Like 11 other states, Wyoming adjusts its school funding formula to reflect regional differences in the cost of hiring a school district’s most important (and most expensive) resource—teachers. The Wyoming Regional Cost Adjustment (RCA) which only applies to the salary components of the school funding model, is an amalgam of two alternative labor cost indices—the Wyoming Cost-of-Living Index (WCLI) and the Wyoming Hedonic Wage Index (HWI). Both labor cost indices are constructed so that the state average has an index value of 100. Locations where labor costs are 10% above the state average have an index value of 110 while locations where labor costs are 10% below the state average have an index value of 90. The WCLI is updated biannually, but the Wyoming HWI has not been updated since 2005. Each district’s RCA is the larger of the WCLI, the 2005 Wyoming HWI or 100. In other words, districts where labor costs are below the state average are treated as if their costs were equal to the state average. This Lake Woebegone approach, wherein no districts are below average, narrows the range of the geographic cost adjustment and greatly diminishes the ability of the RCA to equalize district purchasing power.

This dissertation is an assessment of the shallow groundwater (SGW) regime within the drainage area of Joe Pool Lake (JPL), an impoundment on Mountain Creek (MC) located in Grand Prairie, Texas. A thin zone of highly-weathered consolidated rock is normally found at the upper surface of the bedrock in north-central Texas; the SGW regime, or shallow aquifer, as defined for this study, extends vertically downward from the water table to the base of this highly-weathered layer, and extends laterally over the surface water drainage area of JPL and its tributaries. Geologically, the shallow aquifer thus consists largely of unconsolidated material, chiefly Holocene and Quaternary deposits on the floodplains and terraces of MC, Walnut Creek, and other creeks of the MC drainage system. The creation of JPL has, in itself, had a significant impact on the shallow groundwater regime; rapid urbanization has occurred in the vicinity of JPL since the completion of the impoundment, and questions exist as to the effects, current or potential, of this urbanization on the SGW. The objective of the research reported herein was to examine and analyze the impact of the lake itself on the SGW, and to evaluate the impacts of the subsequent urbanization on the hydrology of the JPL watershed. The research utilized finite-difference simulation of groundwater flow, applied in an investigative sense, to gain an understanding of the hydraulics of the groundwater regime, and used Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to prepare simulation input data, to process and interpret supporting data, and to analyze and evaluate simulation results. The flow simulations were undertaken using the U.S. Geological Survey’s MODFLOW-2005 software to calculate heads and model-wide flow totals, and using the MODFLOW postprocessor ZONEBUDGET-1996 to calculate internal flows and sub-regional groundwater budgets. Two steady-state simulations were performed with the objective of determining the rates and directions of groundwater (GW) flow throughout the SGW, in an average or long-term sense, first as the system now exists, with the lake in place, and then as the system existed prior to construction of the lake. In each simulation, it was assumed that the GW flow regime was in hydrologic equilibrium, and was limited by GW divides coinciding with the topographic divides surrounding the study area. The model was calibrated by comparing the observed borehole water level with calculated heads and comparing the baseflow per unit area of the catchment with the model calculated flow from SGW into the river. The optimum model thus obtained was again simulated using an unconfined approach so that the heads above the land surface and dry heads were kept within 25% of total. Finally the head distribution was found to be a replica of the subdued image of the topography. Based on the results of simulation and the information supported by land-use, streamflow analysis, and demographic data, it appears that whereas the SGW in general is sensitive to the external systems and factors, to date the impact of impoundment and urbanization have been moderate. Obviously, in any natural setting the effect of recharge due to population-based water is trivial compared to the effect of land-use change and urbanization; the impact of rainfall is utmost. The presence of the lake has had an impact on the area hydrology and GW-SW interaction has changed. Prior to lake construction, GW discharged directly to the streams, and by near-surface discharge processes from the water table. In the present regime, GW discharge is primarily into the lake. From there discharge is by lake evaporation, gated discharge, municipal use, etc. The model results provide information that, the recharge to the GW regime has increased by about 5%, whereas the volume of SGW has increased by about 4%, although the distribution of GW has changed. Water levels are higher around the lake, but tend to be lower farther from the lake. The recharge from the shallow aquifer into the strata of the Woodbine is approximately similar in pre and post-lake conditions. Urbanization has imported extra water, but much of the import is either lost by near-surface discharge processes, or exported through sanitary sewer systems, or directly discharged to the SW system through storm sewer network. More work with well distributed observed water table data, improved versions of MODFLOW 2005 such as MODFLOW NWT and MODFLOW USG, and transient simulation would be required for an improvement of the model.

