Little is known about the role that private sources play in making family planning available to women in sub-Saharan African countries. Analyzing the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys for 20 countries through IPUMS-DHS (Boyle, King, and Sobek 2018) and Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 data through IPUMS-PMA (Boyle, Kristiansen, and Sobek 2018), we first consider which women are most likely to utilize private sources. We find that unmarried women are especially likely to use private rather than public sources, as are younger, more educated, and wealthier women. Women using condoms or the pill as their contraceptive method are more likely to use private sources as well. Our second consideration is whether and how the level of private contraceptive source use influences unmet need for contraception, a key individual-level demographic indicator. An analysis of IPUMS-DHS data fails to uncover any relationship between the percentage of contraceptives within a region that come from private sources and unmet need. IPUMS-PMA data, show a small positive relationship, suggesting that increasing the presence of private providers may make women more aware of the possibility of shaping family size and the spacing of siblings.

Bu çalışma, cinsiyet hususunu dikkate alarak suçun belirleyicilerini açıklamayı hedeflemektedir. Arkansas eyaleti ve bu eyalet içerisinden 4 şehir rassal olarak seçilmiştir. Standart en küçük kareler ekonometrik tahmin sisteminin küme dirençli standart hatalar yöntemiyle kullanılmasıyla elde edilen tahmin sonuçları, gelir düzeyinin negatif ve tutuklanma olasılığının suç piyasasına katılımı pozitif ve istatistiki olarak anlamlı olarak etkilediğini göstermiştir. Bu çalışmanın en önemli bulgusu erkek ve kadınlar arasında gelir farkının artmasının erkeklerin, kadınlara göre, suç işleme oranını arttırdığını göstermesidir. Sonuçlar literatürden farklı olarak, tutuklanma olasılığının belirli bir eşik değerinden sonra, suç oranlarını arttırdığını göstermektedir.

Automobile use is recognized as affecting public health, environmental sustainability, land use, and household expense. Car use is closely tied to car ownership rates. Most car ownership research focuses on urban areas; however, 97% of the United States’ land area and a fifth of its population remains rural. Factors that affect car ownership in these communities may be different than in more urbanized areas. This research focuses on the 2,285 counties in the continental United States that are defined as entirely rural by the guidelines established in the Agricultural Act of 2014. These counties were grouped by five multi-state regions using U.S. Census Bureau definitions. Their percentage changes in car ownership, as well as other demographic variables, over a quarter century were calculated using data from the 1990 Decennial Census and the 2014 5-Year American Community Survey. A multiple regression model was estimated for each grouping to identify counties with lower-than-expected changes in car ownership. For each grouping, one of these outlying counties was selected and matched with another county whose changes in car ownership were within expected ranges given demographic developments. Local professionals were then interviewed to identify policies possibly responsible for the difference in car ownership trends between the matched-pair counties. The interviews suggested that, contrary to expectation, transportation policies had no discernable effect on rural car ownership, but land use polices and, more often, cultural factors linked to changing populations were associated with reduced rural car ownership.

This paper investigates long-term earnings differentials between African American and white men using data that match respondents in the Survey of Income and Program Participation to 30 years of their longitudinal earnings as recorded by the Social Security Administration. Given changing labor market conditions over three decades, we focus on how racial differentials vary by educational level because the latter has important and persistent effects on labor market outcomes over the course of an entire work career. The results show that the long-term earnings of African American men are more disadvantaged at lower levels of educational attainment. Controlling for demographic characteristics, work disability, and various indicators of educational achievement does not explain the lower long-term earnings of less-educated black men in comparison to less-educated white men. The interaction arises because black men without a high school degree have a larger number of years of zero earnings during their work careers. Other results show that this racial interaction by educational level is not apparent in cross-sectional data which do not provide information on the accumulation of zero earnings over the course of 30 years. We interpret these findings as indicating that compared to either less-educated white men or highly educated black men, the long-term earnings of less-educated African American men are likely to be more negatively affected by the consequences of residential and economic segregation, unemployment, being out of the labor force, activities in the informal economy, incarceration, and poorer health.

