Violence against women is to date one the most prevalent and destructive human right violations in the world (UN, 2020). Yet, our understanding of how violent attitudes are shaped and developed, is rather limited (Picon, et al., 2017). This thesis contributes to the literature by providing new insight on how the sex of offspring impacts sub-Saharan African father’s attitudes toward intimate partner violence. Using two-stage least squares regression analysis with time and country fixed effects, the relative effect of having daughters, compared to sons, on men’s justification of 15 separate acts of violation is estimated. The findings propose that fathers with daughters are significantly less justifying of physical violence, sexual assaults and controlling behaviour toward intimate partners. Specifically, conditional on the total number of children, men are 1.4 per cent less justifying of wife beating for every daughter they parent. Likewise, for every child being a daughter, fathers are 4.2 per cent less likely to consider either anger, refused financial support, rape or unfaithfulness as appropriate reactions if wife refuses to have sex. Fathers with daughters are also relatively more unlikely to believe that the man should have the final say on the making of large household purchases and number of children to have. The findings are consistent and statistically significant in 10 out of 15 attitude measures using single hypothesis testing, in 9 measures using the Romano-Wolf stepwise testing and in 8 measures using the Bonferroni-correction. Yet, the opposite case is only detected in 1 of 15 of measures. The findings propose that daughters have a relatively softening effect on the development of attitudes tolerant toward violence.

The outbreak of Covid-19 has shone a spotlight on the persistent inequities facing people of color across the nation, including those in New Mexico. The economic shock caused by the pandemic occurred at a time when low-wage workers in New Mexico were already struggling with flat paychecks and exorbitant costs for basic needs like housing and health care, with the vast majority of households having little or no savings for an emergency. Just like the coronavirus crisis itself, the economic crisis is hitting workers of color, particularly Native American workers, the hardest. They are experiencing more layoffs and greater financial hardship than White workers.

This research establishes the influence of linguistic traits on human behavior. Exploiting variations in the languages spoken by children of migrants with identical ancestral countries of origin, the analysis indicates that the presence of periphrastic future tense and its association with long-term orientation has a significant positive impact on educational attainment, whereas the presence of sex-based grammatical gender, and its association with gender bias, has a significant adverse impact on female educational attainment.

I examine the spread and influence of cultural models about intimate partner violence in Malawi. Intimate partner violence is of primary concern to transnational organizations working in Malawi, leading them to implement a variety of cultural messaging campaigns. I track their efforts and evaluate their influence on lay people. I rely on five national surveys carried out between 2000 and 2016, which I combine with a database of newspaper articles that research assistants and I collected, an administrative database of human rights projects, many organizations’ official reports, and key informant interviews. Finally, I leverage the timing of a social movement to combat intimate partner violence that occurred during the middle of one of the surveys I use. I conduct three related, yet standalone empirical studies. I begin by addressing the flow of cultural models about violence against women through media and the implications this has for people’s attitudes. Analyzing media content, I identify the pathways through which transnational organizations circulate messages condemning violence against women while foreign media entertainment companies largely perpetuate gender stereotypes. The number of newspaper articles critical of violence against women published in the month prior to a respondent’s personal survey interview date is positively associated with their stated rejection of physical partner violence. In contrast, men’s personal use of television and movies—a key source of media content perpetuating gender stereotypes in Malawi—is negatively associated with rejection. This findings demonstrate how being specific about cultural content improves understandings of global cultural diffusion. In the second study, I analyze the influence of human rights projects denouncing violence against women on people’s stated attitudes. Transnational organizations channel funding to projects carried out in specific locales, which in turn exposes people there to the cultural messages promoted. Among projects focused on violence against women, I distinguish between bureaucrat-led projects, which reinforced (mostly male) community leaders’ purview over marital/partnership conflicts, from projects that supported and expanded domestic activists’ awareness campaigns around the country. District-level funding for activist-led projects successfully increased women’s probability of expressing rejection of physical partner violence against women. Aid for bureaucrat-led projects, conversely, decreased men’s rejection of such violence. Transnational organizations’ projects influence lay people’s attitudes, but in unique ways depending on how the projects are implemented. The final study examines how the effects of transnational organizations’ human rights messages on lay people hinges on meso-level actors. Human rights campaigns in Malawi translate “gender violence” as nkhanza, an existing cultural concept referring to the violation of expected relationship responsibilities. Physical partner violence is normatively defined as nkhanza but so is refusing sex with one’s partner. I show that individuals interviewed after the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign in Malawi in 2015, during which brokers denounced nkhanza, were more likely than individuals interviewed before the campaign to state they rejected physical partner violence. Women were also less likely to say they could refuse having sex with their partner. Additionally, women’s willingness to report physical partner abuse that they experienced long ago also increased following the campaign. These results emphasize the importance of vernacularization and human rights awareness. These studies clarify how human rights models are spread, interpreted, learned, and applied. Media, human rights projects, and social movements each serve as important diffusion mechanisms, shaping the cultural models people in Malawi know and use.

