Social and economic mobility has long been the cornerstone of American economic democracy - “The American Dream.” Although many suspect mobility in the U.S. is historically low, there are little data to test whether social mobility is low or has, indeed, declined. This Roundtable will present four data projects that create data to examine the changes in socio-economic mobility over time and space. Participants in this Roundtable will demonstrate the importance of their data in evaluating policies that impact socio-economic mobility over time and changes in the well-being of American families. Current and previous APPAM Presidents have stressed that the big data revolution – facilitating analysis of large-scale data sets drawn from administrative records or linked records from multiple sources -- will form the future of evidence-based policymaking. The creation of these integrated data sources will also provide essential input for the new Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. The purpose of the Commission is to evaluate survey and administrative sources to “...facilitate program evaluation, continuous improvement, policy-relevant research, and cost-benefit analyses by qualified researchers and institutions.” The four data projects include: The American Opportunity Study (AOS), which will locate individual records in the 1990 long form census and then track the same individuals into the 2000-2010 decennial censuses, the American Community Surveys (ACS), and ultimately future decennial censuses and American Community Surveys. The Census Bureau’s CLIP (Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project), which creates a longitudinal data set by linking the 2000 and 2010 Census to later ACS data, other survey data, and administrative data, with plans to link the 1940 Census. The Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database (LIFE-M), which uses vital records linked to Census data to describe the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic inequality for the first two thirds of the 20th century (before the PSID begins). The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has been the cornerstone survey used to evaluate socio-economic mobility (using income, earnings, education, or occupation), following the same families since 1968, their offspring and split-offs. The Roundtable consists of Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and one of the founders of the AOS; Martha Bailey, Associate Professor of Economics and Research Associate Professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and PI for LIFE-M; Amy O’Hara, Chief of the Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications at the US Census Bureau; David Johnson, the Deputy Director of the PSID and Research Professor at the University of Michigan. Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at Chicago Harris School, who has been actively involved in the development of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, will moderate the session. Together, these innovative data products, along with survey data, will provide researchers and policy makers a resource of unparalleled statistical power; an opportunity for causal research on an exceptional scale; and a source of data for a wide variety of problems unprecedented in the social and behavioral sciences.

As part of the 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 asking one or two questions about all activities included in a limited number of time diary surveys conducted since the 1980s, the 2010 module of the American Time Use Survey asked six emotion questions about three activities, as first proposed by Kahneman and Krueger. The perception questions captured how happy, meaningful, sad, tired, stressed, or in pain respondents felt on a 7-point scale. To evaluate this approach, this 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 .68 and .59 and two respondent-level components with Cronbachs alphas of .74 and .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. The average well-being score also significantly predicted better health. Finally, we examined the coefficients of variation to assess the variability in the well-being measures across activities. Implications of the subjective well-being measures and limitations of this study were discussed.

Job loss is an ever-present feature of North American labor markets. Each year, employers eliminate positions, close down branches, or even go out of business as part of routine business decisions. In recent decades, even in times of economic expansion rates of job loss have persisted across a wide range of demographic and labor market groups. This dissertation examines the fluctuations in life people face after losing a job in Canada and the United States. In the first paper I study the relationship between job loss and geographic mobility in Canada. Moving is one way individuals may respond to being laid off, either to relocate to cheaper housing or in search of work. Using data from the 1996-2010 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, I find that job loss is associated with both short-distance residential mobility and long-distance migration, and triggers selective neighborhood mobility. The findings establish job loss as a key life course transition motivating residential mobility and long-distance migration in Canada, and as an event that initiates entry into high poverty neighborhoods. The second paper explores to what extent job loss triggers geographic mobility in the United States in the period leading up to the Great Recession. Drawing on geocoded data from the 2003- 2007 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find that being laid off increases the likelihood of both short- and long-distance moves. Job loss also interrupts the housing career: individuals who lose a job are more than twice as likely as people who remain stably employed to transition from owning to renting a home. For those who began as renters, job loss is associated with a decreased likelihood of making a move into homeownership. Finally, being laid off is associated with selection into a high-poverty census tract for those who lived in a lower poverty tract in the previous wave. The third and final paper examines the short-term income trajectories of displaced workers in the U.S. and Canada. Using data from the 1996-2012 U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation and Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics I assess to what extent displaced workers experience changes in four important measures of financial well-being: earnings, individual income, pre-tax and transfer household income, and after-tax and transfer household income. Comparing these income sources elucidates the role of labor markets, families, and social safety net programs in determining income mobility following job loss. Results show that in both countries displaced workers experience earnings losses. I further find that total household income falls following displacement, but this deterioration is mitigated by receipt of transfer payments. While the post-tax and transfer income losses in the two countries are similar, the welfare state plays a larger role of replacing income in Canada, as individuals experience larger earnings losses. Taken together, this research elucidates the social and economic consequences of job loss in North America. The first two papers provide novel evidence on the range of geographic mobility people undertake following a job loss by considering not only long-distance migration but also short-distance residential mobility and the outcomes of moves, including exposure to neighborhood poverty and transitions in homeownership. The results indicate that many moves are undertaken locally and often involve losing out on neighborhood quality or homeownership, which may ultimately compound the financial hardships associated with job loss. The third paper is one of the first to evaluate the economic consequences of job displacement, specifically, in comparative perspective. In doing so, I demonstrate how national institutions shape the experience of job loss.

