The U.S. healthcare industry has been an engine for job growth over the last couple of decades. Much of the job growth has occurred among healthcare occupations that require less than a bachelors degree, and are often referred to as low- and middle-skilled occupations. Healthcare occupations predominate among the twenty occupations with the fastest projected growth rate over the next decade according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).1 Many of these occupations are allied health occupations such as physical therapy assistants/aides, occupational therapy assistants/aides, and home health aides. These positions are common entry points for a healthcare career given their low education entry requirements. Federal agencies such as the Administration for Children and Families have taken notice of these growing job opportunities in healthcare, funding programs targeting recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other low-income groups to train for entry-level healthcare occupations.2 Also, the topic of how to move people into jobs requiring less than a bachelors degree in healthcare has been discussed in several forums held by the countrys leading researchers.3 As the U.S. healthcare system seeks to reduce costs, employers are finding new and creative ways to use individuals in low- and middleskilled positions who are less costly to employ.4-9 Questions are emerging about the quality of these positions, especially in settings that rely heavily on low- and middle-skilled occupations, such as long-term care. There is concern about whether the country is building a health system on a weak workforce foundation. A recent report found that despite high demand for long-term care workers, individuals had been exiting long-term care at a high rate and moving into unemployment or out of the labor force altogether; in addition, these individuals had high rates of disability and poverty.10 There is growing apprehension among researchers that greater reliance on a low-skilled workforce without adequate pay may lead to high turnover, which can disrupt continuity of care and contribute to poor quality of care.11-13 Labor economists14 have studied the deficiencies in socioeconomic well-being of workers across occupation skill levels. Less attention has been given to the socioeconomic well-being of individuals working in healthcare, which may be an important contributor to turnover. In this study, we examined socioeconomic well-being, defined as being above the federal poverty level, having health insurance, and not relying on state/federal assistance programs, among individuals working in healthcare. We categorized healthcare workers according to the education requirements of their occupation, which allows us to determine whether socioeconomic well-being varies by skill.

In Florida and across the country, women are making great strides. More women are earning bachelor’s degrees and women’s entrepreneurship is growing rapidly. Yet, too many women and girls live in poverty with limited access to education, health care, and other important supports that would allow them to achieve economic stability. Wide disparities also persist among Florida’s women by geographic locations and across racial and ethnic groups. Improving the status of women from all backgrounds and walks of life is key to Florida’s future. The Status of Women in Florida by County: Poverty & Opportunity provides data and analysis of several aspects of Florida women’s economic security and access to opportunity. It calculates a Composite Index based on four indicators—health insurance coverage, educational attainment, business ownership, and poverty rates—and ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia on the composite score and component indicators. The report also examines additional data for Florida on topics such as poverty by household type, home ownership, the number of public assistance recipients, and English proficiency. Data are analyzed by counties in Florida (when available) and disaggregated by racial and ethnic groups. This report is the first in a series of four publications on the status of women across Florida’s counties. Future reports will examine women’s Health & Well-Being and Employment & Earnings. This report is released in tandem with a briefing paper, “The Status of Women in Florida by County: Population & Diversity,” which provides data on different populations within Florida and examines the implications of these data for policies to improve women’s status. These publications aim to provide critical data that can . . .

