Increases in U.S. income inequality are driven primarily by rapidly rising incomes of the top 1%. At the national scale, rising inequality is associated with negative consequences for economic growth and stability, a range of social problems and declining social mobility. To date, there is no or little work on the geography of the top 1% and their impact on the cities they inhabit. Using individual income data from the U.S. Census, the paper offers the first detailed analysis of the spatial distribution of the top 1% in the United States. The paper makes use of the range of socio-demographic variables attached to individual records to illustrate that the large majority of the top 1% lives in large cities and that women and ethnic minorities are largely excluded from membership in the top 1%. The widening gap between incomes at the top and bottom will thus lead to increasing gender and ethnic income inequalities. Exploratory analysis of the impact of the top 1% on the bottom 99% suggests that cities with large shares of the top 1% are characterized by higher levels of skill polarization, higher labour force participation rates and lower unemployment rates for those with little formal education and higher median incomes for the better educated. However, the paper shows that higher incomes are outstripped by higher housing costs indicating that any potential advantage trickling down from the top 1% to the bottom 99% is eroded by higher living costs. Preliminary analysis also suggests that cities with a higher share of the top 1% tend to be more segregated with potential implications for the supply, quality, access to and distribution of public local services.

Does the postponement of marriage affect fertility and investment in human capital? I study this question in the context of a 1957 amendment to the Mississippi marriage law that was aimed at delaying the age of marriage; changes included raising the minimum age for men and women, parental consent requirements, compulsory blood tests, and proof of age. Using a difference-indifferences design at the county level, I find that, overall, marriages per 1,000 in the population in Mississippi and its neighboring counties decreased by nearly 75 percent; the crude birth rate decreased between 2 and 6 percent; and school enrollment increased by 3 percent after the law was enacted (by 1960). An unintended consequence of the law change was that illegitimate births among young black mothers increased by 7 percent. I show that changes in labor market conditions during this period cannot explain the changes in marriages, births, and enrollment. I conclude that stricter marriage-related regulations that lead to a delay in marriage can postpone fertility and increase school enrollment.

This report provides critical data and analyzes areas of progress for women in Washington, as well as places where progress has slowed or stalled. It examines key indicators of womens status in several topical areas: employment and earnings, economic security and poverty, and political participation. The data presented on these topics can serve as a resource for advocates, community leaders, policymakers, funders, and other stakeholders who are working to create public policies and programs that enable women in Washington to achieve their full potential.

Disagreement exists over whether permissive minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws affected underage adolescents (e.g., those age 17 years with the MLDA of 18). We used MLDA changes during the 1970s and 1980s as a natural experiment to investigate how underage exposure to permissive MLDA affected high school dropout. Method: MLDA exposure was added to two data sets: (a) the 5% public use microdata samples of the 1990 and 2000 censuses (n = 3,671,075), and (b) a combined data set based on the 1991-1992 National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey (NLAES) and the 2001-2002 National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC; n = 16,331). We used logistic regression to model different thresholds of MLDA on high school dropout. We also estimated models conditioned on demographic variables and familial risk of developing alcohol problems. Results: Only the MLDA of 18 predicted high school dropout. Exposure was associated with 4% and 13% higher odds of high school dropout for the census and NLAES/NESARC samples, respectively. We noted greater impact on women (5%-18%), Blacks (5%-19%), and Hispanics (6%). Self-report of parental alcohol problems was associated with 40% higher odds, which equals a 4.14-point increase in dropout rate for that population. Conclusions: The MLDA of 18 likely had a large impact on high school dropout rates, suggesting that the presence of legal-aged peers in a high school setting increased access to alcohol for younger students. Our results also suggest that policy can promote less dangerous drinking behavior even when familial risk of alcohol use disorders is high.

