This article focuses on the discrimination and racism experienced by people of Asian descent during the COVID-19 pandemic in North America. It has been 2 years since the COVID-19 outbreak began. The unstable situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted our society and the economy. During the COVID-19 epidemic, we have witnessed an increase in hate-motivated incidents where race or ethnicity has been a factor, including incidents against Asian people. Anti-Asian racism was further exacerbated by the xenophobic and racist political rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 virus, especially after former President Trump described the coronavirus as a "Chinese virus". The faulty belief that Asian ethnicities are solely responsible for causing COVID-19 has triggered hate crimes and discrimination toward people of Asian descent. This study shows how the discrimination and racism experienced by people of Asian origin can take various forms and how racial stereotypes produce social inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) 2014–2018, we examine whether the household responsibility hypothesis (HRH) remains in the United States, using commuting times. After dividing couple households into subgroups by relative income level and educational level, we find that couple members in a higher income quartile tend to spend more time commuting. This implies that the HRH only explains the situation of a couple in which the man earns more than the woman. Given that the share of this household type among couples has diminished over time, this suggests that gender inequality within households has improved. Nevertheless, couples in which men earn more than women still dominate. So, we find, overall, that women’s commuting times still tend to be shorter than men’s, regardless of their relative educational levels. Furthermore, we find that the commuting time–gender gap is generally somewhat larger for couple households with a minor child, because men’s commuting times tend only to be slightly greater than when no minor child is present. This implies that women are still taking on a larger burden of household responsibilities, while also providing some financial support for their families.

Shifts in systemic racism and racial inequalities in the U.S. over the last several decades have been mixed—some things have improved whereas others have remained unchanged or even worsened. Although school segregation is now illegal and the country has had its first Black president, the racial wealth gap continues to widen. In the current work, we examine whether shifts in racial inequalities in key structural areas in recent decades predict implicit and explicit racial attitudes among Black U.S. residents (N = 38,448). We observed some evidence of more pro-Black attitudes in states where racial inequalities in income, unemployment, and being uninsured decreased over time. However, the most robust association was between decreased racial inequalities in high school completion rates and decreased pro-Black attitudes. Thus, the current findings provide empirical evidence convergent with the notion that the public education system in the U.S. might be contributing to internalized racism among Black people in the U.S.

The majority of medium- to large-sized municipal water utilities in the United States rely on the 4 trillion USD municipal bond market to finance all or a portion of their operations, maintenance, and capital improvements. Despite the scale and power of the bond market in setting the guardrails for water utilities and local government services, there are limited studies that center municipal bonds in local water management. This dissertation analyzes how the municipal bond market drives and responds to municipal characteristics as expressed through water utility finance. Through empirical, heuristic, and statistical methods, I show that 1) utilities servicing distressed communities are trading off financial risk for affordability risk, 2) nonpayment is only material for water utility finance if nonpayment elasticity exists, and 3) the bond market does not price physical climate risk but does apply a racial yield penalty. The findings have implications for the management of local water utilities as well as broader implications for how infrastructure finance intersects with water management across the U.S.

The empirical link between women's employment status and their experience of different types of intimate partner violence (IPV) is not very apparent. Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 19 developing countries in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, we found that working women were significantly more likely to experience IPV than their stay-at-home counterparts. Given the great diversity in women's employment with respect to economic returns and working conditions, we disaggregated women's employment into three categories vis-à-vis agriculture jobs (AJ), blue-collar jobs (BJ), and white-collar jobs (WJ). The disaggregated analysis revealed that women engaged in all three job categories were significantly more likely to experience IPV. After controlling for potential endogeneity of women's employment, we found that women's work increased the risk of less severe physical violence (LSPV) and emotional violence (EV) but reduced the risk of sexual violence (SV). Endogeneity-adjusted disaggregated analysis showed that women engaged in BJ and WJ faced an increased risk of LSPV but reduced risk of SV. In contrast, women undertaking AJ faced a smaller risk of severe physical violence (SPV) and SV. This study contradicts some long-held beliefs that women's work is a sufficient condition for protecting them from IPV. The public policy should not assume that women's earnings automatically protect them against the risk of IPV. While encouraging a greater female labor force participation rate is important in its own right, women's risk of IPV is context-specific.

