The 2007–2009 financial crisis has caused economic disruption in many US cities and has drawn considerable academic attention. Despite abundant evidence of immigrants’ economic and social value to urban areas, little research has examined the relationship between immigration and resilience. This article investigates whether immigration enhanced economic resilience to the Great Recession for metropolitan areas in the US. It uses ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions to test the immigration effects between 2007 and 2014. The findings indicate that immigration leads to employment and income resilience. On average, metropolitan areas with a larger immigrant population tended to better preserve their growth paths during the Great Recession and to experience greater levels of employment and per capita income growth following the recession.

Abortion is time-sensitive, essential health care1 that one in four women will need in her lifetime.2 The right to abortion is also enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as a fundamental right that helps ensure equal participation in the social and economic life of the country.3 Without meaningful access to abortion, many women—especially women of color and those struggling to make ends meet—are left without the care they need, threatening their health, lives, and futures.4 Protecting the right to abortion and expanding access to abortion care is therefore critical – particularly during times of crisis and uncertainty. Even before the pandemic, many people already faced tremendous barriers to abortion. In 2019 alone, 58 new abortion restrictions were enacted in 17 states.5 These restrictions are profoundly unequal in effect, disproportionately impacting people who have low incomes, people of color,6 young people,7 LGBTQ people,8 and people living in rural areas.9 But COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequities in and barriers to abortion access, and some politicians have attempted to exploit the pandemic to close abortion clinics and prevent pregnant people from making decisions about their bodies and futures. Any state or federal measures to alleviate the financial, medical, and social impacts of the pandemic must include increased access to abortion care. This issue brief provides an overview of ways that COVID-19 and the accompanying economic instability impact abortion care access. This brief also offers solutions for state and federal policymakers to protect and expand access to abortion care during the pandemic and recession.

Whether increases to statutory retirement ages will have the anticipated effect in countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) depends on whether workers have the health capacity to postpone retirement. Methods that were proposed to measure the capacity to work at older age are ill-designed to assess inter-cohort trends, which is important for determining whether the amount of years spent retired and in good health is keeping up with increases in the statutory retirement age. We propose to measure the capacity to work as the amount of time that people would spend working if they kept working until poor health forces them to retire. We find that American workers born in 1936–1947 spent 9.4 years working between ages 55 and 69 but had the capacity to work an additional 3.3 years. We further find significant inter-cohort increases in the years spent working but insignificant ones in the years spent able to work, which might point toward a decrease in the years spent retired and in good health. Increases in the educational attainment of younger cohorts have had a positive effect on the capacity to work, but the expansion of obesity a negative one. Finally, we find similar trends among men and women as well as among Whites and non-Whites, although the capacity to work is much lower among non-Whites. Our results show the importance of considering inter-cohort changes in the capacity to work when designing policies that aim at inducing higher retirement ages.

Aim: To examine the association of psychological distress with all-cause, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer mortality in US adults, and verified whether the associations differed between participants with and without diabetes. Methods: A total of 485,864 adults (446,288 without diabetes and 39,576 with diabetes) who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 1997 to 2013 were linked to the National Death Index through December 31, 2015. Psychological distress was measured by the Kessler 6 distress scale (K6). Multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression models were performed to estimate hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for the association between psychological distress and mortality. Results: We ascertained 11,746 deaths (mean follow-up, 7. 7 years) among people with diabetes and 51,636 deaths (9.9 years) among those without diabetes. Psychological distress was associated with higher all-cause, CVD, and cancer mortality. Compared to non-diabetic adults without psychological distress, HRs (95% CI) were 1.07 (1.04 to 1.09) for mild, 1.26 (1.22 to 1.30) for moderate and 1.46 (1.38 to 1.55) for severe psychological distress. Compared to the same reference group, in diabetic participants the HRs were 1.39 (1.33 to 1.44) for no psychological distress, 1.59 (1.53 to 1.66) for mild, 1.90 (1.80 to 2.00) for moderate and 1.98 (1.82 to 2.17) for severe psychological distress. Similar associations were also observed for CVD and cancer mortality but with non-statistically significant interaction. Conclusion: Psychological distress was associated with higher mortality, particularly in participants with diabetes. Strategies to ameliorate psychological distress may be important to reduce mortality in this population.

