Driven by increasing migration from Africa and sustained flows from the Caribbean, the number of Black immigrants in the United States has more than doubled over the past 20 years. As a result, the number of children with a Black foreign-born parent has also more than doubled during this period. Today about 813,000 children from birth to age 10 reside with a Black immigrant parent and together thesechildren account for roughly 12 percent of all young Black children in the United States. This trend holds important implications for the US Black child population as well as the overall child population as both are becoming increasingly diverse in their origins, languages, and other characteristics.The majority of children of Black immigrants have parents who come from Africa and the Caribbean, but no single country accounts for more than one-fifth of this population. The diversity of Black immigrant origins makes it difficult to generalize about the well-being of children of Black immigrants, given that well-being indicators vary greatly by parental country of origin. That said, in general the children of Black immigrants fall in the middle of multiple well-being indicators with Asian and white children tending to fare better and Hispanic children and Black children of natives (i.e., African Americans) tending to fare worse. Black children with parents from Africa generally fare about as well as their counterparts withparents from the Caribbean and, in both cases, children of Black immigrants born in English-speaking countries with a long history of immigration to the United States for instance, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago tend to be the most advantaged. Children with parents from countries with shorter immigration histories, where English is not a common language, and with substantial refugee flows are likely to be more disadvantaged. Those with origins in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and wartornAfrican nations such as Sudan and Somali are most at risk on several key indicators.

Children in immigrant families account for nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of all children as of 2010, and the vast majority (88 percent) are U.S. citizens. In fact, children of immigrants account for nearly the entire growth in the U.S. child population between 1990 and 2008.1 This policy brief draws on key indicators from the Foundation for Child Development Child Well-Being Index (CWI), as well as additional data, to highlight both similarities and differences in the circumstances of children in immigrant and native-born families. Additional statistics that pertain particularly to the situation of children in immigrant families, namely citizenship and language skills, are also provided. Finally, this brief discusses recently passed federal legislation as it relates to children in immigrant families and points to policies that will ensure that we as a country are securing our future by providing opportunity for every child.

This report presents findings from a two-year study exploring how nonprofit organizations and religious congregations strive to advance the rights, economic standing, and overall well-being of low-income Latina immigrants in Atlanta, GA; Phoenix, AZ; and Northern Virginia, a region within the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. It examines the challenges that service providers, clergy, and advocates in these areas see immigrant women grappling with on a daily basis, as well as the broad array of resources that religious and secular organizations offer to address these challenges. In documenting these resources, the report highlights the remarkable efforts of groups that strive to assist immigrant women in contexts often shaped by strong anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive public policies. It also explores the gaps in resources that continue to remain despite these efforts and captures the views of organizational leaders on how programsand policies can be improved to support Latina immigrants.Based on the research findings, the report makes recommendations for changes in policies and practices that would benefit immigrant women and their families. We hopethese recommendations will be useful to advocates, clergy, service providers, policymakers, and others who support the inclusion of immigrant women in communities and society.

The economic crisis that began in 2008 had multiple implications for retirement behavior. The stock market crash may have caused some individuals to defer retirement because of losses they experienced in their 401(k)-type retirement plans. The spike in unemployment may have led others to retire sooner in response to a job loss or the inability to find work. Coile and Levine (2007, 2009, and 2010) provide evidence of both types of behavior. By the end of 2010, however, the stock market had nearly rebounded to pre-crash levels. Although the market still may be below what individuals had expected and there may have been some short-term impacts, the markets sharp rise has substantially diminished the importance of this part of the story. The weakness in the labor market, however, continues to be extensive and persistent. The purpose of this analysis is to focus on its implications for retirement and retiree well-being in the coming years.

This paper uses micro data from the American Community Survey to examine how the recent housing bust affected households employment, homeownership, home values, and housing costs. To separate dynamics of the housing bust from those of the aggregate downturn, we differentiate between metropolitan areas that did and did not experience bubbles. We find that, for most measures, deteriorations in well-being were more severe in bubble metros than elsewhere, and for several measures, differential effects on less-educated households were also more severe. This underscores the importance of keeping housing markets from overheating, as burdens of adjustment fall differentially on people not well prepared to bear them.

