This paper introduces two methods of creating differentially private (DP) synthetic data that are now incorporated into the synthpop package for R. Both are suitable for synthesising categorical data, or numeric data grouped into categories. Ten data sets with varying characteristics were used to evaluate the methods. Measures of disclosiveness and of utility were defined and calculated. The first method is to add DP noise to a cross tabulation of all the variables and create synthetic data by a multinomial sample from the resulting probabilities. While this method certainly reduced disclosure risk, it did not provide synthetic data of adequate quality for any of the data sets. The other method is to create a set of noisy marginal distributions that are made to agree with each other with an iterative proportional fitting algorithm and then to use the fitted probabilities as above. This proved to provide useable synthetic data for most of these data sets at values of the differentially privacy parameter as low as 0.5. The relationship between the disclosure risk and is illustrated for each of the data sets. Results show how the trade-off between disclosiveness and data utility depend on the characteristics of the data sets.

Objectives. The goal of this study was to measure unionization in the direct care workforce and the relationship between unionization and earnings, looking closely at differences across race/ethnicity and gender. Methods. Using data from the Current Population Survey from 2010 to 2020, we first used logit analyses to predict the probability of unionization among direct care workers across race/ethnicity and gender. We then measured the relationship between unionization and weekly earnings. Results. We found that male (12%) and Black (14%) direct care workers were most likely to be unionized, followed by Hispanic and other direct care workers of color. Unionized direct care workers earn wages that are about 7.8% higher than nonunionized workers, but unionized workers of color earn lower rewards for unionization compared with White direct care workers. Conclusions. Unions are a mechanism for improving job quality in direct care work, and protecting workers' rights to unionize and participate in collective bargaining equitably may be a way to stabilize and grow the direct care workforce. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(11):1676-1684. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307022).

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, same-sex partners of U.S. citizens became eligible for spousal visas. Since then, the U.S. has a seen a rapid rise in same-sex, mixed-citizenship couples. However, this effect varies greatly depending on the LGB policy context of the non-citizen's country of origin. Using waves 2008 to 2019 of the American Community Survey, this study employs a triple-difference design to examine how the policy environment of the origin country moderates the effect of the end of DOMA. Quasi-Poisson models with two-way fixed effects show that, after 2013, individuals in mixed-citizenship, same-sex couples couples coming from countries with progressive LGB policy saw a more than 60-percent increase in incidence relative to those in different-sex or same-citizenship couples. Meanwhile, those from countries with regressive laws experienced no significant increase. These results are corroborated by analyses of individual policies. We argue that the country-of-origin policy context impacts and is impacted by local norms and attitudes as well as individuals' material circumstances. This nexus of factors leaves a lasting impact on immigrants that shapes migration decisions and responses to policy shifts.

This paper examines how the introduction of unilateral divorce affects assortative mating and household income inequality across newly married couples. I exploit variation in the adoption and timing of unilateral divorce laws using three different empirical methods. I find that unilateral divorce increases income inequality by 3.5--16%. This is likely driven by increased assortative mating---unilateral divorce moderately increases educational sorting and substantially increases income sorting. The increased assortative mating could be partially driven by reduced marriage entry among college graduates and changes in women’s labor force participation at the time of marriage.

Between 1980 and 2016 the share of households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution that owned their own home declined by 10 percentage points. For the same households, the share of monthly income spent on rent increased from 28% in 1960 to over 42% in 2016. To asses the extent to which income stagnation is responsible for the decline in affordability, I use Census microdata to construct counterfactual simulations that capture the evolution of housing market trends under alternative assumptions about the distribution of income. Income stagnation explains nearly the entire decline in affordability for the bottom quintile. Housing market frictions that cause the price of housing to deviate from marginal cost matter more to households further up the income distribution. Using Atkinson-type welfare-based inequality measures, I find that the counterfactual distribution of income – with inequality held constant – results in greater welfare for nearly all possible levels of inequality aversion.