Earn more while working less — that’s the dream for many workers who are sick of clocking in 40 or more hours per week. Working fewer hours can lead to lower job stress and better work-life balance, or a part-time job can allow you to grow your earnings with a weekend gig or side hustle. If you’re interested in part-time work, however, finding the right job can be tricky. While workers might prefer part-time schedules, it can seem like the best jobs and benefits are limited to full-time hours. Maybe you’re interested in earning a decent wage with less-than-full-time work and want to know what those jobs look like. To kickstart your search, FinanceBuzz crunched the data to find less-than-40 hour a week jobs that pay well. We used an online data analysis tool from IPUMS to evaluate occupational data from the 2017 American Community Survey and identify the occupations at which at least 25% of workers clocked less than 35 hours of work per week. We then compared these occupations with the most current wage data for each occupation available through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) from May 2018. From there, we narrowed it down to the highest-paying jobs for which part-time work is common. Here are what we found to be the highest-paying jobs for 35 hours or less per week.

Background: The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) is a clinically proven dietary pattern that reduces blood pressure, which is of relevance in America where nearly half of the population has hypertension. Specific to protein foods, the DASH dietary pattern promotes lean mean and plant protein consumption and limits red and processed meat consumption. Limiting red and processed meat consumption will likely benefit both human and environmental health as red/processed meats are associated with many chronic diseases and red meat production is more environmentally demanding than other protein foods. Previous research concluded that DASH compliant diets were associated with less greenhouse gases (GHG) and reported less red/processed meat intake. Beyond GHG, the environmental impacts of the DASH dietary pattern are not well understood. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the environmental sustainability (e.g., GHG, land use, and water withdrawals) of the protein foods in diets of participants encouraged to follow the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH diet). Methods: We hypothesized that the most compliant DASH diets would contain fewer environmentally demanding protein foods compared to the least accordant diets. Diet recalls were obtained from 35-70 year-old, hypertensive Midwesterners (n=406) using the Automatic Self-Administered 24-Hour Recall system. Land use, GHG, and water withdrawals were estimated using the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment model (www.eiolca.net) for a cradle to consumer prediction. Compliance to the DASH diet was evaluated using a nutrientbased DASH score. The association between various DASH nutrient scores and GHG, land use, and water withdrawals of total, animal, and plant protein foods were determined using multiple linear regressions. Results: In general, higher accordance with DASH nutrient targets appears to be associated with less GHG, water withdrawals, and land use for total and animal protein but more GHG, water withdrawals, and land use for plant protein foods, with few exceptions. Specifically, higher adherence with cholesterol, sodium, and fiber recommendations are associated with lower environmental impacts for total and animal protein foods but higher environmental impacts for plant protein foods. The only exception is potassium, in which higher potassium scores are associated with higher environmental impacts for total and animal protein foods but lower environmental impacts for plant protein foods. Conclusions: Greater adherence to the DASH diet may lead to lower environmental impacts from total protein foods, likely due to decreased consumption of animal protein foods but higher consumption of plant protein foods. With growing concerns of climate change, reducing environmental impacts could be a potential motivator for following the DASH diet. Evaluation of the entire diet will be performed in future research.

We find that routine-biased technological change decreases the employment-to-population ratio of foreign-born population over the last three decades (1980–2010). This impact is greater for foreign-born population with lower English proficiency. As computerization and automation substitute for workers in routine occupations, switching from routine jobs to non-routine cognitive jobs may be more challenging for foreign-born workers than for native workers.

This paper estimates the long-term impact of childhood exposure to a preventative public health programme on adult human capital. From 1908 to 1933, local governments in the United States instituted county-level health departments (CHDs) that provided preventative health services geared towards children. This paper estimates the long-term benefits of childhood exposure to this public programme using variation in CHD location, timing and age of exposure. CHD operation before the age of 5 increases men's later-life earnings by 2% to 5%. Exposed boys not only perform better than later- and never-treated groups, but, after adding household fixed effects, exposed men earn more than their brothers.