The labor supply of older men increased from the 1930s to the 1950s cohort. This paper explores the role of three Social Security changes in determining these differences: a delayed normal retirement age, increased delayed retirement credits, and a change in the earnings test that was eliminated beyond the retirement age, and evaluates the effects of several proposed reforms to the Social Security program on individuals' behaviors. I develop and estimate a rich dynamic life-cycle model of labor supply, savings, and Social Security application for healthy and unhealthy people using the Method of Simulated Moments for the 1930s birth cohort. The model captures the key structure of the Social Security retirement benefits, pension systems, and disability insurance, while taking into account uncertainties in health and disability, survival rates, wages, and medical expenditures. My model matches well the observed life-cycle profiles of employment, hours worked by workers, and savings for healthy and unhealthy people from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, and generates labor supply elasticities that rise with age and are smaller for healthy workers. It shows that the joint effects of the three changes in Social Security rules account for over 73% of the observed rises in labor force participation and hours per worker by the 1950s cohort. Of the three changed rules, the change in the earnings test contributes the most to the labor dynamics of older men. Additional policy experiments suggest that postponing the retirement age has little effect on older workers, while eliminating the earnings test and reducing retirement benefits by 23% would further increase older-age participation by 3.4 and 5.1 percent, respectively.

Introduction: Of the 22.8 million coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases recorded in the United States as of March 21, 2021 with age information, three-fourths were in the workingage group, indicating the potentially high economic impact of the pandemic. This study estimates the cost of lost work hours associated with the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 through February 2021. Method: I used a before-and-after analysis of data from the 2017–2021 Current Population Survey to estimate the costs of lost work hours due to economic, workers' own health, and other reasons, from the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: Across March 2020 through February 2021 (a year since the start of the pandemic in the United States), the estimated cost of lost work hours associated with the COVID-19 pandemic among US full-time workers was $138 billion (95% confidence interval [CI]: $73.4 billion–$202.46 billion). Shares of the costs attributed to economic, workers' own health, and other reasons were 33.7%, 13.7%, and 52.6%, respectively. Conclusion: The $138 billion cost of lost work hours associated with the COVID-19 pandemic during March 2020 through February 2021 highlights the economic consequences of the pandemic, as well as indicating the potential benefit of public health and safety interventions used to mitigate COVID-19 spread.

We quantify the roles of increasing returns and trade costs in medical services. Using data on millions of Medicare claims, we document that "imported" medical procedures-defined as a patient's consumption of a service produced by a medical provider in a different region-constitute about one-fifth of US healthcare consumption. Larger markets specialize in the production of less common procedures, and these procedures are more traded between regions. These patterns reflect economies of scale: larger regions produce higher-quality care because they serve more patients. Revealed-preference estimates of quality, which are positively related to external measures of quality of care, have a scale elasticity around 0.7. We use these estimates to evaluate the proximity-concentration tradeoff associated with various policy options for improving access to medical care.

One prominent explanation for municipal incorporation – i.e., the formation of new cities – is that it is a defensive response to the threat of annexation posed by neighboring cities. In this paper, we conduct cross-sectional regression analyses to examine the relationship between race, municipal annexation, and municipal incorporation between 2000 and 2010. Our results suggest that annexation by neighboring cities plays a key role in driving municipal incorporation activity in the U.S.; cities that are next to unincorporated majority-white communities tend to annex more aggressively than those next to majority-minority communities, likely as a result of racially selective annexation efforts; majority-white communities are more likely to incorporate in response to the encroachment via annexation of the nearest city; and communities that have higher shares of non-Hispanic whites than the annexing city are especially likely to use incorporation as a defensive strategy to prevent annexation.

A pre-press version of the findings, which will be published in the September 2022 issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, is now available online. Gig work includes employment where people are paid by the piece of completed work, by the hour, or by the day, rather than a traditional employer-employee relationship. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Handy are examples of gig companies, according to the Congressional Research Service. Using data from the 2008-2019 IPUMS Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, UTHealth School of Public Health researchers found that insecure income from gig work contributed to poor health outcomes among the national workforce, including a sicker workforce, higher unreimbursed healthcare costs, and greater costs to the consumer. Co-authors, led by School of Public Health alumnus Robert Thomas, PhD, JD, MBA, included Gretchen Gemeinhardt, PhD, associate professor of management policy and community health; Paula Cuccaro, PhD, assistant professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences; and John Davis, MA, from UTMB Health. Thomas is also immediate past commissioner of the Texas Workforce Commission. Key findings included: Insecure income earners reported a 50% increase in poor overall health and psychological distress compared to salary earners. The poor health effects of piece work were somewhat eased on workers when accounting for socioeconomic factors, but the trend of increased health risks remained constant, especially for women, those with less than a college degree, financially poorer workers, and non-white-collar workers. Black and Hispanic workers earning insecure income were more likely to report poor health than their white counterparts. Higher rates of hourly pay reduced, but did not remove, the correlation between insecure income and workers' health. The study comes at a time when gig companies are pushing to classify workers as independent contractors, rather than employees, in state courts and legislatures in California, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in the U.S. While the paper utilized pre-COVID-19 data, the researchers say their findings suggest that COVID-era gig workers will likely see an even greater increase in poor overall health and psychological distress. "The longer-term economic burden will ultimately be passed onto the U.S. consumer as we see increases in worker shortages, increases in prices from gig companies, and increases in unreimbursed health care utilization," Thomas said. "It is reasonable to project that the U.S. taxpayer will pay more for uninsured chronic morbidity care of uninsured U.S. workers who are paid an insecure income."

