity scores, once estimated, are frequently treated as known, and the uncertainty inherent in their estimation is ignored. We introduce probabilistic matching, an improvement on propensity score matching, that incorporates the uncertainty of the estimated propensity score into the subsequent matching process by weighting matches by the estimated probability of matching. Notably, this is equivalent to averaging the estimated treatment effect over the propensity score distribution, given the data. Preliminary results demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable or lower bias and lower variance, when compared to vanilla propensity score matching. While we focus on matching in this paper, the idea of incorporating uncertainty can also be brought into other ways of utilizing estimated propensity scores, such as weighing and substratification.

National surveys suggest Texans have a relatively low level of financial literacy that can adversely affect decision-making. Since state lawmakers mandated high school financial coursework in 2007, consumer credit measures of young Texas adults have improved.

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data.

My dissertation examines various facets of coerced labor. Chapter 1 develops a theoretical model of coerced labor and draws predictions regarding the intensity of serfdom in feudal Europe. These predictions are then utilized to explain why Western Europe abrogated serfdom centuries before Eastern Europe. Chapter 2 studies the factors affecting the prevalence of slave unrest in the antebellum Southern United States. I find that areas which were endowed with geographic and climatic conditions best suited for cotton production were more likely to experience revolts and discovered conspiracies. I also find that years in which cotton prices were higher led to more revolts. Chapter 3 investigates a hypothesis which attributes the backwardness of industry in the antebellum South to an inherent incompatibility between urbanization and slavery. In direct contradiction to this hypothesis, I find that county-level urbanization is uncorrelated with the incidence of revolts, discovered conspiracies or panics.

BACKGROUND The growing prevalence of migrant children in diverse contexts requires a reconsideration of the intergenerational consequences of migration. To understand how migration and duration of residence are associated with childrens schooling, we need more comparative work that can point to the similarities and differences in outcomes for children across contexts. OBJECTIVE This paper addresses the importance of nativity and duration of residence for childrens school enrollment on both sides of a binational migration system: The United States and Mexico. The analyses are designed to determine whether duration of residence has a similar association with school enrollment across these different settings. METHODS The analyses are based on nationally representative household data from the 2010 Mexican Census and the 20062010 American Community Survey. Logistic regression models compare school enrollment patterns of Mexican and U.S.-born children of Mexican origin in the United States and those of Mexican and U.S.-born children in Mexico. Interactions for nativity/duration of residence and age are also included. RESULTS The results demonstrate that, adjusting for household resources and household-level migration experience, Mexican-born children in the United States and U.S.-born children in Mexico, particularly those who arrived recently, lag behind in school enrollment. These differences are most pronounced at older ages. CONCLUSIONS The comparisons across migration contexts point to greater school attrition and nonenrollment among older, recent migrant youth, regardless of the context. The interactions suggest that recent migration is associated with lower schooling for youth who engage in migration at older ages in both the United States and Mexico.

Asian Americans are the only non-white US racial group to experience long-term, institutional discrimination yet today exhibit high income. I re-examine this puzzle in California, where most Asians settled historically. Asians achieved extraordinary upward mobility relative to blacks and whites for every cohort born in California since 1920. This mobility stemmed primarily from gains in earnings conditional on education, rather than unusual educational attainment. Historical test score and prejudice data suggest low initial earnings for Asians, unlike blacks, reflected prejudice rather than skills. Post-war declines in discrimination interacting with high initial skills can account for Asians' extraordinary upward mobility.

The incidence of esophageal adenocarcinoma in the United States has risen rapidly over the last 30 years, whereas the incidence of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma has fallen dramatically. In contrast, parts of Asia have extremely high rates of squamous cell carcinoma, but virtually no adenocarcinoma. Within the United States, Asian-Americans as a whole, have low rates of esophageal adenocarcinoma and higher rates of squamous cell carcinoma. It is unclear what the patterns are for those Asians born in the United States. The relative influence of ethnicity and environment on the incidence of esophageal cancer in this population is unknown. We identified all cases of esophageal adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma from the California Cancer Registry 19882004, including 955 cases among 6 different Asian ethnicities. Time trends were examined using Joinpoint software to calculate the annual percentage changes in regression models. Rates of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma varied substantially among different Asian ethnic groups, but squamous cell carcinoma was much more common than adenocarcinoma in both foreign-born and US-born Asian-Americans. Rates of squamous cell carcinoma were slightly higher among US-born Asian men (4.0 per 100,000) compared with foreign-born Asian men (3.2 per 100,000) and White men (2.2 per 100,000), P = 0.03. Rates of adenocarcinoma were also slighter higher among US-born Asian men (1.2 per 100,000) compared with foreign-born Asian men (0.7 per 100,000), P = 0.01. Rates of squamous cell carcinoma decreased for both US-born and foreign-born Asians during this period, whereas adenocarcinoma remained low and stable. These results provide better insight into the genetic and environmental factors affecting the changing incidence of esophageal cancer histologies in the United States and Asia.

The long presence of military installations extending back approximately a century has led to the designation of San Antonio as Military City USA. For long, the military represented the citys major employer. The areas six military bases - Fort Sam Houston, Lackland Air Force Base, Randolph Air Force Base, Brooks City-Base, Camp Bullis and Camp Stanley represent one of the largest active and retired military populations in the country. A 2011 study found that the Department of Defense (DoD) had a $27.7 billion impact on the citys economy; supported 189,148 jobs in the city; granted $4 billion in contracts locally; and provided support for 55,000 DoD retirees in the community.

