Several states have implemented Healthy Behavior Incentive Programs (HBIPs) in Medicaid through Section 1115 demonstration waivers. These programs use financial incentives to encourage positive behavior changes, such as greater use of preventive services, smoking cessation, and weight loss.</p><h3>Objective</h3><p>To test for an association between the introduction of HBIPs and the rates of smoking cessation, weight loss, and annual preventive health visits in states that have adopted behavior-specific programs compared with states that have not.</p><h3>Design, Setting, and Participants</h3><p>A cohort study using a difference-in-differences analysis of the 2011-2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey Interview Results data, adjusting for demographic conditions, state unemployment rates, state Medicaid expansion, national secular trends, and time invariant state-specific factors, was conducted. Two sets of participants were considered: adults aged 18 to 64 years who had a reported annual household income of less than $25 000 (n = 442 089) or adults aged 18 to 64 years who had completed high school education or less (n = 676 883).</p><h3>Exposures</h3><p>Changes in health behavior outcomes in 4 states (Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan) that implemented behavior-specific HBIPs targeting smoking, obesity, and annual health checkups through a Section 1115 waiver, against changes in control states, including Washington, DC, that did not introduce an HBIP (n = 44).</p><h3>Main Outcomes and Measures</h3><p>Rate of smoking, obesity, and attendance at annual preventive health visits.</p><h3>Results</h3><p>Of Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Service respondents used for the less than $25 000 annual household income cohort (n = 442 089), the mean (SD) age was 43.1 (0.8) years, and the mean (SD) percentage of women was 58.4% (2.5%). For the cohort of high school education or less (n = 676 883) population, the mean (SD) age was 41.6 (1.1) years, and the mean (SD) percentage of women was 46.6% (0.9%). During a 2-year period after implementation, there were no improvements in smoking and obesity in individuals with a household income of less than $25 000 (2.49 percentage points, 95% CI, 1.75-3.23 percentage points;<i>P</i> &lt; .001 and −1.94 percentage points, 95% CI, −4.42 to 0.55 percentage points;<i>P</i> = .12, respectively) as well as in the population holding a high school education or less (1.74 percentage points, 95% CI, 0.64-2.85 percentage points;<i>P</i> = .003 and −0.73 percentage points, 95% CI, −1.84 to 0.38 percentage points;<i>P</i> = .19). An association was noted between an increase in preventive health visit rates among states adopting behavior-specific HBIPs relative to control states in the less than $25 000 household income population (3.89 percentage points, 95% CI, 2.64-5.14 percentage points;<i>P</i> &lt; .001). However, these associations were substantively small and not robust across the high school education or less population (1.8 percentage points, 95% CI, −0.12 to 3.71 percentage points;<i>P</i> = .07).</p><h3>Conclusions and Relevance</h3><p>Early postimplementation assessment may indicate that HBIPs were not associated with substantive improvements in incentivized healthy behaviors among populations likely to be Medicaid beneficiaries. The value, format, and timing of the incentive, complexity in delivery, and lack of awareness of incentives among target beneficiaries and clinicians may limit the usefulness of programs even over a longer follow-up period.

Using data on intercounty waste flows in California and a structural model of haulers' decisions about where to deposit waste from each county, this paper studies the effects of environmental protection policies on the spatial and demographic distribution of solid waste. I find that waste is currently more likely to be hauled to disposal facilities in communities with higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics, even after I control for income, disposal fees, and transport distances, suggesting that unobserved characteristics of facilities and neighborhoods matter in haulers' decisions. I account for these factors by allowing for facility fixed effects in the demand model for waste disposal facilities. The results show that policies that limit waste flows would reduce intercounty waste transport but they generally would not lead to a more equitable distribution of trash. In particular, these policies tend to lead to substitution of waste away from facilities near white residents and toward facilities near Hispanic residents, potentially exacerbating distributional concerns.

