Since taking office in 2017, President Trump has expanded interior immigration enforcement, made it easier for states and local governments to apprehend and detain illegal immigrants, and argued that building a wall is essential to reducing crime. These actions are largely based on the perception that illegal immigrants are a significant and disproportionate source of crime in the United States. This brief uses American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census to analyze incarcerated immigrants according to their citizenship and legal status in 2017. The data show that all immigrants—legal and illegal—are less likely to be incarcerated than native‐​born Americans relative to their shares of the population. By themselves, illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native‐​born Americans.

Researchers have determined many of the factors that make neighborhoods susceptible to gentrification, but we know less about why some gentrification-susceptible neighborhoods gentrify and others do not. Some studies claim that internal neighborhood features such as historic housing stock are the most powerful determinants of gentrification, whereas other studies argue that a lack of strong affordable housing policies is the primary driver of neighborhood change. In this article, we move beyond a focus on singular determinants to recognize the interplay between these variables. We develop a socioecological model of gentrification in which we characterize neighborhood change as shaped by nested layers we categorize as people (e.g., demographics), place (e.g., built environment), and policy (e.g., housing programs). We then test the model in the five largest urban regions in the United States to begin to determine which variables within the people, place, and policy layers best predict whether a neighborhood will gentrify.

This article reports the effects of attending an elementary full-service community school (FSCS) on a variety of student academic outcomes in high school. The focal FSCS, Key Elementary, serves students in grades K-5 in a diverse southeastern New York State (NYS) school district. The academic performance of students, born between 1991 and 1996, who attended Key Elementary FSCS is compared with a similar group of students who attended a traditional elementary school in the same district. Overall, students who attended Key Elementary FSCS scored higher on most of the NYS Regents examinations, were more likely to graduate with NYS Advanced Designation high school diplomas, and had higher average cumulative GPAs and SAT I scores than students who attended the comparison school. Students who attended the elementary FSCS also took more AP exams, and were more likely to indicate their intention to enroll in a four-year college. Implications of these findings for future research and practice are discussed.

In recent years, nontraditional workforce training programs have proliferated inside and outside of traditional postsecondary institutions. A subset of these programs, bootcamps, advertise high job placement rates and have been hailed by policymakers as key to training skilled workers. However, few formal data exist on the number, types, prices, location, or other descriptive details of program offerings. We fill this void by studying the universe of bootcamp programs offered as of June 30, 2017. In this report, we discuss the attributes of the 1,010 technologyrelated programs offered in the United States, Canada, and online. We find more diversity among bootcamp providers and programs than would be expected from public discourse. This primarily relates to the mode of delivery (online vs. in person), intensity (part time/full time), cost, and program types. Based on the data we collected, we present a classification structure for bootcamps focused on five distinct program types.

Despite the suggestions of intersectionality theory, most previous studies do not report an additive disadvantage of minority women in labor market. Instead, research shows smaller racial earnings inequality among women than men. We argue racialized household division of work to be associated with the gendered patterns of racial earnings (dis)advantage in labor market. Using the 2012-2016 ACS, we show the mirrored patterns of racial (dis)advantage in annual earnings across earnings distribution between genders. Minority women earn significantly more than whites at the low-end of earnings distribution, but the advantage fades as earnings quantile rises. To the contrary, minority men tend to earn significantly less at the low-end of earnings distribution, but the disadvantage becomes weaker. Additional analyses suggest that the mirrored racial inequality by gender is related with relatively less-educated married whites in rural areas being more likely to follow traditional gender roles. Other implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper studies how the expansion of school choice affects housing markets. First, I use an event study that exploits time variation in the entry of school choice to show that, on average, school choice decreases the willingness to pay for a standard deviation increase in school quality by 6 percentage points, or around $15,000. Second, I develop a structural model featuring heterogeneous agents and residential choice to assess the effects of school choice on opportunity. While school choice is seen as a way to increase opportunity for low-income families, the model shows that school choice leads to gentrification of poorer neighbourhoods, implying that school choice does not necessarily improve outcomes for all low-income households. Intuitively, breaking the link between residence and school causes higher-income families to use school choice and move into neighbourhoods with poor performing schools, driving up house prices. Benefits from school choice programs are thus counterbalanced by a higher cost of living. There is a tradeoff between expanding school choice and benefiting high-ability children, versus making parents of low-ability children, who do not utilize school choice, worse off. Furthermore, I find that the majority of lowincome families prefer that a choice school does not open in their neighbourhood, so that their costs-of-living do not change.

