This study implements a difference-in-differences and multinomial logistic regression to quantify the effects of the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) Advanced Primary Care Practice (APCP) demonstration on the self-reported general health of 367 U.S. counties across 47 states. Using the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS), no statistically significant results were obtained when estimating the models for the general population. However, stratifying the data into three subsamples the elderly, people living in high poverty areas, and the elderly living in high poverty areas reveals statistically significant effects, indicating the importance of FQHCs as a source of medical care for the elderly and those living in communities of high poverty.

This dissertation studies the pricing of liquidity and illiquid assets. For this thesis, liquidity will generally refer to the ease with which an asset can be traded. The first chapter investigates the role of the investment horizon in the impact of illiquidity on stock prices. We obtain a clientele effect where short-term investors choose not to invest in the least liquid assets, as their expected returns are not sufficient to cover expected transaction costs. The least liquid assets are held by less liquidity-sensitive long-term investors. This feature allows us to better explain the cross-section of U.S. stock returns than a single-horizon model. The second chapter studies the pricing of house-specific risk for U.S. residential real estate. We show that house-specific risk is priced and we show that the extent to which it is priced increases with a proxy for the degree of underdiversification. The third chapter studies the impact of time-variation in liquidity on stock prices. It distinguishes between an overall deterioration in liquidity and a situation where only the least liquid assets become even less liquid. The results show that only the risk of an overall deterioration in liquidity is relevant for U.S. stock prices.

Local governments in the United States are required to offer free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. Indigent defendants represented by private attorneys working as assigned counsel fare worse than defendants represented by public defenders or retained attorneys, but the reasons for the observed differences in case outcomes are not well understood. We shed new light on the causes of these disparities by taking advantage of detailed court records from one large jurisdiction in Texas that allow us to track lawyers across different cases. In contrast to the existing literature, we find that the majority of the disparity in outcomes is due to within-attorney differences across cases in which they are assigned and retained; the selection of low-quality attorneys into assigned counsel can explain at most 25% of the gap in outcomes for low-income defendants. A fee structure for assigned counsel that incentivizes obtaining quick pleas from clients likely contributes to moral hazard. We also present evidence that endogenous matching of defendants and attorneys plays some role in determining case outcomes, although defendants' revealed preference for male attorneys with offices close to their places of residence tends to work against them in court.

We investigate the role of social influence in the commute to work. Using instruments to address the endogeneity of commute decisions and a dataset of U.S. military commuters on 100 military bases over the period 2006–2013, we show that workplace peers positively influence one another's decisions to drive alone to work and carpool to work. All else equal, an increase in the fraction of peers who drive alone of 10 percentage points increases the probability of driving alone by 6.05 percentage points. An increase in the fraction of peers who carpool of 10 percentage points increases the probability of carpooling by 5.14 percentage points. To examine whether conventional measures of social status and seniority predict who exerts the strongest influence on others, we disaggregate the dataset into subgroups and identify which subgroups have the greatest influence and which are most susceptible to influence. Results show that in commute decisions, intra-group influence can be more important than inter-group influence. This suggests that workplace travel interventions that seek to shift employees away from driving alone or toward carpooling may be most effective if communicated by one's own peer group.

Has rising trade integration between the U.S. and China contributed to the polarization of U.S. politics? Analyzing outcomes from the 2002 and 2010 congressional elections, we detect an ideological realignment that is centered in trade-exposed local labor markets and that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising trade with China and classifying legislator ideologies by their congressional voting record, we find strong evidence that congressional districts exposed to larger increases in import competition disproportionately removed moderate representatives from office in the 2000s. Trade-exposed districts initially in Republican hands become substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican, while trade-exposed districts initially in Democratic hands become more likely to elect either a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Polarization is also evident when breaking down districts by race: trade-exposed locations with a majority white population are disproportionately likely to replace moderate legislators with conservative Republicans, whereas locations with a majority non-white population tend to replace moderates with liberal Democrats. We further contrast the electoral impacts of trade exposure with shocks associated with generalized changes in labor demand and with the post-2006 U.S. housing market collapse.

This paper focuses on labor market outcomes of young college graduates in the US, analyzing the nexus between migration, overeducation, and economic conditions. A series of overeducation probit models are estimated, using data from the March Supplements of the Current Population Survey, 20002014. We find that labor migrants are less prone to being overeducated as unemployment rates increase. For stayers, in contrast, we find a positive link between overeducation propensities and unemployment rates. As a result of this response divergence, overeducation probabilities of stayers exceed those of movers during times of medium to high unemployment rates. The results are robust to various definitions of overeducation and various sample restrictions.

