How we spend our time has important implications for our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of our families. Prior research has shown that women in same-sex couples spend more time in paid work and less time in housework than women in different-sex couples, whereas men in same-sex couples spend less time in paid work and more time in housework than men in different-sex couples. Scholars tend to attribute these differences to an ‘egalitarian ethic’ of same-sex couples, ignoring the role of differences in personal characteristics between same-sex and different-sex couples, including sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., education, age), economic characteristics (e.g., hourly wage), family characteristics (e.g., residential children), relative resources between spouses, and occupational sex composition, in contributing to the gaps in paid work hours and housework between these couple types. Very little research has compared leisure time between same-sex and different-sex couples. I draw on data from the 2015–2017 Current Population Survey and the 2003–2016 American Time Use Survey to address these gaps in the literature and contribute . . .

A varying number of work hours from week to week creates considerable hardships for workers and their families, like volatile earnings and work–family conflict. Yet little empirical work has focused on racial/ethnic differences in varying work hours, which may have increased substantially in the Great Recession of the late 2000s. We extend literatures on racial/ethnic stratification in recessions and occupational segregation to this topic. Analyses of the Survey of Income and Program Participation show varying weekly hours became significantly more common for White and Black, but especially Latino workers in the late 2000s. The growth of varying weekly hours among White and Latino workers was greatest in predominantly minority occupations. However, the growth among Black workers was greatest in predominantly White occupations. The chapter discusses implications for disparities in varying hours and the salience of occupational composition beyond earnings.

This paper investigates how governors' partisan affiliation affects the poverty status of immigrants to the U.S. To this end, we compare the poverty outcomes of immigrants in states ruled by Democratic governors relative to the outcomes for those in states ruled by Republican governors. We employ a regression discontinuity design using the re-centered Democratic margin of victory as a running variable, to overcome the identification challenge posed by confounding factors. Consistent with the literature on partisan affiliation, we find that immigrants are more likely to get out of poverty in states with Democratic governors than states with Republican governors. Our results are submitted to a variety of robustness checks and sensitivity tests, to assess the validity of the identification strategy, and highlight conditional lame-duck effects. A formal mediation analysis reveals that the empirical results are mediated through better access to the labor market and possibly through higher wages and labor earnings for immigrants. Last but not least, we check for alternative hypotheses and potential detrimental effects for native populations.

In this dissertation, I seek to begin building a new line of health inequality research that parallels the emerging structural racism literature by developing theory and measurement for the new concept of structural sexism and examining its relationship to health. Consistent with contemporary theories of gender as a multilevel social system, I conceptualize and measure structural sexism as systematic gender inequality in power and resources at the macro-level (U.S. state), meso-level (marital dyad), and micro-level (individual). Through a series of quantitative analyses, I examine how various measures of structural sexism affect the health of men, women, and infants in the U.S.

Access to adequate antenatal care (at least four antenatal visits, beginning in first four months of pregnancy) in Zambia in 2013 varied according to population density. We expect greater access to antenatal care in urban areas than in rural areas; surprisingly, women in dense urban areas (urban slums) were least likely to receive adequate antenatal care.

Recent public discussion has focused on inequality and social justice, while economists have looked at inequality’s adverse effects on economic growth. One economic theory builds on the empirically negative relationship between income and fertility observed in the post demographic transition era. It argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility – the fertility gap between rich and poor. In turn, greater differential fertility lowers the average education level, as the poor invest less in the education of their children. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has flattened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as the rich increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship between income and fertility. We show this result both theoretically and quantitatively, after disciplining the model on US data. Without marketization, the impact of inequality on education through differential fertility is reversed. Policies, such as the minimum wage, that affect the cost of marketization, have a large effect on the fertility and labor supply of high income women.

