This article examines the characteristics, location choice and labour market impacts of the recent inflow of Venezuelan refugees in the United States. A few interesting findings emerge from analysing the data. Unlike previous US immigration experience in the 1980s, the flow of recent Venezuelan refugees into the United States is characterized by an inflow of highly educated individuals with a college education. The finding of the analysis also suggests that the location choice of these refugees within the United States is not mainly driven by labour market conditions in the destination cities. Rather, distance to home country and climatic difference with Venezuela are the main factors in determining the flow of Venezuelan refugees into a particular US city. Consistent with this finding, most Venezuelan refugees choose to settle only in two cities in Florida: Miami and Orlando. Examining the labour market conditions in Miami and Orlando following the flow of Venezuelan refugees, the results of the analysis show a lack of evidence that the labour force participation, unemployment rate and weekly wages of US natives are adversely affected by the inflow.

Even though the United States has abolished the most egregious, formal examples of structural racism, their legacy, as well as more subtle forms of exclusion, persist. The effects of this history on Latinos are widespread; many Hispanics struggle with inequity across all aspects of daily life despite hard work. However, a root cause of this inequality—structural racism—and how it applies to Hispanics is not widely known, even by many Latinos. This paper offers a “primer,” the first of a series, detailing historical examples of systemic racism against Hispanics across selected areas and how this phenomenon persists and affects the well-being of Latinos today.

Differential privacy is a restriction on data processing algorithms that provides strong confidentiality guarantees for individual records in the data. However, research on proper statistical inference, that is, research on properly quantifying the uncertainty of the (noisy) sample estimate regarding the true value in the population, is currently still limited. This paper proposes and evaluates several strategies to compute valid differentially private confidence intervals for the median. Instead of computing a differentially private point estimate and deriving its uncertainty, we directly estimate the interval bounds and discuss why this approach is superior if ensuring privacy is important. We also illustrate that addressing both sources of uncertainty-the error from sampling and the error from protecting the output-simultaneously should be preferred over simpler approaches that incorporate the uncertainty in a sequential fashion. We evaluate the performance of the different algorithms under various parameter settings in extensive simulation studies and demonstrate how the findings could be applied in practical settings using data from the 1940 Decennial Census.

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) protocols enable an untrusted data collector to perform privacy-preserving data analytics. In particular, each user locally perturbs its data to preserve privacy before sending it to the data collector, who aggregates the perturbed data to obtain statistics of interest. In the past several years, researchers from multiple communities--such as security, database, and theoretical computer science-- have proposed many LDP protocols. These studies mainly focused on improving the utility of the LDP protocols. However, the security of LDP protocols is largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap. We focus on LDP protocols for frequency estimation and heavy hitter identification, which are two basic data analytics tasks. Specifically, we show that an attacker can inject fake users into an LDP protocol and the fake users send carefully crafted data to the data collector such that the LDP protocol estimates high frequencies for certain target items or identifies them as heavy hitters. We call our attacks data poisoning attacks. We theoretically and/or empirically show the effectiveness of our attacks. We also explore three countermeasures against our attacks. Our experimental results show that they can effectively defend against our attacks in some scenarios but have limited effectiveness in others, highlighting the needs for new defenses against our attacks.

We investigate the impact of removals under the Secure Communities (SC) program on the marriage patterns of immigrant women living in the U.S. where endogamous marriage is the dominant form of partnership. We focus on enforcement by MSA and country of origin and find evidence that deportations increase overall marriage rates, increase the likelihood of endogamous marriage, decrease rates of exogamous marriage to immigrants from other countries and have indeterminate effects on marriage to natives. When examining channels for behavioral responses, we find evidence pointing towards the desire to mitigate the risk of deportation through the increased importance of networks.

