Quality of life in urban areas is strongly linked to land use and land cover, in part because green vegetation mitigates much of the negative consequences of urbanization and population pressures. However, the green vegetation of urban parks, forests, street trees, and landscaping is inequitably distributed in the urban environment. The social and economic processes that give rise to these uneven outcomes are not well-understood, while the rise in the availability of spatially explicit, fine-scale data on neighborhood conditions has created the conditions for an empirically rich investigation into neighborhood socio-ecological change. This dissertation assimilates new observations from different sources with new modes of inquiry to address persistent knowledge gaps: the dependence of socio-ecological relationships on scale and urban or metropolitan context; understanding the duration and significance of neighborhood improvement or decline; and the outstanding need for comparative analyses and novel analytical techniques for comparing neighborhood change between multiple metropolitan areas. Time-series satellite remote sensing of 30 years of vegetation cover is combined with population and housing market data to provide a comprehensive picture of the neighborhood environmental quality, demographic composition, and housing stock conditions. Three different metropolitan areas, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Seattle, are used to elucidate how our common assumptions of socio-ecological relations—and the underlying analytical approaches in which remote sensing plays a pivotal role—often fail to accurately capture the complexities and contradistinctions in the social and economic drivers of neighborhood-level biophysical changes. Results indicate that while population decline confounds conventional explanations for socio-economic differences in environmental quality, neighborhood advantages and disadvantages persist for multiple decades, with wealthier neighborhoods tending to resist cyclical declines in the housing market and accrue yet higher home values while preserving and increasing vegetated cover through irrigation and likely several policy tools. Historical conditions, particularly racial residential segregation, also yield surprising outcomes today, in some places reducing vegetation disparities and exacerbating them in others, depending on metropolitan-level population pressures and the balance of municipal political economies.

In this article the author explores the interconnections between the social and the material—as people move to a space on the land, coexisting with one another. By focusing in on one specific place—the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation (formerly called the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation) in North Dakota—the author analyzes what happened when white immigrants came to homestead and live on land historically reserved for Dakotas. Against the backdrop of Native dispossession, this illustrative case reveals the ways everyday interactions created entanglements through landownership, the gendered division of paid work, neighboring practices, and leasing land. It challenges us to uncover gendered processes, probe denials, and interrogate silences.

Nursing shortages have been an issue in the U.S. healthcare industry over the past 30 years as market forces began to shift away from equilibrium. The U.S. population is aging rapidly as the baby boomers reach retirement age. While the number of U.S. citizens aged 65 and over is projected to be 83.7 million by 2050, almost double its estimated population of 43.1 million in 2012, the working population is expected to decline (Ortman, Velkoff, and Hogan, 2014). With this aging population, the prevalence of chronic health problems is expected to increase, and these demographic trends will require a high demand for nursing care. Although the supply of registered nurses experienced its largest expansion since 1970, there is a cyclical pattern of nursing surpluses and shortages. Therefore, strategies that can satisfy the healthcare demands in the long-run are needed.

Au cours de la première décennie du 20e siècle, deux grandes transformations démographiques ont eu lieu au Canada : l’arrivée d’une grande vague d’immigrants, qui demeure la plus importante dans l’histoire canadienne, et le déclin graduel des taux de fécondité légitime. Ces deux tendances sont mises en relation dans cette étude de la fécondité maritale des immigrantes internationales et des natives en 1911. Pour ce faire, une série de régressions logistiques a été réalisées à partir des microdonnées de l’échantillon de 5 % du recensement canadien de 1911. Nous avons évalué la relation entre la fécondité récente et trois variables d’intérêt : le statut migratoire, le pays de naissance et la durée de résidence au Canada. La fécondité a été mesurée par la présence d’un enfant de moins d’un an (enfant de la femme) dans le ménage. Nos analyses, pour lesquelles nous avons tenu compte d’un ensemble de variables démographiques, culturelles et économiques, démontrent que les immigrantes avaient une propension supérieure aux natives d’avoir un enfant de moins d’un an. Toutefois, des variations dans le comportement de fécondité des immigrantes s’observent selon leur pays de naissance, la durée de leur séjour et la région de résidence, soit « est-centre » ou « ouest » du pays. Une association positive a été observée entre la fécondité récente et la provenance de l’Europe de l’Est, quelle que soit la région du Canada où elles habitaient. Par ailleurs, les américaines étaient moins susceptibles d’avoir un enfant que les natives, dans l’est-centre du Canada. Les Britanniques avaient une propension similaire à celle des natives d’avoir un enfant dans l’ouest du pays. Pourtant, leur fécondité était plus élevée dans l’est-centre du pays. Quant à la durée de résidence au Canada, les immigrantes arrivées au cours des trois dernières années, tant dans l’est-centre que dans l’ouest du pays, étaient moins susceptibles de résider avec un jeune enfant. Cependant, celles ayant vécu au Canada de quatre à neuf ans étaient davantage susceptibles de résider avec un bébé que les natives. Étant donné que les taux de fécondité actuels au Canada sont à la baisse, les immigrantes occupent une place importante dans les tendances de fécondité du pays. Cette étude suggère le besoin d’être sensible à l’hétérogénéité des comportements de fécondité que les immigrantes pourraient manifester une fois installées au pays.

