For practitioners and policymakers to make a serious attempt to affect housing policy, they must cite evidence-based research. Part 2 of this article summarizes many of the private sources of housing data for researchers that can provide such evidence. It then summarizes the challenges of using administrative records (AR) and proposes to construct new data sources by marrying survey data with AR and by constructing synthetic databases. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some data issues.

Although researchers have demonstrated that economic inequality and social capital are inversely related in an aggregate sense across time and space, to date little is known about the relationship between inequality and the socio-economic disparity in social capital outcomes. Using yearly cross-sectional surveys of American twelfth graders fielded during 1976-2009, I show that social capital is strongly related to parental socio-economic status, and that this relationship grows in strength as economic inequality increases. This relationship is confirmed both over time and cross-sectionally. Finally, I argue that, between resource-based and psychological accounts of why this relationship exists, the former appears more promising.

The purpose of writing this project, Best Practices for Church Planting in Metro New York City among French-Speaking African Immigrants is to determine and to expose best practices in planting churches among French-speaking African immigrants in the Metro New York City area. This study seeks to contribute valuable insight and information for newcomers to new church plantings in this area on the use of best practices for starting a successful and healthy church. Chapter 1 develops the purpose, goals, context, and rationale of the project. This chapter introduces the hypothesis and research questions. It also describes the limitations of the study and assumptions. The theoretical and theological foundations for researching are developed in this chapter. Chapter 2 provides previous research

This project examines the intersection of occupational licensing and migration in the teaching profession in the United States, with a focus on preschool teachers, K-12 teachers, and teaching assistants. We attempt to determine the impact of occupational licensing requirements for teachers as a barrier or facilitator of migration and professional development. The methods employed included a literature review, a qualitative analysis based on interviews with teachers and others in the education profession, an online discourse analysis, and quantitative analyses of the teacher and teaching assistant workforces. Teachers are among the most widely licensed professionals and are more likely to face training and licensing requirements than their teaching assistant counterparts. However, different licensure requirements across states limit the ability . . .

The intersection of demographic change and government policy is creating new challenges for mainland Chinese in the marriage market, particularly for men. This has spawned a renewed academic interest in marriage with many studies using current demographic conditions to forecast future marriage levels. These studies forecast a large “marriage squeeze” over the next generation with up to 20 percent of men unable to marry at its peak. Using China census microdata, this dissertation provides historical context for this literature by examining actual 20th century patterns of marriage in mainland China. The empirical results show the relative contribution of marriage market conditions (measured by the unmarried sex ratio) and the propensity to marry (or “force of marriage attraction”) for changing marriage rates. This provides both context and warning for a literature that mostly considers the role of marriage market sex ratios in isolation from likely changes in marriage preferences and patterns of assortative mating. The results indicate the role of marriage market conditions was nuanced over the 1970-2000 period: marriage market conditions may have affected marriage behavior (chapter 5); but they were not responsible for most of the changes in marriage rates across yearly time periods (chapter 4). The results also show that the assumption of static female marriage behavior made in recent studies does not fully fit with the recent past. Women (and men) did modify their marriage behavior and those changes were moderately associated with changes in educational attainment (chapter 2) and marriage market conditions (chapter 5). Most men and women eventually married, but marriage rates changed markedly across periods in ways not well explained by age, education, rural-urban status, or marriage market conditions (chapter 4). Other results show continuity with China’s pre-20th century marriage regime in that long-term bachelorhood continued to be patterned by socioeconomic status (chapter 3) and marriage timing for both men and women continued to show indirect evidence of external pressures to marry and to marry at socially normative ages (chapter 2).

This paper develops and then demonstrates a new approach for quantifying health impacts of traffic-related particulate matter air pollution at the urban project scale that includes variability and uncertainty in the analysis. We focus on primary particulate matter having a diameter less than 2.5 m (PM2.5). The new approach accounts for variability in vehicle emissions due to temperature, road grade, and traffic behavior variability; seasonal variability in concentrationresponse coefficients; demographic variability at a fine spatial scale; uncertainty in air quality model accuracy; and uncertainty in concentrationresponse coefficients. We demonstrate the approach for a case study roadway corridor with a population of 16,000, where a new extension of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill campus is slated for construction. The results indicate that at this case study site, health impact estimates increased by factors of 49, depending on the health impact considered, compared to using a conventional health impact assessment approach that overlooks these variability and uncertainty sources. In addition, we demonstrate how the method can be used to assess health disparities. For example, in the case study corridor, our method demonstrates the existence of statistically significant racial disparities in exposure to traffic-related PM2.5 under present-day traffic conditions: the correlation between percent black and annual attributable deaths in each census block is 0.37 (t(114) = 4.2, p < 0.0001). Overall, our results show that the proposed new campus will cause only a small incremental increase in health risks (annual risk 6 10 10; lifetime risk 4 10 8), compared to if the campus is not built. Nonetheless, the approach we illustrate could be useful for improving the quality of information to support decision-making for other urban development projects.

