Entry rates into self-employment increase during recessions and decrease during economic upswings. I show that this is mostly explained by the higher unemployment rate during a recession, together with the fact that at all times, unemployed persons have a relatively high propensity to become entrepreneurs out of necessity because they do not find paid employment. I use econometric decomposition techniques to quantify these effects based on the monthly matched US Current Population Survey before, during and after the Great Recession. I also document that this counter-cyclical pattern of entrepreneurial entry strongly applies to unincorporated entrepreneurship, but only weakly to incorporated entrepreneurship. This highlights the association of unincorporated and incorporated entrepreneurship with necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship, respectively. The results are useful for policy-makers and practitioners to understand, forecast and act on the different types of entrepreneurial activities that are to be expected over the business cycle.

In the 1990s, the Head Start program expanded, tripling funding and doubling enrollment. For low-income mothers, this expansion provided a significant childcare subsidy, potentially enabling more women to work. Also during this time, employment rates of single mothers rose dramatically, often attributed to changing tax policy and welfare reform. In this paper, we exploit variation over time and across metropolitan areas in Head Start funding to estimate the impact of Head Start funding on female employment to determine if part of this trend can be attributed to changes in the availability of preschool. Increased Head Start funding raised employment rates among single mothers with age-eligible children, relative to mothers with younger, ineligible children in the same area. This also resulted in more weeks worked and higher wage earnings. The increased availability of Head Start can explain a small share of the rise in single mother employment in the 1990s.

The potential for widespread job automation has become an important topic of discussion in recent years, and it is thought that many American workers may need to learn new skills or transition to new jobs to maintain stable positions in the workforce. Because workers’ existing skills may make such transitions more or less difficult, the likelihood of a given job being automated only tells part of the story. As such, this study uses network science and statistics to investigate the links between jobs that arise from their necessary skills, knowledge and abilities. The resulting network structure is found to enhance the burden of automation within some sectors while lessening the burden in others. Additionally, a model is proposed for quantifying the expected benefit of specific job transitions. Its optimization reveals that the consideration of shared skills yields better transition recommendations than automatability and job growth alone. Finally, the potential benefit of increasing individual skills is quantified, with respect to facilitating both job transitions and within-occupation skill redefinition. Broadly, this study presents a framework for measuring the links between jobs and demonstrates the importance of these links for understanding the complex effects of automation.

In many observational studies, the interest is in the effect of treatment on bad, aberrant outcomes rather than the average outcome. For such settings, the traditional approach is to define a dichotomous outcome indicating aberration from a continuous score and use the Mantel-Haenszel test with matched data. For example, studies of determinants of poor child growth use the World Health Organization's definition of child stunting being height-for-age z-score ≤−2. The traditional approach may lose power because it discards potentially useful information about the severity of aberration. We develop an adaptive approach that makes use of this information and improves power. We show our approach asymptotically dominates the traditional approach and performs well both asymptotically and in simulation studies. We develop our approach in two parts. First, we develop an aberrant rank approach in matched observational studies and prove a novel design sensitivity formula enabling its asymptotic comparison with the Mantel-Haenszel test under various settings. Second, we develop a new, general adaptive approach, the two-stage programming method, and use it to adaptively combine the aberrant rank test and the Mantel-Haenszel test. We apply our approach to a study of the effect of teenage pregnancy on stunting.

The literature finds a high degree of economic mobility for men in the 19th century in comparison to today. However, due to data limitations, changes in female economic mobility over time are not well understood. Using a set of marriage certificates from Massachusetts over the period of 1850-1910, we link men and women to their childhood and adult census records to obtain a measure of occupational standing across two generations. Intergenerational mobility for women is higher than for men during 1850-1880. Between 1880-1910, men’s mobility increases to converge with that of women. We also find evidence of assortative mating based on the correlation in occupational income score and real estate wealth between the husband’s and wife’s fathers.

We use retail scanner data on purchases of high calorie food to study the link between recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) and consumption of high calorie food. To do this we exploit differences in the timing of introduction of marijuana laws among states and find that they are complements. Specifically, in counties located in RML states monthly sales of high calorie food increased by 3.1 percent for ice cream, 4.1 for cookies, and 5.3 percent for chips.

