The objective of this thesis is to identify a profile of volunteerism in the United States. Time spent in service of others serves as the dependent variable while explanatory variables include years of education, annual family income, sex, age, household size, racial identity, marital status, region, disability, veteran status, location in a metropolitan area, day of the week, employment status, and if the household has children present. By modeling volunteerism through an econometric lens, this thesis will analyze the concept of time spent in service and how it relates to the Midwestern identity among other attributes. Using data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the study will provide estimates on if residing in the Midwest impacts the hours of volunteerism or time spent in service while examining how this impact differs by education, income level, age, and gender.

Income tends to increase with age, because more work experience and education tends to lead to higher paying jobs. However, young people can also earn higher incomes. Using data from the most recent 2022 American Community Survey, let’s see what those people studied and what they do for a living.

Introduction Nationally, women of African heritage die at higher rates from breast cancer than women of other races or ethnicities. We developed Breast Cancer Champions (BCC) a peer-to-peer education program, which recruited 12 women and deployed them into the community in August 2020 during the height of the COVID-pandemic. BCC aims to improve breast cancer screening rates for women of African heritage through peer-to-peer education, which has proven successful for addressing cancer-related health disparities. Methods BCC community experts, or "Champions," are peer-to-peer educators that conduct awareness and screening events in their communities. Champion's education activities were tracked by biweekly check-in calls, which recorded the activity type, location, and the number of participants for each event. We used spatial and statistical analyses to determine the ecacy of the program at increasing screening rates for women within the area of Champion activity versus women outside of their activity area. Results Over 15 months, Champions conducted 245 in-person or online events to engage women in their community for screening. More women of African heritage were screened in areas champions were active during the intervention compared to historical data comparing areas outside of the Champion activity in the prior 15 months (X 2 = 3.0845, p = 0.079). Conclusion BCC successes could be attributed to pivoting to online community building when in-person events were restricted and enabling Champions to design and conduct their own events, which increased outreach possibilities. We demonstrate improved screening outcomes associated with an updated peer-to-peer education program.

Objectives: This study examined COVID-19’s impact in the 2020 compared to 2019 survey years on preventive medical care utilization. Research Design: Using a cross-sectional sample of adults aged 18 years and over (2019; n = 31,997; 2020; n = 31,568), from the National Health Interview Survey, multivariable models compared 2020 to 2019 survey years for receiving diabetes screening blood tests, well-care visits, and physical therapy. An additional multivariable model predicted not having medical care due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020 2020 survey year. Results: In the 2020 versus 2019 survey years, the likelihood lowered for receiving a blood test for diabetes screening (aOR.83 CI =.76,.90). There was a lowered likelihood for a well care visits (aOR =.98 CI =.84, 1.1) and physical therapy (aOR =.97 CI =.89, 1.0). Black (aOR =.62 CI =.51,.75), Hispanic (aOR =.62 CI =.51,.75) and Asian (aOR.67 CI =.53,.86) adults had a lowered likelihood of having physical therapy compared to White adults. Having no insurance coverage lowered the likelihood of getting all three indicators of preventive medical care. There was a higher likelihood of not getting medical care due to COVID-19 in the 2020 survey year (aOR = 1.7 CI = 1.3, 2.1) with Medicaid compared to private coverage. Conclusions: Use of preventive medical care lowered in the pandemic. Race and ethnicity and not having any coverage contributed to not receiving preventive care. Medicaid appeared to increase utilization of preventive medical care but not acute medical care.

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land abundance favored higher fertility. The demands of childcare, compounded with isolation from extended family as well as a lack of social and market infrastructure, constrained female opportunities outside the home. Frontier women were less likely to report "gainful employment," but among those who did, relatively more had high-status occupations. Together, these findings integrate contrasting narratives about frontier women-some emphasizing their entrepreneurial independence, others their prevailing domesticity. The distinctive frontier gender roles, in turn, shaped norms over the long run. Counties with greater historical frontier exposure exhibit lower female labor force participation through the 21st century. Time use data suggests this does not come with additional leisure but rather with more household work. These gender inequalities are accompanied by weaker political participation among women. While the historical frontier may have been empowering for some women, its predominant domesticity reinforced inegalitarian gender norms over the long run.