Results in this paper depend upon the quality of the underlying matched data. To assess the robustness of our results to potentially mismatched individuals, we examined the results sensitivity to tightening the match criteria. As described above, men in the linked sample are matched on place of birth, year of birth, first and last names. Place of birth is already restricted to exact matches, and year of birth is restricted to falling within a two-year window of the year implied by recorded age in 1910. Mill (2013) shows that within this range, year of birth errors are not predictive of match success, and we make no further restrictions based on implied year of birth.1 Following Mill (2013) and Feigenbaum (2015), we calculated the Jaro-Winkler string distances for first and last names in our sample as recorded in 1910 and for the proposed matches in 1930.2 Jaro-Winkler string distances are explained in detail in Winkler (1990).3 We then restricted the sample those with distances of 0 (or, exact matches) for last names and 0.3 for first names.4 The restricted sample contains 65 percent of the original sample. We then re-estimated results in each of the tables of the main paper using the restricted sample. None of our substantive conclusions were affected, and these results are available upon request.

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns

In diesem Beitrag wird ein theoriegeleiteter, praxisrelevanter Überblick €uber die Bedeutung des r€aumlichen Kontexts f€ur bevölkerungswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen gegeben. Dabei werden zun€achst maßgebliche Raumkonzepte vorgestellt. Im Hauptteil wird aufbauend auf der Theorie der Strukturation (Giddens 1984) zuerst aus einer Mikroperspektive heraus ausgef€uhrt, inwieweit die raumzeitliche Verortung von Individuen menschliches Handeln und soziale Interaktion beeinflussen können. Anschließend wird aus einer Makroperspektive heraus auf die Raumwirksamkeit gesellschaftlicher Strukturen und Prozesse und die R€uckwirkungen auf das menschliche Handeln eingegangen. Danach werden anhand von Beispielen Potenziale aufgezeigt, wie in der bevölkerungswissenschaftlichen Forschung durch die Einbeziehung raumtheoretischer Überlegungen oder aufgrund neu verf€ugbarer r€aumlicher Daten neue Perspektiven eröffnet und Erkenntnisfortschritte erzielt werden können. Die Betrachtungen schließen mit einer kurzen Erörterung statistischer Probleme, die sich bei der Analyse von Daten mit r€aumlichem Bezug ergeben können. Diese werden in bevölkerungswissenschaftlichen Studien h€aufig ignoriert, was zu Fehlinterpretationen der statistischen Ergebnisse f€uhren kann.

We use the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 data sets to evaluate changes in the college matching process. Rising attendance rates at 4-year institutions have not decreased average preparedness of college goers or of college graduates, and further attendance gains are possible before diminishing returns set in. We use multinomial logit models to demonstrate that measures of likely success grade point average became more predictive of college attendance over time, while other student characteristics such as race and parents education became less predictive. Our evidence suggests that schools have become better at sorting while students have efficiently responded to changes in the return to higher education.

This dissertation studies the agricultural sector in the United States. The first two chapters investigate the U.S. agricultural economy during the Great Depression, while Chapter 3 looks at the effects of air pollution on crop yields in recent years. In Chapter 1, Laurence Wilse-Samson and I examine the widespread migration to farms in the U.S. during the Great Depression. We show that the option to move to farms serves as informal insurance during times of economic crisis, and that modernization in the agricultural sector reduces the ability of the land to provide this insurance function. The movement to farms also has spillovers on the broader economy, facilitating a decline in market-based expenditure and a shift into home production. At the same time, by absorbing surplus labor, the subsistence farm sector puts upward pressure on nonfarm wages and thus provides a countervailing force against deflation. We also provide evidence that the introduction of formal unemployment compensation reduces the movement to farms later in the decade. Our results bring attention to a less studied effect by which formal insurance stabilizes the economy during deep crises: it increases market demand by diverting consumption away from home production and towards market-based expenditure. Chapter 2 examines the effects of the Great Depression on out-migration from farms, and how those effects vary across different groups of agriculturalists. Using complete count data from the U.S. population census, I match a sample of individuals from the 1930 census to their records in the 1940 census. Because the 1940 census includes information on location and farm status in 1935, this linked sample provides information on location and farm status for the years 1930, 1935, and 1940, allowing me to follow individuals over the course of the Great Depression. I show that farmers in mechanized agricultural regions are more likely to leave their farms during the crisis, compared to farmers in less mechanized regions, but they are no more likely to transition to the non-farm sector. While tenant farmers are in general more likely to out-migrate compared to farm owners, this differential is even larger in the more mechanized, high-productivity areas. And while farm owners from more productive regions end up earning higher incomes than owners in less productive areas, there is no corresponding earnings premium for tenant farmers. These results suggest that the benefits from productivity-enhancing technological progress accrue to the owners of the land resources, while the costs of the farm crisis (in terms of displacement) are borne heavily by renters. Finally, I show that places with high levels of farm mortgage debt experience higher rates of out-migration, and their residents report lower subsequent income; in addition, the negative effects of mortgage debt on income are more heavily concentrated among farm owners. In Chapter 3, Wolfram Schlenker, Juha Siikamaki and I provide new empirical evidence of a possible nonlinear effect of ozone on corn yields using data for the years 1993-2011 from a comprehensive sample of the Eastern United States that accounts for 91% of U.S. corn production. Our county-level panel analysis links observed historic corn yields to various air pollution measures constructed from fine-scaled hourly pollution monitor data. We find a statistically significant critical threshold of 72 ppb for hourly daytime ozone, considerably higher than the 40 ppb threshold derived in controlled experiments that is used as a standard in Europe. The reduction in peak ozone levels is responsible for 41% of the observed trend in average yields in 1993-2011. Our results improve the understanding of the benefits from environmental regulations and contribute to better projections of future agricultural yields and long-term commodity prices.

