Areal interpolation transforms data for a variable of interest from a set of source zones to estimate the same variable's distribution over a set of target zones. One common practice has been to guide interpolation by using ancillary control zones that are related to the variable of interest's spatial distribution. This guidance typically involves using source zone data to estimate the density of the variable of interest within each control zone. This article introduces a novel approach to density estimation, the geographically weighted expectation–maximization (GWEM), which combines features of two previously used techniques, the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm and geographically weighted regression. The EM algorithm provides a framework for incorporating proper constraints on data distributions, and using geographical weighting allows estimated control‐zone density ratios to vary spatially. We assess the accuracy of GWEM by applying it with land use/land cover (LULC) ancillary data to population counts from a nationwide sample of 1980 U.S. census tract pairs. We find that GWEM generally is more accurate in this setting than several previously studied methods. Because target‐density weighting (TDW)—using 1970 tract densities to guide interpolation—outperforms GWEM in many cases, we also consider two GWEM–TDW hybrid approaches and find them to improve estimates substantially.

How does immigration affect natives local wages? A vast literature considers this, much of it focused on Mexican immigration to the United States. Prior work emphasizes the importance of instrumenting for immigrant destinations, the key role of experience-skill cells, and the potential for spillovers to national markets. I build on these, using the Mexican Tequila Crisis of the mid-1990s and the displacement of workers from hurricane Katrina as exogenous push factors inducing migration. Instrumentation thus includes both a time dimension for the shock period, plus a destination dimension as in prior work. A 1% labor supply shock to particular local labor markets decreases wages of low skilled US natives by 1 to 1.5 percent. It also prompts interstate labor reallocation. Fewer low skilled workers migrate to the shocked local labor markets right after the immigrants from the Tequila Crisis or from Katrina arrive. This explains why within five years, national markets adjust, leaving small differential spatial impacts. Whether the immigrants come from Mexico or from Louisiana makes little difference: the effects from both natural experiments are qualitatively and quantitatively very similar.

The Affordable Care Act is an experiment in federalism — or so it would appear at first glance. On October 1st, health insurance exchanges began enrollment across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. States can choose to manage the exchanges themselves, partner with the federal government or hand the task over entirely to the federal government. Thirty-four states will either partner with or delegate implementation entirely to the federal government, while 16 states (plus D.C.) will oversee their own health insurance exchanges, according to the Commonwealth Fund.1 Amidst a decades-long debate about whether complicated policy reform should be implemented at the state or the federal level, the ACA seems to provide a test of which level is better able to execute a new policy.

How does immigration affect natives local wages? A vast literature considers this, much of it focused on Mexican immigration to the United States. Prior work emphasizes the importance of instrumenting for immigrant destinations, the key role of experience-skill cells, and the potential for spillovers to national markets. I build on these using the Mexican Peso Crisis of the mid-1990s as an exogenous push factor inducing migration. Instrumentation includes both a time dimension for the shock period, plus a destination dimension as in prior work. A 1% labor supply shock to particular local labor markets decreases wages of low skilled US natives by 1 to 1.5 percent on impact. It also prompts net interstate labor reallocation. Fewer low skilled native workers migrate to the shocked local labor markets right after the immigrants from Mexico arrive. This explains why within five years, national markets adjust, leaving small differential spatial impacts. To evaluate longer run effects of immigration I build a model with many regions and calibrate it to US states data. Since local labor markets are well connected through internal migration, the potentially large short-run local effects of immigration are shown to dissipate into the much larger national market.

This dissertation studies three forms of mobility in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter uses newly collected data from Union Army widows pension files to isolate the causal effect of womens income on their decisions about marriage. Making use of exogenous variation in the processing time of pension applications, I show that receiving a pension caused widows to remarry at a significantly slower rate. This suggests that womens income directly influenced marital outcomes, largely by making women more selective in the marriage market. The second chapter explores the extent to which nineteenth century internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading should have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. . . .

Late nineteenth century Ontario was market by great wealth inequality as evidenced from census-linked probate data for the years 1892 and 1902. The average wealth of decedents reporting an average wealth pf $169,415 and the bottom one percent an average of $43. Compared to the United States, Britain, or even new settler economies such as Argentina or Australia, Ontario seems curiously bereft of larger supercharged estates more characteristic of the age of the Robber Barons. This leads to the natural question: where are the wealth extremes and great fortunes of late nineteenth century Ontario? Explanations explored include a slower rate of economic growth, predominance of Montreal rather than Toronto as an economic center, and migration of Canadians to pursue opportunities in the United States. it is not that nineteenth century Canada did not generate rich people, it did not hang on to them in the long run thereby generating perceptions of a shortage of rich people in Canada that persist to present.