Our success as a nation depends on whether all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. Economic security programs such as Social Security, food assistance, tax credits, and housing assistance can help provide opportunity by ameliorating short-term poverty and hardship and, by doing so, improving children’s long-term outcomes. Over the last half-century, these assistance programs have reduced poverty for millions of people — including children, who are highly susceptible to poverty’s ill effects. At the same time, barriers to opportunity, including discrimination and disparities in access to employment, education, and health care, remain enormous and keep poverty rates much higher for some racial and ethnic groups than others. While government programs have done much to narrow these disparities in poverty, further progress will require stronger government efforts to reduce poverty and discrimination and build opportunity for all. Between 1970 and 2017 the poverty rate fell for all groups, but it fell even more for Black and Latino people: by 25 and 27 percentage points, respectively, compared to 8 percentage points for white non-Latino people, we calculate. 1 Even with this reduction, poverty rates for Black and Latino people remained far above the white poverty rate. Our series begins in 1970, the first year that data on Latino ethnicity are available, and ends in 2017, the latest year that data on underreporting of key government benefits are available. (Rather than the official poverty measure, this report uses a variant of the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which among other advantages incorporates the value of non-cash and tax-based benefits, as we detail below.) Economic security programs have become more effective at reducing poverty and racial disparities over the last five decades. In 1970, families’ government benefits and the taxes they paid lowered the white poverty rate by 2 percentage points and the Black poverty rate by 4 percentage points, and increased the Latino poverty rate by 3 percentage points (because their tax payments outweighed their government benefits). In contrast, in 2017, accounting for government benefits and taxes lowered the white poverty rate by 12 percentage points, Black poverty by 16 percentage points, and Latino poverty by 12 percentage points. (See Figure 1.)

In this paper, I use an equilibrium search model of the labor market to quantify the importance of two classic explanations for why the job-finding rate strongly falls with unemployment duration: (i) unobserved worker heterogeneity and (ii) loss of skills. In the model, unobserved heterogeneity has a large impact on job-finding rates but not on reemployment wages. Wages depend almost exclusively on workers' skill levels. I use the available causal estimates of the effects of unemployment duration on callback rates and reemployment wages to calibrate the model parameters for unobserved heterogeneity and skill loss. Quantitative analysis of the model reveals that unobserved heterogeneity accounts for a little more than two thirds of total duration dependence in unemployment, while skill loss for the remaining part. Next, the effects of training and subsidized employment programs on duration dependence are examined through the lens of the model. Subsidized employment raises job-finding rates for all workers but helps short-term more than long-term unemployed workers. Training raises the job-finding rates of the long-term unemployed but lowers job-finding rates for workers with short unemployment spells. The interaction of unobserved heterogeneity with skill loss due to endogenous vacancy creation is crucial for these results.

This paper estimates the long-term impact of growing up in better neighborhoods and attending better schools on educational attainment. First, I use a spatial regression-discontinuity design to estimate school effects. Second, I study students who move across neighborhoods in Montreal during childhood to estimate the causal effect of growing up in a better area (total exposure effects). I find large effects for both dimensions. Combining both research designs in a decomposition framework, and under key assumptions, I estimate that 50–70 percent of the benefits of moving to a better area on educational attainment are due to access to better schools.

In a generalization of the well-known “immigration surplus” result, we show immigration must always increase the average native worker’s marginal product, in any long-run constant returns economy. But in a monopsonistic labor market, immigration may also affect native wages through the mark-downs imposed by firms. Using standard US census data, we reject the restrictions implied by the traditional competitive model. We find that immigration increases mark-downs, and this effect quantitatively dominates the improvements in natives’ marginal products. The capture of migrants’ rents significantly expands the total surplus going to natives, but redistributes income among them (from workers to firms).

