With the outcome of the November midterm elections, the risk of federal legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and impose a cap on federal Medicaid funding has receded. Instead, there is renewed attention by some policymakers on how to once again make substantial progress toward the goal of universal coverage. This has become more urgent with recent survey data showing that the ranks of the uninsured are increasing. For example, data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) show that in 2017, the uninsured rate among children increased for the first time since at least 2008 when the ACS first asked a health insurance question. The share of children without health insurance rose from 4.7 percent to 5 percent between 2016 and 2017 and the number of uninsured children increased by 276,000.1 While the number of children with . . .

Although scholarship regarding spatial inequality has grown in recent years, past research has seen limited use of spatial statistics—let alone comparison between spatial statistical techniques. Comparing and contrasting the application and use of spatial statistics is valuable in research because it allows for more precise identification of spatial patterns, and highlights results that may be hidden when only using a single method. This study serves as a demonstration on how the use of multiple LISA statistics can benefit inequality related research. Analyzing changes in county level poverty in the rural United States from 1990 to 2015 serves as a tool to demonstrate these techniques and this study examined how the geographic distribution of poverty has changed, and well as if there is evidence of diffusion effects. The three featured techniques utilized Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) statistics. The techniques are Bivariate LISA, LISA Cluster Transitions, and LISA Diffusion Transitions, with the last technique specifically designed for this study. Each technique varies in how it reports the changes in the spatial structure of poverty. Bivariate LISA and LISA Cluster Transitions are complementary to each other—with the former technique providing a single global statistic while the latter is more easily interpretable. Diffusion Transitions show how the highest and lowest values of a variable may be spreading over time. The study also produces new findings regarding rural poverty, with poverty in Mountain-West and rural Sun Belt counties on the rise. Analysis shows a diffusion effect for poverty in Southeastern metropolitan fringe counties.

This paper develops new text-mining methods to measure the recognition of American workers in the U.S. press and in American movies. The text-mining program searches 167,193 newspaper articles and 18,056 movie plots for over 35,000 job titles and codes them into standard U.S. Census occupational categories. These occupations are then recoded into common definitions of the working class and tracked over time. For The New York Times since 1980, recognition of working-class jobs has not declined, but it was always low. For regional American papers like the St. Louis Post Gazette, the Detroit News, or the Tampa Bay Times, working-class occupations had once enjoyed higher levels of recognition, but the rates have declined recently to levels similar to the New York Times. U.S. produced movies show a similar decline since 1930 in working-class inclusion.

In the early 1970s, planning and city officials in St. Louis, Missouri were grappling with the consequences of white flight, urban renewal, and a withdrawal of federal funding on the city’s increasingly abandoned and tax delinquent housing stock. In response, the city government implemented a land bank to acquire tax foreclosed housing and other property and re-sell it through an urban homesteading plan. Later that decade, a similar program was implemented in Cleveland, Ohio. By the early 2000’s the land banking idea had transformed from a city agency to a near-governmental non-profit regional organization with the powers to acquire abandoned property and find “productive uses” for it. This dissertation examines the history, development, and current practices of land banking using three case studies: St. Louis, Missouri, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and Syracuse, New York. Based on a combination of archival research, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and GIS-based property data analyses, I argue that land banks are a consequence of neoliberal state restructuring that has shifted the role of the shadow state towards property governance in post-industrial cities. Through a mission of resisting speculation in vacant housing, land banks further challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy of market-first policies, even while their work still reproduces existing capitalist property relations. Ultimately, land banks fail to take their critique of urban land speculation far enough in developing and articulating appropriate productive uses for their properties. Throughout this analysis, I highlight the centrality of abandoned property in the housing landscapes of post-industrial cities in the U.S.

Conservative and progressive religious groups fiercely disagree about issues of sex and gender. But how did we get here? Melissa J. Wilde shows how today’s modern divisions began in the 1930s in the public battles over birth control and not for the reasons we might expect. By examining thirty of America’s most prominent religious groups—from Mormons to Methodists, Southern Baptists to Seventh Day Adventists, and many others—Wilde contends that fights over birth control had little do with sex, women’s rights, or privacy. Using a veritable treasure trove of data, including census and archival materials and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Wilde demonstrates that the push to liberalize positions on contraception was tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny among America’s most prominent religious groups. Taking us from the Depression era, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, by which time most groups had forgotten the reasons behind their stances on contraception (but not the concerns driving them), Birth Control Battles explains how reproductive politics divided American religion. In doing so, this book shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understanding of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America.

