Empirical studies of labor-market flows suggest cross-country differences in long-run aggregate unemployment inflows and outflows of a strikingly large magnitude. The canonical search-and-matching framework of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994, 1999b; the MP model) features small elasticities of steady-state unemployment flows with respect to firing costs, at odds with the idea that labor-market institutions such as employment protection policies are a primary driver of this variation. This paper shows that introducing permanent match-quality heterogeneity in the standard MP model substantially amplifies these elasticities. It then develops a quantitative search model with worker and job heterogeneity consistent with U.S. worker-flow data. This model implies that employment protection differences plausibly account for most of the long-run unemployment-flow variation across high-income countries. In sharp contrast, shutting down heterogeneity implies that large changes in matching efficiency are required to explain the same cross-country variation.

Introduction: Rural populations have less access to cancer care services and experience higher cancer mortality rates than their urban counterparts, which may be exacerbated by hospital closures. Our objective was to examine the impact of hospital closures on access to cancer-relevant hospital services across hospital service areas (HSAs). Methods: We used American Hospital Association survey data from 2008 to 2017 to examine the change in access to cancer-related screening and treatment services across rural HSAs that sustained hospitals over time, experienced any closures, or had all hospitals close. We performed a longitudinal analysis to assess the association between hospital closure occurrence and maintenance or loss of cancer-related service lines accounting for hospital and HSA-level characteristics. Maps were also developed to display changes in the availability of services across HSAs. Results: Of the 2,014 rural HSAs, 3.8% experienced at least 1 hospital closure during the study period, most occurring in the South. Among HSAs that experienced hospital closure, the loss of surgery services lines was most common, while hospital closures did not affect the availability of overall oncology and radiation services. Screening services either were stable (mammography) or increased (endoscopy) in areas with no closures. Discussion: Rural areas persistently experience less access to cancer treatment services, which has been exacerbated by hospital closures. Lack of Medicaid expansion in many Southern states and other policy impacts on hospital financial viability may play a role in this. Future research should explore the impact of closures on cancer treatment receipt and outcomes.

Background: The extent of food deprivation and insecurity among infants and young children—a critical phase for children's current and future health and well-being—in India is unknown. We estimate the prevalence of food deprivation among infants and young children in India and describe its evolution over time at sub-national levels. Methods: Data from five National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) conducted in 1993, 1999, 2006, 2016 and 2021 for the 36 states/Union Territories (UTs) of India were used. The study population consisted of the most recent children (6–23 months) born to mothers (aged 15–49 years), who were alive and living with the mother at the time of survey (n = 175,614 after excluding observations that had no responses to the food question). Food deprivation was defined based on the mother's reporting of the child having not eaten any food of substantial calorific content (i.e., any solid/semi-solid/soft/mushy food types, infant formula and powdered/tinned/fresh milk) in the past 24 hours (h), which we labelled as “Zero-Food”. In this study, we analyzed Zero-Food in terms of percent prevalence as well as population headcount burden. We calculated the Absolute Change (AC) to quantify the change in the percentage points of Zero-Food across time periods for all-India and by states/UTs. Findings: The prevalence of Zero-Food in India marginally declined from 20.0% (95% CI: 19.3%–20.7%) in 1993 to 17.8% (95% CI: 17.5%–18.1%) in 2021. There were considerable differences in the trajectories of change in the prevalence of Zero-Food across states. Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, and Jammu and Kashmir experienced high increase in the prevalence of Zero-Food over this time period, while Nagaland, Odisha, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh witnessed a significant decline. In 2021, Uttar Pradesh (27.4%), Chhattisgarh (24.6%), Jharkhand (21%), Rajasthan (19.8%) and Assam (19.4%) were states with the highest prevalence of Zero-Food. As of 2021, the estimated number of Zero-Food children in India was 5,998,138, with the states of Uttar Pradesh (28.4%), Bihar (14.2%), Maharashtra (7.1%), Rajasthan (6.5%), and Madhya Pradesh (6%) accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total Zero-Food children in India. Zero-Food in 2021 was concerningly high among children aged 6–11 months (30.6%) and substantial even among children aged 18–23 months (8.5%). Overall, socioeconomically advantaged groups had lower prevalence of Zero-Food than disadvantaged groups. Interpretation: Concerted efforts at the national and state levels are required to further strengthen existing policies, and design and develop new ones to provide affordable food to children in a timely and equitable manner to ensure food security among infants and young children. Funding: This study was supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation INV-002992.