Raising children and taking care of family members, while maintaining a job, and without compromising on economic security, career progression or one’s health and wellbeing, is a difficult task anywhere. In the United States, it comes with a set of additional challenges because of a complete absence or limited reach of supporting work-family policies – policies that are designed specifically to help people manage and reconcile their roles as workers and parents or caregivers – such as paid and job-protected parental leave, publicly provided or subsidized child care, rights to request workplace flexibility or part time work and paid leave to attend to ill or disabled family members. Consequently, workers in the US rely heavily on employer generosity, informal family support, and a patchwork of provisions available from various levels of government and with varying degrees of restrictive eligibility criteria. Researchers have repeatedly pointed to the important role of this duality – major changes in women’s work and family roles against a system of unresponsive social policies – in explaining important markers of women’s progress or paradoxes therein, such as a plateauing of labor force participation rates even as they continued to grow in comparable labor markets, existence of a comparatively higher wage penalty for having children compared to other high income countries and declining subjective wellbeing over a period that saw increasing economic empowerment for women as well as a shift in women’s relationship with employment, with more and more of them considering work to be a fundamental aspect of life satisfaction. In my dissertation, I build on these lines of enquiry to study how such substantial changes in work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, translate into mothers’ performance in the US labor market as well as their subjective wellbeing by family and employment status and what, if any, is the effect of small but important state level policy shifts. The dissertation consists of three related empirical papers. In Paper 1 (co-authored with Prof. Jane Waldfogel), we examine changes in the family wage gap –the difference in hourly wages between women with children and women without children –over 1977-2007. We use data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements and adjust for selection into motherhood, by estimating ordinary least square models and employing augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting, and adjust for employment using Heckman selection correction. We find evidence of a significant decline in the motherhood wage penalty but only for married mothers. Overall however, there is a persistent 5-8% significant penalty to motherhood in both 1977 and 2007. While Paper 1 sheds light on mothers’ relative economic well-being compared to non- mothers, the results may not provide much information on their overall quality of life, particularly when the policy environment offers few choices for combining work and family. In Paper 2 therefore, I examine patterns in women’s subjective wellbeing by family and employment status. I replicate least squares regression models from key prior studies using new data – the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System annual surveys from 2005 to 2010 and the American Time Use Survey’s Well Being modules, 2012 and 2013 – and additionally estimate inverse probability of treatment weighted models, to adjust for selection. I find evidence of a positive association of being a parent with subjective wellbeing as well as a positive association of being employed with subjective wellbeing. Confirming prior research, I also find no evidence of the combination of these relationships translating into a “double bonus” for wellbeing and instead find a penalty to being an employed parent. In more detailed analysis of specific work and family categories, I further find that women who are working but not raising families and women who are raising families but not working, tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction on average than women who are doing both. These results further point to the challenges of negotiating work and family responsibilities in the present policy environment. While work-family reconciliation policies overall have not caught up to the changing demands of the family and the workplace in the US, a handful of states (California in 2004, New Jersey in 2009, Rhode Island in 2014 and New York, expected from 2018) have made important strides in that regard by implementing paid family leave insurance programs (PFL) – provisions that ensure benefit payments when parents take leave from work on account of childbirth, thereby making the leave more accessible. These policy changes motivate the focus of paper 3 where I examine the effects of New Jersey’s 2009 policy change on women’s subjective wellbeing. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) annual surveys and random child selection modules from 2005 to 2012, I identify potentially eligible mothers from individual level variation in month-year of child’s birth and state level variation in parental leave policies, and employ a difference in difference research design. Along with overall life evaluation, I also look at multiple self-reported indicators of wellbeing, such as self-rated general health, physical health, stress, depression and emotional wellbeing and whether adequate social and emotional support is available. I find no evidence of a significant effect of the 2009 policy change in New Jersey on women’s subjective wellbeing overall, but strong evidence of improvements in women’s physical health. I further find variation in effects in subgroup analyses, with significant positive effects on the life satisfaction of employed single mothers and women from lower-middle income families, as well as significant improvements in the experience of stress, depression and emotional wellbeing for groups with such relative socio- economic disadvantages. The dissertation thus explores how the changing nature of work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, affect the quality of women’s lives in the United States, using both standard measures such as wages and newer measures such as subjective wellbeing, and by directly examining how small but important state level policy shifts affect women’s wellbeing. Results highlight the importance of work-family reconciliation in women’s wellbeing in every socio-economic and demographic subgroup, but indicate that the nature of the problem may not be the same everywhere, drawing attention to the need for tailored interventions and policies and cautioning against exclusive reliance on either objective or subjective measures of wellbeing to monitor social progress and evaluate social policies.

This study asks (a) What are the relationships between types of living arrangements and psychological well-being for older adults? and (b) How do these relationships differ by gender? Data come from the 2010 wave of the National Health Interview Survey and include non-institutionalized adults aged 65 and older (N = 4,862). Dependent variables include self-rated quality of life and psychological distress. The study finds that older adults living alone or with others fare worse than those living with a spouse only. Yet, the outcomes of different types of living arrangements for older adults vary by gender. Women living with others are at greater risk of worse quality of life and serious psychological distress than men. Programs and policies must be responsive to the diverse needs of this population, rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all approach to housing and community-based services designed to promote older adults psychological well-being and independence.

