The well-being of immigrant youth - of the first or second generation - is intimately tied to their socioeconomic status and success, and these are important for social cohesion in society. Institutional settings and policies vary greatly from one country to the next, so studying key outcomes for immigrant youth in a comparative perspective illuminates which are most effective in promoting their well-being. In this chapter, a framework is presented for that exercise, highlighting recent literature on multidimensional well-being, social inclusion/exclusion, and child well-being. Then key findings from research on immigration and youth are examined within that framework in order to delineate the potential and the challeneges associated with this approah to teasing out what works for immigrant youth.

This study examined the relationship betweenexperiences of day-to-day discrimination and two measuresof health among Gujaratis, one of the largest ethnic groupsof Asian Indians in the U.S. Data were collected viacomputer-assisted telephone interviews with a randomsample of Gujarati men and women aged 1864 in Metropolitan Detroit (N = 423). Using structural equation modeling, we tested two gender-moderated models of the relationship between day-to-day discrimination and health, one using the single-item general health status and the other using the 4-item emotional well-being measure. For both women and men, controlling for socio-demographic and other relevant characteristics, the experience of day-today discrimination was associated with worse emotional well-being. However, day-to-day discrimination was associated with the single-item self-rated general health status only for men. This study identified not only gender differences in discrimination-health associations but also the importance of using multiple questions in assessing perceived health status.

Interactions between culturally diverse individuals can spur economic benefits by stimulating new ideas that raise urban residents productivity. But diversity can also diminish economic well-being by making communication difficult, and by stimulating conflict. This paper investigates whether urban institutionsin particular residents sense of generalized trustdetermine when diversity is an economic asset and when it is a liability. To do so, data on trust, birthplace diversity, wages, and demographics in US metropolitan areas are combined. The evidence suggests that workers are much better able to harness the productivity-enhancing spillovers that arise from cultural diversity when they live in cities endowed with strong informal institutions.

This paper aims to analyse the space and time distribution of the infant mortality rate (IMR) at municipality level in Colombia before and after conferring greater responsibilities to the municipalities for the administration of the local health care systems. Using special econometrics, we find that there is a geographical concentration of IMR persisting over time and defining two groups of municipalities with mortality levels that oppose each other. Additionally, IMR distribution is found to depend on local and neighbouring factors. We conclude that after 18 years of decentralization, differences among municipalities in terms of IMR increased. Decentralization policies designs should include the municipalities development levels as well as the neighbouring area context in order to improve the results expected from decentralization.

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.

Within the context of slow growth in recent years and fiscal pressures, Kosovo faces the complex dual challenges of high unemployment and weak human development outcomes. Promoting the jobs agenda and strengthening human capital rank high among priorities for Kosovos development. 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. On the other hand 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 retirement plans. The purpose of this analysis is to focus on its implications for retirement and retiree well-being in the coming years. High unemployment has the potential to significantly alter the well-being of older workers, both in the present and forthe remainder of their lives.

