We apply the synthetic control method to re-examine the wage and employment effect of the Mariel Boatlift, a large inflow of Cuban refugees to Miami in 1980. This method improves on previous studies by choosing a control group for Miami so as to best match its labor market features in the eight years before the Boatlift. Given the presence of significant measurement error for average city wages we emphasize the importance of using the May-ORG CPS sample rather than the March-CPS. The first includes a more reliable measure of weekly wages, has larger sample size and smaller measurement error. Analyzing wages and unemployment rates we find no significant departure between Miami and its control between 1980 and 1983. Using the March-CPS data, however, one could find negative wage effects in small subsamples after 1979 as pointed out in George Borjas (2015a). However those estimates are imprecise and very sensitive to the choice of sample and of the outcome variable.

This study integrates research in the civic community tradition and structuralist and individualist perspectives on poverty to assess the relationship between religious-based civic community structures and family poverty in the United States. Using multilevel analyses of 2006–2008 American Community Survey, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, and 2000 Religious Congregations and Membership Survey data, results demonstrate that the presence of Mainline Protestant and Catholics adherents within communities–measured as the percentage of a community’s population comprised of Mainline Protestant and Catholic adherents–is significantly and negatively associated with family poverty risks, net of other family and community factors. That is, in communities with a greater presence of Mainline Protestants and Catholics, there were also lower risks of families being in poverty. These findings suggest the importance of the ecology of religion within communities in understanding poverty outcomes for families.

본 연구에서는 이주 노동자의 증가가 지역 노동시장에 미치는 역할이 이주 노동자의 기술 수준에 따라 어떻게 다르게 나타나는지를 분석한다. 이주 노동자의 소비가 노동 수요에 미치는 영향을 반영하기 위하여 실증 분석에서는 서비스 산업 에 초점을 맞추고자 한다. 1990년과 2000년 사이의 미국 총인구 조사 자료와 도구 변수를 이용하여 이민자의 증가가 노동 시장에 미치는 영향을 추정한 결과, 숙련 이주 노동자의 증가는 서비스 산업의 임금 변화 없이 고용을 증가시키는 반면, 비 숙련 이주 노동자의 증가는 균형임금의 소폭 감소하는 효과를 유발하는 것으로 나 타난다. 이 결과는 이주 노동자의 증가가 노동시장에서의 수요와 공급을 동시에 증 가시키며 이민자의 증가에 따른 소비효과는 고학력 이민자에게서 보다 크게 나타남 을 의미하는 것으로 해석할 수 있다.

This paper examines how the value of health insurance affects labor supply, exploiting a quasi-experimental change in health insurance provision - i.e., the Affordable Care Act (ACA) dependent coverage mandate implemented in 2010. Using difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and regression kink designs, I find no evidence of the labor market impact of the ACA dependent coverage mandate despite its substantial impact on insurance coverage for young adults. I also show that the "aging-out-at-26" condition in eligibility leads to low valuation of insurance and in turn no change in the labor supply of young adults.

Although gun violence is one of the most widely discussed issues in American politics, research funding freezes have hindered the development of public health strategies for its prevention. A substantial majority (approximately two-thirds) of annual gun deaths in the United States are suicides, but most political efforts to prevent gun violence focus on homicide. In this study, I evaluated the effectiveness of handgun permit-to- purchase (PTP) laws at preventing firearm suicide. PTP requirements mandate that all potential handgun purchasers at certified sellers must present a permit or license issued by the state. I used a county-level Poisson model controlling for several relevant covariates to estimate the relative risk of firearm suicide one through 35 years after the passage of a state-level PTP requirement. I also tested the popular theory that prevented firearm suicides will manifest as suicides by other means by running the same model with non-firearm suicide as the dependent variable. I found that time since PTP passage was significantly associated with lower firearm suicide rates and that the relative risk by year-since-passage exhibited a pattern that was consistent with my theoretical expectations. Counterintuitively, I also found that PTP requirements had a significant protective effect against non-firearm suicide, a result that suggests that my analysis was subject to unaccounted-for confounding. I ran several sensitivity analyses, which were able substantially clarify the effect of PTP requirements on firearm suicide from the theoretically implausible effect on suicide by all other means I had identified. This study contributes relatively robust evidence to the growing body of literature supporting gun control as a means of suicide prevention, but it also underscores the need for the development of more rigorous data sources and methodologies in the field of gun violence prevention research.

