Why do productive workers and firms locate together in dense cities? I develop a new theory of two-sided sorting in which both heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space. Three forces are essential for generating spatial disparities: complementarity between worker and firm productivity, random matching within frictional local labor markets, and congestion costs. I demonstrate that the equilibrium exhibits excessive concentration of workers and firms, and dispersing them away from dense locations can mitigate congestion without reducing output. I then provide direct empirical evidence of two-sided sorting using German administrative microdata. An exogenous increase in the quality of the local workforce results in more productive firms choosing the same location. Finally, to quantify the implications of the model, I calibrate it to U.S. regional data and show that policies which relocate workers and firms toward less dense areas can increase welfare.

In examining the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson (1995) and its film adaptation by Chris Columbus (2005), most scholarly work and analyses have focused on the work’s identity as a queer text. I assert that elements of this musical have been overlooked for its depth of racial and class hierarchies. Utilizing sociological theory and interracial relationships, I will examine characters and musical numbers to explore diversity and class positioning. I will explore Rent for themes of racial, gender, and sexual identities and how they are presented through the friendships and romantic relationships of the eight principal characters (alphabetically): Angel, Benny, Collins, Joanne, Mark, Maureen, Mimi, and Roger. Through this exploration, I propose that Larson’s work and Columbus’ film adaptation are aspirational in the new millennium: envisioning an egalitarian society irrespective of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity. The ensemble of characters easily intermingles regardless of socio-economic status or social identity as they are united in goals of love and friendship. I submit that the harmony represented in the multicultural community is simultaneously progressive and also traditionalist, as the couples reflect the racial hierarchies and confirm the social mobility through interracial coupling. While Rent is known for its empathetic recognition of individuals with HIV and AIDS both in and out of the homosexual community, the cultural artifact should be examined for other societal aspects as the United States approached the new millennium: including race and social standing. Larson’s Rent reveals the blurring of social hierarchies through romantic pairings, a contemporary trend of mixing racial identities, a forecasting of interracial relationships where women of color couple out of race and then up in social position, black men couple out of race, and the burgeoning economic trends for women and people of color. The content confirms the social and racial hierarchy, along with how social positioning can be fluid through status exchange in coupling with someone of a higher or lower social position. None the less, Rent promotes a value of utopianism. For the 1990s, Rent’s progressive casting redeems the musical. Thus, Rent is both aspirational and inspirational, while simultaneously confirming that social hierarchies exist, should be acknowledged, and apply themselves through interracial and interethnic relationships in the United States.

The impact of autonomous vehicles on the spatial size of cities remains ambiguous, as the future is highly uncertain. This paper uses counterfactual analysis techniques to examine the effects of autonomous vehicles on urban expansion for metropolitan areas in the United States if autonomous vehicles had been introduced before. We argue that distance cost and congestion cost, which are the two components of transportation cost with different effects on urban expansion, should be addressed in autonomous vehicle research. By coupling historical data with hypothetical scenarios of introducing autonomous vehicles to cities, we find that urban expansion, rather than urban densification, would have been the dominant effect if autonomous vehicles had been introduced into cities. The finding indicates that if autonomous vehicles are widely adopted in the future, they are likely to have similar, or even larger, effects on future urban expansion than in the counterfactual past.

The gap between high- and low-income families in California is among the largest in the nation—exceeding all but three other states in 2021 (the latest data available). Families at the top of the income distribution earned 11 times more than families at the bottom ($291,000 vs. $26,000 for the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively). In 1980, families at the top earned 7 times more than those at the bottom, and the current gap reflects 63% income growth for the 90th percentile, and 7% growth for the 10th percentile over four decades.

To be classified as middle class or beyond, any individual in the household must satisfy criteria for four of the indicators of the BMCi: education, homeownership, per person income, and occupational prestige. We do not have income, education, or occupational prestige upper limits on the BMCi. When we use the term “middle class,” we are referring to all relatively affluent households as well as those that are extremely affluent. The BMCi is scored 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. The maximum score is four and is the score required for classification as middle class.1 Our stricter definition that includes homeownership overcomes the wealth vulnerability of middle class blacks that some scholars do not address.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a social dilemma; "social distancing" was required to stop the spread of disease, but close social contacts were needed more than ever to collectively overcome the unprecedented challenges of the crisis. How did Americans mobilize their social ties in response to the pandemic? Drawing from a nation-wide daily online survey of 36,345 Americans from April 2020 through April 2021, we examine the characteristics of Americans' core networks within which people discuss "important matters." Comparing the COVID-19 networks to those previously collected in eight national core network surveys from 1985 to 2016, we observe remarkable stability in the size and relationship composition of core networks during COVID-19. In contrast to the robust nature of core networks, we discover a significant rise in racial homophily among kin ties, and political homophily among non-kin ties. Simultaneously, our study reveals a significant surge in the adoption of remote communication technology to connect with individuals who are geographically distant. We demonstrate that the changing mode of communication contributes to increases in racial and political homophily. These results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic may bring people remotely together but only with the like-minded, deepening social divides in American society.