Royuela V. and Garcia G. A. Economic and social convergence in Colombia, Regional Studies. Gross domestic product (GDP) has usually been used as a proxy for human well-being. Nevertheless, other social aspects should also be considered, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational enrolment and crime issues. This paper investigates economic and social convergence between regions in Colombia in the period 1975-2005. The main results confirm that there is convergence in Colombia in key social variables, although not in the classic economic variable, GDP per capita. It is also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors, while isolation condemns regions to non-convergence

Recent engagements in Iraq (OIF) and Afghanistan (OEF) raise questions about impacts on service members of overseas deployment. The 2010 National Survey of Veterans asked a broad cross section of veterans about deployment to OEF/OIF and combat exposure. Analysis of these data suggests that impacts of deployment and combat on the current socioeconomic well-being of OEF/OIF veterans may be small, but combat appears to reduce self-reported health and other nonpecuniary indicators. Among older cohorts, with clearer sorting into treatment and control groups, patterns are similar, consistent with a system that compensates for lost earnings but not necessarily other trauma.

The question of this study concerns the potential negative effect of premature deindustrialization on basic indicators of well-being and on possible mitigations of that negative effect either due to policy interventions or to generation of other types of employment. The central findings of this study are, first, that there is evidence on both a global and individual country case level for a negative effect from premature deindustrialization on multidimensional household well-being, and second, that while increased social investment has likely made the loss of industrial employment generation less damaging, it has thus far only been a partial solution, and a return to industrial employment generation would improve lives beyond what increased social provisioning has accomplished.

Although the consequences of the Great Recession are extensively discussed in previous research, three critical issue need to be addressed in order to develop a full portrait of the economic experiences of children during this period. First, given the changing immigrant composition of the US child population, new studies are needed for examining the implications of immigrant status for exposure to child poverty during the recession. Second, it is important to understand how traditional patterns of racial inequality among were transformed during the years of the recession. Finally, it is not clear whether recession-related changes in socioeconomic inequalities continued to have implications for child well-being in the post-recession period. Results from this analysis indicate that the adverse effects of the recession were most intense in states with significant changes in their populations of Black and Latino immigrant children. The results further show that declines in parental work opportunities were more consequential for poverty among Whites and Asians. The analysis also finds differential implications of family contexts for child poverty among Black immigrant and natives during the recession. Finally, the results indicate that increases in racial child poverty disparities during the recession did not disappear in the years following the downturn.

Custody laws governing living arrangements for children following their parents’ divorce have changed dramatically since the 1970s. Traditionally, one parent—usually the mother—was assigned sole custody of the child. Today, many divorced parents continue to share parental rights and responsibilities through joint custody arrangements. While joint custody laws have improved the situation of divorced fathers, recent empirical research has documented intended and unintended consequences of joint custody laws for families in such areas as family formation, labor force participation, suicide, domestic violence, and child outcomes.

+ Older workers typically experience longer bouts of unemployment than their younger counterparts. + Once among the ranks of the long-term unemployed, the chances a worker will return to work have been slim. + Prolonged unemployment has obvious consequences for current financial well-being, but its impact can extend well into the retirement years.