This Article explores the public policy benefits associated with increased access to energy consumption data as well as the legal and institutional barriers that currently prevent such access. As state and local governments as well as electricity users attempt to improve the efficiency of their buildings, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and realize the promises of improved demand side management of energy resources, the need for electricity and other energy-related data becomes even more pressing. But the current law that balances making energy consumption data available against any privacy or confidentiality interests in the data is underdeveloped. Thus, this Article draws on the more sophisticated legal frameworks governing health care, education, and environmental emissions data that balance the public policy needs for data evaluation with countervailing interests. A review of the law in these fields shows that the privacy and confidentiality interests in energy consumption data may be overstated and, in any event, can be adequately addressed in most instances through aggregating the data, using historic rather than current data, or through contracts and other agreements to ensure security where access to individualized data is needed.

The authors analyze American Time Use Survey data to examine patterns in domestic work among at-home and breadwinner parents to gauge how time availability, relative earnings, and gender shape time use in couples with extreme differences in earnings and work hours. They find that involvement in female-typed housework is an important driver of overall housework time. It is counternormative housework behavior by at-home fathers that shapes conclusions about how time availability, relative resources, and gender influence parents' housework. Although time availability appears to shape child care in comparable ways across parents, mothers are more engaged in child care than similarly situated fathers. Overall, comparisons point to the importance of distinguishing among gender-normative housework tasks and accounting for differences in engagement on work and nonwork days. The results provide a basis for assessing the social significance of growing numbers of parents in workfamily roles that are not gender normative.

Despite numerous changes in womens employment in the latter half of the twentieth century, womens employment continues to be uneven and stalled. Drawing from data on womens weekly work hours in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we identify significant inequality in womens labor force experiences across adulthood. We find two pathways of stable full-time work for women, three pathways of part-time employment, and a pathway of unpaid labor. A majority of women follow one of the two full-time work pathways, while fewer than 10 % follow a pathway of unpaid labor. Our findings provide evidence of the lasting influence of workfamily conflict and early socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages on womens work pathways. Indeed, race, poverty, educational attainment, and early family characteristics significantly shaped womens work careers. Workfamily opportunities and constraints also were related to womens work hours, as were a womans gendered beliefs and expectations. We conclude that womens employment pathways are a product of both their resources and changing social environment as well as individual agency. Significantly, we point to social stratification, gender ideologies, and workfamily constraints, all working in concert, as key explanations for how women are tracked onto work pathways from an early age.

We present a hedonic framework to estimate US households’ preferences over local climates, using detailed weather and 2000 Census data. We find that Americans favor a daily average temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, that they will pay more on the margin to avoid excess heat than cold, and that damages increase less than linearly over extreme cold. These preferences vary by location due to sorting or adaptation. Changes in climate amenities under business-as-usual predictions imply annual welfare losses of 1%–4% of income by 2100, holding technology and preferences constant.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of this Variable Length Scale (VLS) model in terms of both predictions and local marginal analyses, we employ selected simulations to compare VLS with Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), which is currently the most popular method for such spatial modeling. In addition, we employ the classical Boston Housing data to compare VLS not only with GWR but also with other well-known spatial regression models that have been applied to this same data. Our main results are to show that VLS not only compares favorably with spatial regression at the aggregate level but is also far more accurate than GWR at the local level.

Due to wide-ranging demographic shifts over the last forty years, the United States has experienced increasing ethnic and racial diversity at the national level. This diversity, however, has not been expressed evenly across metropolitan areas and their neighborhoods: certain places have remained racially homogeneous while others are now comprised of multiple groups. This paper explores the relationship between national level diversity and neighborhood level diversity by (1) describing general patterns in the geographic distribution of segregated and diverse neighborhoods observed in 2000 and (2) investigating how this distribution of neighborhoods moderated neighborhood change between 2000 and 2010. Census race and ethnicity counts are used to classify a database of Census tracts in metropolitan areas using a thirteen-part typology measuring diversity and most prevalent race or ethnicity. The geographic distribution of tracts within this typology is assessed using a measure of relative centrality and the classification of adjacent tracts. A multinomial logit model is used to estimate the relationship between different neighborhood spatial contexts and neighborhood compositional change within the typology. Findings demonstrate support for traditional theories of segregation, including spatial assimilation and place stratification, but with considerable complexity: less central tracts have become increasingly diverse but elements of White flight and neighborhood succession to suburbs remain.

In the recent decades aggregate labor productivity in the U.S. became counter- cyclical (labor productivity puzzle). At the same time the U.S. experienced dramatic changes in the structure of households due to increased female labor force partici- pation. I show that changes in the household structure and corresponding changes in labor supply behavior can explain the labor productivity puzzle. I build a model with heterogeneous one- and two-earner households and aggregate technology shocks and calibrate it to the current U.S. data. I impose the household structure change in the model and show that the behavior of labor productivity changes from procyclical to countercyclical, as in the U.S. I also show that individual labor supply volatility depends on the role of the earner in the household. Increase in the proportion of multiple-earner households leads to increase in aggregate labor supply volatility.

