Evidence abounds that agglomeration patterns have changed over time, but little is known about changes in the underlying determinants of agglomeration. We analyze 44 years of coagglomeration patterns of U.S. manufacturing industries and show that over time, input-output linkages and labor market pooling have become less important determinants of industry agglomeration, while knowledge spillovers have become more important. We show that trade and technology shocks are strongly associated with the decline in labor market pooling and the increase in knowledge spillovers. The downward trend in input-output linkages is associated with an increase in trade competition but not with a decrease in the transportation costs of goods.

Objective: Vocal turn-taking is an important predictor of language development in children with and without hearing loss. Most studies have examined vocal turn-taking in mother-child dyads without considering the multitalker context in a child’s life. The present study investigates the quantity of vocal turns between deaf and hard-of-hearing children and multiple members of their social environment. Design: Participants were 52 families with children who used hearing aids (HA, mean age 26.3 mo) or cochlear implants (CI, mean age 63.2 mo) and 27 families with normal-hearing (NH, mean age 26.6 mo) children. The Language ENvironment Analysis system estimated the number of conversational turns per hour (CTC/hr) between all family members (i.e., adult female, adult male, target child, and other child) during full-day recordings over a period of about 1 year. Results: The CTC/hr was lower between the target child and the adult female or adult male in the CI compared with the HA and NH groups. Initially, CTC/hr was higher between the target child and the adult female than between the adult male or the other child. As the child’s age increased, turn-taking between the target child and the adult female increased in comparison to that between the target child and the adult male. Over time, turn-taking between the target child and the other child increased and exceeded turn-taking between the target child and the adult caregivers. The increase was observed earlier in families with siblings compared with those without. Conclusions: The quantity of vocal turn-taking depends on the degree of child hearing loss and the relationship between the children and the members of their social environment. Longitudinally, the positive effect of an assistive device on the quantity of turns between the children and their family members was found. The effect was stronger in families with siblings.

For most of the 21st century, Americans were told we were living through a period of unprecedented economic change and transformation. Record waves of startups and new technologies were unleashing disruption across the economy. Headlines blared about gig work and automation turning the labor market upside down. So dizzying was the pace of change that we would need to reimagine the future of work, the social contract, and even capitalism itself. Reflecting the consensus, one prominent senator declared that we were in the midst of “arguably the largest economic disruption in recorded human history.”...

This paper uses data on broadband connections and the production and sales of agricultural products to empirically estimate the impact of improved connectivity on U.S. farming outcomes. The Federal Communications Commission has detailed data on broadband subscriptions from its semi-annual Form 477 collection. The USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) releases a complete census of agriculture every five years to measure agricultural activity. By pairing periodic releases of the Form 477 data collection with information on farm production expenses and crop yields from corresponding releases of the Census of Agriculture, the analysis directly evaluates the benefit of rural broadband development on the U.S. farming industry. Overall, I find evidence of crop yield improvements from increased Internet penetration rates at thresholds of 25 Megabits-per-second download and 3 Megabits-per-second upload speeds. Among the findings, doubling the number of 25+/3+ connections per 1000 households is associated with a 3.79% increase in corn yields, as measured in bushels per acre. I also find some evidence of cost savings at thresholds of 10 Megabits-per-second download and 0.768 Megabits-per-second upload speeds. Doubling the number of 10+/0.768+ connections per 1000 households is associated with a 2.41% decrease in operating expenses per farm operation. The paper also provides an introductory look at changes in the composition and speed thresholds of connectivity available for selected field crops over time.

Using the government-induced rapid expansion of the coffee mills in Rwanda in the 2000s, I first provide causal evidence that a mill opening increases women's paid employment, women's and their husbands' earnings and decreases domestic violence. Then I provide evidence which suggests that the decline in violence is driven by women's paid employment. The increase in husbands' earnings is not the dominant mechanism. The opening of a mill affects coffee farmers who reside in its catchment area, a buffer zone around the mill, during the harvest months. A mill opening enables women to transition from being unpaid family workers in their family plots to wage workers in the mills. Using a staggered difference-indifferences (DID) design, I show that upon a mill opening, women in the catchment areas are 18% more likely to work for cash and 26% less likely to self-report domestic violence in the past 12 months. Using novel monthly administrative records on the universe of hospitalizations for domestic violence and a DID event-study design, I also show that it is 20% less likely for the hospitals in the catchment areas to have a domestic violence patient in a harvest month compared to one month before the beginning of the harvest season. The decline in violence is present even among couples where husbands work in occupations with no change in earnings with a mill, non-agricultural manual jobs. An increase in women's outside options and their contribution to household earnings, not exposure reduction between couples, explain the results.

