Positive emotions have long-lasting benefits for human development. Understanding the connections between daily travel behavior and emotional well-being will not only help transportation practitioners identify concrete strategies to improve user experiences of transportation services, but also help health practitioners to identify innovative solutions for improving public health. Prior research on the subject had focused on limited travel behavior dimensions such as travel mode and/or travel duration. Other dimensions such as travel purpose and travel companionship have received limited attention. Using data from the 2012–2013 American Time Use Survey, this paper applied the generalized ordered logistic regression approach and examined how the mode, duration, purpose, and companionship characteristics of a trip shape six different emotions during the trip, including happy, meaningful, tired, stressful, sad, and pain. After controlling for personal demographics, health conditions, and residential locations, we find that biking is the happiest mode; public transit is the least happy and least meaningful; and utilitarian walking for transportation is associated with all four negative emotions. Trip duration has a negative association with happiness and a positive association with stress. Travel for discretionary purposes such as leisure, exercise, and community activities is generally associated with higher levels of positive emotions and lower levels of negative emotions than travel for work or household maintenance. Trips with eating and drinking purposes appear to be the happiest and trips with the purpose of spiritual and/or volunteering activities appear to be the most meaningful. Travel with family especially children or travel with friends is happier and more meaningful than travel alone. Transportation planners in the U.S. are recommended to promote biking behavior, improve transit user experiences, and implement spatial planning strategies for creating a built environment conducive to shorter trips, more discretionary trips, and more joint trips with family and friends.

The nonprofit Urban Institute is a leading research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights that improve people's lives and strengthen communities. For 50 years, Urban has been the trusted source for rigorous analysis of complex social and economic issues; strategic advice to policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners; and new, promising ideas that expand opportunities for all. Our work inspires effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places.

Females live longer than males in most parts of the world today. Among OECD nations in recent years, the difference in life expectancy at birth is around four to six years (seven in Japan). But have women always lived so much longer than men? The answer is that they have not. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are not the reasons. Rather, we argue that the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role. The primary reason is that those who survive most infectious diseases carry a health burden that affects organs, such as the heart, as well as impacting general well-being. We use new data from Massachusetts containing information on causes of death from 1887 to show that infectious diseases disproportionately affected females between the ages of 5 and 25. Increased longevity of women, therefore, occurred as the burden of infectious disease fell for all. Our explanation does not tell us why women live longer than men, but it does help understand the timing of the increase.

Chapter I: The Impact of Occupation on Health Participation in meaningful occupations contributes to good health and well-being. Workers are more likely to derive satisfaction from participating in occupations well-suited to their skills and training. This project provides causal evidence of the impact of occupation on health among college graduates. In particular, I estimate the health effect of participation in occupations well-suited to their education level, that is, occupations that value college education. Valuation of college education in an occupation is measured by occupation-specific college earning premium: the adjusted percentage difference in earnings between workers with and without college degrees in this given occupation. The causal inference relies on estimation with instrumental variables, which are constructed in the spirit of Hausman’s price instrumental variables. The result suggests that college educated individuals participating in occupations with higher college earning premiums have better self-reported health, even after accounting for income, occupational . . .

Two investments stand out for their power to improve economic outcomes: higher education and stocks. Absent public funding, though, both are seen as the preserve of the wealthy. As a result, higher education in particular is, in many countries, heavily subsidized with the explicit aim of promoting equality of opportunity. However, differences in characteristics are likely to affect individuals' capacity to take advantage of investment opportunities and improve their economic well-being. Our goal in this project is therefore to study the effect of access to college and the stock market on individual earnings, wealth, mobility, and inequality using a model that derives empirically-plausible measures of ex-ante heterogeneity in learning ability, initial human capital, and initial wealth. Does the power of college to increase well-being exceed that of stocks, as large subsidies to the former suggest? Perhaps not: we show that college does improve economic outcomes, but only for those whose ability and preparedness poise them for success. Stocks, on the other hand, may improve economic outcomes for those whose endowments make human capital investment a relatively unattractive option.

