I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820-1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort's county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in...

This paper examines whether loss of locally available hospital-based obstetric services affects racial/ethnic disparities in intrapartum care access and birth outcomes in rural areas of the US. To conduct causal inference, we combine difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods...

Using monthly data from major U.S. metropolitan areas that span state borders, we estimate the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage using a difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment in two-digit industries of 71 (Arts, Entertainment and Recreation) and 72...

We introduce new measurement tools to understand the sources of earnings differences across space. Based on the natural language employers use in job vacancy text, we develop granular measures of job tasks and of worker specialization. We find that jobs in larger commuting zones involve greater...

We study the joint process of urbanization and industrialization in the US economy between 1880 and 1940. We show that only a small share of aggregate industrialization is accounted for by the relocation of workers from remote rural areas to industrial hubs like Chicago or New York City....

We estimate the urban wage premium in the United States from 1940 to 2010. Drawing on recent advances in the literature on selection on unobservables, we show how to control for heterogeneity in the characteristics of individuals that choose to live in cities to address endogenous sorting....

Do environmental conditions pose greater health risks to individuals living in urban or rural areas? The answer is theoretically ambiguous: while urban areas have traditionally been associated with heightened exposure to environmental pollutants, the economies of scale and density inherent to...

In the United States, rural and low-income communities have difficulty attracting and retaining physicians, potentially adversely impacting health outcomes. With a limited supply of physicians completing medical school at US universities, foreign-born and educated physicians provide a potential...

The rigorous evaluation of anti-poverty programs is key to the fight against global poverty. Traditional approaches rely heavily on repeated in-person field surveys to measure program effects. However, this is costly, time-consuming, and often logistically challenging. Here we provide the first...

Time use data facilitate deeper understanding of individual labor supply choices, especially for women, who are more likely to engage in unpaid care and home production. However, traditional time use data collection methods are time-consuming, expensive and susceptible to significant attrition....