How have the experiences of black working-class women and men residing in urban, suburban, and rural settings impacted U.S. labor relations and the broader American society? This book asserts that a comprehensive and critical examination of the black working class can be used to forecast whether economic troubles are on the horizon. It documents how the increasing incidence of attacks on unions, the dwindling availability of working-class jobs, and the clamoring by the working class for a minimum wage hike is proof that the atmospheric pressure in America is rising, and that efforts to prepare for the approaching financial storm require attention to the individuals and households who are often overlooked: the black working class.

Where We Stand compares the largest 50 metropolitan regions in the United States across more than 200 variables. Topics include demographics, economics, education, transportation and racial disparity.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the history of Koreatown’s development and identify historic places and cultural heritage for the Korean American community in Los Angeles through the assessment of the cultural significance beyond a focus on architectural aesthetics. The goal of the thesis is not to preserve historic buildings but rather to examine the social and cultural value of Koreatown’s historical development and identify places created by collective memory and public history that are meaningful to the past. Los Angeles has a variety of ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown, Little Tokyo and Thaitown. In particular, Little Tokyo is a Community Design Overlay (CDO) district, and the community is trying to create design guidelines that preserve the quality of its historical community and establish long-term goals for its communal identity. However, even though Korean Americans have been in the Southern California for more than one hundred years and Koreatown has great cultural significance in Los Angeles, it is hard to . . .

We examine gaps between minorities and whites in educational and labor market outcomes, controlling for many covariates including maternal race. Identification comes from different reported races within the family. Estimates show two distinct patterns. First, there are no significant differences in outcomes between black and white males with white mothers. Second, large differences persist between these groups and black males with black mothers. The patterns are insensitive to alternative measures of own race and school fixed effects. Our results suggest that discrimination is not occurring based on the child skin color but through mother-child channels, such as dialect or parenting practices.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, and immediately enacted a provision that allowed young adults to remain on their parents insurance until age 26. In my thesis, I estimate the impact of this provision on access to insurance, and health behaviors of the young. Health behaviors include primary care visits, vaccinations, and emergency room visits. I use a difference-in-differences approach using young adults aged 23-25 as a treatment group and adults aged 27-29 as a comparison group. The expansion provision of the bill led to higher rates of insurance coverage for young adults. There were no statistically significant effects on preventative or primary health care measures in the full sample. Minorities and those without college degrees experienced the highest increases in insurance coverage.

The article marries Michael Porters industrial cluster theory of traded and local clusters to Richard Floridas occupational approach of creative and routine workers to gain a better understanding of the process of economic development. By combining these two approaches, four major industrial-occupational categories are identified. The shares of U.S. Employment in each creative-in-traded, creative-in-local, routine-intraded and routine-in-local are calculated and a correlation analysis is used to examine the relationship of each to regional economic development indicators. Our findings show that economic growth and development is positively related to employment in the creative-in-traded category. While metros with a higher share of creative-in-traded employment enjoy higher wages and incomes overall, these benefits are not experienced by all worker categories. The share of creative-in-traded employment is also positively and significantly associated with higher inequality. After accounting for higher median housing costs, routine workers in both traded and local industries are found to be relatively worse off in metros with high shares of creative-intraded employment, on average.

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that educational achievement strongly predicts economic growth across U.S. states over the past four decades. Based on projections from our growth models, we show the enormous scope for state economic development through improving the quality of schools. While we consider the impact for each state of a range of educational reforms, an improvement that moves each state to the best-performing state would in the aggregate yield a present value of long-run economic gains of over four times current GDP. JEL-Codes: I210, J240, O470.

We examine gaps between minorities and whites in education and labor market outcomes, controlling for many covariates including maternal race. Identification comes from different reported races within the family. Estimates show two distinct patterns. First, there are no significant differences in outcomes between black and white males with white mothers. Second, large differences persist between these groups and black males with black mothers. The patterns are insensitive to alternative measures of own race and school fixed effects. Our results suggest that discrimination is not occurring on the basis of child skin color but through mother-child channels such as dialect or parenting practices.

We study the timing of mothers decision to work following the birth of their children. We document a slow, steady increase in employment that begins after the birth of their children and continues at least until their youngest child is sixteen years old. We go on to assess the causes of this pattern. Our evidence indicates that the rising employment profile is not driven by falling childcare costs, differences in wage opportunities, non-labor income, or a variety of other observable characteristics. Instead, our evidence is consistent with women's reservation wages falling as utility from staying at home declines.