This study investigates the potential effects of legalizing cannabis on youth development by examining the associations between state-level policy changes and key indicators of academic performance, substance use, and cognitive functioning. Using data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (American Community Survey), we explore the impact of legalizing cannabis on youth marijuana use, SAT scores, cognitive difficulty, and dropout rates. Our findings suggest that legalizing cannabis, either medically or recreationally, has a negative impact on SAT math and writing/verbal scores and may lead to increased dropout rates among youth. However, there is no significant effect on marijuana use, and the effect on cognitive difficulty is limited. These findings emphasize the need for policymakers to consider the potential negative impact of legalizing cannabis on youth development and implement measures to mitigate any potential harm.

Objective: To explore the role of racial-ethnic background, income, residential context, and historic variation in hearing aid (HA) price HA usage among a nationally representative cohort of older adults with hearing loss. Methods: Multilevel logistic regression models evaluated data from the 2012 through 2017 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to 1) compare historic HA use between subgroups, 2) test for differential responsiveness to price changes between racial and ethnic groups, and 3) assess the relative role of demographic characteristics and HA use. Results: Between 2012 and 2017, the price of economy HAs decreased by 5% while HA use among Non-Hispanic (NH) Whites and Hispanics with hearing loss increased by 30% and 20% respectively, but usage among NH-Blacks increased by less than 10%. After controlling for relevant covariates, NH-Blacks were two times less likely than NH-Whites to use a HA. Household income and price were only significant for NH-Whites who showed that a 1% increase in income was associated with a 10% increase in the likelihood of HA use. Calculation of subgroup participation showed that, when the price of HAs dropped by 1%, the likelihood of HA use by NH-Whites increased by 14.2%, Hispanics increased by 13.2%, and Others increased by 14.8%, but only 2.8% among NH-Blacks. Conclusion: Results suggest that cost is not the primary barrier to HA utilization among minoritized individuals from racial and ethnic groups. Additional analyses are needed to evaluate the role of social, cultural, and environmental influences on HA utilization.

This paper examines the effects of the Safe Delivery Incentive Program in Nepal, a cash transfer program that reduced the costs of childbirth in healthcare facilities. Women giving birth for the first, second, or third time (below-cutoff) became eligible in 2005, and women giving birth for the fourth time or more (above-cutoff) became eligible two years later. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that below-cutoff women in high Human Development Index (HDI) districts increased facility delivery by 8.8 percentage points. Despite larger cost reductions, below-cutoff women in low HDI districts did not increase facility delivery but increased home delivery with skilled personnel by 4.8 percentage points. The program had no impact on above-cutoff women, who become eligible 2 years into the program. I suggest that pre-existing barriers such as poor infrastructure of roads and facilities, customs, liquidity constraints, and lack of program awareness limited the program's effectiveness.

Changes in taxable income can capture many of the behavioural responses to changes in tax policies. In this paper, using the publicly available Current Population Survey (CPS) data and analysing two of the most recent tax reforms (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012), we provide a new estimate for the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates. As is common in the literature, the paper conducts a panel data analysis and compares taxable income from before and after tax reforms to estimate the elasticity. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find an elasticity of 0.81, a value that is within the range of estimates found in previous studies.

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to examine year-by-year effects of the 2014 Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on infant mortality by race and ethnicity over the first 6 years. Methods: Publicly available 2011–2019 Multiple Cause of Death data were extracted in October and analyzed by November 2021. A difference-in-differences event-study design compared infant mortality changes in states that expanded in 2014 to nonexpansion states. Results: In the main model, the 2014 Medicaid expansions were associated with a statistically significant decline in Black infants’ mortality in 2018 and 2019 by 1.19 (95% CI= –2.27, –0.12) and 1.35 (95% CI= –2.45, –0.26) deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. There was also a decline in mortality for Hispanic infants in 2015–2019, including by 0.8 (95% CI= –1.25, –0.36) and 1.28 (95% CI= –1.88, –0.68) deaths per 1,000 live births in 2015 and 2019, respectively. Overall, infant mortality declined by 0.37 (95% CI= –0.70, –0.05) deaths per 1,000 live births in 2019. Conclusions: The study adds evidence on the association of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions with a decline in mortality of Black and Hispanic infants. The findings shed light on the importance of examining year-by-year effects over multiple years.

