In this article, the author studies the effect of the minimum wage on community college enrollment using cross-border variation in state minimum wages. To address spatial correlation in local labor market conditions, schools are paired on either side of state borders based on geographic proximity using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Comparing paired schools, the author finds a substantial reduction in enrollment at community colleges in areas with a higher minimum wage. This effect is observed only among part-time students, which suggests that the minimum wage primarily affects students at the margin between work and postsecondary education.

Mobile home residence in the United States is associated with negative social, economic, and health-related outcomes. However, although research on mobile home residence at the individual level has been performed, a geographic understanding of mobile home prevalence in the United States remains absent from the literature. Therefore, the purpose of our analysis was to evaluate the county-level drivers of mobile home prevalence in the continental United States in 2015. The influence of five groups of variables—demographic, economic, housing, industry and occupation, and natural amenities—were assessed in a series of nested ordinary least squares regressions. Additionally, the full model was run as a spatial lag regression to control for spatial autocorrelation. Our results indicate that the primary drivers of mobile home prevalence in U.S. counties were the percent of population in near poverty, the labour force participation rate, and the percent of the population employed in natural resource occupations.

I find that the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which conferred protection from deportation and work authorization to undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as children, increased eligible immigrants' likelihood of having health insurance coverage. Exploiting a cutoff rule in the eligibility criteria of DACA, I implement a difference-in-regression-discontinuities design. The insured rate increased by up to 4.3 percentage points more for DACA-eligible immigrants than for ineligible immigrants following DACA. Two-thirds of this increase is accounted for by upticks in employer-sponsored and privately purchased insurance. The findings are also consistent with immigrants becoming less averse to approach health institutions, and taking up medical financial assistance at a higher rate.

We examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation.

Women remain largely responsible for the management and performance of domestic labor despite many shifts in both women’s and men’s economic activities. The Great Recession changed the economic landscape in the United States in important ways, affecting men’s economic experiences substantially. Some states were affected less by the recession, thereby providing households a buffer against its harmful effects. Understanding the social and economic contexts of housework such as those influenced by the Great Recession can yield important insights for contemporary American family life and make significant contributions to occupational science as a discipline. The purpose of this project is two-fold. First, we use 2003-2015 American Time Use Study data to examine housework performance before, during, and after the Great Recession. To what extent did the changing economic conditions associated with the Recession change how women and men allocated time to housework? Second, we situate households into geographic context to determine whether and how state-level employment opportunities (e.g., unemployment rate) and policies (e.g., minimum wage) shape women’s and men’s housework performance and how these state-level characteristics provided different contexts for housework before, during, and after the Great Recession. The results indicate that men’s housework hours increased over the three time periods, while women’s housework hours decreased. Individuals living in Census divisions characterized by less traditional gender ideologies reported performing less housework. This project demonstrates the power of social norms around housework performance and documents how housework remains a gendered occupation in the United States and thus a social problem related to the inequitable distribution of unpaid labor worth examining.

We examine how the legalization programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) have affected immigration to the United States since the late 1980s. Our empirical approach exploits variation in IRCA's timing and the magnitude of the legalization shock across metropolitan areas for the one country-Mexico-that dominated the legalized population. We find that "opening the door" to family-sponsored admissions has indeed increased authorized immigration by family members. However, our estimates imply that each IRCA-legalized immigrant has sponsored only one family member for admission over the past three decades. Most induced admissions have also been immediate family, inconsistent with explosive chain migration. Estimates are highly robust and similar in magnitude when we use variation across countries of origin in the magnitude of the legalization shock, irrespective of place of residence within the U.S., or consider survey-based estimates of total immigrant arrivals, rather than admissions alone.

There is currently interest in crafting public housing policy that combats, rather than contributes to, the residential segregation in American cities. One such policy is the Housing Mobility Program (HMP), which aims to help people move from disinvested neighborhoods to ones with more opportunities. This paper studies how design features influence the success of HMPs in reducing racial segregation. We find that the choice of neighborhood opportunity index used to define the opportunity areas to which participants are encouraged to move has limited influence on HMP success. In contrast, we find that three design features have large effects on HMP success: 1) whether the geographic scope is confined to the central city or is implemented as a metro-level partnership; 2) whether the eligibility criteria are race-based, race-conscious, or race-neutral; 3) whether tenant counseling, tenant search assistance, and landlord outreach are successful in relaxing rental housing supply constraints.

Non-response is a commonly encountered problem in many population-based surveys. Broadly speaking, non-response can be due to refusal or failure to contact the sample units. Although both types of non-response may lead to bias, there is much evidence to indicate that it is much easier to reduce the proportion of non-contacts than to do the same with refusals. In this article, we use data collected from a nationally representative survey under the Demographic and Health Surveys program to study non-response due to refusals to HIV testing in Malawi. We review existing estimation methods and propose novel approaches to the estimation of HIV prevalence that adjust for refusal behaviour. We then explain the data requirement and practical implications of the conventional and proposed approaches. Finally, we provide some general recommendations for handling non-response due to refusals and we highlight the challenges in working with Demographic and Health Surveys and explore different approaches to statistical estimation in the presence of refusals. Our results show that variation in the estimated HIV prevalence across different estimators is due largely to those who already know their HIV test results. In the case of Malawi, variations in the prevalence estimates due to refusals for women are larger than those for men.

The majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted American first names. In this paper we study the economic determinants of name choice, by relating the propensity of immigrants to carry an American first name to the local concentration of their compatriots and local labor market conditions. We find that high concentrations of immigrants of a given nationality discouraged members of that nationality from taking American names, in particular for more recent arrivals. In contrast, labor market conditions for immigrants do not seem to be associated with more frequent name changes among immigrants.

The rise of the gig economy is rooted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. Unable to maintain steady employment, Americans sought out additional sources of income to supplement a variety of alternative working arrangements. More than a decade after its conception, the platform economy has now grown substantially and accounts for nearly 15 percent of employment numbers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). As independent contracting opportunities become more commonplace, the economy that envelops them continues to be driven by a demand for flexible work hours and convenience...

Increasingly, governments focus on skilled immigration not only to fill labour market gaps but also due to a perceived political preference for such migration. Across debates in major immigrant-receiving nations, we observe an assumption that the ‘skill’ in ‘skilled immigration’ is clearly definable and easily differentiated from ‘unskilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’ migrant labour. Academic research in industrial relations and economics provides a more complex reading of the concept of ‘skill’ by interrogating the ways in which skill is accumulated. This article reviews concepts of ‘skill’ embedded in skilled immigration policies in five major Western democratic jurisdictions. It demonstrates the plurality of approaches to defining ‘skill’ within political and policy debates in these countries, and links these back to the prevailing theoretical perspectives. The article argues that greater attention by policy-makers and scholars of skilled immigration to the theoretical assumptions underpinning their preferred models of skilled immigration would better reveal the gendered and racialised biases of existing approaches to skills definition.

This paper examines labor supply adjustment-both at the intensive and extensive margins-following financial market development. Specifically, we exploit the staggered passage of bank branching deregulation in the United State to study the impact of relaxing credit constraints on labor supply decisions. We find strong evidence that improvements in how credit markets function decrease weekly hours worked, and that the effect is most significant for the lower-middle (marginal) income group. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous responses across demo graphic groups (race and income). In contrast, we find little to no evidence that deregulation has a significant impact on the extensive margin of participation. (JEL J22, G21, G38, E21)

This article argues that black workers’ perceptions of racial discrimination derive not just from being in the minority, but also from their position in the organizational structure. Researchers have shown that black individuals encounter an enormous amount of racial discrimination in the workplace, including but not limited to exclusion from critical social networks, wage disparities, and hiring disadvantages. But fewer studies examine the extent to which black workers believe racial discrimination is a salient factor in their occupational mobility or the factors that might explain their divergent perceptions of racial discrimination. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with black medical doctors, nurses, and technicians in the healthcare industry, we show that black workers’ status within an organizational hierarchy fundamentally informs perceptions of the nature and type of workplace racial discrimination. These findings have implications for understanding how racial dynamics at work are linked to mental health, occupational satisfaction, and organizational change.

Homeownership has been a central part of community and wealth building strategies in the US, and prior research demonstrates that Post-Civil Rights Era immigrants have employed these strategies with remarkable success. However, research on immigrant homeownership does not differentiate that which is encumbered by mortgage debt and that which is ‘free and clear’ or unencumbered. This is an important distinction since wealth held in the form of encumbered home equity can be fleeting. I use US Census and American Community Survey data to chart progress toward unencumbered homeownership among immigrants born in the 1950s who immigrated to the US in the 1970s. Observing this cohort across a 25 year period (1990–2015), I uncover a robust pattern of unencumbered home equity accumulation as they approach their retirement ages. By the end of the period, this small cohort had amassed more than 66 billion dollars in unencumbered home equity, and some immigrant groups exhibited higher rates of free and clear homeownership than their US-born White counterparts. Other immigrant groups lagged in ways that cannot be explained by compositional differences between groups. I address the theoretical implications of these findings and offer suggestions for a new research agenda on immigrant advancement toward free and clear homeownership.