Immigrant supply shocks are typically expected to reduce the wage of comparable workers. Natives may respond to the lower wage by moving to markets that were not directly targeted by immigrants and where presumably the wage did not drop. This paper argues that the wage change observed in the targeted market depends not only on the size of the native response, but also on which natives choose to respond. A non-random response alters the composition of the sample of native workers, mechanically changing the average native wage in affected markets and biasing the estimated wage impact of immigration. We document the importance of this selection bias in the French labor market, where women accounted for a rapidly increasing share of the foreign-born workforce since 1976. The raw correlations suggest that the immigrant supply shock did not change the wage of French women, but led to a sizable decline in their employment rate. In contrast, immigration had little impact on the employment rate of men, but led to a sizable drop in the male wage. We show that the near-zero correlation between immigration and female wages arises partly because the native women who left the labor force had relatively low wages. Adjusting for the selection bias results in a similar wage elasticity for both French men and women (between -0.8 and -1.0).

Although the effects of urban shrinkage on quality of life and the built environment have received a great deal of attention, the characteristics of those experiencing these impacts have been much less studied. This is ironic, as urban shrinkage or depopulation is by nature a demographic phenomenon: city sizes evolve precisely because people move in and out, are born, and die. Moreover, the demographic processes that contribute to shrinking cities—out-migration and death—are selective and so they also govern who remains behind in cities as they shrink. It is this latter group that is the focus of this research. The analysis contributes to the literature on shrinking cities through its novel consideration of community-level exposure to depopulation. In particular, it investigates who is impacted by loss; the extent to which population loss is experienced disproportionately across urban space and demographic subgroups; and whether decline occurring at multiple spatial scales magnifies exposure for some groups more than others. Findings show that, at both city and census tract levels, demographic characteristics of growth and loss areas are different and, at all levels, some groups are more likely than others to be living in a loss-impacted area.

We summarize the experience of participating in two differential privacy competitions organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this paper, we document our experiences in the competition, the approaches we have used, the lessons we have learned, and our call to the research community to further bridge the gap between theory and practice in DP research.

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 New Hampshire. Now more than ever, lawmakers in New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 67.6 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 New Hampshire.

We live in a world in transformation and transition. As we address the central challenges of our time – a heating planet, an unequal economy, and persistent racial injustice – it is key to weave together our strategies to achieve a more sustainable and equitable society. One frequently described path to do so is “just transition” – a strategy to shift away from fossil fuels to a low-carbon future while protecting fossil fuel communities and workers, as well as communities who has historically suffered from the pollution from those industries. What we suggest in this report is that just transition is one part of a larger “transition to justice” – that is, an effort to not just addressing the damage from a needed change in our energy systems but an attempt to center economic, racial, and social equity as we refashion our nation’s approach to both climate and the economy. This large holistic vision requires not just a commitment to policy but an emphasis on power.

Female labor force participation rose dramatically from 1970s to 2000 and then stagnated. Male labor force participation rate declined since the 1970s. I look into the reasons using the Current Population Survey.

Neighborhood age composition is an understudied area. Furthermore, existing empirical and conceptual work is conflicting, with some scholarship-indicating neighborhoods with older adults are beneficial and other scholarship suggesting it can be detrimental. Combining data from 7,197 older adults from the first wave (2011) of the National Health & Aging Trends Study and census tract data from the National Neighborhood Change Database, the purposes of our study were to: 1) identify the characteristics of neighborhoods experiencing different types of changes in age composition, and 2) examine the association between neighborhood age composition and self-rated health. Findings indicate that neighborhoods experiencing Concentration (where the number of older adults are declining but their percentage of the total population are increasing), the majority of which are in urban areas, have less aggregate economic resources, more indicators of neighborhood disorder, and less access to services and supports. Regression models also suggest older adults living in Concentration neighborhoods reported lower self-rated health compared to those living in the other three neighborhood types. Findings point to the importance of considering neighborhood age composition when targeting interventions and resources, and the potential consequences of being stuck in place in a neighborhood that does not meet elders’ needs.

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 Arizona. Now more than ever, lawmakers in Arizona 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 Arizona, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 61.4 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 Arizona.

