No veteran who has risked his or her life to protect our homes should return to find that they are not able have their own. For their sacrifice, it is imperative that we ensure our veterans have access to safe, affordable, and secure housing. This can be particularly challenging in rural America due to vast geographies, limited resources, and less social service infrastructure. The overall demographic picture of veterans will undergo major shifts in the coming years. As two wars overseas wind down, more veterans will be coming home. Returning to all corners of our nation, they will have housing needs to be addressed. The demographic changes associated with the baby boom generation and the overall graying of America will also shape veterans housing needs. The aging veteran population will have its own unique challenges. Ensuring that their housing needs are met is the least we can do to thank them for their service to this country.

The appendices follow the organization of the paper. Appendix A details the data sources and the procedures used to link and clean the data. Appendix B presents further details on the estimation procedure, Monte Carlo simulations to assess the sensitivity to mis-specification, and details on the optimization algorithms used in the paper. Appendix C presents details on the instrument. Appendix D discusses the parameter estimates under the alternative models. Appendix E presents proofs of the theoretical results on salary competition used in the paper.

Increasing the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) is a frequently discussed reform to U.S. Social Security system. Given that life expectancy in the U.S. has increased substantially more than the retirement age since the establishment of the program, raising the normal retirement age further would seem a natural way to relieve financial pressure on the system. Indeed, simple models of optimal retirement policy have the property that individuals should work a constant fraction of their lives (Crawford and Lilien 1981). However, one objection that has been raised to increasing the normal retirement age is that increases in life expectancy have not been equally shared across the U.S. population. There is a very long standing finding going back to work by

En esta comunicación presentamos «HISDI-MAD: IDE Histórica de la ciudad de Ma- drid» (http://idehistoricamadrid.org). Este geoportal ofrece la posibilidad de conocer la cartografía y demografía de esta gran ciudad a principios del S. XX. HISDI-MAD presenta tres visualizadores que, entre otros, permiten al usuario: na- vegar por sus calles, edificios singulares, parques... toda una gama de información que ha constituido la base del desarrollo urbanístico y demográfico de Madrid hasta el día de hoy. Posibilita estudios multitemporales al comparar cartografía histórica, fotografías aéreas y ortofotografías desde finales del s.XIX hasta comienzos del s.XXI, por medio de unas herramientas accesibles y novedosas que hacen agradable y curioso el paseo por estas épocas de Madrid. Por último, desde HISDI-MAD se permite el acceso a una am- plia colección de mapas socio- demográficos, realizados con los datos históricos proce- dentes del «Plano de Madrid y pueblos colindantes» de Facundo Cañada López (1902) y los «Anuarios Estadísticos del Ayuntamiento de Madrid» contemporáneos al plano. Un aspecto destacado del geoportal se refiere al acceso a documentación original de la época, que ofrece al internauta la visualización y/o descarga de las hojas del Plano Histórico de Madrid, así como su detallada Guía, diseñada originalmente como ayuda a los usuarios del plano. Con este geopotal es nuestro deseo contribuir a la filosofía de compartir los datos científicos geoespaciales mediante servicios WMS (Web Map Services), siguiendo los es- tándares y normativa de interoperabilidad del OGC

Immigrants are widely perceived to be highly entrepreneurial, contributing to economic growth and innovation, and self-employment is often viewed as a means of enhancing labor market integration and success among immigrants. Accordingly, many countries have established special visas and entry requirements to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Research supports some of these stances, but expectations may be too high. There is no strong evidence that self-employment is an effective tool of upward economic mobility among low-skilled immigrants. More broadly prioritizing high-skilled immigrants may prove to be more successful than focusing on entrepreneurship.

This paper studies the links between housing policies and aggregate energy use in the U.S. I connect two strands of literature on cities that cities vary in their per capita energy use in terms of housing supply elasticity to measure the effects of location choice and housing consumption on aggregate energy use. I build a dynamic spatial equilibrium model of U.S. metropolitan areas, accounting for local heterogeneity in housing demand and supply. Importantly, I decompose the supply restrictions into those naturally-occurring and those policy-induced. After matching the model to data on housing prices, construction activity, and building density, I conduct policy simulations to quantify the effects of various housing policies on energy use. Results indicate that removing the federal tax subsidy for housing would result in a lower aggregate energy use, as would increasing land use regulations in high energy use locations. The primary channel is reducing the amount of housing consumed per person, and the secondary channel is in reallocating population from inefficient to more efficient locations.

