There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across the United States, and, in particular, the residents of declining cities report less happiness than other Americans. Although this unhappiness is at least as strong among new residents of such places as long-term residents, some people continue to move to these areas. These areas also seem to have been less happy historically during the era in which these now-declining cities prospered. These patterns are compatible with the view that individuals do not aim to maximize self-reported well-being, or happiness, and that subjective well-being is better viewed as only one part of the utility function. In the past the residents of now declining places were compensated financially for their unhappiness, but it is less clear what draws migrants to these unhappy places today.

A growing body of evidence finds that early-life circumstances are an important determinant of an individuals future outcomes. Here I investigate how shocks in utero and in childhood affect human capital formation, and to what extent their experience at certain developmental stages matters more than others. I focus on violent conflicts that constitute multidimensional shocks to the well-being of many households in developing countries. Using monthly and municipality-level variation in the timing and severity of massacres in Colombia from 1999 to 2007, I show that children exposed to sudden changes in violence in utero and in childhood achieve lower height-for-age (0.09 SD), cognitive (PPVT falls by 0.17 SD and verbal ability, math reasoning, and general knowledge fall by 0.150.28 SD), and socio-emotional outcomes (adequate interaction falls by 0.04 SD). Furthermore, I explore changes in parental investments as potential mechanisms, finding that changes in violence during a childs early-life is associated with lower quantity and quality of parenting. Results do not seem to be driven by selective sorting, migration, fertility, or survival, and are robust to controlling for mother fixed-effects. This is the first study to investigate the effects of early-life violence on child cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in a developing country and among the first to investigate the role of parenting as a potential channel of transmission.

The family is the core institution for child-rearing worldwide, and decades of research have shown that strong families promote positive child outcomes. For this reason the World Family Map Project monitors family well-being and investigates how family characteristics affect children’s healthy development around the globe. Families do not operate in a vacuum: their ability to provide for their children and supervise their development depends not only on parenting behaviors and attitudes but also on the social, economic, and policy environments that surround them. Yet efforts to strengthen families are often considered off-limits or of low priority for policy and programmatic interventions, especially in times of financial strain. With the indicators and analyses presented here, this project points individuals, families, communities, NGOs, and governments to some key factors affecting child and family well-being that policies and programs can shape in order to foster strong families and positive outcomes for children. The World Family Map Project monitors global changes in the areas of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture, focusing on 16 specific indicators selected by an expert group because of their known relationships to child outcomes in the research literature. Each annual report of the project provides the latest data on these indicators, as well as an original . . .

No therapies are known to substantially alter the course of dementia and associated treatment costs. However, enhanced support services for caregivers for people with dementia have been shown to improve caregivers' capabilities and well-being and delay patients' institutionalization. Using a model that simulated disease progression, place of residence, and costs of care, we estimated the economic impact to Minnesota from offering the New York University Caregiver Intervention (NYUCI), an enhanced support services program for adult caregivers of community-dwelling people with dementia. We estimated the impact of the NYUCI on: 1. the potential healthcare savings to all eligible people in the state, assuming all current and future caregivers participate in the NYUCI from 2010 to 2025; 2. the net healthcare cost savings, inclusive of program costs, to eligible caregivers, assuming three less-than-complete levels of participation in the NYUCI from 2010 to 2025 (5% of all caregivers, 10% and 30%); 3. the potential indirect cost savings to all eligible people in the state, assuming all current and future caregivers participate in the NYUCI from 2010 to 2025. Results indicate that approximately 5 percent more people with dementia would remain in the community from year 3 (2013) on, and that 19.3 percent fewer people with dementia would die in institutions over fifteen years. During those years, Minnesota could potentially save as much as $1.24 billion ($996 million in discounted dollars) in direct healthcare costs. The estimated savings in net healthcare costs during those years, including all program costs except for program marketing, were $61.8 million, $103.7 million, and $250.6 million, assuming 5, 10, and 30% of caregivers participate in the NYUCI, respectively. Estimated potential indirect cost savings are also substantial, well exceeding the estimated direct healthcare cost savings. These findings suggest that broader access to enhanced caregiver supports is a promising way to moderate the growing economic burden of dementia. Substantial long-term savings are possible even without a breakthrough in the pharmacologic treatment of the disease. These direct healthcare cost savings would benefit taxpayers (through reduced expenditures for the Medicaid program) and people with dementia and their families, who largely pay the medical and facility fees for those in residential care settings. Other payers who would benefit include the Medicare program, commercial health plans and long term care insurers, to the extent that they fund these formal care services. The substantial indirect cost savings with enhanced support services would benefit caregivers and likely their employers through improved quality of life and increased productivity. Enhanced support services programs for dementia caregivers, such as the NYUCI, are cost-effective ways to manage dementia while researchers continue to seek effective treatments for the disease.

