We analyze regional demographic responses to increased competition from Chinese imports. Treating the opening up of the Chinese economy in recent decades as an exogenous shock to the degree of trade exposure faced by U.S. regions, we find that demographic characteristics such as education level, population growth, immigrant share, and age structure, are not significantly impacted by increased Chinese trade exposure. We also discuss possible mechanisms that may explain this finding and explain why our results may differ in direction from previous studies. Specifically, our finding is consistent with a story where moving costs hamper labor mobility and significant demographic shifts do not occur even after employment falls due to trade exposure.

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.

Evidence from multiple disciplines suggests that early-life conditions and environments affect outcomes across the life course. However, less is known about the effects of policy interventions targeted to adults and communities that may have intergenerational consequences on exposed children. In this study, we undertake novel data linkages to examine the effects of the New Deal work–relief programs on long-term health, disability and mortality outcomes of children born between 1920-1940. We first link the American Manufacturing Cohort (AMC) workforce backward to their childhood census records to capture parental and community exposure to New Deal work-relief programs. We then test the hypothesis that employment in New Deal work-relief programs is associated with lower levels of chronic disease, lower rates of disability and delayed mortality for both the children in benefitting households and children in non-benefit households living in areas that received greater amounts of New Deal funding.

Although the overall divorce rate in the U.S. has declined, among those aged 50 and older it has roughly doubled since 1990 (FP19-13; Brown & Lin, 2012). In this Family Profile, we estimate the national trend in divorce rates for adults aged 50 and older (“gray divorce”) using the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and 1-year estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS) for the years 2008 to 2017 (the most recently available data). To examine state-level variation, we employ the 2013-2017, 5-year estimates from the ACS. This Family Profile supplements previously published profiles documenting the geographic variation in divorce rate overall (FP-17-24; FP-18-21).

We evaluate progress in President's Johnson's War on Poverty. We do so relative to the scientifically arbitrary but policy relevant 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on the standard that President Johnson set. To fill this gap, we develop a Full-income Poverty Measure with thresholds set to match the 1963 Official Poverty Rate. We include cash income, taxes, and major in-kind transfers and update poverty thresholds for inflation annually. While the Official Poverty Rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 12.3 percent in 2017, our Full-income Poverty Rate based on President Johnson’s standards fell from 19.5 percent to 2.3 percent over that period. Today, almost all Americans have income above the inflation-adjusted thresholds established in the 1960s. Although expectations for minimum living standards evolve, this suggests substantial progress combatting absolute poverty since the War on Poverty began.

This article analyzes the attitudes and reactions to World War I on the part of German Americans. It is based only on private letters whose authors could be identified by name and located in the U.S. Census. This provides crucial information such as recency of arrival, social class, community of residence, and in some cases religious background, to supply context for the sentiments expressed in letters. But equally important as who was writing and what they wrote, is the issue of who was not writing. One of the striking features of transatlantic correspondence is how seldom it extended beyond the immigrant generation. This was not due to language loss, but rather to lack of emotional ties. There were U.S. soldiers of the second and third generation writing home from France in the German language, evidence that preservation of heritage languages had no political significance.

This research examines the racially exclusive health outreach practices in Washington, D.C. during the HIV/AIDS crisis that created barriers to healthcare for Latino residents. After analyzing the ways in which mainstream organizations failed to disseminate educational materials within Latino communities, this thesis turns to the ways in which Latino activists combatted exclusion and performed healthcare outreach within their communities. Finally, this research considers the national significance of the D.C. region on Latino HIV/AIDS outreach and the importance of immigrants and transregional migrants to the nation’s capital.

Top-k queries are extensively used to retrieve the k most relevant options (e.g., products, services, accommodation alternatives, etc) based on a weighted scoring function that captures user preferences. In this paper, we take the viewpoint of a business owner who plans to introduce a new option to the market, with a certain type of clientele in mind. Given a target region in the consumer spectrum, we determine what attribute values the new option should have, so that it ranks among the top-k for any user in that region. Our methodology can also be used to improve an existing option, at the minimum modification cost, so that it ranks consistently high for an intended type of customers. This is the first work on competitive option placement where no distinct user(s) are targeted, but a general clientele type, i.e., a continuum of possible preferences. Here also lies our main challenge (and contribution), i.e., dealing with the interplay between two continuous spaces: the targeted region in the preference spectrum, and the option domain (where the new option will be placed). At the core of our methodology lies a novel and powerful interlinking between the two spaces. Our algorithms offer exact answers in practical response times, even for the largest of the standard benchmark datasets.

