Using data on household portfolios and mortgage originations, we find that households residing in a city with few publicly traded firms headquartered there are more likely to own an investment home nearby. Households in these areas are also less likely to own stocks. This only-game-in-town effect is more pronounced for households living in high credit quality areas, who can access financing to afford a second home. This effect also becomes pronounced for households living in low credit quality areas after 2002 when securitization made it easier for these households to buy second homes. Cities with few local stocks have in equilibrium higher price-to-rent ratios, making it more attractive to rent, and lower (primary residence) homeownership rates.

Segregation in public accommodation was an important feature of African-American life prior to the civil rights movement and among other things adversely affected minority access to business and culture. In this paper we study so-called Negro movie theaters in the postwar era, documenting the effects of racial discrimination and other forces on theater location. The predicted effects of racial bias on entry by theaters is ambiguous. It reduces entry of black-owned theaters by limiting the access to key inputs, while at the same time driving black customers away from white theaters and toward African-American theaters. We find that the effects of racial bias appear to be nonlinear. For much of the country, a greater degree of racial bias is associated with more African-American theaters, though the region with the strongest negative racial attitudes saw far fewer theaters. While Southern states both score higher on quantitative measures of racial bias and had a greater concentration of theaters, our structural estimates of firm entry suggest that the greater number of African-American theaters in the region is due to lower fixed costs in Southern states. Further evidence comes from the effect of competition from white theaters. In general, the presence of white theaters has little impact on African-American theater entry, however as a county's education rises, the presence of white theaters crowds out African-American theaters. This suggests that white theaters are a closer substitute in more racially tolerant areas. From these results, we draw implications for the effect of discrimination and segregation on business enterprise and minority consumption of differentiated products.

We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm the distinctiveness of the names using over five million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina from the early twentieth century. The names we identify in the census records are similarly distinctive in these three independent data sources. Surprisingly, approximately the same percentage of African Americans had "black names" historically as they do today. No name that we identify as a historical black name, however, is a contemporary black name. The literature has assumed that black names are a product of the Civil Rights Movement, yet our results suggest that they are a long-standing cultural norm among African Americans. This is the first evidence that distinctively racialized names existed long before the Civil Rights Era, establishing a new fact in the historical literature.

Incomplete observation is an important yet often neglected feature of observational ecological timeseries. In particular, observational case report timeseries of childhood diseases have played an important role in the formulation of mechanistic dynamical models of populations and metapopulations. Yet to our knowledge, no comprehensive study of childhood disease reporting probabilities (commonly referred to as reporting rates) has been conducted to date. Here, we provide a detailed analysis of measles and whooping cough reporting probabilities in pre-vaccine United States cities and states, as well as measles in cities of England and Wales. Overall, we find the variability between locations and diseases greatly exceeds that between methods or time periods. We demonstrate a strong relationship within location between diseases and within disease between geographical areas. In addition, we find that demographic covariates such as ethnic composition and school attendance explain a non-trivial proportion of reporting probability variation. Overall, our findings show that disease reporting is both variable and non-random and that completeness of reporting is influenced by disease identity, geography and socioeconomic factors. We suggest that variations in incomplete observation can be accounted for and that doing so can reveal ecologically important features that are otherwise obscured.

Historical newspapers are a major source of information for a given place and time. The vast majority of newspaper content, amounting to millions of pages, is still scattered in print collections such as libraries, archives, and historical societies around the world. Over 3,500 newspaper titles have been published in Wisconsin to date. Most contemporary text-based library research tools provide limited options for helping users discover and access this content. Using a nine-county area in central Wisconsin as a pilot study area, this project examines the potential for a web-based GIS to help facilitate discovery and access of geo-referenced historical United States newspaper content currently only available in traditional physical formats.

Employment rates for black men have declined sharply over the last half century. We use data from the 1982-2009 March Population Survey and linear decomposition techniques to examine the mechanisms generating change in employment rates for white and black and men with different levels of education. We find that not only did the overall magnitude of change in employment differ by race and education, but so too did the mechanisms generating change. Black men with less than a college degree experienced sharper declines in employment than did white men and more educated black men. Cohort replacement processes played a more prominent role in employment declines for less educated black men than for other men, who were affected more strongly by intracohort change mechanisms. Stronger cohort replacement effects for less educated black men concentrated joblessness to an unparalleled extent among younger black men with the least formal schooling. Declining employment since the 1960s for this group of men was not primarily the result of economic downturns or layoffs later in life, but rather resulted from the inability of more recent cohorts to secure stable employment. Comparisons of the employment experiences of less educated black men in the metropolises experiencing the most deindustrialization to those of men in other areas reveal that these men experienced greater employment declines not only because more recent cohorts had greater difficulty securing stable employment in early adulthood but also because, within cohorts, they experienced additional job losses associated with aging and changes in the economy.

