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Browsing by Author "Speagle, William"

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    Essays in Public Economics
    (2020-08) Speagle, William
    This dissertation consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, I build a life-cycle directed search model to match salient features of the labor market and disability insurance: multiple states, expiring unemployment benefits, disability insurance, human capital depreciation, idiosyncratic match productivity, and aggregate labor productivity shocks. I calibrate my model to match unemployment data between 1990-2018 and the Great Recession. In my second chapter, I examine the long-run effect of racial covenants. Racial covenants were clauses in property deeds that prohibited the sale or renting of a property to specific religious and ethnic minorities. This chapter studies the effect of racially-restrictive covenants, prevalent during the early-to-mid 20th century, on present-day socioeconomic outcomes such as house prices and racial segregation. Using a newly created geographic data on over 120,000 historical property deeds with information on racial covenant use from Hennepin County, Minnesota, we exploit the unanticipated 1948 Supreme Court ruling that made racially-restrictive covenants unenforceable. I employ a regression discontinuity around the ruling to document the causal and time-persistent effects of racial covenants on present-day socioeconomic geography of Minneapolis. In particular, I document that houses that were covenanted have on average 15% higher present-day house values compared to properties which were not covenanted. I also find a 1% increase in covenanted houses in a census blocks reduces black residents by 14% and reduces black home ownership by 19%.