In this report, we evaluate issues related to sample design, household selection and/or screening for eligible respondents, and coverage of different frames and selection approaches; questionnaire design and language of administration; nonresponse and survey operations; survey estimation, including issues related to weighting and measurement error when combining data from multiple modes; and costs. We did this through three approaches. First, we conducted an extensive review of the literature, examining published articles, technical reports, conference presentations, and internal reports conducted by members of the Task Force or their organizations. Second, we reached out to the greater AAPOR community via AAPORNet and asked for any description, papers, or documentation about surveys that had transitioned from telephone to self-administered or mixed-mode approaches or were thinking about making this transition. Finally, we conducted a convenience sample survey (described below) of the AAPOR Community to get more general insights into survey organizations, reasons behind making these transitions.

Objective: Janitorial workers have a high burden of occupational injury and illness, but little information exists on their overall health. Methods: Data from the Washington State Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) were analyzed to characterize the working population of Janitors in Washington State from 2011 to 2017 (η= 490) as compared with all other workers (η= 38,885). Results: Compared with other workers, Janitors were significantly more diverse, had lower socioeconomic status, and reported poorer general health and higher rates of arthritis and depression. Janitors were less likely to have adequate sleep, health insurance, and access to technology. Janitors reported higher rates of smoking and marijuana use. Conclusions: Multiple risk factors compound the vulnerability of Janitors. BRFSS data can be used to characterize the health of occupational groups. Identifying overall health needs can better inform policy and help formulate strategies to improve workers' health.

Rural‐urban migration is an integral part of the structural transformation as societies move from a traditional agricultural economy to a modern economy. This process has many potential consequences for migrants. Our study focuses on the lifetime health effects of the large mid‐20th century migration out of rural U.S. Northern Great Plains states, primarily to urban locations in the West and Midwest. An analysis of marginal treatment effects (MTEs) shows that (a) migrants are positively selected, and (b) the causal impact of migration is decreased longevity. Our evidence suggests that elevated mortality among migrants is linked to increased smoking and alcohol consumption.

This is a panel data study of the effects of the minimum wage increase on youth employment and productivity for the years 2000 to 2017. To address the implementation of substate minimum wages during my time sample, I use a weighted average formula when calculating the minimum wage. Overall, I find no statistical significance in the effects of the minimum wage on employment and productivity. I do however find statistical significance when not accounting for sub-state minimum wages, as much of the general literature on the effects of the minimum wage has done. This suggests that accounting for sub-state minimum wages is important, as otherwise researchers may find conclusions that are not truly statistically significant.

This paper examines whether Medicaid adult vision coverage affects labor market activity using state-by-year changes to these benefits. We find that vision benefits increase hours worked and occupational skill requirements, but no consistent evidence of changes on the extensive employment margin. Intensive margin effects could be facilitated by decreased barriers to transportation - when a state covers vision services, beneficiaries are more likely to commute to work by car or motorcycle rather than other modes. Our study suggests that, conditional on eligibility, Medicaid can have a positive effect on labor market activity by expanding access to services that enable work.

This dissertation contains essays in macroeconomics and public economics. In the first es- say, I analyze the interaction between student debt and occupational choice. In recent times, student debt has grown the most among any other types of debt in the US. Student debt can have distortionary behavioral effects and one such effect is in occupational choice. In this pa- per, I construct a model of occupational choice between being an entrepreneur and a worker and examine how occupational choice is affected by repayment plans available to students. Since entrepreneurship is inherently riskier than becoming a worker, a debt repayment plan that takes into account the income level of the borrower can have an effect on occupational choice. I find that while repayment plans do not change the rate of entrepreneurship in the aggregate, there is substantial change in the composition of entrepreneurs by age. In the second essay, I study the quantitative effects of the decline in price of investment goods on the process of structural change and economic growth. Using the Korean economy to calibrate a canonical two-sector model of growth, I study labor allocations in agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. The model is able to match several features of the economy and has implications for sectoral value-added and employment shares, GDP per capita and investment. In particular, I find that the decline in the price of investment goods decreases the value-added and employment shares in the agricultural sector and increases the level of GDP per capita and investment. In the third essay, I provide estimates for the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using the publicly available Current Population Survey (CPS) dataset. In contrast to studies that use datasets on tax returns that are not publicly available, I use the panel structure of the CPS and exploit tax reforms in the US to employ an instrumental variables approach to study how taxable income responds to changes in tax rates. I find that the elasticity of taxable income is 0.65 for married couples.