Introduction: This report examines employment trends and poverty status among men and women aged 25-54 in the New York City metropolitan area. The report assesses the characteristics of these persons, while examining trends and differences in poverty status by sex, race/ethnicity, and across the five largest Latino nationalities. Methods: This report uses the American Community Survey PUMS (Public Use Microdata Series) data for all years released by the Census Bureau and reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa, (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/index.shtml). See Public Use Microdata Series Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017. Discussion: Generally, among the employed population, full-year employment increased over this period. By 2017, 84.7% of employed men and 79.9% of employed women worked for the full year. By 2017, personal incomes among working poor men were 4.5 times lower than personal incomes among employed men not in poverty ($10,191 compared to $56,051); 3.5 times lower among working poor women compared to employed women not in poverty. Full-year and full-time employment may still not be enough to lift some groups out of poverty.

Over three years ago, I was part of a team that published research showing that the MPD was disproportionately stopping and searching Native American women. At the time, we found that Native American women comprised 1.42% of the population of women in Minneapolis but accounted for 6.57% of police stops of women taking place in Minneapolis. After being stopped, Native American women were far more likely to be searched than white women.

Hayward, and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria. These ten metropolitan areas employed over 39 million individuals representing well over a quarter of the total employed labour force in the USA. Mean, median, standard error of the mean, 25th percentile, 50th percentile, and the Gini coefficient of pre-tax wages and salaries are presented for each metropolitan area. The metros differ significantly in terms of average pre-tax wages and salaries. They differ significantly in terms of the spread in the distribution of pre-tax wages and salaries measured both in terms of the inter-quartile range (the difference between 75th and 25th percentiles) and the Gini coefficient. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward is found to have both the highest average pre-tax wages and salaries and widest inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. The Smallest Gini coefficient is observed in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan area. Inequality measured in terms of the Gini coefficient is nearly 15% higher in San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward as compared to Washington-Arlington-Alexandria. The average pre-tax wages and salaries are about 83% higher in San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward than Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, the lowest in the nation. While aggregate nationwide inequalities attract intense attention, these regional variations point to significant and wide-ranging variations between different regions (metropolitan cities). By focusing on the pre-tax wages and salaries, this study allows us to tie inequalities that are most closely related to the labour market conditions, unlike other sources of income like capital gains, inheritance, government transfers, etc.

This dissertation examined gender inequality in the contemporary context, focusing on the roles of perceived job insecurity, gendered relational contexts, and the occupational structure. The first chapter used panel data and fixed-effects models to examine how changes in different sex, dual-earner partners’ levels of perceived job insecurity are related to changes in their division of housework time. The empirical results showed that when couples enter a scenario in which both partners perceive their jobs to be insecure, men’s housework contributions decrease. This pattern suggests that, in these circumstances, men’s jobs get prioritized and gender inequality in partners’ divisions of housework time deepens. The second chapter compared economic predictors of housework time between people in same-sex couples and people in different-sex couples. Nationally representative, time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey was used to estimate relationships between paid work time, earnings, and time spent in various types of housework tasks. Some of the relationships between economic factors and housework time were larger in magnitude for men in same-sex couples compared with men in different-sex couples. Among women, the couple-type differences in the associations of interest varied across the different types of housework tasks. I argued that the results suggest that the sex composition of couples affects how they divide housework: values, beliefs, and expectations about the gendered division of household labor that allocate labor based on sex differences between partners might influence the housework of different-sex couples, but are less applicable to same-sex couples. The final chapter analyzed inequality in the growth of flexible paid work hours from 1989 to 2018 as well as the structural sources of this growth, focusing in particular on the role of changes in the occupational structure of the labor market. Using harmonized data from the Current Population Survey and the American Time Use Survey, it estimated linear probability models of flexible work hours and performed Kitagawa-Duncan-Blinder-Oaxacatype decomposition analyses of the growth of flexible work hours. Results showed that the proportion of workers with flexible work hours grew for all occupations, but that it grew at a slower rate among education, healthcare, and traditional blue-collar occupations as compared with other occupations, such as management and other professional occupations, and that inequality in the proportion of workers with flexible work hours across occupations increased over time. Additionally, changes in workers’ job and personal characteristics, including their occupations, accounted for part of the growth of flexible work hours, but most of the growth occurred because the propensities of workers to have flexible hours changed. The finding that inequality in the proportion of workers with flexible work hours by occupation grew over time informs the literature seeking to understand unevenness in trends in family behaviors and gender inequality at work and at home. However, the finding that the proportion of workers with flextime grew within all occupations suggests a broad-based growth in the flexibility of work time. This in turn provides evidence that conditions may have become more favorable for achieving gender equality throughout the labor market.