We use newly available micro-data from the 1911 to 1941 Canadian Censuses to investigate the impact of immigration on the Canadian earnings distribution in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that Canadian inequality rose sharply in the inter-war years, particularly in the 1920s, coinciding with two of the largest immigration decades in Canadian history. We find that immigration was not the main force driving changes in the earnings distribution. This results from a combination of self-selection by immigrants, occupational adjustments after arrival, and general equilibrium adjustments in the economy.

We estimate rates of absolute income mobility the fraction of children who earn more than their parents by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust to the choice of price deflator, the definition of income, and accounting for taxes and transfers. In counterfactual simulations, we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the American Dream of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.

We examine how the entry of gig-economy platforms influences local entrepreneurial activity. On the one hand, such platforms may reduce entrepreneurial activity by offering stable employment for the un- and under-employed. On the other hand, such platforms may enable entrepreneurial activity by offering work flexibility that allows the entrepreneur to re-deploy resources strategically in order to pursue the nascent venture. To resolve this tension, we examine the entry of the ride-sharing platform Uber X into local areas. We use two measures of entrepreneurial activity: crowdfunding campaign launches at Kickstarter, the world’s largest reward-based crowdfunding platform, and levels of self-employment from the Current Population survey. Results indicate a negative and significant relationship between platform entry and both measures of entrepreneurial activity. Importantly, the effect manifests primarily amongst unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns and unincorporated entrepreneurial ventures, suggesting that gig-economy platforms predominantly reduce lower quality entrepreneurial activity, seemingly by offering viable employment for the un- and under-employed. These relationships are corroborated with a first-hand survey conducted with gig-economy service providers.

Much of our knowledge of the existing employment situation of people with disabilities comes from analyses of national survey data. These surveys, conducted to provide federal and state governments with the information they need to manage and evaluate their programs and policies, among other reasons, also provide the primary source of statistics on the entire population. They contain a wealth of information . . .

Land use policies enforced by authorities have a great impact on the urban morphology and demographic change. Federal and local governments make policies to pursue economic gain while these policies influence population dynamics by generating racial segregations and urban shrinkage. For a downtown area and its adjacent neighborhood in a small shrinking post-industrial city, such as Binghamton, New York, it experiences a dynamic change in urban policies, such as urban renewal and revitalization. By integrating demographic data and GIS data for the downtown Binghamton, this study analyzes the population and land use - land cover change at the census block level over the past five decades. The association between these changes was analyzed to illustrate a comprehensive understanding of how the population dynamics influence the land use policy and land cover appearances or vice versa. Finally, this research shares insight in how the urban development pattern evolves in a small Post-Industrial shrinking city in the “Rust Belt” of the United States.

This dissertation tackles three applications of economic models to understand urban transportation networks. The first chapter considers the relationship between equity and the transportation system in urban environments where welfare is affected by a host of factors including labor and housing markets as well as local amenities. I examine the effect of transportation policies directed at reducing travel times for commuting on inequality in urban labor markets and consider the choice of city of residence by workers with and without a college degree, using differences in outcomes across these two groups to characterize economic inequality. Behavioral and supply parameters are estimated in a sorting model that controls for the effect on location decisions vis-à-vis wages, rents and amenities. Based on these estimates, policy simulations consider the effect of public transit expansion to lower travel times to work financed by a head tax, congestion pricing or fare increase. Overall the paper documents limited benefits to workers without a college education from the set of proposed policies relative to those with a degree. The second chapter presents joint work which develops a theoretical framework for examining the equilibrium behavior of networks with overlapping externalities which generalizes a series of equilibrium sorting models in housing and social interaction literatures. We present a framework that draws on algorithmic game theory to produce theorems of existence, uniqueness and identification of demand parameters which highlight the importance of the interconnectedness of the network for defining equilibrium outcomes. We end with a series of applications of this framework to empirical examples. The third chapter, also joint work, examines a program that allows solo-drivers to enter carpool lanes upon a payment of a toll, providing the first estimates of commuters’ value of urgency, defined as a discrete willingness-to-pay to avoid failing on-time arrival. Earlier theoretical models that ignore preferences for urgency fail to fit the data and explain important empirical regularities. While the value of time and value of reliability have been commonly used for infrastructure project evaluation, our results show that the value of urgency is the critical parameter for evaluation of congestible infrastructure projects where pricing is possible.

The rise in female employment over the twentieth century radically changed the U.S. economy and the role of women in society. Census and Current Population Survey time-series data show a trend break for the employment of mothers beginning in the mid-1970s, but not for women without children. In the first systematic study of the 1975 introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), I show that this program led to a 6-percent rise in the employment of mothers and can help explain why the U.S. has a high fraction of working mothers despite having little childcare subsidies or maternity leave policies.