Chapter 1 assesses the impact of household car ownership on individual labor supply. Various economic theories suggest one reason for low rates of employment among low-skill, inner-city residents is that their residences are spatially separated from suburban jobs. To measure this, I exploit changes in state insurance rate regulation which has beenshown to suppress auto insurance prices, thereby decreasing the cost of owning a car. I find that rate regulation increases multi-car ownership among married couples withchildren. I find that the additional car in the household consequently encourages married mothers to decrease their labor supply while their husbands increase their labor supply. One possible explanation of this result is that second cars are stronger complements to time spent in home production (and especially childrearing) than they are to time spent in the labor market.Chapter 2 (with Shawn Moulton) tests for political budget cycles among US municipalities. According to the political budget cycle hypothesis, in election years government officials engage in opportunistic fiscal policy manipulation for electoral gains. This chapter tests that hypothesis using data on taxes and spending for a panel of268 US cities over the period 1970-2004. While our estimates provide no evidence of altered total expenditures or taxes in election years, we do find a 0.7 percent increase in total municipal employment, including increases in police, education, and sanitation employment.Chapter 3 (with Andrew Deines, David Lodge, and Richard Jensen) assesses trade-offs between fisheries and hydropower production in a tropical floodplain fishery.We compile catch per unit effort, total harvest, and monthly-mean hydrographs from the Kafue River in Zambia for the years 1955-1996 and develop population growth models to test for effects of density, total fisheries harvest, and water regime. We find that alteration of the flood regime has reduced fish density but enhanced hydroelectric production. The total cost of replacing this hydroelectricity is less than a third of the additional surplus generated by a natural flood regimes impact on fisheries production, implying changes in dam operation to provide environmental flows can be a cost-effective means of improving the material well-being of subsistence fishermen.

The safety net is a broad array of federal and state programs that supports families through cash, food,housing assistance, and tax credits. Some are universal insurance programs that provide benefits regardlessof other income and assets while others, often called means-tested programs, provide benefits to those with low incomes. Some federal programs operate the same across the country, and others allow for significant state administrative variation. The federal and state governments jointly fund other parts of the safety net, and eligibility and benefits vary across the states. States may also fund programs to fill in the gaps or augment federal programs. These variations mean that low-income families can face verydifferent safety nets across the country.This paper examines how safety net policy variation affects poverty among adults under age 65 and children. We measure the effects using a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that captures the effects of cash, noncash, and tax elements of the safety net and show the net effects on adult and child poverty. In 2009, the Office of Management and Budget formed an Interagency Technical Working Group (ITWG) on developing the SPM to provide an improved understanding of the economic well-being of American families and of how Federal policies affect those living in poverty. The SPM would not replace the official poverty measure, which is based only on cash income, but would supplement it. TheSPM provides a useful benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of safety net policies.We highlight the safety nets in three focal states: Georgia, Illinois, and Massachusetts. These states werechosen to illustrate the effects of narrow, medium, and broad safety nets. The results show how universal and means-tested programs affect poverty and how federal and state program rules have very different effects across states with different populations and economies.The paper begins with a summary of the safety net programs included in the assessment. The next section summarizes methods, including the data, the choice of focal states, the SPM metric, and the methods used to implement the SPM in the focal states. Then we describe the variation in demographic and economic characteristics and safety net policies across these states. The results show how the safety net policies affect both the official and SPM measures of poverty in the three states. Results also highlight how individual elements of the safety net affect poverty and net incomes throughout the income distribution.Federal and state safety net programs substantially reduce poverty, especially among children. The focal states safety net policies have substantially different effects on poverty, but federal policies tend to smooth out differences across the three focal states.

The health status of Mexican Immigrants has important repercussions on their economic well-being and that of their families and the areas they live. There is extensive scientific literature documenting the health status of Mexican immigrants but not its causes. Acculturation, assimilation to the labor market, and changes in the composition of the household generate new behaviors that might have a direct effect on the immigrants health status. In this study, I analyze the determinants of the health status of this large segment of the US population from a time use perspective. In particular, I examine how their eating and physical activity habits vary with time since arrival in the U.S.

The health status of Mexican Immigrants has important repercussions on their economic well-being and that of their families and the areas they live. There is extensive scientific literature documenting the health status of Mexican immigrants but not its causes. Acculturation, assimilation to the labor market, and changes in the composition of the household generate new behaviors that might have a direct effect on the immigrant’s health status. In this study, I analyze the determinants of the health status of this large segment of the US population from a time use perspective. In particular, I examine how their eating and physical activity habits vary with time since arrival in the U.S.

