My dissertation examines economic determinants of household financial decisions and investor behaviors. It contains three essays. The first essay investigates whether gender norms shape intra-household financial decision making. Analyzing microdata covering more than 30 million U.S. households, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. Consistent with the gender norm hypothesis, the baseline effect is attenuated among individuals brought up by working mothers, but becomes stronger among descendants of pre-industrial societies in which women specialized in activities within the home and households with a husband born and raised in a southern state. A randomized controlled experiment further reveals that female identity hinders idea contribution by the wife. In contrast, male identity causes men to be less open to an opposing viewpoint of their wife, even if her proposition in optimal. These things suggest that gender identity norms can have real consequences for household financial well-being. The second essay explores the impact of local agglomeration economies on stock market participation. We find that when the industry in which individuals work is locally agglomerated, they are more likely to participate in the stock market. Further, we show that this relationship is especially strong among skilled workers. We find that the local agglomeration effect is not explained by risk tolerance, worker inertia, or a preference for stocks of firms that are in the same industry as the worker. Instead, our findings are consistent with local agglomeration enhancing human capital and in turn, raising workers’ optimal allocations to risky assets. More generally, our analysis underscores the role of geography in shaping human capital and household financial decisions. The third essay examines whether momentum in stock prices is induced by changes in the political environment. We find that momentum profits are concentrated among politically sensitive firms and industries. A trading strategy with a long position in winner portfolios that are politically unfavored and a short position in losers that are politically favored eliminates all momentum profits. Further, our political sensitivity based factor explains 25% (40%) of monthly stock (industry) momentum alphas. Collectively, our results suggest that investor underreaction to political information generates momentum in stock and industry returns.

Although many studies have found that female legislators pursue policies important to women, we know relatively little concerning the effect of women’s descriptive representation (WDR) on women’s quality of life. We address this question by examining the relationship between the election of women state legislators and public health. Specifically, we estimate the effect of WDR on premature death rates from 1981-2010, utilizing an error correction model and a novel instrumental variable approach to mitigate endogeneity. We find that WDR serves to improve the well-being of both women and men. However, the effect of WDR is significantly stronger for women (compared to men) in states that play a larger role in the provision of healthcare. Overall, our results suggest that policy remedies aimed at improving the severe underrepresentation of women in government may help improve the relatively low ranking of the United States on indicators of public health.

In this accessible, engaging, and up-to-date course book, Susan L. Brown employs ethnographic vignettes and demographic data to introduce students to twenty-first century perspectives of contemporary families. Conceived of as a primary or secondary text in classes on family and marriage, this book probes momentous shifts in the definition of family, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage and policy debates on welfare reform and work-familly issues. Brown also chronicles the rise in non-marital childbearing and single mother families and the decline of "traditional" marriage. The book delves into the historical roots of family change, current trends of family formation and dissolution, and the implications of family change for the well-being of adults and children. With a lens towards socioeconomic inequality and racial-ethnic variation in family patterns, Families in America illustrates how family diversity is now the norm.

There is a well-established relationship between union status and health within the general population, and growing evidence of an association between sexual identity and well-being. Yet, what is unknown is whether union status stratifies health outcomes across sexual identity categories. In order to elucidate this question, we analyzed nationally representative population-based data from the National Health Interview Surveys 2013-2014 (N = 53,135) to examine variation in self-rated health by sexual partnership status (i.e., by sexual identity across union status). We further test the role of socioeconomic status and gender in these associations. Results from logistic regression models show that union status stratifies self-rated health across gay, lesbian, and heterosexual populations, albeit in different ways for men and women. Socioeconomic status does not play a major role in accounting for these differences. Findings highlight the need for specific interventions with lesbian women, who appear to experience the most strident disadvantage across union status categories.