S.1. Robustness checks for home-ownership and LTV effects Here, we check for robustness in the impact of price levels and volatilities on ownership (Table S.1) and LTV (Table S.2). We report results for both OLS and instrumental variables (IV) (with land scarcity as the instrument) for volatilities measured using different windows (5 years, as in the main text, and 10 years also), for different year cross sections (2000, as in the main text, and 1990 also), and for different data sets for LTV (AHS and MIRS). For home-ownership, the observed patterns are robust to choice of cross section, volatility window, and year. In each case, we see the strong negative relationships described in the main text. Looking at the OLS specification, the effect of price is very similar across years: a doubling of house prices is associated with a fall in the ownership rate of between 21 and 24 percentage points. The IV results are very similar. With regard to volatility, changing the window of measurement has little effect on the coefficients for each cross section. But the results do vary across years: the OLS effects are larger in 2000 and the IV effects are larger in 1990. Still, the reduced-form effect of the land-scarcity instrument (in the final row) is very similar across years. In Table S.2, the estimated effects are remarkably similar in magnitude across the AHS and MIRS data sets for the 2000 cross section for all variables. In each case, there is a strongly significant negative effect, consistent with the main text. The results are not very sensitive to the chosen volatility window either. However, the effects on LTV in the 1990 cross section (as measured by MIRS), while negative, are all statistically insignificant. This is a result of smaller coefficients, rather than larger standard errors. In Figure S.1, we explore this further: we plot the estimated coefficients from reduced-form regressions of LTV (from the MIRS data) on land scarcity separately by year (over 1978-2008). The dashed lines are 95 percent confidence intervals. The effect has always been negative, though it was small and insignificant until the mid-1990s (averaging about −05). It has grown steadily since though, reaching almost −2 in 2008.

Adventist communities are the subject of much epidemiological research due to their homogeneous lifestyle characteristics. Little is known about how Loma Linda’s built environment influences its Adventist community making it the city with the highest life expectancy in the U.S. One approach is to measure the potential of a city to promote walking, but there is a lack of tools that measure multiple dimensions of this built environment indicator. We developed a built environment toolbox taking into account different factors: access, density, diversity, and quality. A pilot study was conducted to compare the built environment of the city of Loma Linda with the city of Redlands in California. The toolset used network analysis functions in order to test the indexes. The indicators used were access to recreational areas, population density, land use diversity, and quality of sidewalks. Data were obtained from subjects of the Adventists Health Study 2. The city of Loma Linda presented better access to recreational areas, higher population density, and more diverse land use in the participants’ built environment. These findings should inform urban planners in order to consider walkable indicators that can promote a healthy community.

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Investment in water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eradicate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. This paper seeks to understand how these technologies affected human capital formation. We use typhoid fatality rates during early life as a proxy for water quality. To carry out the analysis, city-level data are merged with a unique dataset linking individuals between the 1900 and 1940 censuses. Parametric and semi-parametric estimates suggest that eradicating early-life exposure to typhoid fever would have increased earnings in later life by 1% and increased educational attainment by one month. Instrumenting for typhoid fever using the typhoid rates from cities that lie upstream produces similar results. A simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that the increase in earnings from eradicating typhoid fever was more than sufficient to offset the costs of eradication.

This thesis supplements existing literature by examining the relationship between institutional regulations and gendered assumptions about bodies. This thesis draws from feminist social constructionist perspectives and gendered organizational theories to explore the role of gendered body assumptions in the organizational framework of a hypermasculine political institution. Using the U.S. military as an illustrative example, this thesis studies military policies and rationales historically, focusing on the post-Vietnam accelerated inclusion of women, the increasing use of combat as a divisive component, and the gendered structural elements that are used to determine physical competence. Findings coincide with existing literature and suggest that social meanings relating to gender are a prominent influence in U.S. military policy historically and contemporarily, even when biological reasons are cited as justification. This research provides implications for understanding institutional, strategic use of gender and provides analysis of how physical bodies and accompanying social meanings are impacted by institutional goals.

The net impact of market legality on crime is ambiguous if consumption of the illegally traded good causes violence. With modern crime data, I show that drug control policy that increases market-based violence while reducing violence associated with intoxication raises homicide rates for individuals in their 20s relative to older and younger people. Using a state-level panel of age-specific homicides from 1900 to 1940, when many states and eventually the federal government criminalized alcohol markets, I demonstrate that the spread of the temperance movement similarly com- pressed the age distribution of homicide victims, primarily in northern, urban states with large immigrant populations.