The American "high school movement" of the early 20th century resulted in a dramatic rise in high school graduation rates, a trend that continued into the middle of the century interrupted only by World War II. Previous work has characterized the pre-World War II transformation of secondary education, but less attention has been focused on the continued increased in educational attainment after the War, culminating in Baby Boomer children graduating from high school at a greater rate than any previous generation. High rates of military service and subsequent subsidies for factors shown to be associated with children's educational attainment offer a possible explanation. In this paper, I link Baby Boomer children to their fathers using IPUMS data to examine this relationship. Through linear regression and propensity score matching, I find that father's veteran status is associated with greater educational attainment for children. Exploiting discontinuities in military service, I further examine the exogenous effect of military service and GI Bill subsidies rather than positive selection into military service.

The economic, social and institutional framework of policies gear to promote entrepreneurship are studied by presenting recent data on the labor market, factors associated with poverty in Puerto Rico and efforts to expand the labor participation of the poor. We discuss concepts related to the study of entrepreneurship and identify public and private programs that concentrate efforts on the creation of microenterprises by poor people. Dispersion and fragmentation in efforts to promote micro-entrepreneurship are observed. There is no defined policy towards the promotion of entrepreneurship as an alternative to incorporate the poor into formal labor markets.

We investigate the effect of speaking Spanish at home as a child on completed schooling and aptitude test scores using data from the NLSY79 on Hispanics who grew up in the United States. We model the accumulation of traditional human capital and English fluency, leading to the joint determination of schooling and test scores. We find that speaking Spanish at home reduces test scores, but has no significant effect on completed schooling. The reduction in test scores (1) increases in magnitude in three of the tests when the parents are more educated; (2) is much more dramatic when the choice of home language is made endogenous; and (3) is not systematically greater for the verbal than for the math tests

The emigration of Cuban origin in southern Florida is the result of the existence of several waves of migration from Cuba to the United States, which have occurred in different historical contexts, and their descendants. This has allowed the formation of migrant generations, namely migrant groups who have had different pre-and post-migration experiences from traditional groups. This has enabled new subjects with ways of thinking and perceiving reality, different from the traditional players; both the sender and recipient country are inserted in the system of relations established and amend regulations. This article identifies the different migrant generations coexisting in this settlement and the differences between them in terms of social, economic, cultural and political.

Este artigo apresenta discussão teórica de cinco fatores básicos na pré-cons- tituição de Sistemas de Informação Geográfica Temporais, os quais são: tempo, interatividade, multimídia, hipermapa e classificação de tipos de mapas. Também demonstra a importância de Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS). A partir desta discussão teórica, é feita análise de oito HGIS disponíveis na WEB, levando-se em consideração tais fatores básicos. Conclui-se que a maioria das pesquisas na área de HGIS estão concentradas na América do Norte e países do oeste europeu, que a questão da interatividade necessita ser aprofundada e que o Brasil é um país onde há de se crescer o uso histórico de Sistemas de Informação Geográfica.

This paper develops an economic computational network model of migration. The importance of ties between family members and friends in migration has been long recognised by other social sciences and is increasingly confirmed by econometric studies. The paper presents a micro simulation of an economy in which the heterogeneous population moves between three locations, a rural and urban location of origin, and the destination. The key elements in (return) migration decisions are network feedback effects and income opportunities. The simulations generate stable patterns and detailed information on distributions, which reproduce available data for the geographical population distribution, wealth, and remittances. The model generates the clustering of migrants both at the origin and at the destination that is one of the most pervasive and resilient stylized facts of migrationresearch.

This paper studies the observed slowdown in the US business employment dynamics over recent decades. I propose and quantitatively evaluate the hypothesis that on-the-job human capital accumulation has become important over time. Indirect empirical support for this hypothesis relates to secular trends of rising educational attainment and changing skill demands due to technical advances. The paper also provides more direct and novel empirical evidence, showing that job training requiremnts have risen over time. I construct a multi-worker search and matching model with endogenous separations, where training investments act as adjustment costs. The model can explain how the increase in training requiremnts accounts for the decline in job turnover, the increase in inaction, and the evolution towards a more compressed employment growth distribution, all consistent with the data. Quantitatively, the observed increase in training costs can explain almost one-third of the decline in the job reallocation rate over the last few decades. the key mechanism is that higher job training requirements make firms reluctant to hire and fire workers when economic conditions change, resulting in lower turnover.

