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.

As cities across the United States continue to face considerable economic and social change, public officials, planners, and researchers seek to understand the dimensions of change. One of the failures of U.S. planning has been disregarding the larger multiple county regional context when analyzing cities (Gerkens, 2000). Ignoring the development of these multi-county regions, or Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), and their specific characteristics results in weak policy and planning responses. Analyzing data from an MSA perspective can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing cities and the regions they fall within (Malecki, 2007). Addressing the gaps in knowledge about how and why cities change must remain a primary focus of planning research. One of the regions facing considerable change is the Midwest. This region contains eleven states as defined by the Census Bureau (U.S. Census, 1995). Since the 1970s, the Midwest has experienced significant economic changes that have further impacted social outcomes. Globalization remains central to many of these changes, having a measured impact on the Midwest’s industrial identity (Florida, 2016). The Midwest did not have a singular response to globalization and other economic forces. This has resulted in varying degrees of economic and social health for different localities within the region (Austin & Hitch, 2020). Despite significant research about how Midwest and its MSAs have changed since 1970, policy recommendations still fall short of providing a comprehensive solution to some of the Midwest’s most significant problems (Clark & Doussard, 2019). It is still unclear why specific MSAs in the Midwest have changed and how this contributes to the identity of the Midwest as a region. This analysis seeks to highlight some future areas for research and further consideration. This research project aims to provide a more focused analysis of the variables impacting economic and community development within the Midwest region. Deeper knowledge of the trends in regional change can inform further research and policy recommendations for Midwestern MSAs. This research project utilizes Principal Component Analysis to identify significant trends in the Midwest region’s measures of economic and social health and compare individual MSA trends in comparison with one another. These objectives are pursued to provide a more comprehensive understanding of change at the regional and local level in the Midwest to better inform future research and decisions made by public officials and planners.

Federal administrative tax data are invaluable for research, but because of privacy concerns, access to these data is typically limited to select agencies and a few individuals. An alternative to sharing microlevel data are validation servers, which allow individuals to query statistics without accessing the confidential data. This paper studies the feasibility of using differentially private (DP) methods to implement such a server. We provide an extensive study on existing DP methods for releasing tabular statistics, means, quantiles, and regression estimates. We also include new methodological adaptations to existing DP regression algorithms for using new data types and returning standard error estimates. We evaluate the selected methods based on the accuracy of the output for statistical analyses, using real administrative tax data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income (SOI) Division. Our findings show that a validation server would be feasible for simple statistics but would struggle to produce accurate regression estimates and confidence intervals. We outline challenges and offer recommendations for future work on validation servers. This is the first comprehensive statistical study of DP methodology on a real, complex dataset, that has significant implications for the direction of a growing research field.

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to understand how Black middle-class women describe their experiences that influenced their decisions to be stay-at-home mothers in the southeastern United States. Data were obtained from 32 Black middle-class stay-at-home mothers. This qualitative study addressed the issue that it is not known how Black middle-class women describe their experiences that influenced their decision to be stay-at-home mothers. For this study, one theoretical framework best aligned with the purpose of this research: Historical womanist theory which provided a unique understanding of the social and economic positions and the cultural influence of Black women in the United States. The theoretical framework provided a foundation for the research questions. The research questions were focused on understanding the experiences of Black middle-class stay-at-home mothers, how social positions as an influence to be a stay-at-home mother, how economic positions as an influence to be a stay-at-home mother, and how culture influences being a stay-at-home mother. The data were analyzed using an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview questions. Only ten participants took part in the semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires. An additional 22 participants took part in the open-ended questionnaires .The results from the data sources suggested that Black middle-class women have an opportunity to provide a solid foundation to build a bond with their children, achieve avenues to successfully maintain economical willpower to be a stay-at-home mother, and create a different ideology to become a stay-at-home mother.

lmost two decades after the first U.S. state legalized same-sex marriage, our understanding of how partnered sexual minorities divide unpaid household labor is still very limited. Informed by a gender-as-relational perspective, I provide one of the first nationally representative evidence on household time use patterns at the intersection of gender and sexuality. Using mainly the American Time Use Survey data 2003-2019, including critical years after nationwide Marriage Equality in 2015, I answer two research questions: 1) How does housework and childcare time compare across four groups (men and women partnered with same-sex and different-sex partners)? 2) To what extent do potential mechanisms (resource autonomy, power bargaining, time availability, and gender performance) help to explain the group differentials and do these mechanisms differentially apply to each group? Preliminary findings from descriptive, regression, and decomposition analyses show substantial group differentials across time use outcomes as well as differential importance of each mechanism in explaining these group disparities.

