We consider an example application of electric VTOL (eVTOL) aircraft, designed origi- nally for passenger operations in urban air mobility (UAM) markets, for transporting cargo. The particular case study we examine involves delivering small packages from a warehouse located in Tracy, CA to vertiport hubs in the San Franciso Bay Area. The package transit is envisioned to occur via two legs: an eVTOL trip from the warehouse to a vertiport lo- cated near the consumer, followed by last-mile delivery by car, small UAS, or other mode from the vertiport to the consumer. First, we formulate and solve an optimization problem to select cargo vertiport locations by maximizing the package demand served, subject to limits on the number of vertiports. Next, we examine the sizing, mission performance, recharge time requirements, and daily package throughput of two representative classes of eVTOL vehicles for this case study example.

This book examines how well the American political systems performs by using multiple criteria, including the level of trust the public has towards the institutions of government, the abilities of the institutions to make good public policy, the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, and the extent to which public policy is fair.

There is no consensus about whether exposure to a changing climate influences public concern about climate change. In this paper, we examine the link between climate change and public opinion using a comprehensive index of the mass public’s latent concern about climate change in each state from 1999-2017. The index aggregates data from over 400,000 survey respondents in 170 polls. These new estimates of state-level climate concern enable us to exploit geographic variation in locally experienced climate changes over an extended time period. We show that climate concern peaked in 2000 and again in 2017. At the national level, trends in public opinion clearly mirror trends in temperature. Moreover, climate concern is modestly responsive to changes in state-level temperatures. Overall, our results suggest that continued increases in temperature are likely to cause public concern about climate change to grow in the future. But a warming climate, on its own, is unlikely to yield a consensus in the mass public about the threat posed by climate change.

Past research on immigrant health frequently finds that the duration of time lived in the United States is associated with the erosion of immigrants’ health advantages. However, the timing of U.S. migration during the life course is rarely explored. We draw from developmental and sociological perspectives to theorize how migration during childhood may be related to healthy eating among adult immigrants from Mexico. We test these ideas with a mechanism-based age-period-cohort model to disentangle age, age at arrival, and duration of residence. Results show that immigrants who arrived during preschool ages (2–5 years) and school ages (6–11 years) have less healthy diets than adult arrivals (25+ years). After accounting for age at arrival, duration of residence is positively related to healthy eating. Overall, the findings highlight the need to focus more research and policy interventions on child immigrants, who may be particularly susceptible to adopting unhealthy American behaviors during sensitive periods of childhood.

This fact sheet summarizes the data currently available on the changing costs of rental housing in Buffalo, NY. It explores six data sources for rent figures and what each one can tell us about Buffalo’s rental market. The sources include U.S. Census data, online rental listing sites, and housing organizations in Buffalo.

Does the mining-driven scarcity of women affect gender norms? Do gender norms persist over time? We explore the Gold Rush in Western United States in the late 19th-century as a natural experiment to answer these questions. We use a geographic difference-indifference methodology, exploiting the location and discovery of the gold deposits and its influence on sex ratios, to understand short term and persistent changes in women's labor market participation and marriage market opportunities. Gold mining , through the oversupply of marriageable men with income, increased (decreased) marriage rates among women (men). Women married older men with higher prestige occupations. In parallel, the Gold Rush created a market based service sector economy , potentially catering to men with money but poor marriage prospects. Using all subsequent censuses up until 1940, we show that the effects persist over time.

After losing ground in 49 states — all but Wyoming — between 2000 and 2013, the U.S. middle class is slowly clawing its way back. In 38 states, a larger share of households were “middle class” — defined as earning between two-thirds and twice the state’s size-adjusted median household income — in 2016 than in 2013, according to a new Stateline analysis.

Despite burgeoning interest in entrepreneurial ecosystems, there is little information on metrics for studying the actors and interconnections within these systems. The increasing availability of data and metrics for characterizing entrepreneurial activity in recent years provide opportunities for analyzing EE in more holistic ways. A critical first step in advancing work on this topic, however, is to critically review the use and limitations of currently available data with a focus on the very recent ecosystems literature, as well as constituent topics such as entrepreneurial heritage and spinoffs, entrepreneurial culture, and studies of emerging ecosystems in peripheral regions. In this review, the problems and prospects of available data are discussed, particularly the spatial scales (national or subnational) at which they are available. The paper closes with a critical discussion of the data needed to move the field forward in the four ecosystem‐related topical areas and answer important questions related to the nuanced geographies of EE at the subnational level. This discussion suggests present gaps may be related to a poverty of data‐sharing efforts rather than a poverty of available data.