The analysis of regulations affecting addictive or habitual goods has drawn considerable controversy. Some studies have suggested that such regulations have only small welfare benefits, as consumers value these goods despite health benefits from quitting, while other studies suggest that information or behavioral problems make existing consumption decisions a poor guide to welfare evaluation. We examine potential utility offsets to health benefits of regulations affecting addictive or habitual goods theoretically and empirically. Our analysis focuses on individuals who consume these goods only, ignoring other social costs and benefits. Theoretically, we show the importance of several factors including: money saved in addition to health improvements; differentiating steady-state utility losses from short-term withdrawal costs; lack of utility loss for people dissuaded from starting to consume the good; and accounting for utility consequences of explicit or implicit cost increases. Our empirical analysis considers regulations that affect smoking. To measure the welfare cost of smoking cessation, we divide the population into those with more and less rational smoking behavior and use the valuation of smoking from more rational smokers to impute values of losses for less rational smokers. Our results show that the utility cost of smoking cessation is small relative to the health gains in people for whom withdrawal costs are the main utility loss of quitting, and even among people who have some ongoing loss, the utility offsets represent 20%–25% of the health gains. While marginal smokers induced to quit by regulations can be expected to have low or no steady-state loss, even this higher estimate is far below prevailing estimates of the utility cost of smoking used by the Food and Drug Administration and other analysts.

This dissertation is comprised of three essays related to disruptions in human capital production. In the first essay, the impact of maternal depression on child cognitive and non-cognitive measures for elementary school-aged children is estimated. After applying a bounding methodology to address the methodological concern of endogeneity, maternal depression negatively affects test scores and reduces a child’s ability to learn in the classroom environment, self-control, and interpersonal skills, and increases problem behavior. The second essay examines the effect of earlier school start times on classroom outcomes of fifth grade children. The panel of data follows the same children over time, allowing for a methodology that nets out time-invariant unobserved characteristics that might be influencing results. Findings suggest small movements in start time (1-29 minutes earlier) have no impact on cognitive or non-cognitive outcomes, but large movements (60 minutes earlier or more) lead to lower math scores for girls, lower reading scores for boys, and impaired performance in socioemotional measures for both genders. The last essay measures the effect of “aging out” of the dependent coverage provision of the Affordable Care Act. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that turning 26 leads to increases in labor force participation and directly purchased private insurance for young men and increases in health insurance plan dissatisfaction for both young men and women.

This paper examines the evolution of immigrant earnings in the United States between 1970 and 2010. There are cohort effects not only in wage levels, with more recent cohorts having lower entry wages through 1990, but also in the rate of wage growth, with more recent cohorts experiencing less economic assimilation. The slowdown in assimilation is partly related to a concurrent decline in the rate at which the new immigrants add to their human capital stock, as measured by English language proficiency. The data also suggest that larger national origin groups experience less economic assimilation.

Highly productive U.S. cities are characterized by high housing prices, low housing stock growth, and restrictive land-use regulations (e.g., San Francisco). While new residents would benefit from housing stock growth due to higher incomes or shorter commutes, existing residents justify strict local land-use regulations on the grounds of congestion and other costs of further development. This paper assesses the welfare implications of these local regulations for income, congestion, and urban sprawl within a general equilibrium model with endogenous regulation. In the model, households choose from locations that vary exogenously by productivity and endogenously according to local externalities of congestion and sharing. Existing residents address these externalities by voting for regulations that limit local housing density. In equilibrium, these regulations bind and house prices compensate for differences across locations. Relative to the planners optimum, the decentralized model generates spatial misallocation whereby high-productivity locations are settled at too-low densities. The model admits a straightforward calibration based on observed population density, expenditure shares on consumption and local services, and local incomes, as well as house prices and construction costs in the most expensive cities. Quantitatively, welfare and GDP would be 1.4% and 2.1% higher, respectively, under the planners allocation. Abolishing zoning regulations entirely would increase GDP by 6%, but lower welfare by 5.9% as the increased consumption would be outweighed by greater congestion costs. However, if the profits from development are not shared broadly, than the typical household may see an improvement in welfare from zoning abolition.

This study examines the effects of infrastructure improvements on various outcome measures of economic performance. I focus on three different examples: (1) the opening of the aviation system in the United States, (2) the effects of improving or labeling certain airports as "hub" airports, and (3) improvements in decades-old public school buildings for energy efficiency and sustainability. Together, each case provides substantial evidence that infrastructure is an important input in the functioning and/or performance of economic activity.