We model an environment with overlapping generations of labor to show that policies restricting labor mobility increase a firm's monopsony power and labor turnover costs. Subsequently, firms increase capital expenditure, altering their optimal capital-labor ratio. We confirm this by exploiting the statewide adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), a law intended to protect trade secrets by restricting labor mobility. Following an IDD adoption, local firms increase capital expenditure (capital-labor ratio) by 3.5 percent (5.5 percent). This result is magnified for firms with greater human capital intensity. Finally, IDD adoptions do not spur investment in either R&D or growth options as intended.

The past 50 years have seen substantial growth in educational attainment and dramatic changes in family structure across developed countries. This chapter explores how these two phenomena are interrelated. It begins by revealing cross-country variation in how marital status and childbearing have changed over time for different education groups. In particular, while divorce is more common among lower educated groups across countries, patterns in marriage and unmarried cohabitation vary substantially. Examination of the theoretical and empirical literature reveals that the causal effect of education on the family is context-dependent. For example, more years of education lead to a reduction in fertility in the USA and the United Kingdom, but not in continental Europe. The chapter concludes by identifying a further empirical regularity in the relationship between education and marital status in the USA: divorced women are more likely to be engaged in study across the lifecycle than their married counterparts, and both men and women are most likely to be studying if they have divorced in the past year. The evidence presented shows the importance of looking beyond marital stability as a non-pecuniary benefit of education to understand more fully the complex interrelationships between education and family formation.

It is widely believed that female students benefit from being taught by female teachers, particularly when those teachers serve as counter-stereotypical role models. We study education in rural areas of the US circa 1940--a setting in which there were few professional female exemplars other than teachers--and find that female students were more successful when their primary-school teachers were disproportionately female. Impacts are lifelong: female students taught by female teachers were more likely to move up the educational ladder by completing high school and attending college, and had higher lifetime family income and increased longevity.

I study the long-run impacts of a trade-induced increase in marital sorting. First, I exploit heterogeneous effects by gender and education of a trade-induced labor demand shock to test how changes in inequality affect assortative mating. I find that increased men's skill premium leads to increased sorting in the marriage market, as it deters marriages between college-educated women and high-school-educated men. Second, I study the potential long-term consequences of increased sorting on intergenerational mobility. I present suggestive evidence that marriages in which both spouses have a college degree invest more time and resources in their children, and their children outperform others from an early age. Increased sorting can then lead to higher inequality in children's initial human capital development, lowering intergenerational mobility. I develop an Aiyagari-style overlapping-generations life-cycle model with an explicit marriage market to estimate the long-run effect of the trade shock on intergen-erational mobility. The model, estimated to the US in the 2000s, implies that the trade-induced increase in assortative mating can reduce intergenerational mobility by 0.9%.

Differential privacy (DP) is the state-of-the-art and rigorous notion of privacy for answering aggregate database queries while preserving the privacy of sensitive information in the data. In today's era of data analysis, however, it poses new challenges for users to understand the trends and anomalies observed in the query results: Is the unexpected answer due to the data itself, or is it due to the extra noise that must be added to preserve DP? In the second case, even the observation made by the users on query results may be wrong. In the first case, can we still mine interesting explanations from the sensitive data while protecting its privacy? To address these challenges, we present a three-phase framework DPXPlain, which is the first system to the best of our knowledge for explaining group-by aggregate query answers with DP. In its three phases, DPXPlain (a) answers a group-by aggregate query with DP, (b) allows users to compare aggregate values of two groups and with high probability assesses whether this comparison holds or is flipped by the DP noise, and (c) eventually provides an explanation table containing the approximately 'top-k' explanation predicates along with their relative influences and ranks in the form of confidence intervals, while guaranteeing DP in all steps. We perform an extensive experimental analysis of DPXPlain with multiple use-cases on real and synthetic data showing that DPXPlain efficiently provides insightful explanations with good accuracy and utility.