Despite a century of convergence, there is still no evidence of fully closing gender gaps in employment and wages, possibly reflecting a suboptimal allocation of talent. Economic research has emphasized the role of gender differences in preferences, work–life balance considerations and gender identity norms in shaping the observed gender trends.

Philadelphia has enjoyed relatively strong job growth in recent years after a long period of losses, some resulting from the Great Recession. But an analysis of census data finds that the job gains among city residents employed in Philadelphia have been concentrated in lower-paying sectors of the economy—and in lower-paying jobs within those sectors. As a result, wages for Philadelphians working in the city, when controlled for inflation, declined slightly from the 2005-09 period to 2013-17, according to the most recent data available. The analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that wages for nonresidents working in the city have held steady, reflecting a more even distribution of job gains across the wage spectrum. These two developments have combined to slightly widen the wage gap between resident and nonresident workers. Among individuals working in Philadelphia, city residents earned a median of $31,566 a year in the 2013-17 period, about 55 percent of the nonresident median of $57,914. For 2005-09, the corresponding figure was 58 percent.

This paper is a contribution to the process of identifying, characterizing and modeling the determinants of workers' remittances for the case of Colombia. It also includes a description of the evolution of the migratory flow of Colombians abroad and of the remittances recipient’s households. Remittances determinants are explained by using a VEC model that includes, in addition to the remittances inflows, the stock of Colombian migrants abroad and some macroeconomic aggregates that are thought to approximate the variables that influence the migrant's decision to send money to their families. According to the econometric results, Colombian workers remittances inflows are determined by the performance of the GDP of the countries where the migrants live, as well as by the increase in the international emigration of Colombians. In addition, these transfers show a countercyclical behavior against the Colombian GDP.

Labor force participation among those with disabilities is important to establish independence and promote recovery. However, we know very little about the patterns and trends of labor force participation of women with disabilities, and particularly of mothers with disabilities. In this study, I use two publicly available secondary data sets-the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the National Survey of Beneficiaries (NSB)-to provide insight on how motherhood is associated to labor force outcomes for women with disabilities; whether the associations between motherhood and work vary by SSI and SSDI receipt; and finally whether/how trends in the labor force participation of women/mothers with disability changed over the last three decades (1988-2013). Results suggest that although women with disabilities are selected from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, mothers with disabilities tend to present better labor force outcomes than non-mothers with disabilities, even net of controls. Whereas motherhood is associated with decreased labor force participation for women without disabilities, it is associated with increased labor force participation for women with disabilities. Motherhood seems to be particularly positively associated with labor force participation for SSDI recipients; however, these same recipients are less likely to be employed (conditional on being in the labor force) and earn less (conditional on being employed) when they are mothers.

Decades of sociological and criminological research have established that neighborhood contexts matter in explaining the spatial distributions of crime. Such studies have emphasized the importance of neighborhood-level factors such as neighborhood structural conditions, informal and formal social control mechanisms, and situational opportunities anchored around various types of places. Despite previous theoretical and methodological innovations that have reinforced the crucial role of neighborhood processes that affect the prevalence of crime, they have paid less attention on how various neighborhood factors may have space- and time-differentiated effects on crime. Accordingly, in this study, I assess the spatially and temporally dynamic effects of neighborhood factors on crime. For the spatial dynamics, I consider whether neighborhood factors affect crime differently in residential versus nonresidential blocks. For the temporal dynamics, I examine how neighborhood factors would affect crime differently across different time periods of day. Using data from 2015-2017 for Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and employing multilevel negative binomial regression models, I examine the effects of spatially and temporally dynamic neighborhood factors on robberies. I find that social (dis)organization factors and criminogenic places generally have both space- and time-differentiated effects on robberies. Overall, the results support that qualitative differences in neighborhoods and time of day have substantial implications on how various types of neighborhood factors influence crime like robberies. My results also point toward the direction that it is important to consider city-level, local ecological differences when studying neighborhood effects on crime. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.

