Despite unparalleled government relief spending, many households have fallen into financial distress during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, reports of non-governmental forms of disaster aid - both from organizations and among individuals - are widespread. Given that formal government programs have not fully met the material needs of many households across the United States during the pandemic, we build on disaster scholarship to compare utilization of three distinct forms of disaster support to better understand how households are getting by: (1) government safety net programs, (2) not for-profit support, and (3) informal social support. We focus our study on a large, yet especially vulnerable and under-researched population: rural residents across the Western U.S. Drawing on results from a representative survey fielded during the summer of 2020, we find that informal social support was the most widely used safety net, with over half of all residents giving or receiving some form of informal support. However, differences in age, education, sex, race, ethnicity, and homeownership status variously predicted different types of safety net use, demonstrating the unevenness of pandemic impacts and access to relief resources across demographic groups. Finally, rural residents who experienced the worst pandemic impacts were the most likely to utilize any of the three forms of safety nets examined. Despite identified limitations to government relief, both formal government programs and informal social support systems were utilized by those most affected by the pandemic.

While greater female participation in the job market is seen as an effective way of achieving higher economic growth, some studies reveal that maternal employment could be a risk factor for child mortality. We analyze the association between under-five mortality and maternal employment in 26 developing countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East using Demographic and Health Surveys. Logistic regression results suggest that maternal employment is associated with a 24.5% higher risk of child mortality than stay-at-home mothers. Compared to stay-at-home mothers, maternal engagement in agriculture is associated with 24% higher odds of under-5 mortality, while engagement in blue-collar jobs is associated with 29% higher odds of under-5 mortality. We also find that white-collar jobs do not give any advantage over the stay-at-home mothers with respect to this risk. Interaction of maternal employment types with breastfeeding confirms the increased risk of child mortality for agriculture and blue-collar jobs.

During World War II, the United States federal government instituted an explicit policy of wage controls through the National War Labor Board with the aim of controlling inflation and discouraging labor mobility. These wage controls, which differed by industry, occupation, and geographic region, specified maximum allowable raises for those earning less than a certain level (the so-called "bracket") and froze wages greater than that level. We study the persistent effects of these policies on the within-occupation distribution of labor income drawing on the U.S. Censuses of Population from 1960 to 2000. We find that higher brackets were associated with relative increases in inequality as measured by the p10-p90 and p25-p75 ratios between 1940 and all the way up to 1970 with no effects detectable from 1980 onward. These effects are concentrated in the left tail of the earnings distribution. A one standard deviation increase in the bracket relative to the 10th percentile of an occupation-region's labor earnings distribution in 1940 reduces the change in the log 10-50 ratio in 1960 by 18 log points.

Cross-sectional earnings inequality has risen sharply since the late 1970s in the United States. It remains an open question how this development has affected the insurance and income redistribution roles played by Social Security. The paper's first question is: How have the government preferences over insurance and redistribution evolved during the past four decades? I answer this question quantitatively by constructing a rich overlapping generations model. My findings indicate that the government has become less willing to provide insurance to young workers and redistribute from high-ability to low-ability households. Simultaneously, it has become more willing to tolerate income redistribution from workers toward retired households. To quantify the welfare consequences of the shift in government preferences, I ask the second question: How should Social Security have responded to inequality had the government preferences remained unchanged? Compared to the optimal policy, the current system induces a welfare loss equal to 1.2 percent in consumption equivalent terms. Finally, I show that each driving force of cross-sectional earnings inequality has a differential impact on the optimal policy.

Allowing mixed-use and higher-density development is a common municipal policy response to pressing urban challenges, including housing affordability and climate change. Yet, comparatively little is known about the effects of density-enabling plans and policies. We study how a major 2011 planning initiative, the designation of “urban villages,” affected real estate development in San Jose, California. We track several outcome measures – permits for residential and commercial development, large development projects, parcel transactions, and parcel assessed values – before and after the urban village initiative. We find the initiative's effects to be quite limited. The estimated treatment effects are generally not distinguishable from zero across specifications that vary by parcel land use, treatment period, and identification strategy. Potential explanations include a lack of actual zoning changes; urban village requirements that make development more complicated; and a mismatch between the development types envisioned in municipal plans and real estate market conditions.

Food insecurity, or the lack of access to an adequate supply of nutritious food, is associated with poor health outcomes including diabetes, heart disease, and depression. Food insecurity research has grown in the past two decades and has spurred efforts in the US health care system to "screen and intervene" for patient food insecurity. Using nationally representative data from the period 2013-18, this study is the first to our knowledge to investigate the prevalence of food insecurity for the health care workforce, an industry that ranges from low-skill, low-wage hourly jobs to highly specialized salaried positions. We found that relative to health diagnosing and treating practitioners, the odds of being food insecure were 5.1 times higher for health care support workers and 2.5 times higher for health technologists and technicians. The health care industry is the largest and fastest-growing US employer, and it is vital that leaders and policy makers address food insecurity among the health care workforce.