This study investigates black ethnic immigrant group differences in residential outcomes between developing and mature suburbs. It evaluates the extent to which foreign-born black ethnic groups’ socioeconomic status (SES) and acculturation characteristics agree with the outlines of the spatial assimilation model. Binomial logistic regression models are calculated, using data from the 2012–2016 IPUMS ACS, to examine the impact of place of birth/nativity status, SES, acculturation, family/household characteristics, and region on residence in developing versus mature suburbs within U.S. metropolitan areas. The results reveal mixed results for the expectations of the spatial assimilation model. On the one hand, and in agreement with the spatial assimilation model, residence in mature and developing suburbs is a function of increments in household income and educational levels. On the other hand, the multivariate results reveal suburban type residential outcomes that vary by place of birth and nativity status. The effects of acculturation also reveal findings that diverge from the expectations of the spatial assimilation model.

We examine the labor market consequences of an extensive campaign repatriating around 400,000 Mexicans in 1929-34. To identify a causal effect, we instrument county level repatriations with the existence of a railway line to Mexico interacted with the size of the Mexican communities in 1910. Using individual linked data we find that Mexican repatriations reduced employment of native incumbent workers and resulted in their occupational downgrading. However, using a repeated cross section of county level data, we find attenuated and non-significant employment effects and amplified wage downgrading. We show that this is due to selective in- and out-migration of natives.

This paper develops a search theory of labor unions in which the possibility of unionization distorts the behavior of nonunion firms. In the model, unions arise endogenously through a majority election within firms. As union wages are set through a collective bargaining process, unionization compresses wages and lowers profits. To prevent unionization, nonunion firms over-hire high-skill workers-who vote against the union-and under-hire low-skill workers-who vote in its favor. As a consequence of this distortion in hiring, firms that are threatened by unionization hire fewer workers, produce less and pay a more concentrated distribution of wages. In the calibrated economy, the threat of unionization has a significant negative impact on aggregate output, but it also reduces wage inequality.

A large component of local government spending is comprised of complying with a variety of federal mandates. However, empirical evidence on how local governments finance these mandates, such as whether these expenditures crowd out other spending, and whether local residents value mandated expenditures above their local costs, is non-existent. This paper estimates how local governments financed a federal mandate and its impact on growth following passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). I leverage the role of river networks in distributing pollutants across cities, combined with pre-1972 state regulatory intensity, to predict pre-CWA compliance with the infrastructure mandate. This paper has three main findings. First, cities financed substantial improvements to local water quality primarily through an increase in resident fees. Second, mandate compliance did not crowd-out public spending on non-mandated items. Last, using housing prices as a metric, I find that residents valued the mandated infrastructure above their local costs. I employ a novel hydrological approach to show that positive spillovers as well as complementarities in pollution abatement across jurisdictions explain part of this positive result. These findings imply that mandates can reduce inefficiencies to local public goods provision

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.

The \credibility revolution" has forced social scientists to confront the limits of our methods for creating general knowledge. The current approach aims to aggregate valid but local knowledge. At the same time, the increasing centrality of the internet to political and social processes has rendered untenable the implicit ceteris paribus assumptions necessary for aggregating knowledge producedat different times. The interaction of these two trends is not yet well understood. I argue that a high rate of change of the objects of our study makes \knowledge decay" a potentially large source of error. \Temporal validity" is a form of ex- ternal validity in which the target setting is in the future|which, of course, is always the case. A crucial distinction between cross-sectional external validity and temporal validity is that the latter implies a fundamental incompleteness of social science that renders the project of non-parametric knowledge aggregation impossible. I discuss the limitations of extant strategies for knowledge aggregation through the lens of temporal validity, and propose strategies for improving practice.

Several studies have recently applied sentiment-based lexicons to Twitter to gauge local sentiment to understand health behaviors and outcomes for local areas. While this research has demonstrated the vast potential of this approach, lingering questions remain regarding the validity of Twitter mining and surveillance in local health research. First, how well does this approach predict health outcomes at very local scales, such as neighborhoods? Second, how robust are the findings garnered from sentiment signals when accounting for spatial effects? To evaluate these questions, we link 2,076,025 tweets from 66,219 distinct users in the city of San Diego over the period of 2014-12-06 to 2017-05-24 to the 500 Cities Project data and 2010–2014 American Community Survey data. We determine how well sentiment predicts self-rated mental health, sleep quality, and heart disease at a census tract level, controlling for neighborhood characteristics and spatial autocorrelation. We find that sentiment is related to some outcomes on its own, but these relationships are not present when controlling for other neighborhood factors. Evaluating our encoding strategy more closely, we discuss the limitations of existing measures of neighborhood sentiment, calling for more attention to how race/ethnicity and socio-economic status play into inferences drawn from such measures.