Language interpretation in rural health care settings is an important service to consider when assessing access to equitable, safe, quality care, particularly as many rural communities become increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse. Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) may face additional challenges to providing language services given their small, rural nature. This brief describes common themes that emerged through interviews about language interpretation services with six CAHs located in areas with a high proportion of patients with limited English proficiency (LEP).

Infant sex ratios that differ from the biological norm provide a measure of gender status inequality that is not susceptible to social desirability bias. Ratios may become less biased with educational expansion through reduced preference for male children. Alternatively, bias could increase with education through more access to sex-selective medical technologies. Using National Vital Statistics data on the population of live births in the United States for 1969–2018, we examine trends in infant sex ratios by parental race/ethnicity, education, and birth parity over five decades. We find son-biased infant sex ratios among Chinese and Asian Indian births that have persisted in recent years, and regressions suggest son-biased ratios among births to Filipino and Japanese mothers with less than a high school education. Infant sex ratios are more balanced at higher levels of maternal education, particularly when both parents are college educated. Results suggest greater equality of gender status with higher education in the United States.

Objective: To examine the relationship between payer source for acute rehabilitation, residential median household income (MHI), and outcomes at rehabilitation discharge after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Setting: Acute inpatient rehabilitation facilities. Participants: In total, 8558 individuals enrolled in the Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems (TBIMS) National Database who were admitted to inpatient rehabilitation between 2006 and 2019 and were younger than 64 years. Design: Secondary data analysis from a multicenter longitudinal cohort study. Main Measures: Payer source was divided into 4 categories: uninsured, public insurance, private insurance, and workers' compensation/auto. Relationships between payer source with residential MHI, rehabilitation length of stay (RLOS), and the FIM Instrument at discharge were examined. Covariates included age, injury severity, FIM at admission, and a number of sociodemographic characteristics including minority status, preinjury limitations, education level, and employment status. Results: Individuals with workers' compensation/auto or private insurance had longer RLOS than uninsured individuals or those with public insurance after controlling for demographics and injury characteristics. An adjusted model controlling for demographics and injury characteristics showed a significant main effect of payer source on FIM scores at discharge, with the highest scores noted among those with workers' compensation/auto insurance. The main effect of payer source on FIM at discharge became nonsignificant after RLOS was added to the model as a covariate, suggesting a mediating effect of RLOS. Conclusion: Payer source was associated with preinjury residential MHI and predicted RLOS. While prior studies have demonstrated the effect of payer source on long-term outcomes due to lack of inpatient rehabilitation or quality follow-up care, this study demonstrated that individuals with TBI who are uninsured or have public insurance may be at risk for poorer functional status at the point of rehabilitation discharge than those with private insurance, particularly compared with those with workers' compensation/auto insurance. This effect may be largely driven by having a shorter length of stay in acute rehabilitation.

In any month, administrative data collected by government agencies contain a fraction of the polity’s adults, namely those who have interacted with government agencies in that month. For researchers and policymakers who want to evaluate questions that require a spatial location of the whole population of adults at a given time (e.g. job–residence spatial mismatch, impacts of local policies), these fragmentary records are insufficient. Combining administrative data from several agencies in the State of Washington, United States (US), we impute residential histories by parameterizing the ‘decay’ in maintenance of an observed address. This process yields an imputed population whose demography and geographic distribution matches well with survey estimates. This work uses driving license, voter, social services, and birth records to append address locations to Unemployment Insurance data, a process that could be replicated with administrative records in other US states and countries with sporadic address data from various agencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a large and immediate drop in employment among US workers, along with major expansions of unemployment insurance and work from home. We use Current Population Survey and Social Security application data to study employment among older adults and their participation in disability and retirement insurance programs through the second year of the pandemic. We find ongoing improvements in employment outcomes among older workers in the labor force, along with sustained higher levels in the share no longer in the labor force during this period. Applications for Social Security disability benefits remain depressed, particularly for Supplemental Security Income. In models accounting for the expiration of expanded unemployment insurance, we find that the loss of these additional financial supports is associated with a drop in older adult unemployment rates and an increase in Social Security Disability Insurance claiming. Social Security retirement benefit claiming has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, but has shifted from offline to online applications.