Many countries have enacted legislation over the past few decades making divorce easier. Some countries have legalized divorce where it had previously been banned, and many have eased the conditions required for a divorce, such as allowing unilateral divorce (both spouses do not have to agree on the divorce). Divorce laws can regulate the grounds for divorce, division of property, child custody, and child support or maintenance payments. Reforms can have a range of social effects beyond increasing the divorce rate. They can influence female labor supply, marriage and fertility rates, child well-being, household saving, and even domestic violence and crime.

Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security is the most important source of support; program changes would directly affect their well-being. Income from private pensions, assets, and earnings are relatively more important for higher-income elderly individuals, who have more diverse income sources. The trend from private sector defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans has shifted responsibility for retirement security to individuals. A significant subset of the population is unlikely to be able to sustain their standard of living in retirement without higher pre-retirement saving.

The share of the U.S. population over the age of 65 was 8.1 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 20.9 percent by 2050. The percent over 85 is projected to more than double from current levels, reaching 4.2 percent by mid-century. The aging of the U.S. population makes issues of retirement security increasingly important.Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security is the most important source of support; program changes would directly affect their well-being. Income from private pensions, assets, and earnings are relatively more important for higher-income elderly individuals, who have more diverse income sources. The trend from private sector defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans has shifted a greater share of the responsibility for retirement security to individuals, and made that security more dependent on choices they make. A significant subset of the population is unlikely to be able to sustain their standard of living in retirement without higher pre-retirement saving.

Disparities in health status, health behaviors, and health care access on the basis of sexual orientation have been largely ignored by researchers until recently. Literature reviews in public health, medicine, and nursing note a dearth of studies related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population and report a disproportionate focus on HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (Bohmer, 2002; Snyder, 2011; Johnson, Smyer, & Yucha, 2012). Meanwhile, inequities in health are on the basis of sexual orientation were recently recognized by health policy makers as a public health priority and targeted for elimination (Institute of medicine, 2011). For example, Healthy People 2020 goals, set by the U.S. federal government to monitor improvements in population health, now include improving "the health, safety, and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals" (United States Department of Health and Human Services)

This chapter provides a parsimonious overview of the trends in various well-being dimensions covered in the previous chapters by constructing a composite index of well-being. It discusses the crucial problem of choosing a set of weights to calculate such a composite index. Related problems include normalisation of individual indices and dealing with missing observations. The chapter discusses the advantages of various options, and their implications for the final results. It finds that empirically a wide range of aggregation methods generate comparable results. They all indicate that progress in well-being was commonplace since the early 20th century, with the possible exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is also found that since the 1970s between-country inequality in composite well-being is lower than in GDP per capita, while being more pronounced in the period before.

Recent media attention highlights American womens exceptionalism in the realm of intensive parenting and raises questions about the implications for mothers well-being. In this paper we: 1) assess the multidimensional nature of subjective well-being among women with and without children in the home across a range of activities; and 2) compare mothers subjective well-being while engaged in intensive versus routine childcare. We use new data from the 2010 American Time Use Survey that includes respondent reports of momentary well-being in three randomly selected activities. We leverage within-person variation in reports of meaning, happiness, stress, tiredness, and sadness to assess how the presence of children and other characteristics of activities (whether others present, timing, duration, location) contribute to well-being. We look further at variation in subjective well-being while parenting in the context of time in activities throughout the day, union status, child and parent age, education, employment, and typical sleep duration.

Research on coresidence between parents and their adult children in the United States has challenged the myth that elders are the primary beneficiaries, instead showing that intergenerationally extended households generally benefit the younger generation more than their parents. Nevertheless, the economic fortunes of those at the older and younger ends of the adult life course have shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, with increasing financial well-being among older adults and greater financial strain among younger adults. This article uses U.S. census and American Community Survey (ACS) data to examine the extent to which changes in generational financial well-being over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been reflected in the likelihood of coresidence and financial dependency in parentadult child U.S. households between 1960 and 2010. We find that younger adults have become more financially dependent on their parents and that while older adults have become more financially independent of their adult children, they nevertheless coreside with their needy adult children. We also find that the effect of economic considerations in decisions about coresidence became increasingly salient for younger adults, but decreasingly so for older adults.

