Social capital is presumed to help individuals who lack financial or human capital achieve collective action through their social ties and networks of relationships. But does it help individuals overcome their socioeconomic disadvantages relative to their wealthier neighbors, or does the accumulation of social capital merely reproduce socioeconomic disparities, particularly in economically segregated places? Leveraging data from the Current Population Survey, I test whether residential income segregation is associated with larger income differences in social capital investments and collective action. I find that in more economically segregated places, wealthier residents are more likely to be members of neighborhood organizations and report working with other community members to address local issues. These results are robust to the inclusion of other potential confounders, including income inequality, racial context, and racial residential segregation. This research has implications for policy makers and stakeholders interested in building a more inclusive civic arena.

Using the Current Population Survey between 1996 and 2018, this paper investigates the role constraints to migration might play in explaining racial/ethnic disparities in the labor market. The Delta Index of dissimilarity is used to illustrate a greater distributional mismatch between race/education specific workers and jobs among minorities relative to white non-Hispanics. Regression analysis then shows that this mismatch is consistent with minorities being less responsive to changes in the distribution of job opportunities. However, minorities are more responsive when the growing job opportunities are located in areas with greater same-racial/ethnic representation, suggesting that social constraints might play a role in the observed distributional mismatch. The analysis focuses on 25-54 year old men.

Personal finance website Bankrate.com ranked 162 college majors based on average annual income and unemployment rates. New to the site's ranking this year was another consideration the portion of degree holders who have advanced degrees.

The findings of higher rates of awareness and current use of JUUL compared with Suorin and Vuse e-cigarettes are aligned with JUUL as the market leader,1 being the most popular device among highschool youth who ever used e-cigarettes,10 increased media and news coverage, promotion on social media platforms,1 online engagement about JUUL,11 12 and sharing about JUUL via word-of-mouth in recent years.13 The worrisome trend of social normalisation of e-cigarette use among young people could potentially renormalise combustible cigarette use due to a fourfold increased odds of initiating smoking among e-cigarette users.14 The high nicotine content of newer pod-based vaping devices may further increase the risks of nicotine addiction and initiating smoking.15 Efforts to restrict access of pod-based devices, ban flavours that appeal to young people, and counter-marketing campaigns on the addictiveness of vaping are needed to stem this growing trend. Surveillance of not just the use of JUUL but also other popular pod-based brands (eg, Suorin, Bo and PHIX)16 is recommended to more accurately assess the prevalence of vaping among young people. Limitations of this study include a non-probability-based sample, although we recruited a large sample nationally and weighted analyses to match the US population in this age group. We were not able to assess prevalence of using all available brands of pod-based vaping devices. Current use was based on self-reported measures which are subject to recall bias. In sum, this study contributes new evidence on the prevalence of using JUUL, Suorin and Vuse among a national sample of US youth and young adults to inform future surveillance and intervention efforts.

Using the three-year microdata sample of the American Community Survey for 2009 to 2011, we compute public school teacher salaries for comparison across US states. Teacher salaries are adjusted for state differences in teacher characteristics, cost of living, federal tax rates, household amenity attractiveness, and location within the metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan portions of the states. We find high persistence in the state rankings of nominal public school teacher salaries across time. Yet, we also find that the rankings significantly shift with the adjustments, suggesting they are necessary for meaningful comparisons of public teacher salaries across states. The differences in teacher pay across states also greatly narrow with the adjustments. Finally, this is the first study to show and test that teacher salary comparisons across states should be based on a comparison of public school teacher salaries with nonteacher college graduates in the states, adjusted for differences in personal characteristics and effective federal tax rates.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the earnings disadvantage of 21st century immigrants in the United States. The study is the first to decompose the earnings disadvantage faced by recent immigrants to present the channels through which immigrants lag behind their native counterparts. The decomposition of the earnings disadvantage reveals that the time spent in the United States is the key determinant of the earnings disadvantage. Other important sources of the earnings disadvantage of immigrants are the levels of English-language proficiency and educational attainment. The decomposition analysis also suggests that low levels of human capital cause an even larger disadvantage for immigrants in the years following the 2008-2009 recession as compared with the corresponding relative returns of the prerecession period. The decomposition analysis and trends in returns to human capital variables highlight the merits of a selective immigration system that favors young, English-speaking, and highly educated individuals. JEL Classifications: J1, J3, J6

As this book is being written, the 2020 Census is getting closer and the Census Bureau’s plans are becoming more concrete. However, there are several factors which raise concerns about whether differential undercounts will be reduced in the 2020 Census. Lack of adequate funding for the Census Bureau and high reliance on the internet are two areas which may lead to higher differential undercounts in 2020.