The appropriate way to regulate Internet Service Providers has in recent months been the subject of much public attention. The effects of such regulations on the quality of high speed Internet offerings are unclear. In order to inform how certain regulations may affect product quality, this paper teases out the effect competition has on the quality of products of high speed Internet Service Providers using data recently made available by the FCC, with upload speeds and download speeds proxying for quality. Utilizing multivariate regression controlling for demographic and economic factors, this paper analyzes broadband data published at the census block level to tease out competition's effect. After analyzing a dataset of nearly 21,000,000 observations, it is clear that there is a statistically significant relationship between the amount of competition high speed Internet Service Providers face and the quality of the products they offer. Consequently, policymakers seeking to improve the quality of high speed Internet offerings could use regulatory strictness or laxity to induce competition in the market and increase overall product quality.

Distance and direction measures are constructed and used to contrast occupational mobility following involuntary job displacement and total occupational mobility. Displacement involves specific capital loss. Some voluntary occupational mobility, for example, promotions, reflects augmented skills rather than specific human capital loss. Wage losses following displacement are strongly related to distance and direction. This is reflected in a downward shift in the skill portfolio. By contrast, the skill portfolio change in total occupational mobility shows a neutral or modest upward pattern, suggesting limited or no specific human capital loss from voluntary occupational mobility. The mean distance in occupational mobility following displacement declined significantly in the 1980s and 1990s suggesting the labor market was more efficiently reemploying workers following displacement, lowering displacement costs in that period.

Using a large database of online job postings, we demonstrate that employee skill requirements rise when there is a larger supply of relevant job seekers. We identify this effect using variation across time, occupations, and places, which allows us to control for potentially confounding factors. We further exploit the natural experiment arising from troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan over this period as a shock to local, occupation-specific labor supply. Our estimates imply that the increase in national unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 increased requirements for a bachelor's degree within occupations by 2.2 percentage points and increased the fraction requiring two or more years of experience by 3.5 percentage points.

Aggregate level local health data has become more easily available to the public through Web-Based Data Query Systems (WDQS). Local health data can be a powerful vehicle for improving the health of a community. When aggregated, local health data help monitor the incidence, trends, and patterns and disease in a given population. WDQS make local health data easily available over the internet. WDQS are interactive and have the capability for users to query off multiple datasets and to pre-select variables. Despite the advantages of WDQS, only 29 states have implemented them. States that have not implemented WDQS are using outdated technologies such as static reports to share their health data. We conducted a three part study to investigate the challenges state agencies face with their implementation of WDQS. The three part study included a systematic review of literature, a Delphi study, and a survey of state health coordinators in all fifty states. We found that the high cost of system development, data sharing between state agencies, inadequate staffing, standardization of vocabulary between datasets and a lack of understanding of how consumers use their data as the most challenging. Website performance, poor website usability, the cost of hardware/software, privacy/security, data storage, and the ability large data sets are less of a problem. The contribution of this project was significant in developing an understanding of key gaps in knowledge on problems in the development and usage of WDQSs. In the long term, we anticipate that having more useful data will help lead to improved health surveillance and more informed and targeted interventions at the local level.

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common agricultural risk in the nineteenth-century United States. We show that a greater share of the population was organized into religious communities in counties with greater rainfall risk. The link between rainfall risk and membership in religious communities is stronger among more agricultural counties and counties exposed to greater rainfall risk during the growing season.

Several studies suggest that population health improves during recessions and deteriorates during economic expansions. However, the majority of these studies only focus on the short-term or contemporaneous effects of economic fluctuations on health. As a result, very little evidence exists on potential long-term health effects of exposure to booms or recessions. This can be regarded as a major gap in knowledge, given the fact that most diseases are the results of exposure or behaviours during a longer period of time. Furthermore, a large body of research also suggests that many risks associated with recessions may accumulate over the course of life and lead to a gradual deterioration in health. By focusing only on the short-term effects, most studies thus ignore potential longrun health effects of economic fluctuations. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between studies on the population level assessing the short-term effects of economic fluctuations on health, and studies on the individual level, which have analysed the health-effects of risks associated with a declining economy including unemployment, job loss and job insecurity. In order to assess potential longterm effects of business cycles on health, I linked historical information on macroeconomic fluctuations during the 20th century to individual-level data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) as well as the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS). This approach makes it possible to identify the state of the economy during different life-course periods for every respondent and relate it to health outcomes measured in later life. Regarding the macroeconomic conditions at any given age as largely exogenous, the four empirical papers included in this thesis thereby assess the relationship between business cycles and health during three different life-course periods: the time around graduation from full-time education, middle and late adulthood as well as the years nearing retirement. Overall, the results suggest that individuals who experienced less favourable economic conditions during these life-course periods have a higher risk of having additional limitations in physical functioning, lower levels of cognitive functioning, as well as higher risks of cardiovascular disease in later life. 5 In contrast to studies showing that population health improves during recessions, these findings suggest that potential short-term improvements in health may be outweighed by deteriorations in health in the long run. They also raise important questions about the role of potential mechanisms linking differential exposure to the business cycle to health in later life.

