Black women in the United States have a high prevalence of hypertension and suffer the most complications of cardiovascular disease. Black women, though aware of the dangers associated with hypertension, have limited opportunity to access health care and or change their lifestyles. The purpose of this quantitative cross-sectional study was to test if there was a significant difference in hypertension awareness, health care access/use, and lifestyle modifications in Black women prior to and post implementation of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as compared to women of other races. The behavior modification theory guided this study. Secondary data from the National Health Interview Survey for the years 2009 to 2013 for women ages 20 - 65 were analyzed using logistic regression analysis. According to the study results, there was no association (p values > 0.05) among variables age, education, income, length of employment, and hypertension awareness, health care access/use, and life style modification among Black women in the United States, as compared to women of other races. The findings from this study may allow researchers and policy makers to develop more culturally significant health services for Black women. These findings could create positive social change by targeting programs that promote hypertension awareness leading to effective lifestyle changes in Black women.

Place-names, or toponyms, represent both location and symbolic meaning, and examining the spatial distribution of place-names across landscapes can reveal otherwise hidden cultural patterns. Including quantitative methods as part of the process of interpretive ethnocultural research has contributed to revitalizing modern scholarship in toponomy. This study takes a similar methodological approach by using spatial statistical methods to visualize general spatial patterns of French place-names in the Mississippi River Basin, combined with qualitative historical and cultural analysis of socio-political patterns at the more local scale of Minnesota. Integrated analysis of toponymy enables us to better understand how and why French toponymic power changed over time, which yields useful insights to the region’s geography and history.

Since 2014, Airbnb has been the poster-child for an impassioned debate over how to best regulate short-term home rentals (STR’s) in New Orleans, Louisiana. As critical perspectives toward on-demand economic practice become increasingly common, it is important to understand how the impacts of STR platforms like Airbnb extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally conceptualized as the economic (i.e., pressure on housing markets). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which Airbnb recalibrates the spatial and temporal rhythms of everyday neighborhood life for people external to the formal trappings of an STR contract. Drawing in particular on theories of authenticity and feminist political economy, I argue that locals’ emotional labor of “playing host” is necessarily enrolled into the creation of value for Airbnb, and is essential to the reproduction of the platform’s business model and marketing rhetoric.

BACKGROUND Declining occupational sex segregation in the late 20th century helped to usher in unprecedented occupational and economic advancement for women. As the 21st century dawned, that advancement stalled. OBJECTIVE We examine how occupational integration occurred in the early decades of the 21st century by focusing on (1) the extent of occupational feminization and masculinization and (2) occupational succession. More broadly we examine how the representation of women in detailed occupational categories changed between 2000 and 2014, regardless of whether they were historically 'male' or 'female,' and how sociodemographic characteristics contributed to uneven shifts in occupational integration. METHODS We use Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data to estimate the percentage point female at the detailed occupation level, specifically the 5% census microdata sample for 2000, and two 1% American Community Survey (ACS) samples for 2013 and 2014. RESULTS Despite a stall in overall integration, there was much fluctuation within detailed occupations. Moreover, occupational inroads have been uneven in the post-2000 period. Women gained entry into the same types of professional and managerial occupations they entered between 1970 and 2000, especially in the health professions. Men increased their representation in lower-level, nonprofessional occupations. CONTRIBUTION Rather than focus solely on predominantly male or female occupations, we focus more broadly on how occupations feminize and masculinize. More occupations masculinized than previously. Moreover, those in feminizing occupations are more likely to be advantaged (e.g., white, citizens, and educated), while those in masculinizing occupations are more likely to be disadvantaged (e.g., black, Hispanic, and poor English speakers).

