Background Disabilities are not evenly distributed across geography or age, yet few studies on disability have considered these factors. The purpose of this study was to explore rural‐urban differences in disability rates, particularly related to gender and race, and what other rural‐urban disparities help explain these differences. Methods Utilizing the 2008‐2016 Current Population Survey (CPS), we first examined rural and urban disability trends by gender and race, estimating means and rural‐urban percentage differences for men and women by race and conducting t test analysis to test group differences by age cohort (eg, comparing white, non‐Hispanic, rural 15‐ to 24‐year‐old women to white, non‐Hispanic, urban 15‐ to 24‐year‐old women). We then conducted a logistic regression to explore whether or not the effects of rurality on disability rates could be explained by rural‐urban differences in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Results Descriptively, rural people report disability at higher rates than urban people across nearly all age category, gender, and racial combinations. These differences are more pronounced for nonwhite respondents in middle to older age categories. Additionally, while some of the rural disability disparity can be explained by adding demographic and socioeconomic variables to the logistic regression model, the effect of rurality remains significant. Conclusions Our findings suggest that when researchers, policy makers, and service providers are addressing rural and urban differences in health and well‐being, self‐reported disability is another factor to consider. Future work should be mindful of how disability and space intersect with gender and race, creating significant disparities for people of color in rural places.

Since 1980 the U.S. economy has experienced a large increase in income inequality. To explain this phenomenon we develop a life-cycle, overlapping generations model with uninsurable labor market risk, a detailed tax system and investment-specific technological change (ISTC). We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of the U.S. economy and study how ISTC, shifts in taxation, government debt and employment have contributed to the rise in income inequality. We find that these structural changes can account for close to one third of the observed increase in the post-tax income Gini. The main mechanisms in play are the rise in the wage premium of non-routine workers, resulting from capital-non-routine complementarity, as well as a reduction of the progressivity of the labor income tax schedule, which increases post-tax inequality. We show that ISTC alone accounts for roughly 15% of the change observed in post-tax income Gini, while the reduction in progressivity accounts for 16%.

This paper examines the demographic effects of the interregional U. S. slave trade using household data. Aggregate census data indicate a higher child-woman ratio in the exporting areas of the South, a result commonly attributed to slave breeding. New Orleans sales records are linked to the 1830 manuscript census to identify the holdings of slave sellers. Regression results indicate that slave sales caused higher child-woman ratios rather than the reverse. Because interregional traders preferred to purchase young adults rather than young children, higher child-woman ratios neither imply higher fertility nor slave breeding in the exporting areas of the South.

Background: Although substantial research has recognized the extensive prevalence of domestic violence in developing world, little is identified about particular risk and protective factors. Literature has ample evidence that child marriage and women empowerment are linked with domestic violence but the association is context specific. This study analyzes the association between child marriage and domestic violence in a cross countries context. Method: The study is based on data extracted from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and has been taken from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) database. Total observations are (N=324,952) came from 18 countries of Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Adjusted and unadjusted “Multivariate Logistic Regression Models” are used to determine the impact of child marriage on domestic violence. In addition, mediation analysis are done which explores the pathways through which child marriage affects domestic violence. Results: Among all the countries, rate of child marriage is lowest in Rwanda (2014) that is 16.1% and highest in Bangladesh (2007) that is 83.3%. Percentage of violence is lowest in Burkina Faso (2010) that is 10.6% and highest in Congo Democratic Republic (2007) that is 54.7%.Child marriage increases the odds of domestic violence (OR = 1.145; 95% CI = 1.107 - 1.185; p< 0.001). Women married in their childhood are 14.5% more likely to face domestic violence as compared to women not married in their childhood One of the Counterintuitive result of our multivariate logit model is that more empowered women are 8.6% more likely to face domestic violence than women not empowered, (OR = 1.086; 95% CI = 1.041 - 1.132; p< 0.001). The indirect mediating effect of violence was 8.22% of the total effect of child marriage on the domestic violence (P < 0.000). The indirect mediating effect of woman’s empowerment was negative 4% of the total effect of child marriage on the domestic violence (P < 0.000). Conclusion: Child marriage is significantly a risk factor against domestic violence. Our results suggest that a decrease in the rate of child marriage make women less obliging of domestic violence, which ultimately as a consequence to make them reuse to acceptance of domestic violence. Also, an increase in women’s level of education make them less prospective to face domestic violence because increase in their educational level will increase their bargaining power. Through better educational policies it needs to change the women’s attitude against acceptance of domestic violence.