In January 2010, a report was released for the Office of the Vice President’s Middle Class Task Force. The report, entitled Middle Class in America, characterized the aspirations of middle class families, tabulated the associated costs of achieving these aspirations, determined whether actual family incomes were capable of covering the costs, and described how the ability of families to achieve a middle class lifestyle has changed over time. The Bell Policy Center is interested in understanding similar issues for families in Colorado. This project looks within Colorado to understand the composition of the state’s middle-income families, generate cost estimates of the aspirational middle class lifestyle, determine the capacity of actual family incomes to support middle class costs, and detail how the ability of families to . . .

For 40 years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black men with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study's methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical profession. To identify the study's effects on the behavior and health of older black men, we use an interacted difference-in-difference-in-differences model, comparing older black men to other demographic groups, before and after the Tuskegee revelation, in varying proximity to the study's victims. We find that the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.5 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men and 25% of the gap between black men and women.

× Estimates show half of all college students experience food insecurity; but only 18 percent are eligible for federal food assistance (SNAP). Only 3 percent actually receive benefits. × States are losing out on $4.2 billion in federal resources they could be delivering to college students. ✓ We recommend the federal government simplify the enrollment process and expand eligibility, and that states and institutions improve outreach and coordination. Rethinking SNAP Benefits for College Students February 2018 / Principal Investigator: Tom Allison 2 Hundreds of thousands of college students experience food insecurity every day, a condition characterized by disrupted eating patterns and reduced quality and quantity of diets. The struggling, hungry college student subsiding on ramen noodles or scouring for free pizza at on-campus events has permeated pop culture, but going hungry has deep physical, emotional, and academic effects on students, and in some cases can prevent them from completing school entirely. Often times, this problem can go unnoticed, especially since measuring student hunger requires students to self-report, and the stigma around being unable to meet basic needs can keep students from seeking help. Food insecurity carries serious consequences for student success. In one study, the majority of students experiencing food insecurity reported missing classes and study sessions, and not buying required textbooks. 1 Hunger also impairs cognitive development into adolescence and adulthood, leading to poorer test scores and the inability to fully engage in classes. 2 With roughly half of college students earning a degree on time 3 , and serious disparities for African American and Latinx students 4 , policymakers must consider campus hunger an integral part of our lagging student success rates. Over the past years, researchers and stakeholders have focused on food and housing insecurity as a significant challenge for student success. The Wisconsin HOPE Lab found that 56 percent of community college students experienced low or very low food security. 5 A consortium of groups similarly found that about half of community college students they surveyed reported food insecurity in the last thirty days. 6 The Urban Institute estimated 11.2 percent of students at four-year institutions and and 13.3 percent of community college students experience food insecurity, although those rates represent a decline since 2012. 7 Despite these developments, researchers have yet to produce accurate measurements of the potential solution: the number of college students qualified for and participating in federal food assistance programs. Also lacking are statistically representative estimates at the state level. This matters because state factors facilitate federal food assistance programs, in addition to playing a significant role in higher education policy. The research literature also lacks statically representative estimates of SNAP eligibility and participation by race and ethnicity (although Wisconsin HOPE Lab disaggregates their surveys). This is important considering the serious inequities in our higher education system and that the trends could influence policy decisions or outreach strategies to certain subpopulations. 8

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, ``The Structural Shift in the Cyclicality of the U.S. Labor Income Share: Empirical Evidence'', I document a structural shift in the cyclicality of the labor share from countercyclical to procyclical. I conclude that this structural shift is due to a decline in the usage of labor hoarding at the firm level and to an increase in the volatility of real wages. I also provide evidence suggesting this shift is widespread to the entire economy and is not due to structural changes in the industrial composition for the U.S. economy. In the second essay, ``The Cyclicality of the Labor Share: Labor Hoarding, Risk Aversion and Real Wage Rigidities'', I explore whether the decline in the usage of labor hoarding is able to jointly generate the vanishing procyclicality of labor productivity and the shift in the cyclicality of the labor share. I conclude that while these models are able to generate the vanishing procyclicality of labor productivity, they will generate counterfactually a more countercyclical labor share. This counterfactual result also occurs when I consider instead a decline in the workers' bargaining power in the wage bargaining power and an increase in the relative importance of aggregate demand shocks. In the third essay, ``The Public Sector Wage Premium: An Occupational Approach'', I characterize the strategy undertaken by the U.S. government to provide insurance to workers in occupations that are on the left-tail of the private wage distribution. I conclude that the government is effectively offering a high wage premium to non-routine manual workers and a wage penalty to non-routine cognitive workers.

