The COVID-19 pandemic upended California’s economy. The shutdown of most in-person economic activity in spring 2020 led to a dramatic spike in unemployment—especially in hard-hit industries like leisure, hospitality, and personal services. Nine months later, the labor market has improved somewhat but remains precarious, with low-income workers bearing the brunt of the fallout. As a result, the current crisis threatens to reinforce existing inequities and deepen the state’s longstanding economic divide. In this report, we look at the effects of the current downturn on California’s labor market in the context of growing income inequality. We also examine the policy levers that could help promote an equitable recovery and address the needs of the most affected workers and regions. Past recessions have exacerbated income inequality in California. Income inequality has risen substantially in the past several decades, with relatively little progress over the long term for the lowest-income families. Past recessions have tended to worsen income gaps, as lowincome families were harder hit and their earnings were slower to recover. The effects of the current recession are concentrated among lowincome workers, African Americans, Latinos, and women. While no demographic group has been spared, larger increases in un- and underemployment for low-income, African American, and Latino families are likely to worsen preexisting disparities in income and economic opportunity. Women have also been disproportionately affected, jeopardizing long-term gains in their labor force participation. Many workers, especially in inland California, were already struggling before the pandemic. Low-income families in many parts of the state had only just recovered—or had not yet recovered—from the Great Recession when the pandemic began. High-income families across the state had returned to prerecession income levels. There were only two regions—the Bay Area and Los Angeles County—where families at all income levels had experienced two years of full recovery from the Great Recession before the pandemic. Policy interventions can improve economic opportunity, and Californians support a state role in these efforts. State policymakers will inevitably be limited by the level of federal support, but they still have many options available to promote an equitable recovery. While no policy is without cost, surveys indicate robust support among Californians for state government’s role in reducing poverty and narrowing the divide between the haves and have-nots. California is likely to face heightened fiscal constraints for some time, and substantially improving opportunity and reducing inequality would require equally substantial public investments. To deploy state funds most effectively, policy responses must consider how to better target both stimulus and stabilization efforts toward the most affected workers, businesses, and regions. Second, investments need to account for the evolving future of work, including structural changes like a shift toward remote work. Third, the state should leverage financial resources and partnerships to expand investments in long-term opportunity through policies such as dependent care, early childhood interventions, higher education, and workforce training. Finally, barriers to opportunity go beyond income and drive disparities in health, education, and housing across race and region; identifying and proactively addressing these barriers are necessary to ensure the state’s economic vitality now and in the future. Since the full effects of the crisis are yet unknown, policymakers will need to continuously reexamine their priorities and options as our understanding evolves. Despite this uncertainty, ensuring the promise of the California dream is not a new challenge—though maintaining this promise will require a renewed policy commitment.

The co-occurrence of different forms of malnutrition in young children is known to carry differential risks of morbity and mortality. Despite this, there are few, if any, systematic analyses of the prevalence of multiple anthropometric failures (or deficits) in young children under 5. This paper presents the results of the first such an analysis done on data from one of the poorest geographic regions of the world – West and Central Africa. Using data from the demographic and health surveys (DHS) and UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the paper details the prevalence and patterning of child malnutrition using a combination of conventional measures and the Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) for the period 1990–2015. It shows the advantages of the CIAF indicator for gauging the full extent of malnutrition and the ability of an indicator of ‘Multiple Malnutrition’ to identify children under 5 with higher risk of mortality. It also shows how relatively little progress has been made in reducing the extent of malnutrition and emphasises the importance of tracking progress by looking at both rates and total number of affected children. Malnutrition across the region remains strongly associated with household wealth and education. Poorer, rural households are much more likely to experience malnutition, but the widespread prevalence of poor living conditions in urban areas has the potential to undermine any gains made in reducing malnutrition.

This report focuses on the health and well-being of Illinois children, as well as disparities in the social determinants of health that have historically contributed to racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes. The main argument of the report is that there are significant racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic indicators that contribute to health inequalities among different groups of Illinois children.