While there are many studies of how official development aid (ODA) affects economic growth, there are far fewer studies of how aid affects health outcomes. Also, most of the studies of aid effectiveness have been cross-country studies. These studies have been criticized for lacking country specificity and a growing number of influential voices are questioning their usefulness for aid evaluations. There is clearly a lack of systematic studies of aid effectiveness below the country level. In this paper, I aim to fill a gap in the literature by researching how ODA affects infant mortality at the subnational level in Uganda. By matching geocoded data on the placement of aid projects with information on infant mortality from geocoded Demographic Health Surveys, and using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences strategy, I am able to analyze if geographical proximity to active aid projects reduces infant mortality. The unit of analysis is 124 100 children born by 30 550 mothers. The results show that geographical proximity to active aid projects reduces infant mortality in most of the models. The finding is however surrounded by some uncertainty since the significance disappear in the most conservative test of aid. I also find evidence that projects are placed in areas that on average have lower infant mortality than non-aid locations. This suggest that aid projects do not reach those who need them the most. The various mechanisms studied in this paper all have the direction we would expect from the theory. This indicates that the intermediate factors suggested to be important in explaining infant mortality in the theory section, are in fact important explanatory factors for infant mortality.

Identifying the impact of immigration on local labor markets has faced significant challenges because of the evident moving to opportunity bias, where immi-grants' locational choices are influenced by local labor demand shocks. I introduce a novel instrument for immigration, which is the predicted number of immigrants from the push factors of origin countries. Using a mixed effects model that incorporates both fixed and random effects, the actual number of immigrants in each city of United States is regressed on the push factors of the origin countries. Then, the predicted number of total immigrants in each city is obtained by the fitted values of the regression, which is used as an instrument for immigration. I show that the instrument strongly predicts current immigrant population and is less correlated with local labor demand shocks compared to the widely used shift-share instruments.

While chattel Negro slavery in the United States ended in 1865, racial inequality between the descendants of Negro slaves and other racial groups, particularly whites, persists. While explanations for the causes of this inequality are many, the extent to which it is a consequence of Negro slavery itself is an em- pirical question that is relatively underexplored. In this paper, with linked data on males and their fathers in the 1880-1930 US Census, I consider the extent to which slavery conditioned the economic mobility and status of males who had fathers born as slaves approximately 65 years after the emancipation of Negro Slaves. My parameter estimates of the elasticity of son’s economic mobility and status with re- spect to their father’s slave status suggests that through 1930, being a black male descendant of a black male slave father mattered and was associated with lower economic mobility and status. I also estimate the decay rate associated with the in- tergenerational effect of slavery, and find that the chains of slavery are quite long in that as of 1930, it would take as long as 175 years, approximately, for the effects of slavery to disappear entirely. The implied counterfactuals of my estimates provide a context and basis for reparations, as they suggest that in the absence of slavery, the economic mobility and status of male slave descendants would have been higher. The reduction in economic status/mobility as a result of being a descendant of a male slave can be viewed as the “reparable” intergenerational harm of Negro chattel slavery in the US.

This paper investigates the link between management practices and workforce skills in manufacturing firms, exploiting geographical variation in the supply of human capital. Skills measures are constructed using newly compiled data on universities and regional labour markets across 19 countries. Consistent with management practices being complementary with skills, we show that firms further away from universities employ fewer skilled workers and are worse managed, even after controlling for a rich set of observables and fixed effects. Analysis using regional skill premia suggests that variation in the price of skill drives these relationships.

This research investigates whether access to jobs affects poor households’ residential location choices using data from individual households in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Our results, based on discrete choice models, show that the effects of job accessibility on household location choices are contingent upon households’ automobile ownership and employment status. Places with higher job accessibility by public transit mode are more likely to attract poor households that do not own cars but have at least one employed worker or one labour force participant, while job accessibility by automobile travel mode has no positive effect on the location choices of poor households who own automobiles. The results stress the importance of job accessibility for those poor households with limited transportation mobility but strong needs for access to jobs.

