We study the interaction of state and federal dependent health insurance mandates on young adult marriages. Using a new dataset on state-level mandates, we show marriage restrictions of these laws reduced marriage likelihoods by about two percentage points. When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted, its mandate ended marriage restrictions, encouraging marriage among those previously eligible for state mandates. However, among those ineligible for state mandates, it discouraged marrying to obtain insurance through spouses. The combination of these contrasting ACA effects eliminated the marriage gap. We also find these marriage effects resulted in corresponding impacts on out-of-wedlock births.

Blake Stilwell November 16, 2020·3 min read In many ways, the United States military is one of the most successful middle-class jobs programs ever created. No matter what someone's background is, they can join the military, learn a new skill while working, and leave with years of experience and education under their belt. While there are many other reasons to join the military (and many reasons not to join), it's worth looking at post-military possibilities. That's what one veteran-oriented law firm sought to do.

The “income inequality hypothesis” holds that rising income inequality affects the distribution of a wide range of social and economic outcomes. Although it is often alleged that rising income inequality will increase the advantages of the well-off in the competition for college, some researchers have provided descriptive evidence at odds with the income inequality hypothesis. In this paper, we track long-term trends in family income inequalities in college enrollment and completion (“collegiate inequalities”) using all available nationally representative datasets for cohorts born between 1908 and 1995. We show that the trends in collegiate inequalities moved in lockstep with the trend in income inequality over the past century. There is one exception to this general finding: For cohorts at risk for serving in the Vietnam War, collegiate inequalities were high, while income inequality was low. During this period, inequality in college enrollment and completion was significantly higher for men than for women, suggesting a bona fide “Vietnam War” effect. Aside from this singular confounding event, a century of evidence establishes a strong association between income and collegiate inequality, providing support for the view that rising income inequality is fundamentally changing the distribution of life chances.

This study analyzes teacher evaluation reform in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) as a case study of the efficacy of high-stakes teacher evaluation in urban school systems. The effect of evaluation reform in DCPS on measures of teacher quality, standardized test scores, teacher satisfaction, teacher retention, and future labor supply is examined. Evaluation reform has produced mixed results with some improvement in teacher quality and student achievement. Quantitative measures of student achievement have improved but inequities across student sub-populations persist. Teacher attrition is very high, which undermines positive effects of the new evaluation regime. Regional teacher credential enrollment is found to have decreased dramatically, which may impact DCPS as enrollment grows.

Demographic shifts have transformed the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. undergraduate population. Data from the American Community Survey are used to analyze Latino undergraduate enrollment as well as factors that contribute to the matriculation of undocumented Latino young adults. The article concludes with an overview of the implications of the growth of the Latino population and the experience of undocumented students on educational practices and policies.

In the early 2000s, New York’s political leadership began investing in ‘smart growth,’ an economic policy that promotes innovative, sustainable high technology research and manufacturing. Leaving behind its industrial past, the state transitioned from a ‘rustbelt’ to a ‘brainbelt,’ helping to save its economy from the worst effects of deindustrialization. However, the transition from rustbelt to brainbelt may not be as smooth or clean as it seems. This study maps the distribution of industrial pollution in New York State from 2000 to 2015, with special reference to Tech Valley, the geographic hub of the state’s investment in high technology job growth. I find that high technology has not offset the worst aspects of low technology, particularly the pollution that characterized the rustbelt era. Challenging the industry’s claims of environmental sustainability, toxic emissions were found to be higher within Tech Valley than the rest of the state. However, the increased rates of pollution may also be decreasing environmental inequality as toxic exposure is shifting onto more privileged communities in New York State.

This paper examines the determinants of commuting time and hours worked among women living in US metropolitan areas. The empirical analysis using the data of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA) shows that commuting time and hours worked have a positive relationship. However, commuting time and hours worked are not direct causal relation but are affected by the common factors: wage rate and preference for non-work activity time based on the theoretical model of time allocation. Commuting time increases with wages because the disutility of longer commutes must be compensated by higher wage income. The results of our empirical analysis show that commuting time is significantly dependent on wages, marital status, presence of children and household automobile ownership. Policies alleviating constraints of commuting and improving public transport are crucial for improving work-life balance and expanding job opportunities for married women with many household responsibilities, which help to reduce regional labour market inequality.

