The positive relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health has been observed and established across many fields. This paper looks to extend the literature by first, documenting a relationship between health and income through child mortality rates in the early 20th century U.S. and second, examining whether the relationship is causal. I construct a dataset that finds mothers in their childhood household and test whether there is omitted variable bias with the mother’s childhood household socioeconomic status. I find that a one standard deviation increase in husband’s occupational wealth is associated with a decrease in the child mortality rate of 20.7 deaths per 1000 children ever born. The childhood socioeconomic status of both parents also play an independent role in the child mortality rate, as a one standard deviation increase in grandfather’s occupational wealth is associated with a decrease in the child mortality rate of 8.6 and 11.4 deaths per 1000 children ever born (respectively for the wife and husband’s childhood SES). These findings support the existing literature. My attempt to isolate causality further through a fixed effects strategy does not yield a rigorous answer but provides possible intuition into future results.

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities which stem from differences in wealth. We exploit a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view - we identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold. Structural estimation of an occupational choice model reveals that almost all beneficiaries are misallocated in the work they do at baseline and that the gains arising from eliminating misallocation would far exceed the program costs. Our findings imply that big push policies which transform job opportunities represent a powerful means of addressing the global mass poverty problem.

Newspapers have faced extreme challenges in recent years due to declining circulation and advertising revenue. This has resulted in newspaper closures, staff cuts, and dramatic changes to the ways many newspapers cover local government, among other topics. This article argues that the loss of professional expertise in coverage of local government has negative consequences for the quality of city politics because citizens become less informed about local policies and elections. We test our theory using an original data set that matches 11 local newspapers in California to the municipalities they cover. The data show that cities served by newspapers with relatively sharp declines in newsroom staffing had, on average, significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races. We also find suggestive evidence that lower staffing levels are associated with lower voter turnout.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare, by sexual-minority status, the prevalence of feelings of depression and anxiety as well as use of medication for these feelings. Methods: Data on adults ages 18 years and older (N=79,542) came from the 2013–2017 National Health Interview Survey. The authors used descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression to compare, by sexual-minority status, the prevalence of depressive feelings, anxious feelings, and use of medication for these feelings. Results: Adults who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or other sexual minority exhibited greater odds of having frequent (defined as weekly or daily) feelings of depression and anxiety compared with their heterosexual peers. On average, adults who identified as a sexual minority were more likely than their heterosexual peers to take medication for depressive and anxious feelings. Meanwhile, among adults living with frequent anxiety, gay and lesbian adults were more likely than heterosexual adults to take medication for their anxious feelings. Conclusions: Adults who identified as a sexual minority were more likely than heterosexual adults to self-report frequent feelings of depression and anxiety and to use medication for their symptoms. Public health initiatives should focus on mental health promotion and the prevention of depression and anxiety among sexual-minority populations, which may include establishing more welcoming and affirming environments. Mental health providers can also play critical roles in treating sexual-minority populations for depression and anxiety and in researching interventions that narrow mental health disparities related to sexual orientation.

The child poverty rate is higher in the United States than in any other wealthy nation, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated this crisis. Among OECD Nations, the only countries with a higher incidence of child poverty are Chile, Israel, and Turkey.1 Pre-pandemic, at a time of “record low unemployment,” one-in-seven U.S. children (more than 10 million) lived in poverty,2 and 12.5 million children were food insecure and without consistent access to enough food “for an active, healthy life.”3 The crisis of child poverty in the United States directly threatens the personal development of millions of children and further compromises the economic health of the country. The recent report on reducing child poverty from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concludes that “the weight of the causal evidence indicates that poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, especially when it begins in early childhood or persists throughout a large share of a child’s life.”4 The report also finds that child poverty costs the nation between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion per year5 in terms of productivity, public safety and incarceration, health care expenditures, homelessness, and child maltreatment.6 The main reason that the child poverty rate is higher in the United States than other wealthy nations is that other nations have much more robust social policies for children. Almost all wealthy nations other than the United States provide some form of child allowance to help with the costs of raising children. Child allowances are part of these countries’ network of social policies, and many of these policies are highly effective at keeping children out of poverty.7 A notable example is the Canada Child Benefit, which was implemented as one of a number of policies designed to halve the poverty rate in Canada by 2030. The benefit is greatest for low-income families, who receive an allowance of roughly $4,000 per child, per year (and roughly $4,800 for the youngest children). The benefit phases out with income, so higher-income households receive only a partial benefit, and the highest income families are ineligible. While the Canada Child Benefit has only been in place for a short time, it has already been associated with significant reductions in the poverty rate, which fell by 20 percent between 2015 and 2017.

