The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program within the United States. TANF mandated 60-month lifetime time limits for federal cash assistance dollars. Because states reserve the right to set their own stricter or more generous time limits, the 60-month lifetime limit did not bind in all cases. In recent years, however, several states imposed TANF time limits for the first time or made existing time limits more stringent. Using administrative and survey data, I find that stricter time limits decrease annual TANF participation by 22 percent and annual transfer income by 6 percent. Consistent with binding TANF work requirements, widespread unemployment, and increases in employment among those on the welfare caseload, stricter time limits do not tend to increase employment or earnings among single mothers in states without generous TANF programs at baseline. Evidence suggests that macroeconomic conditions and the labor market potential of TANF recipients play large roles in determining labor-supply effects of decreased TANF generosity.

This paper examines inequality in both leisure and consumption over the past four decades. Using time use surveys stretching from 1975 to 2016, we estimate the distribution of leisure time conditional on hours worked and other individual level and family level characteristics. We show that these characteristics, especially when including work hours, explain most of the long run variation in leisure. We then use these estimates to predict the distribution of leisure using work hours and other characteristics in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, a survey that also provides detailed information on consumption. The advantage of this approach is that it gives us measures of consumption and leisure at the family level within a single data source. Combining consumption and leisure allows us to characterize more accurately changes in the distribution of well-being. We find that leisure time is highest for families at the bottom of the consumption distribution, and typically declines monotonically as consumption rises. However, the consumption-leisure gradient is small. We find noticeable differences across family types, with the gradient being largest for single parent families and single individuals and smallest for families with a head age 65 or older. The negative relationship between consumption and leisure appears strongest during the period around the Great Recession. We find that including both leisure and consumption, as opposed to just consumption, in a measure of economic well-being results in less inequality. The negative association between leisure and consumption is a sufficient condition for this result. However, the degree to which leisure inequality offsets consumption inequality depends on the valuation of leisure.

Prior literature has documented large and persistent employment effects in regions exposed to import competition, but non-lasting effects in locations receiving large immigrant waves. Import competition and immigration are comparable to the extent that imports are thought of as the labor embedded in imported goods. We explain this puzzle by arguing that a fundamental difference between trade and immigration is that whereas immigrants systematically enter metropolitan areas with high housing prices, import competition affects all kinds of local labor markets. We argue that when housing expenditure is decreasing as a share of income, internal migration is more responsive to local shocks in high-price locations. We provide evidence that, irrespective of the local shock, internal migration is indeed more responsive in high than in low housing price locations. Hence, conflicting findings in the literature reflect differences between the average local labor markets receiving each shock, rather than systematic differences in how local labor markets absorb those different shocks.

It is of importance to understand the long-run effect of immigration for efficient policy making, especially since the recent rise in immigration in the United States. The present study investigates the effect of historical immigration during the Age of Mass Migration on the support of the Republican party and the assimilation of recent foreign borns on the labor market. To identify the causal effect, we construct a "leave-out" version of the shift-share instrument and implement a two-stage least squares regression analysis. Then, we allow for a more flexible specification through instrumental forests. The forests show that the average conditional local average treatment effect of historical immigration is insignificant when nonlinearities in the data are accounted for. Potential effect modifiers are identified in a data-driven fashion. The effect of historical immigration is found to be significant for some subgroups in the sample. The results suggest a persistence of the effect of historical immigration through a two-sided assimilation process as well as through the establishment of migrant communities. Although immigrants appear to assimilate well within those communities, our findings might suggest an increased segmentation between natives and foreign borns. This has important implications for policy making.

In order to gain insights into how the effects of the uneven adoption of Medicaid expansion varies across the rural/urban spectrum and between racial/ethnic groups in the United States, this research used the fertility question in the 2011–2015 American Community Survey to link infants’ records to their mothers’ household health insurance status. This preliminary exploration of the Medicaid expansion used logistic regression to examine the probability that an infant will be born without health insurance coverage. Overall, the states that adopted Medicaid expansion improved the health insurance coverage for households with infants. However, rural households with infants report lower percentages of coverage than urban households with infants. Furthermore, the rural/urban gap in health insurance coverage is wider in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion. Additionally, Hispanic infants remain significantly less likely to have health insurance coverage compared to Non-Hispanic White infants. Understanding infant health insurance coverage across ethnic/racial groups and the rural/urban spectrum will become increasingly important as the U.S. population transitions to a minority-majority and also becomes more urban. Although not a perfect solution, our findings showed that the Medicaid expansion of health insurance coverage had a mainly overall positive effect on the percentage of U.S. households with infants who have health insurance coverage.

Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a “nuclear family” structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

This paper uses a difference-indifferences (DID) framework to estimate the impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) used to fight the 1918 influenza pandemic and control the resultant mortality in 43 U.S. cities. The results suggest that NPIs such as school closures and social distancing, as implemented in 1918, and when applied for a relatively long and sustained time, might have reduced individual and herd immunity and the population general health condition, thereby leading to a significantly higher number of deaths in subsequent years.

BACKGROUND: In the United States, nationwide estimates of public drinking water arsenic exposure are not readily available. We used the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Six-Year Review contaminant occurrence data set to estimate public water arsenic exposure. We compared community water system (CWS) arsenic concentrations during 2006–2008 vs. after 2009–2011, the initial monitoring period for compliance with the U.S. EPA’s 10 lg=L arsenic maximum contaminant level (MCL). OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to characterize potential inequalities in CWS arsenic exposure over time and across sociodemographic subgroups. METHODS: We estimated 3-y average arsenic concentrations for 36,406 CWSs (98%) and 2,740 counties (87%) and compared differences in means and quantiles of water arsenic (via quantile regression) between both 3-y periods for U.S. regions and sociodemographic subgroups. We assigned CWSs and counties MCL compliance categories (High if above the MCL; Low if below) for each 3-y period. RESULTS: From 2006–2008 to 2009–2011, mean and 95th percentile CWS arsenic (in micrograms per liter) declined by 10.3% (95% CI: 6.5%, 14.1%) and 11.5% (8.3%, 14.8%) nationwide, by 11.4% (4.7%, 18.1%) and 16.3% (8.1%, 24.5%) for the Southwest, and by 36.8% (7.4%, 66.1%) and 26.5% (12.1%, 40.8%) for New England, respectively. CWSs in the High/High compliance category (not MCL compliant) were more likely in the Southwest (61.1%), served by groundwater (94.7%), serving smaller populations (mean 1,102 persons), and serving Hispanic communities (38.3%). DISCUSSION: Larger absolute declines in CWS arsenic concentrations at higher water arsenic quantiles indicate declines are related to MCL implementation. CWSs reliant on groundwater, serving smaller populations, located in the Southwest, and serving Hispanic communities were more likely to continue exceeding the arsenic MCL, raising environmental justice concerns. These estimates of public drinking water arsenic exposure can enable further surveillance and epidemiologic research, including assessing whether differential declines in water arsenic exposure resulted in differential declines in arsenic-associated disease.

Based on data from the 1980s, Sassen’s influential book ‘The Global City’ interrogated how changes in the occupational structure affect socio-economic residential segregation in global cities. Here, using data for New York City, London and Tokyo, we reframe and answer this question for recent decades. Our analysis shows an increase in the share of high-income occupations, accompanied by a fall in low-income occupations in all three cities, providing strong evidence for a consistent trend of professionalization of the workforce. Segregation was highest in New York and lowest in Tokyo. In New York and London, individuals in high-income occupations are concentrating in the city centre, while low-income occupations are pushed to urban peripheries. Professionalization of the workforce is accompanied by reduced levels of segregation by income, and two ongoing megatrends in urban change: gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods and suburbanization of poverty, with larger changes in the social geography than in levels of segregation.

An increasing amount of users' sensitive information is now being collected for analytics purposes. To protect users' privacy, differential privacy has been widely studied in the literature. Specifically, a differentially private algorithm adds noise to the true answer of a query to generate a noisy response. As a result, the information about the dataset leaked by the noisy output is bounded by the privacy parameter. Oftentimes, a dataset needs to be used for answering multiple queries (e.g., for multiple analytics tasks), so the level of privacy protection may degrade as more queries are answered. Thus, it is crucial to keep track of the privacy spending which should not exceed the given privacy budget. Moreover, if a query has been answered before and is asked again on the same dataset, we may reuse the previous noisy response for the current query to save the privacy cost. In view of the above, we design and implement a blockchain-based system for tracking and saving differential-privacy cost. Blockchain provides a distributed immutable ledger that records each query's type, the noisy response used to answer each query, the associated noise level added to the true query result, and the remaining privacy budget in our system. Furthermore, since the blockchain records the noisy response used to answer each query, we also design an algorithm to reuse previous noisy response if the same query is asked repeatedly. Specifically, considering that different requests of the same query may have different privacy requirements, our algorithm (via a rigorous proof) is able to set the optimal reuse fraction of the old noisy response and add new noise (if necessary) to minimize the accumulated privacy cost. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the privacy cost significantly without compromising data accuracy.