This chapter reviews cartographic and phenomenological views of landscape; argues for opportunities to traverse freely between the two seemly disjoint perspectives to landscape understanding, and discusses four geospatial approaches to enrich historical landscapes geographically. Innovations and advances in Geographical Information Science and Technology (GIST) not only facilitate the spatial integration of geographic features and perspectives in landscape interpretation but expand the traditional authoritative and demarcated mapping of the land into collective constructs of contingent personal experiences over space and time. The discussion applies Montello’s figurative, vista, environmental and geographic spaces to frame the transition of landscape concepts from phenomenological to cartographic perspectives. GIST methods of spatial integration, geo-narrative, spatial narrative, and deep mapping incorporate geographic features, feelings, events, and senses to enrich the representation, analysis, and communication of historical landscape. Recent developments in unmanned aviation vehicle (UAV) surveys, virtual reality, and augmented reality give great promises for further geographic enrichments to historical landscapes with holistic syntheses of cartographic and phenomenological perspectives. The chapter concludes with challenges to formalize the methodology and epistemology for studying historical landscape processes and transformation.

We use five years of American Community Survey data to examine how military service provides a non-degree-based pathway into STEM occupations. Military service is associated with STEM occupations in positive and surprising ways. Veterans are more likely than their civilian counterparts to work in STEM, an effect particularly strong for women and among workers without a STEM bachelor's degree. Among workers lacking STEM BAs, veterans were more likely to hold STEM occupations. Indeed, veterans lacking a college degree at all are more likely than their nonveteran counterparts to hold STEM employment. We conclude that military service in itself provides a rarely-discussed route to diversifying STEM and consider the policy implications.

The primary fertility index for a population, the total fertility rate (TFR), cannot be calculated for many areas and periods because it requires disaggregation of births by mother’s age. Here we discuss a flexible framework for estimating TFR using inputs as minimal as a population pyramid. We develop five variants, each with increasing complexity and data requirements. We test accuracy across a diverse set of data sources that comprise more than 2,400 fertility schedules with known TFR values, including the Human Fertility Database, Demographic and Health Surveys, U.S. counties, and nonhuman species. We show that even the simplest and least accurate variant has a median error of only 0.09 births per woman over 2,400 fertility schedules, suggesting accurate TFR estimation over a wide range of demographic conditions. We anticipate that this framework will extend fertility analysis to new subpopulations, periods, geographies, and even species. To demonstrate the framework’s utility in new applications, we produce subnational estimates of African fertility levels, reconstruct historical European TFRs for periods up to 150 years before the collection of detailed birth records, and estimate TFR for the United States conditional on race and household income.

This edited volume adopts a new angle on the study of Spanish in the United States, one that transcends the use of Spanish as an ethnic language and explores it as a language spreading across new domains: education, public spaces, and social media. It aims to position Spanish in the United States in the wider frame of global multilingualism and in line with new perspectives of analysis such as superdiversity, translanguaging, indexicality, and multimodality. All the 15 chapters analyze Spanish use as an instance of social change in the sense that monolingual cultural reproduction changes and produces cultural transformation. Furthermore, these chapters represent five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.