Binge eating has been associated with stress responses. Data in rats suggest that activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is suppressed by consumption of a high sucrose diet, and is increased with exposure to a high fat diet. Additionally, the choice to consume a highly palatable food following exposure to a stressor results in reduced corticosterone levels. To test the effects of intermittent access to a high sugar/high fat food on stress hormone levels, rats were given either unrestricted (UR) access to a sucrose-vegetable shortening mixture (SVS) or 2 hour SVS access 7 days (7D) or 3 days (3D) per week for 4 weeks. Rats on the UR and 3D schedules consumed significantly more calories per day than did controls with no access to SVS, and the 7D and 3D rats consumed as many SVS calories in the 2 hour access period as did the UR rats with 24 hour access to SVS. After 4 weeks of access to SVS (UR, 7D, and 3D), rats were briefly restrained. Control and UR rats had elevated corticosterone during and following restraint, whereas there were no differences in corticosterone levels of 7D and 3D rats in response to restraint, as compared to baseline. Post-restraint consumption of chow was significantly decreased in all groups, and consumption of SVS was reduced in the UR, but not the 7D and 3D rats. These data demonstrate that intermittent access to SVS dampens the corticosterone response to restraint stress and that stressful events do not induce bingeing in non-bingeing animals with access to a high sucrose/high fat food. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence finds that when school budgets are strained, public schools can employ cost-saving measures with no ill-effect on students. We theorize that if budget cuts induce schools to eliminate wasteful spending, the effects of spending cuts may be small (and even zero). To explore this empirically, we examine how student performance responded to school spending cuts induced by the Great Recession. We link nationally representative test score and survey data to school spending data and isolate variation in recessionary spending cuts that were unrelated to changes in economic conditions. Consistent with the theory, districts that faced large revenue cuts disproportionately reduced spending on non-core operations. However, they still reduced core operational spending to some extent. A 10 percent school spending cut reduced test scores by about 7.8 percent of a standard deviation. Moreover, a 10 percent spending reduction during all four high-school years was associated with 2.6 percentage points lower graduation rates. While our estimates are smaller than some in the literature, spending cuts do matter.

Does the economic effect of immigrant women differ from that of immigrants in general? This paper examines if gender has influenced the short- and long-term economic impact of mass migration to the US, using Census microdata from 1880 and 1910. By means of ordinary least squares and instrumental variable estimations, the analysis shows that a greater concentration of immigrant women is significantly associated with lower levels of economic development in US counties. However, immigrant women also shaped economic development positively, albeit indirectly via their children. Communities with more children born to foreign mothers and that successfully managed to integrate female immigrants experienced greater economic growth than those dominated by children of foreign-born fathers or American-born parents.

Health and social welfare policy proposals put forth by the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress could have huge impacts on low-income groups. This paper focuses on older Hispanics, with an emphasis on the Mexican-origin population who form the largest Hispanic subgroup. A demographic portrait is presented that indicates that Mexican-origin individuals have less wealth and lower incomes than do non-Hispanic Whites. Given rising health care costs, lower use of nursing homes, and greater propensity to live with grown children, prevailing economic disadvantage has serious consequences for this population. More restrictive immigration policies aimed at limiting family reunification could have intergenerational caregiving consequences. In addition, because of labor-force disadvantages, low-income Mexican-origin adults are less likely to have private insurance compared to non-Hispanic Whites as they approach retirement. Consequently, Mexican-origin older adults tend to rely on Medicaid when eligible; in contrast, late-life migrants— who do not qualify for federally funded benefits for at least five years—and unauthorized migrants—who are excluded from federally funded benefits—have extremely limited access to safety net provisions. The potential effects of proposed cutbacks in health care financing on older Hispanics are discussed.

Immigrants come to the United States to work and to improve their earnings and material living conditions, and in doing so, they often drive economic growth and local revitalization. Their labor market involvement may either supplement or displace employment opportunities for native-born populations, and immigrant groups can vary significantly in the economic success they achieve in this country. The consensus among economists who assess the macro effects of economic activity and among sociologists who address the impact of noneconomic forces on economic activity is that, on balance, the U.S. national economy—as well as immigrants themselves—benefit from their labor market contributions.