Since the 1980s the stock of immigrants to the US has been rapidly increasing potentially disrupting labor markets across the country. A large body of literature estimates the relative wage impact of immigration on high-and low-skill workers, but we know much less about how these effects map onto changes of the earnings structure. I begin with descriptively documenting the evolution of foreign-born workers in the natives' wage distribution, showing that, over time, they have become increasingly over-represented in the very bottom. I then undertake two distinct empirical approaches in deepening our understanding of the way foreign-born shape the earnings structure. First, I construct a counterfactual wage distribution with lower immigration levels and estimate reduced-form quantile treatment effects. Second, I build and estimate a standard theoretical model featuring Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) technology and skill types stratified across wage deciles. Both analyses uncover similar monotone effects: a one percentage point increase in the share of foreign-born leads to a 0.1-0.2 (0.2-0.3) percent wage decrease (increase) in the bottom (top) decile and asserts no significant pressure in the middle.

This study compares the likelihood of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) present or treated during pregnancy among Mexican origin, non-Hispanic White, and Black birth-giving women. Logistic regression analyses of birth certificate records from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), for years 2009-2012, are used to determine the likelihood of presence or treatment of STIs for birth-giving women. Despite Mexican-origin women having the lowest levels of socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by educational attainment, logistic regression results show that the likelihood of presence or treatment of an STI is unexpectedly higher for Whites and Blacks when compared to their Mexican-origin counterparts. The unanticipated results parallel other health advantages commonly found within the ‘Latina paradox literature’. Results show that women who defer their first prenatal visit until the last trimester of pregnancy have the highest odds of having an STI present or treated during pregnancy. The present study suggest that the Latina paradox could be extended via future research on STIs, and supports policies that might improve the maternal health of underserved women who defer their first prenatal visit until the third trimester.

The simulations have a number of implications for the practice of assortative mating research. First (and this is not a particularly new observation but has perhaps new force), different mechanisms can generate quite similar patterns of assortative mating, so we need to use information additional to that in square tables of marriages to differentiate between the mechanisms. Second, while loglinear models are clearly necessary and far superior to simpler summaries of the structure of tables, we need to be cautious about making inferences from parameters to preferences. Processes happen through time, while loglinear models are one-shot. If at all possible, we should use data with a time dimension, and incorporate time in the modelling. In the absence of properly longitudinal data, this can be read as a renewed injunction to focus on recent marriages where at all possible.

This paper applies information-theoretic measures to consider the systemic effects on individual incomes of complex patterns of social and economic discrimination by race, ethnicity, and gender in the U.S. It estimates non-parametric indices of joint, conditional or incremental, and mutual information between income, social identity, and observable economic characteristics obtained using large-scale cross-sectional data from that economy. The paper advances new conceptual and empirical approaches to the nature and measurement of economic discrimination and inequalities of opportunity, founded on the formal informativeness of measures of social identity on economic outcomes. Estimated values for indices of informational association also cast new light on the effects of the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity on income, perverse patterns in the effects of education across different groups, and a few notable dynamic changes in patterns of income distribution in that economy over the past 40 years.

Most adults spend almost half their waking hours at work. How people feel during work can have far-reaching consequences for their quality of life. This study traces male and female workers’ affective experiences at work to the gender composition of their occupations. To do this, we draw on nationally representative time diary data on affective experiences at work from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 well-being modules of the American Time Use Surveys, as well as data on occupational gender composition from the Current Population Surveys. Our analytic sample contains 5216 activity records of working at main jobs from 4486 non-self-employed workers. We find significant gender differences in the relationship between occupational gender composition and affective well-being: Working in occupations with higher percentages of male workers is associated with higher levels of unpleasantness and lower levels of meaningfulness at work for women but these associations are not significant for men. We discuss the implications of our findings for gender inequality in work-related well-being and for the stalled progress towards gender integration in occupations.

This report is one of the important ways that the Center for Business and Economic Research fulfills its mission as specified in the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS 164.738) to examine various aspects of the Kentucky economy. The analysis and data presented here cover a variety of topics that range from an economic forecast for Kentucky in 2019 to a broad presentation of factors affecting the economy.