Objective:To assess the accuracy of government inspection records, relative to ground observation, for identifying businesses offering foods/drinks.Design:Agreement between city and state inspection records v. ground observations at two levels: businesses and street segments. Agreement could be ‘strict’ (by business name, e.g. ‘Rizzo’s’) or ‘lenient’ (by business type, e.g. ‘pizzeria’); using sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV) for businesses and using sensitivity, PPV, specificity and negative predictive value (NPV) for street segments.Setting:The Bronx and the Upper East Side (UES), New York City, USA.Participants:All food/drink-offering businesses on sampled street segments (n 154 in the Bronx, n 51 in the UES).Results:By ‘strict’ criteria, sensitivity and PPV of government records for food/drink-offering businesses were 0·37 and 0·57 in the Bronx; 0·58 and 0·60 in the UES. ‘Lenient’ values were 0·40 and 0·62 in the Bronx; 0·60 and 0·62 in the UES. Sensitivity, PPV, specificity and NPV of government records for street segments having food/drink-offering businesses were 0·66, 0·73, 0·84 and 0·79 in the Bronx; 0·79, 0·92, 0·67, and 0·40 in the UES. In both areas, agreement varied by business category: restaurants; ‘food stores’; and government-recognized other storefront businesses (‘gov. OSB’, i.e. dollar stores, gas stations, pharmacies). Additional business categories – ‘other OSB’ (barbers, laundromats, newsstands, etc.) and street vendors – were absent from government records; together, they represented 28·4 % of all food/drink-offering businesses in the Bronx, 22·2 % in the UES (‘other OSB’ and street vendors were sources of both healthful and less-healthful foods/drinks in both areas).Conclusions:Government records frequently miss or misrepresent businesses offering foods/drinks, suggesting caveats for food-environment assessments using such records.

Influenza and pneumonia vaccines can reduce morbidities and mortality associated with infectious diseases among older adults. Food security, good nutrition, and high-quality diets are critical for the wellbeing of older adults. However, little is known about the relationship between food insecurity and use of preventive health services, such as influenza and pneumonia vaccinations, among older adults. In this study, we analyzed data on 40,555 adults aged ≥ 65 years from the 2014–2018 National Health Interview Survey in the United States. Through multiple hierarchical logistic regression models, we investigated the associations between food insecurity and influenza and pneumonia vaccines uptake in this population. We found that, during 2014–2018, about 12.6 million (5.3%) adults aged ≥ 65 years lived in food-insecure households in the United States. Of those, 60.6% reported getting an influenza vaccine in the past 12 months, and 54.2% reported ever getting a pneumonia vaccine. Compared to food-secure older adults, food-insecure individuals were not significantly different in terms of influenza vaccine uptake. However, they were 25% less likely to have ever gotten a pneumonia vaccine (adjusted odds ratio = 0.75, 95% CI 0.65–0.86, P < .001). Efforts should be made to develop strategies to improve immunization rates among food-insecure older adults. Healthcare providers could routinely assess their vaccination status and screen them for food insecurity. Also, community level screening and intervention programs should target food-insecure older adults, who often face structural disadvantages. Future studies could explore and identify the underlying predictive factors contributing to low pneumonia vaccination rates among food-insecure older adults.

Market power has been rising while wage polarization and wage growth have both slowed down in the United States since 2000. Over the same time period, routine labor share has continued downward trend whereas non-routine labor share has turned to decline from the previous rise, which results in the dramatic decline of aggregate labor share. I develop a general equilibrium model which incorporates the job polarization mechanism into monopolistic competition to explore the role of market power on these labor market trends. Comparative static analysis suggests rising market power qualitatively contributes to these trends. The calibrated model can quantitatively account for the trends with the magnitude of increase in markups close to the higher end of range in the literature. Empirically, I find that increases in industry concentration are associated with declines in aggregate labor share, declines in labor share across non-routine and routine occupations, and stagnation of growth in wages per efficiency unit of labor across both occupational groups.

Data on diagnosed cases and deaths have been used to delineate the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Information from population employment surveys could shed additional light on the pandemic's effect on the health and behavior of the nation’s workforce.

During the twentieth century, the divorce rate in the United States increased overall, although it has been declining in recent decades. Using National Vital Statistics, Decennial Census, and American Community Survey data, we investigate women's divorce rate and the proportion of women separated/divorced over time from 1900 to 2018. Then, we examine currently separated/divorced women by race/ethnicity and educational attainment from 1940 to 2018. This is a companion profile to FP-20-21 on marriage and FP-20-23 on widowhood.