How does intermarriage affect the economic well-being of immigrants and the children of immigrants? The rapid increase in the population of first and second generation immigrants in the United States raises questions about the processes through which immigrants are integrated into the stratification structure. Intermarriage is a key component of both old (Gordon 1964) and new (Alba and Nee 2003) perspectives on immigrant assimilation, and stratification researchers likewise see marital homogamy as evidence of rigidity in the stratification structure. Long-term trends in assortative mating in the US suggest increasing closure based on educational attainment, and increasing openness on the basis of race and ethnicity. Yet after decades of rising rates of intermarriage, Qian and Lichter (2007) found that during the 1990s, rates of inter-racial marriage between whites and Hispanics and whites and Asian-Americans declined, and intermarriage between immigrant and native-born co-ethnics increased. They interpret these trends as the results of the increased availability of co-ethnic marital partners. The question remains as to how trends in assortative mating affect income disparities between immigrant and non-immigrant households. We use pooled cross-sectional data from the IPUMS-CPS to compare trends in the economic outcomes of immigrant and non-immigrant couple-headed households in the United States between 1996-2010. Based on previous research, we hypothesize that (1) Increasing ethnic homogamy will be associated with declines in educational homogamy among immigrants, and (2) Declining rates of intermarriage will slow the pace at which second generation immigrant households will achieve economic parity with non-immigrant households. We further hypothesize that (3) rates of intermarriage and educational homogamy will be highest for immigrants with a college degree, and that this group will compare favorably with non-immigrant households in terms of household employment and income.

We use data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1997-2009, as included in the Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS), to examine the impact of other family members' poor health or disability on the emotional well-being of children. In addition to supplying basic socioeconomic and demographic data, this large nationally representative household survey provides information on all family members' overall health and disability status along with multiple indicators of mental health for one "sample child" per family. We analyze how the likelihood of emotional problems in children is affected by different family members' disability and/or poor health. We also examine interactions between the child's socio-demographic characteristics and the negative effects of ill-health or disability in the family.

A large literature in sociology concerns the implications of immigrants participation in ethnic enclaves for their economic and social well-being. The enclave thesis speculates that immigrants benefit from working in ethnic enclaves. Previous research concerning the effects of enclave participation on immigrants economic outcomes has come to mixed conclusions as to whether enclave effects are positive or negative. In this article, we seek to extend and improve upon past work by formulating testable hypotheses based on the enclave thesis and testing them with data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (NIS), employing both residence-based and workplace-based measures of the ethnic enclave. We compare the economic outcomes of immigrants working in ethnic enclaves with those of immigrants working in the mainstream economy. Our research yields minimal support for the enclave thesis. Our results further indicate that for some immigrant groups, ethnic enclave participation actually has a negative effect on economic outcomes.

Transforming care for children and the elderly from a private to a public domain engenders a series of benefits to the economy that improve our standard of living. We assess the positive impacts of social care from both receivers and providers points of view. The benefits to care receivers are various, ranging from private, higher returns to education to enhancing subjective well-being and health outcomes. The economy-wide spillovers of the benefits are noteworthy. Early childhood education reduces costs of law enforcement and generates higher long-termeconomic growth. Home-based health care lowers absenteeism and job losses that otherwise undermine labor productivity, providing adequate care at a lower cost and delaying admission into high-cost institutional care. Social care improves mothers labor-market attachment with higher lifetime income; it also lowers physical and psychological burdens of elder care that are becoming more prevalent with an aging population. Social care investment creates more jobopportunities than other public spending, especially for workers from poor households and with low levels of educational attainment. The broad contributions of social care to our standard of living should be recognized in the public discourse, particularly in this era of fiscal austerity.

Many US antipoverty programs and measures assume mothers have little, intermittent, or no employment and therefore have sufficient time to care for children, perform household tasks, and apply for and maintain eligibility for these programs. Employment-promotion policies directed toward low-income mothers since the late 1980s have successfully increased their time in the labor force. However, low wages and insufficient employer-based benefits often leave employed single mothers with inadequate material resources to support families and less time to care for their children. The lack of consideration given to the value of poor women's time in both the administration and benefit levels of antipoverty government support, as well as the measures used to calculate poverty, place more binds on poor and low-income mothers' time. Ignoring these binds causes researchers and policymakers to overestimate single mothers' well-being and reduces the effectiveness of the policies.

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. Importantly, these improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention pneumonia mortality rates, the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. While men and women show similar improvements on most indicators, only the estimates for the former are robust to the inclusion of birth state specific time trends. With the exception of cognitive disabilities for men and, in some specifications, family income for men and women, estimates for African Americans tend to be smaller in magnitude and less precisely estimated than those for whites. We speculate that this may be due to barriers in translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment in the pre-Civil Rights Era.

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being study and the Current Population Survey, we find that labor market conditions play a large role in explaining the positive relationship between educational attainment and marriage. Our results suggest that if low-educated parents enjoyed the same, stronger labor market conditions as their more-educated counterparts, then differences in marriage by education would narrow considerably. Better labor markets are positively related to marriage for fathers at all educational levels. In contrast, better labor markets are positively related to marriage for less-educated mothers but not their more-educated counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories about women's earning power and marriage, the current economic recession and future studies of differences in family structure across education groups.