The notion of equality of opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice policy, and research over the last half century. The sense that differences in agent outcomes that are the consequence of their individual choice and effort are acceptable whereas variation in agent outcomes that are the consequence of circumstances beyond their control are not has underpinned much gender, race, education, and family law and policy over that period, making it a many-dimensioned issue. In this context, the empirical analysis of EO has been hampered in the sense that the usual techniques are one-dimensional in nature. Here a new approach to evaluating levels of and changes in EO which readily accommodates these many dimensions is introduced, and progress in the extent of EO for 18-year-olds in the USA is examined over the period 19602000. The evidence is that gains were made in all categories throughout the period, more so for males than females (though females were better off in an EO sense to start with), more so for children in single parent circumstances, and more so for the poorly endowed.

To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities mayors between 1973 and 2004. We find that relative to whites, black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture causal effects of black mayors. Black mayors also lead to higher black incomes relative to white incomes. We show that our results continue to hold when we compare the treated cities to alternative control groups of cities, explicitly control for changing attitudes towards blacks or use regression discontinuity analysis to compare cities that elected black and white mayors in close elections. (JEL D7, H7, J7)

This dissertation focuses on three prominent areas of macroeconomic policy: fiscal stimulus, bail-outs and industrial policy, and monetary policy. In each case, I analyze the nature of the problem without intervention first before turning to why and how policy can be used to improve outcomes. In the first chapter, I study how relative demand shocks for different goods and services propagate through the economy to affect aggregate employment – and I use these insights to show how fiscal stimulus should be designed to achieve the greatest bang for buck in terms of employment. In the second chapter, I study how firm entry and exit in one industry can affect other industries and the economy as a whole through input- output relationships. I characterize which firms and industries are systemically important, show that the equilibrium is generically inefficient, and study when and how bailouts can be used to improve welfare. In the final paper, I provide a new microfoundation for downward wage rigidity, show that this microfoundation yields predictions that are consistent with the data, and study how monetary policy should behave given this microfoundation.

The partial employment rebound in older manufacturing regions of the U.S. and elsewhere stands out because it runs against decades of theorized and actual manufacturing outcomes, which have been dominated by assessments of decline. Although real in empirical terms, the rebound in manufacturing production remains a second thought in policy terms, as prescriptions to revive manufacturing focus primarily on innovation. This focus on innovation often stands at odds with the complicated market, firm and historical factors that shape the uneven evolution of . . .

German migrants came to North America since colonial times and became one of the most important European immigrant groups to the United States. Early strongholds of German settlement were the mid-Atlantic states, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland. They moved into existing towns and settlements but also founded and named new locations such as Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1683. Driven by economic and socio-political prospects, a heterogeneous group of "German(ic) migrants" from different European source regions, including "related groups" from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Switzerland, and Russian exclaves, boarded sailing ships and (later) steamers for the "New World". Depending on political and socio-economic conditions in Europe and abroad, the migrants came in several waves, with peaks in the mid-1850s, 1870s and 1880s. Major source areas also shifted accordingly, for instance from Southwest (early 1800s) to the Northwest (mid-1800s) and the Northeast of Germany (around turn of the 19th century).

