Scholars have studied the U.S. banking systems of the late 19th century, but the presence and influence of mutual savings banks has largely gone unexamined. A new annual database of New England banks shows that mutual savings banks had a significant presence in the postbellum banking system. Mutual savings banks accounted for about 75 percent of the region's total bank deposits and largely avoided financial panics. The banks seemed to have complemented rather than competed with national banks. Mutual savings bank growth was correlated with agriculture and urbanization, whereas national bank growth was correlated with manufacturing. Mutual savings banks also channeled significant funds to national banks through the interbank network.

In this paper, I estimate the differential effects of compulsory schooling laws on school quality between black and white schools in the United States segregated South. I employ state-level data on length of school terms and pupilteacher ratios to examine these responses. Other literature has found that stricter compulsory schooling legislation failed to impact black students education levels in terms of years of schooling, while having a modest increase on white students years of schooling. I find that an increase in the age at which a child could receive a work permit led to a small increase in the term length in black schools relative to white schools. On the whole, however, the differential effects on school quality are small in scope and magnitude. This finding suggests that in the context I examine, changes in school quality are a minor issue when using compulsory schooling laws as an instrument for educational attainment or when estimating the overall impact of compulsory schooling laws on educational attainment.

In this paper, we fill the gap in the existing literature on the causal effects of rising inequality on human capital investment. First, we propose an instrumentation strategy that yields a vector of instruments from a predicted local wage distribution by interacting initial industry employment shares at the metropolitan level with changes to the within-industry distribution of wages at the national level. With this instrumentation strategy, we are able to separately analyze the causal impact of changing inequality from changes in mean income on postsecondary enrollments. This paper establishes an empirical fact: predicted increases in local wage inequality depress rates of enrollment in postsecondary schooling. In our main analysis on community college enrollments, we find that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of changes in wage inequality corresponds to a 2.05 percentage point decrease in first-year, full-time aggregate community college enrollments. Further, we find evidence of a causal relationship between rising local inequality and residential sorting on an income basis which sheds light on a possible mechanism driving our main result. The instrumentation strategy introduced in this paper could allow researchers to assess the causal relationship between inequality and other economic phenomena.

This paper estimates the effect that the closure and demolition of roughly 20,000 units of geographically concentrated high-rise public housing had on crime in Chicago. We estimate local effects of closures on crime in the neighborhoods where high-rises stood and in proximate neighborhoods. We also estimate the impact that households displaced from high-rises had on crime in the neighborhoods to which they moved and neighborhoods close to those. Overall, reductions in violent crime in and near the areas where high-rises were demolished greatly outweighed increases in violent crime associated with the arrival of displaced residents in new neighborhoods.

Despite sustained increases in material standards of living, fear of the adverse employment consequences of technological advancement has recurred repeatedly. This represents a paradox of abundance: technological change threatens social welfare not because it intesifies scarcity but because it augments abundance. For most citizens of market economics, the primary income-generating asset they possess is their scarce labor. If rapid technological advances were to effectively substitute cheap and abundant capital for (previously) expensive and willful labor, society would be made wealthier, not poorer, in aggregate, but those who own labor but do not own capital might find it increasingly challenging to make a living. This chapter considers why automation anxiety has suddenly become salient in popular and academic discourse. It offers informed conjectures on the potential implications of these developments for employment and earnings.