This article advances an environmental-sociological and quantitative spatial-analytic approach to the study of environmental inequality formation in coal country. We use spatial error regression models in a case study of 2000 census block group proximity to hazardous coal waste impoundments amidst shifting coal production trajectories and impoundment disaster contexts in the declining Eastern Kentucky coalfields. Proximity to abandoned and sealed mines, coal production density, and the “buffering effect” of rural-agricultural context are the most powerful predictors of impoundment proximity in the period encapsulating the boom years of coal production and culminating in 2000. Amidst continued coal industry decline and the post-2000 Martin County impoundment disaster context, proximity to older impoundments, including the failed Martin County impoundment, proximity to abandoned and sealed mines, and poverty levels by 2000 are the most powerful predictors of proximity to impoundments sited from 2001 to 2006. Findings have important environmental justice research and policy implications.

Purpose This study identifies bank deserts in the U.S. in 2009 and 2015, separately for inner city, suburban and rural areas. It also identifies correlations between bank deserts, population characteristics, market competition, and payday lending restrictions, both cross-sectionally and over time. Design/methodology/approach FDIC data on bank office locations are used to identify bank deserts, defined as the 5% of census tracts with the greatest distance from the centroid to the nearest office. Those data are matched to both American Community Survey data to identify population characteristics, to a list of states with payday lending prohibitions, and to levels of market competition. An alternative measure of bank deserts corrects for population density. Geography is analyzed, mean characteristics compared, and random effects regressions capture static and dynamic correlates. Findings Population density explains approximately half of bank distance variance. Bank deserts appear more often in southern and western states, and expanded significantly in inner cities while contracting in rural areas. Regression results suggest African Americans were overall and increasingly likely to live in bank deserts and Native Americans were overall more likely to live in rural bank deserts. Rural poverty is linked to bank deserts, and the effects of competition are complex. Practical implications Space for policy intervention exists in African American inner cities and Native American rural communities. Originality/value The relative measure of bank deserts is novel, as are dynamic estimates and random effects analysis of correlates.

To mine significant dependencies among predictive attributes, much work has been carried out to learn Bayesian netwrok classifiers (BNCT s) from labeled training data set T. However, if BNCT does not capture the "right" dependencies that would be most relevant to unlabeled testing instance, that will result in performance degradation. To address this issue we propose a novel framework, called target learning, that takes each unlabeled testing instance as a target and builds an "unstable" Bayesian model BNCP for it. To make BNCP and BNCT complementary to each other and work efficiently in combination, the same learning strategy is applied to build them. Experimental comparison on 32 large data sets from UCI machine learning repository shows that, for BNCs with different degrees of dependence target learning always helps improve the generalization performance with minimal additional computation.

PURPOSE:To conduct the first epidemiologic study prospectively examining the association between particulate matter air pollution < 2.5 µm in diameter (PM2.5) exposure and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk in the U.S. METHODS:Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) provided information on HCC cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2014 from 16 population-based cancer registries across the U.S. Ambient PM2.5 exposure was estimated by linking the SEER county with a spatial PM2.5 model using a geographic information system. Poisson regression with robust variance estimation was used to calculate incidence rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between ambient PM2.5 exposure per 10 µg/m3 increase and HCC risk adjusting for individual-level age at diagnosis, sex, race, year of diagnosis, SEER registry, and county-level information on health conditions, lifestyle, demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors. RESULTS:Higher levels of ambient PM2.5 exposure were associated with a statistically significant increased risk for HCC (n = 56,245 cases; adjusted IRR per 10 µg/m3 increase = 1.26, 95% CI 1.08, 1.47; p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS:If confirmed in studies with individual-level PM2.5 exposure and risk factor information, these results suggest that ambient PM2.5 exposure may be a risk factor for HCC in the U.S.