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.

In this paper, we investigate three aspects of economic growth of European countries: scale, congestion, and technical efficiency. The distinguishing features of the methodology used are, one, countries are exclusively defined in terms of their sectors, and, two, no specific assumptions on any aspect of the growth process (in particular the production function) are required. As such, we can better understand the performances of the countries for each of the three aspects studied, and avoid the drawbacks of specifying the production function. Our results reveal some important patterns useful for policy-makers. Firstly, we highlight the key sectors for each of the three aspects in every country. Next, our analysis reveals that, for each of the three aspects, higher progresses occur more often when more inefficient or non-optimal behaviour is present. Finally, we demonstrate that there is a relationship between these three aspects. All in all, we argue for the need of sector-specific multi-level policies. That is, policies that target the three aspects simultaneously for each sector individually.

The Effects of a $15 Minimum Wage by 2024 in the US and Mississippi 2 PREFACE Minimum wages can have both positive and negative effects on employment. HR 582, the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, would phase in minimum wage increases over six years, to $15 by 2024 throughout the U. S. In 2017, we conducted, but did not release, a comprehensive analysis of the effects of a similar bill-The Raise the Wage Act of 2017. That bill also proposed to increase the federal minimum to $15 in 2024, but over eight years. Our 2017 report found a very small positive effect-of about 0.1 percent of employment, for the U.S. as a whole and for Mississippi, our lowest-wage state. These findings are highly pertinent to assessing the effects of the 2019 bill. We present this earlier work here to inform current policy discussion. Developments since 2017 indicate that our report overstates the pay and employment effects of the 2019 bill. Two states-Illinois and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia-subsequently enacted their own paths to a $15 minimum wage. Two additional states-Arkansas and Missouri-voted in 2018 to increase their state minimum wages. And a number of large businesses, notably Amazon in 2018, implemented $15 minimum wages for their workforces. Moreover, annual wage growth has accelerated since we conducted our analysis, from about 2.5 percent then to about 3 percent in 2018. These public and business policy developments and the higher rate of recent wage increases imply that HR 582 would increase pay and affect employment by somewhat smaller amounts than we analyze here. How much smaller? Cooper (2017) estimated that the 2017 bill would raise pay for about 41.5 million workers. In his 2019 update, Cooper estimates that the 2019 bill would raise pay for about 39.7 million workers, or about 96 percent of his earlier estimate. Using this benchmark, one can obtain the 2019 adjusted estimates by multiplying the pay and employment estimates in our 2017 report by 96 percent. For a related and more recent discussion, including an expanded analysis suggesting that the minimum wage increase will have more positive effects in Mississippi and other low-wage states than in more affluent states, see Michael Reich (2019), "What are the Likely Effects of a $15 Federal Minimum Wage by 2024?" http://irle.berkeley.edu/likely-effects-of-a-15-federal-minimum-wage-by-2024/ The Effects of a $15 Minimum Wage by 2024 in the US and Mississippi 3 CONTENTS

Changes in the American religious landscape have affected the professional religious labor force in the United States. These changes may be leading clergy to work for multiple congregations (Robbins and Francis in J Empir Theol 27(2):261–280, 2014), in multiple occupations (Chang, in: Carroll (ed) Pulpit & pew: research on pastoral leadership, Duke Divinity School, Durham, 2004), and/or to seek out clergy work outside of congregations (Chang and Bompadre in J Sci Study Relig 38(3):398–410, 1999). Focusing on the latter, this study addresses the research questions: What are the patterns and demographics of non-congregational clergy and how have these patterns changed over time? Using national-level data, we present the first large-scale mapping of clergy working outside of congregations over the past 42 years. We observe that non-congregational clergy are more likely to be women, live in cities, and have an advanced degree. Moreover, clergy in non-traditional types of family structure are more likely to find clergy work outside of congregations compared to clergy living in a nuclear family. We suggest several factors that might account for these differences.