Research shows that descriptive representation can improve political outcomes. We demonstrate that perceptions of how politically represented “people like you” are can also change attitudes and basic welfare-enhancing behavior among members of an historically marginalized group. We experimentally demonstrate that women’s likelihood of applying to jobs increases both when they are aware of the increased number of women in Congress after the 2018 midterm elections, and when information about women’s political representation is framed positively rather than negatively. We also find that Democratic women are significantly more likely to expect discrimination when applying to jobs than Republican women. It follows that Democratic women are positively affected when it comes to applying to jobs that are seen as discriminatory towards women, such as male-stereotyped jobs, while Republican women react to treatment by applying to more jobs in general. Pre-treatment moderators, like modern sexism, collective self-esteem, feelings of marginalization, and age help to explain these results. Finally, we find that while our treatments positively affect both white and non-white Democratic women’s likelihood of applying to jobs, they only positively affect white Republican women, suggesting the importance of considering the intersectionality of race and party when examining the effects of increases in women’s descriptive representation.

This study undertakes a phenomenological examination of the lived experience of undocumented Latina survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). This study served two purposes. First, to provide a greater understanding of this experience through the lens of the survivors, drawing on feminist and empowerment theories. Second, to explore why underreporting is more prevalent among undocumented women versus U.S. women citizens, especially during a time of heightened fear of deportation. To answer this, several research questions were used as probes. These included: how the lived experience of IPV had impacted women’s decisions to leave or not leave an abuser; what motivators influenced their decision to report their IPV to law enforcement; what barriers prevented them from reporting to law enforcement; and how women navigate social support systems. Fifteen undocumented survivors of IPV were recruited using a convenience sampling process. Through their stories of abuse, several themes and sub-themes emerged. Themes included multiple forms of violence, significant impediments to reporting, presence of facilitators for reporting, adverse experiences in dealing with the court system, and experience with help-seeking in public, non-profit and informal service sectors. Study participants reported difficulties and obstacles related to leaving an abusive relationship and gaining access to services. Through their search for safety and assistance, the inventiveness and resilience of these women could be inferred and discerned. Implications are offered for future research, policy, and practice.

Conventional transportation practices typically focus on alleviating trafc congestion afecting motorists during peak travel periods. One of the underlying assumptions is that trafc congestion, particularly during these peak periods, is harmful to a region’s economy. This paper seeks to answer a seemingly straightforward question: is the fear of the negative economic efects of trafc congestion justifed, or is congestion merely a nuisance with little economic impact? This research analyzed 30 years of data for 89 US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) to evaluate the economic impacts of trafc congestion at the regional level. Employing a two-stage, least squares panel regression model, we controlled for endogeneity using instrumental variables and assessed the association between trafc congestion and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as well as between trafc congestion and job growth for an 11-year time period. We then investigated the relationship between trafc congestion and per capita income for those same 11 years as well as for the thirty-year time period (1982–2011) when trafc congestion data were available. Controlling for the key variables found to be signifcant in the existing literature, our results suggest that the potential negative impact of trafc congestion on the economy does not deserve the attention it receives. Economic productivity is not signifcantly negatively impacted by high levels of trafc congestion. In fact, the results suggest a positive association between trafc congestion and per capita GDP as well as between trafc congestion and job growth at the MSA level. There was a statistically insignifcant efect on per capita income. There may be valid reasons to continue the fght against congestion, but the idea that congestion will stife the economy does not appear to be one of them.

Workers in predominantly female occupations have, on average, lower wages compared to workers in predominantly male occupations. Compensating differentials theory suggests that these wage differences occur because women select into occupations with lower pay but more fringe benefits. Alternatively, devaluation theory suggests that these wage differences occur because work performed by women is not valued as highly as work performed by men. One theory assumes that workers choose between wages and benefits. The other assumes that workers face constraints that restrict their wages and benefits. To examine whether female occupations pay less but offer more benefits, I used individual-level data from the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey and occupation-level data from the American Community Survey and from the Occupational Information Network. Contrary to compensating differentials theory, results from multivariate regression analysis provide little evidence that benefits explain wage differences between male and female occupations. Instead, consistent with devaluation theory, workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance coverage and are less likely to have retirement plans compared with workers in male occupations.