Introduction: We examined past-12-month quit attempts and smoking cessation from 2006 to 2016 while accounting for demographic shifts in the US population. In addition, we sought to understand whether the current use of electronic cigarettes was associated with a change in past-12-month quit attempts and successful smoking cessation at the population level. Methods: We analyzed data from 25- to 44-year-olds from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 2006 to 2016 (N = 26,354) and the Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) in 2006-2007, 2010-2011, and 2014-2015 (N = 33,627). Data on e-cigarette use were available in the 2014-2016 NHIS and 2014-2015 TUS-CPS surveys. Results: Past-12-month quit attempts and smoking cessation increased in recent years compared with 2006. Current e-cigarette use was associated with higher quit attempts (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 2.29, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.87 to 2.81, p <. 001) and greater smoking cessation (aOR = 1.64, 95% CI = 1.21 to 2.21, p =. 001) in the NHIS. Multivariable logistic regression of the TUS-CPS data showed that current e-cigarette use was similarly significantly associated with increased past-12-month quit attempts and smoking cessation. Significant interactions were found for smoking frequency (everyday and some-day smoking) and current e-cigarette use for both outcomes (p <. 0001) with the strongest positive effects seen in everyday smokers. Conclusions: Compared with 2006, past-12-month quit attempts and smoking cessation increased among adults aged 25-44 in recent years. Current e-cigarette use was associated with increased past-12-month quit attempts and successful smoking cessation among established smokers. These findings are relevant to future tobacco policy decisions. Implications: E-cigarettes were introduced into the US market over the past decade. During this period, past-12-month quit attempts and smoking cessation have increased among US adults aged 25-44. These trends are inconsistent with the hypothesis that e-cigarette use is delaying quit attempts and leading to decreased smoking cessation. In contrast, current e-cigarette use was associated with significantly higher past-12-month quit attempts and past-12-month cessation. These findings suggest that e-cigarette use contributes to a reduction in combustible cigarette use among established smokers.

This dissertation uses the tools of labor economics to understand how individuals respond to changes in the composition of communities. The first two chapters focus on incarceration. Because men are much more likely to be incarcerated than women, increased incarceration skews the sex ratio in affected communities. Chapters 1 and 2 examine how incarceration affects fertility, partner choice, marriage, and infant and maternal health. The third chapter investigates how a large influx of immigrants into a rural community affects native workers' occupation and migration choices. Many factors influence incarceration, including crime and enforcement practices, which complicates the identification of the effect of increased male incarceration on women's family formation patterns. State sentencing reforms were important drivers of the growth in incarceration which occurred between 1990 and 2000. In chapters 1 and 2, I leverage changes in incarceration levels driven by the North Carolina Structured Sentencing Act (SSA). Enacted in October 1994, this policy increased the severity of . . .

Few studies have examined the familial configurations of adopted children and how these configurations differ from those of nonadoptees. As a result, this study examines the relationship between adoption status and inequalities in the family structure of children. Our results indicate that adopted children are more likely to live in nuclear families compared with nonadopted children. Part of this is driven by the comparatively limited presence of adoptees in single-mother, single-father, and other types of nonnuclear families. Foreign-born adoptees are more likely to live in nuclear families compared with U.S.-born adoptees, but adoptees from racial and ethnic minority groups are less likely to live in such families compared with their White counterparts. These race-ethnic inequalities in family structure are however moderated by foreign-born status. Accordingly, our results indicate that foreign-born Black and Hispanic children have the highest odds of residing in nuclear families among the U.S. population of adopted children.

This study developed a typology of eight heterogeneous types of baby boomer entrepreneurs and extended the occupational choice model regarding driving factors for entrepreneurialism in this population. The study relied on monthly USA Current Population Survey data across 11 years (2006–2016), and using 2-sample t-tests and multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models that incorporated both individual- and metropolitan-level effects, found that new and unincorporated baby boomer entrepreneurs were more likely than their continuing and incorporated counterparts, respectively, to come from central cities, and that continuing, new opportunity, full-time, and incorporated baby boomer entrepreneurs were more likely than new, new necessity, part-time, and unincorporated baby boomer entrepreneurs, respectively, to be physically healthier and better educated. The typology and findings on USA baby boomers have global implications for career progression in older workers.

