It has long been observed that married men earn higher wages than their single counterparts. In this paper, we document that, in the last decades, an analogous pattern has emerged for women. Married women experienced a wage penalty until the 1990s, whereas nowadays there is a sizable premium. To estimate the causal effect of marriage on wages presents three main challenges: a significant part of the female population does not participate in employment (sample-selection bias), there might be some variables that are relevant for both wages and the propensity to marry that are not observable (omitted-variable bias), and wages may also affect marriage decisions (simultaneity bias). We apply a variety of techniques, along with a novel instrument based on local social norms towards marriage, to show that marriage has a positive causal effect on wages for both genders. We also show that the effect of marriage on wages is heterogeneous between and within genders. Further, we present evidence that the main hypotheses discussed in the literature to explain the marriage wage premium for men, namely within-household specialization and employer discrimination, have little support in the data.

Objectives As social determinants of health, mortgage possessions (primarily foreclosures in the US context) and housing instability have been associated with certain mental and physical health outcomes at the individual level. However, individual risks of foreclosure and of poor health are spatially patterned. The objective of this study is to examine the extent to which area-specific social and economic characteristics help explain the relationship between mortgage possessions and obesity prevalence in 75 of the 100 most populous US metropolitan areas. Study design This is a cross-sectional study. Methods The study relies on three sources of data: the Selected Metropolitan/Micropolitan Area Risk Trends (SMART) project, RealtyTrac foreclosure data, and the American Community Survey. Focal social and economic characteristics include foreclosure rates, levels of racial residential segregation, and poverty. Obesity prevalence and several control measures for each metropolitan area are also used. Ordinary least squares regression, weighted using the SMART project data, is used, and statistical significance is set at 0.05. Results The results suggest that mortgage possessions are independently associated with higher obesity prevalence and that foreclosures operate through the specific channel of racial residential segregation and its tie to the racial composition of a metropolitan area. Socio-economic status of an area, and not poverty, is related to foreclosures and obesity prevalence. Conclusion Mortgage possessions not only are socio-economic but also have negative health consequences, such as obesity. The findings provide an empirical base for other researchers to uncover the relationships between segregation, mortgage possessions, and obesity at the individual level of analysis. The public health community should be engaged in addressing the issue of foreclosures in the US because the failure to engage may have broad financial and health consequences across large cities.

To provide a logically coherent explanation for the high correlations found between a nation’s economic affluence and overall subjective wellbeing, this research takes a micro-macro systems approach. We extend the standard micro theoretical model of the household, by separating purchasing from home production. This separation allows analysis of the opportunity costs in trading-off time and money (as in make or buy decisions) for various household processes. By expanding the household model, a formula is derived to empirically test the relationship between aggregate household income and aggregate household purchasing productivity.

Objectives. To describe perceptions of access to abortion among women of reproductive age and their associations with state abortion policy contexts.Methods. We used data from the 2018 Survey of Family Planning and Women's Lives, a probability-based sample of 2115 adult women aged 18 to 44 years in US households.Results. We found that 27.6% of women (95% confidence interval [CI] = 23.3%, 32.7%) believed that access to medical abortion was difficult and 30.1% of women (95% CI = 25.6%, 35.1%) believed that access to surgical abortion was difficult. Adjusted for covariates, women were significantly more likely to perceive access to both surgical and medical abortions as difficult when they lived in states with 4 or more restrictive abortion policies compared with states with fewer restrictions (surgical adjusted odds ratio [AORsurgical] = 1.60, 95% CI = 1.15, 2.21; AORmedical = 1.65, 95% CI = 1.04, 1.95). Specific restrictive abortion policies (e.g., public funding restrictions, mandatory counseling or waiting periods, and targeted regulation of abortion providers) were also associated with greater perceived difficulty accessing both surgical and medical abortions.Conclusions. State policies restricting abortion access are associated with perceptions of reduced access to both medical and surgical abortions among women of reproductive age.

