Despite a relatively strong U.S. economy in late 2018, many workers continue to experience stagnant wages and underemployment. In response, policy interventions like subsidized wages, training and search assistance, expanded public employment, and federal guarantees of employment have all been proposed, but relatively little is known about how a federal job guarantee would function. We therefore discuss a number of relevant labor market considerations: How many people are likely to participate in a job guarantee? What types of work and nonwork activities are the eligible population currently engaged in? What types of work would program participants do? Can we expect workers to be well matched with their employers? Are there unintended consequences of the program for participants or nonparticipants? We conclude that, while a job guarantee could lift employment rates and incomes for many participants, there is considerable uncertainty associated with its impacts. In particular, a potentially very large but unknown fraction of workers currently earning low wages—as well as those outside the labor force—would take up a job guarantee, meaning that it could affect far more workers than are currently unemployed or underemployed.

How do schools teach American identity in light of immigration-driven diversity? This ethnographic study focuses on everyday nation-making at Castro Middle School, located in a city transformed by immigration. Building on theories of bidirectional assimilation, I show how assimilation can produce new definitions of Americanness more recognizable to immigrant communities, facilitating their national identification. At Castro, bidirectional assimilation supported African American students' descriptions of Americans in multicultural terms and their own identification as American. Assimilation between the school and the larger Latino and Asian student populations, however, was limited because of a binary racial paradigm that excluded them from the national community. This study thus nuances the role of race as a barrier in the assimilation process, particularly as it unfolds in schools.

I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820–1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort’s county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in market access reduced average stature by 0.14 inches, and rising market access over the study period can explain 37 percent of the contemporaneous decline in average stature, known as the Antebellum Puzzle. I find evidence that transportation affected health by increasing population density, leading to a worse epidemiological environment.

This paper unveils an important but unexplored channel for the growth of low-skill service employment between 1960 and 2000: the spillover from dual-income households. In particular, we analyze the cross-city association between variation in dual-income households and employment growth in home production substitutes. To address concerns about endogeneity, we use the fact that married working women were extremely concentrated on administrative support occupations, while their birth places were heterogeneously distributed. Our results show that one more dual-income couple creates 0.3 low-skill service jobs in local economies, and the effect mainly comes from the home production service sector. JEL: E24, J12, J21, R12

We examine the relation between the presence of an independent director who is a blockholder (IDB) and corporate policies, risk-taking, and market valuation. After accounting for endogeneity, firms with an IDB have significantly (1) lower levels of cash holdings, payout and research and development (R&D) expenditures, (2) higher levels of capital expenditures, and (3) lower risk. The market appears to value IDB presence and the associated decrease in dividend yield. About 75% of the IDBs in our sample are individual investors, who drive most of our results. Our findings suggest that IDB presence plays a valuable role in shaping some corporate policies and allocating corporate resources.

This paper explores the relationship between the minimum wage, the structure of employee compensation, and worker welfare. We advance a conceptual framework that describes the conditions under which a minimum wage increase will alter the provision of fringe benefits, alter employment outcomes, and either increase or decrease worker welfare. Using American Community Survey data from 2011-2016, we find robust evidence that state-level minimum wage changes decreased the likelihood that individuals report having employer-sponsored health insurance. Effects are largest among workers in very low-paying occupations, for whom coverage declines offset 9 percent of the wage gains associated with minimum wage hikes. We find evidence that both insurance coverage and wage effects exhibit spillovers into occupations moderately higher up the wage distribution. For these groups, reductions in coverage offset a more substantial share of the wage gains we estimate.

Many cities, especially in the U.S. Rust Belt, have experienced long-term declines in population which has the potential to alter social-ecological patterns and, as a result, environmental justice indicators. Housing vacancy, in particular, is intricately tied to changes in both economic and environmental systems. Vacancy may drive increases in volunteer vegetation, creating a potential disamenity and artificially producing outcomes that suggest more equitable relationships between greenness and social variables. Toledo is a shrinking city in northwest Ohio whose population peaked in 1970 at 383,818 before declining by more than 100,000 people. We examined satellite imagery from 1980, 2000, and 2014 to assess changes in greenness (NDVI: normalized difference vegetation index) and its association with housing vacancy statistics to determine whether the relationship between greenness and housing vacancy changed. We observed a weakening relationship between vacancy and NDVI. Specifically, there was a significant negative relationship in 1980; whereas, in 2014 there was no statistical relationship. As vacancy is highly correlated with vulnerable populations, this changing trajectory has implications for environmental justice indicators. Our results highlight a key limitation of using vegetation quantity as an indicator of environmental amenities and suggest more nuanced approaches to evaluating environmental justice indicators are needed.

As the Baby Boom generation matures and current unmet child care needs remain constant, the United States faces a burgeoning crisis in the demand for care workers. The market has slowly but surely begun to adapt, seeing an overall growth of 19 percent in the number of care workers between 2005 and 2015, with most of that growth in adult care. The U.S. Department of Labor suggests that this will only grow further, projecting that the economy will add more than 1.6 million jobs in occupations related to adult care by 2024 (Rolen 2017). This report analyzes changing demographics and trends in earnings for two occupational groups, child care and adult care workers.1 Findings from the analysis show . . .