As many as one-third of Americans report getting too little sleep. Short sleep duration, often defined as less than seven hours, is associated with obesity, decreased cognitive functioning, dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and mortality (Ferrie, 2007). Much of the prior research on sleep duration and its determinants have used data in which respondents are asked to recall their average daily sleep over the past month or longer, data that are known to be inaccurate. Little research has been done using more accurate data available in time diaries, and even this data only extends through 2012, before the full effect of the Great Recession has been seen. For example, the recent recession led to housing loss, increased financial stress, and a restructured labor market that consisted of more precarious work, factors which are associated with lack of sufficient sleep. Additionally, the use of smartphones and tablets has proliferated since 2011; the number of Americans with a smartphone excessively increased from 35% in 2011 to 77% in 2016 (Smith, 2017), an increase linking to a decrease in sleep. Data was derived from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, to analyze the determinants of sleep duration among Americans ages 18 to 64 from 2009 through 2017. The dependent variable is defined as minutes a person sleeps on an average night. Using Ordinary Least Squares on repeated cross-sectional data, results find that over the period under study, the average amount of sleep people get stays roughly constant. These results are due to offsetting trends. The increase in obesity, education, electronic communication, and average age from 2003 to 2017 has reduced the amount people sleep. This increase is offset by the declining average self-reported health (since healthier people sleep less) and the increasing share of people who have never married and who therefore do not have children.

When do groups on the social periphery assimilate into the social core of a nation? Building on a diverse set of literatures, I argue that individual participation in military service creates a number of conditions that drive individuals to assimilate into a broader national culture. To test the theory, I focus on the case of World War I in the United States–a period that closely followed a massive wave of immigration into the United States. Using an instrumental variables strategy leveraging the exogenous timing of the war, I show that individuals of foreign, European nativity–especially, the Italians and Eastern Europeans–were more likely to assimilate into American society after serving in the U.S. military. The theory and results contribute to our understanding of the ways in which states make identity and the prospects for immigrant assimilation in an age without mass warfare.

The state of Indiana expanded Medicaid February 1, 2015, using a Section 1115 waiver in which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services granted permission to Indiana to charge beneficiaries a monthly premium based on income, charge copayments for nonemergency use of the emergency department, and provide financial incentives for healthy behavior.1 We have limited information comparing Medicaid enrollment in states with Section 1115 waivers to states that implemented the full version of Medicaid.2,3 The objective of this study was to evaluate how the use of a Section 1115 waiver in Indiana to expand Medicaid was associated with Medicaid enrollment compared with Medicaid expansion states that did not use a waiver.

Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools occurring after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 781 southern school districts observed between 1964 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 31.8% reduction in black teacher employment. A series of tests indicate that these employment reductions were not due to school district self-selection into desegregation or unobserved district characteristics associated with desegregation. Additional analyses estimate changes in the occupational distribution by race in the 1960 and 1970 Decennial Censuses and indicate that displaced southern black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching, and that southern school districts compensated for reduced black teacher employment by employing fewer total teachers and by increasing their recruitment of white teachers, especially less experienced white teachers and white male teachers.

Across the industrialized world college‐educated parents invest more time in their children relative to noncollege‐educated parents. Yet, the reason for the education gradient in parental time investments is not well understood. Using 24‐hour diary surveys since the 1970s we document an inverse U‐shape in the education gradient in the United Kingdom. Theories unfolding gradually and monotonically cannot easily explain this pattern. Using an exogenous increase in the number of students going on to university in the 1980s, we show that an alternative explanation based on competition for university places can explain the temporal and spatial variation in the education gradient. (JEL J13, J24)

We study the effects of losing insurance on behavioral health – mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) – community hospitalizations. We leverage variation in public insurance eligibility offered by a large-scale Medicaid disenrollment. Losing insurance decreased SUDrelated hospitalizations but mental illness hospitalizations were unchanged. Use of Medicaid to pay for behavioral health hospitalizations declined post-disenrollment. Mental illness hospitalization financing shifted to private insurance, Medicare, and patients, while SUD treatment financing shifted entirely to patients. We investigate implications of reliance on data that is not representative at the level of the treatment variable and propose a possible solution.

This is a landmark decade for women in the labor force. Women represent nearly half of the labor force both nationally (47.2%) and in the state of Connecticut (48.6%). A recent analysis of the 2017 American Community Survey by the Census Bureau found that 63.2% of women in the U.S. ages 15 to 50 who gave birth in the last 12 months were in the labor force: employed, on leave from work, or unemployed. The percent in Connecticut is higher, with nearly 3 in 4 of these women in the labor force (73%). This raises questions such as – what women are participating in the workforce and how can our states and communities better support these working women.

Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by “under-placement” of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the “American Dream” view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children’s prospects.