Today, we are witnessing high, but not unprecedented, rates of migration across national borders and around the globe. It is widely known that this movement holds the potential to influence social and economic conditions in migrant-sending and -receiving countries. What is less commonly recognized is that contemporary flows of migration seem to be generating transnational family arrangements that may influence children’s development and well-being. Families are scattered among countries, with spouses separated and children living apart from one or both parents and their siblings for years at a time. Statistics describing the prevalence and structures of transnational families, however, are hard to come by. One study based on interviews with 385 adolescents born in China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico living in the United States found that 85 percent had been separated from one or both parents for an extended period.1 A larger survey of 8,573 US-based immigrants who had just received legal permanent residence (LPR, known as a “green card”) and their children found that 15 percent of these immigrants’ children had been separated from at least one parent for two years or more. Separation was more common for those children who were born outside the United States: 31 percent had beenseparated from a parent.2 These statistics make it clear that separation is quite common among the children of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. Ethnographic research suggests that parent-child separation may be more common among Black immigrants than other immigrants because of parenting traditions that distribute child care through practices known as child fostering, child circulation, or child shifting. These practices have developed in areas of West Africa and the Caribbean that have long traditions of regional migration. This chapter explores the practice of child fostering and its implications for parent-child separation among immigrants from Ghana. Like many Caribbean immigrants and some West Africans who come from politically stable countries, many Ghanaian immigrants do not raise their young children in the United States. Instead, these children are raised in their country of origin by other family members.3 Some of these children are “left behind” when a parent migrates; others are born in the United States and later sent to Ghana as infants or adolescents. Ethnographic research shows that the ages of their return to the United States vary: many do so as young adults, others when they are ready for elementary school. This chapter analyzes the reasons why many Ghanaian immigrants decide to raise their young children in Ghana. It also assesses the informal and formal social resources available to support the well-being of young children of a select group of Black immigrants in the United States.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is an ongoing time diary survey funded by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and fielded by the United States Census Bureau. Data collection began with some 20,000 interviews in 2003 and 14,000 responses have been collected each subsequent year. ATUS respondents are a nationally representative sample of persons aged 15 and older drawn from households who have concluded their participation in the Current Population Survey (CPS), the monthly labor force survey in the United States. For each activity during the day covered by the ATUS interview, respondents are asked what they were doing, where they were, and who was with them. Background information about the ATUS respondents and their households is collected as part of the ATUS interview. The ATUS public use files also include information collected during the households final CPS interview. The survey is designed to permit the addition of modules on specific topics, such as the 2006-2008 Eating and Health Modules sponsored by the Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, the 2010 Well-Being Module sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, and the 2011 Leave Module sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor Womens Bureau...

Due to rapid expansion in size of the Hispanic American population, Latinos are exerting an ever growing influence on the economy and culture of the United States. At the same time, their own views and lifestyles are being reshaped by exposure to the rest of American society. Hispanics’ patterns of adjustment to and interaction with the surrounding environment are sure to have important implications for the group’s long-term socioeconomic attainment as well as for general societal well-being. In light of the salience of the issues involved, this dissertation explores in- depth a few specific facets of the process of Hispanic incorporation into American society. Chapter 1 focuses on how compositional factors (e.g. women’s economic resources, mate availability) affect the marriage rates of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans relative to those of non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Chapter 2 examines whether the migration of Latino workers to rural areas with burgeoning Hispanic populations impinges on the economic outcomes of established residents. Chapter 3 investigates patterns of occupational segregation by ethnicity in the rural South to gauge labor market competition between Latino migrants and the region’s longer-settled groups. The three studies yield several noteworthy findings. Chapter 1 documents that Mexican American and white women marry at rates well above those of Puerto Rican and, especially, African American women. In addition, the results suggest that Latinas’ limited economic resources reduce their likelihood of marrying vis-à-vis whites and blacks, while their larger supply of stably employed men and higher probability of being foreign-born raise their comparative marriage odds. Chapter 2 provides evidence that growth in the Latino share of the workforce in new rural destinations leads to somewhat less desirable income and poverty trajectories for non-Hispanics. Chapter 3 shows that Hispanics in the rural South experience a large degree of occupational segregation from whites and African Americans and rank below both of these groups in occupational status on average. Furthermore, low levels of English proficiency, US citizenship, and educational attainment largely account for the disadvantaged labor market position of Hispanic workers.

Some loss in memory is considered a part of normal aging; however, there is a considerable heterogeneity in cognitive aging among older adults. Studies show that living arrangements, social interaction, social relationships and size of social network are among the predictors of memory decline for older adults. Moreover, marriage has been associated with physiological health as well as psychological and social well-being. This study has examined the relationship between the marital status and memory performance in older adults. It was hypothesized that (1) being married will be positively related to memory of older adults; (2) participants with larger supportive social network will perform better on memory tests; and (3) that quality of married life will be positively related to memory for married older adults. Results from this study did not support the hypotheses when age was controlled suggesting no relationship between marital status and memory performance.

Much of the research on the economic integration of immigrants centers on educational and occupational mobility from the first through third generation. Although intermarriage is a key component of both old (Gordon 1964) and new (Alba and Nee 2003) perspectives on immigrant assimilation, the role of intermarriage in the economic integration of immigrants remains poorly understood. As the population of immigrants and children of immigrants has increased in the past few decades, the increasing availability of marital partners with the same national origin has led to an increase in endogamous marriages in the second generation. What are the implications of the decline in intermarriage for the economic outcomes of the second generation of post-1960s immigrants? We use pooled cross-sectional data from the IPUMS-CPS 1996-2010 to investigate the relationship between assortative mating by national origins and the economic well-being of adult children of immigrants. We find that (1) children of immigrants who partner with members of the same national-origin group have lower income and living standards relative to those who intermarry; (2) children of immigrants who partner with a native-born spouse or cohabiting partner are not economically advantaged as compared to those who partner exogamously with first and second generation immigrants; and (3) the economic gains from intermarriage depend on the race and ethnicity of both partners, with Asian immigrants the only group to show no effect of assortative mating.

