Reliable estimates of the magnitude and frequency of floods are essential for the design of transportation and water-conveyance structures, flood-insurance studies, and flood-plain management. Such estimates are particularlyimportant in densely populated urban areas. In orderto increase the number of streamflow-gaging stations(streamgages) available for analysis, expand the geographical coverage that would allow for application of regional regression equations across State boundaries, and build on a previous flood-frequency investigation of rural U.S. Geological Survey streamgages in the Southeast UnitedStates, a multistate approach was used to update methods fordetermining the magnitude and frequency of floods in urbanand small, rural streams that are not substantially affected by regulation or tidal fluctuations in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The at-site flood-frequency analysis of annual peak-flow data for urban and small, rural streams (through September 30, 2011) included 116 urban streamgages and 32 small, rural streamgages, defined in this report as basins draining less than 1 square mile. The regional regression analysis included annual peak-flow data from an additional 338 rural streamgages previously included in U.S. Geological Survey flood-frequency reports and 2 additional rural streamgages in North Carolina that were not included in the previous Southeast rural flood-frequency investigation for a total of 488 streamgages included in the urban and small, rural regression analysis. The at-site flood-frequency analyses for the urban and small, rural streamgages included the expected moments algorithm, which is a modification of the Bulletin 17B log-Pearson type III method for fitting the statistical distribution to the logarithms of the annual peak flows. Where applicable, the flood-frequency analysis also included low-outlier and historic information. Additionally, the application of a generalized Grubbs-Becks test allowed for the detection of multiple potentially influential low outliers. Streamgage basin characteristics were determined using geographical information system techniques. Initial ordinary least squares regression simulations reduced thenumber of basin characteristics on the basis of such factorsas statistical significance, coefficient of determination,Mallows Cp statistic, and ease of measurement of theexplanatory variable. Application of generalized leastsquares regression techniques produced final predictive(regression) equations for estimating the 50-, 20-, 10-, 4-,2-, 1-, 0.5-, and 0.2-percent annual exceedance probabilityflows for urban and small, rural ungaged basins for threehydrologic regions (HR1, PiedmontRidge and Valley; HR3,Sand Hills; and HR4, Coastal Plain), which previously hadbeen defined from exploratory regression analysis in theSoutheast rural flood-frequency investigation. Because of the limited availability of urban streamgages in the Coastal Plain of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, additional urban streamgages in Florida and New Jersey were used in the regression analysis for this region. Including the urban streamgages in New Jersey allowed for the expansion of the applicability of the predictive equations in the Coastal Plain from 3.5 to 53.5 square miles. Average standard error of prediction for the predictive equations, which is a measure of the average accuracy of the regression equations when predicting flood estimates for ungaged sites, range from 25.0 percent for the 10-percent annual exceedance probability regression equation for the PiedmontRidge and Valley region to 73.3 percent for the 0.2-percent annual exceedance probability regression equation for the Sand Hills region.

This paper provides direct empirical evidence about how technology affects firms' global sourcing strategies. Using new data on U.S. firms' decisions to contract for manufacturing services from domestic or foreign suppliers, I estimate a large differential impact of firm communication technology on the probability of fragmentation across industries. The effect of firm technology is more than two standard deviations higher in industries whose production specifications are easier to codify in an electronic format, relative to industries in which they are not. The data also show that communication technology lowers coordination costs disproportionately more for domestic rather than foreign fragmentation. This finding highlights the importance of domestic fragmentation as an alternative to offshoring and can be explained by complementarities between technology and worker skills.

Once thought to be a disease of the past, tuberculosis is making a worldwide resurgence due to the advent of drug resistant strains of the disease. As out pharmacological weapons become less effective, some are calling for a return of sanitaria, institutions from the time before antibiotics that have been credited for causing a pre-antibiotic decline in tuberculosis mortality. However, no quantitative studies have been conducted to validate this claim and there has been no research that has identified the primary mechanism through which sanitaria could have made such an impact. Using data from North Carolina, this paper measures the impact of sanitaria on the decline in tuberculosis mortality. Results from an instrumental variables approach indicate that access to an additional sanitaria bed reduced the death rate from tuberculosis for white residents by .695 per 100,000 and had no impact for black residents. Interpreting these results through the lens of an epidemiological and through reducing the likelihood of disease transmission by educating the public in hygienic practices.

