Health concordance–health similarity between intimate partners–is understudied among different-sex cohabiting, same-sex cohabiting, and same-sex married couples due to an overwhelming focus on different-sex married couples. I explore whether existing research and theory extends to health concordance among different-sex cohabiting and same-sex couples. Additionally, I examine health concordance as a site of population health disparities at the couple level. I use the 2008–2018 IPUMS National Health Interview Surveys to perform multinomial logistic regressions of poor-to-fair health and activity limitations concordance on union status, demographic similarity, and socioeconomic resources. Health concordance is common among all couples, characterizing at least 86% of each union status. Marital status differentiates concordance risk for different-sex couples, but not same-sex couples. Same-sex female couples face higher risks of health discordance and concordant disadvantaged health than many other couples, both of which represent major health disadvantages. Union status affects health concordance risk for couples in ways that cannot be easily reduced to marriage, gender, or sex composition. Negative health concordance, especially for same-sex female couples and different-sex cohabitors, warrants further attention as a site of health inequalities. Socioeconomic resources may play a major role in promoting positive health concordance among couples, which could inform policy levers to improve couple health. Health concordance is a site of health disparities because the risk of partners’ concordance in poor health varies considerably depending on union status.

The American Dust Bowl during the thirties conjured images of despair and penury, highlighted by the plight of newly-minted refugees fleeing storms and destroyed ecosystems. I utilize a census-linking approach to create a dataset linking people in the Great Plains region and their migratory responses from 1920 to 1940. By using a difference-in-differences as well as a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, I look at how the Dust Bowl induced changes in migratory responses, selection and outcomes for those living in the Great Plains region. I find that migration rates were higher in the Dust Bowl regions, particularly in counties that experienced high levels of soil erosion. However, I only find modest changes in migrant selectivity and outcomes for Dust Bowl migrants. Interestingly, I find that migration to California increased, as did migrant selectivity and outcomes, providing some context to the westward migratory flows. Contrary to popular opinion, there was not a drastic mass exodus of poor farmers, and there were no drastic changes in migratory responses as a result of the Dust Bowl.

Traffic crashes cause significant loss of life and property across the world. Analyzing transportation safety data provides insights and assists identification of cause and-effect relationships with crash probabilities and outcomes. There are two paradigms in analyzing crash data, data modeling approach and algorithmic modeling approach, that reflect the process of using statistical (or machine learning) methods for inference or prediction, respectively. This study utilized eight years of police-reported crash data obtained from the Nebraska Department of Transportation. Data models including negative binomial regression and multinomial logistic regression and algorithmic models such as stacked regression and deep neural network were used in this study. This research found algorithmic models outperformed data models in predictive capabilities in both regression (crash frequency) and classification (crash injury severity) problems. While the lack of interpretability power of algorithmic models limits their usage, the adoption of SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values was an improvement. Conclusions drawn from both approaches are generally consistent. Salient findings regarding contributing factors include: with 95% significance level, the model indicated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) was statistically significant and associated with crash frequency. Each one million VMT increase per year in a county could lead to an estimated increase of 17.67% to 24.47% in the estimated number of crashes over eight years. Sufficient statistical evidence was not found to indicate significance of the other variables such as unemployment rate, median age, median household income and gender ratio. With 95% significance level, 16 variables were found statistically significant in at least one scenario of: injury relative to property damage only (PDO) and disabling/fatal relative to PDO. These variables are total trucks/buses, total pedestrians, total occupants, female driver involvement, motorcycle involvement, pedestrian involvement, farm equipment involvement, alcohol involvement, rural area, crash type, painted median, road surface, crash occurrence on roadway and in traffic, etc. For instance, keeping all other variables constant, an alcohol-related crash was 5.1 times more likely associated with disabilities/fatalities compared to PDO crash (with 417.6% higher risk). These findings are beneficial for improving highway safety and making better transportation safety policies.

Aging baby boomers create an imbalanced age structure in the housing market, while the growing numbers of younger Hispanic homeowners hold potential to absorb the growing elderly sell-off. This article addresses the gap between Hispanic and White homeownership. It quantifies the volume of homeownership entrances and exits in different ages in recent years, distinguishing periods of recession and boom. A novel method is proposed for measuring cohort life-cycle flows into and out of homeownership with the recently released 5-year files from the American Community Survey. This method captures the market slowdown during the Great Recession downturn, followed by a strong recovery after 2014. Findings from the cohort life-cycle method are starkly contrasted with misleading measurements derived from simple age group growth in the same periods. The crucial importance of growth in Hispanic homeowners is investigated at multiple levels of geography. Changes tracked in 10-million-resident Los Angeles County resemble a U.S. future of fewer older White homeowners being replaced by a large and growing Hispanic resident base. Contrasting this, in a gentrifying district near downtown Los Angeles, we find Hispanics are the departing elderly and Whites (and Asians) are the young replacements.

