The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated devastating losses in employment and earnings; in the economic recovery since those initial losses, pandemic relief programs prevented millions from falling into poverty. The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed in March 2021 in response to the pandemic, provided additional resources to individuals and families in the forms of stimulus checks, emergency rental assistance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) increases, and expansions in unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit, among other policies.1 Families with children have largely benefited from these additional support systems, with child poverty rates dropping to a record low in 2021.

Over the past decade, organized labor has played a significant role in advocating for minimum wage increases. Why might this be, given that the minimum wage may act as a substitute for the bargaining power offered by labor unions? In this paper, we study the interplay between minimum wages and union membership. We estimate that each dollar in minimum wage increase predicts a 5 percent increase (0.3 pp) in the union membership rate among individuals ages 16–40. Consistent with a classic “free-riding” hypothesis, however, we find that minimum wage increases predict declines in union membership among the minimum wage’s most direct beneficiaries. Instead, increases in union membership occur among much broader groups that are not directly affected by the minimum wage.

Objective: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) after major surgery remains an important contributor to morbidity and mortality. Despite significant quality improvement efforts in prevention and prophylaxis strategies, the degree of hospital and regional variation in the United States remains unknown. Methods: Medicare beneficiaries undergoing 13 different major surgeries at U.S. hospitals between 2016 and 2018 were included in this retrospective cohort study. We calculated the rates of 90-day VTE. We adjusted for a variety of patient and hospital covariates and used a multilevel logistic regression model to calculate the rates of VTE and coefficients of variation across hospitals and hospital referral regions (HRRs). Results: A total of 4,115,837 patients from 4116 hospitals were included, of whom 116,450 (2.8%) experienced VTE within 90 days. The 90-day VTE rates varied substantially by procedure, from 2.5% for abdominal aortic aneurysm repair to 8.4% for pancreatectomy. Across the hospitals, there was a 6.6-fold variation in index hospitalization VTE and a 5.3-fold variation in the rate of postdischarge VTE. Across the HRRs, there was a 2.6-fold variation in 90-day VTE, with a 12.1-fold variation in the coefficient of variation. A subset of HRRs was identified with both higher VTE rates and higher variance across hospitals. Conclusions: Substantial variation exists in the rate of postoperative VTE across U.S. hospitals. Characterizing HRRs with high overall rates of VTE and those with significant variation across the hospitals will allow for targeted quality improvement efforts.

Background The total motherhood wage gap among U.S. college-educated women closed over the past two decades and was eliminated by the early 2010s. It is not clear, however, whether the COVID-19 pandemic reversed these trends. Methods Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2000–2022 Current Population Surveys, this study uses linear regression models to estimate trends in the total motherhood wage gap among college-educated and non-college-educated women who work full-time. Results In the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, college-educated women with children did not pay a substantial motherhood wage penalty, but their wages began to decline at the onset of the pandemic, and the decline accelerated over the following years. By the end of 2022, college-educated women paid a 6% wage penalty for motherhood. In contrast to college-educated women, women without a college degree did not experience a substantial change in the motherhood wage penalty during the pandemic. Contribution Our study provides new evidence indicating that by 2022, three years into the pandemic, college-educated mothers experienced the highest motherhood wage penalty since the turn of the 20th century, reversing two decades of progress for this group of women. This study reveals the longer-term career-related ramifications of the pandemic for college-educated mothers and highlights the precarity of mothers’ economic progress related to external shocks, especially those that disrupt childcare and educational systems.

What happens to local communities when manufacturing disappears? I examine changes in associational density over nearly two decades as a proxy for social capital in US labor markets. Exploiting plausibly exogenous trade-induced shocks to local manufacturing activity, I test whether deindustrialization is associated with greater or lower organizational membership. I uncover a robust negative relationship between the two variables, particularly acute in rural and mostly-White areas. My findings, however, are sensitive to measurement: There are no clearly discernible effects of deindustrialization on social capital when I consider alternative proxies for the outcome. To reconcile these results, I present evidence suggesting that economic adversity may induce a qualitative, rather than quantitative, change in social capital.