This study empirically analyzes the role of culture in determining working behaviors of American women whose ancestors/fathers were born outside of the United States. The effect of culture on these women’s working behaviors are studied by using 1970 and 2017 US Census data. Female labor force participation (FLFP) from the woman’s heritage country is defined as a cultural proxy for the working behavior of a second-generation immigrant woman. Cultural proxies are found to be positive and statistically significant for women who kept their heritage languages (HLs) when controlling for characteristics of the women, their husbands and families. This study indicates that cultural transmission is statistically significant for women whose social networks are strong. The main findings show that women who kept their HLs and their ancestors/fathers belong to the countries with higher/lower FLFP rates; they tend to work more/less hours in the US, respectively. Also, the results are robust when controlling origin country characteristics and employing instrumental variable and husband’s culture.

Using United States Census data between 1970 and 2017, we analyze the economic assimilation of subsequent arrival cohorts of Mexicans and Central Amer-icans by comparing their wage and employment probability to that of natives with similar age and education. We find that on average they started with a wage gap of 40-45 percent and eliminated half of it in the 20 years after entry. Recent cohorts, arrived after 1995, did better than earlier cohorts in initial gap and convergence. They also started with no employment disadvantage at arrival and they overtook natives in employment rates by 20 years after arrival.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic eect on women's labor market outcomes. In this study, we assess the eects of state-level policies that mandated the closure of child care centers or imposed class size restrictions using a triple-dierences approach that exploits variation across states, across time, and across women who did and did not have young children who could have been aected. We nd some evidence that both of these policies increase the unemployment rate of mothers of young children in the short term. In the long-term, the eects of mandated closures on unemployment become even larger and persist even after states discontinue closures. We do not nd eects on other labor market outcomes such as labor force participation, being employed but not working, or reducing one's hours. JEL Codes: J2; J6.

The Food Stamp program is currently one of the largest safety net programs in the United States and is especially important for families with children. The existing evidence on the effects of Food Stamps on children’s and families’ outcomes is limited. I utilize a large, recent source of quasi-experimental variation—changes in documented immigrants’ eligibility across states and over time from 1996–2003—to estimate the effect of Food Stamps on children’s health. I find loss of parental eligibility has large effects on program receipt, and an additional year of parental eligibility before age five improves health outcomes at ages 6–16.

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US Civil War (1861–5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger veterans who had been severely wounded in the war left the farm sector, becoming laborers. Consistent with human capital and job matching models, older severely wounded men were unlikely to switch sectors and their wealth declined by 37–46%. War wounds were correlated with children's socioeconomic and mortality outcomes in ways dependent on sex and paternal age group.