Shortages and rationing are common in health care, yet we know little about the consequences. We examine an 18-month shortage of the pediatric Haemophilus Influenzae Type B (Hib) vaccine. Using insurance claims data and variation in shortage exposure across birth cohorts, we find that the shortage reduced uptake of high-value primary doses by 4 percentage points and low-value booster doses by 26 percentage points. This suggests providers largely complied with rationing recommendations. In the long-run, catch-up vaccination occurred but was incomplete: shortage-exposed cohorts were 4 percentage points less likely to have received their booster dose years later. We also find that the shortage and rationing caused provider switches, extra provider visits, and negative spillovers to other care.

[The article explores the economic impact of Generative AI. It finds that it could deliver major increases in dollar values to the economies of western nations (in the trillions of dollars). It also finds that the capabilities of individual workers, in terms of autonomy and productivity, would be changed. Hopes for the future of the technology are strong despite it being in it's earlier stages.]

Istation’s Indicators of Progress (ISIP™) Reading is a computer-adaptative test (CAT) that provides continuous progress monitoring (CPM) as well as sophisticated reporting that gives detailed information to teachers, parents, and students in the critical domains of reading throughout the academic years. ISIP Reading was built on decades of research on how to best teach and assess reading skills, building on the work from our authoring team of renowned literacy experts Joseph K. Torgesen, PhD; Patricia G. Mathes, PhD; and Jeannine Herron, PhD. The early reading assessment (ISIP ER) was designed for students in prekindergarten through grade 3 (Mathes, et al., 2016), and the advanced reading assessment (ISIP AR) was designed for students in grades 4 through 8 (Mathes, 2016). ISIP Reading is now combined into one assessment with a continuous vertical scale

This paper uses immigration to investigate the intergenerational transmission of culture. The culture is proxied by nonmarital fertility and age at the first birth in the immigrant’s home country. Using the Current Population Survey, Censuses, and American Community Survey data covering the years 1970–2020, we find that average outcomes in the home country can explain a statistically significant portion of immigrants’ behavior. Furthermore, we rule out the influence of confounders by including a rich set of demographic and socioeconomic familial controls, other important home country characteristics, as well as state-by-year fixed effects. We find that a one-percentage-point increase in nonmarital fertility rate in the mother’s country of birth is associated with an 8.7 basis-point increase in the likelihood of nonmarital birth among second-generation women. Similarly, a one-year increase in age at first birth in the mother’s birthplace is associated with 0.37 years increase in age at first birth among second generations. The results show that there are cultural factors associated with nonmarital fertility and age at the first birth that can be transmitted from one generation to the next.

Social psychological theory posits entities and mechanisms that attempt to explain observable differences in behavior. For example, dual process theory suggests that an agent's behavior is influenced by intentional (arising from reasoning involving attitudes and perceived norms) and unintentional (i.e., habitual) processes. In order to pass the generative sufficiency test as an explanation of alcohol use, we argue that the theory should be able to explain notable patterns in alcohol use that exist in the population, e.g., the distinct differences in drinking prevalence and average quantities consumed by males and females. In this study, we further develop and apply inverse generative social science (iGSS) methods to an existing agent-based model of dual process theory of alcohol use. Using iGSS, implemented within a multi-objective grammar-based genetic program, we search through the space of model structures to identify whether a single parsimonious model can best explain both male and female drinking, or whether separate and more complex models are needed. Fo-cusing on alcohol use trends in New York State, we identify an interpretable model structure that achieves high goodness-of-fit for both male and female drinking patterns simultaneously, and which also validates successfully against reserved trend data. This structure offers a novel interpretation of the role of norms in formulating drinking intentions, but the structure's theoretical validity is questioned by its suggestion that individuals with low autonomy would act against perceived descriptive norms. Improved evidence on the distribution of autonomy in the population is needed to understand whether this finding is substantive or is a modeling artefact.