Among the first concepts often taught in traditional economics classes are the notions that the minimum wage tends to reduce employment and that rent regulation tends to reduce housing availability. In recent years, the evidence supporting the negative impacts of the minimum wage has become increasingly weak: economists generally agree that moderate increases in the minimum wage have almost no discernible impacts on overall employment, partly because higher-paid workers have more money to spend, tend to be more motivated, and are often better matched with their jobs. But what about rent regulation? It is important to note that popular demand for restricting rent increases tend to occur in times of acute housing shortfalls, such as in the U.S. during World War II. Early rent regulations were often quite severe in their application, but subsequent forms of rent control— viewed as the second generation of rent stabilization programs—tend to allow rents to rise as long as they remain below some target, offer decontrol if the property is vacated, and seek to stabilize housing through other mechanisms such as restrictions on evictions. As in the minimum wage literature, the evidence on the impacts of these more moderate rent regimes is more mixed than older economics textbooks might indicate. Evidence suggests there is little negative impact on new construction, which is logical given that newly produced units have no initial rent targets. However, there is also research that suggests that rent regulations may lead landlords to reduce maintenance or take units off the market through conversion into condos or owner move-in evictions. Some proponents of rent regulations have argued for limiting what they see as loopholes by, for example, making condo conversion more difficult . . .

This study investigates the role of collectivism on labor market outcomes in an individualist country. We explore collectivism as an intergenerationally transmitted cultural value and analyze its explanatory power for the economic outcome of 21,000 male homogamous second generation immigrants in the US. Our collectivism proxy is derived from the country of ancestry’s historical disease environment because collectivistic values have been particularly advantageous in countries with a greater prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Employing this new collectivism proxy that identifies collectivism more precisely than previously used cultural proxies, we find that higher scores of collectivism are associated with higher labor force participation and income earned in the US. The results on income are channeled through the number of hours worked and self-selection into jobs that require collectivistic traits. By analyzing the labor market performance of second generation immigrants, we are the first to show an occupational selection along cultural skills implying that second generation immigrants sort into occupations that demand skills on which they have a “cultural comparative advantage”.

This dissertation estimates the effect of retirement on health. In response to increased longevity and tighter public budget constraints, the general trend in developed countries is for Social Security systems to be modified to encourage people to remain in the labor force longer. Understanding the effect of retirement on health is important for predicting the consequence of these policies. This dissertation estimates the effect in two countries, the United States and China. These two countries provide a broader picture of the effect from different perspectives. The estimation in the United States focuses on voluntary retirement, and the estimation in China uses the mandatory retirement. To estimate the effect of retirement on health and mortality in the U.S., I study the 1983 reforms to the United States Social Security System that raised the retirement age for cohorts born after 1937. Combining IV and difference-in- difference methods, I find that retirement has a positive effect on self-reported bad health and decreases the probability among men of experiencing limitations in daily activities. However, retirement also increases the mortality rate by 0.46 percentage points for men and 1.4 percentage points for women. Heart disease contributes most to the effect on mortality. I also study the time use change after retirement in the U.S., and find that people spend most of their extra time on sleep and eating. To estimate the effect of retirement on health in China, I use the mandatory retirement policy in the public sector. With the difference-in-difference method between workers in public sector and private sector, I find that retirement has a negative effect on self-reported bad health and increase the hospitalization spending. It also increases the probability of reporting diabetes and heart disease. Several variables from physical examination and blood test result, that are related to these disease, such as personal BMI, High Density Lipoprotein (HDL), triglyceride also become worse after the retirement.

Taking a hard look at the changing demographics in the American South, The Dynamics of Southern Politics discusses how this region remains exceptional while also addressing how that exceptionalism is eroding. Author Seth McKee tells a historically rich story going back to the end of the Civil War, tracks electoral changes to the present, and explores some of the most significant components contributing to partisan change. Supported by a host of detailed tables and figures, this book pairs a strong historical foundation with an in-depth analysis of the contemporary region.

