With a specific focus on the extent of occupational segregation by race and sex, my dissertation sets out to understand whetherand if so, howthe local social infrastructure of the communities in which firms are embedded affects the nature of workplace discrimination and inequality and, moreover, to uncover the mechanisms by which variation in these inequities are created and maintained across communities. I address two major theoretical limitations of research on discrimination and inequality at work. First, a large body of research identifies disparities in organizations along lines of ascriptive characteristics such as race and gender, but has failed to explain how groups come to be stratified based on these characteristics. Second, when mechanisms are specified, they are largely assumed to be found within firms. This dissertation contributes to theory by speaking exactly to the local social fabric in which organizations are enmeshed and also specify the community-based mechanism driving workplace inequality.I develop a series of theoretical predictions which are tested using 799,935 establishment-years over four annual panels of data (1993-2008) derived from a variety of sources, but most importantly from data collected annually by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which is protected by federal law. A key takeaway from this dissertation is that communities do indeed matter. Establishments are embedded in xdifferent, localized contexts which influence how minorities and women are segregated across occupational categories. Most prominently, establishments located within the jurisdiction of a more progressive appellate court or with greater representation of minorities and women in the district court judiciary experienced lower levels of occupational segregation. However, a qualification of this finding is necessary: Greater representation of minorities in the judiciary led to lower levels of occupational segregation by race, but to greater levels of segregation by sex. A similar pattern of findings was found with the representation of women in the judiciary. This dissertation expands upon previous approaches to workplace discrimination and inequality through the examination of differences across communities in occupational segregation, and provides a basis upon which future research on the relationship between organizations and their local environments can build.

Shocks to the home country affect immigrants' decisions in real time, due to economic ties to their home country. This paper demonstrates this effect, exploiting exchange rate variation as an exogenous price shock to immigrants. In response to an appreciation of the U.S. Dollar, immigrants earn less, consume more, and send less money home. The estimated exchange rate elasticity of earnings is -0.092. The sign of the elasticity implies that the income effect of the exchange rate on earnings is larger than the substitution effect. Its magnitude offers lower bounds for risk aversion and the unearned income elasticity of earnings.

Many geography phenomena and geospatial problems are complex and dynamic. Traditional Geographic Information System (GIS) models have limitations to represent the detailed dynamic processes of geospatial phenomena in the real world. This dissertation introduces a new GIS model framework which can simulate complex population change by using large amounts of real-world data sets and high performance computing resources. This research developed parallel GIS simulation models using cellular automata (CA) and agent-based modeling (ABM) that have been very popular in urban geography. The case study of the parallel GIS simulation models in this dissertation focused on the population change in the County of San Diego, California. In particular, for the parallel ABM, this research modified the original Schelling model, a popular residential segregation model, to process over 2.8 million resident agents. With the high performance computing capability, the GIS models could simulate the dynamics of population change efficiently and help us understand the formation of residential segregation in the future. In addition, the case study demonstrated performance improvement, technical feasibility, and implementation challenges of the parallelization of GIS simulation models in CA and ABM. While high-performance computing is essential for many scientific research disciplines and the domain of computational science, very few geospatial scientists have utilized high-performance computing for the analysis of geographic problems. One of the important reasons is the lack of accessible high-performance computing resources. A new user-friendly web portal framework was designed and implemented to integrate distributed computing resources and to provide high- performance computing capabilities for GIS models. Grid computing and cloud computing resources were integrated into the web portal framework with accessible web-based user interfaces. Usability test was conducted at the end of this study to evaluate the accessibility and functions of the new web portal prototype in high- performance computing environments. The test results indicated that many users did not prefer the detailed configurations of high-performance computing resources. This study suggested that the detailed settings of high-performance computing environments should be concealed in the web-based user interface designed for scientists or geographers, who could focus more on geographic problems.

Conventional wisdom has it that in the 1930s fiscal policy did not work because it was not tried. This paper shows that fiscal policy, though inadvertent, was tried in 1936, and a variety of evidence suggests that it worked. A deficit-financed veterans' bonus provided 3.2 million World War I veterans with cash and bond payments totaling 2 percent of GDP; the typical veteran received a payment equal to annual per capita personal income. This paper uses time-series and cross-sectional data to identify the effects of the bonus. I exploit four sources of quantitative evidence: a detailed household consumption survey, cross-state and cross-city regressions, aggregate time-series, and a previously unused American Legion survey of veterans. The evidence paints a consistent picture in which veterans quickly spent the majority of their bonus. Spending was concentrated on cars and housing in particular. Narrative accounts support these quantitative results. A simple calculation suggests that the bonus added 2.5 to 3 percentage points to 1936 GDP growth.