This study examines racial inequalities in changing self-employment rates associated with natural hazard impacts and federal recovery assistance in ethnoracially diverse metropolitan counties between 2000 and 2010. It advances the viewpoint that such inequalities can stem from hoarded opportunities tied to white privilege in addition to commonly highlighted social vulnerabilities tied to racial inequities and exclusion. To test that proposition, we conduct change-score analyses using county-level data from the US Census Bureau, the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Results indicate that (a) overall, self-employment rates increase with local property damages from natural hazards, especially among white and Latino workers; (b) those increases are largely explained by the amount of federal public assistance received for disaster recovery, not property damages themselves; and (c) white workers experience the most positive and consistent increases in self-employment from federal recovery assistance. Implications for understanding racial inequities stemming from current and future disasters and government assistance are discussed.

Short-term contracts were a staple of the American residential mortgage market until the Great Depression, after which policymakers pushed for longer terms in order to eliminate refinancing risk. Using a first-of-its-kind data set on mortgages outstanding in 1930, this paper suggests that short-term contracts had remained popular until the Depression because of their appeal to a class of well-off sophisticated borrowers who were undeterred by refinancing risk, and who valued flexible amortization. In contrast, typical wage earners preferred longer terms in order to eliminate refinancing risk, even as they took on the burden of regular amortization payments.

Previous studies have established that firm size is associated with a wage premium, but the wage premium has declined in recent decades. The authors examine the risk for unemployment by firm size during the initial outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 in the United States. Using both yearly and state-month variation, the authors find greater excess unemployment among workers in small enterprises than among those in larger firms. The gaps cannot be entirely attributed to the sorting of workers or to industrial context. The firm size advantage is most pronounced in sectors with high remotability but reverses in the sectors most affected by the pandemic. Overall, these findings suggest that firm size is linked to greater job security and that the pandemic may have accelerated prior trends regarding product and labor market concentration. They also point out that the initial policy responses did not provide sufficient protection for workers in small and medium-sized businesses.

We worked primarily with Focus on Energy (Focus) and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) to better understand the unique barriers that prevent low-income and urban renters from accessing energy-efficient technologies and to make recommendations for program and policy changes that would improve service delivery to this vulnerable population. We make recommendations based in improving stakeholder synergies, community-based programming, and evaluation metrics.

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on “Income Ethnical Segregation” by constructing an index that analyses US Census Data from 1990 until 2010. Following the groundwork of the “SSI” the results can be considered as decomposable and thus also subgroup consistent. The evidence for the biggest 10 MA shows a clear increase of segregation and inequality even though average income climbs as well throughout the years. Same implies that significant differences amongst races have been observed that were especially revealed for the poorer MA such as Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA. As the “Income Ethnical Segregation” can be seen as one component of the overall score of the Entropy Index, which consists of the “Within – Inequality part” and the “Between – Segregation part”, it goes hand in hand with previous assumptions that a higher segregation also estimates higher inequality. The reader will not only be guided through the various indicators and empirical evidence for the case, but moreover also learn about practical application of previously established indices based on the Theil-Between Index. Thus, the main takeaway will be an understanding of the scientific requirements and its empirical application additional to the real analysis on US-Microdata timeseries, when working with segregation measures that include the problematic and continuous variable that is “Income”.

In the United States, particularly in high-cost urban areas, local resistance to multifamily housing development has been widely noted. In many metropolitan areas, legal authority over land-use regulation is assigned to jurisdictions that often are very small, and some scholars argue that this small-scale local control institutionalizes neighborhood-level opposition to new construction. Using census tracts as units of analysis, we assess the relationship between the population size of the city, county, or township that regulates a tract’s land use and the change in multifamily units between two recent waves of the American Community Survey (2008–2012 and 2014–2018). Results of regression analysis indicate that larger jurisdictional population size is indeed associated with increased multifamily construction. However, the relationship applies only for jurisdictions with populations exceeding 100,000 and decays at jurisdictional populations of more than 1 million. This nonlinearity may reflect quasi-monopolistic land-use control in the largest jurisdictions.

This paper explores the role of human capital and labor market barriers in driving the racial gap in occupational standing in the Jim Crow South. To disentangle these two factors, we study the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a large-scale school construction program aimed at improving educational opportunities for Blacks in the rural South during the early 20th century. We build a novel dataset linking Social Security application records to the 1920 and 1940 U.S. Censuses, allowing us to estimate the impact of childhood exposure to Rosenwald schools on outcomes in adulthood for rural Black men and women. We first confirm that Rosenwald schools had a significant positive impact on the educational attainment of rural Blacks, consistent with prior work. We then show that these gains translated into greater labor force participation and higher occupational standing among rural Black women, but that the occupational standing of rural Black men did not improve. In addition, we find no evidence that rural Black men and women broke into jobs from which they tended to be excluded, such as sales or clerical jobs. Overall, our findings suggest that labor market discrimination limited Black upward mobility in the Jim Crow South.

