The income inequality hypothesis is one of the most influential ideas in public health. It posits that in the affluent world income inequality per se has a direct, independent and detrimental effect on health. This hypothesis, established in the 1990s, led to the publication of hundreds of articles across multiple disciplines. This hypothesis is also rather controversial. Debates surround the actual effect of income inequality and the hypothesized mechanisms. The evidence is consistently inconsistent. I argue that several conceptual and methodological limitations afflict this literature and hinder our understanding of the relationship between income inequality and health. In particular, I highlight four limitations: 1) simplistic treatment of inequality and poverty; 2) reliance on cross-national ecological comparisons that do not adequately consider the contributions of unusual cases; 3) reliance on cross-sectional comparisons; 4) reliance on a limited use of indicators. These limitations prompted the present dissertation research, which comprises three empirical studies. In the first study, I reanalyze publicly available data on income inequality and health across 20 affluent countries and 50 U.S. states. Drawing on the analytical difference between gap and headcount measures of income distributions, I argue that income inequality and poverty are dependent but distinct, and I estimate the extent to which poverty rates modify the relationship between income inequality and health. Across countries, the interaction of income inequality and poverty has a significant and adverse effect on health. Across U.S. states, instead, the interaction is not significant because the effect of poverty completely nullifies the effect of income inequality. In the second study, I delve into the interaction observed when comparing affluent countries in the first study. I use a recently developed methodology that decomposes regression coefficient estimates into unique case-specific contributions. I focus on the most frequently used measure of population health, life expectancy. I estimate OLS regression models with four different model specifications, which I then decompose. Four cases make major contributions to the coefficient estimates in all of the models. Two of these cases, Denmark and Japan, are particularly important because they challenge theoretical expectations: Denmark shows remarkably low life expectancy despite low levels of income inequality and poverty; Japan has the highest life expectancy despite relatively high levels of poverty. Denmark’s low life expectancy is explained by the high mortality risk of women born between WWI and WWII, who exhibited a lifelong high propensity to smoke. Japan’s high life expectancy is due to a concerted series of government initiatives (e.g., establishment of universal health insurance coverage, salt reduction . . .

Americans currently face an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. Nowhere is this crisis more pronounced than for the rental households in the Los Angeles Metro area. Inclusionary zoning is one tool local jurisdictions have used to provide affordable housing units, but there is debate over the negative secondary effects this policy could have in the market. As inclusionary zoning has just been re-authorized by the California legislature, now is a particularly apt time to take a closer look at its effects on the broader rental housing market. This research utilizes American Community Survey data to estimate the effects of inclusionary zoning on affordability rates in LA and Orange counties.

This paper studies the effects of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative on health insurance coverage, access to care, health care use, and health outcomes. We exploit a difference-in-differences that relies on the discontinuity in program eligibility criteria. We find that DACA increased insurance coverage. In states that granted access to Medicaid, the increase was driven by an increase in public insurance take-up. Where public coverage was not available, DACA eligibility increased individually purchased insurance. Despite the increase in insurance coverage, there is no evidence of significant increases in health care use, although there is some evidence that DACA increased demand for mental health services. After 2012, DACA- eligible individuals were more likely to report a usual place of care and less likely to delay care because of financial restrictions. Finally, we find some evidence that DACA improved self-reported health, and reduced depression symptoms, indicators of stress and anxiety, and hypertension. These improvements are concentrated among individuals with income below the federal poverty level.

Georgia faces serious challenges in the effort to strengthen and expand the middle class. Earnings and income inequality are higher than the already high levels overall in the US. Educational attainment remains uneven; only about one in four men ages 25 to 34, have at least an Associates (AA) degree. Economic mobility in the Atlanta metropolitan area is among the lowest of all metropolitan areas in the US (Chetty et al. 2014). Georgia’s Department of Education reports graduation rates that are less than 80 percent. Over half of those without at least an AA degree have family incomes in or near the federal poverty level. For the 513,000 young Georgians (25- to 34-year-olds) with at most a high school degree, poverty and near poverty rates reach over 60 percent. As of 2015, over one in three of these less educated, 25-34-year-old Georgians were without jobs despite a Georgia unemployment rate of about . . .

Since the construction of the Africa Sector Database (ASD) at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, there has been a wave of statistical reforms in some of the countries in the ASD leading to significant revaluations of GDP. These reforms have provided a clearer picture of the size and structure of production of the countries involved (Sy, 2015). We update the ASD to reflect these statistical changes. Most importantly, following the methodology of ASD, we expand the ASD by constructing sectoral data for seven new African countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda and Uganda. This has resulted in an expanded database (from the 1960s to 2015) covering about 80% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa.

The nature of the employer-employee relationship is drastically changing in the United States, with lead employers employing fewer workers directly and instead relying on intermediaries and contracting firms for providing labor services. In this paper we investigate the incidence and effects of outsourcing labor service jobs in food, cleaning, security and logistics (FCSL) to business service firms. We first provide long time series using Census and ACS data documenting large movements of FCSL jobs to business service firms, with an accelerating trend since the Great Recession. We then analyze how the outsourcing of jobs affects wages at those jobs by identifying on-site outsourcing events in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) dataset which allows us to compare the same worker before and after he is outsourced to a business service firm. Preliminary results suggest long-run earnings losses of about 5% for the outsourced workers and higher job-to-job mobility.

What is the relationship between family structure and economic inequality? Family structures in Europe and the Americas have changed and marriage has declined since the mid-1990s (OECD 2016a). Moreover, increasing economic inequality in these countries has become the object of considerable concern among scholars, policymakers, and journalists. The conversation about inequality, however, has not systematically focused on the ways in which changes in family structure may be connected to economic inequality, both as a consequence and a cause of this inequality. Existing debate has often unfolded as though the economic and the cultural changes are two independent events: Progressives have focused on the economic causes of changing family structures, while conservatives have stressed the cultural and policy roots of these changes. Underlying both are not fully . . .

