In order to meet ambitions statewide goals for a significant reduction in landfill waste, the state of Minnesota has proposed that communities in the Twin Cities metro area recycle 60 percent of their waste and divert 15 percent of waste for organics recycling by 2030. With existing data suggesting that the Twin Cities region currently recycles about 40 percent of its waste and diverts about 4 percent for organics recycling, the City of Saint Paul contracted with Wilder Research in 2012 to conduct a comprehensive assessment of their recycling and waste management system and explore opportunities for greater recycling, composting, and waste reduction. The assessment aims to further the City's understanding of recycling and waste disposal knowledge, behavior, and preferences among Saint Paul residents, to identify the most effective strategies to meet these waste reduction and diversion goals.

This paper reviews the recent history of economic development policy in New York City and suggests four new growth with equity strategies: Replace discretionary and as-of-right subsidies to firms with investments designed to stimulate labor demand, including investment in public infrastructure; Use available public levers, including standards attached to economic development subsidies, to increase training, earning, and economic mobility opportunities for unemployed and low-wage workers, and connect them with the economic development agenda; 2 Wolf-Powers Strengthen the city's core blue-collar employment base by bringing a deliberate equity vision to the management of the citys physical assets, especially industrial land; and Activate a career pathways system that links secondary schooling both with post-secondary education and training and with the labor market, particularly the new jobs that are being created

Objective: The effectiveness of local public health systems in emergency management depends on trust from the entire community. However, the failure of some government agencies to respond effectively to several major disasters has had a disproportionate impact on certain groups—racial/ethnic minorities, in particular— that are well-represented in the veteran population. Many veterans belong to multiple vulnerable populations at greater risk of harm during disasters. This study examines confidence that local public health systems will respond fairly to disasters in a diverse sample of US veterans. Methods: This study is an analysis of cross-sectional data on 5955 veterans in the 2009 California Health Inter- view Survey. Respondents were asked about their confidence that public health systems would respond fairly to their needs in the event of a disaster, regardless of their race/ethnicity or other personal characteristics. Multivariable regression analysis was used to identify variables on respondent characteristics that were in- dependently associated with confidence. The hypothesis was that there would be less confidence in county public health systems among respondents who were racial/ethnic minorities, had less than a college degree, and were of low-income backgrounds. Results: Approximately 79% of veterans were confident that public health systems would respond fairly. The hypothesis was unsupported, with no differences in confidence by race/ethnicity, education, or income. Also, no differences were noted between men and women or between veterans with and without disabilities. How- ever, confidence was associated with continent of birth, age, homeownership, and marital status. Conclusion: If confidence affects veterans’ willingness to accept disaster preparedness communications or to give proper consideration to recommended emergency countermeasures, then local health departments that issue such information to veterans are not likely to encounter barriers by race/ethnicity, income, education, disability status, or gender.

We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those who changed to very popular American names like John or William, obtained gains in occupation-based earnings of at least 14%. We show that these estimates are causal effects by using an index of linguistic complexity based on Scrabble points as an instrumental variable that predicts name Americanization. We conclude that the tradeoff between individual identity and labor market success was present since the early making of modern America.

In this paper, we analyze the development of occupational regulation of massage therapists in the United States as well as the effects of state licensing and certification on their earnings and numbers. Our results suggest that massage therapists working in states with licensing receive an earnings premium of as much as 16.2 percent. We also find some evidence that licensing seems to reduce the number of massage therapists. We find less convincing evidence that certification has had similar effects. We argue that, taken together, our results suggest that licensing restricts entry at the expense of consumers and that its effects are less likely to be explained by other competing factors.

Beyond postfordism How are recent mutations of the capitalist economic and social order expressed in the form and substance of the world’s economic landscape? How, in turn, is the economic landscape implicated in the social reproduction of capitalism as a whole at the present time? In particular, how are these diverse phenomena expressed in patterns of urban and regional development? These questions motivate the entire essay that follows.