Why do some countries fail to govern their territory? Incomplete domestic sovereignty, defined as the absence of effective state authority over territory, has severe consequences in terms of security, order, economic growth, and human well-being. These negative consequences raise the question of why such spaces remain without effective authority. While the international relations literature suggests that state weakness persists because of an absence of war and the comparative politics literature treats political underdevelopment as the consequence of domestic factors that raise the costs of exercising authority, these views are incomplete. I argue that hostile neighbors weaken state authority over territory through a strategy of foreign interference. Foreign interference in domestic sovereignty is a powerful instrument of statecraft that can yield domestic and foreign policy benefits. I investigate the effects of hostile neighboring states through a cross-national, within-country statistical analysis utilizing a novel indicator of state authority, and pair this analysis with a qualitative case study of Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s. Together, this evidence shows how this international factor is an underappreciated yet important contributor to weak state authority even after accounting for domestic factors. The study's conclusions challenge our understanding of the effects of international politics on internal political development.

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. These gaps persist despite a strong migratory response, and we attribute this to high persistence in labor demand shocks. These trends generate a "race" between local employment and population: Population always lags behind employment, yielding persistent deviations in employment rates. Methodologically, we argue the employment rate can serve as a sufficient statistic for local well-being; and we model population and employment dynamics using an error correction mechanism, which explicitly allows for disequilibrium.

The U.S. system of graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has served the nation and its science and engineering enterprise extremely well. Over the course of their education, graduate students become involved in advancing the frontiers of discovery, as well as in making significant contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy, its national security, and the health and well-being of its people. However, continuous, dramatic innovations in research methods and technologies, changes in the nature and availability of work, shifts in demographics, and expansions in the scope of occupations needing STEM expertise raise questions about how well the current STEM graduate education system is meeting the full array of 21st century needs. Indeed, recent surveys of employers and graduates and studies of graduate education suggest that many graduate programs do not adequately prepare students to translate their knowledge into impact in multiple careers. Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century examines the current state of U.S. graduate STEM education. This report explores how the system might best respond to ongoing developments in the conduct of research on evidence-based teaching practices and in the needs and interests of its students and the broader society it seeks to serve. This will be an essential resource for the primary stakeholders in the U.S. STEM enterprise, including federal and state policymakers, public and private funders, institutions of higher education, their administrators and faculty, leaders in business and industry, and the students the system is intended to educate.

Public-sector jobs in Massachusetts are more likely than private-sector jobs to be good jobs that provide a family-supporting income and wealth-building benefits, so they need to be preserved. At a time of growing economic inequality, jobs in the public sector help preserve the middle of the income distribution—the middle class. Public-sector jobs also help build strong communities because Bay State public-sector workers are more likely to be long-term community residents, increasing neighborhood cohesion, strengthening civic engagement, and reducing crime.

The social safety net faces a period of transition as policymakers seek significant changes to an array of programs that help low-income families pay for food, health care, housing, and other basic needs. These changes are being considered in an economic environment that exposes many families to financial insecurity even as the economy approaches full employment in 2018. As new program rules and budgets are established, policymakers and the public need timely information to understand how these policies will affect people who rely on public assistance. In December 2017, the Urban Institute launched the Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS) to monitor changes in individual and family health and well-being as policymakers make changes to federal safety net programs and the labor market continues to evolve. This new annual survey is a key component of Urban's From Safety Net to Solid Ground project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other foundations. The project offers insights into the implications of proposed changes to programs such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing assistance for the well-being of people striving to cover their basic needs. The WBNS builds on the sampling strategy and survey design employed by the Urban Institute for its Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS). Launched in 2013, the HRMS is a survey of the nonelderly population that explores the value of cutting-edge internet-based survey methods to monitor the Affordable Care Act before data from federal surveys are available. The WBNS draws from the same internet panel as the HRMS and similarly provides data well ahead of federal surveys, which have longer time lags between data collection and the release of estimates. Further, the WBNS is unique in the comprehensive nature of its content, which covers a broad cross-section of topics relevant to health and material hardship, including health insurance, housing, food security, employment, family income, program participation, and family financial security. No single federal survey covers the same breadth of issues addressed in the WBNS. These features of the WBNS will provide policymakers and

Researchers have posited that larger, denser metropolitan areas have important consumption advantages. We examine this us- ing Cragg two-part hurdle and ordinary least square (OLS) regression models employing data from the American Time Use Survey. We test whether: 1) large metropolitan area residents participate in more out- of-home activities because these activities are more plentiful, richer, and/or easier to access, 2) large metropolitan areas have lower travel times because of higher densities, and 3) activities in larger metro- politan areas have more positive associations with subjective well-being than those in smaller places. We reject all three hypotheses. Metropoli- tan area population size is largely unrelated to time spent outside the home, excluding travel. Large-metropolitan-area residents participate in more arts and entertainment activities and eat and drink out more often, but they socialize, volunteer, and care for others outside the home less. Larger metropolitan areas are associated with dramatically more travel time. We find no evidence that large metropolitan area activities contribute any more or less to life satisfaction or affect than activities in smaller places. We also find that life satisfaction does not covary with metropolitan area size. In sum, living in a large metropoli- tan area may primarily involve a tradeoff of (travel) time for money (higher wages), with little net change in welfare.

