The purpose of this study is to evaluate the theory of representative bureaucracy. Cross-sectional and longitudinal data, covering a period from 1997 to 2013, suggest that a greater number of women in the policing workforce is related to higher reporting rates for rape incidents and higher clearance rates for rape cases. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the relationship between female representation and women-centered outcomes is moderated by the presence of a union and mediated by resources for victims and community policing. Looking ahead, more research is needed to identify how female representation in policing influences organizational processes and outcomes for citizens.

Racial segregation is a salient feature of cities in the United States. Models like Schelling (1971) show thatsegregation can arise through white preferences for residing near minorities. Once the threshold or “tippingpoint” is passed, the models predict that all whites will leave. Our paper uses census-tract data for six cities in theUnited States from the 1930s and 1970–2010 to measure decadal, city-specific tipping points. We use a struc-tural break procedure to estimate the tipping points and incorporate these in a regression-discontinuity design toestimate the impact on population trends for neighborhoods that exceed that threshold while controlling for city-specific trends in migration. We find that the magnitude of white flight for neighborhoods that have tipped in2000 has fallen to between 23% and 36% of the level seen in 1970. There was no discontinuity in white flightafter accounting for migration trends during the Great Depression. Finally, we show that in-migration ofminorities in tipped neighborhoods do not fill in the gap left by white flight.

Shared methods, procedures, documentation, and data are essential features of science. This observation is illustrated by autobiographical examples and, far more important, by the history of astronomy, geography, meteorology, and the social sciences. Unfortunately, though sometimes for understandable reasons, data sharing has been less common in psychological and medical research. The China Family Panel Study is an exemplar of contemporary research that has been designed from the outset to create a well-documented body of shared social-scientific data.

Population aging is a marker of our success in both extending longevity and planning our reproduction. The demographic changes that result in the aging of the population also contribute to family change in aging societies. At the same time, changes in demographic behaviors, such as marriage and childbearing, have transformed the intergenerational structure of society. Each of these phenomena also has contributed to an increasing diversity of family forms, raising questions about societal and individual responsibility for well-being in old age. Countries vary in their approaches to social welfare, but even in the most generous ones, families remain the most tenacious and preferred sources . . .

Food assistance is a highly controversial topic in the U.S., especially given that big programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cost billions of Dollars. Though these programs help promote food security, a concern for the provision of healthy diets to program participants remains. This paper compares the simulated impacts of food assistance similar to SNAP to two alternative policy mechanisms: a cashback program whereby participants are reimbursed for a set proportion of their fruits and vegetable expense, and a discount on the purchase price of fruits and vegetables. Using Nielsen Homescan data, a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System is estimated to obtain the necessary parameters to obtain the impacts of these policies. The results make it apparent that households at high levels of poverty benefit more from assistance programs similar to SNAP, while those above the poverty line could benefit more from both the cashback and discount. The discount also appears to provide better gains to participating households than the cashback program.

This is a pilot study investigating synchronic variation in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) object pronouns. HY is a variety that has been transmitted directly by immigrants from Eastern Europe following the second world war and is presently the everyday language of thousands of Hasidic Jews in New York and other communities around the world. In Yiddish, pronominal forms in the dative case, 'mir' (1SG) 'dir' (2SG), have historically been used in four types of syntactic constructions: 1) when the pronoun referent is the recipient of an action in a double object construction; 2) with a transitive verb that inherently selects for an object in the dative form; 3) with a dative experiencer; and 4) as the object of a preposition. Anecdotal observations suggest an innovative leveled paradigm with accusative forms 'mikh' (1SG) and 'dikh' (2SG) in all four historically dative positions. Moreover, while other Yiddish dialects have dative case marking on definite articles and attributive adjectives, spoken HY has largely lost these. With 'mir' and 'dir' as the sole remaining dative forms in in the pronominal paradigm, learners of HY have less evidence for positing dative case than do learners of other dialects. The data for this study come from an online controlled judgement experiment with 113 native HY speakers from New York. Regression analysis reveals an age effect, with younger speakers tending toward innovative dative forms, and an interaction between age and gender, with younger females innovating more extensively than males. However, sex is confounded with language dominance in this community, largely because of an educational model that supports HY-English bilingualism among girls but gives primacy to HY in the education of boys. The model also selects speakers from Hasidic neighborhoods in Rockland County as the most likely innovators. Overall, the results of this study suggest an emergent reduction in the HY case system where, for some young speakers, the distinction between the accusative and dative case forms has been lost. HY offers linguists a unique opportunity to observe the development of a post-coterritorial Yiddish dialect in a new language contact environment. This investigation into HY in its unique sociocultural context contributes to Yiddish linguistics by highlighting changes that have occurred since its arrival to the US and to general theories of language change by identifying the social factors that may be playing a role in these developments.