Disparities in maternal-child health outcomes by race and ethnicity highlight structural differences in the opportunity for optimal health in the United States. Examples of these differences include access to state-level social policies that promote maternal-child health. States vary in their racial and ethnic composition as a result of the complex history of policies and laws related to slavery, Indigenous genocide and relocation, segregation, immigration, and settlement in the United States. States also vary in the social policies they enact. As a result, correlations exist between the demographic makeup of a state’s population and the presence or absence of social policies in that state. These correlations become a mechanism by which racial and ethnic disparities in maternal-child health outcomes can operate. In this commentary, we use the example of three labor-related policies actively under consideration at state and federal levels (paid parental leave, paid sick leave, and reasonable accommodations during pregnancy) to demonstrate how correlations between state demographics and presence of these state policies could cause or exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities in maternal-child health outcomes. We conclude with a call for researchers to consider how the geographic distribution of racialized populations and state policies could contribute to maternal-child health disparities.

Telecommuting came roaring to the forefront of the American workplace in the spring of 2020. While no more than 8% of work was done remotely in 2019, shutdowns and social-distancing policies introduced at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed more than 1 out of every 3 American workers to telecommute. To reflect this shift, the research team aimed to update the spatial modeling toolbox to allow remote employment and develop a quantitative framework capable of analyzing the full range of reallocations, both within and across cities, which may result from its increasing popularity. The researchers build a quantitative spatial model in which some workers can substitute on-site effort with work done from home. The team quantifies their framework to match the distribution of jobs and residents across 4,502 U.S. locations. A permanent increase in the attractiveness of telework results in a rich non-monotonic pattern of reallocations within and across cities. Workers who can telecommute experience welfare gains, and those who cannot suffer losses. Additionally, broader access to jobs reduces inequality across residential locations. The framework robustly predicts changes in residents and housing prices observed 2019— 2021.

A large body of literature describes the occupational gender wage gap at the national labor market level as well as in specific occupations. Yet, among those studies of within-occupational inequality, few have focused on how occupational career change affects gender wage inequality. With an increasing number of female workers entering into the police labor force as well as the high turnover rate in the police sector, it is important to explore wage changes in this highly unionized and hyper-masculine occupation. Using two-wave panel data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-MORG) from 1979 to 2016, this study examines how change in occupational career along with change in union membership may lead to different wage rewards or penalties for police men and police women. Our findings reveal that individuals experience a large increase in wages when joining the police occupation, and this wage bonus is greater for women than for men. Furthermore, individuals joining the police as well as a union see a wage bonus, but wage loss when leaving the police and a union. Overall, police men have a larger wage loss than police women when leaving the police force and losing union membership. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Food-energy-water (FEW) systems are increasingly vulnerable to shocks. Repeated floods, worsening droughts, sudden tariffs, and disease outbreaks all underscore the importance of strengthening production systems during a time of rapid global change. However, the laws, regulations, and incentive programs that govern these sectors were often developed in isolation, creating fragmented and lagged responses to previous crises, ineffective governance of FEW security, and unintended effects even when achieving policy goals. Here, we examine the Mississippi River Basin in the Midwest US to illustrate how policies designed to address one challenge had other unanticipated consequences. We argue for a long view of the future that honors the interconnectedness of FEW sectors with ecosystems (FEWE); values non-provisioning ecosystem services; and prioritizes incentives that improve FEW production, farm profitability, and ecosystem health. Now is the time for reassessment of how well FEWE provide security to all humans and the environment, and to support integrated policies that avoid unintended future consequences.

In May, the federal government formally declared an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency. That same month, the Chicago metropolitan area registered an unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, below 4%, according to federal government data. The last time that happened in metro Chicago was February 2020, a month before the city announced its first COVID-19 death. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in metro Chicago — which includes a total of 14 counties in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin — remained below 4% again in both June and July. While it might be premature to declare an end to the regional economic emergency resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the return of pre-pandemic unemployment levels for three consecutive months is, perhaps, a sign that the worst is behind us. WBEZ analyzed more than 20 years of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Survey to get a closer look at the region’s elevated unemployment rates during the pandemic. We wanted to see how they compared with rates during earlier times of economic upheaval. Here’s what we learned.

This paper examines the interaction between city choice and labour supply decisions in a two-member household. Using data for the United States, I document substantial variation in labour force participation and hours worked across cities, especially among women with children. For this group of women, I uncover a novel stylized fact: unlike childless women and all men, their labour force participation is lower in big cities than in small cities. I build a quantitative spatial model that reproduces the observed differences in labour supply between small and large cities and use it to show that (i) labour supply decisions are affected by the city where the household lives; (ii) households’ preferences for work influence their choice of city. Finally, I use the model to evaluate the importance of spatial frictions on gender gaps in the labour market and the effectiveness of policies aiming at increasing female labour supply.