This year the American Society of Hispanic Economists turned 17 years old since its creation, with ten years as an AEA recognized organization. I am happy to say that today ASHE has become an incredibly supportive professional family for all its members and a source of thoughtful mentorship resources for many young scholars. My strong wish is to maintain that role and to expand our impact through those who have been long part of the organization, the incoming new members, and the new cohort of young Hispanic economists wishing to make changes. As we reflect through this year’s events that have besieged the Hispanic/Latino community in the U.S., we, professionals, stop to ask ourselves how our work sheds light on the issues that matter and the possible solutions that would benefit the community and the nation. In this HEO edition of the Hispanic Economic Outlook, you will find different researchers exploring and presenting different perspectives on the issues affecting the Hispanic community in the U.S. In our first article, Sandra Orozco-Aleman presents a summary of her co-authored work with Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano on crime immigration enforcement and migration in Mexico. They find that drug-related violent crime and the U.S. internal push on immigration enforcement have shaped the composition of Mexican migration into the U.S. by increasing the cost of internal migration within Mexico and the passing through the border. As these trends and migrant compositions are changing, and with the foreseeable increase of immigration enforcement, there is a need to understand further how these changes will impact the national Hispanic community.

It is widely believed that the extension of protection against employment discrimination to women through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) was a fluke, the product of an attempted “killer amendment” by civil rights opponents gone awry. My analysis challenges this conventional wisdom, showing that the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in support of the sex amendment to Title VII was consistent with broader patterns of support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the early to mid‐20th century. In other words, support appears to have been sincere, not sophisticated—proponents preferred a CRA with the sex amendment to one without. I proceed to show that concern about the direct impact on women, and not simply the instrumental impact on labor, played an important role in motivating this support. But, I also find reason for caution in interpreting support for workplace rights as evidence of broad support for women's rights at this time.

Because parental childcare time has an important influence on child development, class- based disparities in maternal and paternal childcare time may contribute to inequality in child outcomes. Theory suggests that class gaps in family structure and class-based assortative mating may widen class gaps in total parental childcare time, while specialization between partners may reduce these gaps. Yet, these hypotheses have not been rigorously tested. We match parental respondents within the American Time Use Survey to generate synthetic parental dyads, which we use to estimate, in turn, the contributions of family structure, assortative mating, and specialization to class gaps in total parental childcare time. We find that class gaps in family structure lead to wider income-based gaps in total parental childcare time than observed in maternal or paternal time. Additionally, assortative mating widens education- and income- based gaps in total parental childcare time. However, specialization does not offset these wider class divides.

When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) relieves the concern of privacy leakage from users’ perspective, as user’s private information is randomized before sent to the aggregator. We study the problem of recovering the distribution over a numerical domain while satisfying LDP. While one can discretize a numerical domain and then apply the protocols developed for categorical domains, we show that taking advantage of the numerical nature of the domain results in better trade-off of privacy and utility. We introduce a new reporting mechanism, called the square wave (SW) mechanism, which exploits the numerical nature in reporting. We also develop an Expectation Maximization with Smoothing (EMS) algorithm, which is applied to aggregated histograms from the SW mechanism to estimate the original distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach, SW with EMS, consistently outperforms other methods in a variety of utility metrics.

Between 1964 and 2000, the intercounty migration rate of married couples declined by 15%. Concurrently, female labor force participation and the relative wages of women increased. In 1964, 36% of married households had both spouses in the labor force and women earned only 50% of the wages of men. Over the following 36 years, the fraction of dual earner households increased to 75% and women’s earnings rose to 64% of men’s. Using a two location household level search model of the labor market, we show that both the increase in dual earner households and the rise in women’s wages contributed significantly to the decline in the migration rate of married households, with each explaining 53% and 20% of the decline, respectively. In addition, we show that the co-location problem has important implications for estimates of lifetime earnings inequality.