Care work is one of the fastest-growing components of New York City’s economy – but frequently one of the most neglected. The pandemic highlighted the importance of care workers to the city’s economy and families, but also caused a great deal of disruption. At the same time, the supply of care worker labor has been constricted, as some left their jobs due to heightened health risk, inadequate support, and higher-paying jobs in other sectors. This Spotlight takes a deep dive into the care economy in New York City. We examine who care workers are: overwhelmingly women, and on average significantly older, less white, and more likely to be immigrants than non-care workers. We explore recent trends in employment: the number of personal care aides grew significantly from 2019 to 2021, but the number of child care workers and preschool and kindergarten teachers declined. While care work is compensated at rates far lower than non-care work, public policy actions in recent years have shown the potential for meaningful impact. We document the change in wages by occupation and discuss ongoing policy advocacy efforts to bring more equity and more stability to the care economy.

I investigate race and gender differences in entrepreneurship participation in the US. I first confirm a finding from the previous literature that, among VC-backed firms, the proportion of females among Asian entrepreneurs is higher than the corresponding proportion among White entrepreneurs. I extend this finding to all types of entrepreneurs, including non-VC-backed ones. However, after controlling for basic non-race demographic variables, such as age, education, and marital status, I find no significant difference in entrepreneurship participation between Asian and White females. Instead, the difference is due to White males being more likely to be entrepreneurs than Asian males and White females. Moreover, exposure to an individualistic culture has a positive effect on male entrepreneurship participation, but no effect on female entrepreneurship participation.

This thesis investigates the relationship between residential location choice and labor market outcomes. The decision to reside in a particular location is intertwined with labor market opportunities, which are crucial determinants for housing market outcomes. Conversely, any barrier to mobility due to housing policy or finance condition adversely affects workers' careers, making any housing policy consequential for the labor market. Chapter 1 focuses on the labor market outcomes of negative equity homeowners who face geographical mobility barriers due to economy-wide factors. Using Census data in 2005-2010, the study estimates the mobility response and labor market outcomes of negative equity homeowners to the China trade shock and compares them to other homeowners. The analysis finds no significant d ifference be tween th e tw o gr oups in te rms of mo bility, em ployment al ong intensive and extensive margin, and wages, suggesting that house lock-in effects d id n ot significantly influence t he p attern o f wages a nd e mployment a fter t he C hina shock. Chapter 2 delves into the mechanisms behind location choice decisions based on labor market prospects and examines the relative weight of spouse career prospects in the location decision of dual-earner, college-educated straight couples. The analysis finds that higher expected wages for husbands in a potential destination makes it more attractive for households, compared to the same increase in expected wages for wives, a gap which monotonically diminishes with age. Several hypotheses are explored, with the division of labor within the household being most consistent with the evidence. Also this difference c annot b e i nterpreted a s a difference in spouses' bargaining power, as the estimated bargaining power from a model including home production shows almost no gender imbalance. Chapter 3 examines the popularity of rent stabilization, a widely advocated housing afford-ability policy despite its inefficiencies. Co ntrary to co nventional be lief, th e st udy fin ds tha t the main benefit o f r ent r egulation f or t enants i s n ot t he p rotection i t p rovides a gainst h igher rent increases over time. Instead, rent regulation is attractive mainly because it is associated with lower quality and less expensive units, which are in higher demand.

Background: The distribution of employees’ eventual tenure plays an important role in economic sociology, labor economics, and social stratification. Objective: I aim to show how variable-r methods used for the point estimation of life table quantities for nonstable human populations can also be used to obtain expected employee tenures and related measures like conditional expected job tenure, the likelihood of a job ending via displacement, and the static effect of eliminating job displacements on expected employee tenure. Methods and Data: When birth rates are changing over time analysts can use variable-r methods to estimate period life tables with a count of intercensal births and two censuses. Once a single-decrement life table is obtained, researchers with data on specific decrements can construct multiple decrement life tables. I argue that the “population of employment relationships” is analogous to a human population. An employee tenure table, analogous to a life table, can be constructed using variable-r methods. Only two retrospective surveys of employee tenure lengths and a count of between-survey hires are required. Tenure-specific sources of decrement, e.g., job displacements, allow an analyst to construct multiple and associated single-decrement tenure tables isolating the effect of that decrement on the period employment tenure distribution. I illustrate and briefly evaluate the method using the 2002-2004 IPUMS Current Population Survey Job Tenure and Displaced Worker Supplements as retrospective surveys of employment tenure lengths and tenure-specific decrements, respectively. I obtain between-survey hiring counts from the 2002 – 2003 Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Results: Variable-r methods generated reasonable expected employee tenure and job survival curves, replicating stylized features of the employee tenure distribution. Multiple decrement methods can be used to estimate the probability of an employment relationship ending via job displacement. Cause-deleted tenure tables can capture the static effect of eliminating a particular risk to the population of employment relationships. Conclusions: Demographers, economists, and sociologists should consider the use of variable-r methods when analyzing trends in expected employee tenure inequalities. Variable-r methods have limited data requirements and enable the estimation of interesting new measures in labor demography. Contribution: Arthur and Vaupel (1984) present an original derivation of the variable-r equations that I utilize in this article. Vaupel had an interest in formal demography throughout his life but started his academic career in business statistics. This paper combines those interests.