In this research note, we demonstrate that trends in the likelihood of child support agreements differ by marital history (i.e., never-married vs. ever-married) and by whether measures rely on the stock of families (i.e., all those in which children live apart from a parent) or the flow (i.e., those that include children who newly live apart from a parent) in a given year. While previous research has highlighted differences by marital history, the contrast between stock and flow is a new contribution. Trends are typically measured with reference to the stock of cases, even while the flow of cases, which more immediately reflects concurrent policy changes, is more relevant in many contexts. Interpretations of recent declines in child support agreements in the stock of cases—referenced as evidence for both mandating participation and the impracticality of requiring child support—may be better informed by considering the flow of cases. We find the flow of previously married mothers increasingly likely to have child support agreements, while the likelihood is relatively consistent over time for never-married mothers. For both groups, using the flow measure, we find notable increases in agreements without payments due in the most recent period. These findings underscore the importance of differentiating stock and flow, and by marital history, in considering the proportion with agreements as an indicator of the effectiveness of current policy.

E-commerce can potentially make urban goods flow economically viable, environmentally efficient, and socially equitable. However, as e-retailers compete with increasingly consumer-focused services, urban freight witnesses a significant increase in associated distribution costs and negative externalities, particularly affecting those living close to logistics clusters. Hence, to remain competitive, e-retailers deploy alternate last-mile distribution strategies. These alternate strategies, such as those that include the use of electric delivery trucks for last-mile operations, a fleet of crowdsourced drivers for last-mile delivery, consolidation facilities coupled with light-duty delivery vehicles for a multi-echelon distribution, or collection-points for customer pickup, can restore sustainable urban goods flow. Thus, in this study, the authors investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with alternate last-mile distribution strategies for an e-retailer offering expedited service with rush delivery within strict timeframes. To this end, the authors formulate a last-mile network design (LMND) problem as a dynamic-stochastic two-echelon capacitated location routing problem with time-windows (DS-2E-C-LRP-TW) addressed with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic.

The first chapter, “The Labor Market Effects of Occupational Licensing in the Public Sector”, examines the influence of occupational regulation for public sector workers. The study initially examines the probability of a licensed worker selecting into the public sector. Using the probability as a control for these individuals’ risk aversion, it next examines how licensing impacts key labor market outcomes, such as wages, hours worked, and employment in the public sector. The results show that having an occupational license increases the likelihood of working in the public sector. After adjusting for the selection bias of choosing into the public sector, it is found that being in a licensed occupation in the public sector raises wages by about 5.4% and increases hours worked, but reduces employment, even when controlling for other labor market institutions that also are more prevalent in the public sector such as unionization. Overall, the estimates suggest that the social welfare effects of licensing in the public sector are like those for the whole sample, and they generally result in a welfare loss in the public sector.