BACKGROUND Despite an increase in scholarly and policy interest regarding the impacts of environmental change on migration, empirical knowledge in the field remains varied, patchy, and limited. Generalised discourse on environmental migration frequently oversimplifies the complex channels through which environmental change influences the migration process. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to systematise the existing empirical evidence on migration influenced by environmental change with a focus on Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change. CONCLUSIONS The contextually contingent nature of migration–environment relationships prevents us from drawing a universal conclusion, whether environmental change will increase or suppress migration in Africa. However, this study unravels the complex interactions between the nature and duration of the environmental pressure, the livelihood of the populations, the role of kinship ties and the role of demographic differentials on migration response. CONTRIBUTION The review provides an initial systematic and comprehensive summary of empirical evidence on the environmental drivers of migration in Africa. It also discusses the implications of the scale, materials, and methods used in the 53 studies.

Recent literature into the mobility patterns of US working age population show that inter-state movement has been low in recent years compared to a few decades ago. Based on decennial census data from 1980 to 2010, the share of state to state movers have moved from close to five percent in 1980 to over nine percent in 1990, and 2000, while declining to slightly over two percent in 2010. While some authors hypothesized that the reduction in state to state movement is due to labor markets being more homogenous across locations, and due to better information flows that allow potential movers to make a utility maximizing choice sooner . . .

This paper examines the relationship between individuals’ migration decisions and risk attitudes. We use the Two-Sample Two-Stage Instrumental Variable (TS2SIV) technique to measure relative risk aversion and its impact on migration. Using the probit model, we find that more risk-averse people are less likely to migrate. The results also indicate that the impact of risk attitudes on migration varies by other demographic characteristics such as age, sex, etc. In addition, we test whether there is any network effect on migration and how risk attitudes vary with the network effect. We consider two ethnic groups; Asian and Hispanic, and find that the size of one’s own ethnic group in a source location has a significant effect on the migration decisions. In addition, we also find that risk attitudes vary with the network effect.

In the midst of an uncertain future, DACA recipients face current difficulties in accessing health care coverage limiting their decisions on employment and schooling. Using the 1% American Community Survey from 2009 to 2016 and a triple-difference approach, this paper evaluates the impact DACA and access to public coverage has on recipients’ health insurance coverage, employment, and schooling. Because there are differences across states with regard to public coverage policies uniquely accommodating DACA recipients, this paper exploits these differences in order to evaluate whether access to public resources affects recipients’ decisions on employment and schooling, and to test whether the access to these resources creates a crowd out effect between public and private coverage among recipients. We find that DACA eligibles are more likely to work in areas offering public resources (called accommodating areas) and to take on Medicaid coverage after DACA. Medicaid-eligible DACA recipients are the group with the highest response rates on employment and public coverage. College attendance increases for young adults, low-income Hispanics, and high-income women in accommodating areas. In non-accommodating areas, the impact of DACA on schooling is either negative or not significant. The results are robust to several different specifications. The findings offer explanations on the mixed results on schooling in previous literature. Our research suggests that having access to further resources, such as health coverage, encourages people to pursue education as well as work.

Background: Early marriage and pregnancy impede the educational attainment of young women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa. Expanding the legal grounds for abortion makes it easier and safer to end unintended pregnancies, but it is not clear whether such high-level policy changes can empower young women and girls to pursue education by delaying marriage or parenting obligations. Methods: I used a difference-in-differences approach to compare marriage, birth, and schooling rates among young women and girls in ten countries that expanded the legal grounds for abortion and eight countries where abortion laws remained extremely restrictive during the period 1996 to 2015. Results: Expanding legal grounds for abortion was associated with a reduction of 2.5 percentage points (95% confidence intervals [CI]: -0.050 – -0.001), or 8.6%, in the annual likelihood of marriage and 0.7 percentage point (95% CI: -0.013 – -.002), or 7.3%, in the annual likelihood of birth. The legal reform was not associated with any statistically significant effect on schooling. The effects of abortion legal reform were driven by those from younger age groups, rural areas, and lower wealth quintiles. The results were robust to several sensitivity analyses. Conclusions: Expanding the legal grounds for abortion enhanced the ability of young women and girls to delay marriage and childbearing. Despite the lack of effects on schooling, this study highlights the broader implications of reproductive health policies to women’s agency in low-resource settings.