We examine the degree to which parental gender preferences in the USA have changed over time. To quantify levels of parental sex preference, we compare the likelihood that mothers have a third child given the gender makeup of their first two children. We construct a novel dataset of women’s fertility histories using full-count censuses from 1850–1880 and 1900–1940 and extend the sample to 2019 using more recent datasets. We find a preference for having a mix of genders with only a small preference for sons. We find that a woman is about 2 percentage points more likely to have a third child if the sex of her first two children is the same, and this effect was very stable from 1850 to 1940. In contrast, we find that this effect gets mu ch larger after 1940, reaching a high point in 1990–2000 of about 6–7 percentage points.

Recent crash reports have consistently shown an over-representation of crashes involving non-motorized roa d users relative to their share of the traveled person-miles. Addressing non- motorized transportation s ys tem u sers’ safety is crucial due to their vulnerability, as w ell a s to promote human and environmental health benefits. This study employs GIS to investigate various exposure measures for pedestrian and cyclist crashes in Lincoln, Nebraska. The analyses use multimodal traffic vol umes predicted from StreetLight Location-Based Services (LBS) data, along with demographic, socioeconomic, land use, and road characteristics data. In terms of predicting crashes, LBS-based traffic variables, such as vehicular, pedestrian, and bike volumes show promising accuracy. Pedestrian and bicycle volumes exhibit a strong correlation with crash rates, whereas vehicular volumes show a relatively weaker correlation. D emographic, socioeconomic, land use, and road characteristics attributes showed limited varying potential as individual predictors of crashes. The integration of these variables with LBS-based traffic data is recommended to enable the accurate identification of crash-prone locations. The paper highligh ths the importance of LBS data in an equitable transportation planning and decision-making process through the inclusion of older vehicles and non-motorized users.

This dissertation consists of three independent essays on transportation and environmental economics. Chapter 1 studies the impacts of docked bikeshare on residential property prices and the metro station house price gradient in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Public bikeshare systems have gained popularity in the United States over the past decade. This study examines the effect of bikeshare systems on property prices and the so-called metro station house price gradient, i.e., the curve that depicts the relationship between property prices and distance to the closest metro station. A priori, bikeshare can have ambiguous effects on residential property prices and the (metro station house) price gradient. It can provide amenities, e.g., by solving the last-mile problem for residents living within a certain radius of metro stations. On the other hand, it can have disamenity effects as more non-residents gain easier access to a neighborhood. Amenity and disamenity effects will affect property prices in opposing ways. The heterogeneous amenity and disamenity effects at different distances to metro stations, and the extent to which bikeshare and metro rail are complements or substitutes, can affect the price gradient. This study employs a hedonic regression model with difference-in-differences to analyze how residential property prices and the price gradient respond to the introduction of docked bikeshare in eight counties and cities of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The study uses detailed property level transaction data from Zillow along withdata on the locations and opening dates of Capital Bikeshare stations and metro stations. This study is the first to examine the effects of bikeshare systems on the price gradient in the North American context. Results show that introducing bikeshare stations near residential properties has no net effect on property prices or the price gradient. A conceptual model is developed to provide possible explanations for the results. Chapter 2, co-authored with Xiaoying Yang, examines the relationship between docked bikeshare systems and public transit in U.S. cities. Bikeshare systems have gained popularity in the United States in recent years as they are an environmentally friendly mode of micro-transportation. This study examines the relationship between docked bikeshare systems and public transit ridership in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs). Bikeshare can be a complement to public transit as it provides a solution to the first/last-mile problem. On the other hand, bikeshare can be a substitute for public transit as people replace short-distance public transit trips with bike rides. This study presents a multi-MSA analysis that includes small and medium-sized MSAs, using transit agency-level monthly ridership data and bike- share entry dates in 31 MSAs. We employ a difference-in-differences model and an event study specification to examine the impacts of docked bikeshare entry in an MSA on public transit ridership. The results show that following bikeshare entry, monthly bus ridership declines by 4.6%. However, rail ridership does not experience a significant change in response to bikeshare entry. In addition, this study uses MSA-level monthly docked bikeshare trip data to analyze the relationship between bikeshare use and public transit ridership. The results also indicate that docked bikeshare primarily serves as a net substitute for buses. However, we find heterogeneity in the effects of bikeshare entry and bus ridership. Specifically, in large MSAs or MSAs that are more bikeable or more transit-friendly, bikeshare tends to serve as a substitute for buses, reducing transit ridership. Conversely, in small or non-bikeable MSAs, this negative impact diminishes. Chapter 3, also co-authored with Xiaoying Yang, analyzes the effects of fuel standard upgrades on urban air pollution in China. Improving fuel quality is an important means of reducing tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles, the main contributor to air pollution in urban areas. This study is based on temporal differences in the implementation of gasoline standard VI in Chinese cities, using a difference-in-differences (DID) method, an event study design, and a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design to investigate the effects of upgrading fuel standards on air quality. We use city-level hourly pollutant data for 334 Chinese cities between 2014 and 2019 and aggregate them to the weekly and monthly levels. The primary results from the DID models show that the upgrade from gasoline standard V to VI has significantly improved air quality, with a 15.2% improvement in the air quality index (AQI). Specifically, PM2.5 and PM10 were reduced by 21.02% and 14.53%, respectively. Results from the RDiT further support the findings from the DID analysis. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the reductions in these pollutants led to a total health benefit of $23.98 billion per year.