Convergence theory stems from neo-classical growth theory and hypothesizes that regional incomes will converge over time. Beta convergence, the idea that regions of initial poverty will grow faster than regions of initial wealth, has received a great deal of study and yields mixed results. Typically beta convergence is tested in an OLS regression with income changed regressed against initial income levels. From the geographic perspective, possible reasons for mixed convergence test results are the impacts that aggregation size and spatial effects can have on model performance. Interestingly, the potential impacts of these problems are relatively unexplored in the convergence literature. This dissertation fills that void through an examination of convergence in the United States from 1970-2004 at three levels of aggregations: states, Economic Areas, and counties. First an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis is conducted in order to determine the magnitude and extent of spatial dependence in the convergence variables. Next, OLS, first order, and second order spatial models are run testing for unconditional and conditional convergence. Results indicate that spatial dependence is a problem in convergence models at all scales, and a spatial model must be used. First order spatial models out- perform second order spatial models. Regression results indicate convergence evidence to be strongest at the smaller levels of aggregation, though model fit tends to be better at larger levels. In the end, the functional Economic Area geography proves to be the most stable unit of aggregation for convergence analysis.

I use a disaggregated measure of geographic concentration to study the possibility that proximity to clusters of organizations with different competitive intensities has varying effects on firm outcomes. The post-Civil War period in the Southern United States saw the presence of two types of firearms firms with varying degrees of competitive experience: Firms that had operated during the Civil War and were exposed to a resource-rich but less competitive environment, and firms founded after the war in a much more competitive but low-resource environment. As expected, proximity to firms founded after the Civil War (though they were inherently weaker) was more likely to lead to firm failure than proximity to firms with Civil War experience (though they were inherently stronger).

In this study, we present an indexing scheme to screen large numbers of brownfield sites in wide areas (municipalities, counties, states or other types of districts) in order to develop initial planning strategies for fund allocation and redevelopment. The scheme entails three dimensions, socioeconomic, smart growth and environmental, for each of which an index is constructed on the basis of location-specific variables irrespective of the target end use. Socioeconomic variables include population density, property values and unemployment which collectively represent the potential contribution of brownfield redevelopment to economic growth. The smart growth or livability index was developed on the basis of the LEED ND evaluation scheme of the U.S. Green Building Council, isolating location-specific features. Finally, the environmental index incorporates variables that represent the potential source of contamination (past use), pathway of exposure (soil permeability) and receptors (zoning, proximity to water bodies, parks, critical habitats, open spaces, wetlands and floodplains). The application of the indices to the City of New Haven, Connecticut as a case study yielded four priority sites out of 47 in the city inventory. Even though the indices were sensitive to the chosen weights, prioritization of sites in clusters reduced the effect; the top four sites were identical in the case study and 31 out of 47 sites were present in the same cluster regardless of the weighting scheme.

Many postbellum southern farms specialized in cotton, but black-operated farms planted much larger shares of cotton than white-operated farms. This paper tests various explanations for the pattern of specialization using 1879 farm-specific data. We find that the cross-sectional racial variation in cotton share is largely explained by location and on-farm labor supply conditions, consequences of the legacy of slavery, rather than debt constraints.

PurposeTo examine how efforts and policies to increase diversity affect the relative representation of women and of minority groups within medicine and related science fields.Method The authors of this report used data from the Current Population Survey March Supplement (a product of the U. S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics that tracks race, ethnicity, and employment) to compute the representation ratios of persons employed in biology, chemistry, and medicine from 1968 to 2009 (inclusive). They derived the representation ratios by computing the ratio of the conditional probability that a member of a given group is employed in a specific skilled science field to the overall probability of employment in that field. Their analysis tested for differences in representation ratios among racial, gender, and ethnic groups and across time among those employed as biologists, chemists, and medical doctors.Results Representation ratios rose for white females, whose percentage increase in medicine was larger than for any other racial/ethnic group. The representation ratios fell for Hispanics in biology, chemistry, and medicine. The representation ratio rose for African Americans, whose highest percentage increase occurred in biology. Asian Americans, who had the highest representation ratios in all three disciplines, saw a decline in their relative representation in medicine.Conclusions The authors have demonstrated that all groups do not benefit equally from diversity initiatives and that competition across related fields can confound efforts to increase diversity in medicine.

Today, the publication of microdata poses a privacy threat. Vast research has striven to define the privacy condition that microdata should satisfy before it is released, and devise algorithms to anonymize the data so as to achieve this condition. Yet, no method proposed to date explicitly bounds the percentage of information an adversary gains after seeing the published data for each sensitive value therein. This paper introduces -likeness, an appropriately robust privacy model for microdata anonymization, along with two anonymization schemes designed therefore, the one based on generalization, and the other based on perturbation. Our model postulates that an adversary's confidence on the likelihood of a certain sensitive-attribute (SA) value should not increase, in relative difference terms, by more than a predefined threshold. Our techniques aim to satisfy a given threshold with little information loss. We experimentally demonstrate that (i) our model provides an effective privacy guarantee in a way that predecessor models cannot, (ii) our generalization scheme is more effective and efficient in its task than methods adapting algorithms for the k-anonymity model, and (iii) our perturbation method outperforms a baseline approach. Moreover, we discuss in detail the resistance of our model and methods to attacks proposed in previous research.

