Female life expectancy is currently shorter in the United States than in most high-income countries. This study examines work-family context as a potential explanation. While work-family context changed similarly across high-income countries during the past half century, the United States has not implemented institutional supports, such as universally available childcare and family leave, to help Americans contend with these changes. We compare the United States to Finlanda country with similar trends in work-family life but generous institutional supportsand test two hypotheses to explain US women's longevity disadvantage: (1) US women may be less likely than Finnish women to combine employment with childrearing; and (2) US women's longevity may benefit less than Finnish women's longevity from combining employment with childrearing. We used data from women aged 3060years during 19882006 in the US National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and harmonized it with data from Finnish national registers. We found stronger support for hypothesis 1, especially among low-educated women. Contrary to hypothesis 2, combining employment and childrearing was not less beneficial for US women's longevity. In a simulation exercise, more than 75 percent of US women's longevity disadvantage was eliminated by raising their employment levels to Finnish levels and reducing mortality rates of non-married/non-employed US women to Finnish rates.

We analyze and develop a quantitative model describing the evolution of personal income distribution (PID) for males and females in the U.S. between 1930 and 2014. The overall microeconomic model, which we introduced ten years ago, accurately predicts the change in mean income as a function of age as well as the dependence on age of the portion of people distributed according to the Pareto law. As a result, we have precisely described the change in Gini ratio since the start of income measurements in 1947. The overall population consists of two genders, however, which have different income distributions. The difference between incomes earned by male and female population has been experiencing dramatic changes over time. Here, we model the internal dynamics of mens and womens PIDs separately and then describe their relative contribution to the overall PID. Our original model is refined to match all principal gender-dependent observations. We found that women in the U.S. are deprived of higher job positions (work capital). This is the cause of the long term income inequality between males and females in the U.S. It is unjust to women and has a negative effect on real economic growth. Women have been catching up since the 1960s and that improves the performance of the U.S. economy. It will take decades, however, to full income equality between genders. There are no new defining parameters included in the model except the critical age, when people start to lose their incomes, was split into two critical ages for low-middle incomes and the highest incomes, which obey a power law distribution. Such an extension becomes necessary in order to match the observation that the female population in the earlier 1960s was practically not represented in the highest incomes. In the overall model, male population dominate in the top income range and the difference between two critical ages is masked. Gender versions of the refined model provide consistent quantitative description of the principal features in the male and female income distribution.

T he state and local workforce has changed significantly over the past decade — change that has been reflected in the size of the public labor force, the compensation packages provided to employees, and the ability of governments to manage their talent pipelines. Against this backdrop, a rebounding U.S. economy, decreasing overall unemployment levels, and changing public sector demographics will challenge governments’ recruitment and retention in 2015 and beyond. For each of the past six years, the Center for State and Local Government Excellence (SLGE) has surveyed . . .

ublic transportation projects are some of the most complex and costly components of urban development. While urban sites may develop naturally through the combined and only partially coordinated efforts of countless private groups, they inevitably reach a critical mass which requires the development of a shared infrastructure. While this problem is not unique to the modern era, the size, density, and intensity of modern urban uses demands a level of advanced and extensive transportation infrastructure that is unprecedented. The extreme costliness and impact of this infrastructure makes its design and implementation a difficult and controversial matter, particularly when divergent strategies are possible. Mass transit is not the predominant mode of travel for most twenty first century Americans. Before the automobile era, however, transit modes of all types graced the country’s cities, providing a level of service unmatched by most modern transit systems through high frequency and dense routes. This research investigates the transportation history of Seattle, a prominent but relatively young American city, to determine the critical cultural, political and social factors which led that city to redevelop its transit systems successfully after their initial dismantlement during the early car era. The research will focus on the unique trends which allowed Seattle to avoid the transit stagnation of other cities in the mid to late twenty-first century. Seattle’s contemporary transit conditions are summarized through the use of spatial and survey data and compared to transit conditions from the peak of the historic streetcar era. Contemporary transportation planning documents and processes are considered to yield insight into the unique transportation planning culture of the Seattle region. Finally, the region’s urban and transportation history is reviewed to identify and track the processes most responsible for the city’s relative success in developing modern transit when compared to similar cities.