Women comprise approximately 8% of the active component in the Marine Corps, a number less than half of the female representation in other military services. While the DoD’s recent mandate to fully integrate women is not the focus of this project, the policy dramatically increases the set of opportunities the Marine Corps can offer to women. This project seeks to provide a foundation to ultimately help determine the “optimal” number of women in the Marine Corps. In particular, we determine what a feasible level of gender integration could look like by creating an empirically justified upper bound of female representation across Marine Corps occupations. To establish this, we develop a mapping of Marine military occupational specialties (MOSs) to its civilian equivalents using detailed job descriptors. We find that previously male-only Marine MOSs are equivalent to primarily male-dominated civilian jobs, where the proportions of women still sit at or below 5%. There is substantial variation in female representation across Marine jobs, however; for example, women comprise more than 25% in the Manpower/Admin Occupational Field (OCCFLD). The analysis reveals the occupational segregation in the Marine Corps closely mirrors that of the civilian labor market. Because some Marine jobs do not map well to civilian equivalents, we also examine determinants of success at infantry training. Finding that physical ability is the dominant predictor of success, we use physical fitness data of male and female civilian youth to further estimate the proportions of women we may expect in the infantry OCCFLD. Finally, we develop an analytical framework that can address the costs and benefits of increasing the proportion of women in the Marine Corps.

Despite the largely voluntary character of Nigerian immigration to the United States since 1970, it is not clear that their patterns of integration have emulated those of earlier immigrants who, over time, traded their specific national origins for “American” or “White” identities as they experienced upward mobility. This path may not be available to Nigerian immigrants. When they cease to be Nigerian, they may become black or African-American. In this paper, I use US Census data to trace patterns of identity in a Nigerian second-generation cohort as they advance from early school-age in 1990 to adulthood in 2014. The cohort shrinks inordinately across the period as its members cease to identify as Nigerian, and this pattern of ethnic attrition is most pronounced among the downwardly mobile–leaving us with a positively select Nigerian second generation and, perhaps, unduly optimistic assessments of Nigerian-American socioeconomic advancement.

Racial and ethnic socialization are essential to the social development of racial and ethnic minorities and have several implications for their psychological well-being. However, the unique contributions of racial socialization and ethnic socialization among Black African immigrants remain understudied. This study aims to explore the mechanisms that underlie the association between racial and ethnic socialization and acculturative stress using a sample of 173 first, 1.5, and second-generation Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the U.S. This study used a path analysis to test an exploratory model that links race and ethnic socialization to acculturative stress through race and ethnic public and private appraisals and identity. Findings of the study revealed that a best fit model comprised of a partially mediated path for the relations of ethnic socialization and acculturative stress, and a fully mediated path for the relations of racial socialization and acculturative stress. Astoundingly, ethnic socialization accounted for about twenty percent of the variance in acculturative stress, yet, racial socialization was not a significant predictor of acculturative stress. As expected, racial socialization significantly predicted racial identity. Messages about race and beliefs and attitudes towards race inform African immigrants’ attitudes and . . .

This article tests whether places with higher exposure to unionization during the 1940s, due to their pre-existing industrial composition, tended to have larger declines in wage inequality, conditional on local economic and demographic observables and regional trends. We find a strong negative correlation between exposure to unionization and changes in local inequality from 1940–50 and 1940–60. This does not appear to be underpinned by skill-specific sorting of workers or by firms leaving places with high exposure to unionization. We also find that the correlation between exposure to unionization in the 1940s and the change in inequality after 1940 persists in long-difference regressions to the end of the twentieth century.

Income uncertainty together with limited insurance amplify the aggregate demand response to shocks. Yet, while the role of credit constraints has been clearly established empirically, this is not the case for the link between income uncertainty and demand. Using data on consumption, income and employment growth across 28 MSA from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I document with an instrumental variable strategy that the consumption-income ratio is positively correlated with employment growth, in contradiction to standard New Keynesian models, and increases by 0.4 percentage points in response to a one percentage point increase in employment growth. Based on this estimate, a sizable fraction of 42% of the increase in saving between 2006 and 2010 can be attributed to negative employment growth.

This study examines the effect of high-skilled immigration on the occupational structure of native-born workers in U.S. cities. I find that increases in foreign college workers in STEM occupations, where they hold a comparative advantage over native-born workers, increase the specialization of college natives in social-intensive tasks. Consistent with the productivity effect of task specialization, I find no evidence of displacement effects but do find evidence of positive wage effects of foreign STEM flows on college natives, particularly for those in high-social occupations. Because migration flows are endogenous, I use a shift-share instrument to identify the effect of high-skilled immigration.

A spatially adaptive floating catchment is a circular area that expands outward from a provider location until the estimated demand for services in the nearest population locations exceeds the observed number of health care services performed at the provider location. This new way of creating floating catchments was developed to address the change of spatial support problem (COSP) by upscaling the availability of the service observed at a provider location to the county-level so that its geographic association with utilization could be measured using the same spatial support. Medicare Fee-for-Service claims data were used to identify beneficiaries aged ≥ 65 years who received outpatient pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) in the Southeastern United States in 2014 (n = 8798), the number of PR treatments these beneficiaries received (n = 132,508), and the PR providers they chose (n = 426). The positive correlation between PR availability and utilization was relatively low, but statistically significant (r = 0.619, p < 0.001) indicating that most people use the nearest available PR services, but some travel long distances. SAFCs can be created using data from health care systems that collect claim-level utilization data that identifies the locations of providers chosen by beneficiaries of a specific health care procedure.