We examine the dynamics of the gender earnings gap over the 1979 to 2018 period among fulltime workers aged 25–29, focusing on the role of marital status and the presence of children. Using data from multiple years of the Current Population Survey, we find that the earnings gap declined among all groups of men and women, and by 2018 there was earnings parity among the those who were not married and without children. The share of people in this group also grew over the period, and comprised a majority of both men and women by 2018. We also find that while marriage was associated with lower earnings among women in 1979, by 2018 it was associated with higher earnings, suggesting greater positive selection of women with high earnings potential into marriage. The positive association between marriage and earnings among men remained stable. While we found a persistent earnings penalty for having children among women over the period, we found an emerging dampening effect of having children over time among men, which suggests that greater participation in childcare among men has led to lower earnings than in the past (i.e., a causal connection) and/or an emerging selection effect of young men more interested in childrearing over time, perhaps reflecting a cultural shift.

In 2014, a leading hospital accreditation agency, mandated hospitals publicly report their exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) rates. This new regulation provided an opportunity to explore differences in EBF outcomes using a standardized definition across a large hospital sample in the United States. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between population demographics and the Baby‐friendly (BF) hospital designation on EBF rates in hospitals throughout the United States. We obtained EBF rates from 121 BF hospitals and 1,608 hospitals without the BF designation. Demographic variables were computed using census tract data for the population surrounding each hospital. Relationships were explored using linear regression. We found that EBF rates were positively correlated with a bachelor's degree, log income, and those who identified as White or Asian and negatively correlated with those without college attendance, individuals living below the poverty line, and those who identified as African American or Hispanic. For all models, the BF designation of a hospital was associated with higher EBF rates (p < 0.01; effect sizes, 0.11–0.49) with the exception of the model containing log income. Using a multiple linear regression model that was allowed to contain more than one independent variable, we were able to explain 22% of the variability in EBF rates. The BF hospital designation was associated with significantly higher EBF rates independent of demographic variables. Support for hospitals to attain the BF hospital designation is a meaningful public health goal.

We estimated long-term tuberculosis (TB) trends in the US population and assessed prospects for TB elimination. We used a detailed simulation model allowing for changes in TB transmission, immigration, and other TB risk determinants. We evaluated 5 hypothetical scenarios from 2017 to 2100: 1) maintain current TB prevention and treatment activities (base-case), 2) provision of latent TB infection testing and treatment for new legal immigrants, 3) increased uptake of latent TB infection screening and treatment among high-risk populations, including a 3-month isoniazid-rifapentine regimen, 4) improved TB case detection, 5) improved TB treatment quality. Under the base-case, we estimate that by 2050 TB incidence will decline to 14 cases per million, a 52% (95% interval: 35, 67) reduction from 2016, and 82% (78, 86) of incident TB will be among non-US-born persons. Intensified TB control could reduce incidence by 77% (66, 85) by 2050. By 2100, we predict TB may be eliminated in the US-born but not the non-US-born. Results were sensitive to numbers entering the US with latent or active TB, and robust to alternative interpretations of epidemiologic evidence. TB elimination in the US remains a distant goal. However, strengthening TB prevention and treatment could produce important health benefits.

Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980, house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs. At any point in time, however, house satisfaction rises with house size. This Easterlin paradox in the realm of housing can be explained by upward-looking comparisons in the size of neighboring houses. Combining data from the American Housing Surveys with an original dataset of three million suburban houses built from 1920 to 2009, I find that the construction of so-called “McMansions” lowers the satisfaction that neighbors derive from a rise in their own house size. Upward-looking comparisons are stronger among people living in larger houses and decrease with the distance from McMansions. I provide further evidence that homeowners exposed to the construction of big houses in their neighborhood value their own home less, and are more likely to upscale to a bigger home and subscribe to a new mortgage.

