A large literature in sociology concerns the implications of immigrants participation in ethnic enclaves for their economic and social well-being. The enclave thesis speculates that immigrants benefit from working in ethnic enclaves. Previous research concerning the effects of enclave participation on immigrants economic outcomes has come to mixed conclusions as to whether enclave effects are positive or negative. In this article, we seek to extend and improve upon past work by formulating testable hypotheses based on the enclave thesis and testing them with data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (NIS), employing both residence-based and workplace-based measures of the ethnic enclave. We compare the economic outcomes of immigrants working in ethnic enclaves with those of immigrants working in the mainstream economy. Our research yields minimal support for the enclave thesis. Our results further indicate that for some immigrant groups, ethnic enclave participation actually has a negative effect on economic outcomes.

Many US antipoverty programs and measures assume mothers have little, intermittent, or no employment and therefore have sufficient time to care for children, perform household tasks, and apply for and maintain eligibility for these programs. Employment-promotion policies directed toward low-income mothers since the late 1980s have successfully increased their time in the labor force. However, low wages and insufficient employer-based benefits often leave employed single mothers with inadequate material resources to support families and less time to care for their children. The lack of consideration given to the value of poor women's time in both the administration and benefit levels of antipoverty government support, as well as the measures used to calculate poverty, place more binds on poor and low-income mothers' time. Ignoring these binds causes researchers and policymakers to overestimate single mothers' well-being and reduces the effectiveness of the policies.

Transforming care for children and the elderly from a private to a public domain engenders a series of benefits to the economy that improve our standard of living. We assess the positive impacts of social care from both receivers and providers points of view. The benefits to care receivers are various, ranging from private, higher returns to education to enhancing subjective well-being and health outcomes. The economy-wide spillovers of the benefits are noteworthy. Early childhood education reduces costs of law enforcement and generates higher long-termeconomic growth. Home-based health care lowers absenteeism and job losses that otherwise undermine labor productivity, providing adequate care at a lower cost and delaying admission into high-cost institutional care. Social care improves mothers labor-market attachment with higher lifetime income; it also lowers physical and psychological burdens of elder care that are becoming more prevalent with an aging population. Social care investment creates more jobopportunities than other public spending, especially for workers from poor households and with low levels of educational attainment. The broad contributions of social care to our standard of living should be recognized in the public discourse, particularly in this era of fiscal austerity.

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. Importantly, 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. While men and women show similar improvements on most indicators, only the estimates for the former are robust to the inclusion of birth state specific time trends. With the exception of cognitive disabilities for men and, in some specifications, family income for men and women, estimates for African Americans tend to be smaller in magnitude and less precisely estimated than those for whites. We speculate that this may be due to barriers in translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment in the pre-Civil Rights Era.

GDP has usually been used as a proxy for human well-being. Nevertheless, other social aspects should also be considered, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational enrolment and crime issues. With this paper we investigate not only economic convergence but also social convergence between regions in a developing country, Colombia, in the period 1975-2005. We consider several techniques in our analysis: sigma convergence, stochastic kernel estimations, and also several empirical models to find out the beta convergence parameter (cross section and panel estimates, with and without spatial dependence). The main results confirm that we can talk about convergence in Colombia in key social variables, although not in the classic economic variable, GDP per capita. We have also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors, while isolation condemns regions to nonconvergence.

The age of parents at the birth of their children may have profound implications for the subsequent lifecourse of parents, the functioning of the family, and for child health and well-being. Using historicalcensus data from the Integrated Public Use Micro Series, this research explore three dimensions ofparental age: chronological age (Martin et al. 2009), social age (Mare and Tzeng 1989; Eliason et al.2009), and relationship age (Bachu 1999) from the early 1900s until 2008. Little is known about longtermhistorical shifts in these dimensions of age, and to our knowledge, there has been no systematicinvestigation of their interdependence. This research addresses the transformation of family life byinvestigating historical change in three dimensions of parental age and the ways in which thedimensions are woven together.