A fascinating development in intergenerational research is the use of names-first and surnames-to overcome data limitations. Name-based estimators are underlying innovative research on mobility across multiple generations, historical periods, or regions. However, it remains unclear how different methods relate to each other, and how reliable they are. This paper reviews name-based methods and validates them empirically, based on newly digitized data from Finland that contain names, name mutations, and direct family links. We show that the different name-based methods are closely related, but that their interpretation depends on sampling properties of the data that differ across studies. To demonstrate the reliability of name-based methods we compare the intergenerational mobility of the two combatant groups in the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Both conventional and name-based methods indicate substantially higher downward mobility among members of the socialist "Red Guard " as compared to the conservative "White Guard ". JEL classification: J62. ‡ We thank Ilkka Jokipii for excellent data collection and data preparation for this project. We are very grateful to James Feigenbaum, Claudia Olivetti and Daniele Paserman for the provision of samples and replication files to link records in the U.S. Census. We also thank seminar participants at SOFI at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, Purdue University, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, and the 2019 SOLE conference for comments. Support from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Univer-sidades (Spain, MDM 2014-0431, ECO2017-87908-R and IJCI-2016-30011) and Comunidad de Madrid (MadEco-CM S2015/HUM-3444) is gratefully acknowledged.

In New Hampshire, 18 percent of all undergraduates, or 17,655 students, are parents and 8,123 college students are single mothers. 1 Ensuring that these single mothers complete their degrees will improve their families' well-being and economic security and bring important benefits to the New Hampshire economy. College graduates have higher earnings, higher rates of employment, and lower poverty rates than those without degrees. 2 Their children also reap important benefits, such as improved behavioral and academic outcomes and an increased likelihood of going to college themselves. 3 Despite the substantial benefits experienced by single mothers who earn college degrees, they are some of the least likely students to earn them: just eight percent of single mother undergraduates in the United States earn an associate or bachelor's degree within six years of enrolling in college, compared with nearly half (49 percent) of women in college who are not mothers. 4 Taking steps to improve single mothers' college success also has important implications for racial and ethnic equity in higher education. Among female college students nationally, 31 percent of Black women, 23 percent of Native American/Alaska Native women, 17 percent of women of two or more races, and 16 percent of Latina women are single mothers, compared with 13 percent of White and seven percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women. 5 Single mothers in New Hampshire who graduate with an A.A.: • Are 47 percent less likely to live in poverty than a high school graduate. • Earn $284,340 more over their lifetime than what they would have earned with only a high school education. • Save New Hampshire $26,854 in public assistance spending over their lifetime. • Contribute $70,630 more in lifetime taxes than a single mother with only a high school diploma.

IPUMS-MLP will consist of nine censuses covering the entire U.S. population enumerated between 1850 and 1940 linked with public historical administrative data from Social Security, the military, and vital registration. The linked database will be invaluable for analyzing the impact of early life conditions on health and well-being in later life, and the large scale of the resource will allow study of very small population subgroups. IPUMS-MLP is not designed to answer any particular scientific question. Rather, we plan general-purpose data infrastructure, a permanent resource that can be continuously expanded to incorporate the latest data sources as they become available, ensuring its usage for decades to come. Former Census Bureau Director Robert Groves drew an insightful distinction between “designed data” and “organic data” [1]. Designed data, such as censuses and surveys, are created entirely to obtain information. Organic data are byproducts of transactions, including administrative records generated by Social Security, Medicare, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Armed Forces. Research on population aging currently relies primarily on designed data, despite the enormous potential of organic data to enrich our analyses. Groves argued that “the biggest payoff will lie in new combinations of designed data and organic data, not in one type alone.” Used in isolation, organic data have profound limitations that reduce their usefulness. They tend to be voluminous but shallow; they often are unrepresentative of the general population; and they frequently omit basic information about demographic behavior, economic status, education, work, and living conditions. IPUMS-MLP will enrich large sources of organic data—including Social Security, Medicare, and military records—by linking them to a century of designed census and survey data, thereby overcoming limitations of the organic data sources. Linking individuals from childhood to old age and death through both designed and organic data allows study of aging as a process over the entire life course, not just over a few years. Indeed, IPUMS-MLP will enable investigators to extend longitudinal analysis beyond individual life histories to investigate and understand processes of change over multiple generations [2]. In his 2010 presidential address to the Population Association of America, Robert Mare [3] argued that “the study of intergenerational mobility and most population research are governed by a two generation (parent-to offspring) view of intergenerational influence, to the neglect of the effects of grandparents and other ancestors and nonresident contemporary kin.” Mare called for the development of sources and methods that will support analysis of change over multiple generations. IPUMS-MLP will meet this need, allowing investigators to trace records back across multiple generations and making it possible for the first time to study the transmission of characteristics and behavior across centuries.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions designed to expand insurance coverage that also alter the tie between employment and health insurance. In this paper, we exploit variation across geographic areas in the potential impact of the ACA to estimate its effect on health insurance coverage and labor market outcomes in the first two years after the implementation of its main features. Our measures of potential ACA impact come from pre- existing population shares of uninsured individuals within income groups that were targeted by Medicaid expansions and federal subsidies for private health insurance, interacted with each state’s Medicaid expansion status. Our findings indicate that the majority of the increase in health insurance coverage since 2013 is due to the ACA and that areas in which the potential Medicaid and exchange enrollments were higher saw substantially larger increases in coverage. While labor market outcomes in the aggregate were not significantly affected, our results indicate that labor force participation reductions in areas with higher potential exchange enrollment were offset by increases in labor force participation in areas with higher potential Medicaid enrollment.