The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.

Tests of income convergence yield mixed results and omission of spatial effects might be one cause. This paper examines the impact of geographic aggregation and spatial effects on conditional convergence in the United States from 1970 to 2004 at three levels of aggregation. A standard ordinary least squares (OLS) conditional convergence model is first developed. Model diagnostics, however, suggest that a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model is appropriate. OLS and SAR models are compared across scales according to their model fit, diagnostics, convergence evidence and possible correlates. Results indicate that (1) convergence evidence and models are sensitive to spatial effects; (2) spatial models consistently out-perform OLS; (3) model fit is better at larger aggregations, while convergence evidence is strongest at smaller aggregations; and (4) spatial aggregation needs to be an explicit concern in the construction of future convergence models. Factors driving convergence remain generally consistent through impact varies by scale.

This paper offers innovative policy and programmatic solutions that address poor nutrition among underserved populations through housing, including:-Expanding on-site access to healthy foods by partnering with local food assistance programs (such as food banks and food pantries) and facilitating the use of online delivery programs.-Serving as a resource for more economical collective/bulk purchasing.-Crafting and coordinating educational efforts in partnership with schools, public health organizations and other entities that also provide nutritional information.-Utilizing resident services and common space to reinforce messages from other institutions to fill key gaps in outreach and promote a culture of healthy eating in everyday life.-Connecting families to healthy foods by encouraging mixed-use development, expanding transit, and adopting housing-based solutions.

The vast empirical literature on wage differentials reflects extreme interest in the subject from economists, social scientists, and policymakers alike. A review of the literature reveals two noticeable shortcomings. First, nearly all past studies have assumed a linear relationship between earnings and worker characteristics without consideration as to the potential specification error this imposes on their estimates. Second, researchers have generally focused on simple mean effects rather than estimating the effects of characteristics and wage rates on earnings distributions as a whole. Using data from the American Community Survey, this dissertation addresses both issues with a simple nonparametric approach, and applies the method to measure wage differentials between federal and private sector workers, as well as wage differences between males and females.

In this article I illustrate how the diffusion of a skill-neutral technology may lead to a skill-biased impact on the economy. While the model is consistent with well-known stylized facts, it generates distinctive predictions that are again in line with the data. In particular, the model postulates a close link between the skill premium and the differential firm size wage premium between skill groups. By only exploiting differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups and rising TFP-dispersion across firms, the model accounts for a third of the sharp increase in the skill premium in U.S. manufacturing from 1977 to 1997.

The basic contours of the Amish economic transformation over the past few decades have been well documented, including the demographic squeeze that pushed many Amish out of farming, their embrace of cottage industries and, to a lesser extent, factory labor, and the social and cultural dilemmas created by successful entrepreneurship. Yet the effects of increasing market entanglement on the distribution of income and assets in Amish communities are still poorly understood. In this exploratory study, we draw on publicly available data from the U.S. Census, the Ohio Amish Directory, and records from real estate transactions to map out the distribution of income and land wealth in one predominantly Amish-populated Census Tract in Holmes County, OH. Our findings illustrate economic differentiation within the Amish community, as well as the ways in which affiliation and church leadership are associated with land holdings. Our case study raises important questions about growing economic inequalities that merit further exploration.

An economic model of crime gives policymakers a basis to understand how income inequality and population density relate to crime at the neighborhood level. This study reveals a negative and significant relationship between population density in Census tracts and both property and violent crime rates. It finds ambiguous results that vary by city for income inequality. This cross-sectional analysis of Census tracts in Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas uses crime and demographic data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study. This study also yields interesting results about the importance of residential stability for crime prevention and comments on possible urban design tools for crime reduction.

Since the Obama administration launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, which offers temporary relief from deportation and the right to apply for work authorization for certain unauthorized immigrants who came to the United States as children, 55 percent of the 1.2 million youth who immediately met the program's criteria have applied, according to MPI estimates. As the first two-year eligibility period draws to a close, early DACA beneficiaries have begun to apply for renewal, with nearly 25,000 renewal applications submitted as of July 20, 2014.