Since 2000, increased gentrification in an expanding section of cities and neighborhoods has renewed interest from policymakers, researchers, and the public in the causes of gentrification. The identification of causal factors can help inform analyses of welfare, policy responses, and forecasts of future neighborhood change. We highlight some features of recent gentrification that popular understandings often do not emphasize, and we review progress on identifying some causal factors. A complete account of the relative contribution of many factors, however, is still elusive. We suggest questions and opportunities for future research.

In this study we provide evidence that historical migration flows impact present-day global health differences. The underlying theory is based on three physiological facts. First, vitamin D deficiency is directly associated with increased risk of premature death. Second, the ability of humans to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight (i.e., ultraviolet radiation, UV-R) declines with the level of skin pigmentation. Third, the level of human skin pigmentation is the result of an evolutionary compromise between the costs of pigmentation (e.g., higher risk of vitamin D deficiency) and its benefits (e.g., lower risk of skin cancer); people living in high UV-R regions, as a result, became more intensely pigmented. Accordingly, when individuals indigenous to high UV-R regions migrate to low UV-R regions the risk of vitamin D deficiency rises markedly, which should in turn impact average health in the recipient region. We develop an empirical measure that allows us to explore the aggregate consequences of local populations’ differential risk of vitamin D deficiency, as caused by historical migration flows. Our proposed measure of risk of vitamin D deficiency holds strong explanatory power vis-à-vis health outcomes in a world sample as well as across US states.

Textile mills played a key role in the economic and social structure of Carolinas’ towns for over one hundred years. Census data on thousands of individuals over a century of time paint a changing picture regarding the mill workers’ gender, age, marital status, education and race. The paper provides a predictive model to estimate the likelihood a Carolinas worker would be in the textiles industry. Last, the paper examines the question of what opened access for blacks, especially black females, into the textiles industry during the 1970s and 1980s. .

During the period 1850-1900, the United States experienced a rapid process of industrialization. In this paper, I test for its effect on fertility and human capital. Using aerial distance from potential transportation routes as an instrument for industrialization, I find that the share of workers employed in manufacturing in a particular county had a significant negative effect on the ratio of children to adults in that county, and a significant positive effect on the proportion of literate adult males. The effect is robust to alternative specifications and measures of industrialization, and it is not a result of immigration. A heterogeneity analysis suggests that the effect was larger in counties that were more industrialized in 1850, leading to a divergence between them and less developed counties.

This paper examines the spatial relationship among slave prices, escape, and slave owners property rights using the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a natural experiment. The act reinforced slave owners property rights, but its effect diminished with distance to the North. Estimates suggest that prices in Northern slave states increased by up to 35 percent relative to Southern states because of the act. The papers findings are robust to changes in sample restrictions, spatial composition effects, and placebo tests on the acts implementation date. The contention that the act had an effect on escape risk is supported by a reduction in rewards offered and the frequency of advertisements for runaways observed in newspaper advertisements from the time.

In the United States, total government spending, and especially government social spending, has increased greatly over the last 50 years. What effect this has had on economic growth is a subject of intense debate among politicians, policymakers, and economists. However, there has been less attention paid to the distributional effects of government spending even though economic inequality has grown greatly over the last generation and much social spending is at least indirectly intended to reduce inequality. The effects of government social spending in the United States on growth in family income at deciles of the income distribution were estimated. The results suggested that social spending but not non-social spending was likely to increase growth in family income per capita measured over 10-year intervals. The largest effects of social spending were for deciles below the median income. At no point in the distribution does social spending have a negative effect.

Freshmen at baccalaureate-granting institutions cite being able to secure a more attractive job and earn a higher income among the most important factors that influenced their decision to pursue a college or university education. Indeed, higher education has been cast as a reliable on-ramp to the American Dream, a mechanism for reducing income inequality, and a key to enhancing economic competitiveness and growth of states and the nation. These benefits have been emphasized by a chorus of individuals calling for dramatically increasing college degree attainment levels in the United States (U.S.). Yet to what extent and how consistently has higher education delivered these trumpeted outcomes for individuals, states, and the nation? U.S. Census American Community Survey microdata and typical education requirements of occupations published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics were utilized to quantitatively analyze employment outcomes of college graduates. A special focus was placed on the incidence of malemployment (the phenomenon of college graduates working in occupations that do not require a college degree), relationships between undergraduate degree fields and labor market outcomes, and variations across states in the employment outcomes of college graduates. The benefits of higher education for individuals and states were found to be highly uneven. Analyses revealed that approximately 31% of adults in the labor force with a bachelor’s degree or higher are malemployed, a rate that varies by undergraduate degree field, educational attainment, race/ethnicity, and age. College earnings premiums generally are far lower for malemployed individuals than for graduates who have secured college-level occupations, and they vary dramatically by undergraduate degree field and state. Myths about higher education and the labor market were dispelled, such as the notion that malemployment affects only recent graduates and that there generally is an insufficient supply of STEM graduates. The principal propositions of the national attainment agenda were evaluated in light of the study’s findings, and a new framework for that agenda was . . .