Fresno is the nations top agricultural county, yet it struggles with slow growth, high unemployment, and an economy dominated by low-wage jobs and few pathways into the middle class. While communities of color account for 68 percent of the population-up from 38 percent in 1980 - the countys racial inequities persist across all indicators of community health and well-being. To build a stronger Fresno, stakeholders must start with equity-just and fair inclusion into a society in which all, including every racial and ethnic group, can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. Equity seeks to counteract the barriers and systemic exclusions (historic and current) that prevent people from realizing their potential. Leaders in the private, public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors must commit to putting all residents on the path to economic security through equity-focused strategies and policies to grow good jobs, invest in human capital, remove barriers, and expand opportunities for communities of color currently being left behind.

With nearly half of US births occurring out of wedlock, understanding how parents navigate their relationship options is important. This paper examines the consequences of a large exogenous change to parental relationship contract options on parental behavior and child well-being. Identification comes from the staggered timing of state reforms that substantially lowered the cost of legal paternity establishment. I show that the resulting increases in paternity establishment are partially driven by reductions in parental marriage. Although unmarried fathers become more involved with their children along some dimensions, the net effects on father involvement and child well-being are negative or zero.

Stress is an event that can negatively affect the quality of life and the well-being of individuals in their workplace. Although it can be related to positive changes, its recurrence in the work environment can cause suffering in the individual and promote several types of diseases. Higher education is not free from this interference, since it is based fundamentally on the social relations that depend on the physical and emotional situation of agents in the academic universe--in particular, the teacher. This context directly affects the quality of teaching and, consequently, the capacity of the professionals trained in this environment. For this reason, several papers have been careful to understand this phenomenon, seeking ways to mitigate the negative effects produced by stress in teachers. Thus, considering the repercussion that the stress causes in the academic environment, the present study sought evidence in order to allow it to identify and analyze the levels of demand, control, and support exerted on the self-reported stress of students enrolled in the courses of Accounting Sciences of higher education institutions in Brazil. To do so, a data survey involving 714 teachers located in different regions of the country was conducted. These data were obtained with the use of the following instruments: Teacher Stress Inventory, to determine the level of stress perceived by teachers; DC-S, to specify the levels of demand, control, and organizational support; MBI, to measure the presence of burnout; Brief COPE, to indicate the prevalence of coping strategies; and UWES, to provide teachers' engagement levels. It was found that, on average, respondents reported a stress index of 82 points, measured by Teacher Stress Inventory, which represented 63% of the instrument's maximum score. With the use of DC-S, a significant level of demand (74% of the instrument) was observed, indicating that respondents feel that the academic environment is permeated by a high level of requirements. Also, it was noted that there were high levels of control for those demands (82% of the instrument), as well as for organizational support (78% of the instrument). These results resonate with the finding that teachers evaluate themselves with significant levels of professional efficacy (78% of the instrument) and low levels of exhaustion (48% of the instrument), and depersonalization (37% of the instrument), measures obtained through MBI. Regarding coping strategies, Brief COPE indicated that respondents are more inclined to adopt problem-oriented ones. From the data reported, teachers in the sample registered reasonable levels of engagement (77% of the UWES maximum level) being the indicator dedication the one with the highest score (82% of the instrument). Also, by means of inferential analysis, it was identified that the perception of demand levels, exhaustion, and use of coping strategy of social and emotional support type contributes positively to the perception of stress. In this same sense, the fact that the respondent is female and the condition of teaching only in the morning also has a positive influence. In the opposite direction, it was verified that the levels of perception of control and support in the organizational environment, the use of behavioral disinvestment coping strategies, and the use of chemical substances (as defined in Brief COPE), as well as the variables family income, teaching in the afternoon/evening or morning/evening, have a profession other than that of a teacher, and, finally, level of satisfaction with the students contribute negatively to the perception of stress. These results allow us to say that academic demands influence self-reported stress, but that this effect can be moderated by the perception of control of these demands and also by the present support in the work environment.

This paper explores historical patterns of racial segregation and its relationship with the observed spatial variation in contemporaneous economic mobility established in Chetty et al. (2014). We combined data from the Equality of Opportunity Project with a novel measure of racial segregation developed in Logan and Parman (forthcoming) and find that past racial segregation explains a significant portion of the spatial variation in intergenerational mobility. These findings are consistent with models showing that persistent institutional factors may drive long-term outcomes across areas. Racial segregation and the environment that fosters it may diminish upward economic mobility by reducing access to networks, labor and capital markets, and political institutions. If so, then reducing the impact of these persistent processes may be key to mitigating current-day gaps in wealth, income, and overall well-being.