With the increasing collection of users’ data, protecting individual privacy has gained more interest. Differential Privacy is a strong concept of protecting individuals. Naive Bayes is one of the popular machine learning algorithm, used as a baseline for many tasks. In this work, we have provided a differentially private Naive Bayes classifier that adds noise proportional to the smooth sensitivity of its parameters. We have compared our result to Vaidya, Shafiq, Basu, and Hong [19] in which they have scaled the noise to the global sensitivity of the parameters. Our experiment results on the real-world datasets show that the accuracy of our method has improved significantly while still preserving ε-differential privacy.

Within the research on immigrants’ health outcomes there is limited examination of how lack of citizenship adversely affects children’s Medicaid/CHIP coverage, access to care and health status in the United States. This dissertation pools data from the National Health Interview Survey from 2008 to 2015 on mixed-status families—families with at least one child that is a U.S. citizen and at least one child that is not a U.S. citizen—and employs family level fixed-effects to isolate the impact of noncitizenship (i.e. lack of U.S. citizenship) on children’s health, healthcare access and insurance coverage. After controlling for observable and unobservable characteristics shared across children living in the same family as well as age and gender, lack of U.S. citizenship lowered a child’s probability of being in excellent or very good health and of being covered by Medicaid/CHIP, and noncitizenship increased a child’s probability of experiencing delays in needed care due to cost. Although the author was unable to distinguish between children by their immigration status, results suggest that foreign-born children without U.S. citizenship do not exhibit health advantages relative to their native-born kin. At the same time, noncitizen children are disadvantaged in accessing needed healthcare services. The long-term public cost and public health implications resulting from these children’s experiences merit further examination.

A critical determinant of the decisions made by potential and current disability beneficiaries is the environment in which each beneficiary lives, an idea that is consistent with the social model of disability. Changes in federal policy and strong economic conditions contribute to this environment, but many other factors at the state and local levels might more directly affect beneficiaries’ decisions. For example, living in a rural or urban setting can affect access to public transit and the nature of available job opportunities. Areas in which a large share of adults with disabilities are employed might signal either relatively positive social attitudes about individuals with disabilities as productive workers or fewer physical barriers to transportation or employers. Areas with high prevalence of poor health behaviors, such as smoking and obesity, might signal generally poor health in the population. These factors could also affect the rate at which individuals enter disability programs or increase the likelihood that beneficiaries return to work. Although the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) cannot directly affect state policies or local economic conditions, there is value in understanding the extent to which these factors might correlate with application rates, benefit receipt, and beneficiary return-to-work rates. If certain area-level characteristics predict higher-than-average application or award rates, it could signal the need for an increase in early intervention or vocational rehabilitation services for workers at risk of leaving the labor force and applying for federal disability benefits. However, characteristics correlated with lower-than-average disability beneficiary work activity might help to inform policies, such as targeted mailings on incentives, and programs that support a return to work, such as SSA’s Ticket to Work program. Areas with higher levels of work activity or successful return-to-work by beneficiaries might also alert policymakers to positive local area characteristics that might be emulated in other areas. The contribution of this study is two-fold. First, it adds to the body of evidence on the relationship between local-level factors and disability program outcomes. Numerous studies have documented the geographic variation in the prevalence of disability and in the receipt of federal disability benefits; they have also documented factors that might be correlated with the claiming of disability benefits (see, for example, Rupp 2012; Nichols et al. 2017; Sevak and Schmidt 2018; and Gettens et al. 2018). Our study adds to this literature by assessing how these factors predict flows into and out of Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs, as well as beneficiary work activity. The second contribution is that we will release a publicly available repository of locallevel predictors and statistics related to DI and SSI receipt, awards, and beneficiary work outcomes for 2001-2018. Our goal in constructing this dataset is to facilitate future research and policy analysis. The dataset may be useful to other researchers who are studying the effects of policy changes on program outcomes but also wish to control for time-varying covariates that influence award and beneficiary work activity. Local area data are available at the level of Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), which are geographic units created by the U.S. Census for statistical purposes. We determined that PUMAs represent a suitable level of aggregation for our analyses and for the public-use file, as they are specific enough to provide action-oriented information and large enough (in population terms) for rates to be estimated with reasonable precision and to minimize the share of cells masked by SSA for privacy reasons.