Low-skill workers are comparatively immobile. This paper estimates the role of housing prices and social transfers in accounting for this fact using a spatial equilibrium model. Reduced-form estimates using US census data show that positive local labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, that this asymmetry is larger for low-skill workers, and that such an asymmetry is absent for average wages, housing values, and rental prices. Generalized method of moments estimates reveal that the comparative immobility of low-skill workers is due not to higher mobility costs but to a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks.

Social capital has been shown to positively influence a multitude of economic, political, and social outcomes. Yet the factors that affect long-run social capital formation remain poorly understood. Recent evidence suggests that early state formation, especially investments in state capacity, are positively associated with higher levels of contemporary social capital and other prosocial attitudes. The channels by which early state capacity leads to greater social capital over time are even less understood. We contribute to both questions using the spatial and temporal expansion of the US postal network during the 19th century. We first show that county-level variation in post office density is highly correlated with a bevy of historical and contemporary indicators of social capital (e.g., associational memberships, civic participation, health, and crime). This finding holds even when controlling for historical measures of development and contemporary measures of income, inequality, poverty, education, and race. Second, we provide evidence of an informational mechanism by which this early investment in infrastructural capacity affected long-run social capital formation. Namely, we demonstrate that the expansion of the postal network in the 19th century strongly predicts the historical and contemporary location of local newspapers, which were the primary mode of impersonal information transmission during this period. Our evidence sheds light on the role of the state in both the origins of social capital and the channels by which it persists. Our findings also suggest that the consequences of the ongoing decline in local newspapers will negatively affect social capital.

While factors such as urban form, infrastructure, and attitudes shape cycling behavior, the experience of cycling can vary drastically across socioeconomic and identity groups. For foreign-born residents of the United States, additional factors associated with income and cultural context may influence cycling. In this study, I ask how factors associated with being an immigrant, such as economic status, cultural habits, residential location, and social environments, motivate or deter cycling. Results are based on 23 in-depth interviews with low-income Latino immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviews reveal that close-knit social networks buoyed by support from immigrant-serving organizations encourage cycling, providing social infrastructure where other types of infrastructure may be absent. However, neighborhood safety is a significant deterrent that men and women respond to in different ways. Other effects, such as gentrification, immigrant experiences, and cultural narratives, shape individuals’ perceptions of belonging as a cyclist in their neighborhood. Findings suggest that planners should collaborate with immigrant-serving community organizations and be more centrally involved in addressing neighborhood conditions and their effects on travel.

Educational assortative mating patterns in the United States have changed since the 1960s, but we know little about the effects of these patterns on children, particularly on infant health. Rising educational homogamy may alter prenatal contexts through parental stress and resources, with implications for inequality. Using 1969–1994 NVSS birth data and aggregate cohort-state census measures of spousal similarity of education and labor force participation as instrumental variables (IV), this study estimates the effects of parental educational similarity on infant health. Controlling for both maternal and paternal education, results support family systems theory and suggest that parental educational homogamy is beneficial for infant health while hypergamy is detrimental. These effects are stronger in later cohorts and are generally limited to mothers with more education. Hypogamy estimates are stable by cohort, suggesting that rising female hypogamy may have limited effect on infant health. In contrast, rising educational homogamy could have increasing implications for infant health. Effects of parental homogamy on infant health could help explain racial inequality of infant health and may offer a potential mechanism through which inequality is transmitted between generations.

Most social mobility studies take a two-generation perspective, in which intergenerational relationships are represented by the association between parents' and offspring's socioeconomic status. This approach, albeit widely adopted in the literature, has serious limitations when more than two generations of families are considered. In particular, it ignores the role of families' demographic behaviors in moderating mobility outcomes and the joint role of mobility and demography in shaping long-run family and population processes. This paper provides a demographic approach to the study of multigenerational social mobility, incorporating demographic mechanisms of births, deaths, and mating into statistical models of social mobility. Compared to previous mobility models for estimating the probability of offspring's mobility conditional on parent's social class, the proposed joint demography-mobility model treats the number of offspring in various social classes as the outcome of interest. This new approach shows the extent to which demographic processes may amplify or dampen the effects of family socioeconomic positions due to the direction and strength of the interaction between mobility and differentials in demographic behaviors. I illustrate various demographic methods for studying multigenerational mobility with empirical examples using the IPUMS linked historical U.S. census representative samples (1850 to 1930), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968 to 2015), and simulation data that show other possible scenarios resulting from demography-mobility interactions.

