We exploit regional variations in house price fluctuations in the United States during the early to mid-2000s to study the impact of the housing boom on young Americans' choices related to home ownership, household formation, and fertility. We also introduce a novel instrument for changes in house prices based on the predetermined industrial structure of the local economy. We find that in MSAs which experienced large increase in house prices between 2001 and 2006, the youngest households were substantially less likely to purchase residential property, to start a family, and to have a child, both in 2006 and in 2011.

Objectives: State Medicaid programs are under increasing pressure to contain pharmaceutical spending. Many states have attempted to limit spending through greater Medicaid managed care penetration, which rose nationally from 54.5% in 1999 to 74.9% in 2011. It is not clear how this expansion has affected beneficiaries with serious mental illness (SMI)-a vulnerable population that often has their drug spending "carved out" from their managed care benefit. We sought to assess the association between managed care penetration and pharmaceutical spending on drugs for SMIs in these states. Study Design: Retrospective cohort study. Methods: State-year observations were constructed to study the relationship between managed care penetration and pharmaceutical spending on drugs for SMIs over the period 1999 to 2011. We analyzed the relationship using both cross-sectional and panel-data methods. Results: Our cross-sectional analyses suggested that carve-out states with greater managed care penetration spend significantly less per enrollee on pharmaceuticals for the treatment of mental disorders: our panel data analyses did not generate statistically meaningful results. Conclusions: Future studies should address whether any effects of managed care on mental health prescription utilization and spending reflect improved care coordination or worsening access to valuable care for the population with SMI.

This report examines trends in linguistic status — Spanish monolingual, English monolingual, or bilingual — among Latinos between 1980 and 2014 using data from the U.S. Census Bureau.1 It explores trends in Latino linguistic status by sex, age, nativity, and among the five largest Latino national subgroups. This report also examines the relation between linguistic status and the following outcomes: educational attainment, median yearly income, employment status, usual hours worked, and poverty status...

Housing Production is Important From 2010 to 2015, there were 6 times as many new jobs and people as new housing units in the Bay Area, and home prices rose by 54% over this period. In the most recent year – 2015 – little has changed – 6 jobs and 4 new people were gained for every new housing unit, while home prices rose faster than in previous years1. To accommodate this growth, cities can change local policies to encourage housing production. In consultation with many developers, city planners, politicians, and advocacy groups, I created two models that summarize the relative impact different local policy measures have on housing production. I then weigh the models’ results against potential equity, administrative, and political concerns. The first model describes the effects on the odds that a given project will be built, while the second examines the cumulative impact on an . . .

This article reviews and reflects on the use of the geographic information system (GIS) as a tool, or geographic information science (GIScience) as a research methodology, and associated techniques of analysis in an empirical study-in-progress on the law and history of early twentieth century British Hong Kong. The article begins by introducing the study and its objectives, as well as the rationale for adopting GIS/GIScience as one of its research methodologies. It then highlights the preliminary findings of the current project and compares them with those of earlier research on the legal history of early twentieth century Beijing using GIS. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in adopting such a digital tool and methodology in historical research. It concludes by reflecting on what GIS can help scholars understand about the social history of law in Hong Kong, beyond what is already known, and how specialists in law, history, and geography can collaborate in a digital law and history project involving the use of GIS. This article also gives an overview of the use of GIS in conducting empirical research in the humanities (including but not limited to history and legal history research) and points to digital sources and web sites useful to researchers who may need tools and data to launch a GIS study in law and history.