There is concern that licensure requirements impede mobility of licensed professionals to areas of high demand. Nursing has not been immune to this criticism, especially in the context of perceived nurse shortages and large expected future demand. The Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) was introduced to solve this problem by permitting registered nurses to practice across state lines without obtaining additional licensure. We exploit the staggered adoption of the NLC to examine whether a reduction in licensure-induced barriers alters the nurse labor market. Using data on over 1.8 million nurses and other health care workers we find no evidence that the labor supply or mobility of nurses increases following the adoption of the NLC, even among the residents of counties bordering other NLC states who are potentially most affected by the NLC. This suggests that nationalizing occupational licensing will not substantially reduce labor market frictions.

The year 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836). This book is an economic history of an early central bank, the Second Bank of the United States (1816-36). After US President Andrew Jackson vetoed the re-chartering of the Bank in 1832, the US would go without a central bank for the rest of the nineteenth century, unlike Europe and England. This book takes a fresh look at the role and legacy of the Second Bank. The Second Bank of the United States shows how the Bank developed a business model that allowed it to make a competitive profit while providing integrating fiscal services to the national government for free. The model revolved around the strategic use of its unique ability to establish a nationwide system of branches. This book shows how the Bank used its branch network to establish dominance in select money markets: frontier money markets and markets for bills of exchange and specie. These lines of business created synergies with the Banks fiscal duties, and profits that helped cover their costs. The Banks branch in New Orleans, Louisiana, became its geographic centre of gravity, in contrast with the state-chartered banking system, which was already, by the 1820s, centred around New York.

We exploit plausibly exogenous changes in the value of reserves in Texas's giant oil fields to determine the impact of crime in Texas counties that have reserves. Texas provides an ideal setting for this research strategy. First, Texas has the largest number of giant oil fields. Second, Texas's giant oil fields possess the greatest remaining oil potential. Third, giant oil fields are dispersed throughout the state. We find that a one percent increase in the lagged value of oil reserves increases violent crime by 0.32%, aggravated assaults by 0.40%, sex offenses by 0.40-0.50%, and drug offenses by 0.40 %. We find that changes in the value of oil reserves in counties adjacent to a given county have no effect on crime in that county. This is evidence of crime creation and not displacement of criminal activities across counties. We explore potential mechanisms that could be driving this increase in crime and find an increase in the share of young males and no increase in the size of the police force

The current data revolution is changing the conduct of social science research as increasing amounts of digital and administrative data become accessible for use. This new data landscape has created significant tension around data privacy and confidentiality. The risk–utility theory and models underpinning statistical disclosure limitation may be too restrictive for providing data confidentially owing to the growing volumes and varieties of data and the evolving privacy policies. Science and society need to move to a trust-based approach from which both researchers and participants benefit. This review discusses the explosive growth of the new data sources and the parallel evolution of privacy policy and governance, with a focus on access to data for research. We provide a history of privacy policy, statistical disclosure limitation research, and record linkage in the context of this brave new world of data.

The study employs hierarchical binomial models to test the effect of poverty and the concentration of poverty within a state and a variety of other factors on the attainment of seventeen-year-old census respondents across six samples from 1960 through 2010. The state level predictors remain important in most models. These measures, taken as a whole, account for substantial variability between the states in all but one sample year. 1960 is the exception. The state level poverty variable was found to produce a negative effect of statistical significance in three of the six samples. Of the control variables, the black population in a state has a negative effect in two samples and the Asian population in a state produces a positive effect in four of the six samples. Family poverty status predicts lower attainment in all six samples. The effect yields the most powerful adjusted odds coefficient in 2010 and the weakest in 1980. One other variable, family size, has a negative effect on the attainment outcomes in each studied sample. Paternal cultural capital predictors and female gender have positive effects in all six samples. The importance of regional differences, historical trends, and emerging policy considerations are also explored.