People who live in declining areas are more likely to have been born nearby, which implies that they have idiosyncratic ties to where they live. Labor demand shocks to places where people have higher levels of these local ties, proxied by their birth places, lead to less migration and larger movements into and out of the labor market. A model of spatial equilibrium that includes a distribution of workers’ preferences for living in their birth places matches these facts and suggests further implications. Declines in local productivity lead to lower migration elasticities and larger declines in real wages after further declines in productivity. Population can take generations to adjust, since ties can only be reallocated slowly. Across a wide class of models, lower migration elasticities make subsidies to local areas more efficient, since they change fewer people’s locations. Local subsidies are more efficient in declining areas, where they are the most common.

This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use available geographic data to account for the fact that families can cross arbitrary administrative boundaries, such as census tract or ZIP code lines, and thus better reflect the real experiences of families than conventional area-based measures. Combining synthetic family locations simulated from Census demographic and geographic data and information on ECE provider locations, we calculate travel time between the locations of families with young children and ECE providers to measure families’ access to providers of different types. The results yield a map of areas with low and high relative ECE access. The average family in Minnesota lives in a location where there are nearly two children for every nearby slot of licensed capacity, however, access to ECE supply varies considerably at the local level. The supply measure can also serve as a weight useful in computing family-centered measures of ECE quality and access costs, incorporating both prices and travel costs, to further characterize the local ECE market from the perspective of families. Improving measures of variation in families’ access to ECE quantity, cost, and quality is valuable as policymakers consider expansions to public supports for early learning and ECE entrepreneurs decide where to invest.

There is growing concern over rising economic inequality, the decline of the middle class, and a polarization of the U.S. workforce. This study examines the extent to which low-wage workers in the United States transition to better jobs, and explores the factors associated with such a move up the job ladder. Using data covering the expansion following the Great Recession (2011-17) and focusing on short-term labor market transitions, we find that around 70 percent of low-wage workers stayed in the same job, 11 percent exited the labor force, 7 percent became unemployed, and 6 percent switched to a different low-wage job. Troublingly, just slightly more than 5 percent of low-wage workers found a better job within a 12-month period. Study results point to the importance of educational attainment in helping low-wage workers move up the job ladder.

Researchers studying income inequality, economic segregation, and other subjects must often rely on grouped data—that is, data in which thousands or millions of observations have been reduced to counts of units by specified income brackets. The distribution of households within the brackets is unknown, and highest incomes are often included in an open-ended top bracket, such as “$200,000 and above.” Common approaches to this estimation problem include calculating midpoint estimators with an assumed Pareto distribution in the top bracket and fitting a flexible multiple-parameter distribution to the data. The authors describe a new method, mean-constrained integration over brackets (MCIB), that is far more accurate than those methods using only the bracket counts and the overall mean of the data. On the basis of an analysis of 297 metropolitan areas, MCIB produces estimates of the standard deviation, Gini coefficient, and Theil index that are correlated at 0.997, 0.998, and 0.991, respectively, with the parameters calculated from the underlying individual record data. Similar levels of accuracy are obtained for percentiles of the distribution and the shares of income by quintiles of the distribution. The technique can easily be extended to other distributional parameters and inequality statistics.

This article discusses a selection of primary sources used to study the black population of Gary, Indiana, from 1906 to 1920. The sources include federal manuscript census schedules, city directo ries, school enumerations, and marriage application records. Through a brief description of each type of document, the author will try to underline the importance of name-based sources in the study of the Great Migration and examine ways social historians can make the most of the wealth of the information contained in them. This research note also addresses three concerns raised by the critics of the Great Migration literature: that migration should be stud ied as a process; that black women and their families should be includ ed in this process; and that smaller "promised lands" (like Gary) should be considered by historians.

Who retires by 65 anymore? Quite a few people actually. The transition to retirement has become longer and fuzzier than 40 years ago, as the range of retirement ages has expanded. Yet, many men and women do retire by the time they reach the traditional age of 65.

Spousal characteristics such as age, height, and earnings are often used to infer social preferences. For example, a “male taller” norm has been inferred from the fact that fewer wives are taller than their husbands than would occur with random matching. The large proportion of husbands out-earning their wives has been cited as evidence for a “male breadwinner” norm. We show that it can be misleading to infer social preferences about an attribute from observed marital sorting on that attribute. We show that positive assortative matching on an attribute is consistent with a variety of underlying preferences. Given gender gaps in height and earnings, positive sorting implies it will be rare for women to be taller or richer than their husbands--even without an underlying preference for shorter or lower-earning wives. Simulations which sort couples positively on permanent earnings can largely replicate the observed distribution of spousal earnings differences in US Census data. Further, we show that an apparent sharp drop in the distribution function at the point where the wife out-earns the husband results from a mass of couples earning identical incomes, a mass which we argue is not evidence of a norm for higher-earning husbands.