The conclusions drawn by those who study gentrification have shifted in recent years; in the 1980s it was assumed that gentrification was harmful to low-income residents of up-and- coming neighborhoods (Marcuse 1986, Ley 1981). More recently, several studies have shown that gentrification does not harm the original residents of a neighborhood and, in fact, might improve their economic well-being (Freeman 2004, Freeman & Braconi 2005, Vigdor 2002). This thesis expands upon that work by using data from the 2000 Census and 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS), as well as the March Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to determine whether gentrification had a positive effect on the labor market outcomes of low-skilled residents. Using probit and OLS models, I find the relationship between gentrification and several labor market outcomes for low-educated adults to be negative and significant. The magnitudes of these effects, however, are very small; although living in a gentrified neighborhood is associated with a small decrease in labor supply, as measured by labor force participation, hours worked per week, weeks worked in the last year, estimates may be biased by the Great Recession. Further research is necessary to determine whether gentrification per se was responsible for these outcomes.

The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low income families. A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has accomplished this goal, but most studies have been based on research designs that compare program participants to non-participants. If selection into these programs is non-random then such comparisons will lead to biased estimates of the program's true effects. In this study we use the rollout of the WIC program across counties to estimate the impact of the program on infant health. We find that the implementation of WIC led to an increase in average birth weight and a decrease in the fraction of births that are classified as low birth weight. We find no evidence that these estimates are driven by changes in fertility or selection into live births. Our preferred estimates suggest that WIC initiation raised average birth weight by 2 g, or by 7 g among infants born to mothers with low education levels. These translate into estimated birth weight increases among participating mothers of approximately 18 to 29 g. Estimated treatments on the treated impacts among infants born to participating mothers with low education are of similar magnitude.

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal 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 levels of pneumoniaas these were the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. These estimates are, ingeneral, larger and more robust to specification for men than for women. With the exception of cognitive disability and poverty for men, the estimates for African Americans are smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. This is despite our finding that African Americansexperienced larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa. We suggest that pre-Civil Rights barriers may have inhibited their translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment.

This paper examines the impact of late-career investment returns and job loss on subsequent retiree well-being. Specifically, we explore whether there is a link between the income of retirees aged 70 to 79 and the stock market and labor market conditions that existed around the time of their retirement. We use data from the 2000 Census and the 2001 through 2007 American Community Surveys and consider both total personal income and income by type. We find that a long-term decline in the stock market in the years leading up to retirement leads to a modest reduction in investment income a decade or so later for those in the top third of the income distribution. The consequences of approaching retirement when the labor market is weak are more severe. A higher unemployment rate around the time of retirement reduces Social Security income for those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution; we estimate that an unemployed worker experiences a roughly 20 percent drop in Social Security income, consistent with claiming benefits several years early. Overall, our results indicate the importance of the challenges faced by lower-income workers who face a weak labor market as they approach retirement.

This article provides policymakers with context for understanding past and future policy discussions regarding Social Security widow benefits. Using data from surveys, projections from a microsimulation model, and recent research, it examines three types of benefits - those for aged widows, widows caring for children, and disabled widows. The economic well-being of aged widows has shifted from one of widespread hardship to one in which above-poverty, but still modest, income typically prevails. Many aged widows experience a decline in their standard of living upon widowhood, a pattern which is pronounced among those with limited education. Widows caring for children have been a sizeable beneficiary group historically, but policy changes and demographic trends have sharply reduced the size of this group. Family Social Security benefits ensure a modest level of household income for widows caring for children. Disabled widows differ from the other groups because they are at higher risk for poverty.

In Massachusetts, as in every other place in the world, there are children needing care and education, people with physical and mental health needs, and those who require assistance with the daily tasks of life because of illness, age, or disability. The labor of meeting these needs— care work—is a complex activity with profound implications for personal, social, and economic well-being. Care work is not just a cornerstone of our economy—it is its foundation. Care work . . .

The Population Reference Bureau INFORMS people around the world about population, health, and the environment, and EMPOWERS them to use that information to ADVANCE the well-being of current and future generations.

This data brief is the fourth in a series that profiles childrenof immigrants using up-to-date census data andother sources.1 The first brief highlighted the fastgrowth of the immigrant population and important demographictrends. The second described the family circumstancesof children of immigrants, and the third highlightedthe circumstances of young children age 0 to 8. The currentbrief focuses on immigrant families incomes, economic wellbeing,and use of public benefits.

Little is known about couples' shared time and how actual time spent together is associated with well-being. In this study, the authors investigated how work and family demands are related to couples' shared time (total and exclusive) and individual well-being (happiness, meaningfulness, and stress) when with one's spouse. They used individual-level data from the 2003-2010 American Time Use Survey (N = 46,883), including the 2010 Well-Being Module. The results indicated that individuals in full-time working dual-earner couples spend similar amounts of time together as individuals in traditional breadwinner-homemaker arrangements on weekdays after accounting for daily work demands. The findings also show that parents share significantly less total and exclusive spousal time together than nonparents, though there is considerable variation among parents by age of the youngest child. Of significance is that individuals experience greater happiness and meaning and less stress during time spent with a spouse opposed to time spent apart.