Public interest and public policy attention on the importance of cognitive and social development of young children has increased in recent years, at least in part, because scholars and researchers have found that experiences early in life have critical developmental consequences. Although scholars have generated a great deal of data on young children, relatively little is known about spatial variation in the well-being of young children. This study uses 12 indicators of child well-being to construct a comprehensive composite index of child well-being for children age 0 to 5 in each state in the United States. Examination of the 12 indicators of well-being for young children shows a high level of variation across states. The modest positive correlations among the four domains in the index suggest that they are measuring different elements of well-being. The composite index reveals that the well-being of young children follows a familiar spatial pattern, namely the well-being of young children in states located in the Deep South and the Southwest is relatively poor and the well-being of children in New England and the upper Midwest is relatively good. However, there are a several exceptions to this pattern which underscores the importance of examining the wellbeing of young children separately for all children. This study adds to a growing literature that uses an index of well-being to examine different groups of children.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between potential worker supply, measured through sex ratios, and commuting times in the United States. Using the American Time Use Survey 2003-2014, we analyze the relationship between commuting times and sex ratios by state and age, and show that the proportion of males to females is negatively related to the commuting times of both male and female workers. Furthermore, this result applies to both private and public sector employees, but does not apply to the self-employed. To the extent that employers compensate their workers for their commutes, our results are important for employers. Given the negative effects of commuting on wellbeing and health, our results imply that individuals living in areas with higher sex ratios may have comparatively better health and well-being outcomes than workers living in areas with lower sex ratios.

This brief examines the coverage experiences under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of mothers living with dependent children. Focusing on mothers is important because just over 90 percent of children live with their mother, including about one-third who live with their mother and no other parent.1 Improving the health and well-being of mothers may indirectly benefit children—for example, reducing maternal depression could improve parenting behaviors and children’s health and development outcomes (Cummings and Kouros 2009; Lovejoy et al. 2000). Though no published research focuses on coverage changes for mothers under the ACA, evidence is available on coverage patterns for all parents. In the years leading up to the passage of the ACA in 2010, the share of parents without insurance coverage had been rising . . .

Housing-related poverty, which includes problems such as residential instability, unaffordability, and overcrowding, are common experiences among many low-income families. While a growing body of research examines the effects of housing-related poverty on children and families, we lack a thorough understanding of the extent to which housing problems impact families, and the mechanisms through which these potential impacts may occur. This body of research is critical for best directing policy efforts that aim to reduce incidences of housing-related poverty. This dissertation addresses this need for additional research on the impact of housing-related poverty as well as new policy considerations for its reducing its prevalence. Paper 1 uses data from Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (FFCW) to estimate associations between residential and school instability and child vocabulary skills and behavior problems in middle childhood. My results indicate that school instability is more strongly and consistently associated than residential instability with increases in internalizing and externalizing behavior. Paper 2 also uses FFCW data, and in combination with data from HUD I examine the association between three measures of affordability – individual housing cost burden, city-wide fair market rent levels, and city-wide availability of affordable housing – and risk of material hardship. I find that unaffordability as measured by individual cost burden and local rents are more consistently associated with hardship than affordable housing supply. Paper 3 uses data from the 2013 American Community Survey to estimate reductions in poverty and housing cost burden that would result from a federal renter’s tax credit program under different proposal scenarios. My results indicate that a generous and well-targeted benefit aimed at low-income renter households could reduce the incidence of poverty status and housing cost burden, primarily when combined with existing credit programs available to many low-income households.

This study examined direct area-level effects of 4 common child well-being outcomes across multiple scales of residential and school neighborhoods to identify relevant contexts for measuring neighborhood effects on elementary school children. Results from growth curve models indicate that neighborhoods operationalized as residential and school census tracts exerted similar effect sizes while neighborhoods operationalized as school attendance zones showed attenuated effects. These results suggest that it may be reasonable to interchange residential and school census tracts when examining contextual effects on child well-being. In addition, results suggest that school attendance zones represent conservative, theoretically sound neighborhoods for elementary school children.

The labor force participation rate in the U.S. has declined since 2007 primarily because of population aging and ongoing trends that preceded the recession. The participation rate has evolved differently, and for different reasons, across demographic groups. A rise in school enrollment has largely offset declining participation for young workers since the 1990s. Participation in the labor force has been declining for prime age men for decades, and about half of prime age men who are not in the labor force (NLF) may have a serious health condition that is a barrier to work. Nearly half of prime age NLF men take pain medication on a daily basis, and in nearly two-thirds of cases they take prescription pain medication. The labor force participation rate has stopped rising for cohorts of women born after 1960. Prime age men who are out of the labor force report that they experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days and that they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities. Employed and NLF women, by contrast, report similar levels of subjective well-being. Over the past decade retirements have increased by about the same amount as aggregate labor force participation has declined. Continued population aging is expected to reduce the labor force participation rate by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage point per year over the next decade. A meaningful rise in labor force participation will require a reversal in the secular trends affecting various demographic groups, and perhaps immigration reform.