This study combines the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances data and the Fiscal Analyzer, a highly detailed life-cycle consumption-smoothing program, to a) measure ultimate economic inequality inequality in lifetime spending power within cohorts, b) assess fiscal progressivity within cohorts, c) calculate marginal remaining lifetime net tax rates, taking into account all major federal and state tax and transfer policies, d) evaluate the ability of current income to correctly classify households as rich, middle class, and poor, e) determine whether current-year average net tax rates accurately capture actual fiscal progressivity, and f) determine whether current-year marginal tax rates on labor supply accurately capture actual remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates. We find far less inequality in spending power than in wealth or labor earnings due to the fiscal systems high degree of progressivity. But U.S. fiscal redistribution generally comes at a price of very high work disincentives for households regardless of age and resource class. There is, however, very substantial dispersion in marginal net tax rates, which seems hard to reconcile with standard norms of optimal taxation. We also find that current income is a very poor proxy for remaining lifetime resources and that current-year net tax rates can provide a highly distorted picture of true fiscal progressivity and work disincentives.

Did rising immigration levels change racial and ethnic exogamy patterns for young adults in the United States? Adding local demographics to Qian and Lichters national results, the authors examine the relationship between the sizes of the local immigrant populations in urban and rural areas and U.S.-born individuals exogamy patterns in heterosexual unions, controlling for the areas racial compositions. Using 2000 census race, ethnicity, and nativity data and log-linear models, the authors test hypotheses about the relationship between high levels of immigration from Asia and Latin America and endogamy rates for U.S.-born Latino/as and Asians. They find that U.S.-born Latino/as and Asians are not consistently more endogamous in high-immigrant areas once population composition differences across local areas are controlled. Surprisingly, U.S.-born Blacks and Native Americans are significantly less endogamous in areas with more immigrants.

In the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, a good deal of commentary held that President Obamas reelection resulted from the countrys changing demography and his overwhelming support among nonwhite voters residing in the countrys urban spaces. Less discussed was the fact that Republican Mitt Romney also carried many urbanized states with ethnically and racially diverse populations and that President Obama would not have been reelected without securing the Electoral Votes of a number of rural states with large white populations. In this paper, we argue that the combination of educated populations and a socio-cultural construct we call northernness allow us to differentiate which urban and diverse states and which white and rural states are Democratic and Republican voting in contemporary presidential elections.

In recent years public storm shelters have come under a lot of scrutiny, and many have come to the conclusion they do more harm than good. However, since not all residents have access to suitable shelter, and safety should be a basic right, it is in the interest of municipalities to look into all possible sheltering options. This idea motivates this planning study to determine the cost and benefit of a public storm shelter network in the city of Norman, Oklahoma.

Renters today are facing the most serious affordability crisis in U.S. history, particularly low- and middle-income earners. In 2014, nearly half of all renters were paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing, including more than 26 percent of renters who devoted over half of their incomes to this necessity.1 With housing demanding so much of their budgets, families have little left for other essentials like food, transportation and health care. When unexpected expenses come up, renters often face eviction, making it difficult to remain in one residence for a long period. In this paper we propose a master lease program that can offer low-income renting families greater housing stability while reducing their costs and helping them build savings. Under this approach, a nonprofit or mission-driven organization would gain long-term access to units in existing buildings through a master lease arrangement a multiyear, fixed-price contract between the owner and nonprofit for control over some or all the units in a building modeled on standard commercial leases. There would be multiple benefits from this arrangement: The master lease would protect the owner against vacancy risk and turnover costs. In exchange for the annuitized cash flow paid out by the nonprofit, the master lease would be priced below market, allowing the nonprofit to price individual units affordably. Because the nonprofits lease would run as long as a decade with known escalations, tenantscould also be offered long-term, multiyear leases with protections against rent shocks. This lease structure would continue to provide tenants the flexibility of renting but also allow them the kind of cost control that is one of the benefits associated with long-term, fixed-rate mortgages. At a time when federal funds for rental assistance programs are disappearing, this unsubsidized program could provide much needed rental housing to low-income families. To the extent that some discounts are needed to make units affordable to tenants, the nonprofit could cross-subsidize by pricing some units at market rates. We believe the model could be particularly impactful for small multifamily properties and in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification that would displace long-time residents. An important element of the model is a savings component woven into the tenants monthly lease payments. A small amount each month we propose $25 would be allocated to a custodial savings account in the tenants name. The goal is to provide a liquid financial cushion that could be called on in the event of unanticipated expenses car problems, medical bills, etc. and would keep the family from having to choose between meeting crisis expenses or failing to pay rent and therefore risk eviction. With the addition of a simple match program, at $25 per month and without any withdrawals, a family would have $600 in reserve after one year, equal to the median liquid savings among low- and moderate-income households.