In this paper, we propose a method for constructing an occupation-based socioeconomic index that can easily incorporate changes in occupational structure. The resulting index is the occupational percentile rank for a given cohort, based on contemporaneous information pertaining to educational composition and the number of workers at the occupation level. An occupation may experience an increase or decrease in its occupational rank due to changes in relative sizes and educational compositions across occupations. The method is flexible in dealing with changes in occupational and educational measurements over time. Applying the method to U.S. history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, we derive the index using IPUMS U.S. Census microdata from 1850 to 2000 and the American Community Surveys (ACSs) from 2001 to 2018. Compared to previous occupational measures, this new measure takes into account occupational status evolvement caused by long-term secular changes in occupational size and educational composition. The resulting percentile rank measure can be easily merged with social surveys and administrative data that include occupational measures based on the U.S. Census occupation codes and crosswalks.

Lack of access to safe, affordable, timely and adequate pregnancy termination care, and the stigma associated with abortion in low-middle income countries (LMICs), pose a serious risk to women’s physical and mental well-being throughout the lifespan. Factors associated with pregnancy termination and their heterogeneity across countries in LMICs previously have not been thoroughly investigated. We aim to determine the relative significance of factors associated with pregnancy termination in LMICs and its variation across countries. Analysis of cross-sectional nationally representative household surveys carried out in 36 LMICs from 2010 through 2018. The weighted population-based sample consisted of 1,236,330 women of childbearing aged 15–49 years from the Demographic and Health Surveys. The outcome of interest was self-report of having ever had a pregnancy terminated. We used multivariable logistic regression models to identify factors associated with pregnancy termination. The average pooled weighted prevalence of pregnancy termination in the present study was 13.3% (95% CI: 13.2%-13.4%), ranging from a low of 7.8 (95% CI: 7.2, 8.4%) in Namibia to 33.4% (95% CI: 32.0, 34.7%) in Pakistan. Being married showed the strongest association with pregnancy termination (adjusted OR, 2.94; 95% CI, 2.84–3.05; P < 0.001) compared to unmarried women. Women who had more than four children had higher odds of pregnancy termination (adjusted OR, 2.45; 95% CI, 2.33–2.56; P < 0.001). Moreover, increased age and having primary and secondary levels of education were associated with higher odds of pregnancy termination compared to no education. In this study, married women, having one or more living children, those of older age, and those with at least primary level of education were associated with pregnancy termination in these 36 LMICs. The findings highlighted the need of targeted public health intervention to reduce unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a local measure of walkability in San Francisco County and evaluate walkability by race, ethnicity, and educational attainment at the census block group level. We used data collected as part of the 2019-2020 Bay Area Young Adult Health Study, wherein we conducted audits of 1525 randomly selected census blocks to assess domains, such as aesthetics, access to amenities, street safety, and topography, which we then imputed to the remaining blocks in the city for overall coverage. We linked the walkability index to 2015-2019 American Community Survey Data aggregating walkability to the block group level. We performed a geographically weighted regression to measure associations between walkability, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment and found signicant negative associations between walkability and the percentage of non-Hispanic Black residents in specic neighborhoods and non-Hispanic Asian residents in all neighborhoods. We also found signicant positive associations between the percentage of residents with a bachelor's or higher degree and walkability. Inequities in walkability across neighborhoods in San Francisco County largely mirrored sociodemographic inequities. Our approach to constructing a walkability index points to a relatively ecient means of estimating ne-scale neighborhood characteristics in urban areas, and our ndings suggest that investments in neighborhood infrastructure may positively impact walkability and address broader inequity concerns.

