Climate variability affects and impacts human society in different ways, depending on the underlying socioeconomic and demographic vulnerability of specific places, social groups, households and individuals. This differential vulnerability presents spatial and temporal variations, and is rooted in historical patterns of development and relations between human and ecological systems. This paper aims to (a) identify and map critical areas or hotspots of vulnerability to climate variability and its evolution over time (1980-2010), and (b) identify internal variation or differential vulnerability within these areas, using newly available integrated data from the Terra Populus project. These data include geo-referenced climate data, and data describing demography and socioeconomic characteristics of individuals, households and places. This study focus on Southern Brazil Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul and assess the impact of climate variability on livelihoods and well-being, and their changes over time and across space, for rural and urban populations.

Racial disparity in family incomes remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years in the United States despite major legal and social reforms. Previous scholarship presents two primary explanations for persistent inequality through a period of progressive change. One highlights continuity: because socioeconomic status is transmitted from parents to children, disparities created through histories of discrimination and opportunity denial may dissipate slowly. The second highlights change: because family income results from joining individual earnings in family units, changing family compositions can offset individuals' changing economic chances. I examine whether black-white family income inequality trends are better characterized by the persistence of existing disadvantage (continuity) or shifting forms of disadvantage (change). I combine cross-sectional and panel analysis using Current Population Survey, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Census, and National Vital Statistics data. Results suggest that African Americans experience relatively extreme intergenerational continuity (low upward mobility) and discontinuity (high downward mobility); both helped maintain racial inequality. Yet, intergenerational discontinuities allow new forms of disadvantage to emerge. On net, racial inequality trends are better characterized by changing forms of disadvantage than by continuity. Economic trends were equalizing but demographic trends were disequalizing; as family structures shifted, family incomes did not fully reflect labor-market gains.

My presentation will review the opportunities and challenges for collecting new sources of international data and for using the data to test theory. First, I will look at the national and cultural context of religion and introduce some of the most recent cross-national data collections. Building on this introduction, I will review the opportunities these new data collections offer for exploring new research questions and testing old theoretical queries. Second, I will look at religion within countries. Here I will stress the importance of exploring the interactions between religions as well as understanding the distinctive religious beliefs, behaviors and spiritual experiences of each religion. Once again, I will introduce new data sources and propose theoretical and substantive issues that should be addressed. Finally, I will discuss how levels of analysis can be combined to better test the theoretical questions we are posing, allowing us to assess how individual decision-making is made within a local and national context. For each of these areas, I offer examples from my own research on how the data can be used and I discuss the implications of the new data for future research and theory.

This paper develops a new theoretical and empirical framework for analyzing occupational choice and career progression, focusing on the role of pre-labor market skills in determining career outcomes. I propose a model of occupational choice in which a worker's skill vector determines his choice of occupation tasks. Skills grow with experience through learning-by-doing in a way that may be related to the initial occupation. To obtain a rich account of pre-market skills and individual career trajectories, I merge the NLSY79 and 97 with O*Net data on the task content of occupations. I find that pre-market skills as measured by the ASVAB test scores(math, verbal, mechanical, and science) and an interpersonal skill measure predict the corresponding task content of the workers' initial occupations, even after controlling for general skill measures like education. I then ask how the relationships between skills and occupations evolve as workers gain experience. Pre-market skills have long-lasting e ffects on career outcomes. Career trajectories are similar across worker skill types, implying that initial diff erences in occupation persist over the course of a career. The change in the tasks performed by a typical worker over the first 25 years of his career is equivalent to the diff erence in tasks associated with about 2.3 years of education. I provide two policy-relevant applications of this framework. First, I study the role played by pre-market skills in the diff ering occupational outcomes of men and women. The ASVAB scores account for a portion of occupational gender gaps, including 70% of the gap in science and engineering occupations. Occupational gender gaps also persist over the course of a career. Second, I quantify the e ffect of layoff s on occupational attainment and career trajectory. I fi nd that a layoff erases about one-fourth of a worker's total career increase in task content, but within 3 years, this eff ect is typically undone.