Background: This study examines the use of career ladders for medical assistants (MAs) in primary care practices as a mechanism for increasing wages and career opportunity for MAs. A growing body of research on primary care suggests that successful expansion of support staff roles such as MAs may have positive organizational and quality of care outcomes, but little is known about worker outcomes. Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of career ladders in improving wages and career opportunity among MAs. Design: We use a mixed-methods design to evaluate the impact of career ladders on MA job quality. Participants: We draw on interview data collected from 115 key informants at four large health systems (ranging from 24 to 29 clinics each), and we analyze wage and employment data for MAs from primary care clinics in the four health systems in the sample. Approach: We describe the MA career ladder context and infrastructure within primary care clinics and evaluate the rewards to MAs for participation in the career ladder programs. Key Results: The expanded roles within career ladders for MAs focused on the following four clinical and educational areas: panel management and care coordination, EHR documentation support, supporting delivery of person-centered care, and supervision and training. The three primary components of the career ladder infrastructure were training and education for MAs and providers, credentialing and certification for MAs, and differentiated job levels for MAs. The use of career ladders in the four large health systems in our case study sample resulted in yearly income increases ranging from $3000 to $10,000 annually. Conclusion: Investing in career ladders in primary care clinics can improve MA job quality while also potentially addressing issues of equity, efficiency, and quality in the health care sector.

The United States has the highest post-tax-and-transfer child poverty rate of any country in the developed world. While many factors can affect poverty, a cross-national perspective reveals the rather straightforward reason why: our relative lack of spending on children and families. The United States spends only 0.7 percent of GDP on family social expenditures, of which the share devoted to cash benefits, 0.1 percent of GDP, is the lowest of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States would need to increase cash transfers to children and families by approximately $200 billion per year to merely match the cash benefit portion of the OECD average. At the same time, the institution of American family has never looked weaker. Family formation and marriage rates have declined substantially over the last four decades, with the largest declines concentrated in the middle- and working-class- es.1 The U.S. fertility gap — the difference between desired and actual fertility — has crept steadily higher,2 at least in part due to the rising costs of core goods like

This article aims to investigate the association between hearing and nonfatal injury or falls in a nationally representative sample of adults from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) utilizing over 20 years of participant surveys. We conducted a pooled cross-sectional analysis of participant surveys (aged 50 years and older) from 1997 to 2017. Self-report hearing difficulty, history of injury over the last 3 months, reported injury from fall over the last 3 months, and reported reason for fall (including due to balance/dizziness) were collected. Using logistic regression, we investigated the odds of injury, injury from fall, and fall due to balance/dizziness by self-report hearing status. In secondary analysis, we investigated the odds of each outcome by reported hearing aid use. Models were adjusted for demographics, year of study, vision difficulty, diabetes, employment, and cardiovascular disease. Reported moderate or greater difficulty hearing demonstrated a significantly greater odds of injury (odds ratio [OR]: 1.29; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.18, 1.42) or fall due to balance/dizziness (OR: 1.26; 95% CI: 1.00, 1.60) compared with reported excellent/good hearing. A dose-response association was seen across levels of reported difficulty hearing for all outcomes. In this nationally representative study of adults aged 50 years and older, greater reported difficulty hearing was significantly associated with increased odds of injury and suggests greater odds of falls or fall due to balance/dizziness compared with reported good hearing. Results suggest hearing loss should be considered as a possible risk factor for both injury and fall prevention studies and programming in older adults.

I study the relationship between undocumented status and homeownership among immigrants in the U.S. Finding that undocumented immigrants are less likely to own their homes (even conditional on observable characteristics), I assess whether policy has affected the relationship between legal status and homeownership and explore potential mechanisms behind differences in housing tenure outcomes of otherwise similar immigrant groups. I use the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy to provide quasi-experimental evidence of the homeownership gap and estimate the impact of the recent immigration policy on housing market outcomes. I supplement the analysis with an evaluation of the legal clarification made in the 2003 changes to Treasury Department rules, explicitly allowing the use of individual taxpayer identification numbers in lieu of social security numbers to establish bank accounts. Comparing the effects of these changes in policy allows for further discussion of the factors that drive the homeownership gap between undocumented immigrants and those with legal status.

Automated census linkage algorithms have become popular for generating longitudinal data on social mobility, especially for immigrants and their children. But what if these algorithms are particularly bad at tracking immigrants? Using nineteenth-century Irish immigrants as a test case, we examine the most popular of these algorithms—that created by Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson (ABE), and their collaborators. Our findings raise serious questions about the quality of automated census links. False positives range from about one-third to one-half of all links depending on the ABE variant used. These bad links lead to sizeable estimation errors when measuring Irish immigrant social mobility.