Over 1.5 million new jobs need to be filled by 2026 for medical assistants, nursing aides, and home care aides, many of which will work in the long-term services and supports (LTSS) sector. Using 16 years of data from the American Time Use Survey, we examined the financial vulnerability of high-skill and low-skill LTSS workers in comparison with other health care workers, while providing insight into their well-being by measuring time spent on work and nonwork activities. We found that, regardless of skill status, working in LTSS was associated with lower wages and an increased likelihood of experiencing poverty compared with other health care workers. Results from time diary data indicated that the LTSS workforce spent a greater share of their time working and commuting to work. Low-skill LTSS workers were hardest hit, spending more time on paid and unpaid activities, such as household and child care responsibilities.

Prior research on recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) has often focused on individual-level factors that promote recovery. Given systemic health inequities, it is also important to study community-level social determinants of health (SDOH) that may promote recovery from AUD. This study extended prior work examining individual profiles of recovery from AUD to assess how individual and community SDOH at the time of treatment entry were associated with recovery from AUD three years after treatment. Data were utilized from the COMBINE study (n = 664), a multisite randomized clinical trial evaluating pharmacological and behavioral treatments for AUD. Public community data sources associated with participants’ study sites were used to measure community SDOH. Multilevel latent profile analyses with individual- and community-level variables as predictors of recovery profiles were estimated. Four profiles were identified based on participants’ alcohol consumption and functioning. Individual SDOH variables, such as fewer years of education and lower income, and community SDOH, including lower rates of health insurance, lower income, and greater income inequality, were each associated with lower functioning profiles. The findings highlight the importance of community SDOH in AUD recovery and the value of including both individual and community SDOH variables in research on long-term recovery.

We use longitudinal administrative records on Medicaid enrollment to document the impact of the ACA expansions on Medicaid coverage from 2008 to 2016. These data were provided to the Census Bureau by CMS and assigned a PIK at the individual level by Census using the PVS. The data CMS collects from states changed over time with the move from the Medicaid Statistical Information System (MSIS) to the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS). States provided data to CMS over our period of study in one of three formats. The first format, MSIS, was the original format used by CMS to collect individual level data from states. Data provided in this format were based on federal fiscal year (FY) of enrollment. The second format, T-MSIS Analytic File (TAF), follows the same fiscal year format as the MSIS files. The newest format, T-MSIS, is based on calendar year (CY). All states except AR switched to T-MSIS by 2016, and most of these switches occurred in 2016.

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 Pennsylvania. Now more than ever, lawmakers in Pennsylvania must do better to ensure all women and families have quality reproductive health care, safe workplaces, equalre presentation 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 wellbeing of families, communities, and the economy. In Pennsylvania, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 67.6 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 Pennsylvania.

This dissertation addresses three important topics in health economics and focuses specifically on the factors that affect the health status of youth and children. Chapter 2 examines the effects of aging out of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on youth food security status. WIC provides nutrition assistance to children under the age of five from low-income households. This study finds that aging out of WIC increases child food insecurity, demonstrating that this break in food assistance programs for children deteriorates child food security. Chapter 3 (joint with Brent Kreider and John V. Winters) analyzes the effects of the fracking boom on child food security. The oil and gas fracking boom provides a natural experimental setting for investigating how macroeconomic conditions affect child food security. This study finds that increases in states’ oil and gas labor income reduce child poverty and improve child food security. Chapter 4 focuses on the effects of statewide Tobacco-21 laws on youth smoking. Raising the minimum legal smoking age is a well-known policy strategy for deterring youth smoking. This study shows that state-level Tobacco-21 laws decrease traditional cigarette smoking among youth but increase electronic cigarette smoking. This finding indicates that electronic cigarettes serve as substitutes for traditional cigarettes.

I examine the geographical distribution of the impact of COVID on unemployment rates in the U.S. The states most impacted and slowest to recover are states highly dependent on tourism and entertainment and states with high population density and large urban centers.

If california were its own country. It would have the world's fifth-largest immigrant population. There were more immigrants in California than there are in several countries where immigrants has been exhaustively studied and debated, including the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, France, and Canada. California has been the most immigrants in the United States (almost eleven million) and the highest share in its population (27%). The state is one of the most important immigrant destinations in the world.