Federated learning (FL), as a type of collaborative machine learning framework, is capable of preserving private data from mobile terminals (MTs) while training the data into useful models. Nevertheless, from a viewpoint of information theory, it is still possible for a curious server to infer private information from the shared models uploaded by MTs. To address this problem, we first make use of the concept of local differential privacy (LDP), and propose a user-level differential privacy (UDP) algorithm by adding artificial noise to the shared models before uploading them to servers. According to our analysis, the UDP framework can realize (ϵi,δi)-LDP for the i-th MT with adjustable privacy protection levels by varying the variances of the artificial noise processes. We then derive a theoretical convergence upper-bound for the UDP algorithm. It reveals that there exists an optimal number of communication rounds to achieve the best learning performance. More importantly, we propose a communication rounds discounting (CRD) method. Compared with the heuristic search method, the proposed CRD method can achieve a much better trade-off between the computational complexity of searching and the convergence performance. Extensive experiments indicate that our UDP algorithm using the proposed CRD method can effectively improve both the training efficiency and model quality for the given privacy protection levels.

Objective: To estimate the motherhood wage penalty and explain its wide variation across the research literature. Background: Determining the size and understanding the cause of the motherhood wage penalty has important policy implications. If there is no practically significant motherhood wage penalty, then many of the popular explanations for the gender wage gap must be reassessed. If there is a significant motherhood penalty, its cause can help direct policy. Method: We conduct a systematic review and meta-regression analysis (MRA) of 49 studies and 1895 estimates of the motherhood wage penalty. Results: Meta-regression identifies 23 research characteristics associated with the reported penalty, including: the ways in which that wages are measured, selective reporting, the econometric methods employed, and the omission of relevant worker qualities from the wage equation. After controlling for multiple paths of heterogeneity, selection, misspecification biases, unobserved productivity effects, and selective reporting, our MRA identifies a small, but robust, motherhood wage penalty, mainly driven by a few countries: USA, UK, Germany, and Norway. Conclusion: We estimate that the motherhood wage penalty is about 4% ± 2%, per child, for US mothers. Our findings are most consistent with a perceived productivity effect or with discrimination.

In this paper, we present evidence from the Current Population Survey examining the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on parental status and gender inequalities in employment in the United States. We show that the drop in the employment rate in post-outbreak months was largely driven by mass layoffs and not by workers quitting their jobs. Results from fixed-effects regression models show a strong fatherhood premium in the likelihood of being laid off for post-outbreak months compared to mothers, men without children, and women without children. We also found that the “fatherhood premium” was higher among lower-educated and mid-educated workers. These findings show that gaps in layoff rates exacerbated pre-existing forms of parental status and gender inequality in employment. Possible mechanisms are discussed, but more work is needed to explain why employers were less likely to lay off fathers following the outbreak, and the short- and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in reinforcing parental status and gender inequality in employment in the United States.

The potential economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Philadelphia is only just beginning to take shape. Locally, some sectors are being hit harder than others—and among them are several in which the jobs of city residents are concentrated.

BACKGROUND Spatial population models are important to inform understanding of historical demographic development patterns and to project possible future changes, especially for use in anticipating environmental interactions. OBJECTIVE We document, calibrate, and evaluate a high-resolution gravity-based population downscaling model for each US state and interpret its historical urban and rural spatial population change patterns. METHODS We estimate two free parameters that govern the spatial population change pattern using the historical population grids of each state. We interpret the resulting parameters in light of the spatial development pattern they represent. We evaluate the model by comparing the resulting total population grid of each state in 2010 against its census-based grid. We also analyze the temporal stability of parameters across the 1990–2000 and 2000–2010 decades. RESULTS Our analysis indicates varying levels of performance across states and population types. While our results suggest a consolidated change pattern in urban population across states, rural population change patterns are diverse. We find urban parameters are more stable. CONCLUSIONS The model’s adaptability, performance, and interpretability indicate its potential for depicting historical state-level spatial population changes. It assigns these changes to different representative categories to assist interpretation.

Introduction Contextual factors representing chronic stressors, such as neighborhood crime characteristics, have been repeatedly linked to compromised mental and physical health, and may contribute to the pathologizing of normative/non-clinical experiences. However, the impact of such structural factors has seldom been incorporated in Clinical High Risk (CHR) for psychosis research. Understanding how context can influence the presence or severity of symptoms such as suspiciousness/paranoia may have important relevance for promoting valid and reliable assessment, as well as for understanding ways in which environment may be related to illness development and expression. Methods A total of 126 adolescents and young adults (nCHR = 63, ncontrol = 63) underwent clinical interviews for Clinical High-Risk syndromes. Neighborhood crime indices and socioeconomic status were calculated through geocoding and extracting of publicly available Census and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data. Analyses examined presence of associations between neighborhood crime indices, socioeconomic status, suspiciousness and total symptoms. Results Greater neighborhood crime was related to increased suspiciousness in CHR individuals, even after controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic status, r = 0.27, p = .03. Neighborhood crime was not related to total symptoms, and neither was neighborhood socioeconomic status. Discussion Results suggest neighborhood crime uniquely related to suspiciousness symptoms in CHR individuals, while this was not the case for healthy volunteers (HV). Future work will be critical for determining the extent to which assessors are pathologizing experiences that are normative for a particular context, or rather, if a stressful context is serving as a sufficient environmental stressor to unmask emerging psychosis.