BackgroundEarly-life stressful experiences are associated with increased risk of adverse psychological outcomes in later life. However, much less is known about associations between early-life positive experiences, such as participation in cognitively stimulating activities, and late-life mental health. We investigated whether greater engagement in cognitively stimulating activities in early life is associated with lower risk of depression and anxiety in late life.MethodsWe surveyed former participants of the St. Louis Baby Tooth study, between 22 June 2021 and 25 March 2022 to collect information on participants' current depression/anxiety symptoms and their early-life activities (N = 2187 responded). A composite activity score was created to represent the early-life activity level by averaging the frequency of self-reported participation in common cognitively stimulating activities in participants' early life (age 6, 12, 18), each rated on a 1 (least frequent) to 5 (most frequent) point scale. Depression/anxiety symptoms were measured by Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder Screener (GAD-7). We used logistic regressions to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of outcome risk associated with frequency of early-life activity.ResultsEach one-point increase in the early-life composite cognitive activity score was associated with an OR of 0.54 (95% CI 0.38–0.77) for late-life depression and an OR of 0.94 (95% CI 0.61–1.43) for late-life anxiety, adjusting for age, sex, race, parental education, childhood family structure, and socioeconomic status.ConclusionsMore frequent participation in cognitively stimulating activities during early life was associated with reduced risk of late-life depression.

The effectiveness of public policing has become an important issue given recent discussions of defunding law enforcement. This has also led to a discussion about the role of private security in potentially filling the void of creating public safety in the absence of public security. Thus, it is implicitly assumed that private security and public police are substitutes for one another. Alternatively, these two forms of security could complement each other. Causally determining whether private security and public police are complements or substitutes for one another is complicated by numerous layers of endogeneity. Nevertheless, excluding the presence of private security from a causal analysis of the effect of public police on crime could result in omitted variable bias. In this work we utilize survey data on private security and public police, as well as crime data, by county over the period 2006–2019 to explore the extent that omitting private security confounds an analysis of public security and crime. Our results indicate that it is a non-trivial omission to exclude private security from such analyses.

The Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) demonstration, a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), aims to help workers with recently acquired injuries and disabilities remain in the labor force. Following a pilot phase, DOL awarded cooperative agreements to state agencies in Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, and Vermont to fully implement RETAIN services. These five RETAIN programs aim to identify and recruit a subset of workers who could be at risk of exiting the labor force and applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). In this brief, we compare the characteristics of people who enrolled in RETAIN in 2022 with all workers and with applicants for SSDI and SSI, in their respective states. Characteristics of RETAIN enrollees differed substantially from those of the two comparison populations. On average, RETAIN enrollees had lower recent earnings than workers in their state but higher earnings than applicants for disability benefits. We also found significant differences between RETAIN enrollees and the comparison populations in sociodemographic characteristics, such as gender, age, race and ethnicity, and education. The findings illustrate how RETAIN enrollees differ from the states' worker populations and the extent to which the RETAIN demonstration projects are reaching people who might be at greatest risk of applying for disability benefits.

Rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility are generally justified by their invariance to changes in inequality. However, I show that whenever the source of inequality is uncorrelated to parent ranks, such as in the cases of gender and birth order, increasing equality leads to a fall in rank mobility as measured by the rank correlation. I develop a method to ex-post quantify the importance of inequality for mobility measurement using cross-sectional income distributions and show that US income mobility could have fallen by as much as 24 percent since 1970 due to increased gender equality. Without specifying a policy objective of interest, it is therefore unclear which conclusions to draw from differences in rank-correlations across societies or from changes over time.