Background: Time shared with a partner is an indicator of marital well-being and couples’ want to spend time together. However, time spent with a partner depends on work and family arrangements as well as on the policies, norms, and values that prevail in society. In contrast to time spent with children, couples’ shared time is underresearched in a cross-national context. Previous studies from specific countries show that dual-earner couples spend less time together and that parents spend less time alone with each other. Objective: The aim of our study is to investigate partnered parents’ shared time across countries to understand how social conditions, cultural norms, and policy contexts are related to the amount and nature of couples’ shared time. Specifically, we compare time spent with a partner in the United States, France, and Spain. Methods: Studying data from national time use surveys conducted in the United States, France, and Spain, we extract information about who undertakes certain activities in order to examine three types of time shared with a partner for parents with children under age 10: total time with a partner indicates the minutes per day spent in the presence of a partner, exclusive time corresponds to the minutes per day spent alone with a partner when no one else is present, and family time indicates the minutes per day spent with a partner and a child at the same time. Results: Our results show that US couples spend the least time together and Spanish couples spend the most time together. Parents in France spend the most time alone with each other. The most striking difference across countries is in time with a partner and children, which is much higher among Spanish families. Conclusions: The constraints of paid work explain a small part of the differences in couples’ shared time observed between countries. Differences in couples’ shared time across countries seem to be related to social norms surrounding family and general time use. Contribution: Examination of couples’ shared time in cross-national context is unexplored. By examining cross-national variation in work and family demands on parents’ time with a partner in three countries - the United States, Spain, and France - each with different social and policy contexts as well as cultural norms about the desire to spend more or less time with a partner, this research begins to fill the current void in the literature.

The growing disconnect between humans and nature has implications for human well-being. Research has linked exposure to nature with various benefits including improved focus, vitality, productivity, and reduced stress, factors that may enhance the academic performance of individual students. In intensively-urbanized landscapes with few natural elements this effect could, via aggregated population-level impacts, influence the academic performance of entire populations, negatively affecting educational attainment and propagating urban poverty. Designing urban environments to provide increased interaction with natural landscape elements such as vegetation could mitigate this effect, benefiting the academic growth and future success of urban students. Recent studies support this idea; however, this effect is poorly understood, hindering the management of urban environments to improve educational outcomes. This study explores relationships between urban nature and the academic performance of urban schools using the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area of Minnesota, USA as a case study area. We used regression analysis to identify relationships among environmental variables on and around school campuses (i.e., tree cover, vegetated land covers, water) and four measures of population-level third-grade reading and mathematics success, accounting for school socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Contrary to expectations, we found a positive relationship between impervious surfaces and reading performance, while relationships between two vegetated land covers (grass, shrub) and water bodies and both mathematics and reading academic success were non-significant. We found a significant, positive relationship between tree cover and reading performance, suggesting that initiatives aimed at increasing tree cover in student environments could support academic success.

Background: Time shared with a partner is an indicator of marital well-being and couples want to spend time together. However, time spent with a partner depends on work and family arrangements as well as on the policies, norms, and values that prevail in society. In contrast to time spent with children, couples shared time is underresearched in a cross-national context. Previous studies from specific countries show that dual-earner couples spend less time together and that parents spend less time alone with each other. Objective: The aim of our study is to investigate partnered parents shared time across countries to understand how social conditions, cultural norms, and policy contexts are related to the amount and nature of couples shared time. Specifically, we compare time spent with a partner in the United States, France, and Spain. Methods: Studying data from national time use surveys conducted in the United States, France, and Spain, we extract information about who undertakes certain activities in order to examine three types of time shared with a partner for parents with children under age 10: total time with a partner indicates the minutes per day spent in the presence of a partner, exclusive time corresponds to the minutes per day spent alone with a partner when no one else is present, and family time indicates the minutes per day spent with a partner and a child at the same time. Results: Our results show that US couples spend the least time together and Spanish couples spend the most time together. Parents in France spend the most time alone with each other. The most striking difference across countries is in time with a partner and children, which is much higher among Spanish families. Conclusions: The constraints of paid work explain a small part of the differences in couples shared time observed between countries. Differences in couples shared time across countries seem to be related to social norms surrounding family and general time use. Contribution: Examination of couples shared time in cross-national context is unexplored. By examining cross-national variation in work and family demands on parents time with a partner in three countries - the United States, Spain, and France - each with different social and policy contexts as well as cultural norms about the desire to spend more or less time with a partner, this research begins to fill the current void in the literature.