Women are still devoting more time than men to child-rearing. That makes women's time spent at work crucial for their fertility decisions. At the same time, the global temperature has been rising, affecting labor supply and productivity. In this study, we investigate whether temperature influences fertility through its effect on the female labor supply (num-ber of hours worked) and productivity. We also test the adaptation hypothesis. According to the latter, couples' fertility in warmer climates may be less affected by higher temperatures. We employ individual-level data from the IPUMS-USA for the period 2002-2019 and temperature data from the World Bank between 1901 and 2001. The obtained results show that temperature affects fertility mainly in the category of women who work full-time in jobs with lower educational demands. We found no effect on fertility for women of either higher or lower education, who work part-time. We also found some evidence in favor of the adaptation hypothesis.

The literature on child development has a strong focus on maternal time use, female labour supply and child outcomes. This paper first highlights that fathers with higher labour supply also spend significantly more time at home with their children, while unemployed fathers spend the least time with their children. The positive association between labour supply and parenting time exists only for fathers, but not for mothers. To quantify the contribution of the heterogeneity in fathers' time investment to the inequality in child development, this paper estimates production functions for cognitive and health development for children aged 1-18 with the father's time input and the mother's time input using the PSID time diary. The estimation is based on a nonlin-ear latent factor model with local gender-specific labour demand shocks as instruments with a control function approach. Counterfactual analysis to remove father heterogene-ity in time investment reduces 22 per cent of the variance in child cognition and 49 per cent of the variance in child health explained by the model among children aged 12-18.

We use data on Jewish refugees resettled in the United States between 1938 and 2005, along with survey data on Israeli citizens born in the Former Soviet Union, to demonstrate the persistent downstream political consequences of socialization under left-wing authoritarian regimes. Using a within-family research design that allows us to identify the effect of spending more time under left-wing authoritari-anism relative to younger siblings, we show that additional years spent under such regimes result in a higher likelihood of voting and of identifying with right-wing political parties after immigration to democratic countries.

In this article, I perform a verification and a reproduction of the main results in Fernández and Fogli (2009), which estimates the role of culture in explaining the labor and fertility decisions of second generation immigrant women to the United States in 1970. While I am able to verify Fernández and Fogli's (2009) main results as well as their robustness relative to both labor and fertility decisions, I am unable to reproduce them relative to labor decisions in alternative samples drawn from the same underlying population.

Individuals' life outcomes are rooted in their parents' and grandparents' experiences, which, in turn, are rooted in the places where they grew up. In the U.S., Black (grand)parents were more likely than White (grand)parents to grow up in the South. Intergenerational theories predict that this racial difference in southern family lineages will shape racial differences in many life outcomes. We test this hypothesis using marriage as a case study. Linking Panel Study of Income Dynamics' data to external sources, we document that southern family lineages positively predict marriage, we trace the implications of this prediction for marriage inequalities, and we provide some insights into the factors driving this prediction. Within each birth cohort, greater exposure to southern lineage's marriage pressures among Black than White people associate with smaller marriage inequalities. Across cohorts, larger declines in this exposure among Black than White people, due to the Great Migration out of the South, associate with larger marriage inequalities. We show how family dynamics channel historical place-based inequalities into contemporary racial inequalities, by combining intergenerational and contextual approaches. Other researchers could employ this combined intergenerational-contextual approach to further illuminate how the past shapes the present.