The Baby‐friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) includes a set of 10 evidenced‐based maternity practices that when used together have been shown to improve breastfeeding outcomes. In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care (mPINC) survey to assess and monitor these and other evidenced‐based maternity practices. The purpose of this study was to explore individual maternity practices measured in the 2013 mPINC survey, along with hospital demographic information, and their relationships with exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) rates, using a sample of United States (U.S.) hospitals. We obtained mPINC survey data from 69 BFHI hospitals and 654 non‐BFHI hospitals in the U.S., and EBF rates from The Joint Commission, a leading hospital accreditation agency. On the basis of linear regression analysis, we found that most maternity practices studied were significantly associated with EBF rates (max adjusted R2 = 14.9%). We found a parsimonious model with an adjusted R2 of 47.3%. This study supports the need for a systematic approach in providing breastfeeding support as no one maternity care practice was able to explain the variability in EBF rates as well as a collection of maternity care practices.

Consumer Surplus From Medicaid in a Prototypical Household Carlos A. Ulibarri, Medical Assistance Division, New Mexico Human Services Department Disclaimer The hypothesis, method of analysis and findings reported in this paper are those of the author, and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Medical Assistance Division of the New Mexico Human Services Department. “The art of dealing with any problem at the theoretical, empirical, or applied economic level is to oversimplify in an artful and useful way versus oversimplifying in some dumb, crazy way….” ~Arnold Harberger Abstract Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Medicaid) constitute a joint federal-state entitlement program, providing health care coverage and medical benefits to low income individuals, including families with children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with disabilities (Gruber, 2000). State Medicaid programs generally subsidize the demand for health insurance across these populations by not requiring premiums or cost-sharing, thereby impacting the welfare of millions of individuals and families across the United States through the provision of health care benefits and lower medical/insurance costs. Consequently, the impact of state Medicaid programs would seem most significant in states which have traditionally had the highest uninsured and poverty rates (Sommers and Oellerich, 2013). In 2018 Medicaid provided health care coverage and medical benefits to nearly one in five Americans, approximating 73 million individuals. New Mexico’s Medicaid program ─referred to as Centennial Care─ is administered by the Medical Assistance Division of the Human Services Department. The program currently provides health insurance coverage to 850,000 beneficiaries, approaching 40 percent of the state’s population. The most recent expansion of the program is the extension of comprehensive medical benefits to low income nonelderly adults under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). New Mexico (NM) became an expansion state on January 1, 2014. At the time, the Medicaid-insured populations were approximately 600,000 in NM and 61.7 million in the US (KFF, 2018). This paper concerns the measurement of expected consumer surplus from Medicaid in a prototypical household, and the welfare implications of ‘anticipated’ changes in cost-subsidies andhealth status. Expected consumer surplus is computed from the estimation of a simple random utility model (RUM) of a household eligible to receive Medicaid benefits. The study is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews an economic rationale for household participation in Medicaid programs. Section 3 describes the RUM framework and variables explaining choice behavior. Section 4 discusses the empirical application and findings of the study. Section 5 ends the study with concluding remarks regarding the role of Medicaid in improving social welfare ─the fundamental aim of applied welfare economics.

Critics deride American suburbs as dull, aesthetically displeasing, socially isolating, unhealthy, environmentally unsound, and lacking in accessibility. However, the dramatic shift of the American population to the suburbs in the post-WWII period suggests suburban living may have advantages. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, this paper examines whether residence in a principal city versus the suburbs offers a more emotionally satisfying lifestyle. First, the findings show that demographically similar city residents and suburbanites engage in a very similar amount and composition of out-of-home activities. Second, the ratio of travel time to activity time for specific travel/activity couplets is lower for city residents for a few activities, and lower for suburbanites for others, but on the whole the differences in accessibility implied by these travel time prices are minor. Third, the activities in which city residents and suburbanites engage are associated with very similar degrees of subjective well-being (SWB), including both life satisfaction and affect. The most noteworthy difference between the two geographies is that suburbanites have modestly but measurably higher SWB than demographically similar urbanites in terms of feelings of happiness (hedonic affect), a sense of meaning (eudaimonic affect), and life satisfaction. These findings suggest that there may be advantages to suburban living.

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from IPUMS Americans speak a lot of languages. Using individual-level census data, we found the most commonly spoken language at home other than English and Spanish in each state and Washington, D.C. German, French, and Vietnamese are common in several states.

