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This project investigates an issue of central importance to some communities, the choice between reliance on natural resource extraction versus reliance on alternative forms of development. Extractive forms of natural resource use have been declining in the United States for decades. In their place, non-extractive forms of natural resource development such as tourism, outdoor recreation, and amenity development have emerged as a possible new direction. In this project, the relationship between these alternative paths and economic outcomes including economic growth, poverty, and opportunity is analyzed. The object is to see when and how particular strategies as well as change between strategies are beneficial. Findings will inform decision making concerning these areas of the United States and so will enhance national welfare. Data for this project come from combining U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Wholedata (a product from the Upjohn Institute available upon request and not posted here) for relevant counties in the United States from 2000 to 2015. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Under Grant No. 1903924: Effects of Natural Resource Dependence. Any opinions, ?findings,and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211022094 for Rural-Urban Differences in the Labor-Force Impacts of COVID-19 in the United States by Matthew M. Brooks, J. Tom Mueller and Brian C. Thiede in Socius

Previous literature on climate change and human population dynamics has mainly focused on how population growth affects greenhouse gas emissions. Much less research has analyzed how climatic variability influences the size of human populations, despite reasonable expectations of such effects. Evidence of climate-fertility linkages, or lack thereof, is needed to refine understandings of adaptive behaviors. It is also needed to refine models of the demographic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, which tend to assume climatic changes will not feedback to impact population dynamics. We test this relationship using birth histories from 23 sub-Saharan African countries and high-resolution climate data. Our analyses show that exposure to climatic variability is associated with fertility in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit in complex ways. Women exposed to hot-and-dry spells experience significant reductions in the annual probability of fertility, while exposure to above-average temperatures and precipitation is associated with increased fertility over baseline. These associations vary between demographic and geographic groups, revealing important differences in vulnerability and adaptive behavior.

Recent cohorts of U.S. children increasingly consist of immigrants or the immediate descendants of immigrants, a demographic shift that has been implicated in high rates of child poverty. Analyzing data from the 2014-2018 Current Population Survey (CPS) and using the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplementary Poverty Measure, we describe differences in child poverty rates across immigrant generations (first-, second-, and third+-generation immigrant children) and how these are rooted in generational differences in the prevalence and impact of key poverty risk factors. We find that (1) poverty rates among Hispanic children are very high, particularly among first- and second- generation with two foreign-born parents children; (2) limited parental employment is by far the greatest risk factor for child poverty compared to having a young or poorly educated parent, living in a single-headed family or disadvantaged place of residence; (3) inter-generational differences in risk factor prevalence explain non-trivial shares of corresponding child poverty gaps; and (4) the patterns observed among the Hispanic population are moderated by race and ethnicity. Understanding the intersection of poverty risks, immigrant generation, and race has significant policy implications has America’s population continues to grow more diverse along multiple social axes.