We propose a mechanism via which a decline in the share of young workers slows employment growth in expanding sectors, and exacerbates sectoral reallo- cation costs. To quantify this mechanism, we develop a search model with per- petual youth, three sectors and endogenous separations of worker-firm matches. Our model incorporates three important features: sector-specific human capital; sec- toral preferences, which imply that only some workers are mobile across sectors; and a wage bargaining distortion, whereby unskilled workers’ wages in shrinking sectors are determined by mobile workers. In our parameterized model, output losses after a sectoral reallocation shock are significant and rise substantially at low population growth rates. While this result is driven by the interactions between the three model features, the wage distortion for unskilled wages is responsible for amplifying the sectoral reallocation costs. The model generates a rise in unemployment and a fall in vacancies after a sectoral shock, counter to conventional wisdom.

The skill premium has increased significantly in the United States in the last five decades. During the same period, individual wage risk has also increased. This paper proposes a mechanism through which a rise in wage risk increases the skill premium. Intuitively, a rise in uninsured wage risk increases precautionary savings, thereby boosting capital accumulation, which increases the skill premium due to capital-skill complementarity. Using a quantitative macroeconomic model, we find that the rise in wage risk observed between 1967 and 2010 increases the skill premium significantly. This finding is robust across a variety of model specifications.

At its core, this project analyzes the interactions between state non-discrimination laws and the socioeconomic status of same-sex households in the United States. There is a large body of work examining the earnings gap for sexual minorities, but there is a dearth in studies looking at the effect of such protective laws. Using annual American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2000 to 2016, we examine the personal total income, household income, and unemployment in the ten states experiencing relevant reform. This study has two main findings. First, we confirm that sexual minorities experience substantial earnings differences, finding that lesbian women experience an income premium of 32.2 percent and gay men face an income penalty of 21.4 percent. Second, we find that non-discrimination laws seem to be decreasing the pay gap in both directions, shrinking the lesbian premium by 6.7 percent and the gay penalty by 12.1 percent. While we are unable to say these effects are causal, in the context of a history of wage penalties for gay males and wage premiums for lesbian women, protective reforms are positively and strongly correlated with closing the lesbian and gay income gap. From these main findings we are left with additional questions including: why does the lesbian premium exist, and why do protective reforms seem to chip away at it? While we review some relevant theories and offer our own, in the end these findings remain a puzzle.

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a linear index-known as a polygenic score-are associated with human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We present two main sets of results. First, we find evidence that the genetic factors measured by this score interact strongly with childhood socioeconomic status in determining educational outcomes. In particular, while the polygenic score predicts higher rates of college graduation on average, this relationship is substantially stronger for individuals who grew up in households with higher socioeconomic status relative to those who grew up in poorer households. Second, the polygenic score predicts labor earnings even after adjusting for completed education, with larger returns in more recent decades. These patterns suggest that the genetic traits that promote education might allow workers to better accommodate ongoing skill biased technological change. Consistent with this interpretation, we find a positive association between the polygenic score and non-routine analytic tasks that have benefited from the introduction of new technologies. Nonetheless, the college premium remains the dominant determinant of earnings differences at all levels of the polygenic score. Given the role of childhood SES in predicting college attainment, this raises concerns about wasted potential arising from limited household resources.