I study occupational mobility and the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on mobility using a skill-based distance measure between occupations based on the O*NET Program's classification of occupational skill requirements. I first show using the skill-based distance and observed job transitions in the US Current Population Survey (CPS) that unemployed workers tend to find jobs with skill requirements that are close to the occupation of their previous job. Also, using the Displaced Worker Supplement of the CPS I show that a larger occupational distance is associated with lower re-employment wages. Exploiting state and time variation in UI generosity during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the subsequent recovery, I show that more generous UI decreases the occupational distance in observed unemployment to employment transitions, so that unemployed workers end up taking jobs with skill requirements closer to their previous job.

This dissertation contains two essays on the relations between economic conditions and the living arrangements of young adults (22-34 year olds) in the 2000s. In the first chapter, I use data from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey for the period 2000-2018 to document recent trends in youth living arrangements and to estimate the impact of state-level economic conditions on individual-level residential outcomes. I find a steep increase in parental coresidence among young adults since 2000. The rise in coresidence is accompanied by declining outflows from the parental home as well as rising inflows into the parental home. Regression results show significant, positive effects of rents on the probability of living with parents relative to all other living arrangements; and significant, negative effects of rising rents on the probability of leaving the parental home. Rents are found to have a larger impact on the living arrangements of non-whites and non-college young adults compared to their respective counterparts. For such youths, rising rents also show a robust, positive association with the probability of returning to the parental home. Overall, rents explain between 9% and 14% of the rise in parental coresidence among young adults over the period 2000-2018. Although the 2000s are also characterized by declining labor market conditions of prime-age workers, changes in prime-age wages are found to explain no more than 5% of the increase in parental coresidence whereas prime-age employment rates show no robust associations with living arrangements. In the second chapter, I take the analysis to the MSA-level and use data on 229 MSAs based on the 2000 Census and the American Community Survey to estimate novel, growth models of coresidence. I find significant, contemporaneous effects of growth in earnings and rents, respectively, on growth in parental coresidence among both non-college and college-educated young adults with larger effects on the less-educated. In the long run, however, only the effects of rents are significant such that MSAs which experience higher growth in housing costs during the housing boom of 2000- ii 2006 also experience higher growth in parental coresidence among all young adults over the entire 2000s. In contrast, changes in the employment rates of prime-age workers show no strong associations with living arrangements either contemporaneously or in the long-run. Overall, both chapters of my dissertation imply that rising rents are the main cause of rising coresidence in the 2000s to the extent the latter is an economic phenomenon.

We provide an updated assessment of the labor market experiences of veterans, documenting three facts, among others. First, we find that male and female veterans receive civilian earnings nearly equivalent to nonveteran men and women. This finding implies that military experience is valued similarly to foregone civilian experience. Second, veterans are clustered in occupations with somewhat lower than average employment and real earnings growth, and in metropolitan areas with lower levels and growth of real GDP per capita. Third, veterans experience lower returns to formal educational investments (e.g., college) than do nonveterans. While we find that veterans realize earnings gains from professional licenses, their returns are lower than for nonveterans.