Close kin provide many important functions as adults age, affecting health, financial well-being, and happiness. Those without kin report higher rates of loneliness and experience elevated risks of chronic illness and nursing facility placement. Historical racial differences and recent shifts in core demographic rates suggest that white and black older adults in the United States may have unequal availability of close kin and that this gap in availability will widen in the coming decades. Whereas prior work explores the changing composition and size of the childless population or those without spouses, here we consider the kinless population of older adults with no living close family members and how this burden is changing for different race and sex groups. Using demographic microsimulation and the United States Census Bureau’s recent national projections of core demographic rates by race, we examine two definitions of kinlessness: those without a partner or living children, and those without a partner, children, siblings, or parents. Our results suggest dramatic growth in the size of the kinless population as well as increasing racial disparities in percentages kinless. These conclusions are driven by declines in marriage and are robust to different assumptions about the future trajectory of divorce rates or growth in nonmarital partnerships. Our findings draw attention to the potential expansion of older adult loneliness, which is increasingly considered a threat to population health, and the unequal burden kinlessness may place on black Americans.

A recent series of studies by the Equality of Opportunity Project has documented substantial geographical differences in intergenerational income mobility. These spatial differences are important because they suggest that place matters more than previously thought in determining economic well-being. In this paper, we show that family characteristics vary widely across areas and simulations indicate that differences these family characteristics can explain a substantial share of the variation in intergenerational income mobility across places documented by the Equality of the Opportunity Project. Additionally, we show that the characteristics of families that move differ substantially from families that do not move, which raise doubts about the external validity of causal inferences based on the Equality of Opportunity Project’s analysis of movers.

Changing racial/ethnic diversity along with economic growth have also drawn renewed public attention to growing income inequality and lack of economic well-being in the American society. This paper investigates one element of contemporary inequality – the income divide between the richest and the poorest population groups in the metropolises of the U.S. Southeast. This paper examines income divide across southern U.S. metropolises in 2000 and 2014, their change during 2000–2014, their variation across major races/ethnicities, and their relationships with important metropolitan characteristics such as diversity, intermixing, socio-economic status and built-environment attributes. Cartographic, ranking/matrix, and correlations analyses suggest that the largest, most diverse, most segregated, and those with a greater presence of better educated are the most income divided metropolises, whereas the small-to-mid-sized metropolises, with lesser educated population are less divided. The income divide has increased during 2000–2014 in a majority of these metropolises, and for all races/ethnicities, even though Whites and Asians are relatively better-off compared to overall population whereas Blacks and Hispanics lag behind.

Population aging is being experienced by many rural communities in the United States, as evidenced by increases in the median age and the high incidence of natural population decrease. The implications of these changes in population structure for the daily lives of the residents in such communities have received little attention. We address this issue in this study by examining the relationship between population aging and the availability of service-providing establishments in the rural United States between 1990 and 2010. Using data mainly from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we estimate a series of fixed-effects regression models to identify the relationship between median age and establishment counts net of changes in overall population and other factors. We find a significant but nonlinear relationship between county median age and the total number of service-providing establishments, and counts of most specific types of services. We find a positive effect of total population size across all of our models. This total population effect is consistent with that found in other research, but the independent effect of age structure that we observe represents a novel finding and suggests that age structure is a salient factor in local rural development and community well-being.