Mistrust between immigrants and the police may undermine law enforcement's ability to keep communities safe. This paper documents that immigration policies affect an individual's willingness to report crime. I analyze the 2015 Priority Enforcement Program, which focused immigration enforcement on individuals convicted of serious crimes and shifted resources away from immigration-related offenses. I use data from the Dallas Police Department that include a complainant's ethnicity to show that the number of violent and property crimes reported to the police by Hispanics increased by 4 percent after the introduction of PEP. These results suggest that reducing enforcement of individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety can potentially improve trust between immigrant communities and the police.

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master–slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

Covariates like age, sex, and race/ethnicity provide invaluable insight to public health authorities trying to interpret surveillance data collected during a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the utility of such data is limited when many cases are missing key covariates. This problem is most concerning when this missingness likely depends on the values of missing covariates, i.e. they are not missing at random (NMAR). We propose a Bayesian parametric model that leverages joint information on spatial variation in the disease and covariate missingness processes and can accommodate both MAR and NMAR missingness. We show that the model is locally identifiable when the spatial distribution of the population covari-ates is known and observed cases can be associated with a spatial unit of observation. We also use a simulation study to investigate the model's finite-sample performance. We compare our model's performance on NMAR data against complete-case analysis and multiple imputation (MI), both of which are commonly used by public health researchers when confronted with missing categorical covariates. Finally, we model spatial variation in cumulative COVID-19 incidence in Wayne County, Michigan using data from the Michi-gan Department and Health and Human Services. The analysis suggests that population relative risk estimates by race during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic in Michigan were understated for non-white residents compared to white residents when cases missing race were dropped or had these values imputed using MI.

This thesis collects three papers on topics in public economics. In the first two chapters, I consider the relationships between political and economic effects at the US state-level. Chapters 2 and 3 both have ramifications for contemporary policy debates, and highlight features of tax and intellectual property systems which have been understudied. The first chapter examines the relationship between economic growth and the outcomes of US presidential elections. Contemporary US politics has been marked by substantial increases in political polarization and a decline in swing voting, which we might expect would reduce the effect of economic growth on election outcomes. Using a Bartik-type instrument and state-level and individual-level data, I find that the effect of state economic growth on incumbent vote share is smaller when state-level polarization or individual partisanship is stronger. I also show that swing voting and economic voting are closely linked. The second chapter studies how tax systems reflect different social preferences about taxing income groups. I apply the inverse-optimum income tax method to quantify these preferences by calculating the implied weights for every US state. To capture major features of state taxation, I extend the theory underlying the inverse-optimum method to include sales taxes, property taxes, and state income taxes. Using IRS data, I calculate effective tax rates for each state, and find the weights for both single and joint filers across incomes in every US state. I find that the weights vary substantially across states, and do not decrease monotonically as might be expected from most theories of social welfare. The third chapter examines the effect of a different public policy: Canada's protection of a specialized form of intellectual property, industrial designs (IDs). Estimating the effect of holding IDs with nearest-neighbour matching, I find a 19% total treatment effect in revenue for Canadian firms holding IDs. To determine the marginal effect of each additional ID held, a regression with fixed effects finds that a 1% increase in the stock of IDs increases revenue by 0.14%. This shows the importance of design protection in Canada's IP policy.

This paper documents a set of facts about the dramatic decline in birth rates in the United States between 2007 and 2020 and explores possible explanations. The overall reduction in the birth rate reflects declines across many groups of women, including women who differ by race and ethnicity, age, and level of education. The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, or social factor that has changed since 2007 that is responsible for much of the decline beyond that. Mechanically, the falling birth rate can be attributed to changes in birth patterns across recent cohorts of women moving through childbearing age. We conjecture that the "shifting priorities" of more recent cohorts, reflecting changes in preferences for having children, aspirations for life, and parenting norms, may be responsible. We conclude with a brief discussion about the societal consequences for a declining birth rate and what the United States might do about it.