The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially. On an annual basis, according to the US Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2 percent (Creamer et al. 2022). Moreover, the CTC benefit’s monthly delivery likely reduced volatility in income and poverty; research has shown that volatility compromises family and child well-being (Hamilton et al. 2022). The dramatic reductions in poverty induced by the expanded CTC represent positive changes to economic well-being. There are potentially larger and longer-run benefits from an increase in economic security for families with low and moderate levels of income (Garfinkel et al. 2022). Income supports enhance children’s lifetime social and economic outcomes by allowing families to meet basic needs and by increasing families’ income stability. Specifically, transfer programs that provide cash and near-cash supports have been shown to promote stronger educational, emotional, and health outcomes (Akee et al. 2018; Hardy 2022; Hardy, Hill, and Romich 2019; Hoynes, Schanzenbach, and Almond 2016; Rothstein and Wozny 2013). The 2021 expanded CTC extended full refundability to families with little or no taxable income. Adults with young children between 0 and 5 years old received refundable credits of $3,600 per child, while those with children between 6 and 17 years old received credits of $3,000 per child. These benefit changes allowed for more of the lowest-income families—historically, those from non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native communities (Hardy 2022)—to benefit from the program (Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, 2021). The Census’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) showed that children from all racial and ethnic minority groups experienced relatively large reductions in poverty rates, but that SPM poverty rates fell most dramatically for Black and Hispanic children. Black child poverty rates fell by 17 percentage points between 2009 and 2021, while SPM child poverty rates fell from 30 percent to 8 percent among Hispanic children over the same period (Creamer et al. 2022). But where in the country did the expanded CTC reduce child poverty the most? It is not obvious, for example, whether the expanded CTC would have reduced poverty more or less in higher- versus lowerpoverty states, or whether the degree of poverty reduction differed by the cost of living in states. Income distributions vary across states, as does the depth of poverty (i.e., how close or far families lie from the poverty line) within any given state. One well-established feature of federally administered transfer programs is that they tend to reallocate resources from higher-income states to lower-income states. And, importantly, states vary on cost of living, which is an often-underexplored driver of poverty. These differences across states are especially relevant today, given well-documented housing supply gaps and staggeringly high housing costs facing many families. On the one hand, some of the nation’s poorest states, disproportionately situated in the South, are among the least expensive. On the other hand, these same less-expensive states tend to provide weaker safety net protections and make lower investments in education; strong safety nets and higher investments in education are two core features of successful economic mobility strategies (Ziliak 2019). This essay investigates how the CTC affected child poverty across states. In our two primary analyses, we examine how the reduction in child poverty varies across two characteristics: state-level cost of living (high vs. low cost of living) and state-level poverty (high vs. low pretax/transfer poverty rates). We find that, although the CTC caused substantial reductions in poverty in each kind of state (i.e., high vs. low cost of living, high vs. low pretax/transfer poverty rates), poverty reductions were the highest in low-cost, highpoverty states, which are those states with a relatively lower cost of living and with a higher baseline poverty rate. It stands to reason that, when the expanded CTC sunset on December 31, 2021, those states were also where child poverty increased the most.

Parental gender preferences may affect partnership decisions and as a result lead to early life disadvantages. We study these preferences in five post‐communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, a region with strong traditional gender norms and persisting inequalities between women and men in labour market outcomes. Using subsamples of census from Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia around 2000 and 2010, we follow Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, to examine the effect of the gender of the first‐born child(ren) on fertility decisions and relationship stability of their parents. We only find strong evidence of ‘boy preferences’ in fertility decisions in the cases of Romania and Russia. However, unlike Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, for the US, we cannot confirm a relationship between the children's gender and parental partnership decisions. This is the case for all examined Central and Eastern European countries, as well as for a number of countries from Western Europe. The cases of Romania and Russia raise questions about other potential consequences of the documented gender preferences. We argue that our approach can be applied more broadly to identify other countries characterised by parental gender preferences, and to motivate further examination of different forms of gender driven early life disadvantages.

Small area estimation is critical for a wide range of applications, including urban planning, funding distribution, and policy formulation. Individual-level population data, which typically include each individual’s socio-demographic characteristics and small area location, are a rich source of information for small area estimation. However, individual-level population data are often not made public due to confidentiality concerns. This paper describes the development of a public-use synthetic individual-level population dataset in the United States that can be useful for small area estimation. This dataset contains characteristics of housing type, age, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino origin for all 308,745,538 individuals in the United States at the census block group level, based on publicly available aggregated data from the 2010 Census. Experimental results suggest the validity of the synthetic data by comparing it to different data sources, and we show examples of how this dataset can be used in small area estimation.

The Impact of Affordable and Accessible Broadband on SSDI and SSI Participation Abstract Online access to government services and benefits has become increasingly prevalent, but a substantial portion of low-income, disabled individuals live without a home broadband connection. We study how the launch of a large-scale broadband subsidy program affected participation in the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. Using difference-in-differences leveraging geographic variation in the broadband subsidy program, we find that SSDI and SSI participation rates significantly increased in areas where the program became available. Effects were driven by areas with fewer physical Social Security Administration offices. Mechanisms appear tied to the convenience of the online application portal, and not to indirect benefits of home broadband such as improved information gathering.