This thesis contains three studies on national and local college wage premia, skill premia, and implications of geographic mobility for local wages. The second chapter investigates the reasons for problems with the standard supply-demand model of skill premium. This chapter shows that the problems of canonical model can be explained by mismeasurement of skills and skill prices. The standard approach assumes changes in wages are driven by changes in skill prices alone, and not by skill levels. We re-estimate the canonical model allowing for changes in skill levels over time. The results show that the demand changes have a much smaller role, and that the elasticity of substitution between college and high school labour is higher compared to the standard approach. The model also yields a much better out-of-sample prediction for the college wage premium. The third chapter examines whether implications of the canonical model continue to hold at the Census regional level using the more general approach in the second chapter. Relaxing the assumption of constant skill levels, this chapter shows that the movements in relative wages mask important trend differences in relative skill prices across regions. The results show that while the standard approach suggests very different relative demand patterns across regions, the alternative approach shows much closer patterns. In addition, elasticities of substitution between college and high school labour are more similar across regions compared to the standard approach. Therefore, differences in changes in relative skill prices across regions are mainly driven by differences in relative skill supply patterns. The fourth chapter presents recent evidence on the comparison of responsiveness of college and high school graduate wages to local demand shocks in the U.S. This chapter shows that there are significant wage effects of local demand shocks in the 1980s, which decline over time for both groups. Moreover, wage effects are deeper for high school graduates during the 1980s and 1990s, but they converge during the 2000s. This is also accompanied by converging annual inter-state mobility rates between the two education groups compared to the 1980s and 1990s, which confirms the importance of labour reallocation across markets.

U.S. Bank deposits by individuals grew from 4% of GDP at the time of the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 to 23% by the time of the Federal Reserves founding. A comprehensive collection of banklevel data shows that most gains occurred immediately after the Acts, Specie Resumption in 1879, and the Election of 1896, and occurred across banks of all ages and types. Checking accounts, clearinghouses, rising incomes, and urbanization contributed to the increasing preference for deposits, but greater confidence in banks also seems to have been central, with highly capitalized banks from earlier entry cohorts seeing the largest gains.

The U.S. labor force participation rate1 has shrunk rapidly and persistently over the past few decades. 1 The labor force participation rate is the number of people who are either employed or actively looking for work as a share of the population that could be working, excluding those in the armed forces, prison inmates, and residents of nursing homes. 2 Based on authors calculation using Current Population Survey ( In the past dozen years, the labor force participation rate for adults of working age (2165) fell by 3.3%, to 75%2 meaning that fewer adults are working or actively looking for jobs. http://www.census.gov/cps/) from years 2001 2013. Nearly one third of those who havent sought work or who stopped trying to find it are people with disabilities. And although overall U.S. unemployment rates are nearly back to normal after the Great Recession that began in 2007, millions of working-age adults with disabilities are willing to work but do not have jobs and do not count as unemployed. This situation leaves the United States with an even smaller pool of workers to support the recovering economy.

This first chapter uses neighborhood vacancies as a proxy for foreclosures and examines their impact on the value of surrounding neighborhood properties. Often, the negative spillover of a foreclosure results from decay of the foreclosed property. Existence of a foreclosure within a neighborhood is proxied for by a vacant structure within 300 feet of the observed unit, resulting in a lower bound foreclosure externality. Using the special neighbor sample of the American Housing Sample waves 1985, 1989 and 1993, small neighborhoods are observed and categorized into racially different neighborhoods (black, integrated or white neighborhood). Additionally, neighborhood-specific averages are constructed, such as mean income, crime and other characteristics. Estimating an hedonic housing price model, this study finds a decrease of about 15 percent for houses located within close proximity to a vacant structure. The effect is even bigger, approximately 18.5 percent, if a house is located near a vacant house in a black neighborhood vs. a white neighborhood. These results suggest that a negative foreclosure effect exists, but that it differs in magnitude depending on the type of neighborhood as well as the general location of the neighborhood (i.e., city center, urban or rural). The second chapter investigates the impact of a municipality’s financial condition on the housing values within a municipality. The data consist of 68,882 housing units located in 175 cities through 115 MSAs across 42 . . .