Importance Millions of Americans gained insurance through the state expansion of Medicaid, but several states with large populations of racial/ethnic minorities did not expand their programs. Objective To investigate the implications of Medicaid expansion for liver transplant (LT) wait-listing trends for racial/ethnic minorities. Design, Setting, and Participants A cohort study was performed of adults wait-listed for LT using the United Network of Organ Sharing database between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2017. Poisson regression and a controlled, interrupted time series analysis were used to model trends in wait-listing rates by race/ethnicity. The setting was LT centers in the United States. Main Outcomes and Measures (1) Wait-listing rates by race/ethnicity in states that expanded Medicaid (expansion states) compared with those that did not (nonexpansion states) and (2) actual vs predicted rates of LT wait-listing by race/ethnicity after Medicaid expansion. Results There were 75 748 patients (median age, 57.0 [interquartile range, 50.0-62.0] years; 48 566 [64.1%] male) wait-listed for LT during the study period. The cohort was 8.9% Black and 16.4% Hispanic. Black patients and Hispanic patients were statistically significantly more likely to be wait-listed in expansion states than in nonexpansion states (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 1.54 [95% CI, 1.44-1.64] for Black patients and 1.21 [95% CI, 1.15-1.28] for Hispanic patients). After Medicaid expansion, there was a decrease in the wait-listing rate of Black patients in expansion states (annual percentage change [APC], −4.4%; 95% CI, −8.2% to −0.6%) but not in nonexpansion states (APC, 0.5%; 95% CI, −4.0% to 5.2%). This decrease was not seen when Black patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) were excluded from the analysis (APC, 3.1%; 95% CI, −2.4% to 8.9%), suggesting that they may be responsible for this expansion state trend. Hispanic Medicaid patients without HCV were statistically significantly more likely to be wait-listed in the post–Medicaid expansion era than would have been predicted without Medicaid expansion (APC, 13.2%; 95% CI, 4.0%-23.2%). Conclusions and Relevance This cohort study found that LT wait-listing rates have decreased for Black patients with HCV in states that expanded Medicaid. Conversely, wait-listing rates have increased for Hispanic patients without HCV. Black patients and Hispanic patients may have benefited differently from Medicaid expansion.

We examine whether stronger legal renter rights encourage business creation by enhancing housing stability. In California, passages of city ordinances that protect renters from arbitrary evictions increase the number of new businesses by 9.9\% and the proportion of female (8.0\%) and racial-minority business owners (12.1\%). These firms can survive in the long run and perform no worse than others. Household-level analysis shows that renters are less likely to move, more likely to become self-employed and generate more business income after law passages. Our evidence suggests that enhancing housing stability can benefit the local economy by promoting self-employment and job creation.

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a host country's labor market, we examine employment and wages for these groups over time after arrival. There is significant heterogeneity between host countries, but in general, refugees experience persistently worse outcomes than other migrants. While the gaps between the groups can be seen to decrease on a timescale of a decade or two, this is more pronounced in employment rates than it is in wages. We also discuss how refugees are distinct in terms of other factors affecting integration, including health, language skills, and social networks. We provide a discussion of insights for public policy in receiving countries, concluding that supporting refugees in early labor market attachment is crucial.

Measuring and forecasting migration patterns, and how they change over time, has important implications for understanding broader population trends, for designing policy effectively and for allocating resources. However, data on migration and mobility are often lacking, and those that do exist are not available in a timely manner. Social media data offer new opportunities to provide more up-to-date demographic estimates and to complement more traditional data sources. Facebook, for example, can be thought of as a large digital census that is regularly updated. However, its users are not representative of the underlying population. This paper proposes a statistical framework to combine social media data with traditional survey data to produce timely `nowcasts' of migrant stocks by state in the United States. The model incorporates bias adjustment of the Facebook data, and a pooled principal component time series approach, to account for correlations across age, time and space. We illustrate the results for migrants from Mexico, India and Germany, and show that the model outperforms alternatives that rely solely on either social media or survey data.

Brain drain, the movement of high school and college graduates out of state for employment, is a concern for state policymakers. This study focuses on brain drain for students who graduate high school in Maryland. Using data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System and applying propensity score matching to control for differences between the groups, we evaluated the degree to which brain drain exists in Maryland, and which students are susceptible to brain drain. Findings indicate that brain drain does exist: students who graduated from a Maryland high school and attended college out-of-state were less likely to return to Maryland to join the workforce compared to students who remained in-state for college. Additionally, higher achieving students were more likely to be lost to brain drain.