On September 22, 2018, the Trump Administration announced changes to the “public charge” immigration rules that control how the use of public benefits affect an immigrant’s legal status.ii These changes are likely to harm millions of immigrant families across the country, but states with large immigrant populations will be disproportionately affected. In this brief, we analyze the impacts that the proposed changes will have on SNAP enrollment (food stamps) among U.S.-born children in “mixed-status” families in Florida and its major metropolitan areas.iii We find that over 80,000 kids will lose benefits across the state and over half of them reside in the Miami metropolitan area.

In understanding the imminent growth of world population, the overpopulation of our metropolitan cities is a real concern. Be it the massive carbon footprint created by the many accelerating factors, the housing limitability and limited affordability, or the possible economic strain for cities and citizens to manage properly, the threat of overly congested metro areas is a threat to maintaining steady economic growth. Research on overpopulation has been conducted regularly specific to targeted metropolitan areas, attempting to not only identify that area’s specific issues, but to explore solutions to identified problems. This study examines the easing of overcrowded urban areas through Light Rail Transit (LRT). It tests the hypothesis that the expansion of LRT would spread the concentrated Metro-Seattle city population to surrounding cities (in this case, the Edmonds urban area), by offering living options outside of the metro areas with reliable transportation to and from city centers. The study uses a Pearson’s correlation between the area populations to identify any analytical relationship. This study . . .

The USA forms the first of the seven case study chapters in this volume. This is entirely appropriate because, as set out in Chapter 1, this is the country which first alerted the research community to the fact that over time the world may not be becoming progressively more mobile in every way and that internal migration rates can fall as well as rise beyond the short-term effects of the business cycle. This experience is all the more notable given the long-standing perception that the USA has always been a highly mobile society (see Long, 1991). As a consequence, for a long while there was considerable resistance in the USA to the idea that the pace of internal migration could be slowing (Fischer, 2002; Wolf and Longino, 2005), so one of the roles of this chapter is to demonstrate that the evidence is incontrovertible. A second objective is to review the existing literature on migration decline in order to see how much agreement there now exists on the factors that are driving this phenomenon. Thirdly, the chapter presents the results of a new analysis that tests the explanatory power of a set of factors that has been neglected in recent research on the US case. Before tackling these three tasks, however, the chapter begins with an introduction to the data sources available for the study of internal migration in the USA and an assessment of the value of those used in the research reported in the following sections.

Urban researchers have long debated the extent to which urban employment is monocentric, polycentric, or diffuse. In this paper I use high-resolution data based on unemployment insurance records to show that employment in US metropolitan areas is not centralized but is spatially concentrated. Unlike residents, who form a continuous surface covering most parts of each MSA, jobs have a bimodal spatial distribution, with most blocks containing no jobs whatsoever and a small number having extremely high employment densities. Across the 100 largest MSAs about 75% of jobs are located on the 10% of built land in Census blocks with at least twice as many jobs as people. Further, most of these jobs are in clustered business districts of more than 5 contiguous employment blocks. These relative proportions are extremely consistent across MSAs, even though cities vary greatly in the physical density at which they are constructed. Motivated by these empirical regularities, I introduce an algorithm to identify contiguous business districts and classify them into four major types. Based solely on the relative densities of employment and population, this algorithm is both simpler to implement and more . . .

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower happiness, and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labor market during economic downturns suffer from p...

This dissertation consists of three papers on integrating social, economic, and political influences on food choice behavior and environmental outcomes and assessing agricultural policy. The first paper analyzes the effects of religious beliefs and homogeneity on meat consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions using a unique dataset on religion prevalence. The empirical evidence suggests that the religious effect on the individuals’ dietary choice considerably varies from religion to religion, and in a more heterogeneous society, individuals are less willing to follow religious dietary laws. The second paper measures the effect of the . . .

In a number of European countries, unemployment rates for young college graduates are higher than for young high school graduates. This presents a challenge for canon- ical models of unemployment that suggest that unemployment should decrease with education. I disentangle two potential explanations for the pattern: “labor market fric- tions” versus “relative productivity.” Here, labor market frictions are obstacles to labor market flows (such as employment protection regulation), whereas relative productivity refers to features that lower the output of educated workers already matched to firms (such as an education system that does not provide the right skills or a lack of jobs that make good use of workers’ skills). The analysis builds on a search and matching model with endogeneous productivity differences and the possibility of mismatch (educated workers working in low skilled jobs). I show that when young educated workers have productivity levels close to uneducated workers, they have higher unemployment rates, because firms create fewer skilled jobs. My counterfactual analysis shows that the rel- ative productivity channel is more important than the labor market frictions channel in accounting for unemployment of young educated workers. The results suggest that improving education policy and fostering firms’ demand for skills may have important roles to play in addressing high unemployment among young workers.