Combining administrative data from the U.S. Army, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the U.S. Social Security Administration, we analyze the effect of the VAs Disability Compensation (DC) program on veterans labor force participation and earnings. The largely unstudied Disability Compensation program currently provides income and health insurance to almost four million veterans of military service who suffer service-connected disabilities. We study a unique policy change, the 2001 Agent Orange decision, which expanded DC eligibility for Vietnam veterans who had served in-theatre to a broader set of conditions such as type 2 diabetes. Exploiting the fact that the Agent Orange policy excluded Vietnam era veterans who did not serve in-theatre, we assess the causal effects of DC eligibility by contrasting the outcomes of these two Vietnam-era veteran groups. The Agent Orange policy catalyzed a sharp increase in DC enrollment among veterans who served in-theatre, raising the share receiving benefits by five percentage points over five years. Disability ratings and payments rose rapidly among those newly enrolled, with average annual non-taxed federal transfer payments increasing to $17K within five years. We estimate that benefits receipt reduced labor force participation by 18 percentage points among veterans enrolled due to the policy, though measured income net of transfer benefits rose on average. Consistent with the relatively advanced age and diminished health of Vietnam era veterans in this period, we estimate labor force participation elasticities that are somewhat higher than among the general population.

Historical censuses have an enormous potential for research. In order to fully use this potential, harmonization of these censuses is essential. During the last decades, enormous efforts have been undertaken in digitizing the published aggregated outcomes of the Dutch historical censuses (1795–1971). Although the accessibility has been improved enormously, researchers must cope with hundreds of heterogeneous and disconnected Excel tables. As a result, the census is still for the most part an untapped source of information. The authors describe the main harmonization challenges of the census and how they work toward one harmonized dataset. They propose a specific approach and model in creating an interlinked census dataset in the Semantic Web using the Resource Description Framework technology.

We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in US local labour markets between 1980 and 2007. Labour markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience signicant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labour markets susceptible to computerisation due to specialisation in routine task-intensive activities instead experience occupational polarisation within manufacturing and non-manufacturing but do not experience a net employment decline. Trade impacts rise in the 2000s as imports accelerate, while the effect of technology appears to shift from automation of production activities in manufacturing towards computerisation of information-processing tasks in non-manufacturing.

Spatially targeted interventions may help protect the public when extreme heat occurs. Health outcome data are increasingly being used to map intra-urban variability in heat-health risks, but there has been little effort to compare patterns and risk factors between cities. We sought to identify places within large metropolitan areas where the mortality rate is highest on hot summer days and determine if characteristics of high-risk areas are consistent from one city to another. A Poisson regression model was adapted to quantify temperaturemortality relationships at the postal code scale based on 2.1 million records of daily all-cause mortality counts from seven U.S. cities. Multivariate spatial regression models were then used to determine the demographic and environmental variables most closely associated with intra-city variability in risk. Significant mortality increases on extreme heat days were confined to 1244% of postal codes comprising each city. Places with greater risk had more developed land, young, elderly, and minority residents, and lower income and educational attainment, but the key explanatory variables varied from one city to another. Regression models accounted for 1434% of the spatial variability in heat-related mortality. The results emphasize the need for public health plans for heat to be locally tailored and not assume that pre-identified vulnerability indicators are universally applicable. As known risk factors accounted for no more than one third of the spatial variability in heathealth outcomes, consideration of health outcome data is important in efforts to identify and protect residents of the places where the heat-related health risks are the highest.

We empirically analyze the impact of immigration to the U.S. on the share of votes to the Republicans and Democrats between 1994 and 2012. Our analysis is based on variation across states and years using data from the Current Population Survey merged with election data and addresses the endogeneity of immigrant flows using a novel set of instruments. On average across election types, immigration to the U.S. has a significant and negative impact on the Republican vote share, consistent with the typical view of political analysts in the U.S. This average effect which is driven by elections in the House works through two main channels. The impact of immigration on Republican votes in the House is negative when the share of naturalized migrants in the voting population increases. Yet, it can be positive when the share of non-citizen migrants out of the population goes up and the size of migration makes it a salient policy issue in voters minds. These results are consistent with naturalized migrants being less likely to vote for the Republican Party than native voters and with native voters political preferences moving towards the Republican Party because of high immigration of non-citizens. This second effect, however, is significant only for very high levels of immigrant presence.