In 2006, Massachusetts passed the Massachusetts Health Reform, which has led to nearly universal health insurance coverage in the state. Using IPUMS USA census data, I estimate a difference-indifferences regression with New Hampshire as my control state to consider the impact of the Massachusetts Health Reform on income and labor force participation. I find a significant increase in labor force participation but no significant change in income. The lack of a decrease in income establishes that the Massachusetts Health Reform increased welfare and utility, and the increase in labor force participation shows that expanding Medicaid and private insurance has a net positive effect. With rising costs in the healthcare industry, healthcare reform is an urgent concern in the United States. Despite spending 17% of its GDP each year on healthcare, the United States remains a disappointing thirty-first in average life expectancy among all countries (World Health Organization 2018). Are there are steps we can take to improve our health outcomes? Considering the growing desire for single-payer systems in the United States (such as the Healthy California Act), I consider the implications of government healthcare reform. Specifically, I explore the effects of the Massachusetts Health Reform on income and labor force participation (LFP). In 2006, Massachusetts passed the Massachusetts Health Reform to make health insurance available to nearly all its citizens. The law includes an individual mandate, an employer mandate, and a Medicaid expansion. Therefore, all citizens are required to purchase health insurance or pay monthly fees, and employers of more than ten people must either provide insurance or contribute to paying their employees' insurance premiums. The plan expands "MassHealth," the Massachusetts Medicaid program, increases subsidies for low-income citizens, and establishes less expensive small-group insurance markets (McDonough et al., 2008). As of 2010, the reform had led to a 42 percent decrease in the proportion of uninsured residents in Massachusetts, compared to a 7.6 percent increase in the proportion of uninsured residents nationally ("Massachusetts", 2012). Residents have witnessed increased access to primary care services along with a simultaneous increase in per capita health spending by the Massachusetts government ("Massachusetts", 2012). Because health insurance, health, and income are related, the reform should have affected income in Massachusetts. 1 Additionally, the pressures placed on citizens and employers through the mandates and Medicaid expansion should affect LFP. Arguments against health care reform often focus on its effects on the financial wellbeing of individuals (Straw et al., 2017). Because the reform in Massachusetts increased access to both private and public insurance markets, I determine whether it increased or decreased income and LFP.

High school and college graduation rates abruptly stagnated among cohorts born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Previous research has attributed some of this reversal in trends to an abnormally high college completion rate for men born in the 1940s due to the Vietnam War. We add a new explanation for the surprising changes in educational attainment among these cohorts — the baby boom. We use the Health and Retirement Survey to estimate birth order effects for the baby boom generation and combine our estimated coefficients with birth order data from Vital Statistics to show that changes in birth order can explain more than 20 percent of the decline in white male college graduation rates during the baby boom. Combining the effects of birth order and cohort size, the baby boom can explain more than a third of the decline in college completion of white men, and the collapse of the baby boom can explain more than half of the rebound among the 1960–1974 cohorts.


Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intradistrict ideological heterogeneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of polarized legislators and a mass public that appears to contain many moderates.

Migration barriers tend to reduce global production by impeding efficient spatial reallocation of labor. Recent research argues for a countervailing effect of barriers, tending to raise global production by preventing the spread of impoverishing institutions from poor to rich countries. While evidence of this mechanism is scarce, it is theoretically plausible at high migration rates. We propose and calibrate a simple model of dynamically efficient migration when migrants spread economic institutions between countries. The net effect of migration depends on three parameters: transmission, the degree to which origin-country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants; assimilation, the degree to which migrants’ productivity determinants become like natives’ over time in the host country; and congestion, the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks. On current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters, dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxation of current restrictions.

This chartbook illustrates the characteristics of the county’s 65-plus population in 2015*, and changes that have occurred since 2000. It also includes population characteristics, such as education, income level, and marital status, that are shown to be associated with the need for long-term services and supports. There are charts that compare the older population of the county to the state as a whole, and charts that illustrate change over time within the county. The data presented in this chartbook are intended to assist planners, decisions makers, and service providers to understand the growth in numbers and proportion of older adults, particularly those who will likely need assistance. An online interactive data center is available for you to define your own topic, county, and population of interest to see current figures and change over time. Please visit www.ohio-population.org.

In the United States, there is substantial heterogeneity in labor market outcomes across demographic groups. Not only do young workers, non-white workers, and those without any college education have persistently higher unemployment rates than other demographic groups, but these disadvantaged workers also experience substantially larger increases in unemployment rates during recessions. In this paper, we analyze the sources of these disparities by decomposing the unemployment rate for each demographic group into the transition rows between labor market states. We find that increases in unemployment rates during recessions is primarily driven by reductions in the job ?nding rates, which can explain about half of the cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate across all demographic groups. In contrast, we find that the gap in unemployment rates between each disadvantaged group and the respective counterpart demographic group can be primarily be attributed to the disadvantaged groups’ higher rates of inflow to unemployment. We conclude that policies to reduce separation rates for these disadvantaged groups could address both the persistent and cyclical disparities in the unemployment rate across demographic groups.