As homeownership has been expanding in the United States over the past several decades, residential segregation between blacks and whites has been declining in most metropolitan areas. However, the degree to which the residential patterns of new homebuyers have mirrored these overall trends in segregation and how the massive increase in home buying has related to changes in segregation has remained largely unexplored. This paper examines the segregation of new black homebuyers from white households, new white homebuyers from black households, and black and white households from each other using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data from 1992 to 2010 merged with data from the Census and ACS. I find that black homebuyers are less segregated from white households than black homeowners overall and black households in general, providing evidence in support of the spatial assimilation model that would predict better outcomes for homeowners. Also consistent with the spatial assimilation perspective, I found in the multivariate models that increased income parity between blacks and whites and growth in black lending are associated with average declines in black/white household segregation from 1990 to 2010. Although subprime lending was not associated with overall changes in segregation, metropolitan areas with higher percentages of loans to blacks from subprime lenders experienced increases in segregation of both black homeowners from white households as well as white owners from black households.

In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-Cuban-American war. In 1901, the US Supreme Court defined Puerto Rico as foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, in other words neither a state of the American union nor an independent country. The Court also ruled that the island was an unincorporated territory hellip belonging to hellip but not a part of the United States (Downes v. Bidwell 1901). The Court later declared that Puerto Ricans were not aliens for immigration purposes in the United States (Gonzales v. Williams 1904). In 1917, Congress granted US citizenship to all persons born on the island, without extending to them all constitutional rights and duties.

Nothing transformed American lives in the last century more than the gender revolution. The empowerment of women redefined courtship, sex, marriage, and child-rearing. Womens entry into the paid workforce, in particular, upended the bourgeois Victorian family model in which he battles in the marketplace and she nurtures in the home. In 1950 about one in five married women went off to work; in 2000 about three in five did. Now, after decades of such astonishing change, the gender revolution appears overbefore its completion.

We employ propensity score matching (PSM) to minimize structural confounding and improve causal inference in an observational neighborhood effects study. We approximate a real-world scenario by creating causal contrasts where those in a higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhood quartile are matched with those in the next lower quartile. Typically studies split a sample into one exposed group and one unexposed group, or compare all lower groups to a single high group (or vice versa). Our approach yields more realistic policy estimates. We estimate the average effect of the treatment on the treated (ATT) moving from a lower to the next higher SES neighborhood quartile on overweight/obesity, type 2 diabetes, and smoking. Neighborhood SES is classified into quartiles of census-tract level median household income (NH income) and percent with bachelors degree or higher (NH education). Individual-level covariate and outcome data from the 2005, 2007, and 2009 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) for San Francisco adults (n=2,515) was linked with census-tract level SES data from the American Community Survey (2006-2010). PSM results suggest a significant difference in ATT only when moving from the moderate-high to high NH education quartile for overweight/obesity (-0.10, 95% CI: -0.20 to -0.03) and smoking (-0.05, 95% CI: -0.12 to -0.03), using exchangeable exposure groups. We failed to find evidence of an effect for other comparisons using NH education. All comparisons using NH income were non-significant with estimates close to zero. The assumptions of observational neighborhood effects studies limit our ability to identify causal effects, but this study addresses some key challenges by using propensity score matching with policy-relevant causal contrasts.

This study reexamines the comparative labor-productivity performance of the United States as well as the United Kingdom the main industrial-rival of the US. In light of the dynamic productivity developments reported by Field, I reassess the British technological and organizational innovations and provide a novel explanation for the rapid divergence of the Anglo-American labor-productivity levels, observed during the early twentieth century. Chapters 2 and 3 present new benchmarks of Anglo-American comparative labor productivity, establishing the relative productivity gap between the two leading industrial nations at both the start of the twentieth century (ca. 1910) as well as the interwar era (1935). Chapter 4 discusses technological change, capital accumulation and efficiency decline in Britain and the US between the wars. Lastly, chapter 5 reexamines American labor quality for the first half of the twentieth century.

It is difficult to determine whether ghettos are good or bad, partly because racial segregation may have some effects that are unobservable. To overcome this challenge, we present a migration model that allows for estimating the over-all effects of racial segregation. The key idea underlying our empirical approach is that if segregation indeed has a negative overall effect, migrants should be willing to give up some earnings to avoid living in segregated cities. Using decennial census data from 1980 to 2000, we provide new evidence that ghettos are bad. It is shown that both black and white migrants prefer to live in less segregated cities. For example, for a one-percentage-point reduction in the dissimilarity index, the estimated marginal willingness to pay of blacks is $436 (in 1999 dollars) in 2000. Among whites, this marginal willingness to pay is $301.

