Logan looks broadly at the impacts of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast from 1950-2005, questioning whether their effects on population and employment are long-term or short-lived and asking which population groups are more vulnerable to damage and displacement. A significant barrier to such analysis is the lack of detailed information on the actual wind damage from historical hurricanes. Logan and Zengwang Xu examine the potential for hurricane wind models to be used as a basis for filling this important data need.

This collaborative project will analyze the relationship between C8 (perflourooctonoic acid) and reproductive health outcomes, including miscarriage, preterm birth, fetal growth restriction, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental deficits among residents of West Virginia and Ohio who had elevated exposure resulting from environmental contamination from a chemical plant.

Chay is engaged in research that empirically investigates the consequences of segregation (and desegregation) in the American South for health outcomes and human capital formation. He finds that the 1946 Hospital Act that led to new hospitals for whites improved health among whites only. The introduction of the Civil Rights Act, which helped provide access to hospitals for blacks, led to substantial relative reductions in black infant mortality.

The complex relationship between demographic processes, spatial segregation, and inequality is evident in work by Logan on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Logan finds that primarily black neighborhoods within the city limits were more likely to be damaged and less likely to be rebuilt than were otherwise similar neighborhoods.

Schooling choice can lead to persistent disparities if individuals in different groups have different levels of access to good schools or make different types of decisions about which schools to attend. This project investigates impacts on student outcomes, competitiveness and racial segregation as a result of the implementation of a new public-school choice system that was first approved in December 2001 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. In this study, Hastings looks at the consequences of winning one’s first choice school in a choice lottery.

Aizer is looking at the long-run effects of the Mother’s Pension program, which was established as early as 1911 in some states, and is the first government-sponsored welfare program in the U.S. It was designed to improve the conditions of young children that had become dependent through the loss or disability of the breadwinner. Because of the program’s historical nature, she can investigate the long-term effects of cash transfers to low-income families on a variety of outcomes, including educational attainment and earnings.

Labor-market migration can transform individuals as they develop new skills that may or may not be marketable at home. Lindstrom examines this issue in the context of temporary Mexican immigrants to the U.S. Consistent with the literature on investment migration there is evidence that migrants return with financial capital that can be translated into self-employment; however, it appears that the Mexican labor market does not reward U.S. labor-market experience.

In U.S. cities, there are important relationships between segregation and public service delivery. Baum-Snow examines the role of urban school desegregation in determining processes of ethnic groupings. He shows that desegregation, in addition to leading to substantial outmigration from urban districts by whites, tended to reduce outmigration among blacks while also reducing private school enrollment among blacks in the South.  Because of these countervailing forces, school desegregation was not an important driver of urban population decentralization in the United States.

Kaivan Munshi and Chay are examining how the consequences of the Great Migration for blacks moving to northern cities depended in part on the presence of an effective civic culture and network support in their respective sending areas. They note that there was substantial variation across sending areas in the density of the black population and that a certain threshold of density was necessary to develop an effective social network prior to migration.

Interested in the early origins of inequality and the role of child health in the production of social inequality, Jackson uses longitudinal data from the U.S. and the United Kingdom to study child health as a source of compounding disadvantage in skill development during the school years. A recent paper examines health as a source of cumulative disadvantage in skill development, focusing in particular on whether the timing and persistence of poor health have a lasting impact.

PSTC researchers Short and Logan join Principal Investigator Buka to provide the Providence County, RI and Bristol County, MA components of the National Children’s Survey. The study will examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of more than 100,000 children across the U.S., following them from before birth until age 21. The goal of the study is to improve the health and well-being of children.