After decreasing for three decades, U.S. pedestrian fatalities increased by more than 40% between 2009 and 2016, hindering progress toward a future transportation system that produces zero deaths. While many researchers have investigated changes in the last decade, this study takes a long-term perspective and asks: what are the most common characteristics associated with U.S. pedestrian fatalities, and how have these characteristics shifted over the last 40 years? It analyzes all 231,675 pedestrian fatalities recorded between 1977 and 2016 in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database. Over 40 years, most pedestrian fatalities occurred in darkness (65%) and involved male pedestrians (70%) and male drivers (67%). They were commonly in roadway lanes (90%), away from intersections (80%), and involved vehicles traveling straight (83%). Most occurred on roadways with speed limits of 35 mph (56 km/h) or higher (70%) and four or more lanes (50%). Trends were compared across eight 5-year periods. Between the earliest and latest periods, there were significant decreases in the proportion of pedestrian fatalities among children younger than 15 (from 18% to 5%) and involving drivers who were drinking (from 15% to 8%). There were significant increases in pedestrian fatalities during darkness (from 63% to 73%), involving large vehicles (e.g., pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs) (from 22% to 44%), on roadways with speed limits 35 mph or higher (from 60% to 76%), and on roadways with four or more lanes (from 41% to 58%). These findings underscore the need for fundamental transportation systems changes to ultimately eliminate pedestrian fatalities.

Displaced workers who end up changing occupations tend to suffer larger wage losses than those who do not. This paper examines the effect of the occupational concentration of employment in the local labour market (LLM) on the likelihood of being employed and (conditional on employment) having changed occupations for displaced workers. I find that workers who do not possess a postsecondary degree are less likely to be employed or to have changed occupations in more occupationally concentrated labour markets. By contrast occupational concentration does not affect these outcomes for more educated workers. These findings are consistent with a pattern where less educated workers focus job searches within their current LLM.

What is the role of migration in regional evolutions? I document that within-US migration causes a reduction in the unemployment rate of the receiving city over several years. To establish this causal effect, I construct an instrument using out-migration of other places and predict its destination from historical patterns. The decline in unemployment is due to housing. Housing is durable, so increased demand causes a surge of new houses and construction jobs. Additionally, migrants' housing demand raises prices, increasing borrowing and nontradable employment. This finding implies the endogenous response of migration amplifies local labor demand shocks by about a third.

Innovation in cities is increasingly regarded as an outcome of two potential inputs: scientific activity and creativity. Recent firm level research has suggested that what really matters for innovation is the combination of these two inputs, rather than the mere presence of workers representing each group. Yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship holds at the city level. This paper investigates this gap in our knowledge by examining how the simultaneous presence of STEM (geeks) and creative workers (hipsters) in 290 US Metropolitan Statistical Areas during the period between 2005 and 2015 has contributed to determine city level innovation. The results indicate that, although at first sight the presence of STEM workers is a more important driver of innovation than that of creative ones, it is the combination of both factors that maximizes innovation in US cities. The most innovative cities are precisely those that are more successful at combining the two. Hence, current policies which tend to focus mainly on either STEM or creativity may be better targeted at ensuring both are present.

With over thirty thousand occupations currently in existence, workers today face a bewildering array of careers from which to choose, and upon which to center their lives. But there is more at stake than just a paycheck. For too long, work has driven a wedge between families, dividing husband from wife, father from son, mother from daughter, and family from home. Building something that will last requires a radically different approach than is common or encouraged today. In Durable Trades, Groves uncovers family-centered professions that have endured the worst upheavals in history-including the Industrial Revolution-and continue to thrive today. Through careful research and thoughtful commentary, Groves offers another way forward to those looking for a more durable future.

Educators and scholars have been advocating for culturally sustaining pedagogies in the classroom that extends, honors, and sustains the cultures and backgrounds of our growing Students of Color population. Moving beyond pedagogies in classrooms, I examine culturally sustaining spaces in culture clubs and community-based organizations and how they cultivate the identity development and sense of belonging of Vietnamese American high school students. I find that these students have complex identities that are intersectional and ever changing, existing outside the Black-White binary. Vietnamese culture clubs provide a space that allows students to belong and express their identity in a positive way, but with curriculum as colonizer (Goodwin, 2010), schools have not yet become a place of belonging for all students. Communitybased organizations provide alternative spaces that center the experiences of Vietnamese American students, allowing them to engage with their complex identities in a place that becomes like a home.