Objective: To assess the influence of community-level socioeconomic status (SES) and urban composition on well-being after spinal cord injury (SCI) rehabilitation. Design: Retrospective analysis of cross-sectional survey data. Setting: Two participating centers in the SCI Model Systems (SCIMS) program. Participants: Persons (N=1454) with traumatic SCI from New Jersey and Alabama enrolled in the SCIMS database in 2000 to 2009. Intervention: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: Dichotomous measures of perceived health (ill vs good health), life satisfaction (dissatisfied vs satisfied), and depressive symptoms (presence of a syndrome vs not) to assess well-being. Results: Multilevel logistic regression was used to model community effects on each indicator of well-being. The likelihood of ill health and dissatisfaction with life in people with SCI, but not depressive symptoms, varied across communities. Community SES was related inversely to the odds of reporting ill health. However, the odds for dissatisfaction were higher in persons with SCI living in high SES and urban communities. Associations between community predictors and dissatisfaction with life were sustained after controlling for individual differences in injury severity, SES, and demographics, whereas individual SES was a stronger predictor of ill health than community SES. Conclusion: This research suggests that community stratification influences the likelihood for diminished well-being for persons with SCI after rehabilitation. Understanding the contribution of communities in long-term outcomes after SCI rehabilitation is needed to inform future interventions aimed at preventing disability in this population.

Research on child custody primarily focuses on the well-being of children following divorce. We extend this literature by examining how the prospect of joint child custody affects within-marriage investment in children through changes in household bargaining power. Variation in the timing of joint-custody reforms across states provides a natural-experiment framework with which to examine within-marriage investment in children. The probability of children's private school attendance declines by 12% in states that adopt joint-custody laws. We also find evidence linking joint-custody reform to higher rates of labor force participation for married mothers, which may indicate less time devoted household production.

Research on coresidence between parents and their adult children has challenged the myth that elders are the primary beneficiaries, and instead has shown that coresidential households benefit the younger generation more than their parents. Nevertheless, the rise in nonfamily living in the later 20th century has reshaped the process. Further, the economic fortunes of those at the older and younger ends of the adult life course have shifted with increasing financial well-being among older adults and greater financial strain especially among the young adult parents of children (Preston 1984). This paper examines the extent to which changes over time in generational financial well-being are reflected in the likelihood of coresidence and in the relative position of both generations in parent-adult child households. We use U.S. Census data from 1960 and 2000 to see whether the processes leading to such households have changed.

What do people do after they lose their jobs, other than look for a new one? The unemployed put more time into unpaid household work, including child care, according to an important new study by Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis. Their findings dramatize the limitations of conventional measures of economic well-being based entirely on market income.

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. These improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention pneumonia mortality rates, the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. Men and women show similar improvements on most indicators but the estimates for men are more persistently robust to the inclusion of birth state specific time trends. With the exception of cognitive disabilities for men and, in some specifications, work disability for men and family income, estimates for African Americans tend to be smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. Since African Americans exhibit larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa, we suggest that the absence of consistent discernible long run benefits may reflect barriers they encountered in translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment in the pre- Civil Rights Era.

Strong public support and extensive research show- ing the value of high-quality early childhood edu- cation and care (ECEC) are driving demand for the expansion of ECEC services across the United States. However, persistent difficulties with recruiting and retaining qualified workers—including workers with the linguistic and cultural competence skills to provide quality services to the nation’s diverse young-child population—threaten to short-circuit efforts to better support the healthy development and well-being of young children across the country. More than 100,000 ECEC workers left the field during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many of the most acute challenges predate the public-health crisis, includ- ing shrinking teacher pipelines, high turnover, and low pay.

American soldiers who have fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gulf War II) have faced unusually stressful work conditions. The disruption to home life from repeated deployments and the stress from fighting wars overseas make their job more difficult than most. Using data from the 2009 ACS from IPUMS, veterans of Gulf War II show adverse effects from their military service in a few basic measures of well-being, when compared to other Americans who have not served in the military. These measures include disability status, unemployment, and divorce rates. I am particularly interested in whether there is a discernible increased risk for cognitive disability for veterans versus a similar civilian population. I found that Gulf War II veterans have 1.6 times higher odds than non-veterans of reporting cognitive difficulties. They have much higher odds of divorce, especially female veterans. I found that veterans faced lower unemployment than similar non-veterans.