Financial sector wages increased extraordinarily over the last decades. An explanation for this trend is that skill demand rose more in finance than other sectors. We use Swedish administrative data, which include cognitive and non-cognitive ability, as well as U.S. data, to examine talent allocation and relative wages in the financial sector. We find no evidence that talent in finance improved, neither on average nor at the top. A changing composition or return to talent cannot account for the surging wage premium. Our findings alleviate concerns about a brain drain, but indicate that finance workers capture rising rents over time.

The Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) from the 1860 Census of Population (one percent sample of free people) is used to study the occupational distribution and the determinants of socio-economic status of Jewish men (age 16 to 60) compared to other free men. Jews cannot be identified directly, but two versions of the Distinctive Jewish Name (DJN) technique are used to identify men with a higher probability of being Jewish. The men identified as likely to be Jewish are more likely to be in managerial, clerical, machine operator, and sales (especially as peddlers) occupations. They are less likely to be in farm related occupations as owners, tenants, managers, or laborers. Using multiple regression analysis to study the Duncan Socio-Economic Index (SEI), it is found that the index increases with age (at a decreasing rate), literacy, being married, and living in the South. It is lower among (free) non-whites, among the foreign-born, those with more children, and those living in rural areas (especially on farms). Other variables the same, US-born Jews do not differ significantly in SEI from other free, native-born men, but foreign-born Jews have a significantly higher SEI than other immigrants or even US-born non-Jews.

Under the dependent coverage expansion (DCE) provision of health reform adult children up to 26 years of age whose parents have employer-sponsored or individual health insurance are eligible for insurance under their parents’ health plan. Using a difference-in-differences approach and the 2008–2014 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Emergency Department Databases and State Inpatient Databases we examined the impact of the DCE on hospital services use. In analyses of individuals age <26 years (compared to individuals over 26) we found a 1.5% increase in non-pregnancy related inpatient visits in 2010 through 2013 during the initial DCE period and a 1.6% increase in 2014 when other state expansions went into effect. We found that the impact of the DCE persisted into 2014 when many state insurance expansions occurred, although effects varied for states adopting and not adopting Medicaid expansions.

While increases in women's labor force participation might be expected to reduce breastfeeding, prior research results for low and middle income countries are mixed. This study advances knowledge in this area by linking data on women’s employment from IPUMS-International (Minnesota Population Center 2017) with data on breastfeeding from IPUMS-DHS (Boyle, King, and Sobek 2017). We utilize a multilevel ordered logit of data on children drawn from three African DHS: in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia. Our dependent variable is compliance with World Health Organization standards for exclusive breastfeeding, begun within one hour of birth and continued for at least six months. We test the effect not only of mother's own employment but also regional levels of female agricultural employment and female nonagricultural employment at the second administrative level. We find that women’s individual employment has no effect on length of breastfeeding, but greater levels of female nonagricultural employment are associated with reduced probability of compliance with the WHO standards. Further, mother’s employment interacts with regional female nonagricultural labor such that nonworking women in areas with high levels of nonagricultural employment have notably lower odds of WHO compliance than working women.

This paper studies how offshoring-related layoff events change the mix of skills that are demanded by trade-affected establishments and firms. Our analysis relies on a novel data set which combines the universe of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) petitions filed by US establishments during 2010-2015 with detailed information on online job vacancies. TAA petitions allow us to precisely identify the timing of layoff events, the number of affected workers, and the type of offshoring resulting in the layoff (materials versus service). Utilizing within establishment and within firm variation in the timing of filing a TAA petition, we find that service offshoring events do not change the overall number of posted job vacancies at either the establishment or firm levels. However, service offshoring leads to an increase in the demand for "soft" skills (such as communication) and in the demand for "specific skills" (such as computer) across establishments within the same firm. Conversely, we find that materials offshoring events reduce demand for labor while having no impact on the composition of skills demand.