While a large literature has investigated the role of parental human capital on children’s well-being, relatively little is known regarding the effects of human capital investment in children on long run outcomes of parents. In this study we explore the human capital variations created by the 1974 Tanzania education reform to estimate the effect of children’s primary schooling attainment on parental survival. Using 5,026,315 census records from 1988, 2002, and 2012, we show that the 1974 reform resulted in an additional 1.1 years (31%) of educational attainment among exposed cohorts. Using the reform as instrument for child education we find that each additional year of primary schooling in children resulted in a 3.7 percentage point reduction (p < .001) in the probability of maternal death, and a 0.8 percentage point reduction (p = .011) in the probability of paternal death by the time exposed child cohorts reach age 50. The results suggest that—at least in a setting where social security coverage is largely absent—a substantial fraction of human capital gains generated by reforms are shared with the parental generation.

Housing is a large and important component of the nation's economy. For individual households, the decision whether to rent or won a home is a consequential financial decision, while the location and quality of their homes are major determinants of their day-to-day well-being. The stakes . . .

As a country, we want to ensure that people have access to basic supports, including food, healthcare, and housing. Women are more likely than men to face economic insecurity at all stages of their lives, due to ongoing employment discrimination, overrepresentation in low-wage jobs, difficulty accessing affordable, comprehensive health care, and greater responsibilities for unpaid caregiving. As a result, programs and policies that protect health, ensure access to high-quality child care and higher education, and help people meet their basic needs are essential to women and their families.

Internal migration has now replaced fertility and mortality as the leading agent of demographic change in most countries, and it is the main process shaping patterns of human settlement within and between countries. Migration is widely acknowledged to be integral to the process of human development as it plays a significant role in enhancing educational outcomes. At regional and national levels, internal migration underpins the efficient functioning of the economy by bringing knowledge and skills to the locations where they are needed. At an individual level, migration is essential to economic and social well-being by allowing individuals to pursue their goals and aspirations, including pursuing further study. It is the multi-dimensional nature of migration that underlines its significance in the process of human development. Unlike other demographic events, such as birth and death, migration is a repetitive process involving varying distance, duration, origins and destinations. Human mobility extends in the spatial domain from local travel to international migration, and in the temporal dimension from short-term stays to permanent relocations. Classification and measurement of such phenomena is inevitably complex (Bell et al., 2002), which has severely hindered progress in comparative research, with very few large-scale cross-national comparisons of migration. In recent years, however, there have been significant methodological advances (Courgeau, Muhidin, & Bell, 2013; Rees et al., 2016) and the emergence of global repositories of internal migration data (Bell, Bernard, Ueffing, & Charles-Edwards, 2014; Minnesota Population Center, 2011), which has given rise to a series of innovative papers under the umbrella of the Internal Migration Around the GlobE (IMAGE) project1 . This work has made significant headway toward quantifying and understanding the extent of cross-national variations in levels of migration (Bell et al., 2015a), age patterns (Bernard, Bell, & Charles-Edwards, 2014b), distance moved (Stillwell et al., 2016) and population redistribution (Rees et al., 2016), but education and its relationship with migration have not been explicitly considered.

The nonprofit Urban Institute is a leading research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights that improve people's lives and strengthen communities. For 50 years, Urban has been the trusted source for rigorous analysis of complex social and economic issues; strategic advice to policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners; and new, promising ideas that expand opportunities for all. Our work inspires effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places. AB O U T NE I GH B O RH O O D P RE S E R VA T I ON I NC. Neighborhood Preservation, Inc. in Memphis, Tennessee, promotes neighborhood revitalization by collaboratively developing practical and sustainable resolutions to blighted properties and to the systems that lead to widespread neglect, vacancy and abandonment of real estate. The Organization focuses on policy advocacy and implementing and documenting replicable comprehensive neighborhood improvement projects.