Immigrants’ social networks exert considerable influence over their labor market opportunities and yet the pre-sorting of co-nationals by ability and across space, endures as a key challenge for empiricists attempting to establish causal network effects. To surmount this issue, we leverage the chaotic dispersal of Vietnamese refugees across the U.S. in 1975, which was demonstrably exogenous in both initial network size and quality, in tandem with an absence of pre-existing networks of co-nationals, to causally identify the effects of network size and network quality on refugees’: occupational outcomes, skill intensity and skill upgrading. Our administrative data provide refugee’s precise initial locations and pre-placement characteristics in Vietnam, which we uniquely employ as additional controls, as well as longitudinal information about their locations and occupations six years hence. We construct instruments from the initial quasi-random refugee allocations of network size and quality and leverage refugees’ geo-locations to insulate our results from the Reflection Problem. Overall, network quality is a far more important determinant of refugees’ labor market outcomes when compared to network size, one interpretation of which is that the type of referrals network members receive are more important than the overall number of referrals. Blue-collar networks: increase the probability of refugees’ working in blue-collar jobs, draw additional workers into more manual and less complex intensive employment and serve to up-skill individuals along the manual skill dimension. Given the protracted circumstances under which the Viet Kieu entered the U.S., the composition of their networks played a pivotal role in their ultimate success.

Using a nationally representative dataset, this paper examines the nonprofit/for-profit difference in the gender pay gap specifically within the human services field. This industry-specific analysis is necessary because nonprofit organizations are concentrated in these fields. Unlike the conventional finding (based on economy-wide analyses) that the gender pay gap is smaller in nonprofits, this study does not find a significant nonprofit/for-profit difference in the gender pay gap within the human services. In addition, it examines the nonprofit pay differential for both female and male human services workers relative to their for-profit counterparts and finds an overall wage premium for nonprofit men.

Does trade with immigrants’ country of origin generate returns to countryspecific knowledge and skills that they bring to the destination? I examine this question in the context of US trade with Mexico. Using NAFTA as a shock, I show that trade intensification with Mexico strongly and positively affects wages, occupational upgrading and inter-industry sorting of Mexican descendants in the US, specifically those employed in managerial occupations. The results suggest complementarity between origin- and destination-specific skills and knowledge, as the benefits of trade are mostly accrued to the US-born Mexican descendants.

This paper builds on Padilla and Cachanosky (2018) and examines if immigrants' educational attainments matter, particularly for immigrants with low educational attainments, when it comes to test the impact immigrants have on the economic freedom of the US states. Except in the area of government transfers and subsidies, we don't find any evidence to support such hypothesis. In addition, our results indicate that the economic significance associated with immigrants without a high school diploma's negative impact on economic freedom score for the area of government transfers and subsidies is likely trivial. Our results are robust to various specifications. (JEL F22, H70, O43) This paper builds on Padilla and Cachanosky (2018) and examines if immigrants' educational attainments matter, particularly for immigrants with low educational attainments, when it comes to test the impact immigrants have on the economic freedom of the US states. Except in the area of government transfers and subsidies, we don't find any evidence to support such hypothesis. In addition, our results indicate that the economic significance associated with immigrants without a high school diploma's negative impact on economic freedom score for the area of government transfers and subsidies is likely trivial. Our results are robust to various specifications. (JEL F22, H70, O43)

Background: The trend of increasing total and out-of-pocket expenditure among patients with diabetes mellitus represents a risk of financial hardship for Americans and a threat to medical and nonmedical needs. We aimed to describe the national scope and associated tradeoffs of financial hardship from medical bills among nonelderly individuals with diabetes mellitus. Methods and Results: We used the National Health Interview Survey data from 2013 to 2017, including adults ≤64 years old with a self-reported diagnosis of diabetes mellitus. Among 164 696 surveyed individuals, 8967 adults ≤64 years old reported having diabetes mellitus, representing 13.1 million individuals annually across the United States. The mean age was 51.6 years (SD 10.3), and 49.1% were female. A total of 41.1% were part of families that reported having financial hardship from medical bills, with 15.6% reporting an inability to pay medical bills at all. In multivariate analyses, individuals who lacked insurance, were non-Hispanic black, had low income, or had high-comorbidity burden were at higher odds of being in families with financial hardship from medical bills. When comparing the graded categories of financial hardship, there was a stepwise increase in the prevalence of high financial distress, food insecurity, cost-related nonadherence, and foregone/delayed medical care, reaching 70.5%, 49.4%, 49.5%, and 74% among those unable to pay bills, respectively. Compared with those without diabetes mellitus, individuals with diabetes mellitus had higher odds of financial hardship from medical bills (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.27 [95% CI, 1.18–1.36]) or any of its consequences, including high financial distress (aOR, 1.14 [95% CI, 1.05–1.24]), food insecurity (aOR, 1.27 [95% CI, 1.16–1.40]), cost-related medication nonadherence (aOR, 1.43 [95% CI, 1.30–1.57]), and foregone/delayed medical care (aOR, 1.30 [95% CI, 1.20–1.40]). Conclusions: Nonelderly patients with diabetes mellitus have a high prevalence of financial hardship from medical bills, with deleterious consequences.

