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

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

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

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

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.

Policy and social trends have combined to greatly reduce the percentage of Brazils children engaged in labor force work in recent years. Still, 4.3 million children ages 10 to 17 are estimated to be working in the labor force as of 2008 (15.5 %), according to Brazils statistics ministry, the IBGE (PNAD 2008). While many employed children may be doing tasks that they can accomplish safely, in work that does not conflict with school attendance, many others arefound in types of work identified as ?hazardous? by Brazils Ministry of Labor and Employment. In this paper, we focus on those categories of work in which Brazilian children may be found in large numbers, yet which are likely to harm their ?health, safety or morals? (ILO Convention 182, Article 3). One obvious yet usually overlooked question is how children come to enter such kinds of work. We speculate that characteristics of parents where they live, what labor force work they do, where they do it, and so forth play a very important role in childrens labor force entry and types of first jobs. Since long-term panel studies that could parse out causal pathways do not exist, we use cross-sectional data to document relationships that are suggestive of causality, employing detailed descriptive summary statistics as well as multivariate statistical modeling to better understand which children engage in ?hazardous? work. We also explore whether doing jobs that are considered ?hazardous? for children is associated with disadvantage in any dimensions of well-being for which we have data, when we compare children working in hazardous occupation/industry groups to other children engaged in labor force work.

In this paper, we study the impact of prenatal sex selection on the well-being of girls by analyzing changes in childrens nutritional status and mortality during the years since the diffusion of prenatal sex determination technologies in India. We further examine various channels through which prenatal sex selection might affect girls outcomes. Using repeated cross-sections from a rich survey dataset, we show that high sex ratios at birth reflect thepractice of sex selective abortion. We then exploit the large regional and time variations in the incidence of prenatal sex selection to analyze whether changes in girls outcomes relative to boys within states and over time are associated with changes in sex ratios at birth. We findthat an increase in the practice of prenatal sex selection appears to be associated with a reduction in the incidence of malnutrition among girls. The negative association is stronger for girls born in rural households and at higher birth parities. An examination of the various mechanisms linking between prenatal sex selection and children outcomes suggests that prenatal sex selection does not lead to a selection of girls into better endowed families, but there is some evidence of a larger reduction in family size for girls relative to boys. We also find an increase in girls breastfeeding duration suggesting an improvement in parental care and treatment. On the other hand, prenatal sex selection does not appear to be associated with a reduction in excess female child mortality, or a reduction in son preference.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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