The decennial Census provides detailed information about local labor markets but at very low-frequencies, making it difficult for researchers to identify short-run effects in local labor markets. Machine learning techniques open the door to studies analyzing local labor markets at high frequency by allowing researchers to analyze large text corpora, such as those found in classified ads. Motivated by Census tabulations showing a Cuban immigration surge in the Miami metro area around 1980, we document a decline in the Help Wanted Index, a monthly count of help-wanted classifieds, for Miami relative to geographic baselines. We conduct a supervised learning exercise demonstrating a statistically significant decline in the fraction of job openings for roles typically associated with less-educated workers using a 1/29 sample of the Miami Herald 's classifieds. We explore these results using topic modeling, which naturally generates occupational and industry categories with minimal researcher degrees of freedom. This exercise uncovers a statistically significant increase in the proportion of job openings advertised for positions in accounting, sales, and engineering and a corresponding decrease in the proportion advertised for positions in the food and automotive industry. Analysis of the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Supplement confirms the relative importance of job openings for less-educated workers' wage outcomes, but the linkage with employment outcomes is statistically indistinguishable from zero for all workers. We conclude with directions for future research and suggestions for agencies aiming to modernize their statistical releases. 1

Unlike most other countries, in the United States, subnational governments (states) have substantial authority over collective bargaining and union organization laws. Because states compete for business investment and union (dis)organization likely has spillover effects beyond state borders, weak unions in one state may affect union organization in other states. We examine how union decline in one state is associated with union decline in neighboring states, and whether the presence of prounion (left-leaning) governments may limit the spread of union decline. Examining a period of major union decline (1983–2014), we find that union weakness in one state is associated with union weakness in nearby states. We observe that Democratic power in Congress is associated with higher unionization rates, but that liberal state governments have been relatively powerless to stop union decline in this period. These findings have important implications for understanding the historical and contemporary weakness of American unions and for the future of union strength in the United States.

Preclinical data demonstrating neuroapoptosis in animals exposed to anesthetics and human data identifying an association between anesthesia and learning deficits1 led to the 2016 US Food and Drug Administration warning that repeated or lengthy anesthetic exposure in children younger than 3 years may affect brain development.2 Recent prospective studies demonstrate no harm from short anesthetic exposure in infants.3 Most anesthetic exposures in young children are under 2 hours.4 Despite these reassuring findings, concerns regarding neurocognitive impairment may lead parents and physicians to defer anesthetic exposure and, thus, surgery. Pediatric surgical epidemiology has been geographically limited without assessment of trends over time. We assessed trends in surgical exposure among children younger than 3 years using a comprehensive national database.

Using recent household data from the American Community Survey, I examine the differences in specialization in market and home production between married and unmarried gay, lesbian, and different-sex couples. I construct four measures of household specialization: the probability that both members of a couple participate in the labor force, the probability that both work full-time, the absolute difference in weekly hours worked, and the absolute difference in yearly hours worked. I find strong evidence of a specialization gap between married and unmarried same-sex couples in that married couples specialize noticeably more than unmarried couples in a way similar to different-sex couples. However, married same-sex couples divide household labor more equally than married different-sex couples. Further, unmarried same-sex couples specialize even less than suggested by previous studies that combined married and unmarried same-sex couples in their sample. JEL Codes: D13, J12, J22

The nullification of slave-based wealth after the US Civil War (1861-65) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that white southern households with more slave assets lost substantially more wealth by 1870 relative to households with otherwise similar pre-War wealth levels. Yet, the sons of these slaveholders recovered in income and wealth proxies by 1880, in part by shifting into white collar positions and marrying into higher status families. Their pattern of recovery is most consistent with the importance of social networks in facilitating employment opportunities and access to credit.

This study explores the everyday experiences of Mexican immigrant elder women residing in North County San Diego. While the literature on aging has focused primarily on white, middle to upper class experiences, this study focuses on working-class, elder immigrant women from Mexico and who reside in the United States. A Critical Life Course Framework was used to bridge past and current experiences of elders to make sense of life course transitions, continuity, and contemporary realities. A Community Cultural Wealth Framework was used to highlight their cultural strengths and strategies for navigating life challenges. This study employed 10 semi-structured qualitative interviews to consider how Mexican immigrant women give meaning to their experiences in older age and how those experiences influence the quality of their life. Findings included: the importance of family to elders, the meaning of everyday activities, nature of health and wellbeing, circumstances of livelihood and survivability, gendered experiences of aging such as spousal caretaking and widowhood, and sources of strength and empowerment. Recommendations provided for organizations, counties and national policy on how to better support and recognize the strengths of Mexican immigrant elder women.

Will new technologies cause industries to shed jobs, requiring novel policies to address mass unemployment? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? The elasticity of demand. Using data over two centuries for US textile, steel, and auto industries, this paper shows that automation initially spurred job growth because demand was highly elastic. But demand later became satiated, leading to job losses. A simple model explains why this pattern might be common, suggesting that today’s technologies may cause some industries to decline and others to grow. Automation might not cause mass unemployment, but it may well require workers to make disruptive transitions to new industries, requiring new skills and occupations.