Objectives The objective of this study was to investigate whether the sleep-cardiovascular health (CVH) association varies by Hispanic/Latino heritage group and housing tenure status (i.e., homeownership, unassisted housing, government-assisted housing), which is an important social determinant of health. Design Cross-sectional analysis of pooled National Health Interview Survey (2004-2017) data. Setting United States. Participants US-born/non–US-born Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central/South American, and US-born non-Hispanic (NH)-white adults. Measurements Within each housing tenure category, Poisson regressions with robust variance estimated the adjusted prevalence ratios (PRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of (1) habitual sleep duration (<6-hours, 6-<7-hours, and >9-hours vs. 7-9 hours) and sleep quality for Hispanic/Latino heritage groups compared with NH-whites and (2) ideal CVH for Hispanic/Latino heritage groups within each sleep duration category, separately, compared with NH-whites who reported 7-9 hours sleep duration. Results Among 283,767 NH-white and Hispanic/Latino adults (mean age=47.0±0.09 years, 50.1% female), 33% rented housing (4% government-assisted; 29% unassisted), and 67% were homeowners. Compared with their NH-white housing tenure counterparts, only Puerto Rican homeowners were more likely to report <6-hours (PR=1.70 [95% CI: 1.44-2.01]) and 6-<7-hours (PR=1.31 [1.19-1.44]) sleep duration. Overall, Hispanic/Latino heritage groups were either less likely or no more likely to report >9-hours sleep duration and poor sleep quality compared with NH-whites. Disparities in CVH were large between Puerto Rican unassisted renters and homeowners who reported >9-hours of habitual sleep compared with their NH-white housing tenure counterparts who reported 7-9 hours. Conclusions Hispanic/Latino-white disparities in the sleep-CVH relationship may vary by Hispanic/Latino heritage group and housing tenure.

Numerous articles and books are written describing the apparent shrinking, decline, or death of the American middle class. 1 In this chapter, I present several of the key facts and review the veracity of some of the more widely held conceptions. Income inequality in the United States has grown in the last 30 years; the middle deciles have made significantly less progress in pre-tax income than the top decile. However, the income distribution is not becoming bimodal; instead there is a noticeable movement of households from the middle of the distribution to the upper part of the distribution. 2 Households in the middle of the income distribution are experiencing positive growth in income and consumption, though at a slower pace than the growth at the top. In the last 30 years, the likelihood of owning a home, owning two cars, or sending a child to college has risen for households across the income distribution including those in the middle class. Disturbingly, lower GDP growth and increased inequality in the distribution of that growth have combined to reduce the probability that children out-earn their parents at similar ages (Chetty et al. 2017). And measures of life expectancy and subjective well-being fell for some groups (Case and Deaton 2017; Blanchflower and Oswald 2019), although life expectancies in aggregate are again rising.

I use geographic variation in immigration over time to establish a previously undocumented stylized fact: foreign immigration to the US reduces the employment rates of native female workers. This effect persists across skill groups, has become less pronounced over time, and is robust to the specification used to estimate it, the definition of the geographical area, and the potential for geographic self-selection among immigrants. It also contrasts sharply with typical findings from studies that focus on native men, as well as my own estimates for men. The pattern of declining female employment effects is consistent with well-documented declines in female labor-supply elas-ticities, and I find that the female employment effect is driven primarily by married women and those with children, among whom labor supply is known to be relatively elastic. While I find that immigration does not impact the average wages of either low-or high-skilled native women, there is a pronounced negative wage effect for highly skilled native women who are married or have children, with smaller positive effects for other groups. I argue that the female-male difference in native employment effects cannot be explained by gender differences in native skill distributions. As further evidence of this, I show that the female employment effect is driven primarily by competition from female immigrants.