Predicting the binding mode of flexible polypeptides to proteins is an important task that falls outside the domain of applicability of most small molecule and protein−protein docking tools. Here, we test the small molecule flexible ligand docking program Glide on a set of 19 non-α-helical peptides and systematically improve pose prediction accuracy by enhancing Glide sampling for flexible polypeptides. In addition, scoring of the poses was improved by post-processing with physics-based implicit solvent MM- GBSA calculations. Using the best RMSD among the top 10 scoring poses as a metric, the success rate (RMSD ≤ 2.0 Å for the interface backbone atoms) increased from 21% with default Glide SP settings to 58% with the enhanced peptide sampling and scoring protocol in the case of redocking to the native protein structure. This approaches the accuracy of the recently developed Rosetta FlexPepDock method (63% success for these 19 peptides) while being over 100 times faster. Cross-docking was performed for a subset of cases where an unbound receptor structure was available, and in that case, 40% of peptides were docked successfully. We analyze the results and find that the optimized polypeptide protocol is most accurate for extended peptides of limited size and number of formal charges, defining a domain of applicability for this approach.

More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, black–white family income disparities in the United States remain almost exactly the same as what they were in 1968. This article argues that a key and underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the national trend of rising income inequality. From 1968 to 2016, black–white disparities in family income rank narrowed by almost one-third. But this relative gain was negated by changes to the national income distribution that resulted in rapid income growth for the richest—and most disproportionately white—few percentiles of the country combined with income stagnation for the poor and middle class. But for the rise in income inequality, the median black–white family income gap would have decreased by about 30 percent. Conversely, without the partial closing of the rank gap, growing inequality alone would have increased the racial income gap by 30 percent.

This study looks at the extended family household living of elderly women aged 60+ in Brazil in 2010 (35.9 percent) by whether they had had a live birth using 2010 Brazilian census data (36.8 vs. 29.0 percent). It applies a binomial multivariate logistic model containing socio-demographic, socio-economic, and socio-geographic characteristics to the two groups of women both nationally and by broad income group. It decomposes the gap into propensity differences (118.9%) and compositional differences (-23.5%). The study found that many characteristics such as income had similar relations with the probability of extended family living among women who had or did not have a live birth. While basic income had a negative relation, receiving pension income among lower income elderly women had a positive relation. This finding was a possible side effect of the non-contributory pension, as a similar finding did not exist in other income groups. The major difference between the two fertility groups was that factors associated with a special ‘need’ for informal support (such as having a disability or being very old) were more important for the co-residence of women who had never had a live birth. For both long-standing cultural as well as politico-economic reasons, Brazilians may expect a network of kin, not just biological children, to care for and sometimes share, residence with elderly family members AND they have developed a non-contributory pension program aimed at the very poor that enables old people to control and share resources within what may be extended family households.

In this paper, I analyze the impact of mandatory milk pasteurization in 38 large U.S. cities on five subsequent mortality rates: the mortality rate from diarrhea and enteritis for children under the age of two and the all-age mortality rates from non-pulmonary tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. I analyze these outcomes using Vital Statistics data for 38 large U.S. cities spanning 1900 to 1924 in conjunction with decennial census data from 1900 to 1930. I find a statistically significant relationship between milk pasteurization ordinances and a decline in mortality from non-pulmonary tuberculosis and diarrhea and enteritis. I find evidence of a similar relationship between milk pasteurization ordinances and mortality rates from scarlet fever and diphtheria.

We show that eliminating firms' access to tax havens has unintended consequences for economic growth. We analyze a policy change that limited profit shifting for US multinationals, and show that the reform raised the effective cost of investing in the US. Exposed firms respond by reducing global investment and shifting investment abroad-which lowered their domestic investment by 38%-and by reducing domestic employment by 1.0 million jobs. We then show that the costs of eliminating tax havens are persistent and geographically concentrated, as more exposed local labor markets experience declines in employment and income growth for over 15 years. We discuss implications of these results for other efforts to limit profit shifting, including new taxes on intangible income in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.