The long-term care (LTC) sector will soon face a shortage of care workers. The consequences are potentially dramatic, urging the need to design policies aiming at reducing the turnover rate of LTC workers. Immigrant workers are an important part of the LTC workforce. Pooling data from the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) for years 2003–2019, we compare US-born and immigrant LTC workers’ propensity to stay in the LTC workforce over one year. We distinguish two categories of LTC workers: personal care workers and nurses. We show that for both categories, naturalized citizens, legal noncitizen immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants have a higher probability of staying in the LTC workforce compared to US-born citizens. We provide two potential explanations: we show that immigrant personal care workers are more likely to report a better health, and that immigrant nurses have a lower wage variation sensitivity. Our results also suggest that wage increases are likely to be associated with higher retention rates in the profession.

Background The suppression of viremia among persons with HIV (PWH) using antiretroviral therapy has been hypothesized to reduce HIV incidence at the population level. We investigated the impact of state level viral suppression among PWH in the United States on estimated HIV incidence between 2010 and 2015. Methods Viral suppression data and HIV incidence estimates from the National HIV Surveillance System were available from 29 states and the District of Columbia. We assumed a one year delay for viral suppression to impact incidence. Poisson regression models were used to calculate the estimated annual percent change (EAPC) in incidence rate. We employed a multivariable mixed-effects Poisson regression model to assess the effects of state level race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, percent men who have sex with men (MSM) and hepatitis C virus prevalence as a proxy for injection drug use on HIV incidence. Findings Fitted HIV incidence for 30 jurisdictions declined from 11.5 in 2010 to 10.0 per 100,000 population by 2015 corresponding with an EAPC of -2.67 (95% confidence interval [95%CI] -2.95, -2.38). Southern states experienced the highest estimated incidence by far throughout this period but upon adjustment for viral suppression and demographics there was a 36% lower incidence rate than Northeast states (adjusted rate ratio [aRR] 0.64; 95%CI 0.42, 0.99). For every 10 percentage point (pp) increase in viral suppression there was an adjusted 4% decline in HIV incidence rate in the subsequent year (aRR 0.96; 95%CI 0.93, 0.99). While controlling for viral suppression, HIV incidence rate increased by 42% (aRR 1.42 95%CI 1.31, 1.54) for every 5 pp increase in percent Black race and by 27% (aRR 1.27 95%CI 1.10, 1.48) for every 1 pp increase in percent MSM in states. Interpretation A decline in estimated HIV incidence from 2010 to 2015 was associated with increasing viral suppression in the United States. Race and sexual orientation were important HIV acquisition risk factors.

As of August 24, 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had resulted in the deaths of approximately 2,500 Virginians. The 2020 hurricane season began June 1 and is considered to be extremely active. The threat of a hurricane increases the complexity of risk management decisions related to the pandemic—and the effects of the pandemic increase the complexity of planning for a hurricane. In this report, we study the implications that a hurricane during the COVID-19 pandemic would have for the Commonwealth of Virginia. This analysis should help inform advance planning for the hurricane season in general and could be used in response to a specific storm with an estimated track through Virginia. We focus on the combined impacts of COVID-19 and a hurricane on morbidity and mortality; we do not examine other effects, such as effects on infrastructure, social networks, and the economy. A conceptual framework for assessing risk is foundational for developing a model of the risks associated with the intersection of hurricanes and COVID-19. We adopt the Department of Homeland Security Risk Lexicon definition of risk as “potential for an adverse outcome assessed as a function of threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences associated with an incident, event, or occurrence” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Risk Steering Committee, 2010). Using this definition, we separate risk into the categories of threat, vulnerability, and consequence, as seen in Figure S.1. In this report, we examine two threats: a hurricane and COVID-19. The vulnerability involved is the susceptibility to these threats and can be thought of in terms of storm, health, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Storm vulnerability is related to parts of the physical environment that would be adversely affected by a hurricane exposure, such as homes in a storm surge area, homes without floodproofing, and areas where roads are likely to be flooded. Health vulnerability is related to characteristics that make a person more susceptible to health threats, such as age and comorbidities. Socioeconomic vulnerability includes a lack of resources to evacuate in case of inclement weather; limited access to consistent, high-quality health care; and the inability to access social services because of barriers associated with language or other characteristics. In this report, we focus on how these vulnerabilities affect consequences: hurricaneassociated COVID-19 spread, death from COVID-19 or a hurricane, and other health and safety effects.