By how much do traditional gender norms in marriage constrain aggregate output? Married women are traditionally expected to stay home and take care of the household. This gender role reduces married women’s labor force participation, away from their comparative advantage. A low likelihood of working in the future also reduces women’s incentive to get educated. I develop a model featuring education, marriage, and labor supply choices to quantify the aggregate economic consequences of gender norms in marriage. I find that relative to single women, married women in 1940 U.S. faced a norms wedge that acted as a 44% tax on market wage. By 2010, the norms wedge had halved. Had gender norms remained at the level of 1940, married women of 2010 would have had an 18% lower labor force participation rate, 13% lower market earnings, and their total market and home output would have been lower by 7%. For the aggregate economy, total market and home output would have been 3.5% lower. I validate the model through a reduced form analysis, which uses county-level variation in World War 2 casualties that increased female labor force participation and consequently weakened traditional gender norms.

This study spatiotemporally examines an association between unemployment and mortality. Hypothesizing the spatiotemporally heterogeneous association, we employ the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA)-based random slope model with the spatiotemporal interaction under the control of common covariates. The model design aims to investigate the spatiotemporally transforming relationship between unemployment rates and mortality rates. The causes for all, self-harm, and mental disorders in 3,108 coterminous counties in the United States for 2001-2014, which includes two economic recessions, are considered. The results show the sporadic spatial effect and the cause-specific change of spatiotemporal interactions during the study period. The spatiotemporal patterns did not only have the same magnitude but also show the same direction of shift for causes of death. The spatiotemporal changes of the associations of one-year lagged unemployment rates are summarized as follows: (1) Dakotas and the west Appalachian counties have highly positive association in recent years; (2) the geographical shifts in high association regions were various for each cause of death: the dividing cluster for all-cause, the southerly moving cluster for the self-harm and interpersonal violence, and intensifying clusters in central and west Appalachian for the mental and substanceuse disorders mortality; (3) the associations become weaker during the Great Recession period. Those patterns may be attributed to regional contexts, such as devoid of healthcare facilities and psychological deprivation. Even though there are possible mediating factors indicated by the substantial degree of residuals in some regions, our approach illustrates that the association of unemployment and mortality is spatiotemporally different across regions. It also suggests the spatiotemporal approach is effective in investigating the relationship between unemployment and mortality.

How did the Great Recession affect the college degree fields? Utilizing the geographic variation in the severity of the recession in the US, I answer this question using the differences-in-differences and synthetic controls approaches. To explore these effects systematically, I categorize fields based on their sensitivity to the recession. The results show that there was a shift from recession-sensitive majors towards recession-resistant majors. The effects were immediate and larger for more local institutions. These findings suggest that students’ expectations about future labor market outcomes are affected by shocks to the current local labor market conditions.

