The tragic killing of Michael Brown at the hand of Darren Wilson, a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, further highlighted the long-standing disparities in health, education, employment, and overall well-being disproportionately burdening Black boys and young men in the St. Louis region. Since that event and the associated developments, actions have centered on attending to structural determinants, racism, and equity. However, less attention has been devoted to the overall well-being of Black boys and young men ages 18–29 in the St. Louis region and to the paucity of available economic opportunities. This brief report seeks to shift the focus by documenting regional trends in three economic social mobility indicators and crime rates. The analysis substantiates an urgent need for regional interventions to remedy the stagnant social mobility levels of Black males.

Background and Objectives The encore years, or later life stages when adults enjoy health and free time, are the prime opportunity for leisure to maximize the overall quality of life. Physically active leisure is widely known to be linked to overall subjective well-being (SWB). However, experienced SWB or momentary emotion during active leisure as well as passive leisure has yet to be examined. Research Design and Methods Data were derived from the 2012/2013 American Time Use Survey Well-being modules. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to identify comparable matched samples of older adults. Results The PSM identified 211 older adults who reported a series of emotions (i.e., happy, meaningful, tired, sad, stressed, pain) during active leisure, and the comparable counterpart (n = 211) during passive leisure. Results from the Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests showed that active leisure was associated with greater levels of experienced happiness and meaningfulness, as well as with lower levels of sadness (p < .05). Discussion and Implications Physically active leisure is linked to greater levels of experienced SWB among older adults. Although more detailed roles of active and passive leisure for experienced SWB are yet to be verified, choices that older adults make in their free time may significantly impact their experienced SWB and, in turn, their overall quality of life. Aging and public health policies should enhance accessibility to active leisure to promote older adults’ SWB.

The tax code helps set the rules for how our economy works and how wealth and power are distributed. Low taxes on the wealthy and corporations result in fewer revenues, which lead policymakers to constrain investments in programs and benefits important to women. A powerful but lesser-known effect is how these low taxes also incent or enable behaviors that have negative downstream effects on women’s economic well-being, stability, and opportunity.

Standard practice within the correctional system dictates that certain needs, such as antisocial personality, cognitions, and peers, are to be prioritized when providing interventions. However, greater concern has arisen regarding the prevalence of non-criminogenic needs, including traumatic experiences and mental health problems, in the justice-involved youth population and whether these youths’ needs are being met while in the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice literature indicates that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which may act as a proxy for trauma, and mental health concerns are prevalent in the justice-involved youth population. While these topics have been examined independently, the current study utilized a large sample of male (n = 38,100) and female (n = 12,762) youths on community supervision to identify whether these youths’ needs are currently being addressed in Washington State. Moreover, the effect of programming on these youths’ adverse experiences and specific mental health problems (internalizing, externalizing, or co-occurring symptoms) was examined to ascertain whether provided interventions ameliorated the effect of these needs on youths’ recidivism. Life course theory was also tested to assess whether early-onset youth differed from those with a late onset on their reoffending. In a statistically weighted sample of youth with need-service matches versus those with mismatches, results demonstrated that mismatches were not associated with increased recidivism. Additionally, mediated path analyses showed that only substance abuse treatment impacts the relationship between ACEs and reoffending for males. Internalizing symptoms presented as a protective factor that was mediated by substance use treatment. Conversely, both externalizing and co-occurring symptoms presented as risk factors, but the effect of the latter was decreased by substance abuse programming for males. Lastly, early-onset of deviance resulted in higher recidivism odds. These findings have implication for practice, insofar that they add context regarding which youth histories (ACEs) and attributes (mental health symptomatology) affect treatment efficacy, thus potentially reducing risk to the public and improving youths’ personal well-being. In short, the results suggest a move away from a hyper-focus on risk to consideration of both youths’ needs and their responsivity to programming.

American working conditions have deteriorated over the last 30 years. One commonly-noted change is the rise of nonstandard and unstable work schedules. Such schedules, especially when held by mothers, negatively affect family functioning and the well-being and development of children and bear implications for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. This paper describes and compares the working schedules—in terms of type, duration, and variability—of American mothers in 1990 and 2012 in an attempt to assess whether nonstandard and unstable schedules are growing more common. Analyses demonstrate that evening work has increased in prevalence for single mothers but not for their partnered peers. Mothers in both single-mother and two-partner households experienced considerably greater within-week schedule variability and higher likelihood of weekend work in 2012 than they did in 1990. These changes resulted from widespread shifts in the nature of work, especially affecting less-educated mothers.