Fertility stalls in a number of countries Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria in the late 1990s Cameroon, Mozambique, Rwanda, etc. Important theoretical and policy issue Large impact on future population size Role of family planning programs African exceptionalism No consensus on the countries with stalls Number of countries ranges from 1 to 12 As many as 20 countries with stalls in SSA Few countries consistently in the lists (e.g. Kenya)

In South Dakota, 23 percent of all undergraduates, or 11,017 students, are parents and 4,475 college students are single mothers. 1 Ensuring that these single mothers complete their degrees will improve their families' well-being and economic security and bring important benefits to the South Dakota economy. College graduates have higher earnings, higher rates of employment, and lower poverty rates than those without degrees. 2 Their children also reap important benefits, such as improved behavioral and academic outcomes and an increased likelihood of going to college themselves. 3 Despite the substantial benefits experienced by single mothers who earn college degrees, they are some of the least likely students to earn them: just eight percent of single mother undergraduates in the United States earn an associate or bachelor's degree within six years of enrolling in college, compared with nearly half (49 percent) of women in college who are not mothers. 4 Taking steps to improve single mothers' college success also has important implications for racial and ethnic equity in higher education. Among female college students nationally, 31 percent of Black women, 23 percent of Native American/Alaska Native women, 17 percent of women of two or more races, and 16 percent of Latina women are single mothers, compared with 13 percent of White and seven percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women. 5 Single mothers in South Dakota who graduate with an A.A.: • Are 47 percent less likely to live in poverty than a high school graduate. • Earn $294,389 more over their lifetime than what they would have earned with only a high school education. • Save South Dakota $21,857 in public assistance spending over their lifetime. • Contribute $65,978 more in lifetime taxes than a single mother with only a high school diploma.

We explore how permanent residency affects personal income tax participation and net personal income tax payments using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. We exploit the timing and geographic unevenness of IRCA’s legalization programs alongside newly digitized data on personal income taxes in California, home to the majority of applicants. Green Cards induced the previously unauthorized to file state income tax returns at rates comparable to other California residents. While the new returns generated little additional revenue through the end of the 1990s, they did raise the incomes of families with children through new claims of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit.

Racial discrimination has been linked to allostatic load (i.e., cumulative biological stress) among African American women. However, limited attention has been given to psychosocial processes involved in the stress response—critical for understanding biological pathways to health—in studies examining racial discrimination as a social determinant of health. We examined whether the superwoman schema (SWS), a multidimensional culture-specific framework characterizing psychosocial responses to stress among African American women, modifies the association between racial discrimination and allostatic load. We used purposive sampling to recruit a community sample of African American women ages 30–50 from five San Francisco Bay Area counties (n = 208). Path analysis was used to test for interactions while accounting for the covariance among SWS subscales using both linear and quadratic models. Significant interactions were observed between racial discrimination and four of the five SWS subscales. Feeling obligated to present an image of strength and an obligation to suppress emotions were each protective whereas feeling an intense motivation to succeed and feeling an obligation to help others exacerbated the independent health risk associated with experiencing racial discrimination. Our findings affirm the need to consider individual variability in coping and potentially other psychosocial processes involved in the stress response process, and offer several insights that may help elucidate the mechanisms by which racial discrimination gets “under the skin.”.