How many languages are spoken at LaGuardia? 100? 150? You may have heard figures like these thrown around, but this question is not so easy to answer. LaGuardia Community College’s Institutional Profile 2019 (Lerer, 2019) shows that our students spoke 106 different languages as of 2014 and 98 different languages in 2018. The American Community Survey, a sampled version of the U.S. Census administered every year, asks questions about language in their surveys and their latest data in 2019 indicate that there are over 80 languages and language groups (such as Niger-Congo languages) in the borough of Queens1 . Both data sets include largely the same set of major languages in Queens such as Spanish (495,560 or 22.3% according to ACS) , Chinese (142,416 / 6.1%), Korean (39,821 / 2.1%), Bengali (74,462 / 2.7%), Filipino and Tagalog (38,826 / 1.4%), and Russian (34,413 / 1.5%). Just to illustrate this point, I have shown the top 30 languages in Queens (with the ACS data through IPUMS (Ruggles et al., 2018)) and LaGuardia Community College (with the Institutional Research data) in Tables 1 and 2.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited interest in responses to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, the last comparable U.S. public health emergency. During both pandemics, many state and local governments made the controversial decision to close schools. We study the short-and long-run effects of 1918-19 pandemic-related school closures on children. We find precise null effects of school closures in 1918 on school attendance in 1919-20 using newly collected data on the exact timing of school closures for 168 cities in 1918-19. Linking affected children to their adult outcomes in the 1940 census, we also find precise null effects of school closures on adult educational attainment, wage income, non-wage income, and hours worked in 1940. Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.

With about a month to go before the first caucuses and primaries, the issue of economic inequality and how to tackle it remains a focal point in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and it will likely continue to be a central issue in the general election. About six-in-ten U.S. adults say there’s too much economic inequality in the country these days, and among that group, most say addressing it requires significant changes to the country’s economic system, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Preschool programs in the United States have expanded dramatically in recent decades. There has been significant scholarly attention to the implications of this for inequalities in children's educational outcomes, but less attention to the implications for the work-family lives of parents. Drawing on data from 2001 to 2017 American Community Surveys, this paper examines how children's preschool enrollment is associated with maternal employment, with particular attention to differences by mothers' race, ethnicity, and nativity. Findings document unequal access to preschool programs across groups but also different patterns of association between children's preschool enrollment and maternal employment. Immigrant mothers are doubly disadvantaged compared to their U.S.-born counterparts: Children are less likely to attend preschool, and when they do attend, this does little to facilitate maternal employment. The paper's conclusion addresses limitations of existing preschool programs for work-family reconciliation, but also emphasizes that limitations are more severe for some families than others.

This year marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, which provided American women a constitutional guarantee to the franchise. We assemble data from a variety of sources to document and explore trends in women’s political participation, issue preferences, and partisanship since that time. We show that in the early years following enfranchisement, women voted at much lower rates than men and held distinct issue preferences, despite splitting their votes across parties similarly to men. But by the dawn of the 21st century, women not only voted more than men, but also voted differently, systematically favoring the Democratic party. We find that the rise in women’s relative voter turnout largely reflects cross-cohort changes in voter participation and coincided with increasing rates of high school completion. By contrast, women’s relative shift toward the Democratic party permeates all cohorts and appears to owe more to changes in how parties have defined themselves than to changes in issue preferences. The findings suggest that a confluence of factors have led to the unique place women currently occupy in the American electorate, one where they are arguably capable of exerting more political influence than ever before.

In this paper, we propose a method for constructing an occupation-based socioeconomic index that can easily incorporate occupational structure changes. The resulting index is the education percentile rank of an occupation for a given cohort, based on contemporaneous information pertaining to education composition and the number of workers at the occupation level. An occupation may experience an increase or decrease in its ranking when either education or size of relevant occupations change. The method is flexible in dealing with changes in occupation and education measurements over time. Applying the method to U.S. history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, we derive the index using the IPUMS U.S. Census microdata from 1850 to 2000 and the American Community Surveys (ACS) from 2001 to 2018. Compared to previous occupational measures, this new measure takes into account occupational status evolvement caused by long-term secular changes in occupational distributions and education composition. The resulting percentile rank measure can be easily merged with social surveys and administrative data that include occupational measures based on the U.S. Census occupation codes and crosswalks.

The impact of legal status on economic outcomes has been well documented in the literature with most research focused on labor market outcomes such as wages and occupational mobility. In this paper, I utilize the exogenous variation created the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 to estimate the effect of amnesty polices on homeownership among undocumented immigrants. Using a regression discontinuity framework, the results suggest that the IRCA increased homeownership rates of eligible immigrants by around 4 percentage points relative to ineligible immigrants. Moreover, an extension to the main analysis suggests that immigrants ineligible for the IRCA adjusted their household formation by increasing the rates of coresidency. (JEL J61, R23, R31)