This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. The authors try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap. The authors focus on three periods of history, but not in chronological order. The first is the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported large reductions in the gaps in reading and mathematics scores. Second, the report focus on the period from about 1990 until 2008, when the gap wobbled around a generally straight trend line, although scores of 9- and 13-year-olds generally rose overall. And third, the report takes a more expansive view, beginning early in the 20th century, in an attempt to understand the impact of a variety of factors on changes in the gap. These factors include information on educational attainment, employment and earnings, child well-being, the family, neighborhoods and the effects of concentrated poverty and deprivation, lack of social capital, and intergenerational mobility. Appendices include: (1) Trends in NAEP White-Black Reading Gaps at Selected Percentiles; and (2) Trends in NAEP White-Black Mathematics Gaps at Selected Percentiles. (Contains 58 footnotes, 16 figures, and 1 table.)

Comprising two independent empirical analyses, this dissertation leverages the data and methodology of the happiness research program to address issues in tort and employment discrimination. The first piece of the dissertation uses domain-specific measures of well-being – financial satisfaction and perceived relative income – to gain insight on potential differences in the way that individuals of different demographic groups assess their income. Insofar as it reflects or impacts the economic incentive structures facing workers of different demographic groups, the subjective assessment of income has far-reaching implications in a variety of civil rights contexts, where the expansion of economic opportunity among historically disadvantaged groups is a first-order goal. The results of the study indicate that different race/gender pairs do respond to income differently: for both financial satisfaction and perceived relative income, white females, black females and black males all have lower returns to personal income than do white males. White males, in other words, appear to reap more “bang for the buck” in terms of both of the outcome variables, even after a host of control variables are introduced. The results are germane to ongoing debates about claiming behavior, filing deadlines, and race/gender clustering in the employment context. The second chapter employs survey data on subjective well-being and a battery of self-assessed health measures to estimate the hedonic impact of emotional health, as decoupled from its physical counterpart. The analysis is done with an eye toward tort law, which has historically drawn a distinction between physical and emotional harms, limiting recovery on the latter through various common law doctrines. After offering a cautious defense of the use of subjective well-being as a proxy for injury in the tort context, the paper shows that a range of potentially inactionable emotional conditions, including “stand alone” emotional conditions with no concomitant physical manifestations, exert a significant negative impact on subjective wellbeing. To the extent that subjective well-being, or happiness, captures something meaningful about what it means to be “made whole” as an aggrieved tort litigant, the results of this paper suggest that the limitations on recovery for stand-alone emotional harms may be misguided.

Military service has traditionally been the domain of healthy, robust males, butservice can also reflect risk preference and socioeconomic status. Service also raisesthe probability of exposure to violence through combat, a significant stressor, and itmay represent other types of treatments as well, both positive and negative. We mightexpect to find an ambiguous relationship between military service and later-life health,and several recent studies support this. In this paper, we explore the relationshipbetween combat exposure and health past age 50 in the Health and Retirement Study,a rich longitudinal panel including many male veterans that now asks about combatexposure in its core survey. Using regression analysis and an instrumental variablesapproach, we show that combat exposure harms mental health and emotional well-being and raises a biomarker of stress at older ages, but it appears often to havenegligible effects on a wide array of physical health metrics.

Military service has traditionally been the domain of healthy, robust males, but service can also reflect risk preference and socioeconomic status. Service also raisesthe probability of exposure to violence through combat, a significant stressor, and it may represent other types of treatments as well, both positive and negative. We mightexpect to find an ambiguous relationship between military service and later-life health, and several recent studies support this. In this paper, we explore the relationshipbetween combat exposure and health past age 50 in the Health and Retirement Study, a rich longitudinal panel including many male veterans that now asks about combatexposure in its core survey. Using regression analysis and an instrumental variables approach, we show that combat exposure harms mental health and emotional well-being and raises a biomarker of stress at older ages, but it appears often to have negligible effects on a wide array of physical health metrics.