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

The Portland Metropolitan Area, OR, is known for introducing growth boundaries to contain urban sprawl in the United States of America. This controversial policy is charged of pushing up housing price and intensifying road congestion. This paper updates the debate by examining the existing empirical evidences up to 2010 in comparison with other metropolitan areas where urban growth is less regulated. Portland’s regional planning’s results are mixed. It contains urban growth efficiently, but it also has unwanted side-effects that support the Conservative’s critics of regional planning.

Esta tesis tiene como objetivo principal analizar c´omo la cobertura de distintos niveles de educaci´on en la poblaci´on afectan causalmente a la innovaci´on tecnol´ogica. Usando datos de panel para las generaciones que nacieron en los distintos estados de EEUU entre 1910 y 1939, se estudia el efecto de la cobertura de educaci´on secundaria y terciaria en variables que tienen relaci´on con los niveles de gasto en Investigaci´on y Desarrollo de cada observaci´on. Por medio de un m´etodo de estimaci´on de m´ınimos cuadrados en dos etapas (2SLS) se concluye que los niveles de educaci´on terciaria tienen un efecto significativo y positivo en la innovaci´on tecnol´ogica, mientras que la educaci´on secundaria no tiene efecto significativo.

This work investigates how the provision of a variety of public policies affects individual life-cycle decisions. In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by considering a dynamic interaction between extending health insurance coverage and the demand for federal disability insurance. I argue that as the ACA provides insurance cover-age to the uninsured, it improves this group's health and reduces their demand for federal disability insurance. In order to provide a quantitative assessment of this dynamic link, I extend the Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari incomplete markets model by endogenizing health accumulation and disability decisions. Findings suggest that the ACA reduces the fraction of working-age people receiving disability benefits from 5.7 to 4.9 percent. Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of social security survivors benefits and argues that survival benefits provide insurance against the heterogeneity of mortality rates. Specifically, the provision of survivors benefits mitigates the inequality induced by within cohort mortality differences and the associated price variations in the private life insurance market. Further, survivors benefits also help insure the uncertainties of income shocks and life events. The risk spreading provided by survivors benefits, however, is funded via taxes that distort individual decisions. Counterfactual results from a dynamic model suggest that removing survivors benefits for dependent children and aged spouses generates an ex-ante utility change equivalent to a 0.3 percent decline and 0.8 percent increase of permanent consumption, respectively. In Chapter 4, considering that people choose both years of education and their area of specialization, I estimate the impacts of technological progress and immigration on educational choices of native-born Americans. Results derived from a general equilibrium model suggest that these two changes lead to opposite effects on educational choices. In particular, the influx of immigrants reduces natives' incentives to complete college degrees and major in natural sciences and engineering fields.

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings withinestablishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

There is a gap in existing literature in regards to the role of community in understanding the motivations of Civil War soldiers. Current historiographical studies try to apply the same motivational factors to entire states, armies, or to all Union or Confederate soldiers in general. Some historians even attempt to show that regardless of Union or Confederate, soldiers motivations were similar due to a shared American identity. This thesis explores a community in the mountain valleys of present-day Southwest Virginia, which stayed loyal to Richmond and the Confederacy. This case study of Montgomery County illustrates that enlistment motivations varied based on a mixture of internal and external factors distinctive to a soldiers community; therefore, there cannot be a representative sample of the Confederate Army that covers all the nuances that makes each community unique. Enlistment was both a personal decision and one influenced by the environment. Montgomery County soldiers were the product of their community that included external factors such as slavery, occupation, and class, and internal ideological themes such as honor, masculinity, and patriotism, that compelled them to enlist in the Confederate Army in the first year of the war, April 1861 through April 1862. These men enlisted to protect their status quo when it was convenient for them to leave their home and occupation, and if they had fewer family obligations.

This paper proposes that the decline in federal disability insurance (DI) screening stringency raises the incentive of being uninsured. To support it, we provide a theoretical model and empirical evidence.