Recent studies have paid more attention to how position-generated social capital varies by an individual's characteristics, and less to how geographical distributions of occupations may constrain position-specific connections. By integrating two national surveys from the United States, we differentiate the extent to which individual social capital fluctuates by occupational compositions at the county, metropolis, and state levels. Multilevel analyses show that when more people at all three levels work in education, training, and library occupations, residents have a greater chance to gain access to professional-type resources. Similar spatial effects on farming and production resources, however, are more apparent at the county level. Not only does the association between individual social capital and local occupational structures vary across different occupations, but the magnitude of such spatial effects also differs by the scope of the geographical areas. The findings underscore how contextual factors and geographical location may contribute to building occupation-specific network resources.

Understanding the child care needs of parents working nontraditional hour (NTH) schedules-defined here as any work outside of 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays-has become a growing concern for policymakers trying to reduce barriers to accessible child care. Families working these schedules can face extra challenges finding child care, and the child care arrangements they use are less often supported by public funds. Further, structural inequities in the labor and education markets mean that NTH schedules are more common for Black and Latino workers and workers in families with low incomes-who already face disparities in access to quality child care and good jobs. The child care crisis brought on by the pandemic and other challenges of COVID-19 have amplified these issues as well as the importance of the essential workforce and impact of race on families' risks and opportunities. Using data from the 2014-18 American Community Survey and the 2016 Survey of Program Participation, we find that roughly a third of Connecticut children younger than 6 with working parents had parents that worked NTH schedules. The most common hours these parents worked were evenings, mornings, and weekends, with fewer working overnight. Although parents of all types and income levels work NTH schedules, these schedules are much more common among families that have faced structural barriers to employment, education, and good wages. This is true especially for families with low incomes, Black and Latino families, parents with lower levels of education, and single-parent families. Further, these patterns hold true for essential workers as well. This brief is one in a set of three examining NTH work patterns. The companion briefs include one providing these data for Connecticut and one for Oklahoma.

Health capital development during childhood can affect later-life outcomes. This paper examines the long-term effects of the introduction of Medicaid during the 1960s as one of the earliest attempts in US history to provide publicly financed health insurance for the poor. Using a large panel dataset and a difference-in-differences- in-differences identification strategy, I show that exposure to Medicaid during ages 0-5 has sizable and significant effects on economic and non-economic outcomes throughout ages 25-55, including income, employment, education, disability, and wealth. Exposure to Medicaid among fully eligible cohorts is associated with roughly 0.4 percentage higher wage income, equivalent to an increase of $145 above the mean of annual wages. It also implies a minimum of 7.8% externality of the programme in labour market wages.

How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new out-group change the in-group’s perceptions of other out-groups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of other minorities as in- or out-groups depending on perceived distances across groups. We test this framework by studying how Mexican immigration to the United States affected white Americans’ attitudes and behaviors toward Black Americans. We combine survey and crime data with a difference-in-differences design and an instrumental variables strategy. Consistent with the theory, Mexican immigration improves whites’ racial attitudes, increases support for pro-Black government policies, and lowers anti-Black hate crimes while simultaneously increasing prejudice against Hispanics. Results generalize beyond Hispanics and Blacks, and a survey experiment provides direct evidence for recategorization. Our findings imply that changes in the size of one group can affect the entire web of intergroup relations in diverse societies.

In 2018 New Mexico, a “traditional” state had the ninth largest Latino/a/x population in the country, exceeded only by the eight other “traditional” states. It was also poised (at 49%) to soon become America’s first majority Latino/a/x state. The broad term New Latino/a/x Diaspora (NLD) may also obscure important regional differences in Latino/a/x enrollment growth and impact on educational systems. Improvisation and innovation have been hallmarks of language education policies for Latinos in the NLD. Finally, while the notion of the NLD might imply a blank slate or new starting point for the local negotiation of inter-ethnic relationships and educational practices, local interactions are never entirely free of broader national influence. Indeed, the general mobility of the US population, Latino/a/x immigrants’ common pattern of secondary migration from established to new diaspora areas, nationally and transnationally circulating images of Latinos in mass media including social media, and national policies.