Unexpected and massive immigration flows are the subject of public debate in many countries that host forcibly displaced migrants. Policymakers worry about the effects that free entry has on local labor markets. In addition, forced displacement adds a moral dimension to the agenda when making economic and social policy decisions. In August 2015, the Venezuelan government decided unilaterally to close the border. In mid-2016 and as a consequence of national and international pressure , the border reopened. This decision along with the political instability in Venezuela caused an unprecedented increase in migration to Colombia and other countries in Latin America. Using a difference-indifferences approach, I exploit the massive immigration flow of Venezuelans to Colombia in recent years and the timing of the events to evaluate its effects on wages and employment. I use two measures of immigration flows: first, the number of registered immigrants; and second, the Internet search intensity of keywords that only Venezuelans would Google. Graph-ical analysis of both measures as well as anecdotal evidence suggests that Internet search is better than migrant counts at identifying where most of the immigrant communities are located. Concerning the effects on labor markets, I find negligible reductions in wages in the informal sector. Among the less educated, there is also a small reduction in wages in the formal sector. Employment regressions suggest mild reductions on employment in the formal sector mostly explained by a transition of Colombians from the formal to the informal sector. All in all, if a Colombian worker earns 10 dollars per hour, the reduction in her salary would be of 2-7 cents of a dollar. According to these calculations, my results suggest a loss of well-being close to zero for Colombians.

Aging population is a worldwide phenomenon. In the United States, as in 2015 about 48 million Americans are over 65 or older, which accounts for 14.9 percent of the total population. And by 2030, one of every five Americans will be over the age of 65. The ramifications of an aging population are serious and potentially large because it challenges the fiscal and macroeconomic stability tasks through increase in government spending on pension, health care and social benefits programs for the elderly such as Social Security and Medicare programs. This dissertation composes of three essays that aim at examining the relationship between government policies and the preparedness for retirement and healthcare aspects of the aging population. In Chapter 1, I examined the effect of federal tax policy in encouraging working classes to save more for their retirement, especially among those who are approaching to be retired. One of the big questions that center the empirical research on retirement and saving is whether the American save enough for their consumption in post-retirement period. Although the answer is still unsolved due to disagreement over what constitutes adequate saving for retirement. It is of great importance to see how government policies help promote saving for retirement. The second and third Chapters examined the effects of the federal minimum wage expansion to home care workers on employment, and on the utilization and the cost of home care services that become increasingly important for senior and disabled people in the country. In sum, the dissertation provides important evidence on how public policies influenced economic behaviors among the older workers and families, and have critical policy implications in bolstering the financial and healthy well-being of the older Americans.

Racial and ethnic socialization are essential to the social development of racial and ethnic minorities and have several implications for their psychological well-being. However, the unique contributions of racial socialization and ethnic socialization among Black African immigrants remain understudied. This study aims to explore the mechanisms that underlie the association between racial and ethnic socialization and acculturative stress using a sample of 173 first, 1.5, and second-generation Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the U.S. This study used a path analysis to test an exploratory model that links race and ethnic socialization to acculturative stress through race and ethnic public and private appraisals and identity. Findings of the study revealed that a best fit model comprised of a partially mediated path for the relations of ethnic socialization and acculturative stress, and a fully mediated path for the relations of racial socialization and acculturative stress. Astoundingly, ethnic socialization accounted for about twenty percent of the variance in acculturative stress, yet, racial socialization was not a significant predictor of acculturative stress. As expected, racial socialization significantly predicted racial identity. Messages about race and beliefs and attitudes towards race inform African immigrants’ attitudes and . . .

Most adults spend almost half their waking hours at work. How people feel during work can have far-reaching consequences for their quality of life. This study traces male and female workers’ affective experiences at work to the gender composition of their occupations. To do this, we draw on nationally representative time diary data on affective experiences at work from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 well-being modules of the American Time Use Surveys, as well as data on occupational gender composition from the Current Population Surveys. Our analytic sample contains 5216 activity records of working at main jobs from 4486 non-self-employed workers. We find significant gender differences in the relationship between occupational gender composition and affective well-being: Working in occupations with higher percentages of male workers is associated with higher levels of unpleasantness and lower levels of meaningfulness at work for women but these associations are not significant for men. We discuss the implications of our findings for gender inequality in work-related well-being and for the stalled progress towards gender integration in occupations.

Females live a lot longer than males in most parts of the world today. But that was not always the case. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are only partial reasons. Rather, the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role. Those who survive most infectious diseases carry a health burden that affects organs and impacts general well-being. We use newly collected data from Massachusetts containing information on cause of death since 1887 to show that females between the ages of 5 and 25 were disproportionately affected by infectious diseases. Both males and females lived longer as the burden of infectious disease fell, but women were more greatly impacted. Our explanation does not tell us precisely why women live longer than men, but it does help understand the timing of their relative increase.

Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has declined sharply, and what remains often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change mirrors others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups constitute the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? In this study, we examine the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare during the 2001-2015 period and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance is associated with increases in these two forms of hardship.