We document the falling socioeconomic status of American households without private vehicles and the continuing financial burden that cars present for low-income households that own them. We tie both these trends to the auto-orientation of America’s built environment, which forces people to either spend heavily on cars or risk being locked out of the economy. We first show that vehicle access remains difficult for low-income households and vehicle operating costs remain high and volatile. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Survey of Consumer Finances, and Census Public Use Microdata, we then show that in the last fifty years households without vehicles have lost income, both in absolute terms and relative to households with vehicles. We link these trends to the built environment by examining the fortunes of carless households in New York City, and particularly in Manhattan. Most of New York’s built environment did not change to accommodate cars, and in New York the fortunes of the carless did not fall. Our results suggest that planners should see vehicles, in most of the United States, as essential infrastructure, and work to close gaps in vehicle access.

Objectives There is great interest in the relationship between paid and unpaid labor time. Yet, in the United States most studies have focused on the housework component of unpaid labor. Limited research has examined how parental employment status relates to child care time. This study examines how unemployment is related to time in multiple types of child care and how this relationship varies by gender. Methods I use data from the 2003-2013 American Time Use Surveys to study cohabiting and married parents ages 18-65 (N=44,198). I predict time spent in total child care, routine child care, and educational/recreational child care by parental unemployment status using ordinary least squares and seemingly unrelated regression models, and examine differences between weekday and weekend time use. Results Consistent with time-based theories, I find unemployed parents spend more time in child care than employed parents, but patterns vary by gender: unemployed mothers and fathers spend more time in child care on weekdays, but unemployed fathers spent less time in child care on weekends. Conclusions Results suggest similarities and differences between the unemployment-child care time relationship and the relationship of unemployment with other types of unpaid labor such as housework.

This report estimates the costs and savings of the proposed Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin. First, we use data on health spending and insurance coverage to provide new estimates of the potential costs and savings of the Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin. We show that the Medicaid expansion could save nearly $100 million annually because of a reduction in uncompensated care costs, and that these savings exceed the costs to private insurers. Second, we re-evaluate the recent Flanders and Williams report (Flanders and Williams, 2019). Their analysis deviates from standard econometric practice in two key dimensions: failing to control for long-term time trends in health care costs and failing to adjust their expenditure data for inflation. Making either change to their analysis, we show that their results do not hold up, and controlling for state level trends and inflation shows a savings, not a cost, from the Medicaid expansion. We similarly find that their analysis of ER visits does not hold up after controlling for time trends.

This dissertation examines the racially motivated mob dominated violence that took place during the autumn of 1919 in rural Phillips County, Arkansas nearby Elaine. The efforts of white planters to supplant the loss of enslaved labor due to the abolition of American slavery played a crucial role in re-making the southern agrarian economy in the early twentieth century. My research explores how the conspicuous features of sharecropping, tenant farming, peonage, or other variations of debt servitude became a means for the re-enslavement of African Americans in the Arkansas Delta. However, as black sharecroppers faced economic, social, and political struggles rooted in racism and discrimination; they attempted to change their surroundings through activism and resistance. A point of interest in this work is World War I and how attitudes following the war shaped the ways in which sharecroppers in the Delta region of Arkansas engaged with race and the social order. The emergence of a labor movement became the catalyst for sharecroppers to form a labor union which represented a material threat to white hegemony. In general, this dissertation will explore the causal connections of the Elaine Riot of 1919 and the circumstances that eventually led to the landmark Supreme Court case Moore v. Dempsey (1923).

I investigate the relationship between immigration and local public finances, exploiting variation in immigration inflows across local labour markets and data on local government revenues and expenditures. I find that increases in immigration did not result in any change to local government revenues. This is not explained by offsetting decreases in revenues from local sourcs and increases from state-level intergovernmental transfers. Finally, I demonstrate that the lack of impact on revenues similarly implies that immigration does not have an effect on local public expenditures. The findings suggest that immigration does not act as a drain on local public finances.

This paper examines the decline of employment in middle-wage routine occupations during the last four decades (1976 to 2017) using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data. The paper addresses how the associated labor market flows have developed gradually. In the macro perspective, the decline in employment in these occupations can be essentially accounted for by changes in transition rates from unemployment to routine jobs and from labor force nonparticipation to routine jobs. In the Micro perspective, the decline is mainly driven by changes in the propensity to work in routine jobs; however, changes due to demographic differences is comparatively small. Further, we consider hetorogeneity in the switching probabilities by industry. After performing all the macro and micro studies we find that the prior results still hold and no considerable deviations occur at the industry level.