Objectives: By convention, women's early marriage is considered a sociocultural decision sensitive to factors acting during adolescence such as poverty, early menar-che, and less education. Few studies have examined broader risk factors in the natal household prior to marriage. We investigated whether biosocial markers of parental investment through the daughters' life-course were associated with early marriage risk in rural India. We used an evolutionary perspective to interpret our findings. Materials and Methods: A prospective cohort recruited mothers at preconception. Children were followed from birth to age 21 years. Multivariable logistic regression models estimated odds ratios of marrying early (<19 years) associated first with wealth, age at menarche and education, and then with broader markers of maternal phenotype, natal household characteristics, and girls' growth trajectories. Models adjusted for confounders. Results: Of 305 girls, 71 (23%) had married early. Early married girls showed different patterns of growth compared to unmarried girls. Neither poverty nor early menarche predicted early marriage. Girls' non-completion of lower secondary school predicted early marriage, explaining 19% of the variance. Independent of girls' lower schooling, nuclear household, low paternal education, shorter gestation, and girls' poor infant weight gain were associated with marrying early, explaining in combination 35% of the variance. Discussion: Early marriage reflects "future discounting," where reduced parental investment in daughters' somatic and educational capital from early in her life favors an earlier transition to the life-course stage when reproduction can occur. Interventions initiated in adolescence may occur too late in the life-course to effectively delay women's marriage.

Several initiatives are promoting longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) restoration in the Southern United States for conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), landowners plant longleaf pine on farmlands and pasturelands in exchange for annual payments and other financial incentives. While the introduction of this program was an important step towards longleaf pine restoration, there exists a necessity to understand how the decisions of landowners to enroll in CRP are manifested over space. An understanding about the role of a range of factors on the spatial density of longleaf pine plantations enrolled under CRP would help in prioritizing locations for longleaf pine plantations, thereby increasing the efficacy of conservation-related resources. We evaluate the effects of socioeconomic, topographic, and distance variables on the spatial density of longleaf plantations enrolled under CRP using clustered point process model in Georgia, a state with 47% of the total acreage under CRP-supported longleaf plantations. Only 30% of the current longleaf pine locations under CRP were within the Significant Geographic Area. About 86% of current longleaf plantations under CRP are present on former croplands and pasturelands. The spatial density of longleaf pine plantations is negatively associated with the distance from cropland and pastureland and positively associated with land capability classes, and distance from the sawmills. Longleaf pine restoration efforts should focus on those croplands or pasturelands which are closer to existing CRP-supported plantations, located on lower soil capability classes, and are far from wood consuming mills. Our study would support current programs that are supporting longleaf pine restoration in the Southern United States.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a major social concern. There is an extensive economic literature estimating the social costs associated with SUDs in terms of health care, labor market outcomes, and crime. However, beyond anecdotal claims that SUD treatment centers (SUDTCs), settings in which patients receive care, reduce residential property values, there is little empirical work on this question. We apply a spatial difference-in-differences model and administrative data to test this relationship. We find that SUDTCs sort into lower-value areas, but once SUDTC selection is addressed, we find no evidence that SUDTCs influence residential property values.

Understanding the child care needs of parents working nontraditional hour (NTH) schedules-defined here as any work outside of 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays-has become a growing concern for policymakers trying to reduce barriers to accessible child care. Families working these schedules can face extra challenges finding child care, and the child care arrangements they use are less often supported by public funds. Further, structural inequities in the labor and education markets mean that NTH schedules are more common for Black and Latino workers and workers in families with low incomes-who already face disparities in access to quality child care and good jobs. The child care crisis brought on by the pandemic and other challenges of COVID-19 have amplified these issues as well as the importance of the essential workforce and the impact of race on families' risks and opportunities. Using data from the 2014-18 American Community Survey and the 2016 Survey of Program Participation, we find that more than a third of District of Columbia children younger than 6 with working parents had parents that worked NTH schedules. The most common hours these parents worked were evenings and weekends, with fewer working during the early morning or overnight. Although parents of all types and income levels work NTH schedules, these schedules are much more common among families that have faced structural barriers to employment, education, and good wages. This is true especially for families with low incomes, Black and Latino families, parents with lower levels of education, and single-parent families. Further, these patterns hold true for essential workers as well. This brief is one in a set of three examining NTH work patterns. The companion briefs include one providing these data for Connecticut and one for Oklahoma.

The concept of human capital has been used over time in various sciences, such as Human Resources, Psychology, Economics, etc. Each of the sciences attributes a particular meaning to it, in this work we would like us to concentrate on the meaning given by Economics