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America.

Few studies have examined the relationship between education and diabetes among men in the United States and whether this relationship differs by race/ethnicity. This study examined whether racial disparities in diabetes existed by educational attainment in 336,746 non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic men 18 years of age and older in the United States. Logistic regression models were specified to examine the odds of reporting diabetes by educational attainment. Within race/ethnicity, both White and Hispanic men who had less than a high school education (odds ratio [OR] = 1.42, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.19, 1.69], and OR = 1.64, 95% CI = [1.22, 2.21], respectively) had consistently higher odds of diabetes than men with a bachelor's degree or higher level of educational attainment. Educational attainment did not appear to be associated with reporting a diagnosis of diabetes in non-Hispanic Black men. Identifying why educational attainment is associated with diabetes outcomes in some racial/ethnic groups but not others is essential for diabetes treatment and management.

Aging-dependent diseases are largely a consequence of the underlying chronic degenerative accompaniments of aging with incidences expected to increase exponentially with age. Ischemic stroke should be aging because much of the underlying pathology is a consequence of aging. National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) from 1970 to 2009 were analyzed to define secular trends in sex- and age-specific ischemic stroke incidence. Over the 40 years, sex-specific distributions demonstrated exponentially increasing ischemic stroke incidence with age supporting the notion of ischemic stroke as an aging-dependent disease. Using NHDS data we next examined carotid endarterectomies (CEA) performed in the United States from 1970 through 2010, and the recent introduction of carotid angioplasty and stenting (CAS). Two substantial rises in CEA rates followed by subsequent falls were evident over the four decades. Adoption of CAS was limited. Juxtaposing rates against highly cited studies suggests enthusiasm driven increases tempered by observational study and trial results. Lastly, we examined the potential benefit of CEA for asymptomatic patients in the setting of improved medical care since completion of the Asymptomatic Carotid Surgery Trial in 2004. Nine studies were identified reporting ipsilateral stroke rates in patients with asymptomatic carotid disease published after 2004. Seven included patients who were not likely candidates for CEA. Other biases were prominent in all but one study. The pooled annual ipsilateral stroke rate was 0.98% (95% Credible Interval [CrI]: 0.54 to 1.57); excluding the three most biased studies 1.36% (95% CrI: 0.88 to 1.83). The best estimate of ipsilateral stroke incidence in patients with significant asymptomatic carotid stenosis is somewhat greater than 1%. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we then synthesized evidence and combined it with decision models to compare CEA outcomes with contemporary medical care. Estimates from Bayesian meta-analyses of ipsilateral stroke rates and relative risk reduction of stroke following CEA were incorporated in Markov cohort models over a five-year time horizon. Compared with medical care, to gain expected quality adjusted life . . .

No therapies are known to substantially alter the course of dementia and associated treatment costs. However, enhanced support services for caregivers of people with dementia have been shown to improve caregivers’ capabilities and well-being and delay patients’ institutionalization. Using a model that simulated disease progression, place of residence, and direct costs of care, we estimated the potential savings to Minnesota from offering the New York University Caregiver Intervention, a program of enhanced support services for spouse and adult child caregivers of community-dwelling people with dementia, to all eligible people in the state from 2010 to 2025. Results indicate that approximately 5 percent more people with dementia would remain in the community from year 3 (2013) on and that 19.3 percent fewer people with dementia would die in institutions over fifteen years. During those years Minnesota could save $996 million in direct care costs (with a range of nearly $100 million to $2.64 billion under worst- and best-case scenarios, respectively). These findings suggest that broader access to enhanced caregiver supports could produce a positive return on investment or be cost-effective—assuming widespread implementation, reasonable program costs, and substantial caregiver participation.

The human capital and creative class hypotheses argue that the agglomeration of skilled and creative people is key to economic growth. Migration is assumed to play an important role in forming these agglomerations. However, the results of this study indicate that while younger cohorts of skilled and creative individuals are highly mobile, skilled and creative couples are highly immobile. This research hypothesizes that it is these relatively immobile skilled and creative couples that are behind the link between urban growth and concentrations of skill and creativity. Indeed, this analysis finds a strong empirical link between concentrations of skilled couples, but not creative class couples, and economic growth. Public policies designed to increase the size of the skilled population should be directed at retaining younger cohorts long enough for them to develop the local networks upon which spillover effects rely.