This paper explores the commuting behavior of elder workers in the United States, with a focus on metropolitan areas and metropolitan population sizes. Using the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003-2018, estimates reveal a positive correlation between commuting time and residing in metropolitan areas, driven by longer commutes in more populated areas. Furthermore, elder workers in metropolitan areas of more than 2.5 million inhabitants use more public transports than workers in less-populated or non-metropolitan areas. The analysis may allow policy makers to identify which workers may be more affected by the negative consequences of commuting, and also who has more limitations in their commuting behaviors.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal spending on government safety net programs in the United States increased dramatically. Despite this unparalleled spending, government safety nets were widely critiqued for failing to fully meet many households' needs. Disaster research suggests that informal modes of social support often emerge during times of disruption, such as the first year of the pandemic. However, use of formal government programs and informal support are rarely examined relative to each other, resulting in an incomplete picture of how households navigate disaster impacts and financial shocks. This study compares estimates of informal social support to formal government program use in the rural U.S. West, drawing on data from a rapid response survey fielded during the summer of 2020 and the 2021 Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC). We find that informal social support systems were, on aggregate, used almost as extensively as long-standing government programs. Our findings highlight the critical role of person-to-person assistance, such as sharing financial resources, among rural households during a disruptive disaster period. Routine and standardized data collection on these informal support behaviors could improve future disaster research and policy responses, especially among rural populations.

Urban inequality is a major challenge for cities in the 21st century. This inequality is reflected in the spatial income structure of cities which evolves in time through various processes. Gentrification is a well-known illustration of these dynamics in which the population of a low-income area changes as wealthier residents arrive and old-settled residents are expelled. Less understood but very important is the reverse process of gentrification through which areas of cities get impoverished. Gentrification has been widely studied among social sciences, especially in case studies, but there have been fewer quantitative analyses of this phenomenon, and more generally about the spatial dynamics of income in cities. Here, we first propose a quantitative analysis of these income dynamics in cities based on household incomes in 45 American and nine French Functional Urban Areas (FUA). We found that an important ingredient that determines the evolution of the income level of an area is the income level of its immediate neighboring areas. This empirical finding leads to the idea that these dynamics can be modeled by the voter model of statistical physics. We show that such a model constitutes an interesting tool for both describing and predicting evolution scenarios of urban areas with a very limited number of parameters (two for the United States and one for France). We illustrate our results by computing the probability that areas will change their income status in the case of Boston and Paris at the horizon of 2030.

Cities have long been thought to drive economic growth. Despite this, analyses of spatial policies have largely ignored the effects of such policies on growth. In this paper, I develop a spatial endogenous growth model in which heterogeneous agents make forward-looking migration decisions and human capital investments over the life cycle. Local externalities in the human capital investment technology drive both agglomeration and growth. I show that, along a balanced growth path, the growth rate depends on the spatial distribution of human capital, making it sensitive to spatial policies. I calibrate the model to data on U.S. metropolitan areas and show that it can rationalize the faster wage growth of workers in big cities, as well as other key patterns in life-cycle wage profiles, migration decisions, and city characteristics. Because workers accumulate human capital at different rates depending on where they live, the model provides an environment in which spatial policy can not just attract skilled workers, but produce them, too. I find that policies that further concentrate skilled workers in large cities are growth-enhancing.

This study used a mixed-methods research approach. The research team administered two online surveys of 65 restaurant employees and 42 operators. Survey questions addressed hiring practices, wage and tipping policies, current benefits offerings and preferences. Restaurant worker demographics, wages, and access to health insurance were also examined using data from the 5-Year American Community Survey from 2016-2020.Thirteen restaurant employees and three operators were interviewed to better understand their personal experiences working within the industry, the pandemic’s ongoing effects, and their personal views regarding wage and benefits practices, staffing, and unionization.