National surveys suggest Texans have a relatively low level of financial literacy that can adversely affect decision-making. Since state lawmakers mandated high school financial coursework in 2007, consumer credit measures of young Texas adults have improved.

Part of a wider range of investigations to produce generally acceptable standards for measuring affective well-being, time diary surveys have tested several approaches to measuring subjective well-being during diary days. As an alternative to the standard approach of asking a single question about each activity reported in time diary surveys, the 2010 module of the American Time Use Survey asked six emotion questions about three activities. The perception questions captured how happy, meaningful, sad, tired, stressed, or in pain respondents felt on a 7-point scale. To evaluate this approach, our research examined the reliability and validity of the six emotion questions, and assessed their variability across activities. Using principal component analysis, we assessed the associations among items and obtained two activity-level components with Cronbachs alphas of 0.68 and 0.59 and two respondent-level components with Cronbachs alphas of 0.74 and 0.65. To test validity, we regressed self-rated health on the underlying components and socio-demographic controls. Both of the respondent level components were significantly associated with better health (odds ratio 1.81, 1.27). Using each of the perceptions individually, we found that happiness, meaningfulness, and lack of fatigue, stress, and pain were related to better health, but none as strongly as the first component. Finally, we examined the coefficients of variation to assess the variability in the well-being measures across activities. Measurement implications and limitations of this study are discussed.

This dissertation, “Childhood Nutrition and Income Status Effects on Health and Economic Outcomes”, estimates the effects of childhood nutrition and family income on an adult’s health and social economic status. The relevance of my work lies in the fact that the future rests on today’s children, i.e. evidence shows that intergenerational disparity in health and economic outcomes among adults are reflective of what happened early in their lives. Hence, there is a real need to understand childhood intervention policies or affirmative actions that may affect future economic well-being. The first chapter in my dissertation investigates the long-term effects of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program by ex- amining the adults who had exposure to the program when they were children. Using the difference-in-differences methodology and exploiting the timing of the introduction of the WIC program in the US, our results suggest that children of low-income families who were exposed to the WIC program end up as adults who were healthier and more economically stable. In particular, exposed individuals have 6 percent less probability of having cancer and 0.4 less of number of ADL. In addition, our results suggest that individuals with expo- sure of WIC are more likely to be employed and above the census poverty line. Moreover, full exposure to WIC program also reduces the chance of having mental problems and feel- ing depressed. Males show larger beneficial effects for both physical health outcomes and mental health outcomes. These findings suggest that WIC has long lasting beneficial effects for low-income families. The second chapter contributes to the growing body of research that measures the effects of health shocks, both during childhood and in-utero, in developing countries. Our paper looks the Great Chinese famine . . .

This chapter assembles a quantitative portrait of the adolescent girls who migrate to the cities and towns of poor countries, drawing mainly on a large collection of data from demographic surveys and census micro-samples. For adolescent girls and young women, migration puts important urban resources within reach, in the form of access to higher levels of schooling, more varied labor markets and employment opportunities, and multiple levels of health-care institutions. But while the move is underway and until she locates a safe home in her new location, an adolescent girl can confront a range of social and sexual risks that can threaten her well-being and thwart hopes for advancement. Much of the literature on adolescent migration is focused on these risks but neglects the potential benefits. We find that in many countries, significant percentages of urban adolescent girls are recent in-migrants. In characterizing their life-circumstances, we give special attention to indicators of social isolation, the conditions of housing and neighborhood, and school enrollment. We show that adolescent girl migrants are a highly diverse group, advantaged in some respects and disadvantaged in others. Field studies in urban India shed light on the difficulties with which girls must cope as they strive to adapt to urban life.