Much of the existing research on the economic assimilation of post-1965 immigrants relative to the native born has revolved around earnings. The earnings differential is a helpful measure of inequality as it indicates the amount of resources an individual or group has for socio-economic well-being, but it still limits our complete understanding of immigrants' economic incorporation and more specifically, their labor market experiences. Added to this, assimilation is not a uniform process. I evaluate one of the key assertions of segmented assimilation theory by examining national origin patterns of labor market integration, for post-1965 Latin American and Caribbean immigrants' changes in employment status over the period 1980 to 2000. Segmented assimilation theory posits that assimilation can be downward, especially in disadvantaged contexts, conventional as in upward mobility, or partial. Using repeated cross-sections of the 5% IPUMS USA decennial Census samples of 1980, 1990 and 2000, the study assesses changes in the likelihood of being unemployed or out of the labor force as opposed to employed over the course of 1980 to 2000, for pooled cross-sections of working age immigrants relative to US non-Hispanic Whites and native minorities. Emphasis is placed on measuring the effect of national origin and duration of residence on employment status while controlling for the Census year, demographic and human capital factors. Results show that all foreign born have lower risks of nonparticipation than the native majority and native minorities over their course of US residence. Higher labor force participation, however, does not translate into higher likelihoods of full labor market integration. Differentials in labor market integration actually follow a downward assimilation pattern for foreign born Mexicans and Guatemalans/Hondurans/Nicaraguans as their risks of unemployment increase with longer US residence and are similar to native minorities of Hispanic origin. Foreign born Jamaicans' risks of unemployment also mirror those of native Hispanics, thus suggesting a propensity for downward assimilation as well. Foreign born Cubans appear most likely to assimilate conventionally as their risks of unemployment approach parity with the native majority over their duration in the US. Hence, upward and downward assimilation trajectories in labor force attachment depend on nationality.

Foundational theories of international migration rest on the assumption thatimmigrants maintain reference groups in their country of origin even after settling in a newplace. Such assumptions are extended in popular accounts to argue that immigrants therefore donot mind dirty, dangerous, or demeaning jobs that native-born workers shun. This paper usesdata from the nationally-representative National Latino and Asian American Survey to examinewhether immigrants' subjective well-being is shaped more by social comparisons in the homecountry, as theory would predict, or by social comparisons in the United States. I find that bothrational assessments of the decision to migrate and affective well-being are more closelyassociated with comparisons to others in the United States than comparisons to those in the homecountry. This finding challenges migration theories, and suggests the need for further research onthe effects of destination country social status on international migrants.

How significant was the economic progress of African Americans in the United States between1970 and 2000? In this paper the authors examine this issue for black men 25 to 55 years of agewho live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. They present evidence that significant racial disparitiesremain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men, and they discusschanges in industrial composition, migration, and demography that might have contributed to thestagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, the authorsshow that there was no progress in the financial well-being of black children, relative to whitechildren, between 1970 and 2000.

How significant was the economic progress of African-Americans in the U.S. between 1970 and 2000? In this paper we examine this issue for black men 25-55 years old who live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We present the evidence that significant racial disparities remain in education and labor market outcomes of black and white men. We discuss changes in industrial composition, migration, and demographic changes that might have contributed to the stagnation of economic progress of black men between 1970 and 2000. In addition, we show that there was no progress in a financial well-being of black children, relative to white children, between 1970 and 2000.

The rights that the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) enumerates include the rights to (1) an adequate standard of living, (2) an education directed toward the development of the childs fullest potential, (3) the highest attainable standard of health, and (4) the childs own cultural identity and use of his or her own language. The CRC states that these rights shall be ensured regardless of various statuses of children, including race, ethnic origin, national origin, and language. This article presents a statistical baseline for assessing the diversity of children in the United States with regard to these statuses, presents results for statistical indicators of well-being for children distinguished by these statuses, and discusses public policies to reduce inequalities relevant to these rights.

Subjective well-being data reveal that blacks are less happy than are whites. However, much of this racial gap in happiness has closed over the past 35 years. We investigate measures of subjective well-being that indicate that the well-being of blacks has increased both absolutely and relative to whites. These changes in well-being are found across various datasets and measures of subjective well-being. However the gains in happiness are concentrated among prime-age women and those living in the south. While the opportunities and achievements of blacks have improved over this period, the happiness gains far exceed that which can be attributed to these objective improvements.

This paper examines the impact of late-career investment returns and job loss on subsequent retiree well-being. Specifically, we explore whether there is a link between the income of retirees aged 70 to 79 and the stock market and labor market conditions that existed around the time of their retirement. We use data from the 2000 Census and the 2001 through 2007 American Community Surveys and consider both total personal income and income by type. We find that a long-term decline in the stock market in the years leading up to retirement leads to a modest reduction in investment income a decade or so later for those in the top third of the income distribution. The consequences of approaching retirement when the labor market is weak are more severe. A higher unemployment rate around the time of retirement reduces Social Security income for those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution; we estimate that an unemployed worker experiences a roughly 20 percent drop in Social Security income, consistent with claiming benefits several years early. Overall, our results indicate the importance of the challenges faced by lower-income workers who face a weak labor market as they approach retirement.