Although the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the largest and most extensively studied programs affecting low-income workers in the U.S., relatively little is known about its mechanisms. Motivated by a wealth of prior sociological and survey research showing EITC recipients devote a substantial share of tax refunds to purchasing and maintaining vehicles necessary for job search and commuting, this study examines the personal transportation pathway. I use a simulated instrument approach leveraging metro-level variation in EITC exposure to compare labor-supply responses to policy changes between areas with varying levels of dependence on cars for commuting workers. The main results, robust to a range of specifications, give strong support to the transportation mechanism: employment effects are 18% smaller in cities with abundant public transportation and 16% larger in highly car-dependent areas. These results are tempered, however, by supplemental analyses into the seasonality of estimated EITC responses and respondents' reports of transportation difficulties. The paper also presents new evidence using the simulated instrument approach to address two outstanding questions in the literature: the effects of state EITC supplements and the impact of the 2009 EITC expansion.

The cyclicality of economic recessions worsens fiscal stability and increases vulnerability to future shocks. This article argues that the concept of resilience provides an important frame for understanding the dynamic character of public financial management. The study introduces a theoretical framework that decomposes fiscal resilience into precrisis fiscal resistance, postcrisis fiscal recovery, and long-term fiscal renewal. It empirically tests the model employing a Cox proportional hazard model and over three decades of data (1991–2018) covering two previous recessions—the dotcom recession and the Great Recession. The findings indicate that although strategic decisions associated with revenue diversification and countercyclical capacity facilitate fiscal resilience, specific features of local government finances such as the revenue structure and service structure are critical to fiscal recovery and renewal. In addition, the underlying characteristics of each recession affect whether institutional and economic conditions facilitate fiscal resilience. The article discusses implications for financial management and emphasizes embedding resiliency-based frameworks in local government strategic planning.

We study the political impacts of unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States. Our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in Mexican municipalities and migrant networks from data on over 7 million likely unauthorized migrants who obtained consular IDs. We find evidence of conservative electoral and policy responses. Unauthorized migration significantly increases the vote share of the Republican Party in federal elections, decreases spending on education, and increases relative spending on policing and on the administration of justice. Among the mechanisms we explore, job loss in "migrant intensive" sectors and an increase in poverty best explain the political reaction. We also document subsequent out-migration and heightened in-group values among US natives. By contrast, unauthorized migration inflows have no discernible impact on wages, unemployment, or crime rates. We find suggestive evidence the main political impacts of unauthorized migration, and their drivers, are smaller in counties that have more progressive taxation or a more generous social safety net.

While it is important to recognize the racist roots of contemporary urban conditions and Black disadvantage, the focus on the HOLC redlining maps of the late 1930s, which have become a staple of both research and popular literature, is misplaced. Despite statistical associations between the maps and contemporary measures of racialized disadvantage, extensive research has found no evidence to support a connection between them. Instead, the Second Great Migration and white flight, both acting in the context of the exclusion of Black buyers from the growing suburbs, led to the spatial and economic bifurcation of urban Black populations within cities and the reconfiguration of the formerly predominately whiteethnic redlined areas as segregated areas of concentrated Black poverty. It is that migratory process, rather than any public or private actions based on the maps, which, while racist, principally reflected underlying housing and economic conditions, that account for the associations found in the literature. Today, while redlined areas still tend often to be concentrated poverty areas, the great majority of poor Black households live outside those areas. A focus on the HOLC maps as a driver of contemporary inequities and disadvantage is both poor history and a poor starting point for policies to address today’s persistent racialized inequities.

We demonstrate an important complementarity between patriotism and public good provision. After 1933, the New Deal led to an unprecedented expansion of the US federal government's role. Those who benefited from social spending were markedly more patriotic during WW II: they bought more war bonds, volunteered more and, as soldiers, won more medals. This pattern was new-WW I volunteering did not show the same geography of patriotism. We match military service records with the 1940 census to show that this pattern holds at the individual level. Using geographical variation, we exploit two instruments to suggest that the effect is causal: droughts and congressional committee representation predict more New Deal agricultural support, as well as bond buying, volunteering, and medals.

This paper examines the impact of the 529 plan tax benefits on plan participation and savings. Using state-level data on tax benefits for plan contributions and on the number of open accounts and the amount of assets under management, we estimate fixed effects regression of the use of 529 accounts as a function of measures of tax benefit generosity. Our results imply that offering a tax benefit per se does not significantly increase the percentage of children with an account or the average balances in accounts. In addition, while regression analysis suggests that offering a larger tax benefit for a moderate contribution leads to a small increase in the growth of the percentage of children with 529 savings plans and a larger tax benefit for the maximum contribution is associated with larger balances in savings plans, neither finding is sustained within multiple permutation tests and both are likely spurious.