This thesis explores questions in labor economics and applied microeconomics, with particular focus on issues that have implications for public policy. The first essay estimates the Frisch elasticity, sometimes known as the wage elasticity of labor supply in response to anticipated wage changes. Despite its importance in macroeconomic and public finance models, its estimation requires a setting that is difficult to find; as a result, we have little quasi-experimental evidence on its magnitude. In the essay, I explain why child support—tax-like payments from noncustodial parents towards custodial parents in cases of divorce and nonmarital births—satisfies the two key features lacking in almost all settings that other researchers have looked at in the past. Specifically, we require that individuals anticipate their future effective wage in advance, satisfied because it is common knowledge that child support payments end on emancipation of the youngest eligible child, and exogeneity, satisfied if we believe that the ages of these children (who live away from the payers) do not directly affect the labor supply decision. Exploiting these two features, I estimate the Frisch elasticity in an event study design using individual-level panel data from four countries. Empirically, I find that the observed child support rate that fathers face drops to nearly zero upon emancipation of the children; correspondingly, these fathers increase their work hours and earnings at this time. Based on these results, I estimate Frisch elasticities of 0.7 to 0.8 on the intensive margin and 0.1 to 0.2 on the extensive margin. The second essay, coauthored with Janjala Chirakijja and Seema Jayachandran, shows that lower heating prices reduce mortality in winter months, driven mainly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes. To obtain a causal estimate, we combine the considerable geographic variation across counties in whether an area relies on natural gas or electricity for home heating with temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas and electricity. The effect we find is meaningfully large—US natural gas prices dropped 42 percent in the late 2000s and this averted 11,000 winter deaths per year—and does not just represent short-run hastening of mortality. Because the effect seems to be larger for low-income households, our results have implications for heating-related policies like the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). In addition, our findings highlight a health benefit of increases in the U.S. energy supply, and hence have direct implications for energy and environmental policies. The third essay, coauthored with Jason Ward, explores the extent to which seasonal unemployment affects drug use. The unemployment rate varies across months of the year, generally for reasons unrelated to the current macroeconomic conditions and outside the control of individuals. This seasonality in the unemployment rate also varies across industries and occupations, motivating a difference-in-differences strategy. We find that an increase in seasonal unemployment leads to lower legal substance use among working individuals. For illicit drug use, we find increased use of marijuana only among women with income above $20,000. Because seasonal unemployment is both highly predictable and temporary, it allows us to disentangle the mechanisms involved. We find some evidence that the income effect is larger than the psychological distress caused by unemployment. Our results also suggest that the workplace might facilitate legal substance use, and that the increase in marijuana use among women with income above $20,000 is due to an increase in leisure time.

Using the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2017, this article explores the evidence for potential migration constraints by comparing distributions of people and jobs across race and education. Using the Delta Index of dissimilarity, it illustrates a greater distributional mismatch between workers and jobs among racial minorities, relative to White non-Hispanics. This mismatch suggests greater migration constraints among racial minorities.

The authors study the effect of the minimum wage on the employment outcomes and Social Security claiming of older US workers from 1983 to 2016. The probability of work at or near the minimum wage increases substantially near retirement, and previous researchers and policies suggest that older workers may be particularly vulnerable to any disemployment effects of the minimum wage. Results show no evidence that the minimum wage causes earlier retirements. Instead, estimates suggest that higher minimum wages increase earnings and may have small positive effects on the labor supply of workers in the key ages of 62 to 70. Consistent with increased earnings and delayed retirement, higher minimum wages decrease the number of Social Security beneficiaries and amount of benefits disbursed. The minimum wage appears to increase financial resources for workers near retirement.

Between 1907 and 1914, the “Galveston Movement,” a philanthropic effort spearheaded by Jacob Schiff, fostered the immigration of approximately 10,000 Russian Jews through the Port of Galveston, Texas. Upon arrival, households were given train tickets to pre-selected locations west of the Mississippi River where a job awaited. Despitethe program’s stated purpose to locate new Russian Jewish immigrants tothe Western part of the U.S.,we find thatroughly 85 to 90percent of the prime-age male participants ultimately moved east of the Mississippi, typically to large Northeasternand Midwesterncities. We use a standard framework for modeling location decisions to show destination assignments made cities more desirable, but this effect was overwhelmed by the attraction of religious and country of origin enclaves. Economic conditions appear to be of secondary importanceto our ethnic measures, even for participants at the top of theskill distribution.

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived widening of the economic divide between urban and rural areas, and on the continued rise of national income inequality. We demonstrate that, in fact, the average income gap between urban (metropolitan) and rural (nonmetropolitan) households has not risen over the past 40 years, and makes virtually no contribution to national income inequality. Rising national inequality is driven by rising inequality within both urban and rural America, not by an urban/rural divergence. As is well known, the growing dispersion of household money income is partly driven by rising wage inequality, particularly in urban areas. Less well recognized is the role played by other income sources. We show that a decline in the progressivity of the distribution of social security payments and cash transfers, and an increase in the regressivity of the distribution of retirement incomes, have jointly made a comparably large contribution to rising income inequality. At the same time, the share of income from self‐employment has declined, particularly in rural America, and because self‐employment income is very unequally distributed, its diminution has retarded the growth of rural inequality. In 2014–15, however, rural inequality increased, cutting the urban/rural inequality gap in half. . .

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today’s Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.