The paper applies a new measure of intergenerational mobility. This measure was originally developed in the assortative mating literature and we adapt it for quantifying the degree of intergenerational mobility along traits like education level and income quantile captured by categorical variables. We argue that the new measure controls for the variations in the trait distributions of young adults and their parents more adequately than a commonly used measure, the intergenerational persistence coefficient. In the empirical application, the investigated trait is the educational attainment and we interpret both the new measure and the intergenerational persistence coefficient as being proxies for the inequality of opportunity for obtaining certain degrees. By using both measures and census data from eight waves, we quantify the extent to which parental education determined the education level of Americans between 1960 and 2015. Surprisingly, the two measures result in qualitatively different findings. In addition, the measures considered have diverging policy implications illustrating the importance of adequately controlling for variations in the trait distributions. Failing to do so can potentially reverse the relative priority of different policies aiming at reducing the heritability of high school degrees and university diplomas.

With the aging of the Baby Boom generation, increasing numbers of older adults require assistance in their daily lives and most help comes from family members. Delays in childbearing mean many adult elder care providers are simultaneously raising children. Although past research has documented disparities in psychological distress and financial costs, less is known about the social costs resulting from elder caregiving and how this varies by parental status. We examine the social costs of elder caregiving by comparing elder and child care configurations to investigate three questions. First, do the daily time use patterns of elder caregivers differ by parental status? Second, do the daily time use patterns of elder caregivers differ by caregiving intensity? Third, does caregiving intensity moderate associations of elder caregiving and parental status on daily time use? We address these questions using nationally representative time diary data from the 2011-2017 American Time Use Survey (ATUS).

This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes for prime-age men and women between 2006 and 2016. We estimate the relationship at the most disaggregated level feasible in the American Community Survey in order to provide estimates that include rural areas that have, in some cases, seen particularly high prescription rates. Given the limited time period, it is particularly important to account for geographic variation in both short-term and long-term economic conditions. We estimate three panel models to control for evolving local economic conditions: a difference-in-differences specification, a specification with specific controls for economic conditions, and a model that focuses on a comparison group of place with similar performance in 2000. These modelling approaches find a range of statistically significant and economically substantial results for both prime-age men and women. For example, we find that a 10 percent higher local prescription rate is associated with a decrease in the prime-age labor force participation rate of between 0.15 and 0.47 percentage points for men and between 0.15 and 0.19 percentage points for women, depending on the control strategy. We also estimate effects for narrower demographic groups and find substantially larger estimates for some groups, notably for white and minority men with less than a BA. We also present evidence on reverse causality. We show that a short-term unemployment shock did not increase the share of people misusing prescription opioids and that prescription levels vary substantially within quintiles of longer-term labor market performance. Our estimates are generally robust to estimation within those quintiles of 2000 labor market performance. These results argue against theories of reverse causation that rely on prescriptions rates being higher in labor markets that were already weaker.

In this paper, we argue that models coming from a variety of fields share a common structure that we call matching function equilibria. This structure revolves around an aggregate matching function and a system of nonlinear equations. This encompasses search and matching models, matching models with transferable, non-transferable and imperfectly transferable utility models, BLP models, trade gravity models, and matching with peer effects. We provide a proof of existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium as well as an efficient algorithm to compute it. We show how one can estimate parameters in matching functions of these models by maximum likelihood and obtain closed-form formulas to compute their confidence interval for models with constant return to scale. We also propose an approach to construct counterfactuals without estimating their matching functions for a subclass of these models. We illustrate our estimation approach by analyzing the impact of the elimination of the Social Security Student Benefit Program in 1982 on the marriage market in the United States.

In countries in the developed world, income inequality is increasing, while tech­nological and societal changes open labour market opportunities for women. At the same time they are undergoing an important demographical transition with decreasing fertility and increasing population ageing. All these trends affect the decisions that different generations make over the life-cycle. In chis thesis, I inves­tigate the role that these trends play for education, fertility, and pensions using overlapping generations models. This type of economic models allow us to inves­tigate the decisions of economic agents along the life cycle taking into account the interaction with other generations. The structure of chis thesis will follow dte life-cycle of an economic agent: In the second chapter I investigate how income inequality is affecting the educational de­cisions of young agent.?? and their social mobility. In the third chapter, I investigate the decision of couples co have children and educate them and how chis decision is affected by changes in the gender wage gap. In the forth chapter, I investigate how in an economy with a pay-as-you-go pensions system the intragenerational con­flict between rich and poor as well as the intergenerational conflict between old and young about the allocation of public resources into education and pensions are affected by income inequality and po:pulation ageing. The research that I con­duct in this thesis aims at contributing co our understanding of the mechanisms at play...