This dissertation explores heterogeneity in how family structure affects children. Detailed measurements of parental interactions are exploited to estimate a dynamic economic model of parental relationship quality, parental decisions to continue their relationship, and child human capital development. The empirical specification takes into account measurement error, controls for observed demographics and initial conditions, and integrates out missing data. Parental separation is shown to have little effect on cognitive skill development during childhood, but is found to exert considerable influence on the development of non-cognitive skills such as the ability to control aggression. Parental separation's effect on non-cognitive skill development largely depends on parental relationship quality; in particular, children whose parents have a poor quality relationship on average benefit if their parents separate. If separated parents in the sample had instead chosen to stay together, their children would have on average been 21 percent more likely to receive special services because of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and 20 percent more likely to have been suspended or expelled. Almost two-thirds of the difference in non-cognitive skills between children of separated and non-separated parents at age 9 can be explained . . .

We propose a visual analytics system that enables the exploration evolutionary patterns in geographically inconsistent data, removing the need for harmonization of the geographical regions into a common geometry, a time consuming and error-prone process that is currently used in virtually all longitudinal analysis of geographical data. This work also includes incremental developments in the representation, clustering, and visual exploration of region-based geographical data. While we leverage the well known context of census data, our proposal is suitable for any region-based data. The method enables an easier identification and understanding of the demographic groups present in a city and their evolution over time. We present the feedback of experts in urban sciences and sociology, along with illustrative scenarios in the USA and Canada on the decennial censuses between 1970 and 2010.

Biomedicine in the United States has often acted as a tool of social control, especially with respect to black and brown bodies. This control extends even into death with medical doctors and researchers controlling the disposition of bodies, literally rendering them faceless in the name of science. Definitional violence is enacted upon them, transforming them from individuals with dynamic lives to biological placeholders. This chapter attempts to reconstruct a small part of the identities of those people of color curated as a part of the George S. Huntington Anatomical Collection by combining skeletal data with archival texts and mapping data associated with the collection. This recombination of biological and historical data reveals that those individuals represent a specific spatial, temporal, and social section of New York City’s history. This chapter rejects the idea that they are representatives of New York’s “poorest of the poor.” Instead, it interprets them as a heterogeneous population that was subjected to very specific forms of cultural violence that aimed to redefine them as an aggregate group suitable for medical study. By opening up bioarchaeology to previously unused social science methodologies, we can begin to undo this process and understand how these individuals were collected in the first place.

The nonprofit Urban Institute is a leading research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights that improve people's lives and strengthen communities. For 50 years, Urban has been the trusted source for rigorous analysis of complex social and economic issues; strategic advice to policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners; and new, promising ideas that expand opportunities for all. Our work inspires effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places. AB O U T NE I GH B O RH O O D P RE S E R VA T I ON I NC. Neighborhood Preservation, Inc. in Memphis, Tennessee, promotes neighborhood revitalization by collaboratively developing practical and sustainable resolutions to blighted properties and to the systems that lead to widespread neglect, vacancy and abandonment of real estate. The Organization focuses on policy advocacy and implementing and documenting replicable comprehensive neighborhood improvement projects.

In recent decades, the USA has admitted a large number of foreign-born students into its educational system, raising concerns that the presence of foreign-born students would adversely impact the educational achievement of US-born students and incentivize them to move to private schools where there are fewer immigrant students. In this article, I attempt to extend our understanding of how stricter immigration policy, such as the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), may affect college enrollment and the public-private school choice of US-born individuals. The analysis shows that the share of immigrant students across Arizona’s educational system declined significantly by the passage of LAWA: the share of foreign-born students in elementary and secondary schools in Arizona would be higher by approximately 1.1 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively, in the absence of LAWA. Similarly, the share of foreign-born college students in Arizona declined significantly by 1.5 percentage points due to LAWA. Despite this decline, there is no evidence that LAWA has statistically significantly affected natives’ college enrollment rates. However, there is evidence that LAWA reduces the proportion of US-born white non-Hispanic student in higher education attending private colleges.

Where do people live, and how has this changed over timescales of centuries? High-resolution spatial information on historical human population distribution is of great significance to understand humanenvironment interactions and their temporal dynamics. However, the complex relationship between population distribution and various influencing factors coupled with limited data availability make it a challenge to reconstruct human population distribution over timescales of centuries. This study generated 1-km decadal population maps for the conterminous US from 1790 to 2010 using parsimonious models based on natural suitability, socioeconomic desirability, and inhabitability. Five models of increasing complexity were evaluated. The models were validated with census tract and county subdivision population data in 2000 and were applied to generate five sets of 22 historical population maps from 1790–2010. Separating urban and rural areas and excluding non-inhabitable areas were the most important factors for improving the overall accuracy. The generated gridded population datasets and the production and validation methods are described here.