A Background Employment instability is a major source of strain affecting an increasing number of adults in the United States. Little is known about the cumulative effect of multiple job losses and unemployment on the risks for acute myocardial infarction (AMI).Methods We investigated the associations between different dimensions of unemployment and the risks for AMI in US adults in a prospective cohort study of adults (N = 13 451) aged 51 to 75 years in the Health and Retirement Study with biennial follow-up interviews from 1992 to 2010. Unadjusted rates of age-specific AMI were used to demonstrate observed differences by employment status, cumulative number of job losses, and cumulative time unemployed. Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine the multivariate effects of cumulative work histories on AMI while adjusting for sociodemographic background and confounding risk factors.Results The median age of the study cohort was 62 years, and 1061 AMI events (7.9%) occurred during the 165 169 person-years of observation. Among the sample, 14.0% of subjects were unemployed at baseline, 69.7% had 1 or more cumulative job losses, and 35.1% had spent time unemployed. Unadjusted plots showed that age-specific rates of AMI differed significantly for each dimension of work history. Multivariate models showed that AMI risks were significantly higher among the unemployed (hazard ratio, 1.35 [95% CI, 1.10-1.66]) and that risks increased incrementally from 1 job loss (1.22 [1.04-1.42]) to 4 or more cumulative job losses (1.63 [1.29-2.07]) compared with no job loss. Risks for AMI were particularly elevated within the first year of unemployment (hazard ratio, 1.27 [95% CI, 1.01-1.60]) but not thereafter. Results were robust after adjustments for multiple clinical, socioeconomic, and behavioral risk factors.Conclusions Unemployment status, multiple job losses, and short periods without work are all significant risk factors for acute cardiovascular events.

The intergenerational link of childbearing and poverty provided an important rationale for funding the first U.S. family planning programs. This paper evaluates this rationale using the county-level roll-out of U.S. family planning programs from 1964 to 1973. Preliminary evidence using public use census data shows that U.S. family planning programs reduced the share of children in households below 150 percent of the poverty line by roughly 5 percent. However, we find no evidence that family planning programs affected the share of children in single-parent homes or in families receiving welfare. In ongoing work, we are using the 1970, 1980 and 1990 15-percent restricted Census data to refine these inferences and investigate the mechanisms for this relationship.

In this article I argue that it is time to focus attention on the recruitment and preparation of quality teachers in and for U.S. Puerto Rican communities as a way to address the low-educational attainment and school success of Puerto Rican youth. Although teacher quality is the one factor that has consistently had the largest impact on student success, policies and practices that affect teacher recruitment and preparation are barriers to increasing teacher quality in and for Puerto Rican communities. Nevertheless, advocating for change in the 21st century requires anticipating the challenges we face as well as the powerful tools and practices that are needed to overcome these challenges. This article takes a historical, public policy perspective to identify the broad range of resources the Puerto Rican community has developed over six decades of community activism, in the largest Puerto Rican city and Latino city that also prepares the nation's teachers.

The problem of joblessness is a deep and persistent one for African Americans. Since as early as 1960, the black unemployment rate has been about twice the white rate. What policies can be pursued to eliminate this disparity and achieve full employment for black workers? Given the inability of the normal workings of the private sector to solve this problem over the last five decades, only strong action by thefederal government will be able to address it. On occasions of deep economic downturns, the federal government has engaged in job creation. Most recently, in response to the Great Recession, the federal government has actively worked to create jobs. The persistent plight of high unemployment in many of Americas communities should be seen as a crisis as serious as the episodic deep national recessions.The federal government should support the following in high-unemployment communities: (1) the direct creation of public sector jobs, (2) sectoral job training programs that are coupled with strong job placement programs, and (3) wage subsidies for hiring the unemployed. These three policies in combination should bring large numbers of jobs to blacks who are disproportionately likely to reside in high-unemployment areas.

New research concerning unprecedented growth in the US penal system during the twentieth century creates rich opportunities for prison museums to engage broad audiences in a conversation about the problems of mass incarceration. The case of Eastern State Penitentiary, however, suggests that public historians' ability to call the law into question may be limited by the founding vision of their host intuitions. Specifically at issue are the priorities of historic preservationists whose architectural commitments risk obscuring important histories of race, power, and community. If they do, we stand to forget that many of the same social forces underlying the United States' carceral turn account too for the gentrification of its urban spaces during the late twentieth century. Eastern State's complicity in both may explain why it still struggles to fulfill its mission to “place current issues of corrections and justice in an historical framework.”

Research generally focuses on how immigration affects native workers, while the impact of immigration on domestic firms is often overlooked. This paper addresses this important omission by examining whether firms respond to immigration by expanding their production activities within a city in order to utilize the abundant supply of low-skilled workers. Using data on immigration and the universe of establishments in U.S. cities, the results indicate that firms respond to immigration at the extensive margin by increasing the number of establishments. Not surprisingly, immigration has a more positive impact on the number of establishments that are small in size and in relatively mobile, low-skill-intensive industries. Additional evidence indicates that immigration has little impact on employment within existing establishments, the intensive margin, or on the number of establishments in service industries which may expand simply due to immigrant consumption.