The National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) measures the share of American households that are at risk of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement. The NRRI compares households’ projected replacement rates – retirement income as a percentage of pre-retirement income – with target rates that would allow them to maintain their living standard and then calculates the percentage falling short. Since the Great Recession, the NRRI has shown that even if households work to age 65 and annuitize all their financial assets, including the receipts from reverse mortgages on their homes, roughly half of households are at risk.

For many low-income Medicare beneficiaries, Medicaid provides important supplemental insurance that covers out-of-pocket costs and additional benefits. We examine whether Medicaid participation by low-income adults age 65 and up increased as a result of Medicaid expansions to working-age adults under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Previous literature documents so-called “welcome mat” effects in other populations but has not explicitly studied older persons dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. We extend this literature by estimating models of Medicaid participation among persons age 65 and up using American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2017 and state variation in ACA Medicaid expansions. We find that Medicaid expansions to working-age adults increased Medicaid participation among low-income older adults by 1.8 percentage points (4.4 percent). We also find evidence of an “on-ramp” effect; that is, low-income Medicare beneficiaries residing in expansion states who were young enough to gain coverage under the 2014 ACA Medicaid expansions before aging into Medicare were 4 percentage points (9.5 percent) more likely to have dual Medicaid coverage relative to similar individuals who either turned 65 before the 2014 expansions or resided in non-expansion states. This on-ramp effect is an important mechanism behind welcome mat effects among some older adults.

Although many previous studies have examined the outcomes of STEM graduates, there is very limited research examining the educational attainment of their children. Given the increasing contribution of immigration to the supply of STEM graduates, we use data from the ACS to examine disparities in children's schooling progress in the families of immigrant and U.S born STEM graduates. Our analysis shows several findings. First, the children of STEM graduates are less likely to fall behind in school than the children of graduates in Business, Arts/Humanities, and other fields of study. This relative STEM advantage is, however, stronger in immigrant than U.S born families. Second, the children of immigrant STEM graduates have more favorable outcomes than the children of U.S. born STEM graduates; however, the favorable outcomes of the former are more consistent for children whose parents have U.S. rather than foreign STEM degrees. Finally, our results show that it is only among the children of STEM graduates that we find lower odds of schooling progress among 1.75- compared to second-generation children. These odds are statistically significant, implying that there is some convergence in the outcomes of first- and second-generation children of immigrant STEM graduates.

Among the economic demands of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a demand for a federal jobs program that would eliminate unemployment for African Americans. From the 1960s to today, Black Americans have been about twice as likely as White Americans to be unemployed. Consequently, Black people never achieve low unemployment. They can be said to be living in a permanent economic recession. This Article presents a suite of policies to end high unemployment in African American communities. The policies include those that work indirectly by increasing the demand for goods and services, and those that directly create jobs. Since anti-Black racial discrimination in the labor market is at the root of the persistently high rate of Black joblessness, a strong affirmative action program to counteract discrimination will also be needed. Some might think that a universal basic income is an acceptable alternative to a jobs program, but a job has economic, psychological, and sociological benefits beyond an income. A society that denies many African Americans the opportunity to work denies them not just an income, but also opportunities for identity, self-esteem, service, and social relationships. Ending the permanent recession in Black America is an important step toward providing equal opportunity in America.

Measurements of human interaction through proxies such as social connectedness or movement patterns have proved useful for predictive modeling of COVID-19, which is a challenging task, especially at high spatial resolutions. In this study, we develop a Spatiotemporal autoregressive model to predict county-level new cases of COVID-19 in the coterminous US using spatiotemporal lags of infection rates, human interactions, human mobility, and socioeconomic composition of counties as predictive features. We capture human interactions through 1) Facebook- and 2) cell phone-derived measures of connectivity and human mobility, and use them in two separate models for predicting county-level new cases of COVID-19. We evaluate the model on 14 forecast dates between 2020/10/25 and 2021/01/24 over one- to four-week prediction horizons. Comparing our predictions with a Baseline model developed by the COVID-19 Forecast Hub indicates an average 6.46% improvement in prediction Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) over the two-week prediction horizon up to 20.22% improvement in the four-week prediction horizon, pointing to the strong predictive power of our model in the longer prediction horizons.

Food insecurity is disproportionately high amongst households that include someone with a disability. This population is also more likely to incur higher health care expenses related to their disability or secondary diseases. Higher health care expenditures may limit a household’s ability to purchase a sufficient quantity of food, which increases their risk of becoming food insecure. Increased access to free or subsidized health insurance may reduce either current expenditures on health care, or the concern with the potential of incurring high medical bills in the future, either of which may improve a household’s food security status. Therefore, this paper utilizes the expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act as a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between increased access to health care and food insecurity amongst households that include someone with a disability. Data for this project came from the 2011 to 2018 Current Population Survey’s (CPS) Food Security Supplement (FSS). A Fixed Effects Difference and Difference (FE-DD) was used to estimate the effect of Medicaid expansion, which occurred in three different treatment periods 2014, 2015, and 2016. The overall treatment effect estimate is interpreted using the Goodman-Bacon decomposition method. The results from this paper suggests that Medicaid expansion had no significant effect on household food security amongst households with someone with a disability.