Historical practices, such as housing discrimination in Detroit, have been shown to have lasting impacts on communities. Perhaps the most explicit example is the practice of redlining in the 1930s, whereby lenders outlined financially undesirable neighborhoods, populated by minority families, on maps and prevented residents from moving to better resourced neighborhoods. Awareness of historical housing discrimination may improve research assessing the impacts of current neighborhood characteristics on health. Using the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study (DNHS), we assessed the association between two-year changes in home foreclosure rates following the 2007–2008 Great Recession, and residents’ five-year self-rated health trajectories (2008–2013); and estimated the confounding bias introduced by ignoring historical redlining practices in the city. We used both ecological and multilevel models to make inference about person- and community-level processes. In a neighborhood-level linear regression adjusted for confounders (including percent redlined); a 10%-point slower foreclosure rate recovery was associated with an increase in prevalence of poor self-rated health of 0.31 (95% CI:−0.02 to 0.64). At the individual level, it was associated with a within-person increase in probability of poor health of 0.45 (95% CI:0.15–0.72). Removing redlining from the model biased the estimated effect upward to 0.38 (95% CI:0.07–0.69) and 0.56 (95% CI:0.21–0.84) in the neighborhood and individual-level models, respectively. Stratum-specific foreclosure recovery effects indicate stronger influence in neighborhoods with a greater proportion of residents identifying as white and a greater degree of historic redlining. These findings support earlier theory suggesting a historical influence of structural discrimination on the association between current neighborhood characteristics and health, and suggests that historical redlining specifically may increase vulnerability to contemporary neighborhood foreclosures. Community interventions should consider historical discrimination in conjunction with current place-based indicators to more equitably improve population health.

We examine the influence of board cultural diversity on firms' corporate social performance. We derive directors' cultural roots from their last names to create a measure of board cultural diversity. We find that board cultural diversity is positively associated with corporate social performance. This finding supports the stakeholder theory and is consistent with the view that board cultural diversity enhances firms' ability to satisfy the needs of their broader groups of stakeholders. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns and the use of different culture frameworks. The observed positive relationship between board cultural diversity and corporate social performance is particularly strong for firms that operate in industries with high visibility to consumers and in highly competitive industries.

A method is presented for estimating the “underlying” infant mortality rates for areas with small populations. It is described and illustrated in a case study that estimates infant mortality rates for 2494 US counties that had less than 1000 births in 1970. The method’s validity is tested using a synthetic population in the form of a simulated data set generated from a model life table infant mortality rate, representing Level 23 of the West Family Model Life Table for both sexes. The test indicates that the method is capable of producing estimates that represent underlying rates. Although some judgment is needed with the method, it has sufficient transparency that estimates can be replicated. The results support the argument that the method can produce reasonable estimates of underlying infant mortality rates for small populations subject to high levels of stochastic variation.

California has been a global leader in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The state has set an ambitious goal of reducing GHG to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The statewide goal cannot be accomplished without the support of local stakeholders. We analyzed over 150 city climate action plans (CAPs) in California and examined their reduction goals. We hypothesized five sets of factors that can explain whether a jurisdiction adopts a plan or not, and what kind of target it sets. We find that size of the city, political ideology, and institutional capacity are related to a higher chance of adopting a climate action plan, while political ideology and air quality explain the extent of aspiration of targets. We also find evidence of policy diffusion where neighbors are more likely to adopt plans. Our findings identify gaps in the CAPs within the state and address what lessons can be learned from the Californian experience of local climate policy adoption and goal-setting.

This dissertation exams how policies designed to alleviate discrimination in labor markets affect relative worker effort, how criminal justice policies affect labor markets, and how the availability of affordability housing affects criminal recidivism. The data used for this dissertation include self-collected data from laboratory experiments, publicly available data from large U.S. government agencies, and restricted access data from U.S. government agencies. The empirical methods consist of experimental randomization and difference-in-differences models. In the first chapter, I show that workers do not change the effort they exert at work when they learn about their coworker’s wages, which is contrary to much of the anecdotal evidence received from managers for why they prefer to not implement pay secrecy bans in the workplace. In the second chapter, I show that decriminalization of marijuana possession is associated with lower wages and decreased employment for young workers, which I argue is driven by decriminalization shifting the composition of the workforce to include more marijuana users. In the third chapter, I show offenders released into areas with better access to affordable housing are less likely to recidivate and return to prison

Females live a lot longer than males in most parts of the world today. But that was not always the case. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are only partial reasons. Rather, the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role. Those who survive most infectious diseases carry a health burden that affects organs and impacts general well-being. We use newly collected data from Massachusetts containing information on cause of death since 1887 to show that females between the ages of 5 and 25 were disproportionately affected by infectious diseases. Both males and females lived longer as the burden of infectious disease fell, but women were more greatly impacted. Our explanation does not tell us precisely why women live longer than men, but it does help understand the timing of their relative increase.