A lasting question in economic literature is how economic growth differs between urban areas and rural areas of states. Are fertility, schooling attainment, and mortality higher in urban areas or rural? Where the Baby Boom has been documented in the U.S. for both the white and black populations, do we similarly observe an increase in fertility rates for the urban white, urban black, rural white, and rural black populations? Do we observe differences in access to education and levels of discrimination for white and black individuals on an urban-rural level? Also, how do the costs of schooling compare over time for white and black individuals in urban and rural areas? Starting with the first available urban and rural economic measurements in 1900, this dissertation characterizes how fertility, schooling attainment, mortality, and discrimination have changed in urban and rural areas by race in states from 1900–2010. To identify how economic development compares in urban areas versus rural, the first chapter of this dissertation provides urban and rural measurements of fertility, schooling attainment, and mortality risk. From this data collection, we find evidence of steadily declining young adult mortality risk and infant mortality for urban and rural areas over time. We also observe increases in schooling attainment, with less disparity between white and black expected schooling over time in both urban and rural areas. As for fertility, this paper finds increases in fertility rates for urban white, urban black, rural white, and rural black populations during the Baby Boom. This paper then presents an urban-rural growth model for fertility and schooling. By closely fitting the model’s fertility and schooling paired solutions to the observed data, this model generates calibrated cost of schooling values. We find that the cost of schooling, which impacts the decision of individuals to pursue further schooling, is greater for urban areas than rural. The second chapter turns to investigate how discrimination exists historically on an urban versus rural level by race. Using the calibrated cost of schooling values from the prior chapter of the dissertation, we can think about how much black individuals would have been willing to give up of their lifetime wealth to have faced the white cost of schooling in the same area, whether urban or rural. The amount that a black individual would relinquish of their lifetime wealth to face the white cost of schooling can serve as a measurement of discrimination. This paper constructs measurements of discrimination in urban and rural areas from 1900–2010. We find evidence of greater discrimination for black individuals in urban areas than rural areas leading up to the integration of schools. We also observe that after the integration of schools and the Civil Rights Movement, there is steady improvement across states and census divisions in access to schooling and equality. The Sourcing of Data Appendix provides sourcing details of all data and any processes used in the constructed urban and rural measurements of fertility rates, enrollment rates and schooling attainment, and mortality risk.

Women are less likely than men to be in "risky" occupations, that is, those that exhibit large within-occupation wage dispersion. We first demonstrate that a new theoretical channel-the competitive structure of the marriage market-may incentivize both men and women to choose riskier careers with lower wage returns. We then show that a unifying factor-women's relative inability to reap the benefits of a risky career due to their shorter reproductive span-can help rationalize a set of gender differences in labor-market and marriage-market outcomes. We provide evidence that supports the importance of the marriage market in risky career choices and their gender differences.

Using time-diary data from the U.S. and six wealthy European countries, I demonstrate that non-partnered mothers spend slightly less time performing childcare, but much less time in other household activities than partnered mothers. Unpartnered mothers' total work time—paid work and household production—is slightly less than partnered women's. In the U.S. but not elsewhere they watch more television and engage in fewer other leisure activities. These differences are independent of any differences in age, race/ethnicity, ages and numbers of children, and household incomes. Non-partnered mothers feel slightly more pressured for time and much less satisfied with their lives. Analyses using the NLSY79 show that mothers whose partners left the home in the past two years became more depressed than those whose marriages remained intact. Coupled with evidence that husbands spend substantial time in childcare and with their children, the results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers receive much less parental care—perhaps 40 percent less—than other children; and most of what they receive is from mothers who are less satisfied with their lives.

Understanding the child care needs of parents working nontraditional hour (NTH) schedules-defined here as any work outside of 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays-has become a growing concern for policymakers trying to reduce barriers to accessible child care. Families working these schedules can face extra challenges finding child care, and the child care arrangements they use are less often supported by public funds. Further, structural inequities in the labor and education markets mean that NTH schedules are more common for Black and Latino workers and workers in families with low incomes-who already face disparities in access to quality child care and good jobs. The child care crisis brought on by the pandemic and other challenges of COVID-19 have amplified these issues as well as the importance of the essential workforce and the impact of race on families' risks and opportunities. Using data from the 2014-18 American Community Survey and the 2016 Survey of Program Participation, we find that more than a third of Oklahoma children younger than 6 with working parents had parents that worked NTH schedules. The most common hours these parents worked were early mornings and weekends, with fewer working evenings or overnight. Although parents of all types and income levels work NTH schedules, these schedules are much more common among families that have faced structural barriers to employment, education, and good wages. This is true especially for families with low incomes, Black and Latino families, parents with lower levels of education, and single-parent families. Further, these patterns hold true for essential workers as well. This brief is one in a set of three examining NTH work patterns. The companion briefs include one providing these data for Connecticut and one for Oklahoma.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the vital role women play in our economy and in the economic security of families, both nationally and in Georgia. Now more than ever, lawmakers in Georgia must do better to ensure all women and families have quality reproductive health care, safe workplaces, equal representation in government, and economic security. Women need policies that reflect their roles as providers and caregivers—roles that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated are critical to the well-being of families, communities, and the economy. In Georgia, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 65.4 percent of families, and these numbers are higher for some mothers of color across the United States. The following policy recommendations can help support the economic security of women and families in Georgia.