Do traditional two-state worklife estimates need adjustment for unemployment? To answer, an augmented three-state model classifies individuals as either 1) employed; 2) unemployed; or 3) inactive but not marginally attached. Periods of unemployment may reduce worklives; however, removal of those marginally attached or discouraged from the inactive state raises worklives. The three-state model results are compared to worklife estimates from the same initial data using the traditional two-state model. Results show that in many cases, the two-state model results are a good proxy for the three-state results that control for unemployment.

The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article shows that the expansion of the minimum wage played a critical role in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services that were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed. We digitize over 1,000 hourly wage distributions from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage reports and use CPS microdata to investigate the effects of this reform on wages, employment, and racial inequality. Using a cross-industry difference-in-differences design, we show that earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white workers. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points prereform to 0 afterward. We can rule out significant disemployment effects for black workers. Using a bunching design, we find no aggregate effect of the reform on employment. The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the civil rights era. Our findings shed new light on the dynamics of labor market inequality in the United States and suggest that minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.

The New York metropolitan area is one of the oldest, largest, and perhaps most complex urban region in the United States (U.S.). Its 23.7 million residents live across four states, produce a GDP of more than $1.7 trillion, are governed by a fragmented political system, and experience persistently high degrees of geographic and racial/ethnic inequality and segregation. This chapter investigates the evolving spatial organization of occupation and race across the metropolitan area. While white professionals have traditionally lived in an outer ring of suburbs and blue-collar immigrant and minority groups have lived closer to the city center, our research shows that the forces of gentrification and minority and immigrant suburbanization have been turning the metropolitan area inside out. Specifically, young, usually white, professionals are increasingly located in and around the central city whereas many working-class minorities have shifted away from it. At the heart of this spatial reordering lie the diminishing plurality of native-born whites within the region and the increasing share of immigrant minority groups, especially for foreign-born Hispanics and Asians. This trend has lessened the share of white males in better occupations even as the region’s occupational structure slowly but inexorably tilts toward managerial and professional occupations. Technology is transforming white-collar work as blue-collar work continues to disappear. Dramatic shifts are thus afoot, yet inequality and segregation remain high. We argue that these changes in the spatial organization of the metropolitan area challenge us to see these inequalities from a new vantage point. As elites are now more likely to live among less advantaged groups, this may provide the social basis for new thinking.

In light of growing difficulties for schools to attract teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and the continued discussions surrounding unionization of education, this paper examines the effect of collective bargaining laws on the salary of teachers with a STEM degree. To identify the effect, we leverage the policy discontinuity of CB laws at state borders and compare the earnings of STEM-degree holding teachers in a cross-border commuting zone. Our results show that the bargaining laws lead to higher returns to STEM degrees in the labor market for teachers. The effect is concentrated in female teachers, who predominate the teaching profession. In exploring a potential mechanism, we demonstrate that in states which mandate collective bargaining, female teachers accrue longer durations of experience. This suggests that teachers' unions help to retain female teachers with a STEM degree.

his descriptive paper examines racial and gender patterns of employment in New Orleans Louisiana using the 2018 American Communities Survey microdata in the context of the post-Katrina economy, with a focus on women workers. This paper reviews the literature on occupational crowding, and then uses a simple measure of crowding to analyze the local labor market focusing on an intersectional lens to examine patterns by race and ethnicity, gender, as well as additionally important dimensions of citizenship and age. A review of the literature shows the proliferation of these low-wage service occupations as associated with the redevelopment trajectory of New Orleans, as well as broader trends in the service economy. This paper then discusses how such a case study in the context of the “New New Orleans” can help to pose further research questions about occupational crowding, including methodologies for measurement, the relationship between crowding patterns and changes in service work, and how specific local and regional policy and redevelopment decisions shape crowding patterns.

This study investigates the impact of malaria eradication programs on Black-white economic disparities in the early 1900s U.S. South. Malaria eradication was widespread and improved health across races. Yet, only white men experienced economic benefits. Using matched census records, we find that increased exposure to the program was associated with higher schooling attainment and income for whites but not for Blacks. Blacks exposed to malaria eradication were more likely to be farm laborers, and both Blacks and whites were more likely to migrate out of state. Our findings suggest that malaria eradication, a broadly applied intervention, widened racial gaps.

Although previous research documents that having dinner together as a family positively relates to long-run child and family outcomes, one aspect of family dinner that has not been explored previously is the role that dinner timing may play in facilitating or hindering parental time investments in their children. We use time diary data for roughly 41,000 families from the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (2003–2019) to examine whether the timing of family dinner is correlated with differential parental time investments in children during the evening. We find that parents who start dinner as a family before the median time (6:15 p.m.) spend more quality time in the evening with their children, including more time reading and playing with their children. The relationship cannot be explained by observable family constraints, as it is stable regardless of parental labor force activity and the day of the week. Additionally, parents who eat dinner later do not reallocate quality time to other times of the day. These findings suggest that having dinner earlier may be an important mechanism facilitating parental time investments in children.