Criminality has always been part of human social interactions, shaping the way peoples have constructed states and legislation. As social order became a greater concern for the public authorities, interest in investigating incentives pushing individuals towards engaging in illegal activities has become a central issue of the political agenda. Building on the existing literature, this paper proposes to focus on a few primary determinants of crime, whose effect is in- vestigated using a Responsiveness Scores (RS) approach performed over 50 US states during the period 2000-2012. The RS approach allows us to account for unit heterogeneous response to each single determinant, thus paving the way to a more in-depth analysis of the relation between crime and its drivers. We attempt to overcome the limitations posed by standard regression methods, which assume a single coefficient for all determinants, thus contributing to the literature in the field with stronger evidence on determinants' e ects and the geographical patterns of responsiveness scores.

In an emergent type of labor market niche, bicultural immigrants serve as cultural brokers between clients and workers and among different groups of workers whose communications are hindered by cultural and language barriers. We focus on the bicultural Latino nurses who are recruited as cultural brokers to facilitate “culturally competent care” in a predominantly white institution that serves an increasingly diverse patient population, with Hispanics being the majority-minority group. Through a qualitative study based on twenty-six in-depth interviews in Northern California, we find that these nurses adopt “code hybridization” strategies to manage their roles as cultural brokers. We discuss the larger institutional contexts that shape the successes and impacts of these strategies, as well as the theoretical implications for assimilation theories.

We explore the decline in teen employment in the United States since 2000, which was sharpest for those age 16–17. We consider three explanatory factors: a rising minimum wage that could reduce employment opportunities for teens and potentially increase the value of investing in schooling; rising returns to schooling; and increasing competition from immigrants that, like the minimum wage, could reduce employment opportunities and raise the returns to human capital investment. We find that higher minimum wages are the predominant factor explaining changes in the schooling and workforce behavior of those age 16–17 since 2000. We also consider implications for human capital. Higher minimum wages have led both to fewer teens in school and employed at the same time, and to more teens in school but not employed, which is potentially consistent with a greater focus on schooling. We find no evidence that higher minimum wages have led to greater human capital investment. If anything, the evidence points to adverse effects on longer-run earnings for those exposed to these higher minimum wages as teenagers.

This paper used individual level data to analyze the impacts of an increase in the minimum wage on hours worked and employment. The demographic analyzed was individuals between the ages of 16 and 29 who don’t have a high school degree and live in the United States’ North East. This analysis was disaggregated by gender and found heterogeneous impacts on hours worked and employment. The estimated impacts of the minimum wage for men in the analyzed demographic is a slight reduction in both hours worked and the probability of being employed. The estimated impact of the minimum wage for women in this demographic is a small increase in hours worked and a moderate increase in the probability of being employed. Both the effects on hours worked and the employment effect for men are of small magnitudes that they may better be seen as no effect. Only the employment effect for females has a magnitude that is of economic significance.

For the purpose of this research, minorities are defined as both racial and ethnic categories that are numerically inferior than the majority racial or ethnic group. Historical social inferiority is an arguable consequence of numerical inferiority, but is not included in this research’s definition of a minority. In this research, we see how women are numerically inferior in certain legal occupations, however gender/sex is also incorporated within the broader category of racial and ethnic minorities. Current literature utilizing census bureau data, goes into some detail about the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority lawyers. However, this research project reaches greater depth concerning the representation of racial/ethnic groups as lawyers in addition to other legal occupations such as: judges, paralegals, legal support workers, legal assistants, and judicial clerks. The goal is to see how racial and ethnic representation has changed over time spanning back almost forty years. Variables such as age, race, average earnings, regional placement, and sex/gender are used in this . . .