We assess the role of gender-conforming social norms in household decision-making and gender inequalities in the labor market with a parsimonious household model that endogenizes commuting time. Using the American Community Survey 2008–2019, we test the model predictions and find that women in same-sex couples have a longer commute to work than working women in different-sex couples, whereas the commute to work of men in same-sex couples is shorter than the one of working men in different-sex couples, even after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner's characteristics, location and urbanicity, fertility, marital status, industry and occupation. These differences among men and women amount to a sizable portion of the gender commuting gap estimated in the literature, and are particularly stark among married couples with children. Within-couple gaps in commuting time are also significantly smaller in same-sex couples, and labor supply disparities mimic the commuting ones. According to our model, these differences are interpreted as gender-conforming social norms leading women in different-sex couples into jobs with a shorter commute and fewer hours worked while their male partners or spouses hold jobs with a longer commute and more hours worked, thus reinforcing gender inequalities.

This paper studies the impact of return migrants from the United States to Mexico on workers’ wages in Mexico and contrasts it with the effect of out-migration trends. The empirical estimation reveals that return migrants and nonmigrant workers are imperfect substitutes. The mechanism driving imperfect substitution is consistent with migrants’ foreign acquisition of human capital that is valued in the home-country labor market. The results suggest that occupation-specific experience in the United States drives imperfect substitution. Imperfect substitution generates distributional and sign asymmetries on the impact of wages for out-migrant- and return-migrant-induced labor supply shocks of the same magnitude.

The emergency food system (EFS) is a critical part of the United States’ social safety net. Using 2015–2020 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data, we identified trends in EFS use among food insecure, low-income households by estimating the probability of EFS use adjusting for demographics using multivariable logistic regression. From 2015 to 2019, between 31.0% and 34.4% of households received emergency food, while 42.4% did in 2020. EFS use did not increase in 2020 compared to prior years for older adults and non-metropolitan households. Targeted outreach should be used to expand the reach of this resource to underserved and marginalized populations.

This article analyzes choice between marital and non-marital childbearing based on a conceptual model that considers the repercussions of marriage laws for the individual wellbeing of women and men living in couples. Childbearing responses to changes in three marriage laws are evaluated: (1) the annulment of coverture laws in the second half of the 19 th Century and the first part of the 20 th Century; (2) a switch in legal regime used to attribute marital property (from a British system generally less protective of the property rights of lower-earning spouses to a regime of community property), and (3) changes in the availability of Common law marriage in addition to regular marriage. The model is based on a WIHO (Work-In-Household) model and assumes that individual women and men make decisions regarding production and reproduction.

This paper studies how the expansion of e-commerce over the past decade affected labor markets. Utilizing the variation of state legislation on e-commerce sales tax collection-the Amazon Tax-which reduced out-of-state e-commerce retailers' price advantage, this paper finds declines in employment and wages in sectors complementary to e-commerce, such as warehousing and last-mile transportation. In the retail sector, there are observed declines in local employment and the number of establishments. Effects in retail are heterogeneous by sub-sector. While big box retail employment increases, other brick-and-mortar retail employment decreases. As the Amazon Tax may induce brick-and-mortar retailers to incorporate online channels, this paper analyzes changes in retail occupational structure. In non-urban areas, this paper finds an increase in the share of office and service occupations and a decrease in the share of sales and related occupations. Through a general equilibrium model, this paper finds that these results are consistent with an economy in which consumers substitute e-commerce purchases for big box purchases, which leads to the crowding out of other brick-and-mortar retail.

This paper proposes a novel pre-processing technique to improve record linkage for historical Chinese populations. Current matching approaches are relatively ineffective due to Chinese-specific naming conventions and enumeration errors. This paper develops a three-step process that both triples the match rate over baseline and improves match accuracy. The procedures developed in this paper can be applied in part or in full to other sources of historical data, and/or modified for use with other character-based languages such as Japanese. More broadly, this approach suggests the promise of language-specific linkage procedures to boost match rates for ethnic minority groups.

The exodus of people from California to Texas is picking up steam. In 2021, it was the most popular interstate move in the country, with 111,000 people – or 300 people a day – headed to the Lone Star from the Golden State, a whopping 80% increase compared to 2012, according to an analysis of U.S. census and IPUMS data by StorageCafé. During the pandemic, as remote work became a reality for many, the trend of people moving from high-cost cities to more affordable areas started taking root. The number of people leaving California for Texas has grown by 36% between 2016 and 2021 while the migration stream from all other states to Texas did not change, rising a mere 0.1%, according to data from the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.