Objectives. To estimate the risk of mortality from police homicide by race/ethnicity and place in the United States. Methods. We used novel data on police-involved fatalities and Bayesian models to estimate mortality risk for Black, Latino, and White men for all US counties by Census division and metropolitan area type. Results. Police kill, on average, 2.8 men per day. Police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018. Black men's mortality risk is between 1.9 and 2.4 deaths per 100 000 per year, Latino risk is between 0.8 and 1.2, and White risk is between 0.6 and 0.7. Conclusions. Police homicide risk is higher than suggested by official data. Black and Latino men are at higher risk for death than are White men, and these disparities vary markedly across place. Public Health Implications. Homicide reduction efforts should consider interventions to reduce the use of lethal force by police. Efforts to address unequal police violence should target places with high mortality risk. (Am J

To understand national trends in mortality over time, it is important to study differences by demographic, socioeconomic and geographic characteristics. One issue with studying mortality inequalities, particularly by socioeconomic status, is that there are few micro-level data sources available that link an individual's SES with their eventual age and date of death. In this paper, a new dataset for studying mortality disparities and changes over time in the United States is presented. The dataset, termed 'CenSoc', uses two large-scale datasets: the full-count 1940 Census to obtain demographic, socioeconomic and geographic information; and that is linked to the Social Security Deaths Masterfile (SSDM) to obtain mortality information. This paper also develops mortality estimation methods to better use the 'deaths without denominators' information contained in CenSoc. Bayesian hierarchical methods are presented to estimate truncated death distributions over age and cohort, allowing for prior information in mortality trends to be incorporated and estimates of life expectancy and associated uncertainty to be produced.

How do we ensure that waste and inefficiency do not undermine the mission of publicly funded schools? Derek Neal writes that economists must analyze education policy in the same way they analyze other procurement problems. Insights from research on incentives and contracts in the private sector point to new approaches that could induce publicly funded educators to provide excellent education, even though taxpayers and parents cannot monitor what happens in the classroom. Information, Incentives, and Education Policy introduces readers to what economists know—and do not know—about the logjams created by misinformation and disincentives in education. Examining a range of policy agendas, from assessment-based accountability and centralized school assignments to charter schools and voucher systems, Neal demonstrates where these programs have been successful, where they have failed, and why. The details clearly matter: there is no quick-and-easy fix for education policy. By combining elements from various approaches, economists can help policy makers design optimal reforms. Information, Incentives, and Education Policy is organized to show readers how standard tools from economics research on information and incentives speak directly to some of the most crucial issues in education today. In addition to providing an overview of the pluses and minuses of particular programs, each chapter includes a series of exercises that allow students of economics to work through the mathematics for themselves or with an instructor’s assistance. For those who wish to master the models and tools that economists of education should use in their work, there is no better resource available.

I started writing my blog, Family Inequality, in 2009. My purpose was to engage with people around the social trends and events that were dra­matically shifting the landscape in which I worked. These were stark: Economic inequality increased, with those at the top pulling away from everyone else and progress stagnating or worse in the middle. Marriage rates fell and the proportion of children born to parents who weren't mar­ried rose. And inequality in access to marriage ramped up, in particular the gap in marriage rates between rich and poor, and between Black and White. These three trends are all interconnected, and each became a part of the cultural and political debates of the day on everything from parent­ing styles and poverty rates to election demographics and the future of economic growth. Then, in 2012, same-sex marriage erupted into academic sociology with the publication of an incendiary study claiming children were worse off if their parents were gay or lesbian-just as the issue was working its way toward the Supreme Court. This raised the possibility that social sci­ence, wielded by religious conservatives for political ends, would derail the very visible progress toward a possible breakthrough in equality for gay and lesbian couples. Most of us who had already been arguing about...

Wisconsin is expected to experience positive job growth through 2022, but will the state have workers to fill these jobs? Challenges include the retirement of baby boomers, migration patterns that do not favor Wisconsin, as well as skill and geographic mismatches between available workers and available jobs. The state has a unique opportunity to meet these challenges by leveraging evidence-based policy options such as using data to better align education and workforce training programs with employers’ needs, providing more practical experiences to students who will be future workers, accelerating the preparation of low-skilled workers to meet current demand, and finding ways to engage and support the chronically unemployed. Policymakers might also consider proactively shaping the future labor market by encouraging entrepreneurship and the growth of high-skilled jobs, facilitating community efforts to attract residents, and strengthening policies that support working families.