The fidelity and utility of global gridded datasets is a function of the input statistics and geographic data used in their construction. The quality and resolution of census data and robustness of microdata varies greatly from country to country, but in order to complete regional and global scale analyses of geographic data, it is necessary to integrate these inputs into a common schema and grid resolution. This paper and talk will draw on examples from the production of SEDACs Gridded Population of the World Version 4 to illustrate the need for high resolution census and cartographic data in order to produce accurate top down population allocations. It will also explore challenges of tying microdata to place to make connections with other spatial data - through coordinates and/or fine-grain administrative units with accompanying boundary data. It will use examples from the Terra Populus project to display the utility of the variable richness of microdata (population characteristics beyond counts and basic demographics), particularly in connection with other spatial data.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes two provisions that will transfer federal dollars to state economies: an expansion of Medicaid to cover those earning less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) and health insurance subsidies for people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the FPL. These coverage expansions are financed by changes to Medicare payment policy, reductions in Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, and new taxes and fees, which transfer money from state economies to the federal government. The June 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the ACA gave state governments discretion over whether to expand Medicaid, but most of the other provisions in the ACA including reductions to Medicare and DSH paymentswill occur regardless of how states handle the Medicaid provision. In determining whether to expand Medicaid, Pennsylvanias stakeholders may wish to consider the ACAs overall economic effects on the state, both with and without the Medicaid expansion. To inform this policy debate, we estimated the effects of the ACAs implementation in Pennsylvania (with and without the Medicaid expansion) on rates of insurance coverage (by source), net flows of federal spending, change in gross domestic product (GDP), state employment, state government spending and tax revenues, and uncompensated care costs. To estimate the ACAs coverage and federal spending impacts, we used the RAND COMPARE microsimulation model. We then applied the Regional Input-Output Modeling System multipliers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to determine the ACAs broader economic effects. We estimate these policy effects at the state level and within Pennsylvanias regions.

Charles Kenny’s statement in Bloomberg Business Week that “the world is rapidly adding wrinkles” describes population aging in more visual terms than the terms used in most census reports (February 7, 2013). Declining fertility and increased life expectancy, language more recognizable in the demographic community, account for global growth in the old-age population. The U.S. population is part of the growth in wrinkles. Today more than 40 million Americans are age 65 and older (Howden and Meyer, 2011, table 1). This group makes up almost 13% of the U.S. population, more than a three-fold increase from 1900 (authors’ calculations, U.S. Census Bureau, 1996). By 2050, one in five people . . .

The Labor Studies (LS) Program is one of the largest and most active in the NBER, with almost 150 members producing nearly 200 Working Papers each year. The breadth of topics and expertise is stunning : it ranges from cutting edge research on aggregate labor market issues like unemployment and productivity to the effects of government programs like Disability Insurance, the differences in labor market outcomes among different educational, gender, and racial groups, and to many other topics in social science. Reflecting their diversity, two-thirds of program members are affiliated with at least one other NBER program, and in the past few years the Labor Studies program has convened joint sessions at the NBER’s Summer Institute with Public Economics, Economics of Education, Economics of Children, and with Working Groups in Personnel Economics and the Economics of Crime. This summer we will add a new joint session with Development Economics. In this report I briefly summarize some of the main themes emerging from recent work by LS affiliates in three areas: immigration, gender, and unemployment. These topics barely scratch the surface of the vast body of work by LS affiliates, but give a flavor of some of the emerging ideas and latest techniques in the field.

Currently, there is an on-going interest to use Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in History. This article has two main goals: firstly, we attend to present a historiographical review of relationships between GIS and History. After that, this work shows the theoretical and epistemological framework in order to explain why historians can use GIS, underlying what is Geographically-Integrated History.

China's ongoing urban economic growth has sharply increased the population's per capita income, lowered the count of people living below the poverty line, and caused major environmental problems. We survey the growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of China's urban pollution challenges. We begin by studying how urban population and industrial growth impacts local pollution levels and greenhouse gas production. As the urban population grows richer, its demand for private transportation and electricity sharply increases. Such privately beneficial activity exacerbates urban pollution externalities. Facing these severe environmental challenges, China's urbanites increasingly demand quality of life progress. We survey the emerging literature investigating the demand for environmental progress in China. Progress in mitigating externalities hinges on whether the powerful central and local governments choose to address these issues. We analyze the political economy of whether government officials have strong incentives to tackle lingering urban externalities. We conclude by discussing future research opportunities at the intersection of environmental and urban economics

Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act explicitly directed more federal aid for K-12 education to poorer areas for the first time in US history, with a goal of promoting regional convergence in school spending. Using newly collected data, we find some evidence that Title I narrowed the gap in per-pupil school spending between richer and poorer states in the short- to medium-run. However, the program was small relative to then-existing poverty gaps in school spending; even in the absence of crowd-out by local or state governments, the program could have reduced the gap by only 15 percent.