This paper examines the association between "active life style" behaviors and health. Health is measured with the widely-used five-category general self-rated health indicator (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor). Analyses are based on the 2006-2008 and 2010 waves of American Time Use Survey (ATUS). For respondents in the 2010 wave of the ATUS, we also examine three specific health outcomes: whether the individual (1) has hypertension, 2) took pain medication on the diary day, and 3) woke up rested on the diary day. Finally, in 2010 we have measures of ATUS respondents' momentary perception of well-being during each of three randomly selected activities. Our study is the first that we know of to examine the association between health behaviors and general and momentary measures of well-being.

We assess the importance of interpersonal income comparisons using data on suicide deaths. We examine whether suicide risk is related to others' income, holding own income and other individual and environmental factors fixed. We estimate models of the suicide hazard using two independent data sets: the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and the National Center for Health Statistics' Multiple Cause of Death Files combined with the 5% Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with others' income.

Although multiracial youth represent a growing segment of children in all American families, we have little information on their well-being within single-mother households. This article examines multiracial children's level of poverty within single-mother families to identify the degree to which they may stand out from their monoracial peers. Using data from the 20062008 American Community Survey (3-year estimates), we explore the level of racial disparities in child poverty between monoracial White children and monoracial and multiracial children of color. Fully adjusted multivariate logistic regression analyses (n?=?359,588) reveal that nearly all children of color are more likely to be poor than White children. Yet many multiracial children appear to hold an in-between status in which they experience lower rates of poverty than monoracial children of color. The high level of variation across groups suggests that the relationship between race and childhood poverty is more complicated than generally presumed.

The Waite-Gallagher Marriage Benefit Theory (2000) articulates the premise of greater financial advantage, health benefits, and social well-being for married couples, not shared by cohabitating or singles. This benefit was not generalizable to same-sex couples or African-American. The significance of the current study is the use of a large dataset (The U. S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey) to explore if there is an association between type of legal status of marital relationship and financial advantage and health benefits for same-sex couples. Minority stress explains the systematic exclusion of same-sex couples from the entitlements of citizenship. The wage disadvantage theory of minority groups counters Waite and Gallagher and sheds light on a problem of comparison related to a heterosexual, Caucasian sample. Combining insights from a historical, political, economic, and social perspective, with a large secondary dataset from the 2010 American Community Survey 1-year tabulation, this quantitative dissertation seeks to extend the Waite-Gallagher theory. The findings suggest support for the Waite-Gallagher marriage benefit theory i.e. marriage does matter for lesbian and gay males. The principal conclusion is the existence of a statistically significant relationship between the state context (legal recognition of marriage vs. non-recognition) and financial advantage and health benefits when using a large secondary data set.

BACKGROUNDThe family migration literature presumes that women are cast into the role of the tied migrant. However, clearly identifying tied migrants is a difficult empirical task, since it requires the identification of a counterfactual: who moved but did not want to?OBJECTIVESThis research develops a unique methodology to directly identify both tied migrants and tied stayers in order to investigate their frequency and determinants.METHODSUsing data from the 1997 through 2009 U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), propensity score matching is used to match married individuals with comparable single individuals to create counterfactual migration behaviors: who moved but would not have moved had they been single (tied migrants) and who did not move but would have moved had they been single (tied stayers).RESULTSTied migration is relatively rare and not limited just to women: rates of tied migration are similar for men and women. However, tied staying is both more common than tied migration and equally experienced by men and women. Consistent with the body of empirical evidence, an analysis of the determinants of tied migration and tied staying demonstrates that family migration decisions are imbued with gender.CONCLUSIONSAdditional research is warranted to validate the unique methodology developed in this paper and to confirm its results. One line of future research should be to examine the effects of tied staying, along with tied migration, on well-being, union stability, employment, and earnings.