Does racial wage discrimination increase during economic downturns? In this article, the author tests empirically the association between economic conditions and racial wage discrimination for black, Hispanic, and Asian workers. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the author finds that the wage gap between Hispanics and whites, and between Asians and whites, increases with the job-seeker rate and unemployment rate. However, the wage gap between black and white workers increases slightly with the unemployment rate and does not change at all with the job-seeker rate. The author advances the concept of “wage discrimination flexibility” to argue that racial wage discrimination against black workers is more rigid and resistant to changes in economic environments, whereas wage discrimination against Hispanics and Asians is more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. The author discusses the implications of these findings for theories of discrimination and for policies aiming to foster equal opportunities in the labor market.

Background: Childhood cancer survivors are at elevated risk for poor health-related quality-of-life (HRQOL). Identification of potentially modifiable risk factors associated with HRQOL is needed to inform survivorship care. Methods: Participants included 4294 adult childhood cancer survivors from the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study who completed a survey and clinical assessment at entry into the survivorship cohort (baseline) and follow-up (median interval: 4.3 years) between 2007 and 2019. The SF-6D compared utility-based HRQOL of survivors to an independent sample from the U.S. Medical Expenditures Panel Survey. Chronic health conditions (CHCs) were graded using modified Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events. General linear models examined cross-sectional and temporal associations of HRQOL with CHC burden (total and by organ-system), adjusting for potential risk factors. Findings: Survivors reported poorer HRQOL compared to the general population (effect size [d] = −0.343). In cross-sectional analyses at baseline, significant non-demographic risk factors included higher total CHC burden (driven by more severe cardiovascular [d = −0.119, p = 0.002], endocrine [d = −0.112, p = 0.001], gastrointestinal [d = −0.226, p < 0.001], immunologic [d = −0.168, p = 0.035], neurologic [d = −0.388, p < 0.001], pulmonary [d = −0.132, p = 0.003] CHCs), public (d = −0.503, p < 0.001) or no health insurance (d = −0.123, p = 0.007), current smoking (d = −0.270, p < 0.001), being physically inactive (d = −0.129, p < 0.001), ever using illicit drugs (d = −0.235, p < 0.001), and worse diet quality (d = −0.004, p = 0.016). In temporal analyses, poorer utility-based HRQOL at follow-up was associated with risk factors at baseline, including higher total CHC burden (driven by cardiovascular [d = −0.152, p = 0.002], endocrine [d = −0.092, p = 0.047], musculoskeletal [d = −0.160, p = 0.016], neurologic [d = −0.318, p < 0.001] CHCs), public (d = −0.415, p < 0.001) or no health insurance (d = −0.161, p = 0.007), current smoking (d = −0.218, p = 0.001), and ever using illicit drugs (d = −0.217, p < 0.001). Interpretation: Adult survivors report worse utility-based HRQOL than the general population, and potentially modifiable risk factors were associated with HRQOL. Interventions to prevent the early onset of CHCs, promote healthy lifestyle, and ensure access to health insurance in the early survivorship stage may provide opportunities to improve HRQOL. Funding: The research reported in this manuscript was supported by the U.S. National Cancer Institute under award numbers U01CA195547 (Hudson/Ness), R01CA238368 (Huang/Baker), R01CA258193 (Huang/Yasui), R01CA270157 (Bhakta/Yasui), and T32CA225590 (Krull). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

This paper investigates how fiscal policy reacts differently to negative income shocks on different points on the labor income distribution, and how fiscal policy shocks may have different effects at different points along the labor income distribution. Empirical examinations of fiscal policy typically consider a fiscal policy reaction function, where a single fiscal policy variable, such as the government budget deficit, responds to a variable related to the aggregate state of the economy, such as the output gap (in addition to outstanding government debt and allowing persistence). In this paper, I consider a fiscal policy reaction function where fiscal policy may respond to a weighted average of multiple quantiles along the labor income distribution. I also examine eight different fiscal policies variables including four types of government transfer variables shown to be countercyclical, government consumption and government investment, and personal versus corporate tax revenue. Embedding the fiscal policy variables into a Bayesian structural vector autoregression (SVAR), I estimate both the reaction of each of these fiscal policy variables to shocks to points along the labor income distribution, and the multiplier effect of fiscal policy shocks over time on points along the income distribution. With impulse response functions predicted by the SVAR, I show which fiscal policy variables are more reactive to shocks along the income distribution, which have larger multiplier effects, and how variable fiscal policy variables attenuate or exacerbate labor income inequality.