This paper examines the effects of the Safe Delivery Incentive Program in Nepal, a cash transfer program that reduced the costs of childbirth in healthcare facilities. Women giving birth for the first, second, or third time (below-cutoff) became eligible in 2005, and women giving birth for the fourth time or more (above-cutoff) became eligible two years later. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that below-cutoff women in high Human Development Index (HDI) districts increased facility delivery by 8.8 percentage points. Despite larger cost reductions, below-cutoff women in low HDI districts did not increase facility delivery but increased home delivery with skilled personnel by 4.8 percentage points. The program had no impact on above-cutoff women, who become eligible 2 years into the program. I suggest that pre-existing barriers such as poor infrastructure of roads and facilities, customs, liquidity constraints, and lack of program awareness limited the program's effectiveness.

This thesis investigates the effectiveness and impact of protected areas (PAs) on biodiversity conservation and human well-being in Zambia's Muchinga Province. Using a postpositivist lens and primarily quantitative methodologies, the research explores the potential placement of PAs based on geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical analyses and examines the outcomes of existing PAs in protecting biodiversity and promoting human health and material well-being. The results show promising siting of PAs from a conservation perspective, but also reveal challenges, such as forest loss within protected boundaries. The analysis on human well-being indicates mixed results, with no significant correlation between PAs and childhood health, but a significant association between PA proximity and household wealth. Addressing the shortcomings of PAs, particularly in game management areas, is recommended to enhance their effectiveness in both conserving biodiversity and supporting local livelihoods. The thesis underscores the need for a community- centered approach to PA management and calls for further research on community perceptions and additional well-being indicators to guide future conservation strategies and sustainable development efforts in Muchinga Province.

This paper explores the extent to which ties to migration destination affect housing tenure decisions for movers in the US, in particular, long distance (LD) movers. 1 Using American Community Survey from 2012 to 2019, we show that LD movers are less likely to own their next home compared to short distance (SD) movers by 5.1 percentage points. We explore how various channels of local ties affect LD movers' housing tenure choices. We find that, among LD movers, the lack of geographic proximity reduces the likelihood to own their next home, while social connectedness can mitigate this effect substantially. This result is robust across different empirical specifications. Our analysis also shows that these local ties bear very different significance for SD movers' housing tenure choices compared to LD movers.

This study provides new evidence on the local labor market impacts of trade, differentiating between the employment, income, migration, and informality channels. It uses a unique dataset matching information on exports and imports from customs with indicators on employment and labor incomes for around 2,000 Mexican municipalities over 2004–14. The analysis uses an instrumental variable approach that combines the initial structure of trade across municipalities with global trends in trade between low- and middle-income countries (excluding Mexico) and the United States by sector. First, the study finds that expanding exports per worker in Mexico’s municipalities increased labor force participation but not employment rates. Exports also raised total labor incomes but not average labor incomes, implying a growing labor supply. The results also find that export and import expansion increased immigration and lowered the rate of informal workers. Second, the analysis examines differences by geography and sectors. It finds that trade affected labor markets in the North through the income and migration channels and in the South through the employment and informality channels. Exports benefitted the total incomes of workers in both the manufacturing and service sectors but reduced informality only in manufacturing. Third, the study suggests a more favorable role of intermediate relative to final imports, driven by manufacturing imports. It also finds evidence for positive spillovers from global value chain participation through the employment and income channels. Finally, it examines how local policy mediates the labor market effects from trade, focusing on connectivity, labor market flexibility, and education spending.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary source of labor force data in the United States; the panel component of the CPS provides an excellent opportunity for studying short-run change in areas such as labor force participation and poverty. The Census Bureau's recommended procedures for linking CPS data occasionally yield a collection of matched observations that appears-based on demographic information-to represent different people rather than a single person across CPS files. We describe our methodology for assigning a unique identifier to records that share Census Bureau identifiers and have demographic characteristics that are consistent across observations. The identifier eliminates a currently-recommended step when working with linked CPS data-checking to ensure that records with a shared identifier look like the same individual based on age, sex, and race-and provides researchers a common starting point for analyzing validated CPS panel data. This identifier extends previous efforts at IPUMS CPS to create unique identifiers for leveraging the panel aspect of the CPS and are available from IPUMS CPS.