Birth rates provide useful information on population growth, and an above-replacement birth rate is indicative of stability. However, previous research has found that birth rates in industrialized societies such as the U.S have been decreasing in recent years. We use data from the American Economic Association to analyze this by using graphs and tables to observe the trend in birth rates of different demographics, using R (R Core Team 2020) and other packages. We also observe the trends behind changing economic and cultural factors that could affect the birth rates. We find that birth rates of young women of different races have been on a steep decline over the past 20 years, and factors that are known to decrease birth rates have increased. This report shows that the decline in birth rates is the result of cultural and economic changes between two generations of women. While this indicates that the U.S has become more culturally liberated, the declining birth rates showcases systemic effects of the worsening economy and increasing costs on the average American woman.

This article examines a pathway whereby occupational sex composition widens gender gap in pay, asking how differently gender tokens-men and women in the numeric minority in opposite-sex occupations-derive monetary rewards from engaging in managerial tasks. Using a dataset of job tasks from the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative, I find that a large portion of the cross-occupation variation in wage returns to managerial work is attributed to the sex composition of occupations. Female tokens derive lower returns to managerial tasks compared to their non-token counterparts, whereas male tokens benefit from managerial work to a greater extent than when they are in mixed-sex or male-dominated occupations. The study concludes by discussing the gendered outcomes of engaging in managerial tasks, typically sex-typed as being "men's work," in gender-atypical work environments.

Background: Physical activity (PA) and sleep duration have established associations with health outcomes individually but tend to co-occur and may be better targeted jointly. This study aimed to describe the cross-sectional prevalence, trends, and population characteristic correlates of activity-sleep patterns in a population-representative sample of US adults from the National Health Interview Survey (2004-2018). Methods: Participants (N = 359,019) self-reported aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity and sleep duration. They were categorized as "meeting both"/"meeting PA only"/"meeting sleep only"/"meeting neither" of the 2018 US PA guidelines and age-based sleep duration recommendations. Trends in activity-sleep patterns were analyzed using weighted multinomial logistic regression, and correlates were identified using weighted binary Poisson regressions, with P ≤ .001 considered significant. Results: "Meet sleep only" was most prevalent (46.4%) by 2018, followed by "meet neither" (30.3%), "meet both" (15.6%), and "meet PA only" (7.7%). Many significant sociodemographic, biological, and health-behavior correlates of the activity-sleep groups were identified, and the direction and magnitude of these associations differed between groups. Conclusions: Public health campaigns should emphasize the importance of both sufficient PA and sleep; target women and older adults, current smokers, and those with lower education and poorer physical and mental health; and consider specific barriers experienced by minority ethnic groups.

We examine how different measures of teacher quality are related to students’ long-run trajectories. Comparing teachers’ test-based value-added to nontest value-added – based on contributions to student absences and grades – we find that test and nontest value-added have similar effects on the average quality of colleges that students attend. However, test-based teacher quality measures have more explanatory power for outcomes relevant for students at the top of the achievement distribution such as attending a more selective college, while nontest measures have more explanatory power for whether students graduate from high school and enroll in college at all.

This study looks at human capital in Spain during the early stages of modern economic growth. We have assembled a new dataset for age-heaping and literacy in Spain with information about men and women from six population censuses and forty-nine provinces between 1877 and 1930. Our results show that, although age-heaping was less prevalent during the second half of the 19th century than previously thought, it did not decline until the early 20th century. Given that literacy increased throughout the whole period, our study thus unveils stark differences between age-heaping and literacy, which raises further questions regarding sources, methods and interpretation.

We analyze the impact of Ford Motor Company’s compensation practices on the Detroit-area labor market from 1918 to 1947. Previous studies imply that Ford paid race-independent wages, but its Black workers were sorted into undesirable departments. We extend these results using propensity score reweighting of census data and Ford’s records and confirm that Ford paid equal wages. We then develop a search model with discriminatory and equal wage firms to assess the impact of Ford’s policy on the larger labor market. Calibrated simulations suggest that Ford may have reduced the wage gap in southeastern Michigan by as much as 50%.