How do emotions like happiness, pain, stress, sadness, and fatigue vary during travel and by travel mode? Understanding the relationship between how we travel and how we feel offers insight into ways of improving existing transportation services, prioritizing investments, and theorizing and modeling the costs and benefits of travel. Drawing on the American Time Use Surveys well-being module, which surveyed over 13,000 respondents about mood during randomly selected activities, we address these questions using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effects panel regression. Controlling for demographics and other individual-specific attributes, we find that, contrary to the common perception that travel is an onerous, derived demand, mood is generally no worse during travel than on average. However, compared to other influences, travel has only a small total impact on how we feel. The estimated relationship between mood and mode tends to be weak and often not statistically significant. Nevertheless, we find that bicyclists have the most positive affect. Next happiest are car passengers, and then car drivers, though when controlling for the pleasure typically derived from interacting with others, drivers are at least as happy as passengers. Bus and train riders experience the most negative emotions, though a small part of this can be attributed to the fact that transit is disproportionately used for the unloved work trip. Our findings suggest that bicycle use may have benefits beyond the typically cited health and transportation ones, and that improving transit riders emotional experience may be as important as improving traditional service features such as headways and travel speeds. Our findings are ambiguous as to whether the joy of driving will limit the appeal of autonomous vehicles.

Are longer trips more strenuous or unpleasant than shorter ones? This paper examines this question using data from the American Time Use Surveys well-being module, which queried individuals about the extent to which they felt happiness, pain, sadness, stress, and fatigue during three randomly selected daily activities. Over 22,000 instances of individuals traveling are observed, including their trip duration, mode, purpose, and demographic and geographic information. Trip duration is regressed on each emotion, plus a constructed, composite mood variable. Overall, the relationship between trip duration and traveler mood is not strong, which is unsurprising given prior findings on the limited impact of activities on mood. However, there is a statistically significant and negative association between trip duration and mood, primarily because of rising stress, fatigue and sadness on long trips. This is particularly true for drivers, while negative emotions do not rise with increasing trip duration for auto passengers. This suggests strain rises as the result of operating the vehicle for long periods, not traveling in an auto per se. Long bicycle trips are more painful than shorter ones, probably due to the physical demands of the mode, and long train trips are associated with less sadness. For commutes, long trips significantly degrade the mood of both drivers and bus riders, in the latter case probably due to vehicle crowding and standing. The findings imply that reducing the duration of trips, for example through land use policies that reduce trip distances, or congestion reduction, would have emotional benefits. Policies to promote ridesharing instead of solo driving for long trips may increase traveler mood in the aggregate. Improving bus service or substituting rail for bus for long commuting trips may also improve traveler mood.

Based on detailed occupation titles and making use of measures that do not require pairwise comparisons among demographic groups, this paper shows that the occupational segregation of Black women declined dramatically in 1940-1980, decreased slightly in 1980-2000, and remained stagnant in 2000-2010. An important contribution of this paper is the quantification of the well-being losses that these women derive from their occupational sorting. The segregation reduction was indeed accompanied by well-being improvements, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Regarding the role that education has played, this study highlights that, only from 1990 onward, Black women with either some college or university degrees had lower segregation (as compared with their peers) than those with lower education. Nevertheless, the well-being loss that Black women with university degrees derived in 2010 for being segregated from their peers in education was not too different from that of Black women with lower education.

Paradoxically, men report better health and quality of life than women, but men experience higher mortality rates than women at most ages. One conclusion from these findings is that men have been selected to disregard signs of ill health, or even to deceive themselves about their health, to their detriment because presenting themselves as healthy has fitness benefits. We hypothesize that men have been sexually selected to present themselves to women as healthy but that the cost of not attending to their minor health problems results in earlier mortality than women. We present a review of the human and primate literature that supports health selection theory, the hypothesis that females have preferentially selected males who present themselves as healthy.

I estimate the effects of college loan and subsidy eligibility on college attendance and later life outcomes. I use seven datasets and a Fixed Effects Instrumental Variables approach based on large policy changes in Guaranteed Student Loans, Pell Grants, and Social Security Student Benefits. I find that unsubsidized loan eligibility shifted attendance towards four-year colleges and private colleges, but did not increase overall college attendance or later life earnings. I find a significant effect of subsidy eligibility on college attendance, a smaller significant effect on eventual college completion, but no effect on later life earnings, job satisfaction, or well-being. I also do not find any evidence of external benefits, such as reduced criminal behavior or increased civic engagement. Using a sufficient statistic approach as well as a direct approach, I conclude that the subsidy programs did not increase social welfare. Overall, these results suggest that college credit constraints explain very little of the variation in college attainment and later life outcomes.