While the strategy in previous chapter is theoretically superior to existing ones due to its independence of utility measures and privacy models, and its privacy guarantee under publicly-known algorithms, it incurs a high computational complexity. In this chapter, we study an efficient strategy for diversity preserving data publishing with publicly known algorithms (algorithms as side-channel). Our main observation is that a high computational complexity is usually incurred when an algorithm conflates the processes of privacy preservation and utility optimization. We then propose a novel privacy streamliner approach to decouple those two processes for improving algorithm efficiency. More specifically, we first identify a set of potential privacy-preserving solutions satisfying that an adversarys knowledge about this set itself will not help him/her to violate the privacy property; we can then optimize utility within this set without worrying about privacy breaches since such an optimization is now simulatable by adversaries. To make our approach more concrete, we study it in the context of micro-data release with publicly known generalization algorithms. The analysis and experiments both confirm our algorithms to be more efficient than existing solutions.

During the past six years, Nevada's economy has recovered. Nevertheless, there has been little research examining how different groups of workers fared during the recovery period. This study fills this gap by analyzing labor-market conditions for Latinos throughout the states economic recovery.

Dominant narratives of migrant resistance focus on the massive protests of 2006, but migrant protest was significant well before this landmark event. Drawing on an original database of 222 migrant protest events, this paper traces the development of migrant resistance in California between 1990 and 2010. We argue that migrant protest may be understood as political ‘acts of citizenship’, which vary as they respond to specific vulnerabilities and political attachments. While a non-trivial minority of protests exhibited a global politics, oriented towards migrants’ home countries or other places outside of the USA, the overwhelming majority of protests may be understood as inclusion politics, which sought to counter migrant precarity by promoting the integration and fair treatment of migrants within the USA. Within this broad emphasis on inclusion, however, migrant protest in California alternated between a work politics focused on issues such as wages and unionization, a protection politics focused on public services and goods, and an immigration politics centered on issues of legalization and law enforcement. The latter became increasingly prevalent over time, and would come to define the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Taken as a whole, the evidence affirms that migrants have significant capacity for developing collective agency and resistance.

In my first chapter, I consider the long-term effects of World War II on women. WWII drew women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and, often, into atypical occupations. After the war, they returned home where they became the mothers of the baby boom generation. Their daughters changed the female labor force by pursuing higher education and careers. My research analyzes whether cultural change during World War II helped to produce this break with the past. I use data on war manufacturing infrastructure and armed forces mobilization rates to predict whether the daughters were affected by the war’s impact on their mothers. I also construct a measure of predicted war plants using pre-war infrastructure to remove the possibility of an endogenous decision to locate plants where women were particularly amenable to employment. My analysis shows that these war-related variables increased baby boomer women’s education, although not their labor force participation. The primary impact was on their attainment of a college degree. The Quiet Revolution in women’s employment, careers and education was therefore impacted greatly by their mothers’ experiences before their daughters were born. My second chapter also considers intergenerational impacts on women’s careers, though in a more contemporary context. This chapter considers the effect of a stay-at-home mother on her daughter’s career choice, specifically her tendency to choose her father’s career. I provide some descriptive statistics of women who choose to be homemakers and those . . .

