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.

This dissertation examines the relationship between changes in the role of female household members, measured through policy and technological shocks, and child outcomes. The first chapter uses a bargaining framework to examine how the introduction of female inheritance rights implemented in four Indian states between 1986 and 1994 impacts the educational achievement and labor force participation of children. I investigate time varying state amendments to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 which provided equal inheritance rights to both male and female children. Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for India (IPUMS India) I find that the probability of primary school completion rose by 5.8 percentage points, and the probability of labor force participation decreased by 2.8 percentage points for children living in states that implemented reforms relative to control states. In a sample with a 51 percent primary school completion rate and an 8.8 percent employment rate for children ages 10-14, these results indicate an 11.4 percent increase in primary school completion and child labor force participation decreasing to just over twothirds of the mean. Performing a triple difference analysis, I find that these results are larger for Hindu children, female children, and children living in rural areas. These children are directly affected by the inheritance laws put into place throughout the observed years of data. The second chapter uses a time allocation framework to examine how the presence of household durable goods impacts child outcomes. I use micro-level data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) to test the hypothesis that the presence of time-saving household appliances caused a decrease in time allocated to housework, increase in school enrollment rates, and decrease in labor force participation rates for children ages 12-18 in China over the last two decades. To control for endogeneity of household durable goods, I instrument household ownership of each time-saving appliance by the average ownership rate of that appliance among households with no children living in the same community. I estimate that living in a household that owns a washing machine: (1) decreases the average time dedicated to housework by 78 minutes per week, (2) increases the probability of being enrolled by 12 percentage points, and (3) decreases the probability of being employed by 48 percentage points. The final chapter, which is joint work with Jaqueline Oliveira, uses a static model of health, wages, and fertility to examine how family size, specifically number of children, impacts income risk. We use micro-level data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to test the hypothesis that households without access to formal insurance use their children as a way to smooth consumption through transfers. Households in developing countries have been found to mitigate income risk through alternative informal insurance methods. Using the occurrence of multiple births (twins) and variations in the strictness of the One Child Policy to address the endogenity of family size, we estimate the effect of children on health and income of senior individuals within the household. Given the lack of formal insurance in developing countries, understanding the different tactics used to smooth consumption is important for improving the overall well-being of households in these areas. If households have a way to insure against income risk, consumption should not vary when an income shock occurs. We use health shocks among senior individuals in China to proxy for a shock to income. If health care is a large part of household expenses for senior individuals, a health shock can be seen as an income shock. We hypothesize that if transfers received from children respond to these health shocks, there will be less of an effect on consumption of other goods and services following this shock. We find that children help mitigate the probability of reporting bad health in the current period and mitigate the decrease in average labor income and average total income for senior individuals when they experience a health shock in the previous period.

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.

The 2016 election highlighted deep social and political divisions in the United States, and related unhappiness and frustration among poor and uneducated whites. We find large heterogeneities in optimism across race groups. After controlling for individual characteristics, African Americans are by far the most optimistic, while whites and Asian Americans are the least optimistic, and these differences are largest among low-income groups. When adding a rural/urban dimension, we found that poor rural whites are the least hopeful among the poor. African Americans and Hispanics also display higher life satisfaction and lower stress incidence than do poor whites. The gaps between African Americans and whites tend to be at their peak in middle age (45-54 and 55-64 year olds). We also explored the association between our detailed data on subjective well-being with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality rate data at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level. Our results suggest that the absence of hope, which relates to fears about downward mobility among poor and middle-class whites, matches the trends in premature mortality among 45-54 year olds of the same cohorts and in the same places. MSAs with a higher percentage of African-American respondents, which are typically urban and ethnically diverse, tend to be healthier, happier, and more optimistic about the future. We also discuss the mediating effects of reported pain, reliance on disability insurance, and differential levels of resilience across blacks, Hispanics, and whites. These trends constitute a social crisis of proportions that we do not fully understand. We highlight the importance of documenting the extent of the crisis and exploring its causes as a step toward finding solutions in the safety net, health, education, and well-being arenas.

This paper describes a new initiative to create and disseminate longitudinal data infrastructure for the United States based on the entire population enumerated between 1850 and 2020. The National Longitudinal Research Infrastructure (NLRI) aims to produce a foundational reference collection for demographic and health research. The availability of a massive collection of life histories of the U.S. population over 170 years will open new avenues for social and behavioral research, education, and policy-making. By disseminating the infrastructure to the broadest possible audience, the project will enhance scientific and public understanding of critical policy-related issues. We are developing the infrastructure through three closely interconnected research projects: (1) the Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project (CLIP); (2) the American Opportunity Study (AOS); and (3) the Multi-Generational Longitudinal Panel (IPUMS-MLP). The paragraphs that follow briefly describe the origins of the project and our preliminary studies. We then explain how NLRI will overcome critical barriers and transform research on the effects of public policies, social institutions, and health care on the health, well-being, and functioning of people over the life course and in their later years.