The population of unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women has nearly tripled in the US over the past two decades. While previous studies have tended to ignore these women, or treat them as single/married, this paper examines the labor supply responses of cohabiting women, single women, and married women from 1996 to 2016 using March-CPS. A comparison of the three groups finds that cohabiting women have the lowest labor force participation elasticity with respect to after-tax wages. That cohabiting women would work more hours if their partners earned more annually and married women would not, points to another behavioral difference between the two groups. Results from ATUS-CPS 2003–2017 further imply that cohabiting women share some of the same characteristics of single and married women. We conclude that unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women should be classified as a separate female group.

Objectives. To examine the impact of the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (Cal/OSHA's) 2017 workplace violence (WPV) prevention in health care safety standard on nonfatal violent injuries among health care workers (HCWs). Methods. We accessed estimated counts of WPV from the survey of occupational injuries and illness from 2011 to 2019 specific to HCWs. We used the Current Population Survey estimates of HCWs to create rates per 10 000. We conducted a longitudinal panel analysis and a comparative interrupted time-series analysis to examine the change in incidence and in rates associated with California's new standard. Results. Adoption of the 2017 safety standard led to an additional 3.48 reported WPV injuries per 10 000 HCWs in California, or an additional 473 injuries. Sensitivity analyses suggest other injuries did not change in the same period. Conclusions. It appears that the Cal/OSHA standard increased reporting of WPV injuries among HCWs in the first year of its adoption compared with the United States. Mandating reporting of all WPV incidents in the health care setting may be a means to ensure a more complete understanding of this public health problem. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(11):1668-1675. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307029).

The U.S. nonstandard workforce remained at around 10% of the total employed population for the past decades, although the subnational levels reveal variation. Insufficient scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding its spatial distribution and associated causes. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the contextual factors that help explain the geographic unevenness of the nonstandard workforce across U.S. metropolitan areas from 1997 to 2017. We find evidence that the urban context matters, but unevenly across arrangements and time. Three out of four of the nonstandard arrangements studied are more prevalent in metropolitan areas, while on-call workers are typically rural. Independent contractors are more concentrated in cities with higher fissuring, contrary to temporary and contracted out workers. Higher unemployment rates seem to push workers toward on-call arrangements, and inequality to temporary jobs. While the city effects change substantially over time, individual determinants are consistent.

Existing research has enumerated why people move; this article responds to recent calls for increased focus on residential immobility – or staying in place – by focusing on why and how middle-income renters remain immobile as housing costs change around them. This article examines how middle-income renters make sense of housing cost change and their ability to remain in place. Using thirty-two semi-structured interviews with middle-income renters in New York City, this research analyses housing narratives to understand the financial and social complexities of remaining in place. Middle-income renters who are intentionally immobile explain how they stay in their neighbourhood area by making financial trade-offs and negotiating landlord relationships to avoid rent increases. Within a broader narrative of inevitable price displacement, this demonstrates how structural processes of urban housing and urban change manifest in the housing narratives of middle-income renters as they act to defer their own displacement and actively hold their place in changing neighbourhoods.

The overall aim for this dissertation was to examine the extent that the Great Migration was associated with birth and mental health outcomes. Although Great Migration movers and their children experienced economic gains in education and earnings, literature has suggested that their health may not have followed the same trajectory. Compared to non-migrators, migrators experienced increased risks in adult mortality and infant mortality (Black et al., 2015; Eriksson & Niemesh, 2016). However, there are sizable research gaps remaining. The degree that these findings apply to other health outcomes and the potential mechanisms that might explain the worsened health outcomes documented in literature are unknown. This dissertation, situated towards the latter half of the Great Migration (between 1940 to 1980), aimed to answer a fraction of the many lingering questions that remain about the health of Great Migration migrators.