By altering the market for private schooling, large-scale school voucher programs may have effects on the educational experience of private school students beyond the effects of small-scale programs. Using eight large, state-level, voucher-style programs adopted between the late 1990s and mid-2000s and a unique dataset on school expenditures and teacher compensation, I estimate the effects of vouchers on educational inputs experienced by students in private school. Large-scale, voucher-style programs alter the inputs students experience in ways that tend to worsen the experience of black students while improving the experience of white students. These effects are driven by changes in inputs deployed at newly established schools. Back-ofthe-envelope calculations indicate that the market effects of vouchers are large enough to substantially reduce the benefits of moving from public to private school for black students, reversing more than 100 percent of the gains in student-teacher ratio, 87 percent of the gain in per-teacher compensation, and 51 percent of the gain in instructional hours. My estimates suggest that extrapolation from prior studies may be inappropriate when considering how larger programs affect students.

The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers or living in single-headed households, the latter of which is concentrated among non-college and minority households and thus particularly affects lower-SES children. A potential contributor to both phenomena is the declining labor market opportunities faced by non-college and minority males, which make these males less valuable as marital partners. We explore the impact of the labor market on the marriage market by exploiting large scale, plausibly exogenous trade-induced shocks to local manufacturing employment, stemming from rising import competition from China. We trace out how these shocks impact marriage, divorce, childbearing, and the prevalence of children growing up in poor and single-parent households. We find that trade shocks between 1990 and 2010 have had quite modest impacts on household structure in aggregate. When we disaggregate these shocks into components affecting male versus female employment, however, we find impacts that are both economically and statistically significant. Import shocks concentrated on male employment reduce marriage rates and fertility, raise the fraction of births due to teen mothers, and, most significantly, increase the fraction of children living either in poverty or in single-headed households. On net, our findings do not suggest that rising import competition from China has been an important contributor to changing marital behavior in this time interval, since these shocks have not been particularly biased against males. But our analysis strongly supports the hypothesis that changes in labor demand that reduce male employment opportunitiesand in particular, the sharp decline in labor market conditions facing non-college U.S. males over the last three decades may be a quantitatively important contributor to the rise in the share of U.S. children living in poor and in single-headed households.

This paper provides a broad overview of the asset ownership characteristics of U.S. Hispanic households. In general, Hispanic households exhibit lower levels of financial asset ownership than the rest of the population across all asset classes. Financial asset ownership among Hispanics is influenced by several socioeconomic factors. Social networks, the prevalence of a collective belief system, and cultural and experiential barriers are also direct contributors to the comparatively low levels of financial asset ownership among Hispanics. This paper provides several strategies that can be implemented by financial institutions and intermediaries to increase financial asset ownership among Hispanics. Financial planners can play a critical role in increasing financial asset ownership by (1) increasing financial education and financial literacy among Hispanics; (2) promoting, supporting, and implementing policies and initiatives that include more Hispanics into the formal financial system; and (3) providing individualized and customized financial planning strategies that incorporate the unique needs of Hispanics living in the U.S.

This article contributes to environmental inequality outcomes research on the spatial and demographic factors associated with cumulative air-toxic health risks at multiple geographic scales across the United States. It employs a rigorous spatial cluster analysis of census tract-level 2005 estimated lifetime cancer risk (LCR) of ambient air-toxic emissions from stationary (e.g., facility) and mobile (e.g., vehicular) sources to locate spatial clusters of air-toxic LCR risk in the continental United States. It then tests intersectional environmental inequality hypotheses on the predictors of tract presence in air-toxic LCR clusters with tract-level principal component factor measures of economic deprivation by race and immigrant status. Logistic regression analyses show that net of controls, isolated Latino immigrant-economic deprivation is the strongest positive demographic predictor of tract presence in air-toxic LCR clusters, followed by black-economic deprivation and isolated Asian/Pacific Islander immigrant-economic deprivation. Findings suggest scholarly and practical implications for future research, advocacy, and policy.