State governments have a long history of providing income tax relief to their elderly constituents. Our research investigates the current distributional and revenue effects of these tax breaks, as well as the economic status of the elderly, and explores how these measures have changed since 1990. Using data from the 1990 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and the 2013 American Community Survey, combined with the TAXSIM calculator, we calculate current state income tax liabilities and revenues and simulate the effects of removing all age-related tax breaks. Our analyses reveal that the economic well-being of the elderly has grown substantially relative to the nonelderly and that state tax breaks primarily benefit the middle- and upper-income elderly. Revenue costs of these tax breaks have also grown substantially, and their modest and mixed effects on income equality, measured by changes in the Gini, cast doubt on equity as a justification.

Based on detailed occupation titles and making use of measures that do not require pair-wise comparisons, this paper shows that the occupational segregation of African American women declined dramatically in 1940-80, decreased slightly in 1980-2000, and remained stagnant in 2000-10. This paper quantifies the well-being losses that African American women derive from their occupational sorting. The reduction of segregation was indeed accompanied by well-being improvements, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Regarding the role that education has played, this study highlights that it was only from 1990 onward that African American women with either some college or university degrees had lower segregation (as compared with their peers) than those with lower education. Nevertheless, the well-being loss that African American women with university degrees derived in 2010 for being segregated from their peers in education was not too different from that of African American women with lower education.

To support the Commission’s work, this report seeks to: Assess the area’s employment opportunities as they relate to the qualifications of African Americans with low to moderate incomes. Analyze how employment is related to the population decline of D.C.’s African American community. Identify the impact of the lack of affordable housing on the low- and moderate-income African American community in Washington, D.C. Propose feasible policies to improve the economic well-being of the city’s African American residents. The city must enact policies and support programs that ensure equal economic opportunities for its African American residents. Such steps are essential to properly honoring and building upon the invaluable contributions of African Americans to the culture, social fabric, and civic life of the nation’s capital.

Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF; "welfare"), the program created by the 1996 welfare reform law, economic relief for low-income families is no longer an entitlement. Instead, it is time-limited and tied to work requirements. State governments also have both formal and informal incentives to keep traditional cash assistance caseloads low. Welfare reform, by linking welfare participation to the low-wage labor market, has been seen by some commentators as emblematic of a larger shift in public policy toward market-based solutions to social problems and the use of social policy to service markets ("neoliberalism"). In this paper, I test the logic underlying this market-based paradigm—that restricted access to cash benefits improves the well-being of low-income households by incentivizing labor market participation. Using quantitative models of the relationship between household food insecurity and state cash assistance coverage from 2001 to 2013, I find that the decline in the accessibility of traditional welfare is associated with an increased risk of material hardship in low-income households with children, particularly those headed by a single female. I generally fail to find evidence that changes in welfare coverage are associated with changes in the probability of a household having an employed adult present, however. In concert, these findings call into question the logic of welfare reform specifically and the blanket implementation of market-based solutions to social problems generally.

Background: Growing evidence indicates that immigration policy and enforcement adversely affect the well-being of Latino immigrants, but fewer studies examine ‘spillover effects’ on USA-born Latinos. Immigration enforcement is often diffuse, covert and difficult to measure. By contrast, the federal immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 was, at the time, the largest single-site federal immigration raid in US history. Methods: We employed a quasi-experimental design, examining ethnicity-specific patterns in birth outcomes before and after the Postville raid. We analysed Iowa birth-certificate data to compare risk of term and preterm low birthweight (LBW), by ethnicity and nativity, in the 37 weeks following the raid to the same 37-week period the previous year (n = 52 344). We model risk of adverse birth outcomes using modified Poisson regression and model distribution of birthweight using quantile regression. Results: Infants born to Latina mothers had a 24% greater risk of LBW after the raid when compared with the same period 1 year earlier [risk ratio (95% confidence interval) = 1.24 (0.98, 1.57)]. No such change was observed among infants born to non-Latina White mothers. Increased risk of LBW was observed for USA-born and immigrant Latina mothers. The association between raid timing and LBW was stronger among term than preterm births. Changes in birthweight after the raid primarily reflected decreased birthweight below the 5th percentile of the distribution, not a shift in mean birthweight. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the implications of racialized stressors not only for the health of Latino immigrants, but also for USA-born co-ethnics.