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...

Baby boomers-comprised of persons born between 1946 and 1964-made up almost one-third of the US population in 2010, the year that the first baby boomers reached retirement age. The baby boom generation is increasingly dominating the older segment of the population. However, we have not yet thoroughly analyzed whether the baby boom generation will follow the migration preferences of older cohorts. This research focuses on how the nexus of aging, migration, and income plays out for the older population, with a particular emphasis on the baby boom generation. The results show a distinct North-South disparity through spatial income redistribution due to elderly migration. We find that-in terms of net income gains-the winners of retirement migration are states located in the West and South, whereas the interior and the East Coast are losing net income. Older persons' migration across interstate boundaries creates this stark income gain disparity because it is a highly selective process. Those choosing to move out of state are predominantly white, affluent, and better educated persons. Importantly, we also find a strong positive association between income and interstate moves for the baby boomers, but not for the WWII generation. The income selectivity and the associated spatial income redistribution will become stronger in the future when baby boomers become more and more dominant among the older population

The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between local government spending on parks and recreation and self-rated health in the United States. Using four publicly available datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Current Population Survey, the Decennial Census, the American Community Survey, and the State and Local Government Finance Survey for the years 1997–2012 (n = 303,203), we estimated a multinomial and a binary logit model predicting self-rated health with county area percentage of expenditures contributed to parks and recreation operations as the independent variable of interest. A one-percent increase in the portion of county area expenditures contributed to parks and recreation operations was associated with decreased relative risk of very good (RRR = 0.95; 95% CI = 0.93, 0.96), good (RRR = 0.95; 95% CI = 0.93, 0.97), or fair (RRR = 0.89; 95% CI = 0.87, 0.92) health relative to excellent health. The effect held in the binary logit model for adult men and women, but not youth. Higher levels of parks and recreation spending were associated with higher levels of self-rated health for adults across the United States from 1997 to 2012. Investing greater portions of local government budgets in parks and recreation operations may have the potential to improve self-rated health among residents.

Urban wildlife populations present different scenarios for managers compared to rural populations, partly because of greater diversity in stakeholder attitudes and opinions regarding urban wildlife. Wild urban canids—especially coyotes (Canis latrans)—have been of increasing interest throughout North America in recent years. Our objective was to evaluate the potential of using iNaturalist-generated observations of urban red foxes and coyotes for cost-effective, customizable data collection to inform urban canid management. Our research is important on two fronts; first, it is a way to engage the public to make them more aware of urban canids, and secondly, it is an attempt to empirically test if we can more efficiently and effectively track coyotes and red foxes in urban areas. We used iNaturalist to collect over 800 community-generated locations for red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and coyotes in Madison, WI from 2015 and 2016. We concurrently placed radio-collars on 11 red foxes and 11 coyotes to determine areas used in this urban ecosystem. We compared iNaturalist to radio-telemetry locations to identify factors that led to a positive relationship between these two inherently different spatial data sets. Greatest overlap between iNaturalist and telemetry data for both red foxes and coyotes occurred in areas with moderate human development and there was minimal overlap in natural areas. The overlap between iNaturalist and telemetry locations was comparable for both species, but the underlying mechanism differed by species-specific habitat use. iNaturalist reports appeared to show where and when humans most often interacted with red foxes and coyotes, rather than their true spatiotemporal distribution. Understanding the relationship between community-generated reports and local canid distribution may inform how iNaturalist can be used as a management tool and allow managers to proactively monitor and manage human-wildlife interactions with urban wildlife.

In this chapter, the authors offer a critical appraisal of predictions of a jobless future due do rapid technological change, as well as provide evidence on whether the rate of occupational change has been increasing. The authors critique the “task replacement” methodology that underlies the most powerful and specific predictions about the impact of technology on employment in particular occupations. There are a number of reasons why assuming a correspondence between task replacement and employment declines is not warranted. The authors also raise questions about how rapidly the development, acceptance, and diffiusion of labor-displacing technologies is likely to occur. In the empirical portion of the chapter, the authors compare the current rate of employment disruption with those observed in earlier periods. This analysis is based on an analysis of occupation data in the US covering the period 1870–2015. Using an index of dissimilarity as the metric, the authors find that the rate of occupational change from 1870 to 2015 does not provide evidence of a sharp uptick in the rate of occupational shifts in the information age. Instead, the rate of occupation shifts has been declining slowly throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, the issues and results discussed here suggest that imminent massive employment displacement is not a foregone conclusion.