This article explores how parents and school personnel perceived and experienced parental involvement at a school serving a low-income mainly black population. The first author recorded detailed field notes (n=70) and conducted in-depth interviews with parents (n=20) and school personnel (n=20) over a three-year period. Despite rhetoric of inclusion, the schools policies and practices restricted parents to predetermined and acceptable roles of parental involvement. Ideologies of colorblind racism undergirded school policies and practices, thereby maintaining current social hierarchies of white privilege and racial minority disadvantage. This colorblind approach to parental involvement created barriers to the development of authentic relationships and, therefore, the development of a positive, mutual, and respectful relationship between student families and school personnel. Naming racism and recognizing its impact on the school environment are important first steps towards change. School staff and teachers must be willing to interrogate their participation in maintaining social hierarchies.

Based on worldly experience, most people would agree that firms are hierarchically organized, and that pay tends to increase as one moves up the hierarchy. But how this hierarchical structure affects income distribution has not been widely studied. To remedy this situation, this paper presents a new model of income distribution that explores the effects of social hierarchy. This ‘hierarchy model’ takes the limited available evidence on the structure of firm hierarchies, and generalizes it to create a large-scale simulation of the hierarchical structure of the United States economy. Using this model, I conduct the first quantitative investigation of hierarchy’s effect on income distribution. I find that hierarchy plays a dominant role in shaping the tail of US income distribution. The model suggests that hierarchy is responsible for generating the power-law scaling of top incomes. Moreover, I find that hierarchy can be used to unify the study of personal and functional income distribution, as well as to understand historical trends in income inequality.

This article documents and explores black–white differences in US women’s labor force participation, occupations, and wages from 1940 to 2014. It draws on closely related research on selection into the labor force, discrimination, and prelabor market characteristics, such as test scores, that are strongly associated with subsequent labor market outcomes. Both black and white women significantly increased their labor force participation in this period, with white women catching up to black women by 1990. Black–white differences in occupational and wage distributions were large circa 1940; they have narrowed significantly since then as black women’s relative outcomes improved. Following a period of rapid convergence, the racial wage gap for women widened after 1980 in census data. Differences in human capital, which are rooted in the history of racial discrimination, are an empirically important underpinning of the black–white wage gap throughout the period studied.

The main objective of this dissertation is to examine patterns of residential segregation, housing turnover, and neighborhood connection by race/ethnicity and family structure. Only two studies have examined residential outcomes by family structure, and both of these studies have focused on residential segregation and use cross-sectional data from the 2000 Decennial Census (Iceland et al. 2010; Marsh and Iceland 2010). In order to address these limitations, the current study asks two main research questions, (1) does family structure have a relationship with residential outcomes (residential segregation, housing turnover, and neighborhood connection) over and above race/ethnicity? And (2) does family structure have a relationship with residential outcomes (residential segregation, housing turnover, and neighborhood connection) in conjunction with race/ethnicity? To address these questions, I perform three sets of analyses. The first uses the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Decennial Census data and 2006-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) data drawn from the Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) and the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) to examine residential segregation between white, black, and Hispanic married-couple and female-headed families conducting . . .

While Arizona has seen continued economic momentum and the successful implementation of an expansive, statewide paid sick days law,1 the state lags behind in other policies that would support women and their families, including those concerning maternal and reproductive health. Policymakers should prioritize policies that advance economic security and health care in Arizona. Women need policies that reflect their roles as providers and caregivers. In Arizona, mothers are the sole, primary, or co-breadwinners in 58.8 percent of families,2 and these numbers are higher for some women of color. The following policy recommendations can help support the economic security of women and families in Arizona.

Using the US Census waves 1940-1990 and CPS 1990-2010, we look at how economic uncertainty affected fertility cycles over the course of the XXth century. We use cross-state and cross-cohort variation in the volatility of income growth to identify the causal link running from uncertainty to fertility. We find that economic uncertainty has a large and robust negative effect on completed fertility. We hypothesize that a greater economic uncertainty increases the risk of large consumption swings, which individuals mitigate by postponing fertility and ultimately decreasing their completed fertility. Differences in volatility account for between 45% and 61% of the one child variation observed during the post WWII baby boom. JEL Classification Codes: J11, J13, E32, N30