This study compares trends in workfamily context by education level from 1976 to 2011 among U.S. women. The major aim is to assess whether differences in workfamily context by education level widened, narrowed, or persisted. We used data from the 19762011 March Current Population Surveys on women aged 2564 (n = 1,597,914). We compare trends in four workfamily forms by education level within three race/ethnic groups. The workfamily forms reflect combinations of marital and employment status among women with children at home. Trends in the four workfamily forms exhibited substantial heterogeneity by education and race/ethnicity. Educational differences in the workfamily forms widened mainly among white women. Compared with more-educated peers, white women without a high school credential became increasingly less likely to be married, to be employed, to have children at home, and to combine these roles. In contrast, educational differences in the workfamily forms generally narrowed among black women and were directionally mixed among Hispanic women. Only one formunmarried and employed with children at homebecame more strongly linked to a womans education level within all three race/ethnic groups. This form carries an elevated risk of workfamily conflict and its prevalence increased moderately during the 35-year period. Taken together, the trends underscore recent calls to elevate workfamily policy on the national agenda.

BackgroundThe prevalence of food allergy is thought to be increasing, but data from the United States have not been systematically synthesized.ObjectivesTo summarize the data on prevalence of food allergy in the US pediatric population and to estimate the effects of time, race/ethnicity, and method of assessing food allergy on the estimated prevalence.MethodsEmbase, MEDLINE, bibliographies of identified reports, and data from publically available data sets were searched. Studies were limited to those in English with data from the general pediatric US population. Study synthesis was performed by meta-analysis and meta-regression to estimate the effect of study- and participant-level covariates. Meta-regression was limited to nationally representative surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.ResultsA total of 10,090 publications were identified, from which 27 different survey administrations, representing 452,237 children, were identified, covering the period of 1988 to 2011. Because of heterogeneity among surveys in the estimated food allergy prevalence, a summary estimate of food allergy prevalence was not possible. Meta-regression was performed using 20 of these surveys. Temporal trends were pronounced, with an estimated increased prevalence of self-reported food allergy of 1.2 percentage points per decade (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.7-1.6). The increase per decade varied by race/ethnicity: 2.1% among non-Hispanic blacks (95% CI, 1.5%-2.7%), 1.2% among Hispanics (95% CI, 0.7%-1.7%), and 1.0% among non-Hispanic whites (95% CI, 0.4%-1.6%).ConclusionSelf-report of food allergy among US children has sharply increased in the past 2 decades. The increase has been greatest among non-Hispanic black children, a disparity that needs to be investigated

Medicaid reimburses health care providers for medical services at a lower rate than any other type of insurance coverage. To make up for the burden of treating Medicaid patients, providers claim that they must raise the rates of individuals covered by private insurance a phenomenon referred to as cost-shifting. The current literature attempting to identify and measure the degree of cost shifting in the US health care market has produced mixed results. In this paper, I examine cost-shifting with a new identification strategy where I exploit a Medicaid expansion for the disabled where for every new Medicaid enrollee another individual dropped private coverage, creating an opportunity for significant cost-shifting. Using the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Projects Nationwide Inpatient Sample, I first replicate previous findings from the March Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation and demonstrate that there is 100 percent crowd-out from these particular Medicaid expansions. Next, I find that hospitals reduce the charge rates of the privately insured, a result that is consistent with profit maximization in the simple two-sector mixedeconomy model outlined by Sloan et al. (1978). The results suggest that hospitals are not employing cost-shifting strategies as they claim.

In recent years, the intelligence and defense communities have indicated interest in understanding the potential relationships between anomalous climate events and socio-economic consequences outside of the United States that could have implications for US national security. Our research evaluates potential linkages between retrospective climate analyses and empirical socio-economic datasets in Somalia and Kenya surrounding the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa. Subnational-level data on internally displaced persons in Somalia from 2008 2012 were used to correlate drought-related population movements to climate-model-derived moisture indices. The analysis was expanded to account for livelihood zones and to investigate the predictive capabilities of linear models for observed population movements. Additional analyses investigated market price response to drought and market connectivity and explored the use of census data on household water infrastructure to assess drought vulnerability of specific communities. Results suggest that drought-induced migration response occurred with low but significant correlations across a broad range of medium- to long-term (6 months to 4 years) standardized drought indices but was limited largely to the geographic area in southern Somalia subject to a confluence of three factors: al-Shabaab governance during the 2011 drought, associated legal and operational impediments to aid delivery, and non-arid seasonality patterns.

Ahead of Mothers Day, a new report offers a geographic and historical look at working motherhood in the U.S.

This article discusses the impact changes to the retirement age may have on the distribution of retirement time. The author investigates the length of time men and women are alive between the date of their retirement and their death, finding that the most critical factor in determining length of retirement time is and individual’s socio-economic status. As a result, the author opines that because individuals in lower economic classes tend to die earlier, increasing the retirement age will impact these individuals disproportionally and increase retirement time inequality.