Objectives: Breast cancer survivors have reported worse health-related quality of life (HRQoL) outcomes on some subscales when compared with members of the general population. However, the increased attention to breast cancer survivorship should have improved the HRQoL of these survivors. Our aim was to examine whether physical and mental component scores (PCS-12 and MCS-12) using the Short Form (SF-12) questionnaire were different for racial/ethnic minorities, specifically for Black and Hispanic women relative to White women. Furthermore, we stratified the data by age group to evaluate these racial/ethnic differences in HRQoL of breast cancer survivors. Study design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: Pooled cross-sectional analyses using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey between 2008 and 2016 were conducted. Pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to examine the racial/ethnic differences in PCS-12 and MCS-12 scores of breast cancer survivors. Furthermore, stratified analyses by age group were conducted to evaluate racial/ethnic differences in HRQoL by the age of breast cancer survivors. Results: After adjusting for confounders, there was no association between race/ethnicity and PCS-12 scores. However, Hispanic breast cancer survivors had statistically significantly lower MCS-12 scores (by 1.9 points [95% confidence interval {CI}: −3.53 to −0.37]) when compared with White breast cancer survivors. For PCS-12, after stratifying by age, the adjusted analyses showed no significant differences in PCS-12 scores when White female breast cancer survivors were compared with the other racial/ethnic categories. On the other hand, Black female survivors aged <50 years had 4.3 points (95% CI: 0.46–8.13) higher MCS-12 scores when compared with their White counterparts, while Hispanic breast cancer survivors aged <50 years had 3.1 points (95% CI: −0.40–6.69) higher MCS-12 scores relative to White women. Furthermore, among female breast cancer survivors aged ≥50 years, Hispanic women had 3.2 points (95% CI: −4.98 to −1.40) lower MCS-12 scores than White women. Conclusion: Our study generated findings showing the racial/ethnic differences in HRQoL of breast cancer survivors and presented results stratified by age group. These findings provide the much-needed rationale for targeted and racial/ethnic-specific HRQoL improvement strategies among breast cancer survivors.

This paper asks whether the effect of fertility on women’s labor supply depends on gender norms. To separate the role of gender norms from institutional features, I compare the labor supply response to children among women living in the United States but born in different countries. Hence, I compare native to immigrant women and, within immigrants, those born in less and more gender-egalitarian countries. I instrument for the variable of interest, having more than two children, with the sex composition of the first two children. The findings show that women from all countries reduce employment due to having more than two children. Yet, this effect is substantially larger for women born in less gender-egalitarian countries. In particular, women from countries with the least egalitarian gender norms have an employment response three times larger than the employment response of natives. Thus, the negative effect of fertility on the labor supply decreases with gender egalitarianism.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with loss of revenue, reduced work hours, and reduced earnings for physicians in the United States.1-3 Furthermore, pandemic restrictions and related regulatory changes allowing physicians greater flexibilities potentially altered physicians’ work activities and environments.4,5 We analyzed a longitudinal data set to examine changes in US physician work hours and activities before and after the COVID-19 pandemic emerged.

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a law had higher leverage, delayed loss recognition, made more risky and fraudulent loans, and lost more capital and deposits in the Long Depression of 1873 to 1878. These effects were most pronounced for bankers with the largest reduction in liability. We find no evidence that limiting liability increased firm investment at the county level.