This paper evaluates the impact of eliminating affirmative action in California in postsecondary admission during 1995. Using methodology of difference-indifferences , I compare the university enrollment of minority in California with other states that did not eliminate affirmative action in 1990s. In contrast with the expectation, eliminating affirmative action does not reduce the enrollment of minority students. Research on outcomes by school types does not provide a clear support that fewer minorities enrolled in public schools. Result in labor market also fails to find evidence proving that minority are worse off in earnings after eliminating affirmative action. 2 In 1960, the term "affirmative action" firstly existed in a series orders in response to Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action (AA thereafter) is intended to promote the opportunity of minority group and compensate past discrimination by erase differences between races. In education and labor markets, race is broadly taken into account when the decision of admission, employment or payment is made. One extreme case is quota that sets a particular enrollment (or employment) number for each race. But quota is illegal in United States. There are two main area of adoption of AA-education and labor market. In this paper, I focus on the effect of AA on higher education, especially on school enrollment of minorities. In labor market, most people agree that employers have prejudice and discrimination on minorities. But in education, equity across races is always an important mission. Some even argue that affirmative action overprotects minorities so that produces environment of reverse discrimination. In 1990s, California firstly eliminated affirmative action in higher education admission. Some believe minorities were harmed by the change of law. Some support the policy and think it brings more fairness and better match for students. Nevertheless, most arguments concentrate on administrative data from specific schools. Some other research regards behaviors change in college selection. The purpose of my study is to explore the change of the well-beings of minorities after AA was ended. In this paper, I generalize the argument to the entire states and broaden the topic to two more general outcomes-college enrollment and earnings. By a study of the impact of eliminating AA on a macro-level to see what the effect on postsecondary school enrollment and future earnings of minorities, I conclude that negative effect of elimination of AA is not so serious as people worried. Conducting the methodology of "difference-in-differences", I compare the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics before and after the law was enacted, and detect 3 the difference between the earnings of the minorities who are and not affected by the policy change. The rest of paper is recognized as follows. Section I introduces background information and Section II reviews previous literature. Section III describes data sources and potential limitations. In section IV, I present the empirical strategy of my research and the result with sensitivity test. Labor market outcomes are provided in Section V. Section VI discusses and concludes.

Using data from South Asia, this article examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters. During marriage search, parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughter’s groom, rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger sisters. Relative to younger brothers, younger sisters increase a girl’s marriage risk; relative to younger singleton sisters, younger twin sisters have the same effect. These effects intensify in marriage markets with lower sex ratios or greater parental involvement in marriage arrangements. In contrast, older sisters delay a girl’s marriage. Because girls leave school when they marry and face limited earning opportunities when they reach adulthood, the number of sisters has well-being consequences over the life cycle. Younger sisters cause earlier school-leaving, lower literacy, a match to a husband with less education and a less skilled occupation, and (marginally) lower adult economic status. Data from a broader set of countries indicate that these cross-sister pressures on marriage age are common throughout the developing world, although the schooling costs vary by setting.

Economic development agencies seek industries to benefit their local economies. This article investigates how manufacturing composition affects a region's income and educational attainment using data for individuals and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1970 through 2009. The results provide an understanding of the importance of changes in industry composition on the well-being of residents of an MSA. Using fixed-effects regressions, we model individual educational attainment and real income as a function of manufacturing composition, allowing for nonlinearities through squaring manufacturing composition. Across MSAs, high levels of manufacturing are associated with lower educational attainment and higher income; however, higher growth in manufacturing decreases both educational attainment and income.

Mexicans are among the top five immigrant groups in 43 states. In nine states, Mexicans make up more than 40 percent of the immigrant population, and up to nearly 60 percent in states such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This population is made up predominantly of adults between 18 and 64 years old and contributes to the country economically through work and consumption and socially through culture and community life. Through work, they also pay taxes programs that benefit all Americans, including Social Security and Medicare. Despite these significant contributions, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are poorly integrated and face high levels of social exclusion, with many not benefiting from existing health and social protection programs. Mexican immigrants' naturalization rates are far below those of other immigrant groups, and they are more likely to have low incomes, live in poverty, and many among their ranks are undocumented. These social characteristics contribute to their lack of health insurance and access to care, and have negative consequences for their health in terms of chronic disease and overall well-being. This report examines the health services implications of the social integration of Mexican immigrants in the United States, with special emphasis on the impact of the health system for nonelderly adults where access is heavily shaped by private insurance that is largely obtained through employment. This report is a result of binational collaboration between Secretariat of Government of Mexico, through National Population Council and Migration Policy Unit, and the University of California, through its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.