Among the factors thought to contribute to lagging improvements in infant health in recent years are increasing obesity and diabetes prevalence among women of childbearing age. This paper uses a difference-in-difference-in-difference empirical strategy to investigate the impact of mandated insurance coverage for diabetes on adverse pregnancy outcomes. Among educated women, who have high rates of coverage through private insurance that is subject to insurance mandates, diabetes mandates are associated with a reduction in low birth weight and premature birth prevalence. These gains are concentrated among older women and are larger for African-Americans. There is a weaker effect on the prevalence of high birth weight, potentially because of the deleterious effects of an increased probability of pregnancy weight gain in excess of 35 pounds among diabetic women in states with mandates.

This paper studies the process by which firms adapt to repeated reductions in demand. I focus on the American brewing industry during the early twentieth century. Many states and counties chose to prohibit the sale and production of alcohol in the years leading up to the 1919 federal prohibition. Because of high transportation costs, local prohibition in nearby markets reduced the demand for beer production for some breweries more than others. Using novel micro-data at the brewery level, I show that breweries adapted to this first shock by acquiring machinery such as carbonators to produce alternative products like soft drinks. This initial investment strategy allowed them to endure federal prohibition (1919-1933), when no brewery was allowed to produce or sell beer. Breweries that faced the average reduction in demand due to local prohibitions were 12 percent more likely to survive the entire prohibition period (local + federal) than breweries not affected by local prohibitions. Higher survival rates are consistent with a model in which firms adapt to reductions in demand by making irreversible investments in other products, thereby endogenously increasing their ability to respond to future shocks, rather than with models in which firm survival depends exclusively on exogenous productivity.

In this study, I deploy an ethnographic approach to analyze the detrimental effects of gentrification on longstanding residents in New Orleans Trem neighborhood. I focus on conflicts between long-established residents and gentrifiers over the use of neighborhood space on a day-to-day basis as a means for examining the consequent changes in neighborhood life. As their neighborhood gentrifies, long-term residents of Trem must contend with greater policing, the erosion of place-based knowledge, practices, and cultural traditions, the loss of social networks, and the closure of vital neighborhood institutions. These changes in neighborhood life provide a starting point from which to begin to understand the broader effects (beyond displacement) that longstanding residents experience as a result of gentrification.

We utilize the decennial U.S. Census to study social effects in housing consumption across 4 million households from 126 ethnic groups and 2,071 geographic locations in the U.S. We find that the homeownership decisions within ethnic groups are locally correlated, after controlling for the homeownership rates within the group and the region. Social influence is stronger for younger, less educated, and lower-income individuals; immigrants; and Americans with ancestors from more unequal, uncertainty-avoiding, and collectivistic cultures. Our results suggest that both status and information considerations play an important role in the social comparison process in capital markets.

The purpose of this study was to examine bilingual students' opportunities to learn in schools affected by high-stakes accountability policies. Understanding that access to instruction supporting language development is essential to improving bilingual students' opportunities to learn, I examined the ELD program at a bilingual school as well as the ways high-stakes accountability affected the development of academic language in both English and in Spanish. My study was based on the perspective that not only viewed language development in relation to social and contextual factors, but assumed that these social and contextual factors are, in fact, problematic. To this end, I conducted a qualitative case study of six classrooms across two language environments within the same school. Additionally, I followed six students to examine differences in instructional opportunities based on students' levels of proficiency in language and in literacy. My hypothesis was that ELD could not be distinguished from other types of instruction occurring during the literacy block and that students opportunities varied greatly based . . .

Maine faces a growing number of elderly households as the baby boomer generation ages, which will have a major impact on housing. John Gallagher discusses the availability of affordable housing for elder adults and what is being done to address the widening gap between the needs and wants of elders with limited financial resources and compares that to what will actually be available to them.