In this paper we study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education, i.e. those activities carried out during leisure time and outside formal education courses which boost individuals’ human and social capital. For immigrants the private investment in these activities is likely to have relevant external effects as informal learning and education enhances the likelihood of greater socio-economic integration in the host society. We first develop a simple theoretical framework, which allows us to highlight the different constrains/opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives. Then, we empirically investigate the determinants of participation in informal education using the American Time Use Data (ATUS; period 2003-2015) which contains detailed information on daily time budgets of a large sample of immigrants and natives in the US. Consistently with a theoretical model of time allocation we find evidence that immigrants are more likely to engage in informal education and, conditional on participation, they allocate more time to these activities. Over time, immigrants show a higher degree of assimilation into the host society. Our results also highlight heterogeneous patterns across gender.

In this work we introduce the DP-auto-GAN framework for synthetic data generation, which combines the low dimensional representation of autoencoders with the flexibility of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This framework can be used to take in raw sensitive data, and privately train a model for generating synthetic data that will satisfy the same statistical properties as the original data. This learned model can be used to generate arbitrary amounts of publicly available synthetic data, which can then be freely shared due to the post-processing guarantees of differential privacy. Our framework is applicable to unlabeled mixed-type data, that may include binary, categorical, and real-valued data. We implement this framework on both unlabeled binary data (MIMIC-III) and unlabeled mixed-type data (ADULT). We also introduce new metrics for evaluating the quality of synthetic mixed-type data, particularly in unsupervised settings.

In this paper, we show that (i) the volatility of worker flows increases with age in US CPS data, and (ii)a search and matching model with life-cycle features, endogenous separation and search effort, is well suited to explain this fact. With a shorter horizon on the labor market, older workers’ outside options become less responsive to new employment opportunities, thereby making their wages less sensitive to the business cycle. Their job finding and separation rates are then more volatile along the business cycle. The horizon effect cannot explain the significant differences between prime-age and young workers as both age groups are far away from retirement. A lower bargaining power on the youth labor market brings the model closer to the data.

This paper is one in a foundational research series for the Postsecondary Value Commission authored in summer 2019 by scholars with diverse backgrounds and expertise. The research presented in these papers applies an equity lens to the philosophical, measurement, and policy considerations and assumptions underlying key components of postsecondary value to students and society, including investment, economic and non-economic returns, mobility, and racial and socioeconomic justice.

This paper provides new insights on the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition. We exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the American South in the 1890s as plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between earnings opportunities in agriculture and fertility. Households staying in agriculture reduced fertility because children are a normal good, while households switching to manufacturing reduced fertility because of the higher opportunity costs of raising children. The lower earnings opportunities in agriculture also decreased the value of child labor which increased schooling, consistent with a quantity-quality model of fertility.

Parenthood can expands one’s world by creating new social networks, engaging in new institutions, and deepening investment in existing ties. However, new evidence suggests ways in which low-income parents’ world is constricted because they are parents. Housing options for parents in poverty because landlords worry about the extra hassle brought by children. Low income parents spend more time indoors to avoid dangerous individuals and neighborhoods. They spend more time dealing with bureaucracies, and they may even retract from demanding relationships with extended family. While middle-class parents enter new social circles and tote their children to and from opportunity expanding activities, parenting in poverty is increasingly characterized by: 1) confined solitude as parents try to protect their kids from danger and the demands of wayward extended kin; 2) submission to the demands of a range of powerful societal institutions like the state, schools, and landlords consume their time.

US baby boomers, as a heterogeneous and particularly transformational cohort born between 1946 and I 964, are the large, unique post-World War 11 demographic cohort that rose with the knowledge economy and has been shaping the US economy since its birth. Skillful, educated, innovative and transformational, boomer entrepreneurs have literally transformed society. Without US boomer entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and JeJT Bezos, our society would not be what ii is Loday. As lhe boomer generation has aged, it is interesting to observe what has happened to its entrepreneurial prowess (Acs and Audretsch, 1990). As note.cl in Weber and Schaper (2004), some of the potential barriers faced by older entrepreneurs can include lower levels of energy and pro­ductivity, which could result in predominantly unproductive necessity or part-tirne entrepreneurs; however, boomer entrepreneurs might diJTer. This study focuses on the age eJTect for different entrepreneur types because the complexity of age effect on entrepreneurship could lie in nuanced entrepreneur types. The study focuses just on boomers for the following reasons: (1) this large cohort is aging with continued strong socioeconomic implications; (2) the knowledge economy equips aging boomers with better human, social and physical capital (Lee and Vouchilas, 2016) and enables them to continue to pursue outstanding entrepreneurial opportunities (Evans and Leighton, I 989; Blanchflower and Oswald, I 998) beyond the usual age of retirement; (3) compared to previous generations, boomers are more likely to be college graduates, be healthier, and have higher incomes (Lee and Vouchilas, 2016); (4) focusing on one generation elimi­nates confounding cross-generational noise to better understand senior entrepreneurs.