The economic insecurity fueling our current political climate underscores one of the key challenges of the complex economic restructuring the United States is experiencing. Despite low unemployment and more than nine years of unbroken economic growth, the majority of Americans remain anxious about their economic conditions and futures. The problem has not just emerged since our last great recession, but is linked to a much longer term, slow-moving but increasingly urgent crisis. The crisis is evidenced by a combination of sluggish job growth, stagnating and fluctuating earnings, growing inequality, and widespread economic insecurity. These symptoms are rooted in a process of economic restructuring associated with the rise of information technology as an economic force, coupled with the expansion of multi-national corporations and global trading relationships. The combination has given rise to a deep sense of economic anxiety—and a bit of nostalgia for a more secure economic past—that has fed into rising social and political polarization. Silicon Valley is at the heart of these global economic changes and has been for decades. As the home to successive rounds of cutting-edge innovation in information technology industries, Silicon Valley has not only led the information revolution, but has also experienced the economic changes associated with these technological developments earlier and more deeply than most regions of the country. Though the concentration of technology industries here makes it unique, in many ways the region represents just a more intense version of trends that are being experienced throughout the U.S. economy, and indeed the whole world.

In August 2016, Connecticut parents learned that the state’s child care assistance program, Care 4 Kids, would stop enrolling most children due to insufficient funding.1 In a state where families can expect to pay more than $20,000 a year to send two children to a child care center, this news was devastating to many parents.2 One such parent was Annunziata Zito, a mother with two children ages 8 and 3. Without assistance from Care 4 Kids, she thought she might have to quit her job, leaving her family living in poverty.3 Connecticut was an early adopter of a new federal requirement to extend eligibility for child care assistance to a full year.4 The change was based on evidence from child development experts that shows providing consistent child care is important for young children.5 Continuous access to high-quality child care promotes strong relationships and positive interactions with early educators, which in turn supports skills such as vocabulary, early literacy skills, and healthy behaviors. But with children staying in the program longer and no new federal or state resources, Connecticut could no longer enroll new children. In the year that followed, the number of children receiving child care assistance through Care 4 Kids was cut by more than 40 percent. This particularly affected parents with infants, who could not enroll their babies when they returned to work. After Care 4 Kids stopped enrolling new children, the number of infants and toddlers in the program dropped from 8,200 to 4,400.6 Connecticut’s experience was a bellwether for the country. For decades, federal and state lawmakers underfunded child care assistance, resulting in dwindling enrollment levels and fewer quality options for parents as the value of their child care voucher eroded over time. Congress took action in 2014 to improve quality, requiring minimum safety protections, such as background checks for child care providers, and extending eligibility periods for child . . .

This study presents one of the first national studies that combines the migration and race of the economic experiences of free blacks, with an extended analysis of antebellum wealth inequality. In doing so, I analyze economic asymmetry among early blacks and whites in the United States of America. For the data analysis, I used information from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS). I present results of informative property ownership and wealth ratios. This study finds that economic differences among ethnic groups, as measured by differences between early blacks and whites, are intertwined with asymmetrical freedoms.

Housing is a large and important component of the nation's economy. For individual households, the decision whether to rent or won a home is a consequential financial decision, while the location and quality of their homes are major determinants of their day-to-day well-being. The stakes . . .

Laws that constrain eligibility for social safety net programs can have the unintended consequence of discouraging eligible citizens from enrolling. This “chilling effect” of laws at the federal level such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), has been previously established by the literature. At the state level, there are an increasing number of restrictive laws using immigration status as an inclusion or exclusion criteria. There has also been an increase in the number of citizen children in the United States that are part of immigrant families, and these children are more likely to be living in poverty or near poverty, experience food hardship, be uninsured, and be in poor health than their counterparts in native families. However, there is little research that has looked at whether these state laws also create an unintended chilling effect on U.S. citizen children in immigrant families. Therefore, this series of studies is designed to test whether restrictive immigration-related state laws passed during 2000 to 2008 had a chilling effect on enrollment in Medicaid, SCHIP, and food stamp benefits by eligible immigrant families where at least one child is a U.S. citizen. Twenty states were chosen for these studies based on their large immigrant population as a percent of the total state population or because of substantial immigrant population growth over the time period of the analysis. Aims: The specific aims of these three studies are to: 1) Characterize demographic, economic, and political drivers of state adoption of these restrictive laws. These factors can both be used to address policy endogeneity in studies two and three, and offer insight for state level immigrant advocates. 2) Identify whether there is a negative effect of state level restrictive laws on the enrollment in public insurance of U.S. citizen in immigrants’ families. Identify additional factors such as citizenship that may interact with state laws to create lower enrollment for eligible children in immigrant families compared to native families. 3) Understand if there is a chilling effect of restrictive state laws that may lead to lower enrollment in food stamp benefits for immigrant families in a restrictive state policy environment compared to similar families not impacted by these laws. Results: The first study identified two state economic factors, net revenue and unemployment rates, two demographic factors, the state population’s education level and percent of immigrants that are not citizens, and political congruence in the state governing bodies as drivers behind state adoption of restrictive laws. State restrictive laws created a chilling effect that reduced uptake of Medicaid/CHIP among U.S. citizen children in immigrant families compared to children in native families. There was also an identified impact of the mother’s citizenship on child enrollment. No chilling effect was observed for family food stamp enrollment. However, independent of state laws, immigrant families were less likely to enroll in food stamp benefits compared to their native counterparts.