The latest U.S. economic recession, commonly referred to as the Great Recession, has had a far-reaching impact, but its effects may be disproportionately experienced by working-age people with disa...

The first substantial waves of voluntary migration from Africa arrived in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The largest number of them hailed from Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa. Highly select in their educational aspirations and achievements, many of them settled and started families. By 2010, their U.S.-born children had begun to reach adulthood, offering us a first look at intergenerational mobility among voluntary migrants from Africa. The racial diversity in this group of immigrants allows us to gauge the impact of racial stratification on immigrant adaptation. 1990 U.S. census and 20082012 American Community Survey data are used to uncover patterns of affluence and poverty among young Egyptian, Ethiopian, Nigerian, and South African immigrants in 1990 and U.S.-born men and women of those ancestries in 20082012. White and Black cohorts of U.S. birth and stock serve as additional referents. I find that women of the African second generation have advanced faster than their male counterparts and that racial group membership is at least predictive of financial well-being as specific national origins, with Black Africans, and Ethiopians in particular, showing pronounced disadvantages compared with White Africans in both the immigrant and second generations.

Historically, the U.S. government has passed legislation to mitigate discrimination and unequal access to education, employment, housing, and wealth for minorities. Federal programs such as affirmative action, school desegregation, and the Fair Housing Act were created in an effort to eliminate unequal access and allow minorities the opportunity to improve their socio-economic well-being. In this dissertation, I address a pair of important public policy questions. First, what defines “progress” in terms of how we as a society view policies such as affirmative action, which were intended to address the social, economic, and political equality of minorities compared to whites? Second, how do we measure progress? This analysis sets out to frame this debate by talking about outcomes. How much do people succeed when they come out the other end? Utilizing common measures of inequality, I examined the extent to which whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and all other races have become more alike in their incomes, education, and occupations using census data from 1980 to 2010. Seven metropolitan areas were selected based on differences in their racial composition, residential segregation, and social inequality. There will be two main contributions from this study. First, I will establish a common metric for measuring how equal minorities and whites have become. Second, I will assess the extent to which the income, education, and job profiles of people from different races have become more or less alike over a 30-year span. The research found significant differences between blacks, Hispanics and all other races compared to whites in the distributions of income, education, and jobs. Asians only differed significantly from whites on education. Race, time, and metropolitan region were significantly related to the variation in incomes, education, and job over three decades. Future research should examine these variables for gender, and across all major metropolitan areas. In the meantime, policy makers should begin to evaluate socio-economic outcomes of well-being to measure progress for groups that have faced historical discrimination.

Hispanic students residing in the United States have historically been the lowestachieving ethnic group in public schools and have a high dropout rate. A stark comparison to those statistics can be found within the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools in San Antonio, Texas, which have a majority Hispanic student population that is thriving academically and advancing to college. Using the Search Institutes positive youth development theory, the purpose of this study was to (a) quantitatively explore how school climate moderates the relationship between Hispanic student acquisition of developmental assets and academic success at KIPP charter schools from the perspective of both students and staff members and (b) identify the catalysts for growth and academic success. The Search Institute surveys, Creating a Great Place to Learn and the Developmental Assets Profile, were used to collect data from 78 students (Grades 68) and 45 staff members at KIPP Aspire and Camino. A series of multiple regression analyses were conducted using Andrew F. Hayess PROCESS, a tool within SPSS, to explore moderation effects. School climates organizational attributes dimension had a significant moderation interaction between developmental assets (empowerment, boundaries and expectations, constructive use of time, positive values, and social competencies) and academic success (GPA). School climates relationships dimension significantly moderated (a) academic success and (b) social competencies, a developmental asset. Implications for positive social change include shaping future intervention programs and school initiatives to build positive school climates, increase academic and social well-being, and help Hispanic students achieve success in school.

This paper aims at quantifying the welfare loss that a society can experience due to the segregation of the demographic groups that comprise it. In aggregating the well-being losses (gains) of the groups derived for being concentrated in low-status (high-status) organizational units, this paper embraces the distributive approach adopted in the literature on economic deprivation and poverty. In addition to developing several measures, this paper explores the welfare losses that the United States has experienced over the last decades due to occupational segregation by both gender and race/ethnicity. The analysis is undertaken at both a national and a regional level since occupational segregation along these lines is far from been a homogenous phenomenon across the country.