Labor composition by gender, age, and education has undergone dra- matic changes over the last forty years in the United States. Furthermore, the volatility of total market hours differs systematically between genders, age, and education groups. I develop a large-scale business cycle model which suggests that demographic changes by gender and education affect labor supply elasticities at the micro level. This has important repercus- sions on aggregate volatility. Changes in labor composition account for 30% of the observed changes in aggregate volatility over this period of time. To solve the model over this large transition, I develop a new algorithm which extends perturbation methods to the stochastic transition path and can be applied to a broad class of DSGE models.

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using transaction values, self-reported values from the census, and rental values. Additionally, while most studies use micro-level data, some have used summary statistics such as the median housing value. Assessing community housing price indices in Los Angeles, we find that indices based on transaction prices are highly correlated with indices based on self-reported values, but that the former are better correlated with public goods. Moreover, rental values have a higher correlation with public goods and income levels than either asset-value measure. Finally, indices based on median values are poorly correlated with the other indices, public goods, and income.

This dissertation consists of three comparative studies of health and mortality which address major topics in the field: persistent mortality disparities within the U.S., how mortality in the U.S. compares to other highincome countries, and early life determinants of adult morbidity in developing countries. The design of these studies is predicated on the belief that we can draw meaningful inferences from comparisons across populations. Chapter I examines the contribution of smoking to black-white mortality differences above age 50 from 1980-2005. This study shows that smoking-attributable mortality accounted for 20-40% of the black-white mortality gap among males between 1980-2005, but accounted for almost none of the black-white mortality gap among females. The results support the hypothesis that later initiation and lower rates of smoking cessation among black men may contribute to their higher levels of smoking-related mortality relative to white men. Chapter II provides a comprehensive assessment of U.S. mortality relative to other high-income countries. This study demonstrates that mortality differences below age 50 account for the majority of the gap in life expectancy at birth between American males and their counterparts in other high-income countries. Among females, this figure is 41%. The major causes of death responsible for Americans' excess years of life lost below age 50 are unintentional injuries, noncommunicable diseases, perinatal conditions, and homicide. This study also finds that the U.S.'s unique pattern of age-specific mortality rankings holds for birth cohorts whose mortality experience spans the period 1935-2005. Chapter III explores the association between two measures of early life conditions and adult morbidity in six countries. The findings from this study indicate that those born during the autumn in Ghana, Mexico, Russia, and South Africa and during the monsoon in India experience a health advantage. In China, the autumn-born experience a health disadvantage. This study also finds that pre- and postnatal rainfall and temperature conditions are associated with adult health outcomes, particularly height and blood pressure. The results provide support for the hypotheses that early life disease and nutritional conditions are important influences on later life health

Using established theories of neighborhood selection as a theoretical framework, as well as qualitative and quantitative methods and mixed data sources, this paper documents a study exploring the residential patterns of African Americans living in Arlington, Virginia, during Segregation (1900-1970). A southern town bordering Washington, D.C., Arlington has been home to African Americans since slaves first worked the tobacco farms in the 1600s. During the period when black neighborhoods in Northern cities were inundated by southern, black migrants during the Great Migration, Arlington's farms and settlements, many of them integrated, were similarly inundated by white federal workers from across the Potomac River. Developers, the County, and the federal government each played a role in accelerating Arlington's transition from a collection of farms into a bustling white suburb with three highly segregated black neighborhoods. The study introduces a new procedure for aggregating manuscript census data for use with segregation indexes.

Despite the specter of artists clustered in inner reaches of a few hip, fashionable cities, people do artwork as a major occupation in most U.S. communities. Artists move across state lines more often than workers in other occupations, and because more apt to be self-employed, for reasons other than a job. The author explores why artists migrate, varying by artistic discipline and age cohort. Some metros home grow more artists by offering nurturing infrastructure. Finding considerable complexity in the spatial distribution of artists over time, the author argues that the bohemian stereotype is inaccurate, undermining respect for artwork as an occupation and for artists' roles in creative placemaking.

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