We find three intertwined ambitions that drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity at the beginning of the 20th Century: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll-call votes over the past century. These votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset's physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socio-economic and geophysical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community's resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users' current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

I examine how production of a child labor-intensive crop (cotton) affected schooling in the early twentieth-century American South. Because cotton production may be endogenous, presence of an agricultural pest (the boll weevil) is employed as an instrument. Using newly collected county-level data for Georgia, I find a 10 percent reduction in cotton caused a 2 percent increase in black enrollment rate, but had little effect on white enrollment. The shift away from cotton following the boll weevil's arrival explains 30 percent of the narrowing of the racial differential in enrollment rates between 1914 and 1929.

Existing research on occupational segregation measures the degree of under- and overrepresentation of a group in an occupation given that group’s expected level of representation; the occupational crowding hypothesis posits that the expected level of representation is based on the share of the group with the educational attainment level possessed by the majority of the occupation’s workers (Bergmann 1971). Black men are overrepresented in low-wage occupations, and underrepresented in high-wage occupations, even after controlling for education (Bergmann 1971; Gibson, Darity, and Myers 1998; Hamilton, Austin and Darity 2011). The occupational crowding hypothesis indicates that the crowding of black workers into low-wage occupations is due to: (1) employers’ desire not to associate with blacks; (2) employers’ perception that black workers are less productive; (3) employers’ fear of reprisal from white customers or employees. Since occupational crowding research typically ignores the effect of business cycles on occupational sorting, this research examines whether the Great Recession exacerbated the occupational crowding of black men in the U.S

This study explores gentrification and displacement of vulnerable residents that may be happening in the Denver neighborhoods of Globeville and Elyria-Swansea. These neighborhoods contain an underprivileged, mostly Latino population. They have endured poverty, poor street connectivity, substandard sidewalks and lights, and vehicular pollution. A series of public projects are planned for these neighborhoods, including a major expansion to Interstate 70, a renovation of the National Western Center, and construction of new commuter rail lines with three new stations in Globeville and Elyria-Swansea. These projects may stimulate gentrification with displacement of underprivileged residents in these neighborhoods. These projects will also displace Globeville and Elyria-Swansea residents through the demolition of homes and businesses in the way of these projects

This paper examines the role that federal and especially state tax policies play in mitigating income inequality. The results show that the tax code reduces income inequality considerably in all states. All of this income compression is attributable to federal taxes, as state taxes, on average, widen the after-tax income distribution slightly. Nevertheless, there is very substantial cross-state variation in the impact of state tax policies. The paper further documents that the mitigating influence of taxes on income inequality has risen since the early 1980s, with the increase at the state level due mostly to changes to the tax code.

More than 1000 cities in the United States have signed the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement, yet few have created comprehensive estimates of their energy consumption and carbon emissions footprints. In this paper, we provide estimates of both of these measures for residential and commercial buildings in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. over the 2000-2010 period. This tracks the progress towards sustainable development in major urban areas nationally, identifying leaders and laggards, as well as opportunities for improvement. This research also offers real-world policy relevance for energy efficiency efforts in the urban areas where the vast majority of U.S. GDP is produced.

Genetic understanding of smoking is advancing rapidly. Three recent studies discovered variants in nicotinic receptor genes that impact measured smoking behavior. We document associations between these variants and multiple smoking and health outcomes available in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Although these variants are associated with relatively modest differences in measures of past smoking intensity, we find substantial effects on later-life health and mortality outcomes. To understand this set of reduced-form patterns, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of smoking, health, and mortality that explicitly incorporates genetic heterogeneity. Structural estimates will allow us to understand the mechanisms by which these genes operate (preferences v.s. addiction dynamics), shedding light on how policies differentially affect individuals by genotype. The estimated model will permit counterfactual simulations assessing the consequences of genetic testing interventions that provide individuals with more information about their predisposition for addiction.

