Damage due to tropical cyclones accounts for more than 50% of all meteorologically-induced economic losses worldwide. Their nominal impact is projected to increase substantially as the exposed population grows, per capita income increases, and anthropogenic climate change manifests. So far, historical losses due to tropical cyclones have been found to increase less than linearly with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP). Here we show that for the United States this scaling is caused by a sub-linear increase with affected population while relative losses scale super-linearly with per capita income. The finding is robust across a multitude of empirically derived damage models that link the storm's wind speed, exposed population, and per capita GDP to reported losses. The separation of both socio-economic predictors strongly affects the projection of potential future hurricane losses. Separating the effects of growth in population and per-capita income, per hurricane losses with respect to national GDP are projected to triple by the end of the century under unmitigated climate change, while they are estimated to decrease slightly without the separation.

A generation ago, the Supreme Court upended the voting rights world. In the breakthrough case of Thornburg v. Gingles, the Court held that minority groups that are residentially segregated and electorally polarized are entitled to districts in which they can elect their preferred candidates. But while the legal standard for vote dilution has been clear ever since, the real-world impact of the Court’s decision has remained a mystery. Scholars have failed to answer basic empirical questions about the operation of the Gingles framework. To wit: Did minorities’ descriptive representation improve due to the case? If so, did this improvement come about through the mechanisms—racial segregation and polarization—contemplated by the Court? And is there a tradeoff between minorities’ descriptive and substantive representation, or can both be raised in tandem? In this Article, I tackle these questions using a series of novel datasets. For the first time, I am able to quantify all of Gingles’1s elements: racial segregation and polarization, and descriptive and substantive representation. I am also able to track them at the state legislative level, over the entire modern redistricting era, and for black and Hispanic voters. Compared to the cross-sectional congressional studies of black representation that form the bulk of the literature, these features provide far more analytical leverage. I find that the proportion of black legislators in the South rose precipitously after the Court’s intervention. But neither this proportion in the non-South, nor the share of Hispanic legislators nationwide, increased much. I also find that Gingles worked exactly as intended for segregated and polarized black populations. These groups now elect many more of their preferred candidates than they did prior to the decision. But this progress has not materialized for Hispanics, suggesting that their votes often continue to be diluted. Lastly, I find a modest tradeoff between minorities’ descriptive representation and both the share of seats held by Democrats and the liberalism of the median legislator. But this tradeoff disappears when Democrats are responsible for redistricting, and it intensifies when Republicans are in charge. In combination, these results provide fodder for both Gingles1’s advocates and its critics. More importantly, they mean that the decision’s impact can finally be assessed empirically.

We put forward a new data object called the public transit travel time cube and demonstrate how the cube can be used in the analysis of transit travel time changes over space and time. The travel time cube contains the shortest path transit travel time between sets of origins and destinations in the city, at all times of day. Once computed, a wide range of investigations become readily available to the transit planner or transportation researcher. We conduct three demonstrative analysis using travel time cubes for the Wasatch Front, Utah and the Portland region in Oregon. Our studies investigate how travel times were impacted by service cuts and expansions in the two regions respectively, and the impact this had on jobs accessibility. We also use the travel time cube to study the last mile problem, and compute the travel time savings and the stability gained by solving the last mile problem with bicycling. The paper concludes with an expanded discussion on the merits of the travel time cube and outlines four avenues for continued research.

Economic and social forces have altered the landscape for religious institutions in many postindustrial cities, with potentially serious implications for communities that ostensibly stand to benefit from their presence. In recent decades, changes in neighborhood racial composition and out-migration to distant suburbs have divested many urban communities of once-vibrant social institutions, among them places of worship. This article undertakes an empirical approach to examine the socioeconomic correlates of church closures in neighborhoods in a Midwestern U.S. metropolitan area. Utilizing an index of nine measures of social and economic viability, the study found that the type of congregational closure is significantly related to viability outcomes. In particular, the closure of geographically based congregations and those characterized by bridging social capital were significantly related to declines in neighborhood viability. Theoretical concepts from religious ecology, place attachment, and social capital/civic engagement structure the analysis.

Purpose—Education is an established correlate of cognitive status in older adulthood, but whether expanding educational opportunities would improve cognitive functioning remains unclear given limitations of prior studies for causal inference. Therefore, we conducted instrumental variable (IV) analyses of the association between education and dementia risk, using for the first time in this area, genetic variants as instruments as well as state-level school policies. Methods—IV analyses in the Health and Retirement Study cohort (1998–2010) used two sets of instruments: 1) a genetic risk score constructed from three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (n=8,054); and 2) compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) and state school characteristics (term length, student teacher ratios, and expenditures) (n=13,167). Results—Employing the genetic risk score as an IV, there was a 1.1% reduction in dementia risk per year of schooling (95% CI: −2.4, 0.02). Leveraging compulsory schooling laws and state school characteristics as IVs, there was a substantially larger protective effect (−9.5%; 95% CI: −14.8, −4.2). Analyses evaluating the plausibility of the IV assumptions indicated estimates derived from analyses relying on CSLs provide the best estimates of the causal effect of education. Conclusion—IV analyses suggest education is protective against risk of dementia in older adulthood.