This study evaluated and analyzed how eight craft breweries in Southern New Jersey communicated Sense of Place (SOP) to build brand identity through their websites. In the highly competitive market of craft breweries, many utilize their distinctive geographic identifiers to market their unique SOP to their customers. SOP can be described as the entire group of cognitions and affective sentiments held regarding a particular geographic locale (Altman & Low, 1992; Jorgensen & Stedman, 2001). In this study, SOP was evaluated through Gruenewald’s (2003) Multidisciplinary Framework for Place Conscious Education (MFPCE), which details five indicators: perceptual, sociological, ideological, political, and ecological. A sixth indicator, temporal, was also added (Cavaliere, 2017). Additionally, an effective brand identity strategy informs, guides, and helps develop, nurture, and implement a business’s overall branding strategy (Madhavaram et al., 2005). Brand identity activities ought to be significantly influenced by an in-depth understanding of, and appreciation for, an organization’s unique SOP. Since a website is often used by a business as a comprehensive tool to communicate their unique products and services, the increasingly competitive online domain depends on a business’s ability to orchestrate verbal and visual stimuli on product web pages to effectively convert page visitors into buyers (Schlosser et al., 2006). Only one of the eight breweries communicated SOP through all six indicators. Their website communication was comprehensive, descriptive, effective, and visually appealing. This model allows breweries to create interesting, memorable, and engaging website content that drives consumers to experience the place and product.

Adverse life course events associated with unemployment can negatively affect individuals’ future labor market prospects. Unauthorized status, and subsequent unauthorized employment, may operate similarly, marring immigrants’ labor market prospects even after they change legal status. However, it is unclear how and why any durable disadvantage associated with prior unauthorized status operates differently by gender. This is an important shortcoming, given that legal status and gender overlap to influence both migration and stratification. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of lawful permanent residents, we find durable disadvantage associated with prior exposure to unauthorized status, especially among women. Men with prior exposure to unauthorized status experience persistent occupational disadvantage over time relative to men who were never unauthorized. However, women with exposure to unauthorized status experience widening occupational disadvantage over time relative to women who were never unauthorized. Human capital and legal processes help to explain this pattern.

We examine the relationship between parental disability and child outcomes in the American Community Survey. We focus on families with veteran parents, for whom parental disability is a direct result of service-related activities and thus is more plausibly exogenous to child outcomes than other forms of parental disability. Using the service connected disability rating (SCDR) as a measure of the severity of veteran disability, we document a gradient in child outcomes with respect to parental disability (even conditional on having a disabled parent). Children with more severely disabled parents are more likely to be late for grade, less likely to be in private school, and more likely to have disabilities themselves. These results lend meaningful insight to broader populations; we find similar associations between parental disability and child outcomes in non-veteran families. We provide evidence consistent with two broad mechanisms: first, parental disability reduces parental labor supply and thus household income (even net of transfers) and second, children—especially older children—allocate time away from work and schooling to provide care for disabled parents.

Introduction The goal of this study was to identify use of family planning (FP) in the Buyende district of Uganda, and what factors influence its use or lack of use. Methods Study participants included 60 women from 18 to 49 years old who lived in the Buyende District of Uganda. This was a mixed-methods study. Descriptive statistics and chi-squared analysis were performed on the survey data to identify factors associated with modern FP use. Qualitative analysis, consisting of an iterative coding process, was used to identify themes that arose in focus groups regarding barriers to FP use. Results Most participants were 20-24 years old (26.7%), married (86.7%), had a primary education (86.7%), and had a mean parity of 5.23 (range 0 to 14). One third of survey participants were currently using a form of modern contraception, and women who spoke to a healthcare provider in the last 12 months about FP were significantly more likely to be using a form of modern contraception (46.2% vs 10.5%, p=0.016). The most common barriers to FP use were side effects (71%), fear of husband disapproval (19.4%), and lack of access (16.1%). Qualitative analysis of focus groups demonstrated 9 major themes that emerged as barriers to FP: misinformation/misconceptions about FP; concerns about side effects; negative community perceptions of FP; lack of education; male opposition to FP; use of traditional methods; distance to health facilities; financial concerns; FP going against religious beliefs. Discussion It is important to continue to address not only the material access to FP and lack of education, but also the gender inequalities that are foundational to the lack of usage where desired.

In this paper, we explore the impact of the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease—diphtheria antitoxin—on the historical health transition. In 1895, the State Board of Health in Massachusetts began providing free supplies of the antitoxin for medical use through- out the state. This policy has later been recognized as a significant event in the public health history of Massachusetts. We use cross-municipality variation in pre-antitoxin diphtheria mor- tality rates and the availability of free antitoxin in 1895 to create an instrumental variable for local adoption rates, as measured by the number of antitoxin bottles per capita. By analyzing approximately 1.6 million death certificates from 1880 to 1914, we find that a hypothetical 10- year delay in the development of antitoxin would have reduced life expectancy at birth by one year, primarily due to reductions in child mortality. Our results suggest that medicine played a significant role in the increase of life expectancy in the state of Massachusetts in the early 20th century.