This dissertation addresses the effects of constraints in education, particularly in the transition from completing education to entering the labor market. Chapter 1 examines the effect of merit aid scholarship programs and student loans on labor market outcomes after graduation. Qualifying for merit aid programs leads to a dramatic decrease in student loans as well as a decrease in salary income one year after graduation. Using merit aid eligibility as an instrument for loans, I find that graduates with higher loans have higher income after graduation, in sufficient magnitudes to offset the amount of their loans within two to three years of graduation. Examining the heterogeneity of the results with respect to ability and family income suggests that these results are generated by short term credit constraints after graduation. Chapter 2 explores the long run impacts of child labor by studying changes in minimum working age laws and compulsory schooling . . .

This dissertation combines three studies in anthropometric history, a field of economic history that uses measurements of the human body to make inference about the standard of living in historical contexts. Chapter 1 of this dissertation places the three studies into the context of this field, which it also surveys very briefly as it relates to the present research. Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation study the Antebellum Puzzle, a simultaneous decline in average stature and rise in GDP per capita—coupled with lower average stature in richer regions—in the antebellum United States. Chapter 2 addresses recent suggestions that the Antebellum Puzzle may be an artifact of sample-selection bias, stemming from a reliance on data from military volunteers to construct height samples. This chapter provides the first empirical test of this argument by using a two-step semi-parametric sample-selection model to estimate trends and patterns in average stature in the antebellum United States that are corrected for selection into military service on the basis of both observable and unobservable characteristics. I find that the Antebellum Puzzle is robust to these corrections, and therefore is not an artifact of sample-selection bias. This result, however, does not imply that sample-selection bias can be disregarded in studies of historical heights. On the contrary, the degree of sample-selection bias is shown to vary over birth cohorts and across regions and sectors, and accounting for sample selection meaningfully and statistically significantly alters . . .

We demonstrate that machine learning enables the capability to infer an individual's propensity to vote from their past actions and attributes. This is useful for microtargeting voter outreach, voter education and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns. Political scientists developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for estimating election outcomes since the late 1940s. Two prior studies similarly used machine learning to predict individual future voting behavior. We built a machine learning environment using TensorFlow, obtained voting data from 2004 to 2018, and then ran three experiments. We show positive results with a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.39.

This chapter examines the position of African American men in the labor market prior to the start of the Great Recession. In order to provide a multidimensional picture of the average African American male worker, descriptive statistics will be provided, which includes the occupations in which most African American men were employed, this demographic groups average earnings, their average unemployment rate and labor force participation rate, and trend analyses for these statistics. Examination of the position of African American men in the workforce begins with the four- to five-year period that preceded the Great Recession. This chapter also includes a brief look at the role of the relatively higher incarceration rate of African American men in their labor market position.

The growing recognition that educational attainment is one of the strongest preventive factors for adult health and longevity has fueled an interest in educational attainment as a population health strategy. However, less attention has been given to identifying social, economic, and behavioral resources that may moderate the health and longevity benefits of education. We draw on theories of resource substitution and multiplication to examine the extent to which the educationmortality association is contingent on other resources (marriage, employment, income, healthy lifestyles). We use data on adults aged 3084 in the 19972006 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and estimate discrete-time event history models stratified by gender (N = 146,558; deaths = 10,399). We find that the mortality benefits of education are generally largest for adultsespecially womenwho have other resources such as employment and marriage, supporting the theory of resource multiplication. Nonetheless, our results also imply that other resources can potentially attenuate the mortality disadvantages (advantages) associated with low (high) levels of education. The findings suggest that efforts to improve population health and longevity by raising education levels should be augmented with strategies that assure widespread access to social, economic, and behavioral resources.

Medicaid reimburses healthcare providers for services at a lower rate than any other type of insurance coverage. To account for the burden of treating Medicaid patients, providers claim that they must cost-shift by raising the rates of individuals covered by private insurance. Previous investigations of cost-shifting has produced mixed results. In this paper, I exploit a disabled Medicaid expansion where crowd-out was complete to investigate cost-shifting. I find that hospitals reduce the charge rates of the privately insured. Given that Medicaid is expanding in several states under the Affordable Care Act, these results may alleviate cost-shifting concerns of the reform.