There is no debate over the fact that children are losing Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) coverage. Overall, more than 828,000, or 2.2 percent, fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, combined, at the end of 2018 than the previous year.1, 2 A drop in child enrollment is unusual; between 2000 and 2016, enrollment declined in only one year—2007—by 1.1 percent.3 During this period, the nation achieved historic success in covering children with the rate of uninsured children reaching an all-time low of 4.7 percent in 2016. In 2017, child enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP was basically flat while the uninsured rate for children increased for the first time in a decade to 5 percent despite the strong economy.4 The decline in children’s enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP reinforces serious concerns that this alarming trend could continue—and perhaps even worsen. At a time when the economy is strong, the critical question is whether these children are moving to private coverage or becoming uninsured—a question that will not be answered definitively until the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data become available this fall.

estimate a model of dynamic bargaining between internet service providers (ISPs) and Netflix over interconnection fees and use it to evaluate counterfactual ISP mergers. I show that the size of the downstream consumer market an ISP serves is much more important than its disagreement point for determining bargaining outcomes with Netflix. I evaluate several mergers between ISPs serving non-overlapping markets and find that smaller ISP mergers would lengthen negotiations and reduce Netflix's share of the bargaining surplus, while larger mergers would have no significant effect.

In the context of growing worldwide inequality, it is important to know what happens when the demand for low-skilled workers changes. Because natural resource shocks are global in nature, but have highly localized impacts on labor prospects in resource extraction areas, they offer a unique opportunity to evaluate low-skilled men's behavior when faced with extreme variations in local labor market conditions. This situation can be utilized to evaluate a broad range of outcomes, from education and income, to marital and fertility status, to voting behavior.

Free trade increases economic activity in the long run but produces significant labor market disruptions. I study the short-term and long-term effects of trade liberalization on workers by examining how young adults in the United States responded to the post-2000 U.S.-China trade boom. Because adjustment frictions increase with age, the long-term impacts of trade are determined by not only how but also where in the lifecycle workers respond to trade shocks. To document these adjustment mechanisms, I assemble several datasets and employ multiple identification strategies. The main empirical approach leverages the geographic variation in local exposure to China’s obtaining permanent normal trade relation (PNTR) status in 2000. Over-all, I find that young people’s short-term responses to trade liberalization were overwhelmingly negative. In particular, I find that PNTR essentially had no college attainment effects but infact raised the incidence of several undesirable outcomes. Those negative outcomes include lower geographic and industry mobility and increased engagement in criminal activities and risky health behaviors. I also show that PNTR significantly diminished young adults’ chances of long-term economic success. My findings imply that without government intervention, the disruptive effects of trade will likely remain high in the long run.

Within a large field of family violence research, a slowly growing body of literature has examined community-level variables to explain variation in violence. Studies investigating the role of ecological factors have largely been informed by social disorganization theory. This represents considerable progress, but the community context also includes many ecological factors yet to be considered by studies examining family violence, and as such, successful neighborhood interventions have been limited. Furthermore, few community-level studies have explored whether serious family violence is geographically clustered. The current study used police calls for service data to examine how the health context of a community is associated with family violence. Accounting for spatial dependence, a higher prevalence of self-reported mental illness in a neighborhood related to family violence, although a higher prevalence of physical health difficulties was negatively associated with family violence. These results carry implications that can inform community-based efforts, particularly in economically disadvantaged neighborhood, aimed at reducing family violence.

Foster children come from many different backgrounds and experiences. Using pooled (2016-2018) Current Population Survey (CPS) data, this profile examines how foster children compare to biological, adopted, and stepchildren. Statistics reported here represent minor children identified as a foster child to the head of household. The CPS estimate is lower than that provided by the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), which considers foster children through age 20. Further, AFCARS designates children placed in foster care with a relative who are likely identified as a relative to the household head in the CPS rather than a foster child. The CPS data allow for detailed poverty estimates that include foster children (e.g. supplemental poverty)—which is not available in any other dataset— providing unique insight into a vulnerable population in the U.S.

Early detection of pancreatic cancer is challenging because cancer-specific symptoms occur only at an advanced stage, and a reliable screening tool to identify high-risk patients is lacking. To address this challenge, an artificial neural network (ANN) was developed, trained, and tested using the health data of 800,114 respondents captured in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and Pancreatic, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian cancer (PLCO) datasets, together containing 898 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Prediction of pancreatic cancer risk was assessed at an individual level by incorporating 18 features into the neural network. The established ANN model achieved a sensitivity of 87.3 and 80.7%, a specificity of 80.8 and 80.7%, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.86 and 0.85 for the training and testing cohorts, respectively. These results indicate that our ANN can be used to predict pancreatic cancer risk with high discriminatory power and may provide a novel approach to identify patients at higher risk for pancreatic cancer who may benefit from more tailored screening and intervention.