The quality and dynamics of mother-father couple relationships shape the experiences and well-being of the entire family.1,2 A large body of research, for example, suggests that children thrive when their parents are in stable, high-quality, low-conflict relationships.3-6 Despite the size and growth of the Latinoa population in the United States, little is known about the relationship dynamics of Hispanic couples or how they might differ from other racial and ethnic groups. Few studies have examined how Hispanic couples interact and communicate with one another, how they resolve arguments or disagreements, or the relevance of these factors for their family’s well-being. One reason that research on this topic is lacking is that data on these issues are scarce for the U.S. Hispanic population. A recent review of more than 20 (primarily national) data sets revealed that only one—the Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) evaluation data set—includes both a large enough sample of Latinos and information on an array of domains of family life. This data set therefore has the potential to address critical gaps in knowledge about Hispanic family life. Still, the SHM evaluation data set, while rich in information on married couplesb,c and their children, is a convenience sample of couples that may not represent the general population of Hispanic couples in the United States. This brief assesses the extent to which Hispanic participants in the SHM evaluation data set represent the broader U.S. population of Hispanic couples. Specifically, we examine how representative the study’s Latino couples are of low-income Hispanic couples with children (under age 18) in the general . . .

Several recent studies have documented an alarming upward trend in disability and functional limitations among US adults. In this study, we draw on the sociomedical Disablement Process framework to produce up-to-date estimates of the trends and identify key social and medical precursors of the trends. Using data on US adults aged 45–64 in the 2002–2016 National Health Interview Surveys, we estimate parametric and semiparametric models of disability and functional limitations as a function of interview time. We also determine the impact of socioeconomic resources, health behaviors, and health conditions on the trends. Our results show increasing prevalence of disability and functional limitations. These trends reflect the net result of complex countervailing forces, some associated with increases in functioning problems (unfavorable trends in economic well-being, especially income, and psychological distress) while other factors have suppressed the growth of functioning problems (favorable trends in educational attainment and some health behaviors, such as smoking and alcohol use). The results underscore that disability prevention must expand beyond medical interventions to include fundamental social factors and be focused on preventing or delaying the onset of chronic health problems and functional limitations.

As a doctor, I know first hand the value of healthcare coverage. We can’t predict when we will get sick or when an accident might happen. Even the best diet and exercise plans can’t completely eliminate the threat of cancer, diabetes, or depression. That’s why we must ensure that every Michigander is able to see a doctor when they need one and access high-quality care that they can afford. There are so many things we can’t control when it comes to our health. Access to healthcare should not be one of them. Michiganders today are trapped in a broken health insurance system that leaves too many families suffering from high costs and lack of affordable coverage. Nearly 600,000 Michiganders still lack health insurance coverage, even after the expansion of Medicaid thanks to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).1 Many more have subpar insurance that doesn’t adequately pay for care for themselves and their families, and rising healthcare costs are preventing Michiganders from enjoying the freedom that comes with financial and physical well-being. Health insurance premiums in the individual market rose by almost 30 percent in the last year alone. One in five Michiganders aged 25 to 44 reported that they couldn’t access care in the last year because of cost,2 and nearly one in four Michigan households had out-of-pocket health expenses over 10 percent of their total income, which the World Health Organization defines as “catastrophic health expenditure”.3...

This dissertation offers three vignettes on the determinants of health and well-being over the life course. The first essay uses multiple Canadian census files to document the longterm effects of potential in utero exposure to the 1918 flu pandemic on educational attainment. This study finds that those who were in utero during the peak of the pandemic, particularly in their first or second trimesters, experienced long-term deficits in their educational attainment. The second study explores the potential impact of spousal institutionalization in nursing homes/residential care facilities on elderly financial security. It shows that the absence of fully funded universal long-term care insurance (like Canadian medicare) places married seniors at risk of significant losses in their material standards of living and low income status. The third paper examines the impact of online communication and social media use on subjective well-being (SWB). In one empirical approach, I find that those who communicate online or use social media report lower levels of SWB. This is especially true for older adults and social media. In a separate quasi-experimental analysis that exploits variation in access to and use of social media by time, age group, and access to personal computers, I find that social media may be responsible for increased political engagement and social trust.