Did the World War II (WWII) GI Bill increase the probability of completing high school and further affect the probability of poverty and employment for the cohorts for whom it benefited? This paper studies whether the GI Bill, one of the largest public financial aid policies for education, affected low education levels in addition to its documented effects on college education, and whether it increased economic well-being for its beneficiaries. I use the 1970 Census and the variation in WWII military participation rate across birth cohorts and states of birth for men. I find that the WWII GI Bill significantly increased the probability of completing high school by 13 percentage points and reduced the probability of being below the poverty line by 4 percentage points for black and white men. It also increased the probability of being employed by 3 percentage points and the number of weeks worked by two weeks.

Given the labour market struggles of young adults in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Millennial generation is often portrayed as lacking the economic wherewithal to be the nation's next generation of homebuyers. Assessments of their economic situation sometimes do not go beyond references to student loan debt. This chapter sizes up the economic outcomes of households headed by young adults in the USA using basic measures of their well-being. It shows whether Millennials in the USA are in any more dire financial straits than members of Generation X, the Baby Boom, and the Silent generation were when they were young. The US Census Bureau has uniformly collected data on household income since the 1960s. This chapter analyses these and other long-running data series on household well-being to assess whether Millennials are faring better than prior generations when they were the same age as today's Millennials.

This chapter describes where rural America is and how the population of rural America is changing. Rural America is large and diverse. Some rural areas are growing rapidly, whereas other rural communities house far fewer people today than they did a century ago. Rural concerns are often overlooked in a nation dominated by urban interests. Yet a vibrant rural America contributes to the nation's intellectual and cultural diversity and provides most of the nation's food, minerals, clean air, and clean water. The demographic change in rural America has implications for poverty and family well-being. This chapter considers the unfolding demographic story of rural America, setting the stage for the remainder of the book. It examines how poverty influences the viability of rural communities, the lives of rural residents, and the contributions rural America makes to the nation's material, environmental, and social well-being.

Using data on over 10,000 person-spells of non-employment lasting 2 months or longer in the NLSY79, my dissertation examines how women’s reasons for job exit, motherhood status, and education affect 1) the probability and timing of their return to work, 2) whether they change occupation and industry of employment between the jobs they left and the jobs they return to, and 3) whether and how women change work hours and wages between the jobs they left and the jobs they return to. Women’s exits have been studied widely, yet little is known about who returns to work. But, returning to work likely has important consequences for the well-being of women and their families. As would be expected given the high overall labor force participation rates of women in the 1980s to 2010s, nearly all women who spend two months or more not employed eventually return to work, although the timing of their reentry and the duration of their exit from employment vary greatly. Women who leave for family reasons tend to postpone re-employment for around a year longer than women who leave for other reasons; this difference is largest for women who have a bachelor’s degree. In addition, most women (51-76%, depending on classification scheme) who leave jobs and are observed returning to work change both occupation and industry upon returning to work, although change is less likely when leaving a job in occupations/industries with greater training and/or licensing requirements. On average, women who leave jobs and are observed returning to work do not experience a change in hourly wage, while they tend to return to jobs with about two fewer weekly work hours. Women who leave for family reasons and/or have children while away from employment tend to return to fewer work hours. Wages upon return are also predicted to be lower when women have children while away from employment. Results for changes in occupation/industry and job conditions upon return to work largely reflect a story of accumulated advantage, where women . . .

This paper deals with the quantification of the well-being loss/gain of a demographic group associated with its occupational segregation, an issue that has not been formally tackled in the literature. For this purpose, this paper proposes several properties to take into account when measuring this phenomenon. Building on standard assumptions of social welfare functions, it also defines and characterizes a parameterized family of indices that satisfy those properties. In particular, the indices are equal to zero when either the group has no segregation or all occupations have the same wage, and the indices increase when individuals of the group move into occupations that have higher wages than those left behind. In addition, ceteris paribus, the indices increase more the lower the wage is of the occupation left behind, and consider small improvements for many people to be more important than large improvements for a few.