Economic outcomes vary tremendously throughout the United States. This variation is due to an amalgamation of processes, ranging from spatial access barriers to differences in institutions across jurisdictions. This dissertation explores three different aspects of these spatial variations. Specifically, I explore how economic outcomes across the United States are affected by social safety net policies, pharmaceutical marketing, and the expression of American Indian sovereignty through self-determination policies.The first essay is titled “The Impact of Food Assistance Work Requirements on Labor Market Outcomes.” The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly named the Food Stamp Program, has long been an integral part of the US social safety net. During US welfare reforms in the mid-1990s, SNAP eligibility became more restrictive with legislation citing a need to improve self-sufficiency of participating households. As a result, legislatures created two of these eligibility requirements: the General Work Requirement (GWR), which forces an adult to work to receive benefits, and the Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents (ABAWD) work requirement, which requires certain adults to work a certain number of hours to receive benefits. Using restricted-access SNAP microdata from nine states, I exploit age cutoffs of the ABAWD work requirement and General Work Requirement (GWR) to estimate the effect of these policies on labor outcomes. I find that at the ABAWD age cutoff, there is no statistically significant evidence of a discontinuity across static and dynamic employment outcomes. At the GWR age cutoff, unemployed SNAP users and SNAP-eligible adults are on average more likely to leave the labor force than to continue to search for work.The second essay is titled “Open Payments and Opioid Overdose Mortalities in the United States.” The United States registered over 190 opioid overdose deaths per day in 2020. Many factors contribute to the epidemic, but a pronounced feature is overprescribing of opioid analgesics. I explore the legal marketing of medical technologies via provider payments and its potential effect on mortality rates. Using the Open Payments database from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and cause of death data from the CDC, I examine the relationship between population-weighted opioid-associated payments and overdose deaths at the county level for the contiguous US. The presence and magnitude of payments varies across counties and regions. Results indicate that opioid producers predominantly advertise through food and entertainment related transfers with median values of around \$17. Additionally, I found no statistically significant evidence of “detailing” behavior. Regression results suggest that the number of physicians receiving a payment in a county at an earlier period has a stronger association to opioid-mortalities than the aggregate value of the transfers in the county. The third essay is titled “Business Activity in Tribal Areas During the Self-Determination and Nation-to-Nation Eras.” Despite development efforts, tribal nations inside the borders of the US exhibit higher poverty rates and associated social concerns than other areas of the US. Business development can be a key way to sustainably reduce poverty. This article characterizes differences between county-level economies with and without tribal lands using several measures of business activity. Consistent with county-level business size distribution plots, results from regression analyses show that tribal areas on average have more firms and establishments compared to nontribal US counties over the entire analysis period. In terms of industrial diversity, employment is becoming more concentrated in certain industries over time relative to nontribal areas. Estimates from counterfactual kernel densities show that estimating conditional means may not accurately reflect the changing distributions of tribal business activity. The chapter concludes that stronger support systems for existing enterprises could foster future economic growth in tribal counties.
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