Dylan Connor

• PhD, Geography
• Associate Professor at Arizona State University

Significance Intergenerational social mobility in the United States has declined over the last century, sparking a national debate about how to improve equality of opportunity. By analyzing data spanning the 20th century, we demonstrate strong temporal patterns operating across regions. Some areas of the United States have witnessed significant dec...

With over 30 million people moving to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), governments feared that Europe was losing its most talented workers. Using new data from Ireland in the early twentieth century, I provide evidence to the contrary, showing that the sons of farmers and illiterate men were more likely to emigrate than t...

This article examines the role of work at the cutting of technological change—frontier work—as a driver of prosperity and spatial income inequality. Using new methods and data, we analyze the geography and incomes of frontier workers from 1880 to 2019. Initially, frontier work is concentrated in a set of ‘seedbed’ locations, contributing to rising...

Urbanization has long fueled a dual narrative: cities are heralded as sources of economic dynamism and wealth creation yet criticized for fostering inequality and a range of social challenges. This paper addresses this tension using a multidisciplinary approach, combining social sciences methods with satellite imagery-based spatial pattern analysis...

Wealth inequality has been sharply rising in the United States and across many other high-income countries. Due to a lack of data, we know little about how this trend has unfolded across locations within countries. Examining the subnational geography of wealth is crucial because, from one generation to the next, it shapes the distribution of opport...

Coastal salinity represents a critical global environmental crisis that threatens agricultural productivity and food security. Traditional remote sensing methods to measure soil salinity in coastal areas are confounded by the presence of soil moisture and ubiquitous water-based land uses. This study introduces CoSal, a remote sensing and machine le...

Over 2.4 million properties in the United States, both residential and commercial, could face chronic flooding by the century’s end. Despite FEMA’s role in defining Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs), regulating new developments, and mandating flood insurance for federally backed mortgages, the efficacy of these policies in reducing population risk...

This article examines whether the patterns of urbanization in China over the past twenty years have resulted in a more balanced or increasingly polarized city size distribution. China is an important study area due to the immense scale of its urbanization and the substantial role of its planners in coordinating and striving for more balanced develo...

Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left‐behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place‐ba...

The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outsid...

Urban informatics appears to be a suitable area for the application of digital twins. Definitions of the term share some characteristics, but these definitions do not agree on what exactly constitutes a digital twin. The term has the potential to be misleading unless adequate attention is paid to the inherent uncertainty in any replica of a real sy...

Automated census linkage algorithms have become popular for generating longitudinal data on social mobility, especially for immigrants and their children. But what if these algorithms are particularly bad at tracking immigrants? This study utilizes a database on nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, generated from the most widely used algorithms, cr...

We document that children growing up in places left behind by today’s economy experience lower levels of social mobility as adults. Using a longitudinal database that tracks over 20,000 places in the USA from 1980 to 2018, we identify two kinds of left behind places: the ‘long-term left behind’ that have struggled over long periods of history; and...

Children born into poverty in rural America achieve higher average income levels as adults than their urban peers. As economic opportunity tends to be more abundant in cities, this "rural advantage" in income mobility seems paradoxical. This article resolves this puzzle by applying multilevel analysis to new spatial measures of rurality and place-l...

Wealth inequality has been sharply rising in the United States and across many other high-income countries. Due to a lack of data, we know little about how this trend has unfolded across locations within countries. Investigating this subnational geography of wealth is crucial, as from one generation to the next, wealth powerfully shapes opportunity...

Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, and social processes across the rural–urban continuum. Most existing classifications are, however, only available at relatively aggregated spatial scales, such as at the county scale in the United States. The absence of rurality or urbanness measures at...

This paper examines the role of work at the cutting of technological change – frontier work – as a driver of prosperity and spatial income inequality. Using new methods and data, we analyze the geography and incomes of frontier workers from 1880 to 2019. Initially, frontier work is concentrated in a set of ‘seedbed’ locations, contributing to risin...

We document that children growing up in places left behind by today’s economy experience lower levels of social mobility as adults. Using a longitudinal database that tracks over 20,000 places in the United States from 1980 to 2018, we identify two kinds of left behind places: the ‘long-term left behind’ that have struggled over long periods of his...

We study a program that funded 39,000 Jewish households in New York City to leave enclave neighborhoods circa 1910. Compared to their neighbors with the same occupation and income score at baseline, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after removal, and these gains persisted to the next generation. Men who left enclaves also marrie...

Internet-of-Things (IoT) innovations are reconfiguring our societies and our day-to-day lives. But how do these new technologies enter our communities, and when they do, will they complement or dislocate existing activity? This paper raises these questions with respect to a rapidly proliferating class of “smart vending technologies.” We focus on on...

Current estimates of U.S. property at risk of coastal hazards and sea level rise (SLR) are staggering—evaluated at over a trillion U.S. dollars. Despite being enormous in the aggregate, potential losses due to SLR depend on mitigation, adaptation, and exposure and are highly uneven in their distribution across coastal cities. We provide the first a...