This paper is the first to study the effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 on marriage rates between foreign-born individuals and natural-born citizens. Using marriage license data, I find that gains to marriages involving a native bride and foreign groom decrease by 0.2 log points. The decrease in is driven by reductions in gains to marriages involving a Mexican groom or a non-Canadian, non-Mexican groom. I do not find evidence that the effects differed for states with lower educational attainment or higher shares of illegal immigrants.

Despite the benefits of gaining citizenship, many eligible immigrants in the United States are not naturalizing. In this article, we examine factors that lead to naturalization in the United States, finding that immigrants’ pathways to citizenship are simultaneously shaped by individual characteristics, place-based attributes, and family dynamics. Of notable significance, and largely omitted from previous empirical work on naturalization, we find that having a naturalized spouse prior to one’s own naturalization is associated with a higher probability of naturalization, whereas being married to an undocumented immigrant reduces the probability of naturalization. Similarly, having a naturalized adult in the family other than a spouse improves the odds of naturalization, but having an undocumented family member other than a spouse reduces the odds. These findings suggest that while eligible immigrants with naturalized family members are more likely to improve their access to naturalization through pooled resources and increased information sharing, eligible immigrants with undocumented family members are more likely to avoid the naturalization process entirely, likely due to chilling effects from immigrant enforcement and policies that target close ties with liminal legality. These findings suggest that immigrants’ access to citizenship could be improved by (1) reaching immigrants who are the first in their families to naturalize and (2) improving the context of reception for undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families. More broadly, while individual factors play a role in naturalization, complex contextual factors, including place and family, shape immigrants’ pathways to citizenship and provide opportunities for new policies to promote immigrant integration.

During the first half of the 20th century new technology, ideas, and behaviors transformed American society from a technologically advanced rural and agricultural people into an industrial power. The pace of this transformation was uneven across regions which has contributed to the notion that while goods markets were well integrated in the United States at the turn of the century, labor markets were not - particularly Southern labor markets. This dissertation uses new data and techniques to measure different frictions in labor markets, particularly in manufacturing, and consistently finds that Southern labor markets did not possess significantly larger labor market frictions than other regional labor markets. The first chapter takes a broad view of American labor markets by using linked Census data between 1850-1940 to estimate the costs associated with workers changing occupations and locations. This chapter shows that instead of falling, costs increased modestly for workers changing occupation and location. It also shows that these switching costs were lower when moving within region and higher when moving across regions, but that the trend held for all regions. The second chapter studies the manufacturing sector to revisit the notion that wage gaps between the North and South were evidence of weak labor market integration. Using newly hand recorded data from the United States Census of Manufactures it is possible to test for the existence of relative factor price equality by comparing wage bill ratios for high skilled salaried workers and low skilled wage earners. Based on this proxy measure of labor market integration it increased over time across the entire country between 1920-1930. In no period were Southern states measurably different from their peers. The last chapter uses the same manufacturing data to determine the extent of convergence in the American manufacturing sector. I show that convergence was faster in the manufacturing sector than the overall economy. I find that convergence across states was stronger than convergence across industries implying that the arrival of new industries was less important for convergence in income that took place across the country than convergence of other economic features of the States.

The Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities explores the digital methods and tools scholars use to observe, interpret, and manage nature in several different academic fields. Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, and cultural lenses, this handbook explores how the digital environmental humanities (DEH), as an emerging field, recognises its convergence with the environmental humanities. As such, it is empirically, critically, and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualised, and parsed framings of past, present, and future environments, landscapes, and cultures. Currently, humanities, geographical, cartographical, informatic, and computing disciplines are finding a common space in the DEH and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding, and software into league with literary and cultural studies and the visual, film, and performing arts. In doing so, the DEH facilitates transdisciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, painting, philology, philosophy, and the earth and environmental sciences. This handbook will be essential reading for those interested in the use of digital tools in the study of the environment from a wide range of disciplines and for those working in the environmental humanities more generally.