Research on early compulsory schooling laws finds minimal effects on attendance but fails to investigate heterogeneous effects. Similarly, research proposes limited contexts in which expansion policies can increase equality but has difficulty separating policy and cohort effects. Capitalizing on within-country variation in timing of early compulsory laws, passed 1852 to 1918, I ask whether they improved equality of school attendance or educational attainment by class, nativity, and race. Based on census data, compulsory laws increased equality of attendance and attainment, particularly among young men in the North, where the laws reduced class and race gaps by over 20%. Early compulsory schooling laws provided hidden gains, missed in previous analyses, suggesting policies that raise minimum schooling can increase educational equality in certain contexts.

Irish Speakers & the Empire City is a collaborative endeavor to try to identify and record the household information of residents of New York City born in Ireland who claimed Irish (Gaelic) as their mother tongue on the 1910 census. It is estimated that somewhere between 54,000 and 75,000 speakers of the Irish language were resident in New York City between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth centuryapproximately 20-25% of the overall Irish population in the city. Irish was, in other words, one of the many languages spoken in this dynamic immigrant city other than English at the turn of the centuryalbeit one whose history has been difficult to track down. This web project, in addition to building a volunteer-sourced dataset of NYC residents who claimed Irish as a mother tongue, utilizes IPUMS data to offer a broader perspective on the demographics and linguistic backgrounds of the Irish-born in NYC as a whole.

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career progression. This paper uses a range of US and UK data to document a more disturbing long-run effect of recessions: young people who leave school in the midst of recessions are significantly more likely to lead a life of crime than those graduating into a buoyant labour market. These effects are long lasting and substantial.

Historical demography, which is the study of human population dynamics in the past, is central for understanding human behaviours and traits, such as fertility, mortality and migration. An important factor in demographic research is the geographic context. Where people lived often determined their social ties, exposure to diseases and economic development. Such information is essential not only for historical demographic research but also for a wide range of disciplines. While the geographic context on an aggregated level has an important role in longitudinal historical studies, geographic contexts on a micro-level have only played a minor role. This licentiate contributes to historical demographic research by studying how geographic factors on the micro-level can be included in longitudinal historical analyses. A primary focus is the methodological development for creating longitudinally detailed locations that can be linked to individuals in demographic databases. This research should offer a variety of possibilities for studying how geographic factors on the micro-level affected human living conditions throughout history. The thesis has four research objectives. The first objective is to extend a standardised data model for longitudinal demographic data to include geographic data. This is achieved by introducing IDS-Geo, which is a geographically extended version of the standardised data model IDS. The second objective is to develop and evaluate harmonisation methods to ensure that source data comply with standardised data models. This is achieved by testing and developing a method for first harmonising Swedish environmental data and metadata and then testing the data for compliance against standardised data models and specifications. The third objective is to develop a methodology for creating integrated longitudinal demographic and geographic databases that include geographic factors on the micro-level in demographic research. The core of the methodology is to transform geographic objects in snapshot time representations (digitised from historical maps) into longitudinal object lifeline time representations, and to link individuals to these geographic objects using standardised locations. The methodology is implemented in a case study in which we integrate information from approximately 60 digitised historical maps with longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD). We link 80,431 individuals in five rural parishes in Sweden during 1813-1914 to the property units where they lived. The resulting database is tested using fundamental queries for spatio-temporal data. Additional historical geographic data used for computing context variables are constructed. The results are a unique contribution in terms of linking individuals over such long time periods to longitudinal geographic data on the micro-level. Lastly, the fourth objective of the thesis is to perform longitudinal demographic analyses where geographic factors can subsequently be included. This is performed by analysing the intergenerational effects of child bearing by relatively older women on the longevity of adult offspring in pre-transitional Utah, USA.

These notes, compiled from research conducted in two seemingly disparate study sites, reflect remarkably similar observations and experiences in the field. The rural settings and evidence of subsistence livelihoods illustrate intersecting aspects of women's economic strategies in a transnational context.

This study estimates parents' valuations of small classes by examining the effects of randomly assigned class type on the decision to remove one's child from the Tennessee Student Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment, using a new hedonic estimation strategy that estimates the cash payment that would be required to generate the same difference in attrition rates as was observed between treatment and control groups. In 2010 dollars, our preferred estimates indicate that parents on the margin of sending their children to private schools valued small classes at $2,000-$18,000 per year relative to a cost of $3,000 per student year.