This paper studies the impact of payday loan borrowing on the financial well-being of Social Security (SS) income and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) receivers. Specifically, it focuses on the borrowing behaviors of low-wealth, Old-Age, Survivors, Disability Insurance program (OASDI) and SSI beneficiaries who rely on alternative financial services (AFS), such as payday lending. A significant share of low-income and low-wealth population experience financial hardship and pay excessive fees and interest when they borrow from alternative financial service providers. In 2009 17 percent of households in the U.S. were considered under-banked because they both maintained bank accounts and relied on AFS (FDIC 2009). Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) unbanked and under-banked supplements and Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), this research investigates the following research questions: 1) Are Social Security Administration (SSA) beneficiaries more likely to use payday loans than non-SSA recipients? 2) How does payday loan use vary by income, age, and education among SSA beneficiaries? 3) How does receiving income from SSA affect payday loan use? Our findings suggest that there is little or no demographic variation between SSA beneficiaries and non-SSA beneficiaries who use payday loans. However, being an SSA beneficiary increases the likelihood of receiving payday loans. Lower-income SSA beneficiaries use payday loans more intensively. Borrowing behaviors of lower-income SSA beneficiaries, especially from AFS, are understudied in the literature. This paper attempts to fill this gap.

A recent series of studies by the Equality of Opportunity Project has documented substantial geographical differences in intergenerational income mobility. These spatial differences are important because they suggest that place matters more than previously thought in determining economic well-being. In this article, we show that family characteristics vary widely across areas and simulations indicate that differences in these family characteristics can explain a substantial share of the variation in intergenerational income mobility across places documented by the Equality of the Opportunity Project. Additionally, we show that the characteristics of families that move differ substantially from families that do not move and that family characteristics differ by the type of move made, which raise questions about the external and internal validity of causal inferences based on the Equality of Opportunity Project’s analysis of movers.

Objective This study examined the amount of time married couples share together in a new “encore adult” life course stage around the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Also investigated was the relationship between shared time and experienced well-being for this age group. Method Time diary and survey data were used from nationally representative 2003–2014 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 26,303 adults aged 50–79 years. Analyses examined amount of total and exclusive shared couple time and experiences of happiness and stress when together using multivariate models. Results Shared time was positively associated with couples living on their own, conjoint employment/nonemployment, and age. Encore women and men reported feeling happier and less stressed when with their spouses. Men seemed to find time with spouses more enjoyable if both partners or just their wives were working. Discussion Encore adults are living longer as couples; results suggest couple relationships may occupy most of their days, with potentially positive implications for emotional well-being. Men and women are happier during time with a spouse when the woman works, with men reporting even higher levels of happiness than women. This is important as contemporary couples navigate increasingly complex work/retirement transitions in gendered ways.

The household living arrangements of older persons – whether living alone, with a spouse or partner, with their children or in multi-generational households – can be an important factor associated with their health, economic status and overall well-being. Understanding the patterns and trends in older persons’ living arrangements is thus relevant for global efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals, in particular those targeting poverty, hunger and health. The United Nations Database on the Households and Living Arrangements of Older Persons 2018 presents evidence drawn from 672 unique data sources, including census and survey microdata samples archived at IPUMS-International and household rosters from Demographic and Health Surveys, among other sources. The resulting dataset describes older persons’ households across 147 countries or areas, representing approximately 97 per cent of persons aged 60 or over globally.

The federal earned income tax credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that provides substantial benefits to low-income working families with children at home but little to those without resident children. But families without resident children also struggle, including noncustodial parents, who are often considered "childless" for tax purposes. We model a plan that would increase the maximum childless EITC to almost half the size of the maximum EITC for one-child families and that would begin to phase the childless EITC out at the same income level used for families with children. This would improve parity between people with and without children at home, filling a gap in existing credit benefits. It could also improve noncustodial parents' economic well-being and increase their capacity to support their children. The federal EITC delivered about $66 billion in benefits to 27 million families in the 2016 tax year (the latest year for which data are available). Workers with children at home received 97 percent of the aggregate benefits. Childless workers receive few benefits from the credit because the maximum credit they can qualify for is relatively small and their credit phases out at much lower income levels than the credit for workers with children. On average, childless workers in 2016 received less than $300 from the EITC, compared with $2,400 for workers with one child at home, $3,800 for workers with two children at home, and $4,100 for workers with at least three children at home. 1 In some cases, "childless" workers have children, but their children live primarily with another parent or are too old to be considered qualifying children for tax purposes.