The age of parents at the birth of their children may have profound implications for the subsequent lifecourse of parents, the functioning of the family, and for child health and well-being. Using historicalcensus data from the Integrated Public Use Micro Series, this research explore three dimensions ofparental age: chronological age (Martin et al. 2009), social age (Mare and Tzeng 1989; Eliason et al.2009), and relationship age (Bachu 1999) from the early 1900s until 2008. Little is known about longtermhistorical shifts in these dimensions of age, and to our knowledge, there has been no systematicinvestigation of their interdependence. This research addresses the transformation of family life byinvestigating historical change in three dimensions of parental age and the ways in which thedimensions are woven together.

Comprising two independent empirical analyses, this dissertation leverages the data and methodology of the happiness research program to address issues in tort and employment discrimination. The first piece of the dissertation uses domain-specific measures of well-being – financial satisfaction and perceived relative income – to gain insight on potential differences in the way that individuals of different demographic groups assess their income. Insofar as it reflects or impacts the economic incentive structures facing workers of different demographic groups, the subjective assessment of income has far-reaching implications in a variety of civil rights contexts, where the expansion of economic opportunity among historically disadvantaged groups is a first-order goal. The results of the study indicate that different race/gender pairs do respond to income differently: for both financial satisfaction and perceived relative income, white females, black females and black males all have lower returns to personal income than do white males. White males, in other words, appear to reap more “bang for the buck” in terms of both of the outcome variables, even after a host of control variables are introduced. The results are germane to ongoing debates about claiming behavior, filing deadlines, and race/gender clustering in the employment context. The second chapter employs survey data on subjective well-being and a battery of self-assessed health measures to estimate the hedonic impact of emotional health, as decoupled from its physical counterpart. The analysis is done with an eye toward tort law, which has historically drawn a distinction between physical and emotional harms, limiting recovery on the latter through various common law doctrines. After offering a cautious defense of the use of subjective well-being as a proxy for injury in the tort context, the paper shows that a range of potentially inactionable emotional conditions, including “stand alone” emotional conditions with no concomitant physical manifestations, exert a significant negative impact on subjective wellbeing. To the extent that subjective well-being, or happiness, captures something meaningful about what it means to be “made whole” as an aggrieved tort litigant, the results of this paper suggest that the limitations on recovery for stand-alone emotional harms may be misguided.

This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. The authors try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap. The authors focus on three periods of history, but not in chronological order. The first is the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported large reductions in the gaps in reading and mathematics scores. Second, the report focus on the period from about 1990 until 2008, when the gap wobbled around a generally straight trend line, although scores of 9- and 13-year-olds generally rose overall. And third, the report takes a more expansive view, beginning early in the 20th century, in an attempt to understand the impact of a variety of factors on changes in the gap. These factors include information on educational attainment, employment and earnings, child well-being, the family, neighborhoods and the effects of concentrated poverty and deprivation, lack of social capital, and intergenerational mobility. Appendices include: (1) Trends in NAEP White-Black Reading Gaps at Selected Percentiles; and (2) Trends in NAEP White-Black Mathematics Gaps at Selected Percentiles. (Contains 58 footnotes, 16 figures, and 1 table.)

Military service has traditionally been the domain of healthy, robust males, butservice can also reflect risk preference and socioeconomic status. Service also raisesthe probability of exposure to violence through combat, a significant stressor, and itmay represent other types of treatments as well, both positive and negative. We mightexpect to find an ambiguous relationship between military service and later-life health,and several recent studies support this. In this paper, we explore the relationshipbetween combat exposure and health past age 50 in the Health and Retirement Study,a rich longitudinal panel including many male veterans that now asks about combatexposure in its core survey. Using regression analysis and an instrumental variablesapproach, we show that combat exposure harms mental health and emotional well-being and raises a biomarker of stress at older ages, but it appears often to havenegligible effects on a wide array of physical health metrics.

Military service has traditionally been the domain of healthy, robust males, but service can also reflect risk preference and socioeconomic status. Service also raisesthe probability of exposure to violence through combat, a significant stressor, and it may represent other types of treatments as well, both positive and negative. We mightexpect to find an ambiguous relationship between military service and later-life health, and several recent studies support this. In this paper, we explore the relationshipbetween combat exposure and health past age 50 in the Health and Retirement Study, a rich longitudinal panel including many male veterans that now asks about combatexposure in its core survey. Using regression analysis and an instrumental variables approach, we show that combat exposure harms mental health and emotional well-being and raises a biomarker of stress at older ages, but it appears often to have negligible effects on a wide array of physical health metrics.