How do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I document that students trade off initial earnings against lifetime earnings when choosing college majors and that students from low-income families are more likely to choose majors associated with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. I provide causal estimates of how student debt affects this trade-off using the staggered implementation of universal no-loan policies across 22 universities from 2001 to 2019. I find that students who are required to take on more student loans to finance their education choose majors with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. Furthermore, student debt affects students differentially depending on their family backgrounds: Students from low-income families display greater sensitivity to changes in student debt. Finally, I show that differences in student debt amounts lead to different job profiles and earnings later in life. Combined, these findings highlight the role of financial frictions in human capital investments and subsequent labor market trajectories.

This three-article dissertation focuses on labor market regulation in the American construction industry. The United States faces two parallel crises: one with affordable housing supply, and one with maintaining residential construction labor standards. Historically, issues with labor standards have been addressed on public works through prevailing wage requirements. Labor standards—while good for workers—may increase construction costs; higher costs, in turn, negatively impact low-income families by reducing supplies of affordable housing. In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, I re-examine whether this tradeoff exists and, if so, its implications. I estimate that prevailing wage requirements add, at most, 6% to the costs of affordable housing construction. The implicit baseline for this paper is the current practices in the residential construction industry, including the cost advantages realized by contractors engaging in illegal and undesirable practices. An alternative baseline would be the cost of building affordable housing for contractors who abide by labor standards, classify their workers correctly and pay the required amounts in social insurance and taxes. Informal employment, defined as the illegal misclassification of employees as independent contractors or employment of workers using cash-only payments, has long been rampant in the American construction industry. These actions rob workers of legally earned benefits, defund social programs, and undermine the competitiveness of law-abiding contractors. While enforcing labor laws has proved difficult, prevailing wage laws may make states abler to strengthen enforcement and limit informality. Under penalty of law, these regulations require employers to submit weekly certified payrolls to government agencies on public works projects, which increases governmental oversight. In Chapter 3 of this dissertation, I use state-level data from 2010-2019 to examine the relationship between prevailing wage laws and informal construction employment. State prevailing wage laws, even those of weak and average strength, are associated with significant reductions in informality. Lastly, Chapter 2 of this dissertation focuses on occupational licensing requirements in construction. Over time, disagreements have persisted over the effects of occupational licensing on markets and the appropriate role of government in the regulation of occupations. In Chapter 2, I exploit state variation in occupational licensing laws to examine labor market outcomes of occupational licensing in construction. Data on licensing comes from 2016-2019 Current Population Survey (CPS) data as well as a new 2019 data set on licensing requirements for the three primary construction occupations that require licensing in certain states: electricians, plumbers, and operating engineers. Consistent with prior literature, results suggest the presence of occupational licensing is associated with an 8.3 to 14.8 percentage point increase in earnings for electricians, plumbers, and operating engineers. Employment results are more mixed; while these results suggest occupational licensing is associated with a 1.2 to 1.3 percentage point increase in the proportion of workers employed as electricians, plumbers, or operating engineers, effects on the level of employment in these occupations were not statistically significant. In supplemental analyses I explore possible competing explanations for these employment findings.

We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms-i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one's political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual's ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.

Prior research has begun the task of assessing the applicability of group threat theory to explain sexual orientation hate crime. Drawing upon this perspective, researchers have hypothesized that relatively large and growing gay populations might be perceived as a threat to heterosexual norms, leading to sexual orientation hate crimes. Previous work has also identified an additional source of threat that may be particularly salient: threat to traditional marriage. Using data for a sample of metropolitan areas, we assess the impact of a previously unexamined potential source of threat: same-sex marriage. We also compare the relationships between the relative size and growth of the gay population and hate crimes expressed as incidence and victimization rates. The results reveal that the effects of the gay population’s relative size on incidence vs. victimization rates differ in important respects, and that the level of same-sex marriage is positively associated with both hate crime rates.

The Spanish Language in the United States addresses the rootedness of Spanish in the United States, its racialization, and Spanish speakers’ resistance against racialization. This novel approach challenges the "foreigner" status of Spanish and shows that racialization victims do not take their oppression meekly. It traces the rootedness of Spanish since the 1500s, when the Spanish empire began the settlement of the new land, till today, when 39 million U.S. Latinos speak Spanish at home. Authors show how whites categorize Spanish speaking in ways that denigrate the non-standard language habits of Spanish speakers—including in schools—highlighting ways of overcoming racism.