Differently from OLTP workloads, OLAP workloads are hardly predictable due to their inherently extemporary nature. Besides, obtaining real OLAP workloads by monitoring the queries actually issued in companies and organizations is quite hard. On the other hand, hardware and software benchmarking in the industrial world, as well as comparative evaluation of novel approaches in the research community, both need reference databases and workloads. In this paper we present CubeLoad, a parametric generator of workloads in the form of OLAP sessions, based on a realistic profile-based model. After describing the main features of CubeLoad, we discuss the results of some tests that show how workloads with very different features can be generated.

Information flooding may occur during an OLAP session when the user drills down her cube up to a very fine-grained level, because the huge number of facts returned makes it very hard to analyze them using a pivot table. To overcome this problem we propose a novel OLAP operation, called shrink, aimed at balancing data precision with data size in cube visualization via pivot tables. The shrink operation fuses slices of similar data and replaces them with a single representative slice, respecting the constraints suggested by dimension hierarchies, until the result has either size or error smaller than a given threshold. An optimal computation of the shrink operation has exponential complexity, so we present both a greedy algorithm based on agglomerative clustering, which returns a sub-optimal solution, and a branch-and-bound algorithm that returns an optimal solution. Finally, we discuss some experimental results to evaluate the shrink operation from the efficiency and effectiveness point of view.

This thesis examines whether access to medical health insurance improves the financial welfare of potentially accessibility-constrained population. Previous studies show that young adults aged 19 to 30 years are disproportionately uninsured compared to the U.S. non-elderly population aged 19 to 64 as a whole. Being uninsured exposes young adults to significant financial risk due to negative medical shocks. Starting in the 1990s, states have sought to address this issue by passing laws allowing adult children to remain on their parents' health insurance, and in 2010 the Affordable Care Act extended this coverage nationwide to dependents through age 26. Using individual level data, we examine how eligibility for health insurance under extended parental coverage laws affects the financial outcomes of adult dependents. We find a significant reduction in bankruptcy risk for young adults being eligible for the health insurance. We conclude that these laws have a positively causal effect on the financial welfare of young adults.

I investigate a possible unintended consequence of Proposition 2 override behaviorthat it led to increased segregation in school districts in Massachusetts. This can occur because richer, low-minority towns tend to have more successful override votes that attract similar households with relatively high demands for public services who can afford to pay for them. To evaluate this hypothesis, I collect panel data on override behavior from 1982 to 2012 and merge this with data on school district enrollments and other district- and town-level characteristics. I find evidence that passing overrides earmarked for schools results in a significant decrease in the percent of nonwhite students enrolled in Massachusetts school districts. This happens in districts with below-average nonwhite school enrollments, and hence increases segregation.

Infants who are underweight at birth earn less, score lower on tests, and become less educated as adults. Previous studies have found mixed evidence that socioeconomic status mitigates this effect. In this paper, we reconcile these findings using a unique dataset in which adoptees were quasi-randomly assigned to families. We find that the average income within a zip code mitigates the effects of low birth weight, as in Currie and Morreti (2007), whereas other family characteristics do not, as in Currie and Hyson (1999). These results cannot be explained by differences in genetics, prenatal healthcare or neonatal healthcare.

This paper provides the first estimates of the long-term individual effects of serving on the losing side of the American Civil War on migration, health, and occupational outcomes. We compare men who served in the Confederate Army with their men who served in the Union army in the border state of Kentucky, which contributed significant numbers of soldiers to both armies. To create the dataset, we collected the universe of existing Union and Confederate enlistees from Kentucky and matched men to their pre- and post- war occupations and place of residence using the 1860 and 1880 censuses. Our findings show that Confederate soldiers were positively selected from Kentucky population prior to the onset of the conflict. We demonstrate strikingly different postwar migration patterns between Union and Confederate veterans and show how leaving Kentucky erased the socioeconomic disadvantage faced by Union veterans. Our results suggest that the decision to serve on the Union or Confederate side created lasting social divisions between otherwise similar men, and that these divisions had diverse economic consequences.

Developing countries have rapidly urbanized since 1950. To explain urbanization, standard models have emphasized rural-urban migration, focusing on rural push factors (agricultural modernization and rural poverty) and urban pull factors (industrialization and urban-biased policies). Using newly compiled historical data on urban birth and death rates for 7 countries from Industrial Europe (1800-1910) and 33 developing countries (1960-2010), we show that a non-negligible part of developing countries' rapid urban growth and urbanization can also be linked to demographic factors, i.e. rapid internal urban population growth, or an urban push. The much lower urban mortality of today's developing countries, relative to Industrial Europe, where higher urban death rates virtually offset urban births, has compounded the effects of migration. High urban natural increase, rather than migration, is also found to be associated with urban congestion, thus providing further insight into the phenomenon of urbanization without growth.