Past research consistently suggests that single people (i.e. singles) are stigmatized, but do they constitute a stigmatized 'group'? The current research will provide deeper insight into the stigmatization and well-being of singles by understanding the ‘group-y’ nature of singles, and how identification with groups and perceptions of groups map onto discrimination and prejudice. Study 1 will examine the extent to which singles identify as part of a group. Participants will be assigned a novel minimal group identity and then complete measures of group identification for four distinct group memberships (e.g., minimal group, relationship status, sexual orientation, nationality). We hypothesize that single participants' identification with their single group will be lower compared to other identities—including partnered people—although a smaller subset of singles may identify strongly with other singles. We also hypothesize that singles in general will perceive less discrimination towards singles relative to other aspects of their identity. In contrast, Study 2 will examine the extent to which singles are perceived as a group and the extent to which they are perceived as being responsible for their group membership. Participants will complete measures of entitativity and perceptions of responsibility for similar out-group identities as in Study 1 (e.g., single people or people in romantic relationships, sexual or asexual people, etc.). We hypothesize that singles will be rated lower in entitativity than people in romantic relationships and other groups, yet rated higher in responsibility than other groups. Moreover, we hypothesize that prejudice towards singles will be more acceptable than prejudice towards other groups. Throughout both studies, we will use Bayesian sequential analyses in order to efficiently acquire evidence in favor or against our experimental hypotheses. We discuss the importance of group-based theoretical perspectives for understanding the current and future stigmatization and well-being of singles.

This study examines the impacts of exposure to a universal health coverage policy at early age on utilization of health services at later age. Our empirical strategy identifies the effects of the program by exploiting cross-cohort variation in exposure, generated by the age eligibility of the policy, and cross-province variation in the policy's intensity, generated by differences in provincial geographic characteristics. We find that exposure to the program at early age reduces probability of visit for treatment, mainly hospitalization, but does not affect preventive care and outpatient treatment at later age. Our results are robust to various controls for cohort-varying factors and ongoing poverty-reduction policies. We document larger impacts among individuals from low-income and low-education households, and those living in areas with higher risks from natural disasters. These results imply that the program benefited the most vulnerable population. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find no substantial change in household's financial well-being and household's labor market decisions associated with exposure at early age. Combining with results from previous studies, these findings suggest that the main mechanism is through increases in utilization at early age.

Women’s increased labor force participation in the latter half of the 20th century resulted in a shift from male-sole-earner to dual-earner couples in the United States. There has been limited research since 2001 examining relative earning patterns within different-gender married and cohabiting couples. The first goal of this dissertation was to provide a contemporary portrait of couples’ relative earning patterns using the 2017 Current Population Survey (CPS). Prior research found that as of 2001, men were main contributors in more than half (55%) of dualearner couples. I found that by 2017 this number decreased to less than half (47%); and that higher levels of women’s education, women being more educated than their partners, having no or fewer children, cohabiting (versus married), and African American individuals were associated with a greater odds of couples being egalitarian (dual or equal providing) or nontraditional (women providing the majority or women sole) in their earning arrangements. Implications of the shift from the male-sole-earner to dual-earner partnerships for the well-being of partnerships have been studied; but little research has examined how individuals’ earnings relative to their partners relate to work-family conflict. The second goal of this dissertation was to examine the associations between relative earnings and both directions of work-family conflict—work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC)—and whether these associations varied by gender. Using data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW), I found that main contributors worked longer work hours and had more perceived job strain, than secondary contributors. Main contributors experienced more WFC than secondary contributors, but when work hours and perceived job strain were controlled for, the higher WFC of main contributors than secondary contributors disappeared. Secondary contributors shoulder more FWC—housework and childcare—than main contributors; but relative earnings were not associated with FWC. I did not find gender differences in the association between relative earnings and WFC or FWC. These findings may suggest movement towards gender equality in terms of what makes work-family balance difficult. Overall, the findings from this dissertation provided a more nuanced understanding of gender equality within partnership in the United States.

Objectives Drawing on activity theory of aging, we examined whether solitary activities may be associated with negative wellbeing, as they may reflect social isolation. Using American Time Use Surveys, with information on ‘with whom’ individuals engaged in activities over a 24-hour period, we created measures capturing solitary days and solitary activities to understand their prevalence and associations with wellbeing. Method At the daily level, we examined associations between solitary days and proportion of the day in solitary activities with life satisfaction. At the activity level, we examined associations between engaging in an activity alone versus with others and emotional state during the activity. Results Solitary days and higher proportion of the day spent in solitary activities were associated with lower life satisfaction. These associations were attenuated controlling for individual covariates. Engagement in activities alone was associated with lower levels of happiness and higher levels of sadness and pain during the activity, and association with happiness remained even adjusting for covariates. Discussion A sizable proportion of older adults reported solitary days, and proportion of the day spent in solitary activities increases by age. Examining lived experiences of older adults and presence of others during activities could contribute to research on social isolation.