Drawing on the identity literature across social sciences, this paper investigates the nature of social stratification by identity groups in the US society as a potential cause and consequence of the Great Recession. The recent experience of the US society reflects the exacerbation of class, race and gender stratification since the 1980s. In effect, the consumerist society has reinforced the historical stratification of social identities with white men in high-paid, high-social status managerial and financial occupations at the top and black women in low-paid, low-status service occupations at the bottom. Learning from this experience, this paper calls for a deconstruction of the neoclassical individual in economic theory and policy into a representation of the individual at the unique intersection of multiple social identities changing over time and space. As such, each individual is a unique combination of evolving identities in a stratified society where the other can become part of the self. In effect, the particularity of the capitalist society is to have reduced the individual to its top identity which has led to the rejection of human diversity within the self and to the exacerbation of stratification within the society. Therefore, the paper concludes on the importance for economic actors, at the individual level, to reconcile the self and others to avoid that group behaviour overtakes resource allocation over time.

The earned income tax credit (EITC) is the cornerstone US anti-poverty program for families with children, typically lifting millions of children out of poverty each year. Targeted to low-income households with children and only available to those who work, the EITC contains strong incentives for nonworkers to become employed. Most of the existing economics literature focuses on federal EITC expansions in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper takes a longer view, studying all federal expansions since the program’s inception in 1975. We find robust evidence that EITC expansions increase the extensive margin of labor supply.

Since June 26, 2015, marriages to same-sex couples have been legally recognized across every state in the United States, bringing new challenges to measur ing relationship status in surveys. Starting in 2015 for select households and in 2017 for all households, the Current Population Survey (CPS) used a new household ros­ter that directly iden­ti­fied same-sex and dif­fer­ent-sex cohabiting and mar­ried couples. We gauge how the estimates and characteristics of same-sex couples vary according to old and new roster categories using the 2015/2016 and 2017/2018 CPS. Employing the new roster, we distinguish the sociodemographic characteristics of mar­ried and cohabiting same-sex cou­ples. These find­ings have impli­ca­tions for the measurement of same-sex couples and our understanding of marriage among sexual minorities.

My thesis would contribute new credible evidence to relatively small literature on the effect of military campaigns on political outcomes. Moreover, unlike most previous work which studies recent conflicts I could measure how persistent the potential effects are. In addition, existing literature focuses mainly on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa or other developing regions. These conflicts feature asymmetric and irregular warfare of insurgents against govern-ment. In contrast, the American Civil War was by and large fought in conventional manner and therefore my thesis could bring new perspective.

The recession associated with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic started in March 2020 as a result of state government mandates for closures of non-essential businesses, and individuals’ decisions to limit their time in public for essential needs only. The food service industry reports high unemployment rates during COVID-19. It has been established that minority groups have had the highest rates of unemployment throughout COVID-19, and it is important to quantify both the magnitude and the potential causes for the differential impact these minority groups have suffered during COVID-19. The empirical model used in this study is a probit regression model to estimate for the probability of unemployment that is used to examine the potential reasons for the differential impacts that COVID-19 pandemic has had on unemployment rates by minority groups. The dependent variable in this study is employment status and the explanatory variable of interest captures the effect of COVID-19 on minority employment for each follow up month during the pandemic from April 2020 through March 2021. This study includes a food service industry interaction term to explain the differential impact of unemployment by minority group. The findings from this study report the probability for Black Americans being unemployed during the early stages of COVID-19 decreased, however, they do show to be the minority group to experience an increase in the probability of being unemployed in the food service industry. The conclusion differs for Latinx Americans and Asian Americans.

What’s in a name? For many parents, everything. Consider the widespread popularity of baby name books, with dizzying titles like 100,000+ Baby Names: The most helpful, complete, & up-to-date name book and The Big Book of 60,000 Baby Names. For some parents, the decision is far too important to entrust to anyone besides an expert. In these cases, baby name consultants abound to proffer personalized naming advice, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to nearly $30,000 [1]. At the time the linked article was written, the upper reaches of that reported range exceeded 50% of median household income in the United States.