We use Census and Labour Force Survey (LFS) data for the period from 1971 to 2012 to investigate whether the Canadian wage and employment structures have polarized, that is, whether wages and employment have grown more in high- and low- than in middle-paying occupations. We find that there has been faster growth in employment in both high- and low-paying occupations than those in the middle since 1981. However, up to 2005, the wage pattern reflects a simple increase in inequality with greater growth in high-paid than middle-paid occupations and greater growth in middle than low-paid occupations. Since 2005, there has been some polarization but this is present only in some parts of the country and seems to be related more to the resource boom than technological change. We present results for the U.S. to provide a benchmark. The Canadian patterns fit with those in the U.S. and other countries apart from the 1990s when the U.S. undergoes wage polarization not seen elsewhere. We argue that the Canadian data do not fit with the standard technological change model of polarization developed for the U.S..

Today׳s real-world databases typically contain millions of items with many thousands of fields. As a result, traditional distribution-based outlier detection techniques have more and more restricted capabilities and novel k-nearest neighbors based approaches have become more and more popular. However, the problems with these k-nearest neighbors based methods are that they are very sensitive to the value of k, may have different rankings for top n outliers, are very computationally expensive for large datasets, and doubts exist in general whether they would work well for high dimensional datasets. To partially circumvent these problems, we propose in this paper a new global outlier factor and a new local outlier factor and an efficient outlier detection algorithm developed upon them that is easy to implement and can provide competing performances with existing solutions. Experiments performed on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

Homicide clearance rates have fallen to a historic low, with less than two- thirds of homicides cleared by arrest. However, only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist in the literature, and results are mixed regarding the impact of community characteristics (e.g., economic deprivation, residential stability) on clearance. Additionally, although research has established that community members are critical to homicide case outcomes, the effect of collective efficacy (i.e., social cohesion among neighborhood residents combined with their willingness to intervene) on homicide clearance rates has not been empirically tested. In an effort to fill this gap in the literature and potentially address previous inconsistencies, I combine data from the Homicides in Chicago Dataset, PHDCN, and 1990 U.S. Census to explore the direct and indirect effects of structural features, collective efficacy, and legal cynicism on homicide clearance rates in Chicago neighborhoods. Results indicate that economic deprivation, residential stability, population size, and legal cynicism all significantly decrease the likelihood of homicide clearance, while immigrant concentration and collective efficacy significantly increase the likelihood of homicide clearance. Results also indicate that collective efficacy may partially mediate the relationship between economic deprivation and homicide clearance. Potential implications and directions for future research are also discussed.

The phenomenon of rising IQ scores in high-income nations over the 20th century, known as the Flynn Effect, indicates historical increase in mental abilities related to planning, organization, working memory, integration of experience, spatial reasoning, unique problem-solving, and skills for goal-directed behaviors. Given prior research on the impact of formal education on IQ, a three-tiered hypothesis positing that schooling, and its expansion and intensification over the education revolution, is one likely cause of the Flynn Effect is tested in three studies. First, a neuroimaging experiment with children finds that neuromaturation is shaped by common activities in school, such as numeracy, and share a common neural substrate with fluid IQ abilities. Second, a field study with adults from insolated agrarian communities finds that variable exposure to schooling is associated with related variation in the mental abilities. Third, a historicalinstitutional analysis of the cognitive requirements of American mathematics curriculum finds a growing cognitive demand for birth cohorts from later in the 20th century. These findings suggest a consilience of evidence about the impact of mass education on the Flynn Effect and are discussed in light of the g-factor paradigm, cognition, and the Bell Curve debate.

The Dominican population in the United States continues to grow at a steady pace (Hernandez & Rivera-Batiz, 2003; Hernandez, 2004). Contrary to the past, demographic growth is now accompanied by tremendous internal mobility and geographic dispersion of the Dominican population. Historically, Dominicans have been heavily concentrated in the northeast, particularly in New York State, specifically in New York City (Graham, 1996). State preference, however, has begun to change among Dominicans. Census data reveals, for instance, that although New York continues to house the largest number of Dominicans in the U.S., Dominicans are progressively spreading to other states along the northeast corridor as well as out of these boundaries.