The use of information and communication technology to automate routine tasks involves two types of innovation: technological and organizational. Together, improvements in technological capabilities and complementary changes made by firms in the way they organize work and implement work practices constitute the conditions under which machines substitute for or complement human workers. Building on the prevailing model of routine-biased technical change and recent insights into organizational complementarities, I conduct three qualitative case studies in health care and real estate to assess the relationship between technology and firm-level labor demand. Unique combinations of technological innovation, organizational complementarity, and decision-making at each firm produce differential impacts for labor demand, with even similar technologies exhibiting quite different patterns of substitution for workers of all skill types. In addition, studying firm-level complementarities illuminates how and why the scope of the routine task may be growing, with particularly important implications for relatively higher skill workers.

This paper focuses on the changing need for skills in the American workplace and how that has worked to the benefit (or detriment) of women and men and racial and ethnic groups. In a previous study, we found that employment is growing rapidly in occupations requiring higher levels of social or analytical skills but is near standstill in occupations requiring higher levels of physical skills. Building on that analysis, we will address the following major questions: How has the need for skills changed within occupations? What are the skill characteristics of occupations that have virtually disappeared in the past few decades compared with the occupations that have emerged more recently? As women have surged into the labor force since the 1960s, what are the skill characteristics of the jobs they have taken? Has this helped narrow the gender pay gap? Have white, black and Hispanic workers been affected differently?

We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to public services in the United States. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer compared to emails signed with a white-sounding name. Moreover, responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests suggest that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus toward blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race. Finally, we show that attitudes toward the government among blacks are more negative in states with higher discrimination. (JEL: D73, H41, J15).

"Middle-skills" jobs require more education and training than that provided by a high school diploma but less education and training than a four-year college degree. Employers struggle to find workers with the needed combination of knowledge and skills to fill middle-skills jobs; this search for workers is particularly pertinent to the tri-state region of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, where the boom from new oil and natural gas technologies related to extraction has propelled the region economically. In this report, researchers surveyed instructional staff at five colleges with training partnerships with oil and gas industry companies in the tri-state region to examine whether these colleges' science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs emphasize the skills and knowledge areas that employers need. In addition, researchers examined which knowledge areas and skills might need more support by asking instructional staff about areas in which students had difficulty and if more resources (and if so, which ones) were needed.

A Chicano/a is someone who lives in contact with two different cultures: the Mexican and the Anglo-American. Thus, Chicanism is usually referred to in terms of duality, fluidity, transculturalism, alterity, mestizaje (Anzaldúa) or hybridity (Bhabha). However, ethnic identification is overall an open conception which depends on individual performance. Humour can seize the potential of Chicanism’s constructed nature to de-construct and re-define its parameters, and thus work as a fundamental instrument for individual and collective change. Diverse theories on humour’s mechanisms (relief and incongruity theories, the carnivalesque; the “antirhetoric” of humour [Gilbert] and sympathy theory [O’Donnell]) disclose the usefulness of laughter as a therapeutic strategy, as a tool for intercultural dialogue and social change, and a form of resilience or resistance. This essay is concerned with how Michele Serros employs humour with social aims in How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000). She foments intra and intercultural dialogue, promotes a sense of community, and destabilizes pre-hold racist conceptions —in this sense, special attention will be paid to the use of irony and the mockery of racist discourses. As the essay concludes, through a comic genre, Serros enters the mainstream and stands as a subject advocating for freedom of self-definition.

We estimate the increasing health care needs of American inmates by combining data on inmate demographics and national health trends. Decades of harsh punishment combined with demographic shifts have led to a "greying" prison population that is a source of concern for policymakers. Our estimates reveal that inmate health care needs are significant and growing beyond what is predicted by their age profile. While the fraction of inmates aged 40 or more increased by 49 percent between 1996 and 2004, the prevalence of medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and cancer among inmates grew between 177 and 268 percent.