Data associated with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) are often studied for evidence of discrimination in terms of minority applicants or for home location in minority neighborhoods, with mixed results. The present analysis utilizes a data set covering 2014–2016, combining characteristics of home location and applicants from the HMDA data with information on depositor characteristics from the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation's Summary of Deposits data and the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Consistent with predictions from the red-lining literature, loan acceptance rates are adversely influenced by high minority locations, although the effect is larger for minority applicants. The relationship banking literature predicts that community banks will yield higher rates of loan acceptance, and the results support that hypothesis. That same literature suggests that familiarity in terms of similar race/ethnicity characteristics for depositors and home location or loan applicants will yield a loan acceptance advantage; and that hypothesis is not supported. Subsidiary analyses suggest that market competition improves loan acceptance rates for minority applicants, consistent with models of discrimination. Additionally, minority depositors are associated positively with loan acceptance rates, which may reflect higher levels of bank risk, and a risk premium, in those markets.

At the population level, those with more education tend to report better sleep, mirroring the education gradient found in other health outcomes. But research has shown that higher educational attainment does not always confer the same health benefits for Non-Hispanic Black (Black) and Hispanic adults as it does for Non-Hispanic White (White) adults. It is therefore possible that the educational gradient in sleep varies across racial/ethnic groups in the United States. Using the 2004–2018 National Health Interview Survey (N = 356,048), we examined differences in self-reported sleep duration and sleep quality by level of educational attainment and race/ethnicity. Utilizing multinomial (sleep duration) and negative binomial (times in the past week with difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep) regression models, we found that, compared to their less educated counterparts, college or more educated Whites were more likely to report ideal sleep compared to short or long sleep, and also reported fewer times with difficulty falling or staying asleep. The education-sleep association was generally reversed for Black and Hispanic adults, with the worst sleep being reported by those with college-level education. These patterns remained after adjusting for health behaviors, health outcomes, and socioeconomic status. Our study suggests that education does not yield the same protective benefit for sleep among Black and Hispanic adults as it does for White adults, and that highly educated Black and Hispanic adults in particular experience a sleep disadvantage. The differential education gradient in sleep may, therefore, be an important factor underlying current racial and ethnic health disparities.

Most US workers receive their health insurance through employers due to its favorable tax treatment, improved bargaining power, and reduced adverse selection concerns. This institutional structure, however, favors large employers and full-time workers; thus, not all segments of the workforce enjoy the benefits of this system. Artists are especially disadvantaged relative to other sectors in the employment-based health insurance system as they tend to be self-employed workers and/or work on contractual bases. Theory suggests that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), by expanding options for health insurance to those without offers from employers, should represent an improvement, particularly for occupations that favor independent work, such as artists. We use large-scale survey data that identifies occupations and contains sufficient numbers of artists to study the impact of the ACA on the health insurance of these workers. We find that the 2010 Young Adult mandate of the ACA increases employment-related health insurance by 10.7 percentage points (ppts) (and any coverage by 6.6 ppts) for 21–25 year-old artists and that the Medicaid coverage rate of artists below the poverty level increases by 12.4 ppts (although its effects on any coverage are statistically imprecise) due to the state Medicaid expansion component of the ACA in 2014. Both these effects are significantly larger than for other workers. Our results thus indicate that recent health reforms have important and larger effects on artist occupations than other worker populations.

This article examines how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would changefinancial resources for and transfers to the previously uninsured if they wereto purchase coverage in the ACA insurance exchanges (marketplaces) in2014. The results suggest that the law provides gains to some, relative to theirspending in the pre-ACA period, particularly those in poor health and withvery low incomes, but it also potentially imposes financial losses on many,again compared to their experience when uninsured. We estimate changes inexpected payments—defined as premiums plus expected out-of-pocketcosts—from purchasing coverage and paying cost sharing post-ACA,relative to expected out-of-pocket payments when being uninsured pre-ACA, across population subgroups characterized by income, age, and healthstatus. We also estimate changes in expected transfers to the previouslyuninsured under alternative assumptions on how much health carespending increases after the ACA.

In this research brief, we contribute to a much-needed, initial, and growing inventory of data on Puerto Rican migration after Hurricane Maria. Using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, we provide a detailed account of out-migration from and return migration to Puerto Rico in the quarters and years after Hurricane Maria. We show that out-migration from Puerto Rico was and remains elevated after Hurricane Maria, particularly for more vulnerable places with respect to water area and especially substandard housing. We also show that return migration to Puerto Rico by the second quarter of 2019 is low, 12–13%, with those emigrating from relatively more vulnerable places returning to the island at comparably higher levels than those from less vulnerable places. Taken together, our results help to round out a small, but growing body of research on migration after Hurricane Maria and other extreme weather events.