This study investigated the dynamics of utility affected by urban flooding in New Orleans. Disasters occurring in an urban area affect urban change. However, the impact on urban utility change has been rarely investigated. Utility defined as a net benefit of a resident living in an area is measured with earnings subtracting housing and commuting costs. This study applied regression models to test the relationship between urban flooding and urban utility, simulating multiple scenarios to split the total effect into flood effect and recovery effect. Using American Community Surveys’ microdata between 2001 and 2016 collected from IPUMS USA, two hypotheses could be tested: urban utility decreased by urban flooding while increased by recovery activities. With additional in-depth analyses, various policy implications useful for planning are suggested. Firstly, New Orleans becomes a less livable city from utility perspectives. The utility increase is significantly smaller in New Orleans (5.6%) than the rest of Louisiana (10.3%) between 2005 and 2016 mainly because rent price increased relatively high in the city. Secondly, a disaster prevention policy could have not only been cost-effective but also led New Orleans to be a more livable place. Lastly, government support positively affected urban utility. For example, the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005 could contribute to one percent increase in urban utility of New Orleans. Therefore, policy makers and stakeholders will be informed of the change in urban utility associated with disasters by adopting various quantitative approaches provided from this study, which is especially important in the era that global climate change increases disaster risk and vulnerability.

This paper examines the role of program features in determining the effectiveness of merit scholarships on educational outcomes using data from the 2009 to 2014 American Community Survey. Exploiting the variation in the timing of program adoption as well as program features across states, I find that leniency of academic requirements for initial eligibility largely contributes to program effects on associate’s degree completion, whereas generosity of scholarship amount significantly increases college attendance and bachelor’s degree completion. The estimates also indicate that lower requirements for scholarship renewal appear to positively affect the likelihood of completing a degree in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (STEM). The findings suggest that leniency and generosity are important determinants of program effectiveness on educational outcomes. It is thus relevant to take program features into account when designing merit scholarships.

This report from the University of Oregon Labor Education and Research Center provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of unions on living standards for workers in Oregon. Both national and state-level data show that unions raise wages, improve health and pension benefits, reduce overall income inequality, and significantly decrease racial and gender inequalities. Unions also make it much less likely that workers will need to rely on public benefits such as food stamps or welfare. Statistical analysis reveals that, all other things being equal, Oregon workers covered by a union contract earn 11% more than non-union workers, are 17.5% more likely to get health insurance through their job, and are 41% more likely to have an employer-provided retirement plan. Being covered by a union contract adds an average of $4,701 per year to each worker’s annual income. Overall, unions increased the income of working Oregonians by a total of $1.4 billion in 2017. National research has consistently shown that unions have a strong, positive impact on workers’ wages and benefits. For the first time, this report examines this same question specifically for Oregon workers. Key findings from our analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data show that:

In this study we explore the effects of anti-immigrant polices in the foreign-born population such as the adoption of section 287 (g) which allows local police officers to arrest immigrants and process them for deportation as if they were immigration officers or ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) agents. Using census and American Community Survey data, we compare the social and economic characteristics of the foreign-born population (citizens and non-citizens) who live in counties which have adopted section 287 (g) to those who live in adjacent counties with similar number of residents and to urban areas which have declared their localities as sanctuary cities. Through this exercise, we also test the theory of migration-trust networks (Flores-Yeffal 2013) which argues that undocumented immigrants segregate themselves to cope with their unlawful status and experience social and economic disadvantage. These isolated immigrant communities are prevented by uneven local policies from experiencing assimilation, such as learning English, or leaving their labor niches.