Demographers have consistently documented the importance of educational attainment for population-health. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the relationship between educational attainment and health varies considerably across contexts. This study examines how the education-sleep association varies across U.S. states to glean insights...

Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, and social processes across the rural-urban continuum. Most existing classifications are, however, only available at relatively aggregated spatial scales, such as at the county scale in the United States. The absence of rurality or urbanness measures at...

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high. The rise of inequality between people and places is being fueled by technological changes that heavily favor workers with college degrees, particularly those in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). But among workers in these leading technological se...

Rural America is often portrayed as a distressed and left-behind place, where the outlook for rural children is stagnant. This view of rural hardship is supported by the fact that since 1980, almost one in three rural communities have seen increases in poverty of 50 percent or more. But are such worsening conditions a typical feature of rural commu...

The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs that provide temporary assistance. Scholars have highlighted the success of refugee groups to show the positive impact of governmental programs on assimilation and integration. In the past, however, refugees arrived without formal s...

This article shows that parents reveal information about their fertility behavior through how they name their children. I arrive at this finding from a detailed examination of the net fertility of 130,000 married couples in Ireland, a country known for its historically high fertility rate, circa 1911. After stringently accounting for couples' occup...

Current estimates of U.S. property at risk of coastal hazards and sea level rise (SLR) are stag-gering, evaluated at over a trillion U.S. dollars. Despite being enormous in the aggregate, po-tential losses due to SLR depend on mitigation, adaptation, and exposure and are highly uneven in their distribution across coastal cities. We provide the firs...

Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, or socioeconomic processes across the rural-urban continuum. However, existing county-level classifications may ignore the within-county variations of rurality, which can be problematic if the scale of interest is at the place-level or finer. Moreover, e...

This article shows that parents reveal information about their fertility behavior through how they name their children. I arrive at this finding from detailed examination of the net fertility of 130,000 married couples in Ireland circa 1910, a country known for its historically high fertility rate. After stringently accounting for the occupation, r...

Most cities in the United States of America are thought to have followed similar development trajectories to evolve into their present form. However, data on spatial development of cities are limited prior to 1970. Here we leverage a compilation of high-resolution spatial land use and building data to examine the evolving size and form (shape and s...

The collection, processing, and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth's surface. While satellite-based Earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....

The county scale has thus far dominated rural demographic research—this descriptive profile of small town America is unique with its place-based lens. Another important extension is the nationwide application of the Community Capitals Framework which builds on the body of research examining capitals within case studies focused on one or more commun...

The collection, processing and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth’s surface. While satellite-based earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....

How entrenched is the spatial structure of inequality in cities? Although recent discussions provide conflicting answers to this question, the absence of long-term, longitudinal neighborhood data curtails direct examination of the issue. Focusing on the city of Denver, we develop a new strategy for analyzing neighborhood dynamics from 1940 to the p...

Over the past 200 years, the population of the United States grew more than 40-fold. The resulting development of the built environment has had a profound impact on the regional economic, demographic, and environmental structure of North America. Unfortunately, constraints on data availability limit opportunities to study long-term development patt...

Proponents of restrictive immigration policies often claim that families arriving with fewer skills and resources will struggle economically. This claim is challenging to test as lower-skilled migrants also tend to face greater discrimination, exclusion, and obstacles in the United States. I use unique multigenerational data on Irish Americans in t...

How have our cities evolved into what they are today? Despite strong claims regarding the forces shaping the spatial organization of cities, evidence on long-term urban change remains thin. Notably, direct testing of the regularities and rules thought to characterize long-term urban development is surprisingly rare. By leveraging new and unpreceden...

Current research provides conflicting images of low-income neighborhoods as both highly persistent through time but also increasingly at-risk to gentrification. Attempts to understand neighborhood persistence and change are severely limited by the absence of long-term longitudinal neighborhood data. Using Denver as a proof-of-concept, we devise a n...

Across many cities in the early twentieth century, one in five children died before their fifth birthday. There is much we do not know about how infant and child mortality was reduced, nor why it declined at different rates across populations. This article investigates mortality using data from 13,247 families in Dublin City in the 1900s with a nov...

One hundred years ago, a complete census of Ireland was taken as part of a larger census of the UK. The information gathered included details on every person compiled by household and by house address. This data included the name, sex, age, religion, place of birth and relationship to others in the household. As it transpired, this was the last cen...

One hundred years ago, a complete census of Ireland was taken as part of a larger census of the UK. The information gathered included details on every person compiled by household and by house address. This data included the name, sex, age, religion, place of birth and relationship to others in the household. As it transpired, this was the last cen...

One hundred years ago, a complete census of Ireland was taken as part of a larger census of the UK. The information gathered included details on every person compiled by household and by house address. This data included the name, sex, age, religion, place of birth and relationship to others in the household. As it transpired, this was the last cen...