This handbook chapter seeks to document the economic forces that led the US to become an urban nation over its two hundred year history. We show that the urban wage premium in the US was remarkably stable over the past two centuries, ranging between 15 and 40 percent, while the rent premium was more variable. The urban wage premium rose through the mid-nineteenth century as new manufacturing technologies enhanced urban productivity; then fell from 1880 to 1940 (especially through 1915) as investments in public health infrastructure improved the urban quality of life; and finally rose sharply after 1980, coinciding with the skill- (and apparently also urban-) biased technological change of the computer revolution. The second half of the chapter focuses instead on the location of workers and firms within metropolitan areas. Over the twentieth century, both households and employment have relocated from the central city to the suburban ring. The two forces emphasized in the monocentric city model, rising incomes and falling commuting costs, can explain much of this pattern, while urban crime and racial diversity also played a role.

Immigrant revitalization has been used to understand the crime reducing benefits of immigrant concentration. Recently, the South, a region described as a one with a distinct appetite for violence and the most violent region in America, has seen dramatic increases in the concentration of immigrants. The Southern Culture of Violence (SCV) Thesis has been used as an explanation for this distinctness. Using negative binomial regression with 1990 and 2000 data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) supplemented with Census data, I examine the impact of immigrant concentration, the change in these concentration levels, and the lagged impact of the former on violent crime rates in the South compared to regions outside of the South. I also examine the effects of immigrant concentration in areas that have had low, average, and high levels of immigration in 1990. I find that immigration has negative effects on violent crime that vary in degree based on the region. I also find some evidence for a lagged effect and stronger effects when focusing on communities with higher levels of immigrant concentration, especially in the South. I discuss how the effect of revitalization may be weakened due to the SCV and the level of receptiveness of immigrants along with other mediating factors. I conclude by suggesting that future studies that more directly examine immigrant feelings of reception, opportunity, and ultimately the cultural conditions in specific regions along with additional studies that more deeply investigates the intersecting roles of immigration, race, crime, and inclusion.

This paper looks at the effect of religious beliefs on economic growth using a Brazilian city-level survey data as opposed to the more popular country-level data, thus separating the effect from different social and historical context. The hypothesis is that certain religious beliefs stimulate people's positive behaviors and hence increase productivity. We also find that religious pluralism is positively correlated with economic growth.

From 1940 to 1970, nearly four million black migrants left the American rural South to settle in the industrial cities of the North and West. Competition in the Promised Land provides a comprehensive account of the long-lasting effects of the influx of black workers on labor markets and urban space in receiving areas.

This paper studies how the likelihood and timing of divorce are influenced by Social Securitys 10-year rule, which provides spousal benefits to divorced people if their marriages lasted at least 10 years. Bunching analysis indicates that approximately 2% of divorces occurring in the 6 months after 10-year anniversaries would have occurred earlier if not for Social Securitys 10-year rule. For older couples, who are likely more focused on retirement and have greater earning disparities, divorces are approximately 9% higher in the 2 years after 10-year anniversaries than would be predicted without the abrupt change in Social Security benefits. The increase in divorces after 10 years of marriage appears to come from couples with disparate earning records.

During the African American Great Migration, millions of blacks left the Southern USA in favor of cities in the North. Despite the social and economic consequences of this migration, the question of its impacts on labor markets in the North has largely been overlooked in the literature. In this paper, I use both local wage comparisons and structural simulations of the aggregate Northern labor market to provide new evidence on the effects of the Great Migration on wages in the North, redoubling the evidence that it caused large declines in wages for blacks, with little effect for whites. The agreement between my local and aggregate wage effect estimates has implications for our general understanding of how immigration and wages are related and how that relationship can be measured.

Taking advantage of historical census records that include full first and last names, we apply a new approach to measuring the effect of cultural assimilation on economic success for the children of the last great wave of immigrants to the United States. We created a quantitative index of ethnic distinctiveness of first names and show the consequences of ethnic-sounding names for the occupational achievement of the adult children of European immigrants. We find a consistent tendency for the children of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrants with more American-sounding names to have higher occupational achievement. About one-third of this effect appears to be due to social class differences in name-giving, and the remaining two-thirds to signaling effects of the names themselves. An exception is found for Russian, predominantly Jewish, immigrants, where we find a positive effect of ethnic naming on occupational achievement. The divergent effects of our new measure of cultural assimilation, sometimes hurting and sometimes helping, lend historical empirical support to more recent theories of the advantages of different paths to assimilation. The effects of ethnic first names are also found for a restricted analysis of recognizably ethnic last names, suggesting that immigrants' success depended on being perceived as making an effort to assimilate rather than hiding their origins.