The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across households. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women's employment and spouses' division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples' division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. nationally representative surveys, we examine the role of parenthood in spouses' earnings correlations between 1968 and 2015. We examine the extent to which changes in spouses' earnings correlations are due to (1) changes upon entry into marriage (assortative mating), (2) changes between marriage and parenthood, (3) changes following parenthood, and (4) changes in women's employment. Our findings show that increases in the correlation between spouses' earnings prior to 1990 came largely from changes between marriage and first birth, but increases after 1990 came almost entirely from changes following parenthood. In both instances, changes in women's employment are key to increasing earnings correlations. Changes in assortative mating played little role in either period. An assessment of the aggregate-level implications points to the growing significance of earnings similarity after parenthood for rising income inequality across families.

The U.S. population is aging. We examine whether immigration causally affects the likelihood that the U.S.-born elderly live in institutional settings. Using a shift-share instrument to identify exogenous variation in immigration, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the less-educated foreign-born labor force share in a local area reduces institutionalization among the elderly by 1.5 and 3.8 percentage points for those aged 65+ and 80+, a 26-29 percent effect relative to the mean. The estimates imply that a typical U.S-born individual over age 65 in the year 2000 was 0.5 percentage points (10 percent) less likely to be living in an institution than would have been the case if immigration had remained at 1980 levels. We show that immigration affects the availability and cost of home services, including those provided by home health aides, gardeners and housekeepers, and other less-educated workers, reducing the cost of aging in the community.

We examine how the legalization programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) have affected immigration to the United States since the late 1980s. Our empirical approach exploits variation in IRCA's timing and the magnitude of the legalization shock across metropolitan areas for the one country-Mexico-that dominated the legalized population. We find that "opening the door" to family-sponsored admissions has indeed increased authorized immigration by family members. However, our estimates imply that each IRCA-legalized immigrant has sponsored only one family member for admission over the past three decades. Most induced admissions have also been immediate family, inconsistent with explosive chain migration. Estimates are highly robust and similar in magnitude when we use variation across countries of origin in the magnitude of the legalization shock, irrespective of place of residence within the U.S., or consider survey-based estimates of total immigrant arrivals, rather than admissions alone.

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women1 are typically paid just 85 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.2 This gap in pay, which typically amounts to a loss of $833 every month, $10,000 every year, and $400,000 over a 40-year career, means that AAPI women have to work more than 14 months to make as much as white, non-Hispanic men were paid in the previous calendar year alone.

This study used 2009–2015 time-diary data to examine gender differences in daily activities among children and adolescents aged 10–17 in Finland, Spain and the UK (N = 3517). In all three countries, boys were significantly more involved in screen-based activities and exercising and girls in domestic work, non-screen educational activities and personal care. Gender differences in socializing time were only significant in the UK, with girls socializing more than boys. Gender gaps within countries were largest in domestic work (UK: 60%; Finland: 58%; Spain: 48%) and exercising (UK: 57%; Finland: 36%; Spain: 27%), followed by educational time (UK: 35%; Finland: 34%; Spain: 18%) and screen-based activities (UK: 31%; Finland: 16%; Spain: 16%), and lower in personal care (UK: 27%; Finland: 21%; Spain: 14%) and socializing (UK; 21%; Finland: 13%; Spain: 6%). Two-way country-gender interactions in children’s activities were statistically significant when comparing Spain and the UK on screen-based activities, socializing, and personal care, with larger gender gaps in the UK than in Spain. By contrast, gender differences in child time use between Finland and either Spain or UK were not statistically significant. The complex role of national contexts and life-course stages in shaping gendered time-use patterns is discussed.

Objective: To examine variation in employment and economic outcomes before, during, and after the great recession by disability and mental health status. Methods: Using a sample of adults in the 1999 to 2016 National Health Interview Survey (N = 419,336), we examined changes in labor force and economic outcomes by mental health and physical disability status. We employed difference-in-differences analyses to determine whether the changes in these outcomes during and after the recession for each comparison group (those with moderate mental illness, serious psychiatric disability, or physical disability) were significantly different from the changes for persons with neither a mental illness nor a disability. Findings: While the recession impacted all groups, those with mental illnesses or physical disabilities were hardest hit. Persons with disabilities were disadvantaged on all outcomes at each period, but persons with mental illnesses were the most disadvantaged. Unemployment, poverty, and use of food stamps increased for all groups, but the increase was greatest for persons with mental health problems who also saw a more substantial decline in wage income. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: The effects of the recession persist well after the recovery period. Practitioners should be aware that although most persons with mental illnesses want to work, they face significant barriers to employment. Following economic shocks such as those brought on by the current coronavirus pandemic, interventions should focus on people who are the most vulnerable, especially those with mental health problems. Renewed focus on employment for people with mental disorders is important. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Impact and Implications—While the Great Recession was a national crisis, it did not burden everyone equally. Persons with mental disorders continued to report higher rates of unemployment, and they have not benefited as much from the recovery as persons without disability or with nonpsychiatric disability. The disadvantaged economic status of persons with mental illnesses remains a significant policy concern, especially in the era of COVID-19. Renewed efforts to address this inequity are necessary. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)