Over 20% of Americans do not have adequate access to primary care services due to a lack of available physicians (HRSA, 2014). In response many have called for an increased role of the Nurse Practitioner. The retail health clinic, a recent innovation, is well suited to serve as a conduit for this expanded role. In this paper, I examine retail health clinics by estimating the determinants of clinic location choice and by evaluating their impact on unnecessary visits to nearby emergency departments (EDs). First, I construct a structural discrete choice model of clinic location that accounts for both demand and competition effects. This model incorporates a rich error structure that allows for spatial correlation and market level unobservable heterogeneity. I find that clinics are more likely to locate in areas that are populous, wealthy, educated, and white, and that they are less likely to locate in traditionally under-served communities. Second, I combine the results of my predictive model with data on ED visits to determine if clinics help direct patients away from receiving treatment at expensive emergency rooms. I find that access to retail clinics causes a substantial decrease in the number of ED visits for bronchitis and upper respiratory infections. The savings associated with retail clinic induced ED diversion is conservatively estimated to be at least $88 million in 2012 alone. In California, counterfactual analysis suggests that relaxing the barriers to clinic entry would result in $10.5 million in annual health care savings.

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants' interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants' participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These music schools offer parents highly valued Western cultural capital in the form of difficult-to-acquire competence in classical music, which parents are promised will help their children gain access to higher-status educational institutions. Parents internalize this valorizing of classical music and believe it will help their children. In . . .

Based on a case study of metropolitan areas in Southern California, the paper aims at analyzing house prices in the light of practices and policies that yield a financialization of the suburban production. Property price is indeed central in a system based on secondary capital flow, suburban investment and land rent ultimately being captured by financial organizations. The subprime crisis acted as a momentum of financialization. A bet, or systemic anticipation on property price growth has been structuring local governance, and series of contractual agreements between developers, jurisdictions, districts and homeowners. The equilibrium of this system derives from a shared belief about housing price continuous growth. The analysis of local trajectories of price (1980‑2010) yields unexpected results: negative trends and relative devalorization of housing is a major issue in suburban subdivisions, a systemic failure of the financialized suburban production system.

OLAP is the main paradigm for flexible and effective exploration of multidimensional cubes in data warehouses. During an OLAP session the user analyzes the results of a query and determines a new query that will give her a better understanding of information. Given the huge size of the data space, this exploration process is often tedious and may leave the user disoriented and frustrated. This paper presents an OLAP tool named Falseto (Former AnalyticaL Sessions for lEss Tedious Olap), that is meant to assist query and session composition, by letting the user summarize, browse, query, and reuse former analytical sessions. Falseto's implementation on top of a formal framework is detailed. We also report the experiments we run to obtain and analyze real OLAP sessions and assess Falseto with them. Finally, we discuss how Falseto can be seen as a starting point for bridging OLAP with exploratory search, a search paradigm centered on the user and the evolution of her knowledge.

This article discusses the consequences of family composition for poverty and income and its implications for policy. Marriage rates are declining, rates of nonmarital births are increasing (both poverty-increasing), while families are smaller, and there are more working mothers (both poverty-decreasing). Marriage remains less likely and nonmarital births more common for blacks than for whites and Hispanics, though even among whites, 36 percent of births were to unmarried mothers by 2011. On the other hand, divergent patterns across education groups are more common: marriage rates have continued to fall, but not for women with college degrees. Mens earnings have fallen, and, after an increase, womens have also declinedthough less so for those with bachelors degrees. The article also discusses policy responses designed to reduce nonmarital childbearing (potentially reducing the number of children and families at high risk of poverty) and to help single-mother families (reducing the risk of poverty faced by such families).