This thesis provides a contextual analysis of how changing demographics in the United States have been related to contemporary trends of Mainline decline and Conservative growth using four denominations as examples. This is accomplished using spatial fixed effects regression on data at the county-level for the 1980-2010 time period. I focus on socio- demographic changes such as racial-ethnic and socioeconomic changes, as well as general population change dynamics (i.e. natural increase and migration) that provide environments favorable for some denominations’ growth and not others. I rely on an organizational ecology and socio-demographic niche framework, which conceptualizes religious denominations as normative organizations that draw from sub-populations as their primary resource. A set of hypotheses are tested for the six contextual variables included in the analyses. Findings partially support the general hypothesis that growth is most guaranteed when resource (i.e. people) changes have a stable source such as natural increase, when the denomination has the right religious products and membership composition (i.e. niche components) to attract growing segments of the population, as well as emphasizing membership growth in the denomination’s evangelism strategy.

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 Siikam¨aki 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

Although more and more research shows that diversity is good for business, workforce statistics released by Silicon Valley technology companies show a startling lack of diversity. National statistics show higher unemployment rates for people of color with science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, degrees than their white counterparts. At a time when STEM employment is increasingly important to the American economy, Americas old prejudices should not be allowed to hamper the nations future.

Although the United States is regarded as having a well-developed and deep financial system, financial inclusion continues to be a challenge for many communities and households. Using four databases with over 4 million data points and a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methodology, we developed the Financial Inclusion Metropolitan Index (FIMI) for 251 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, to help us identify the main determinants behind financial inclusion. The results from the multi-dimensional index (FIMI) show that technology is the most important contributor to financial inclusion in U.S. metropolitan areas, specifically mobile, internet and computer access, as well as digital account access and use. Results from a separate individual-level analysis confirm the importance of technology, race, citizenship and inequality as key determinants of financial inclusion in the U.S. However, we also find that they are less apt at explaining other financial outcomes such as uptake of savings accounts, being a lasting participant of formal financial sector or using alternative financial services.

This paper studies the role of occupational segregation in explaining the low wages among first, second and third generation Mexican immigrants in the United States. Mexican-Americans earn lower wages than African-Americans mainly because they possess less human capital. With respect to Americans of European descent, their lower wages are also a product of their smaller rewards for skills and underrepresentation at the top of the occupational structure. Occupational segregation constitutes an important part of the wage gap between natives and Mexican-born immigrants. For subsequent generations, the contribution of occupational segregation to the wage gap varies significantly between groups and according to the decomposition used.

This dissertation explores the impact of perception on labor market outcomes in three contexts. The first chapter uses NELS:88 data to examine the differential impact of subject specific self-perception on education choices and labor market outcomes. I find that test scores, grades and perception are all positive and statistically significant indicators of the years of education attained, and dissonance between the measures does not appear to affect investment in education. However, perception outperforms test scores when predicting later wages. These findings challenge the standard assumption that individuals have perfect information about their ability, and points to the importance of understanding self-perception in explaining future success. The second chapter uses 2000 Census data to determine if there are country level differences in the returns to education for Hispanic males who migrated as adults. It also explores if similar country level effects are present in the returns to Hispanic males . . .

The resistance of Sub-Saharan Africans to diseases that were plaguing the southern United States contributed to the establishment of African slavery in those regions. Specifically, Africans' resistance to malaria increased the profitability of employing African slave labor, especially that of slaves coming from the most malaria-ridden parts of Africa. In this paper, I first document that African slavery was largely concentrated in the malaria-infested areas of the United States. Moreover, I show that the introduction of a virulent strain of malaria into US colonies greatly increased the share of African slaves, but only in states where malaria could thrive. Finally, by looking at the historical prices of African slaves, I show that enslaved individuals born in the most malaria-ridden African regions commanded higher prices.