Poverty rates have risen across the United States since 2000, but the fastest growth in poverty is occurring in the suburbs (Berube and Kneebone 2013). Today, more poor people live in suburbs than cities (Berube and Kneebone 2013). Parallel to this increase in suburban poverty has been federal retrenchment in cash assistance in exchange for service-based assistance (Allard 2004). By and large, the federal government administers social service funds to state governments who then allocate the money to nonprofit entities. This reliance upon local providers creates an uneven patchwork of care (Peck 2008; Allard 2009; Berube and Kneebone 2013) as nonprofits determine where to locate without an overseer ensuring that services are equally distributed according to need. Whereas cash welfare payments were not bound by location, social service providers are (Allard 2009; Berube and Kneebone 2013; Allard 2017), raising questions as to the safety net’s ability to respond to new geographies of poverty. This study addresses the question: Is there a spatial mismatch between the location of social services and poor populations? This question is answered through a quantitative spatial analysis of the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) using Esri’s ArcMap Geographic Information Systems software. The locations of American Job Centers, food pantries, and soup kitchens are analyzed in relationship to poverty data (from the 2012-2016 American Community Survey) to ascertain how the social service safety net aligns with the current geography of poverty.

An ex post quasi-experiment was conducted to compare the quality of life in counties where community colleges were established to the quality of life in similar counties where no colleges had been established. Twenty-eight pairs of rural counties were studied. The first county in each pair was chosen such that the only institution of higher education there between 1960 and 2010 was a community college that was founded in the 1960s. The second county in each pair was chosen as a control from the same geographic region, with similar population and similar per capita income in 1960 and no institution of higher education between 1960 and 2010. In the decades after the community colleges were established, the counties with a community college evolved differently than the counties with no college. The population grew much faster, sub- baccalaureate educational attainment rates were higher and, for a time, per capita income was significantly higher. Mortality rates diverged in the last two decades; however, neither mortality nor baccalaureate attainment rates were significantly different for any of the five decades studied.

Background: The gender pay gap in the United States is an ongoing issue, affecting women in nearly all occupations. Jobs traditionally associated with men tend to pay better than traditionally female-dominated jobs, and there is evidence to suggest within-occupation gender pay differences as well. Purpose: We compared and contrasted gender wage disparities for registered nurses (RNs), relative to gender wage disparities for another female-dominated occupation, teachers, while controlling for sociodemographic factors. Methods: Using data in the American Community Survey, we analyzed the largest U.S. random representative sample of self-identified RNs and primary or secondary school teachers from 2000 to 2013 using fixed-effects regression analysis. Results: There is greater disparity between nurse pay by gender than in teacher pay by gender. In addition, the net return in wages for additional education is higher for school teachers (21.7%) than for RNs (4.7%). Conclusions: Findings support preferential wages for men in nursing, more so than for men in teaching. Clinical Relevance: The substantial gender disparities are an indirect measure of the misallocation of resources in effective patient care.