Using tools rooted in welfare economics, this paper explores the social welfare loss that arises from occupational segregation by gender and race in the US at the regional level. After controlling for characteristics, the losses are lower in the Northeast than in the South and West according to a wide range of indicators, including those that take into account the relative size of disadvantaged groups (incidence), the magnitude of their losses (intensity), and the inequality among those groups. The West has the highest (conditional) losses, although the intensity of the phenomenon barely differs from that in the South or Midwest.

This dissertation contains two essays on the relations between economic conditions and the living arrangements of young adults (22-34 year olds) in the 2000s. In the first chapter, I use data from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey for the period 2000-2018 to document recent trends in youth living arrangements and to estimate the impact of state-level economic conditions on individual-level residential outcomes. I find a steep increase in parental coresidence among young adults since 2000. The rise in coresidence is accompanied by declining outflows from the parental home as well as rising inflows into the parental home. Regression results show significant, positive effects of rents on the probability of living with parents relative to all other living arrangements; and significant, negative effects of rising rents on the probability of leaving the parental home. Rents are found to have a larger impact on the living arrangements of non-whites and non-college young adults compared to their respective counterparts. For such youths, rising rents also show a robust, positive association with the probability of returning to the parental home. Overall, rents explain between 9% and 14% of the rise in parental coresidence among young adults over the period 2000-2018. Although the 2000s are also characterized by declining labor market conditions of prime-age workers, changes in prime-age wages are found to explain no more than 5% of the increase in parental coresidence whereas prime-age employment rates show no robust associations with living arrangements. In the second chapter, I take the analysis to the MSA-level and use data on 229 MSAs based on the 2000 Census and the American Community Survey to estimate novel, growth models of coresidence. I find significant, contemporaneous effects of growth in earnings and rents, respectively, on growth in parental coresidence among both non-college and college-educated young adults with larger effects on the less-educated. In the long run, however, only the effects of rents are significant such that MSAs which experience higher growth in housing costs during the housing boom of 2000-2006 also experience higher growth in parental coresidence among all young adults over the entire 2000s. In contrast, changes in the employment rates of prime-age workers show no strong associations with living arrangements either contemporaneously or in the long-run. Overall, both chapters of my dissertation imply that rising rents are the main cause of rising coresidence in the 2000s to the extent the latter is an economic phenomenon.

In the context of an economy that has experienced both historic highs and lows during the last fifteen years, including Depression-level unemployment related to COVID-19 shutdowns, there is great interest in understanding the levels and trends of poverty in Oregon. Interpretations of progress against poverty and how social policies affect poverty hinge on how poverty is measured. Existing poverty measures have well-known limitations that fail to reveal the true nature of poverty. The Oregon Poverty Measure Project, inspired by Supplemental Poverty Measure methods developed at the federal level, aims to produce the most valid measure of poverty for the state. In this report, we use 2014-18 American Community Survey data with a number of adjustments to economic resources and thresholds.1 We find that: • Overall, 13% Oregonians were in poverty using the Oregon Poverty Measure (ORPM), slightly lower than 14% based on the federal Official Poverty Rate (OPM).2 • During this period, ORPM poverty declined overall, from 15% to 13%. • The overall child ORPM poverty rate was substantially lower than the Official Poverty Measure for children (13% vs. 19%) and the older adult poverty rate considerably higher (12% vs. 8%). • Black Oregonians and Native Americans experienced disproportionately high rates of poverty (17% and 18%, respectively) compared to Whites (12%), although disparities were less under the ORPM than under the Official measure. • Geographically, poverty in Oregon is higher than the state average in Southern Oregon and pockets of metropolitan areas. • The share of Oregonians in deep poverty (4%) remained mostly unchanged, suggesting pockets of persistent poverty in Oregon. For the first time in the state, we document the influence of programs that comprise the federal and state social safety net. We find that, in the absence of Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a considerably higher share of Oregonians would be in poverty. We anticipate that the Oregon Poverty Measure Project will produce policy-relevant information and contribute to ongoing discussions about the hardships experienced by Oregonians. Next steps in the Oregon Poverty Measure Project include the production of a series of policy briefs focused on key findings, poverty forecasts, and analysis of policy impacts.