There has been a striking reversal in where college graduates choose to live within the largest US cities. For most of the twentieth century, Americans who could afford it moved to the suburbs. At some point after 1980, college graduates started moving back downtown. This urban revival intensified at the turn of the twenty-first century, even as the suburbanization of the US population as a whole continued unabated. Accelerating inflows of college graduates transformed downtown neighborhoods in almost all large US cities, raising policy concerns over housing affordability in gentrifying areas. The share of downtown residents with a college degree rose threefold between 1980 and 2017, from 15 to 45 percent, and downtown areas reverted from being the least-educated to being the most-educated areas of US cities. This gentrification of the United States’s downtown areas had a strong age and racial bias. Over the last few decades, college graduates who are young and white experienced much larger changes in their propensity to live downtown than any other demographic group. Now, in the post-pandemic era, there are early signs of renewed suburban attractiveness and there may be yet another reversal in college graduates’ location choices. In this article, we discuss these changes in where the college-educated choose to live within cities and their consequences.

In the hiring discrimination literature, employers are depicted primarily as majority members who strive to bolster their privileged group status by limiting immigrants’ employment opportunities. While minority employers are expected to be less discriminatory towards immigrant hiring than their majority counterparts, our argument contradicts this expectation. Building on the segmented assimilation and social identity literature, we analyse the disparities in organisational support for high-skilled immigrant hiring among Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms (2009–2018) with a focus on organisations led by Asian CEOs. We find that firms with Asian CEOs tend to have a lower intent to hire high-skilled foreign workers compared to those with CEOs of other races, but such a negative effect improves significantly when the Asian CEOs received a prestigious college education. This article extends theoretical discussion on hiring discrimination by emphasising the importance of CEO minority status and education.

Public school districts across the United States (U.S.) have struggled with the hemorrhaging of teachers for many years and have become creative in staffing classrooms, which includes hiring overseas teachers. This qualitative phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of Jamaican exchange visitor program (EVP) teachers practicing in northeastern North Carolina K-12 public and charter schools. An amalgamation of Milton Gordon’s (1964) assimilation and John Berry’s (1977) acculturation theories guided the research. Semi-structured interviews were used to capture and examine the Jamaican EVP teachers' stories of success, challenges, and resilience. The study capitalizes on the power of Jamaican EVP teachers’ stories to amplify and document their multicultural experiences. Findings from the stories revealed six dominant themes in narratives and hold significant insights into how sponsors (teacher recruitment agencies), school district leaders, and local school leaders could improve the experiences of immigrant EVP teachers. Implications for practice include implementing practices beyond relocation assistance, assisting participants in finding housing, reliable transportation, and financial aid, all essential factors that could help ease transitions. Other implications for practice include providing immigrant teachers with high-quality personalized predeparture professional development and mentorship sessions through online learning platforms orienting them to the American culture and teaching in multicultural society classrooms. Further study recommendations include conducting studies to compare the phenomenon of assimilation and acculturation of Jamaican EVP teachers with EVP teachers from other nations and geographical settings within the U.S.

High-resolution air quality data products have the potential to help quantify inequitable environmental exposures over space and across time by enabling the identification of hotspots, or areas that consistently experience elevated pollution levels relative to their surroundings. However, when different high-resolution data products identify different hotspots, the spatial sparsity of 'gold-standard' regulatory observations leaves researchers, regulators, and concerned citizens without a means to differentiate signal from noise. This study compares NO 2 hotspots detected within the city of Chicago, IL, USA using three distinct high-resolution (1.3 km) air quality products: (1) an interpolated product from Microsoft Research's Project Eclipse-a dense network of over 100 low-cost sensors; (2) a two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ simulation; and (3) a down-sampled product using TropOMI satellite instrument observations. We use the Getis-Ord G i * statistic to identify hotspots of NO 2 and stratify results into high-, medium-, and low-agreement hotspots, including one consensus hotspot detected in all three datasets. Interrogating medium-and low-agreement hotspots offers insights into dataset discrepancies, such as sensor placement and model physics considerations, data retrieval caveats, and the potential for missing emission inventories. When treated as complements rather than substitutes, our work demonstrates that novel air quality products can enable researchers to address discrepancies in data products and can help regulators evaluate confidence in policy-relevant insights.

The American family has undergone significant change in recent decades. There is no longer one predominant family form, and Americans are experiencing family life in increasingly diverse ways.