Limited access to mental health care has many adverse effects, especially for marginalized communities. Between 2002 and 2017, five states (NM, LA, IL, IA, and ID) passed legislation allowing psychologists to prescribe psychotropic medication when deemed necessary for patient care, popularly referred to as the RxP movement. We find that psychologists, when given prescriptive authority, have higher rates of annual income but do not work an increased number of hours. Using Vital Mortality Statistics, a restricted data set provided through the National Center for Health Statistics, we determine the effect of state-level expansions of prescriptive authority of psychologists on suicide rates. We find that, after allowing ample time for education, training, and experience requirements, that the rate of suicide reduced for both men and women, white and black, individuals who are divorced or single, and for people between the ages of 35 and 55.

Policymakers often promote the importance of STEM jobs but are concerned about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in these jobs. However, there is no agreedupon definition of STEM jobs. I use occupation task data from O*Net to analyze the STEM task content of occupations, drawing several conclusions. First, there is no clear, robust definition of STEM occupations, even when using task data. The occupations included are highly sensitive to the cut-offs and methods used. Second, there are a number of occupations that should clearly be considered STEM by task content but are typically not, including nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and economists. Third, the gender gap in STEM jobs depends heavily on how one defines STEM. One traditional definition shows that STEM jobs are 76% male, but most task-based definitions show gender gaps only half as large (62-65% male). Racial gaps in STEM and the earnings premium for STEM occupations (35-43%) are fairly stable across definitions. The results imply that policies promoting traditionally-defined STEM jobs can unnecessarily exclude women and draw workers away from other important occupations.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are the most important source of comparative information on the health of women and young children in low- and middle-income countries and are well-suited for studies of the relationship between environmental factors and health. However, barriers have limited the use of the DHS for these purposes. IPUMS DHS, an online data dissemination tool, overcomes these barriers, simplifying comparative analyses with DHS. IPUMS DHS recently incorporated environmental variables that can easily be attached to individual or household records, facilitating the use of DHS data for the study of population and environment issues. We provide a brief introduction to IPUMS DHS, describe the current and anticipated environmental variables and how to use them, and provide an example of the novel research possibilities facilitated by this latest IPUMS DHS development. IPUMS-DHS is available free online at dhs.ipums.org.

Using interest group ratings of Congressmen to proxy for political environment, we find that from 2005 to 2010 college graduates aged 25–40 moved to MSAs that were more economically conservative but socially liberal than their Origin MSAs and the national average MSA. Results for college graduates aged 41–60 were similar but weaker. Non-college graduates of both age groups migrated away from more conservative MSAs. Some state-level policy and MSA-level labor market controls capture much of younger college graduates’ migration toward economic conservatism, but less of that toward social liberalism, especially among the unmarried and childless. Younger college graduates migrated to socially liberal enclaves in conservative states. This geographic sorting by political orientation may have contributed to our current political polarization.

Background: Few studies have examined whether community factors mediate the relationship between patients surviving cancer and future development of sepsis. We determined the influence of community characteristics upon risk of sepsis after cancer, and whether there are differences by race. Methods: We performed a prospective analysis using data from the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke cohort years 2003 to 2012 complemented with county-level community characteristics from the American Community Survey and County Health Rankings. We categorized those with a self-reported prior cancer diagnosis as “cancer survivors” and those without a history of cancer as “no cancer history.” We defined sepsis as hospitalization for a serious infection with 2 systemic inflammatory response syndrome criteria. We examined the mediation effect of community characteristics on the association between cancer survivorship and sepsis incidence using Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for age, sex, race, and total number of comorbidities. We repeated analysis stratified by race. Results: There were 28 840 eligible participants, of which 2860 (9.92%) were cancer survivors, and 25 289 (90.08%) were no cancer history participants. The only observed community-level mediation effects were from income (% mediated 0.07%; natural indirect effect [NIE] on hazard scale] ¼ 1.001, 95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.000-1.005) and prevalence of adult smoking (% mediated ¼ 0.21%; NIE ¼ 1.002, 95% CI: 1.000-1.004). We observed similar effects when stratified by race. Conclusion: Cancer survivors are at increased risk of sepsis; however, this association is weakly mediated by community poverty and smoking prevalence.