Using the March Current Population Survey, I show that over the last two decades, married households in the United States received increasingly more public insurance against labor income risk, whereas the opposite was true for single households. To evaluate the welfare consequences of this trend, I perform a quantitative analysis. As a novel contribution, I expand the standard incomplete markets model a` la Aiyagari (1994) to include two groups of households: married and single. The model allows for changes in the marital status of households and accounts for transition dynamics between steady states. I show that the divergent trends in public insurance have a significant detrimental effect on the welfare of both married and single households.

As data services gain momentum in academic libraries, liaison librarians are expected to be part of the education force for data literacy. Nonetheless, due to the broad scope of data literacy, training librarians to improve data-related skills can be challenging. This article used consultation statistics to identify tools and resources employed to solve users’ data questions. The results offered insights into users’ data needs and provided librarians with a clear direction to further develop data skills in their assigned disciplines. The methodology used in this study can be replicated at other institutions to identify needs and to direct professional development.

Introduction: In 2016, the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) proposed voluntary industry reductions in sodium, a major modifiable risk factor for CVD, for processed foods. Yet, reformulation could cost the food industry up to $16bn over 10 years, perhaps partly explaining why in 2017 Congress blocked the FDA from implementing these long-term voluntary targets. Aim: To estimate the potential health gains and health-related cost savings for food industry employees from the FDA sodium targets. We defined the industry perspective as including all costs to the food industry and all health-related costs and health benefits to people working in the industry. Methods: Utilizing the validated US IMPACT Food Policy dynamic microsimulation model, we estimated QALYs gained, costs, and incremental cost effectiveness ratios (incremental cumulative cost per QALY gained, with costs and QALYs discounted at 3%) from 2017-2036 in individuals working in the wider food system (food services and drinking places; food and beverage stores; food manufacturing) and the subset of food manufacturing. Data sources included NHANES, matched to demographic data for workers from the American Community Survey, and meta-analyses of sodium effects on blood pressure and blood pressure on CVD. Costs included industry reformulation costs, government costs, and health-related costs (healthcare, productivity, informal care) for individuals working in the industry. We modelled the FDA sodium targets under 2 scenarios: a) Short-term, 100% compliance of 2-year reformulation targets with no further progress. b) Long-term, 100% compliance of 10-year reformulation targets We tested our assumptions with probabilistic sensitivity analysis. Results: Achieving the short-term, 2-year reformulation targets would generate net discounted industry costs of ~$7bn, health-related cost savings of ~$1.7bn (95% UI: $1.0bn, $2.9bn) and health gains of ~60,000 QALYs (50,000, 77,000) over 20 years, with an ICER of ~$85,000 ($12,000, $243,000) per QALY gained. Achieving the long-term sodium reduction targets could result in industry costs of ~$16bn, health-related cost savings of approximately $5.1bn ($3.4bn, $8.3bn), and industry health gain of ~180,000 (149,000, 209,000) QALYs, with an ICER of ~$60,000 ($2,000, $168,000). For the subset of food manufacturing, the long-term sodium reduction targets would lead to health-related savings of ~$1bn ($0.6bn, $1.6bn) and ~32,000 (27,000, 37,000) QALYs gained with an ICER of $489,000 ($160,000, $1,052,000). Conclusions: Sustained sodium reduction is estimated to benefit the overall food industry with a healthier workforce and partly offset the reformulation costs for the subset of the processed food industry.

This paper describes geographic variation in the sex composition of the foreign-born population in the US since 1990, and uses Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to identify key sources of variation in regional sex ratios. We use data from the 1990 and 2000 US Censuses, and from the 2007–2011 American Community Survey, to create estimates of the size and characteristics of foreign-born populations at the level of Consistent Public-Use Microdata Areas. We find substantial local- and region-level variation in population sex ratios, with the highest sex ratios in the South and Midwest. This variation is partly explained by differences in the age- and national origin-composition of immigrants, but the effects of immigration history, age, and national origin on sex ratio vary substantially by region. The West in particular stands out as having high levels of unexplained difference from other regions. Future research is necessary to understand these regional differences in gendered immigration patterns.

Climate change is challenging rural livelihoods across the globe and migration is one potential adaptation strategy. However, migration is a difficult endeavor that requires substantial social and financial resources. This suggests that the use of migration as adaptation to climate change is likely a stratified process. In this way, climate change has the potential to reinforce existing inequalities and trap resource poor households in place. Mexico provides the ideal case study to investigate the intersection of climate, migration, and inequality given the strong history of international migration, vulnerability to climate impacts, and high levels of income inequality. Using multilevel discrete-time event-history methods, this study examines the association between climate strain and international migration across rural contexts characterized by low, average, and high socioeconomic marginalization between 1986-2013. This period encompasses the height and decline of Mexico-US migration, as well as large changes to the Mexican economy and agricultural sector which negatively impacted many rural households. Results suggest that precipitation deficits in prior corn growing seasons increase the likelihood of migration from households in average socioeconomic settings, while hot spells increase the probability of migration from households in highly marginalized contexts. Households that sent migrants were more likely to report agricultural employment compared to non-migrants in both settings. Finally, migrant households in the average marginalization group were more likely to own property, while social capital was predictive of migration in high marginalization contexts as migrant households were more likely to have familial ties to US migrants.