In one of the greatest extensions of property rights in human history, common law countries began giving rights to married women in the 1850s. Before this “women's liberation,” the doctrine of coverture strongly incentivized parents of daughters to hold real estate, rather than financial assets such as money, stocks, or bonds. We exploit the staggered nature of coverture's demise across U.S. states to show that women's rights led to shifts in household portfolios, a positive shock to the supply of credit, and a reallocation of labor toward nonagriculture and capital‐intensive industries. Investor protection thus deepened financial markets, aiding industrialization.

Medical bills are a prime source of financial insecurity for families, making up much of the debt sent to collections and even contributing to bankruptcy in some cases (CFPB 2014; Gross and Notowidigdo 2011; Himmelstein et al. 2019; Karpman and Caswell 2017). But even in less drastic cases, high medical bills can contribute to family financial insecurity by making it more difficult to pay for other necessities, such as housing, food, and other bills, in addition to other needed medical care (Hamel et al. 2016). Consequently, medical cost burdens can affect every member of the family, including children—potentially affecting not only their material circumstances but also their wellbeing and healthy development (Chaudry and Wimer 2016; Wherry, Kenney, and Sommers 2016). And consequences of financial insecurity for children’s health can extend beyond the short term and into their adulthood (American Academy of Pediatrics 2016).

In the United States, low-income and racial minority populations have higher rates of diet-related disease, food insecurity, and transit use. SNAP, which provides low-income households with money for groceries at authorized retailers, creates an altered food procurement environment. How transit networks affect access to SNAP retailers is assessed by calculating transit travel times to all transitable SNAP stores of neighborhoods in 33 MPOs in the American Midwest. Low-income, Black, Hispanic, and public assistance populations, which are disproportionately affected by food insecurity, living in neighborhoods with low transit access scores are then identified. These neighborhoods are compared to USDA low-income, low-access neighborhoods. Results indicate low transit access is experienced in fringe-urban, majority white, car-dependent neighborhoods. However, 117,460 Black people, 121,589 Hispanic people, and 89,185 lowincome people live within these neighborhoods. Future research and policy should target suburban and exurban regions to accommodate a non-negligible portion of potentially food insecure populations.

This paper analyzes the relationship between agglomeration economies and productivity in the context of a developing country while taking into account the marked presence of an informal sector. Using data from Colombia, we investigate the effect of agglomeration economies on formal and informal productivity. We examine whether the informal sector achieves benefits from agglomeration economies as well as whether there are differences between the formal and informal sectors in terms of agglomeration returns. We find that agglomeration economies, measured by the density of local employment, have a significantly positive effect on productivity in the informal sector, while there is little effect in the formal sector. We estimate an elasticity of wages with respect to employment density of approximately 2% for the informal sector, which implies that informal workers in denser areas will earn approximately 11% more than those in less dense areas.

In this article, I estimate the effect of the Medicaid expansions that occurred under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on mortality. The ACA enabled states to expand Medicaid eligibility to all low-income, non-elderly adults. As a result, a significant proportion of previously uninsured people gained health insurance coverage. Using variation over time in eligibility rules by state/county and by parental status, I estimate the impact of Medicaid eligibility on age-specific mortality rates. I find that the expansion of Medicaid eligibility reduced healthcare amenable mortality rates by about 1.8 percent for adults aged 55-64. There are no detectable mortality impacts for the younger adult population.

We compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differ entially exposed to policy-induced changes in Head Start and K–12 spending, depending on place and year of birth. IV and sibling-difference estimates indicate that, for poor children, these policies both increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced pov- erty and incarceration. The benefits of Head Start were larger when followed by access to better-funded schools, and increases in K–12 spending were more efficacious when preceded by Head Start exposure. The findings suggest dynamic complementarities, implying that early educational investments that are sustained may break the cycle of poverty.

Social interactions vary across workplaces, in part because workers and managers treat informal social interactions as a facet of workplace cultures, encouraging it in some instances and suppressing it in others. Equally, such interactions are consequential for social capital, and may be a dimension of cultural fit. Thus processes of status attainment and resource allocation may vary across workplaces in concert with their sociability. Using a new measure of time spent with coworkers, constructed using the American Time Use Survey, this paper shows that work explains a great deal more variation in sociability between coworkers than individual characteristics. The extent of shared workplace identities, influenced by occupational competition levels and union membership, and incentives to socialize are two important mechanisms in this process. Moreover, norms and expectations of appropriate behavior in the workplace accompany occupational differences in sociability, and matching these expectations is consequential for workers’ earnings.