This collection consists of three chapters whose overarching theme is inequality. The first chapter explores the differential impact of trade liberalization on workers according to their educational attainment when schooling decisions are endogenous. My main findings are that the oldest educated workers gain most from trade liberalization, while the oldest uneducated workers gain the least. Moreover, I find that ignoring the economy's transition path following trade liberalization leads to an understatement of trade-induced inequality, while ignoring the endogeneity of workers' schooling decisions leads to an overstatement of trade-induced inequality. The second chapter explores the differential impact of global changes on workers depending on their sectoral choice. I develop a model with endogenous unemployment, labor-force-participation and sectoral-entry decisions. In order to quantify the impact of global changes on the Canadian economy, I calibrate the model to Canadian data from 1993-2010. My main findings are that world price changes lead to an increase in unemployment in the manufacturing and service sectors, while they lead to a decrease in unemployment in the the natural resource and agriculture sectors. Labor-force participation increases in the natural resource sector as a result of changing world prices, but changes little in other sectors. Finally, I find that changes in world prices from 1993 to 2010 lead to a 7:5% decrease in aggregate welfare in the short run and to a 5:5% decrease in the long run. The final chapter, cowritten with Leif Danziger, shows that a graduated minimum wage, in contrast to a constant minimum wage, can provide a strict Pareto improvement over what can be achieved with an optimal income tax. The reason is that a graduated minimum wage requires high-productivity workers to work more to earn the same income as low-productivity workers, which makes it more difficult for the former to mimic the latter. In effect, a graduated minimum wage allows the low-productivity workers to benefit from second-degree price discrimination which increases their income.

Spending on infrastructure accounts for several percentage points of global world product, reflecting its perceived importance to growth and development. Previous literature has made limited progress in providing unbiased estimates of its impacts, or causal evidence about policy changes that can alter this impact. Primarily, this is because of the selection problem: locations in which infrastructure is built differ from those in which it is not built. This dissertation provides evidence towards three important questions related to infrastructure and development. First, what role does manmade transport infrastructure play in determining and maintaining patterns of economic geography? Second, to what degree does the relocation of economic activity in response to changes in the transport infrastructure network affect estimates of the economic impact of those changes? Third, what is the effect of involving beneficiary communities in decision-making on projects to improve local infrastructure? To address the selection problem, Chapters 2 and 3 exploit quasi-experimental variation in distance to a land transport route created by the opening and location of bridges over major rivers in the historical United States, using a new dataset containing every bridge built over the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Chapter 4 presents evidence from a randomized experiment in Bangladesh. Subjects

This paper explores the geographical distribution of patenting in the nineteenth century United States, as it evolves in response to improvements in access to trans- portation. I revisit the Sokoloff (1988) hypothesis that increasing market access, caused by the spread of transportation infrastructure, led to an acceleration of innovation. I find that twenty years after the arrival of the railroad in a county, the number of patents per capita has doubled. Using cardinal detection lines from the most important ports in 1826 as an instrumental variable suggests that 30-70% of the increase in patenting between 1850 and 1860 was caused by the spread of the railroad in this period, and 15-30% of the increase between 1850 and 1870. These results are driven by the area of a county that is close enough make a round trip to transportation with in a day, and not by area further away. A 1% increase in the area of the county that is within 1.5 miles of some form of transport corresponds to a to a 1.5% increase in patenting. These results are robust to controls for urbanization. Much of the effect comes from patenting in counties that had not previously patented, suggesting that new access to existing markets spurs development and leads to integration into broader markets for innovation.

Teenage mothers tend to have poor economic outcomes later in life. However, the girls who become teenage mothers come from less advantaged backgrounds than those who delay childbearing until later in life, making causality difficult to establish. This paper examines the effect of having a child during high school versus becoming a young mother, but one who has already finished high school. I compare the outcomes of girls who have a child in the end of their senior year of high school to a control group comprised of girls who give birth a few months later. I find that girls who give birth during the school year are 9 percentage points less likely to graduate from high school; however, this has little effect on their eventual labor market outcomes. Despite being much more likely to obtain a High School degree, the control group does not enjoy higher earnings later in life, and is not any more likely to be working.

Education policy is a core element of the state's sovereignty and autonomy. This book analyzes the rise of the western education state and its limits in times of transition from western to non-western globalization and of waning newspaper interest in France, Germany, the UK and the US.