Objective : Korean American Elderly (KAE) have high rates of depression but underuse mental health services. The purpose of this study was to assess the meaning of depression and help seeking among KAE residing in the United States who have clinically significant depressive symptoms. Methods : As a follow up to the Memory and Aging Study of Koreans (MASK; n=1,118), a descriptive epidemiological study which showed that only one in four of KAE with clinically significant depressive symptoms (Patient Health Questionnaire-910) used mental health services, we conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with participants with clinically significant depressive symptoms regarding the meaning of depression and beliefs about help seeking. Ten participants with clinically significant depressive symptoms were approached and 8 were recruited for semi-structured interviews. Results : KAE did not identify themselves as depressed though experiencing clinically significant depressive symptoms. They associated depression with social discrimination, social isolation, and suicide in the extreme circumstance. They attributed depression to not achieving social and material success in America and strained relationships with their children. Participants attempted to self-manage distress without telling others in their social network. However, KAE were willing to consult with mental health professionals if the services were bilingual, affordable, and confidential. Conclusion : KAE with clinically significant depressive symptoms are a vulnerable group with need and desire for linguistically and culturally relevant mental health services who are isolated due to a complex array of psychological and social factors.

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants’ location choices respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, which helps equalize spatial differences in employment outcomes for low-skilled native workers. We leverage the substantial geographic variation in labor demand during the Great Recession to identify migration responses to local shocks and find that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants respond much more strongly than low-skilled natives. Further, Mexican mobility reduced the incidence of local demand shocks on natives, such that those living in metro areas with a substantial Mexican-born population experienced a roughly 50 percent weaker relationship between local shocks and local employment probabilities.

We provide new evidence of one channel through which circular labor migration has long run effects on origin communities: by raising completed human capital of the next generation. We estimate the net effects of migration from Malawi to South African mines using newly digitized Census and administrative data on access to mine jobs, a difference-in-differences strategy and two opposite-signed and plausibly exogenous shocks to the option to migrate. Twenty years after these shocks, human capital is 4.8-6.9% higher among cohorts who were eligible for schooling in communities with the easiest access to migrant jobs.

Genealogy has become a widely popular pursuit, as millions of people now research their family history, trace their forebears, attend family reunions and travel to ancestral home sites. Geographers have much to contribute to the serious study of the family history phenomenon. Land records, maps and even GIS are increasingly used by genealogical investigators. As a cultural practice, it encompasses peoples' emotional attachments to ancestral places and is widely manifest on the ground as personal heritage travel. Family history research also has significant potential to challenge accepted geographical views of migration, ethnicity, socio-economic class and place-based identities. This volume is possibly the first ever book to address the geographical and scholarly aspects of this increasingly popular social phenomenon. It highlights tools and information sources used by geographers and their application to family history research. Furthermore, it examines family history as a socio-cultural practice, including the activities of tourism, archival research and DNA testing.

Shaped by the institutions, ideas, and interests that drive American policymaking, the US health care delivery system is uniquely complex, costly, and unequal. Initially private, it has become an increasingly complex public/private mix, as incremental reforms adopted over many decades have sought to correct market failures to finance and deliver health care services to vulnerable populations, particularly segments of the low-income demographic. While successive reforms have led to better coverage and access over time, they are unlikely to lead to universal access due to their inability to reduce, or even contain, costs over the long run.

In this paper, I measure the effect of gaining dependent coverage on labor market outcomes of young adults. The ACA's expansion provides a natural experiment where I can exploit the exogenous source of variation in insurance coverage brought on by the law to instrument for health insurance status. In other words, the expansion provides a way to study the effects of gaining health insurance without coverage being linked with individual-level characteristics such as income or labor status, which wouldve biased any estimates. This instrumentation allows me to mitigate the endogeneity present between health insurance and labor status. I first measure the causal effect of the ACAs dependent coverage expansion on insurance rates of post-college age young adults using a difference-in-differences (DD) design, where the difference of the changes within affected and unaffected groups provides a causal effect of the expansion. I define treated ages as 23-25, and control ages as 27-29, as they are most similar in their demographic characteristics and labor supply decisions. Then using a two-stage residual inclusion control function method, I instrument for insurance coverage status to find a causal effect of dependent coverage on labor force status, labor supply, and income.

The cross-sectional distribution of log annual earnings growth becomes more negatively skewed during recessions. However, earnings growth is the sum of changes in employment time (weeks of employment within a year) and changes in earnings rate (weekly earnings). Distinguishing between the two sources of variation is important for interpreting the cyclical patterns of earnings growth. We use administrative data from Italy and survey data from the United States to disentangle the role of employment time in shaping the distribution of earnings growth. We find that year-to-year changes in employment time are responsible for almost all of the tail observations (below the 10th and above the 90th percentile), and generate more than four-fifths of the observed cross-sectional variance of earnings growth. Moreover, changes in employment time account for the cyclical properties of the skewness of the earnings growth distribution: the skewness of earnings growth is positively correlated with GDP growth but the correlation disappears when controlling for the skewness of changes in employment time. We show that the cyclicality of aggregate labor market conditions, including the separation rate and the hiring rate, explains the negative skewness of earnings growth during recessions.