There is a complex set of public policies and associated programs that constitute the social safety net in the United States. In Life-Course Implications of U.S. Public Policies, the authors encourage others to systematically consider the influence of policies and programs on lives, aging, and the life course, and how the consequences might vary by gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, and social class. The volume aims to foster an appreciation of how policy influences connect and condition the life course. Chapters examine issues relating to health, housing, food security, crime, employment, and care work, amongst other issues, and demonstrate how the principles of the life-course perspective and cumulative inequality theory can be used to inform contemporary ...

There is robust evidence that Asians are not treated differently from Whites and receive greater leniency than Blacks and Hispanics in criminal punishment. Some research findings even suggest that Asians receive the most favorable sentencing outcomes among all racial/ethnic groups. This line of research, however, has not paid attention to Asian nationality groups. Particularly, it is unclear whether there is within-race variation among offenders from different Asian countries. Using the data compiled by the United States Sentencing Commission to examine whether and how an Asian's nationality affects criminal punishment, this study focuses on sentences imposed on offenders who are Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Pakistani, and Vietnamese nationals. Results from logistic, ordinary least squares, and Tobit regression analyses indicate that with legal and extralegal factors held constant, Asians of different nationalities face varying odds of incarceration or downward departures, and they receive dissimilar sentence lengths.

This paper calculates the change in optimal labor supply and total family welfare resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). We estimate labor supply elasticities for married families in the Current Population Survey from 2015 to 2017, using a joint family utility model. These elasticities are then used to simulate changes in optimal labor supply and resulting change in welfare among families with different characteristics under the new TCJA tax code. We find that optimal hours are lower post-TCJA, relative to before. However, there are differences across family members and family types. Both men's and women's optimal hours decline with income starting in the second quintile, but the decline is more dramatic for men. Overall, all families' welfare increased post-TCJA, with the gains in welfare disproportionately benefiting the wealthy; families with any self-employment income; families with children; and families renting, versus owning, their home.

Unlike most unions, teacher unions have maintained steady membership over the past 40 years yet recently teacher protests have been on the rise. Is this because teacher unions are no longer effective? Given the data available and a DID model framework, selection into unions and selection into teaching were controlled in this study, however, selection into employment is saved for future analysis. Although the DID variable did not prove to be statistically significant in the three variations of the DID model studied here, other features were quite intriguing. For instance, the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition indicates union membership results in significantly higher wages after the Janus versus the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees court decision. As a result, although one form of analysis did not prove to be illustrative, another did. This research will act as a sound basis for future studies on the effectiveness of teacher unions.

We describe how racial and ethnic disparities among prime-aged men have evolved over the last 50 years. We examine several outcomes including annual earnings, employment, measures of income, and home ownership status using data from the March CPS, the Census, and the ACS. Both Blacks and Hispanics have experienced a 20-25% earnings disadvantage relative to whites since 1980. In terms of employment, the gap has been increasing for Blacks but decreasing for Hispanics. These differences are reflected in income and home ownership status. The disparities in earnings are similar across education groups but the disparities in employment are driven primarily by workers who have not completed high school. Comparing Hispanic immigrants with natives reveals that while native Hispanics fare better than Blacks, many of the employment and earnings gains are attributable to Hispanic immigrants.

Objectives To investigate the heterogeneous effects of education on sleep duration for Black and White adults and how the education effects changed between 2004 and 2018. Methods A total of 251,994 adult participants in the 2004 to 2018 National Health Interview Survey were included in pooled cross-sectional data analyses. Separately for Black and White men and women, we calculated prevalence ratio and average marginal probability of short sleep (<7 hours) for each education level over the study period based on weighted logistic regression models. Results Opposite educational gradients in short sleep were observed between Black and White adults. Greater educational attainment was associated with lower likelihood of short sleep among White adults but higher likelihood of short sleep among Black adults. Such heterogeneous educational gradients were robust after accounting for a set of socioeconomic, family, and health factors and persisted between 2004 and 2018. Conclusions The health implications of education are not uniform in the US population, and heterogeneous education effects on sleep duration persisted over the past decade. More scholarly attention is needed to identify challenges and barriers that may be unique for race, sex, and education subpopulations to maintain healthy sleep.

This paper estimates the wage gap between full-time black and white male workers in the United States, comparing available data between 2010 and 2019. Wage gaps may happen between age, education level, race, and so on. The ordinary least squares model is used to estimate the regression. This paper determines the factors that cause wage gaps between black and white workers. Have the wage gaps decreased since 2010? Does occupation type influence the wage gaps? Does education level influence the wage gaps? This paper determines factors that cause wage gaps between black and white workers in the United States.