In recent decades, the possibility that climate change will lead to depopulation of vulnerable areas in the global tropics via migration, mortality, or collapsing fertility has generated significant concern. We address this issue by using data on subnational population growth from 1809 subnational units across the global tropics and linked data on climate exposures to examine how decadal temperature and precipitation anomalies influence population-weighted intercensal growth rates. Our fixed-effects regression analysis reveals that the lowest predicted population growth rates occur under hot and dry conditions. The effects of heat and drought are strongest in districts that, at baseline, have high population densities, high precipitation rates, or high educational attainment. These patterns are contrary to common assumptions about these processes, and even the rare combination of hot and dry conditions, occurring in less than 7% of our sample, does not lead to local depopulation. Taken together with previous findings, this suggests that depopulation narratives do not have a strong evidentiary basis.

After-school programs (ASPs) and Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) are becoming increasingly popular, due in part to their potential to reduce crime. Prior research shows that there is an inverse relationship between participation in these programs and the probability of engaging in criminal activity. However, these studies are largely conducted at the individual level, meaning that they do not provide estimates of programmatic impacts on aggregate-level criminal activity. The current study investigates the effect of youth and young adult programs on neighboring crime rates over time. Specifically, using block groups as the unit of analysis, a fixed effects regression model is used to evaluate the relationship between the availability of ASPs and SYEPs and crime rates from 2019 to 2021 across New York City’s (NYC) five boroughs. I find no evidence of a statistically significant relationship between program site locations and crime, even when I disaggregate my data according to crime type (i.e., violent and property crime) and program type (i.e., ASPs and SYEPs), or when I vary the year in which I measure my dependent variable (by allowing for the possibility that changes in site locations might affect future crime rates).

The American South has been characterized as a Stroke Belt due to high cardiovascular mortality. We examine whether mortality rates and race differences in rates reflect birthplace exposure to Jim Crow-era inequalities associated with the Plantation South. The plantation mode of agricultural production was widespread through the 1950s when older adults of today, if exposed, were children. We use proportional hazards models to estimate all-cause mortality in Non-Hispanic Black and White birth cohorts (1920–1954) in a sample (N = 21,941) drawn from REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS), a national study designed to investigate Stroke Belt risk. We link REGARDS data to two U.S. Plantation Censuses (1916, 1948) to develop county-level measures that capture the geographic overlap between the Stroke Belt, two subregions of the Plantation South, and a non-Plantation South subregion. Additionally, we examine the life course timing of geographic exposure: at birth, adulthood (survey enrollment baseline), neither, or both portions of life. We find mortality hazard rates higher for Black compared to White participants, regardless of birthplace, and for the southern-born compared to those not southern-born, regardless of race. Race-specific models adjusting for adult Stroke Belt residence find birthplace-mortality associations fully attenuated among White—except in one of two Plantation South subregions—but not among Black participants. Mortality hazard rates are highest among Black and White participants born in this one Plantation South subregion. The Black-White mortality differential is largest in this birthplace subregion as well. In this subregion, the legacy of pre-Civil War plantation production under enslavement was followed by high-productivity plantation farming under the southern Sharecropping System.

Education plays a key role in facilitating socioeconomic mobility in the United States, both for individuals and for their children. Parents’ educational backgrounds are associated with their children’s life outcomes, including the children’s educational attainment and occupational success later in life.1 While the educational attainment of Black and White parents has been well-studied—along with this metric’s relationship to their children’s later educational and life outcomes—much less is known about the educational attainment of Latinoa parents. Yet Latino children represent the largest racial and ethnic minority group among children in the United States today, as well as a growing segment of the country’s future labor market, economy, and citizenry.2 Understanding the educational attainment of Latino parents is critical to understanding Latino families’ needs and how school systems can better support and engage them. It may also highlight challenges and opportunities in the U.S. educational (e.g., student retention and success), labor market (e.g., occupational segregation), and social safety net systems (e.g., job training and skill development programs). This brief presents the first national portrait of the educational attainment of Latino children’s parents. We begin by comparing the parental education profiles of Latino children with at least one U.S.-born parent to those who live with immigrant-only parent(s). We do this for three reasons: First, while more than 90 percent of Latino children today were born in the United States, roughly half have a parent who is an immigrant.3 Second, the educational experiences of individuals differ based on where they completed their education. Third, children with parents born in the United States presumably have at least one parent who attended school in the United States and who is familiar with the U.S. education system.4,5 Following this comparison, we focus our analysis on the economic diversity within the Latino population. In this section, we examine how parental education levels vary with parental income: Parental education may be even more important for children in low-income families by serving as a conduit for economic mobility. Finally, we explore differences in the educational profiles of Hispanic children’s parents by elements of heterogeneity within the Latino population: parents’ country of heritage, English language proficiency, citizenship status, and time lived in the United States. Our analyses draw on one-year data from the 2019 American Community Survey.