This study uses data from the 2002 Rwandan census to situate the discourse on migration and orphan well-being within the context of the household. According to its findings, migrant orphans are less likely than non-migrant orphans to live in households with less favorable structural characteristics such as single-parent households. Significant differences are also found in the implied gains to living standards and schooling associated with migration among paternal, maternal, and double-orphans. However, the higher living standards and schooling attainment of orphan migrants relative to their non-migrant counterparts disappear within child-headed household contexts. More generally, the results indicate that the higher living standards of migrant orphans are in part driven by the fact that they mostly live in households with migrant householdheads or migrant spouses. Yet the analysis also suggests that orphans living within these contexts experience higher levels of intra-household discrimination in investments in their schooling, relative to their orphan counterparts who live in non-migrant households.

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of the causal effects of in-hospital voluntary paternity establishment (IHVPE) programs on paternity establishment rates and consequent family structure, behavior, and well-being. The empirical analysis is compatible with a conceptual framework in which fathers, who are heterogeneousin quality, must make transfers to mothers in exchange for rights to their children. However, because maternal utility is more sensitive to father quality in marriage thanoutside marriage, mothers trade off the benefits of paternal transfers with the costs of interacting with lower-than-desired quality partners in marriage. Following a decrease in the cost of paternity establishment, more mothers expect partial transfers outside marriage and thus choose to remain unmarried, thereby raising the marriage threshold in father quality. Using variation in the timing of IHVPE initiation across states and years, I show that IHVPE programs increase paternity establishment rates by 38percent, and reduce the likelihood of parental marriage post-childbirth. The decrease in marriage leads to positive selection into the samples of both married and unmarriedfathers, providing evidence for an increase in the marriage threshold in father quality. Accounting for selection out of marriage, there is some indication of a net reductionin paternal transfers: private health insurance provision for children declines, while maternal labor supply increases. On the whole, measures of child welfare such as total family income and child mental and physical health are unaffected, although childrens access to preventative care declines. I perform numerous robustness checks to support the validity of my findings.

Following the report of the Stiglitz Commission, measuring and comparing well-being across countries has gainedrenewed interest. Yet, analyses that go beyond income and incorporate non-market dimensions of welfare most oftenrely on the assumption of identical preferences to avoid the difficulties related to interpersonal comparisons. In thispaper, we suggest an international comparison based on individual welfare rankings that fully retain preferenceheterogeneity. Focusing on the consumption-leisure trade-off, we estimate discrete choice labor supply models usingharmonized microdata for 11 European countries and the US. We retrieve preference heterogeneity within and acrosscountries and analyze several welfare criteria which take into account that differences in income are partly due todifferences in tastes. The resulting welfare rankings clearly depend on the normative treatment of preferenceheterogeneity with alternative metrics. We show that these differences can indeed be explained by estimated preferenceheterogeneity across countries rather than demographic composition

This paper examines the empirical relationship between democracy and different forms of inequality. We argue that democracy creates incentives for targeted as opposed to general redistribution; that ethnic groups are often convenient targets for group-based distribution; and thus that democracy should reduced inequality between ethnic groups, but with little effect on overall inequality. Using a new data set from 75 countries, we find support for this argument: there is a strong and robust relationship between democracy and between-group inequality, but no such relationship exists between democracy and (a) overall inequality, (b) within-group inequality or (c) polarization. Two-stage least squares analysis with a new instrument for democracy (one based on regional democracy scores at the time of regime inception), along with an analysis of lagged democracy's effect on between-group inequality, indicates that democracy likely causes lower BGI. The analysis therefore underlines the attractiveness for parties in competitive democracies of group-based distributive politics as opposed to general "rich-to-poor'' transfers that raise the well-being of all low income individuals.

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.