Latin America has been characterized as a region with an excess of inequality for being a middle-income region (Londoño and Székely 2000). It ranks as the second most unequal region in the world, after Sub-Saharan Africa, a position that holds independent of the metric used to measure welfare, whether consumption or income (Alvaredo and Gasparini 2015). Although inequality in Latin America is still substantial today, the region is also known to have experienced a turning point in the trend in the early 2000s (Gasparini et al. 2011), changing from a slightly increasing trend during the 1990s to a steady decline since the early 2000s (López-Calva and Lustig 2010). This represents a sharp contrast with what has occurred in other developing regions, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and in East Asia and the Pacific, where income inequality has been on the rise since the early 2000s (Alvaredo and Gasparini 2015).5 The literature on the rise and fall of income inequality is vast. Following the seminal studies of Gasparini et al. (2009) and López-Calva and Lustig (2010), a growing body of literature has documented the turning point in total income inequality and has hypothesized about the potential supply, demand, and institutional factors that may be associated with the unique equalizing momentum of the region . . .

Since the widespread growth of proactive policing strategies across the United States during the 1990s, community members and scholars alike have critiqued these law enforcement techniques for their injurious effects on minority communities. Prior research has established that suspect and neighborhood characteristics influence police decision making and stop outcomes, with Blacks and Latinos faring worse than their White counterparts. What remains largely unknown, however, are the underlying mechanisms driving these disparities. This study approaches the problem by conducting a neighborhood-level analysis of the reasons that police officers provided for making 4.5 million stops over a period of twelve years as a part of the New York City Police Department’s stop and frisk policy. Specifically, this analysis examines how the proportions of stops that are made based on appearance varies depending on neighborhood racial and ethnic composition and perceived crime rates. The results indicate that nonbehavioral stop rates are significantly higher in Black and Latino neighborhoods, and that perceived crime is one of the strongest predictors of the proportion of stops in a neighborhood that are made for nonbehavioral reasons. The findings of this study advance the literature on policing by providing evidence that neighborhood characteristics are salient factors in determining policing . . .

This dissertation includes three essays that analyze factors affect residential sorting across neighborhood. Chapter 1 estimates the effect of crime on household location choice using a two-stage residential sorting model which incorporates the effect of mobility cost. The results from the second stage show that people are willing to pay more to move to a location with lower violent crime occurrences, but also willing to pay more to move to a place with higher property crime. When recovering the willingness to pay (WTP) for the two types of crime using elasticities, the results show that people are willing to pay $651 and $977 for a one hundred unit decrease in violent crime and $23 and $27 for a one hundred unit increase in property crime for 2005 and 2010 respectively. The difference-in-difference results show that people are willing to pay less to move to a location in which the police number increases, and pay more to move to a location where the crime rate decreases while police force increases. Chapter 2 analyzes whether or not, and to what degree local environmental risk impact household residential location choice. Employing a two-stage horizontal sorting model, the results indicate that black households are willing to pay $3438 more for a 1% increase in the faction of black than white households, and households of other races would like to pay $8613 more for a 1% increase in the fraction of same race neighbors than white households. With each $10000 increase in household income, household’s marginal willingness to pay increases by $591 for a decrease of 1000 pounds of releases in the neighborhood. The counterfactual simulation of turning off tastes over environmental risk shows that differential preferences for environmental risk by race serve to segregate households. Chapter 3 analyzes how environmental disamenities affect residential location choices using an equilibrium sorting model. The empirical analysis indicates that households are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for housing and neighborhood characteristics, which shaped the way that households sort across neighborhood. Based on results from the first stage estimation, poor households are more likely to select houses closer to landfills, and black households are more probably to choose households located near a demolish landfill when keeping distance fixed. Counterfactual simulation results indicate that when switching off heterogeneous preferences for landfill disamenities there is little impact on housing consumption of white, but for black and poor households, I see more notable changes.

This study analyzes whether residential infill development promotes mixed income communities in the Orlando metropolitan area from 1990 to 2009. Compact development and more diverse housing options realized through infill can alleviate spatial segregation and promote social diversity in communities by attracting diverse new residents into the neighborhood. However, as infill housing reflects neighborhood conditions, the impacts of infill housing on neighborhood income diversity vary depending on neighborhood types. The results show that infill development is only positively associated with neighborhood income diversity in gentrifying communities. Therefore, a more direct guideline or incentive program for infill, which can ensure a broad range of housing prices in infill development, should be implemented to promote mixed income communities through infill.

Part of a wider range of investigations to produce generally acceptable standards for measuring affective well-being, time diary surveys have tested several approaches to measuring subjective well-being during diary days. As an alternative to the standard approach of asking a single question about each activity reported in time diary surveys, the 2010 module of the American Time Use Survey asked six emotion questions about three activities. The perception questions captured how happy, meaningful, sad, tired, stressed, or in pain respondents felt on a 7-point scale. To evaluate this approach, our research examined the reliability and validity of the six emotion questions, and assessed their variability across activities. Using principal component analysis, we assessed the associations among items and obtained two activity-level components with Cronbachs alphas of 0.68 and 0.59 and two respondent-level components with Cronbachs alphas of 0.74 and 0.65. To test validity, we regressed self-rated health on the underlying components and socio-demographic controls. Both of the respondent level components were significantly associated with better health (odds ratio 1.81, 1.27). Using each of the perceptions individually, we found that happiness, meaningfulness, and lack of fatigue, stress, and pain were related to better health, but none as strongly as the first component. Finally, we examined the coefficients of variation to assess the variability in the well-being measures across activities. Measurement implications and limitations of this study are discussed.