Past studies suggest that full-time maternal employment may be negatively related to children’s cognitive development. Most studies measure maternal employment at one time point, while mothers’ work hours may not be stable during early childrearing years. Using data from the 2001 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (N ≈ 6,500), the authors examine stability in mothers’ work hours across four waves when children are 9 and 24 months old, in preschool, and in kindergarten, mothers’ background characteristics associated to it, and its link to child cognitive development. Results show that the majority of mothers change work hours across the four waves. Analysis using multinomial logistic regression models suggests that mothers’ older age, fewer children, and higher household income are related to working full time at all four waves compared to varying work hours across the waves; more children and less than high school completion are related to staying home at all four waves; and mothers’ older age, being White, no change in partnership status, and holding a college degree are related to working part time at all four waves. Compared to mothers’ changing work hours, mothers’ stable work hours, full time or part time, at all four waves is related to children’s better reading, math, and cognitive scores in kindergarten, whereas mothers’ staying home at all four waves is negatively related to these scores. These associations disappear when background characteristics are controlled for in ordinary least squares regression models. These findings underscore the role of background characteristics in shaping both mothers’ stable employment and children’s cognitive development.

West Virginians disproportionately suffer from higher rates of illness, disease and disability. As a result, West Virginians also have some of the nation’s highest rates of pre-existing conditions. These are health conditions which were diagnosed or treated by a provider prior to the purchase of insurance. They are also those conditions undiagnosed by a physician for which a “prudent” person would have sought care. Until the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a . . .

Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines (what we call structural factors); some portion is caused by purely racial factors, such as housing market discrimination and preferences for the race of one’s neighbors. Past attempts to measure the structural component of segregation have generally focused on only 1 socioeconomic status (SES) variable and have produced results that are high in potential measurement error. In this article, we use an innovative method and uniquely suitable data (geocoded microdata obtained through the U.S. Census Bureau’s Research Data Center [RDC] program) to disaggregate segregation into a “structural” and a residual component. Our measure shows the amount of segregation that would remain if we could randomly assign households to housing units based only on nonracial socioeconomic characteristics. This inquiry provides valuable building blocks for understanding and remedying housing segregation.

Social scientists and historians have long been interested in the spatial structures of changes in economic activity, population, and the labour force. Does the development of a skilled and proficient labour force in one area lead to greater economic activity? For the same reason, does the increase in jobs and other opportunities in a specific area lead to population growth? What sorts of lags exist? To what extent are population and labour force changes impervious to changes in the local economic context? Yet, these questions have not been directly addressed, at least at the national level.2 Using a variety of newly arrayed material, this chapter sets out to do just that. The recent development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques, as well as the expansion of a variety of spatial analysis methods, makes this work possible. GIS has become a popular, widespread way to make thematic maps. Using these techniques, along with materials that are created to be comparable over time, makes it possible to visualize changes in population, employment, average wages, as well as many other variables. To do this requires creating materials that are broadly comparable across decades.

Do immigrants have better labor market outcomes under Democratic governors? By exploiting variations associated with close elections in a regression discontinuity (RD) design applied on gubernatorial elections in 50 states over the last two decades, we find that immigrants are more likely to be employed, work longer hours and more weeks, and have higher earnings under Democratic governors. Results are robust to a number of different specifications, controls, and samples.

The chapters in this dissertation focus on environmental economics but vary in their contributions to current environmental economics literature. The second chapter shows that coal stockpiles accumulated through contractual obligations during periods of low natural gas prices restricts the responsiveness of coal-fired plants when relative coal-to-gas prices change. It implies that the social marginal benefit associated with higher price of coal can be smaller than what we would expect in the short run. In the other two chapters, I revisit moving costs, a central concept in non-market valuation. Specifically, I emphasize the role that moving costs play in household migration and their impact on households’ exposure to local air pollution. In chapter 3, I find that low-income households face higher moving costs. I run simulation models to show that the heterogeneous moving costs can explain why a disproportionate number of low-income people live near undesirable land uses. Chapter 4 offers a complementary argument to Chapter 3. I use a natural break in moving costs among Californian homeowners to test if lower moving costs cause households to move to cleaner neighborhoods in terms of air pollution. I do not find such evidence from the public-use census data set, but the low geographic resolution of the data might have driven the result.

This study explored the role of the Federal Government in helping Gulf War II Era veterans to secure employment after leaving active duty service. The study focused on the Veterans’ Employment Initiative and the effects it had on the Gulf War II Era veterans’ employment situation. The study used a mixed method approach. For the quantitative analysis, public data from IPUMS-USA was used to get statistical findings. While, 30 Gulf War II Era veterans were interviewed to get an in-depth understanding of the statistical findings. The results showed the Federal Government has done a lot to help veterans, but there is still a disconnect between available programs and the veterans’ knowledge about these programs.