Essays on the Economics of People and Place

This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of people and places. The essays share a common goal of understanding the long-run consequences of economic and social processes on people, places, and the economy. The essays also share a common approach of combining newly available administrative data with transparent empirical methodologies.;The first chapter paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on educational attainment and income. Using confidential Census data linked to county of birth, I relate cross-county variation in the severity of the recession to differences in long-run outcomes between individuals who were younger versus older when the recession began. Individuals who were born in counties with a more severe recession and were children or adolescents during the recession are less likely to obtain a college degree and, as adults, earn less income. My estimates, combined with the large number of potentially affected individuals, suggest that the 1980-1982 recession could depress economic output today. Every U.S. recession since 1973 resembles the 1980-1982 recession in persistently decreasing earnings per capita in negatively affected counties, which suggests that other recessions might also have significant long-run effects.;The second chapter examines the role of social interactions in location decisions. We study over one million long-run location decisions made during two landmark migration episodes by African Americans born in the U.S. South and whites born in the Great Plains. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of social interactions for each receiving and sending location. Social interactions strongly influenced the location decisions of black migrants, but were less important for white migrants. Social interactions were particularly important in providing African American migrants with information about attractive employment opportunities and played a larger role in less costly moves.;The third chapter estimates the effect of social connectedness on crime across U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We use a new source of variation in social connectedness stemming from social interactions in the migration of millions of African Americans out of the South. Cities with higher social connectedness had considerably fewer murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and larcenies, with a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness reducing the murder rate by 14 percent. As predicted by a simple economic model, effects on city-level crime rates are stronger in cities with a higher African American population share.