The percentage of older adults in the United States reporting being in good health has increased since the 1980s. This study tries to explain long-term trends in self-rated health in the United States. We used 47 years of repeated cross-sectional data from the National Health Interview Survey to estimate regression models that predict trends in self-rated health. Our results show that the improvement in self-rated health of men as well as women aged 50–84 is largely explained by gains in educational attainment. Self-rated health has slightly improved among those with post-secondary education, while it did not improve among those without post-secondary education. This study is one of the few to try to explain long-term trends in self-rated health. It does so for a much longer period of time than any previous study.

Using the text from job ads, we introduce a new dataset to describe the evolution of work from 1950 to 2000. We show that the transformation of the US labor market away from routine cognitive and manual tasks and toward nonroutine interactive and analytic tasks has been larger than prior research has found, with a substantial fraction of total changes occurring within narrowly defined job titles. We provide narrative and systematic evidence on changes in task content within job titles and on the emergence and disappearance of individual job titles.

We estimate a neighborhood choice model using 2014 American Community Survey data to investigate the degree to which new housing supply can improve housing affordability. In the model, equilibrium rental rates are determined so that the number of households choosing each neighborhood is equal to the number of housing units in each neighborhood. We use the estimated model to simulate how rental rates would respond to an exogenous increase in the number of housing units in a neighborhood. We find that the rent elasticity is low, and thus marginal reductions in supply constraints alone are unlikely to meaningfully reduce rent burdens. The reason for this result appears to be that rental rates are more closely determined by the level of amenities in a neighborhood—as in a Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium framework—than by the supply of housing.

County Community College (JCCC), in suburban Johnson County, Kansas, offer an interesting lens through which to examine topics of institutional history and culture, community relationships, and the leadership decisions of first presidents and their boards. The histories of CoD and JCCC, founded in restricted-residency, affluent, and rapidly expanding suburbs in the 1960s, also provide telling examples of campus/community interactions around the question of who could be a part of the community-and therefore the campus. Finally, comparing these two campuses affords readers a useful glimpse at 1960s-era protests in the community colleges, describes how campus unrest occurred, and examines its management on nonresidential campuses.

We present new estimates of the outcomes of first-generation Mexicans and their descendants between 1880 and 1940. We find zero convergence of the economic gap between Mexicans and non-Mexican whites across three generations. The great-grandchildren of immigrants also had fewer years of education. Slow convergence is not simply due to an inheritance of poverty; rather, Mexican Americans had worse outcomes conditional on the father’s economic status. However, the gap between third-generation Mexican Americans and non-Mexican whites is about half the size today as it was in 1940, suggesting that barriers to Mexican American progress have significantly decreased over time.

Research Summary This article conceptualizes households as a crucial pool of labor for small entrepreneurs. The household varied historically in its scope (depending on whether bonded workers were included) and work intensity (depending on the authority or coercion exercised by household heads). Drawing on data that enumerate over 100,000 households in New York City, I examine how the shift from institutions of unfree labor to wage labor affected business proprietorship between 1790 and 1850. Given the disproportionate importance of unfree household labor to small entrepreneurs, the contraction of this labor source may offer one general explanation for their decline. Managerial Summary How does household scope and composition affect the ability of an individual to run their own business? Historical archives can provide useful insights into this question. They track long‐term declines in family size and the emancipation of non‐family members—such as apprentices, indentured servants, and slaves—from the authority of household heads. Examining records from early New York City, this study shows that business ownership was strongly linked with the ownership of slaves and the presence of dependent males after the American Revolution. Large households and unfree laborers were especially important for entrepreneurship among individuals with limited wealth. For modern economies, the results suggest that policymakers consider potential tensions between small business ownership and the development of free and equitable labor markets.

Living apart together (LAT) relationships are an emerging relationship form typically defined as unmarried couples in a committed, long-term relationship who choose to live apart (maintain separate residences) rather than cohabit or marry (Connidis, et al., 2017). Other researchers have classified married couples who live separately as LATs, as well (Binstock & Thornton, 2004). This profile examines the LAT status of newly married individuals who report having entered a marriage in the last year. We define newlywed LATs as those not living with their spouse for reasons other than marital discord1 . Using data from IPUMS-USA, we present their characteristics by times married, age, and educational attainment.