The racial and ethnic diversity of 56 of the largest urban areas has increased dramatically from 1980 to 2020. The average share of the population White dropped from three-quarters to a little over half while the average Latino share nearly tripled. The mean value of an index of diversity jumped from 49 to 74 over the same period. Urban areas with the highest levels of diversity had much less than half of the population White with varying mixes of Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Areas with the lowest diversity had high percentages of their populations White with one exception (El Paso with a large Latino population). In 1980, average diversity in the suburban periphery was far lower than in the urban core, especially for areas in the Northeast and Midwest. Suburban diversity increased substantially by 2020 in all regions, but remained far lower in the Northeast and Midwest.

This paper uses census data to examine the impact of child labor restrictions imposed by compulsory schooling laws and child labor regulation on fertility. By exploiting variation induced by changes in legislation across time and between US states during the early twentieth century, I show that parents chose to have fewer children in response to the constraints imposed on the labor supply of their potential children and the increase in their expected quality. My findings suggest that compulsory schooling laws and child labor regulation contributed to the demographic transition in the US and provide additional empirical support for the notion that financial incentives play a role in determining household fertility decisions.

Background: To date, no data exist on gender-related publication biases in nephrology. This study was conducted to determine whether gender differences exist in the current literature published in high-ranking US nephrology journals, and how they may have changed over time. Methods: The PubMed search was performed using the easyPubMed package in R, which extracted all articles indexed in PubMed from 2011 to 2021 from the US nephrology journals with the highest impact factors, i.e., Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), American Journal of Nephrology (AJN), American Journal of Kidney diseases (AJKD), and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). Gender with predictions > 90% were accepted and the remaining were manually identified. Descriptive statistical analysis was carried out on the data. Results: We identified 11,608 articles. On average, the ratio of male to female first authors decreased from 1.9 to 1.5 (p < 0.05). Additionally, in 2011, women accounted for 32% of first authors, a number that rose to 40% in 2021. All but the American Journal of Nephrology showed a variation in the ratio of men to women first authors. For the JASN, the ratio changed from 1.81 to 1.58, p = 0.001, for CJASN, the ratio declined from 1.91 to 1.15, p = 0.005 and for AJKD, the ratio declined from 2.19 to 1.19, p = 0.002. Discussion and conclusions: Our study shows that gender biases in publications continue to exist in first-author publications in high-ranking Nephrology journals published in the US; the gap is however closing. We hope this study lays the groundwork to continue following and evaluating gender trends in publication.

Reconstruction brought a political and social revolution to the former Confederacy. Freedmen were enfranchised and Black political participation soared, despite widespread hostility in the defeated Confederacy. Federal troops occupied the region and Freedmen’s Bureau offices were established widely. The reforms of Reconstruction were eventually reversed by white supremacists, but by then Black southerners had had substantially increased civil and human rights for several decades. We ask how these major institutional changes – Black enfranchisement, Federal military occupation, the Freedmen’s Bureau,– affected Black political participation and Black socio-economic achievements. We use the location of Federal troops and Freedmen’s Bureau offices as indicators of more intensive Federal protection of the rights of newly freed people. We find that Black men were more likely to be able to register to vote, and the Republican Party received more votes, in counties with more such Federal protection. Turning to socio-economic outcomes, we find that Black children were more likely to attend school and Black people were more likely to be literate in areas where Reconstruction was more rigorously enforced. Similarly, Black people were better able to achieve higher levels of occupational status and earnings, and Black farmers were more likely to own their own farms, in counties with a more intensive Federal presence. These effects persisted at least until the early twentieth century. In all instances, however, the positive impact of Reconstruction was reduced in the cotton-plantation zones. The results indicate the power of political-institutional change – such as the expansion of the franchise – to provide opportunities for oppressed people to achieve a measure of political power and socio-economic advancement.