Public opinion regarding smoking and health has been of interest to polling companies since the 1940s. This article documents the rate of change in the public's awareness and beliefs about smoking and health in North America (the United States and Canada). It reports on four broad categories of opinions: public awareness of reports that smoking has been linked to lung cancer; beliefs that smoking is harmful to health and a cause of lung cancer; beliefs that smoking is a cause of diseases other than lung cancer; and beliefs about the health hazards of secondhand smoke.

Purpose We examine changes to health insurance coverage and access to health care among children, adolescents, and young adults since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Methods Using the National Health Interview Survey, bivariate and logistic regression analyses were conducted to compare coverage and access among children, young adolescents, older adolescents, and young adults between 2010 and 2016. Results We show significant improvements in coverage among children, adolescents, and young adults since 2010. We also find some gains in access during this time, particularly reductions in delayed care due to cost. While we observe few age-group differences in overall trends in coverage and access, our analysis reveals an age-gradient pattern, with incrementally worse coverage and access rates for young adolescents, older adolescents, and young adults. Conclusions Prior analyses often group adolescents with younger children, masking important distinctions. Future reforms should consider the increased coverage and access risks of adolescents and young adults, recognizing that approximately 40% are low income, over a third live in the South, where many states have not expanded Medicaid, and over 15% have compromised health.

New data reveal significant variation in economic mobility outcomes across U.S. localities. This suggests that social structures, institutions, and public policies—particularly those that influence critical early-life environments—play an important role in shaping mobility processes. Using new county-level estimates of intergenerational economic mobility for children born between 1980 and 1986, we exploit the uneven expansions of Medicaid eligibility across states to isolate the causal effect of this specific policy change on mobility outcomes. Instrumental-variable regression models reveal that increasing the proportion of low-income pregnant women eligible for Medicaid improved the mobility outcomes of their children in adulthood. We find no evidence that Medicaid coverage in later childhood years influences mobility outcomes. This study has implications for the normative evaluation of this policy intervention as well as our understanding of mobility processes in an era of rising inequality.

The nation needs to modernize its “built environment” of how Americans save for retirement. A good retirement savings system helps people adequately accumulate assets, invest those assets well, and receive those assets as a lifelong benefit. A universal, government-administered plan would provide adequate, advancedfunded retirement annuities for all—and, converting the tax deductions to a refundable tax credit is a key feature of fairness and efficiency. Guaranteed Retirement Accounts supplement Social Security and are mandated and a public option to current commercial IRAs and 401(k) plans.

Im Gegensatz zu vielen vorranging statischen Mobilitätsplattformen treffen in einer produktiven Daten-getriebenen Mobilitätsdienste-Plattform schreibintensive Batch- bis Stream-Prozesse auf hohe Zugriffsraten von Nutzern über die Web-Services. Die gesamte Datenaufbereitung läuft asynchron ab und ermöglicht so die Unterteilung in verschiedene Softwarebausteine, auf welchen sich die jeweiligen technischen Anforderungen effizienter, weil einfacher als bei monolithischen Architekturen umsetzen lassen. Dieses Kapitel präsentiert für die verschiedenen Abschnitte des Datenflusses unterschiedliche Skalierungsmöglichkeiten.

What has happened since President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional War on Poverty in his January 8, 1964 State of the Union Address? There is no doubt that the United States has become a more affluent nation since that famous declaration: Real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has in fact doubled over the past 50 years. Despite this growth, the official poverty rate for 2012 now stands at 15 percent, a full 4 percentage points higher than it was during the early 1970s. And the poverty rate is only 4 percentage points lower than the 19 percent rate of 1964. This apparent lack of progress against poverty cannot be blamed on the economic devastation wrought by the Great Recession, although that certainly increased poverty over the last five years. Rather, the direct connection between economic growth and poverty reduction is now much weaker than in the past. Poverty remains high because many workers have not shared in the economic gains of the past 40 years; instead most of those gains have been captured by the economic elite. Over these same decades, the official poverty measure has increasingly obscured some of the progress that has been made in reducing poverty because it fails to account for many government benefits the poor now receive, such as Food Stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. If these safety net benefits were counted as family income, today's official poverty rate would fall from 15 to about 11 percent...

After adjusting for sample-selection bias, I find a net decline in average stature of 0.64 inches in the birth cohorts of 1832--1860 in the US. This result supports the veracity of the Antebellum Puzzle—a deterioration of health during early modern economic growth in the US. However, this adjustment alters the trend in average stature, validating concerns over bias in the historical heights literature. The adjustment is based on census-linked military height data and uses a two-step semi-parametric sample-selection model to adjust for selection on observables and unobservables.