Beginning in the 1960s—and accelerating over the last two decades— changes in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and nonmarital childbearing have transformed family life in the United States. The family continues to serve a primary role in raising children and caring for elderly relatives. But new family patterns and increased instability are creating complex family and economic ties that often span multiple households. These unstable living arrangements and complex family relationships also affect the health and well-being of children and adults, creating challenges for families and policymakers alike

U.S. Army doctrine requires that commanders understand, visualize, and describe the infrastructure component of the Joint Operating Environment to accomplish the Armys missions of protecting, restoring, and developing infrastructure. The functionality of modern cities relies heavily on interdependent infrastructure systems such as those for water, power, and transportation. Disruptions often propagate within and across physical infrastructure networks and result in catastrophic consequences. The reaction of communities to disasters may further transfer and aggravate the burden and facilitate cascading secondary disruptions. Hence, a holistic analysis framework that integrates infrastructure interdependencies and community behaviors is needed to evaluate vulnerability to disruptions and to assess the impact of a disaster. The research for Human-Infrastructure System Assessment (HISA) for Military Operations adopts the Capability Approach (CA) to measure and predict the impact of potential infrastructural interdictions on the City of Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria. With the CA, 10 capabilities are identified to describe the well-being levels of Maiduguri. To quantify these 10 capabilities, 16 indicators were chosen to represent them. These indicator justifications provide the rationale for choosing the indicators for the corresponding capabilities and predictive modeling. Developing probabilistic predictive models of the indicators (or their indices) allows analysis of social well-being in relationship to cascading infrastructure failure.

This paper investigates using multiple datasets (e.g., the CPS and NSAL) whether the increasing presence of foreign born blacks and their native-born children are obscuring summary estimates of the progress made by third generation and higher African Americans. Three measures of "black" were created, (1) a third generation and higher blacks, excluding foreign born blacks, (2) a foreign born black community including first and second generation blacks, and (3) a black-alone group, which included foreign born blacks and third generation and higher blacks. Four estimates of progress were analyzed including percent of high school and college completion, labor force participation rates, the percentage of children living with single mothers, and self-reported arrest rates. It was hypothesized that a summary measure that collapses all blacks into one category-the black-alone group-will not accurately assess the well-being of American blacks, the community of foreign born blacks, and third generation and higher blacks. The analyses generated four findings: First, there are significant gender differences between the foreign born community and third generation and higher blacks. Second, the results revealed that there are substantial differences between the black foreign born community and third generation and higher . . .

Little is known about couples' shared time and how actual time spent together is associated with well-being. In this study, the authors investigated how work and family demands are related to couples' shared time (total and exclusive) and individual well-being (happiness, meaningfulness, and stress) when with one's spouse. They used individual-level data from the 20032010 American Time Use Survey (N = 46,883), including the 2010 Well-Being Module. The results indicated that individuals in full-time working dual-earner couples spend similar amounts of time together as individuals in traditional breadwinnerhomemaker arrangements on weekdays after accounting for daily work demands. The findings also show that parents share significantly less total and exclusive spousal time together than nonparents, though there is considerable variation among parents by age of the youngest child. Of significance is that individuals experience greater happiness and meaning and less stress during time spent with a spouse opposed to time spent apart.

Cohabitating unions have become increasingly common in American society as has parenthood among cohabiting couples. Several studies have considered differences in the quality and nature of married and cohabiting relationships with much evidence showing that cohabitors have lower relationship quality than married individuals. Extending this literature in light of recent evidence that marriage and cohabitation exert similar effects on individual well-being, we use the American Time Use Survey (2003-2014) to investigate whether married and cohabiting individuals differ in the time they spend with a partner, variation by parenthood, and the effects of shared time on well-being. Preliminary findings indicate that among non-parents married individuals spend more time with a spouse than cohabiting individuals. While married parents spend more time together overall than cohabiting parents, cohabiters spend more time alone together and less time with a partner and children. Next steps will leverage unique new data to examine differences in well-being.

In this article, we present analyses of the roles of education and occupation in shaping trends in income inequality among college-educated workers in the United States, drawing data from two sources: (1) the 19602000 U.S. Censuses and (2) the 20062008 three-year American Community Survey. We also examine in detail historical trends in between-occupation and within-occupation income inequality for a small set of high-status professionals, with focused attention on the economic well-being of scientists. Our research yields four findings. First, education premiums have increased. Second, between-occupation and within-occupation inequality increased at about the same rates for college graduates, so that the portion of inequality attributable to occupational differences remained constant. Third, scientists have lost ground relative to other similarly educated professionals. Fourth, trends in within-occupation inequality vary by occupation and education, making any sweeping summary of the roles of education and occupation in the overall increase in income inequality difficult.