For the last several decades, people around the world have become increasingly interested in Korean economy and society. Along with this demand factor, the supply factor, that is, the eagerness of Korean scholars to actively interact with global academia, has encouraged Korean scholars to write more articles about the Korean economy in English. The combination of these two factors has over the last two to three decades resulted in the growth of English-language papers dealing with Korean subjects. However, the increase in English-language papers examining Korean subjects over the last two decades is largely explained by the overall growth of English-language papers in general, while the ratio of Koreanrelated subjects among those English-language publications has actually declined. More analyzes should be made to understand this pattern. However, if we consider policy measures to improve the situation, it is reasonable first to think about how to enhance the availability or quality of data used for research on Korea. Even without allocating more money, the Korean government can attract scholars to study Korean subjects by making existing government data more available to scholars. Since the government is the largest data holder, a more forward-looking approach by the government can attract more scholars to study Korean subjects and to write more papers in English. the Korean government can attract scholars to study Korean subjects by making existing government data more available to scholars. Since the government is the largest data holder, a more forward-looking approach by the government can attract more scholars to study Korean subjects and to write more papers in English. the Korean government can attract scholars to study Korean subjects by making existing government data more available to scholars. Since the government is the largest data holder, a more forward-looking approach by the government can attract more scholars to study Korean subjects and to write more papers in English.

Regulatory agencies overseeing the labor market often rely on worker complaints to direct their enforcement. However, if workers face differential barriers to complain, this system could result in ineffective targeting and create disparities in working conditions. To investigate these implications, we examine how the onset of Secure Communities—a localized immigration enforcement program—affected occupational safety and health. Counties’ participation in Secure Communities substantially reduced complaints to government safety regulators, but increased injuries, at workplaces with Hispanic workers. We show that these effects are most consistent with employers reducing safety inputs in response to workers’ decreased willingness to complain.

Non-governmental air quality monitoring networks include low-cost, networked air pollution sensors hosted at homes and schools that display real-time pollutant concentration estimates on publicly accessible websites. Such networks can empower people to take health-protective actions, but their unplanned organization may produce an uneven spatial distribution of sensors. Barriers to acquiring sensors may disenfranchise particular social groups. To test this directly, we quantitatively examine if there are social inequalities in the distribution of sensors in a non-governmental air quality monitoring network (PurpleAir) in Los Angeles County, California. We paired sociodemographic data from the American Community Survey and estimates of PM2.5 concentrations from the USEPA's Downscaler model at the census tract level (n = 2203) with a sensors per capita (SPC) variable, which is based on population proximity to PurpleAir sensors (n = 696) in Los Angeles County. Findings from multivariable generalized estimating equations (GEEs) controlling for clustering by housing age and value reveal patterns of environmental injustice in the distribution of PurpleAir sensors across Los Angeles County census tracts. Tracts with higher percentages of Hispanic/Latino/a and Black residents and lower median household income had decreased SPC. There was a curvilinear (concave) relationship between the percentage of renter-occupants and SPC. Sensors were concentrated in tracts with greater percentages of adults and seniors (vs. children), higher occupied housing density, and higher PM2.5 pollution. Results reveal social inequalities in the self-organizing PurpleAir network, suggesting another layer of environmental injustice such that residents of low-income and minority neighborhoods have reduced access to information about local air pollution.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is at the crossroads. It is important to evaluate the effectiveness of the ACA in order to make rational decisions about the ongoing healthcare reform, but existing research into its effect on health insurance status in the United States is insufficient and descriptive. Using data from the National Health Interview Surveys from 2009 to 2015, this study examines changes in health insurance status and its determinants before the ACA in 2009, during its partial implementation in 2010–2013, and after its full implementation in 2014 and 2015. The results of trend analysis indicate a significant increase in national health insurance rate from 82.2% in 2009 to 89.4% in 2015. Logistic regression analyses confirm the similar impact of age, gender, race, marital status, nativity, citizenship, education, and poverty on health insurance status before and after the ACA. Despite similar effects across years, controlling for other variables, youth aged 26 or below, the foreign-born, Asians, and other races had a greater probability of gaining health insurance after the ACA than before the ACA; however, the odds of obtaining health insurance for Hispanics and the impoverished rose slightly during the partial implementation of the ACA, but somewhat declined after the full implementation of the ACA starting in 2014. These findings should be taken into account by the U.S. Government in deciding the fate of the ACA.

This paper uses the IPUMS CPS survey and state school-closure data from Education Week to analyze the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's school closures and economic shutdowns on married couples in the United States. I find that existing inequalities for both gender and racial minorities in the labour force were exacerbated during the COVID-19 recession. Additionally, both partial and full school closures were associated with a ~2 percentage point decrease in labour force participation for the entire sample and could have long-term impacts on the demographic indicators of labour force participation. When isolating parents during COVID-19, I found that mothers who were able to telework were able to complete more of their full-time work schedule compared to fathers who could telework, and full school closures decreased the fraction of full-time work parents were able to complete by ~2 percentage points. An intersectional analysis of labour force participation showed Black women and mothers experienced the pandemic recession differently from other racial groups in the sample. * A special thank you to Professor Olney, for your guidance and encouragement during this past year. And a special note to my grandfathers, whose hands I didn't get to hold once more and who didn't make it to read this final document, but who I know would be proud that academia and feminism is being carried on in the family. 2