Over the past decade, policymakers and employers have been concerned that slower population growth combined with the retirement of the baby boom generation would lead to a shortage of skilled labor. Even prior to the Great Recession, the concern was that an inadequate supply of skilled workers at both the top and middle of the distribution would hamper future economic growth by creating barriers for firms looking to locate or expand in the United States. More recently, the worry is that the lack of skilled workers has made it difficult to fill jobs that are in high demand during the economic recovery, leading to slower than expected improvement in the labor market. Of particular concern is the lack of workers able to fill middle-skill jobs that require some postsecondary education and training but less than a four-year college degree. This means having not only a sufficient number of workers but also a workforce with the right mix of skills to meet the diverse needs of the nations economy.

década de 1980 marcó un punto de inflexión en el escenario migratorio de América Latina y el Caribe. La emigración hacia los países desarrollados, en particular hacia Estados Unidos, se convirtió a partir de entonces en el fenómeno social de mayor relevancia para algunos países latinoamericanos. Algunos países, que hasta entonces figuraban como lugares de destino, experimentaron marcados descensos de la inmigración. A la larga historia de emigraciones mexicanas y caribeñas —particularmente cubana y puertorriqueña— hacia Estados Unidos, se suman la centroamericana y sudamericana. Con la crisis, a comienzos del decenio, y los posteriores procesos de ajuste y reestructuración económica, los flujos migratorios no solo se intensificaron, sino que adquirieron . . .

Farming is among the most dangerous industries for fatal and nonfatal injuries. A comprehensive agricultural injury surveillance system is absent in North Carolina (NC), and data sets tradi...

The focus on knowledge, innovation, and a highly educated workforce as the agents of economic transformation has reemphasized Marshalls ideas in the air as the keys to successful long-term growth strategies. He was among the first to suggest that wealth occurs where creative, skilled labor concentrates. It is these individuals who generate the ideas that create new products, processes, innovations, and, most importantly, jobs. Recent empirical work has validated the importance of a well-educated labor for development. As a result, areas that seek to reverse periods of economic contraction are driven to policies and practices that help attract and retain highly productive and skilled labor. Some regions have capitalized on warm weather, mountains, or Bohemian life-style neighborhoods to attract well-educated labor. Other regions lacking those assets have turned to investments in sports facilities or other entertainment-oriented amenities to compete with areas with milder winters. Do those investments often funded by higher taxes have the potential to change labor migration patterns? That is the focus of the research reported to help community leaders design new public policies for redevelopment strategies. Two analyses are provided. The first focuses on the relationship between different sets of amenities and the movement of highly educated workers. The second looks for differences in migration patterns and the presence of different amenities related to the age of educated workers. The findings suggest some entertainment amenities are indeed useful for attracting workers, but additional research is needed.

What is the effect of wars on industrialization, technology and commercial activity? In economic terms, such events as wars comprise a large exogenous shock to labor and capital markets, aggregate demand, the distribution of expenditures, and the rate and direction of technological innovation. In addition, if private individuals are extremely responsive to changes in incentives, wars can effect substantial changes in the allocation of resources, even within a decentralized structure with little federal control and a low rate of labor participation in the military. This paper examines war-time resource reallocation in terms of occupation, geographical mobility, and the commercialization of inventions during the American Civil War. The empirical evidence shows the war resulted in a significant temporary misallocation of resources, by reducing geographical mobility, and by creating incentives for individuals with high opportunity cost to switch into the market for military technologies, while decreasing financial returns to inventors. However, the end of armed conflict led to a rapid period of catching up, suggesting that the war did not lead to a permanent misallocation of inputs, and did not long inhibit the capacity for future technological progress.