We study the effect of family income and maternal hours worked on child development. Our instrumental variable analysis suggests different results for cognitive and behavioral development. An additional $1,000 in family income improves cognitive development by 4.4 percent of a standard deviation but has no effect on behavioral development. A yearly increase of 100 work hours negatively affects both outcomes by approximately 6 percent of a standard deviation. The quality of parental investment matters and the substitution effect (less parental time) dominates the income effect (higher earnings) when the after-tax hourly wage is below $13.50. Results call for consideration of child care and minimum wage policies that foster both maternal employment and child development.

This paper measures the extent to which the price of nursing home care affects a potential substitute living arrangement: coresidence with adult children. Exploiting variation in state Medicaid income “spend-down” provisions over time, I find that living in a state with a spend-down provision decreases the prevalence of coresidence with adult children by 1–4 percentage points for single elderly individuals, with a corresponding increase in the use of nursing home care. These findings suggest that changes in Medicaid eligibility for long-term care benefits could have large impacts on living arrangements, care utilization patterns, and Medicaid expenditures.

In 2016, the American opioid crises reached a new apex. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 63,632 people died due to drug overdoses—more than two-thirds of which were caused by opioids. While it is difficult to pinpoint an exact starting point of the crisis, it is safe to assume that prescribing patterns by the medical community is one of the primary culprits. With this thesis, I examined whether the United States' insurance rate affected opioid overdose death rates from 2001 to 2015. I also studied if the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion either helped or exacerbated the epidemic. Prior to starting my research, I hypothesized that a higher insurance rate would correlate to lower opioid overdose death rates. I also believed Medicaid expansion would help to combat the crisis. In my results, I found that if insurance rates increased by one percent, opioid overdose death rates decreased by approximately 1.2 to 1.8 percentage points. My Medicaid expansion variable was insignificant.

This paper examines the causal relationship between waterborne uranium exposure and birth outcomes in order to more fully understand the external costs of the activities that increase the probability of human exposure to uranium, such as the prevalent military use of depleted uranium munitions. I use the Church Rock Uranium Mill industrial accident as a natural experiment, in which children born in specific counties are exposed to uranium via a contaminated water supply. I examine changes in birth outcomes, which approximate human capital endowment at birth, and I find that waterborne uranium contamination does not manifest via observable decreases in birth outcomes, specifically birth weight, or via changes in gender ratios. I also provide evidence suggesting that migratory responses to the contamination are not driving a change in the population's determinants of birth outcomes. Collectively, these results support modern militaries' claims that the risk of unintentional harm by uranium based weapons are "negligible".

Citation: Jeffrey ES, Banta JE, Modeste NN, Dos Santos H (2018) Childhood obesity factors and family structure on Latino-American adolescents in the national health information survey from 2008 to 2015. Abstract Latinos are the largest minority group in the US and childhood obesity is a huge problem for that group mostly because of the easy access to unhealthy and high-calorie dense foods and lack of opportunities and willingness for exercise. The rates of obesity among Latino adolescents (12-19 years old) are 22.8% which is the higher rates of obesity among all adolescent groups in the country. We investigated the association between Body Mass Index (BMI) in Latino adolescents and demographical and social factors such as family income, geographic location, parental education, gender, the language of interview, family size, and household structure. Participants in this research study were Latino adolescents between the ages of 13-17 years who lived with single mothers, single fathers, married, and unmarried couples, step-parent, or with extra adults in the home. Household structure has been shown to be related to childhood obesity in the general population, but data is limited for adolescents and nonexistent for Latinos. Responses from 2008-2015 were collected in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and then multiple NHIS surveys have been combined into one system called the Integrated Health Interview Survey (IHIS) from which we obtained data. Bivariate analysis at first showed some association between household structure and BMI, but in the final model, the association disappeared in favor of the other covariates, mostly education and income. In families with parents who had at least a college degree, children had 48% lower odds of becoming obese. Also, after controlling for all the potential confounding variables, females had 18% lower odds of being obese compared to males. Therefore, interventions to this Latino population should be targeted to increase opportunities for education for Latino parents, incorporating messages about weight management and the importance of having a normal BMI for children.

The traditional gendered division of household labor, where women did the bulk of all domestic labor, is eroding. The literature on housework, however, does not discuss the ways how to test for the non-traditional gender performances. Using the American Time Use Survey (2003–2016), the present study fills in this research gap and re-tests the relationship between relative earnings and the performance of housework. The analysis of women’s time spent on domestic work shows that the traditional gender display explanation still applies to women’s participation in routine tasks such as cooking and cleaning. Thus, breadwinning wives display gender neutralizing behavior and ‘do’ gender. On the other hand, American men show non-normative gender behavior in cooking and cleaning, but not in maintenance, where they still ‘do’ gender. This paper unveils a persistent traditional gender performance of women in housework and a new pattern for men’s involvement in indoor routine housework.

Policymakers subsidizing health insurance often face uncertainty about future market prices. We study the implications of one policy response: linking subsidies to prices, to target a given post-subsidy premium. We show that these price-linked subsidies weaken competition, raising prices for the government and/or consumers. However, price-linking also ties subsidies to health care cost shocks, which may be desirable. Evaluating this tradeoff empirically using a model estimated with Massachusetts insurance exchange data, we find that price-linking increases prices 1-6%, and much more in less competitive markets. For cost uncertainty reasonable in a mature market, these losses outweigh the benefits of price-linking.

To understand national trends in mortality over time, it is important to study differences by demographic, socioeconomic and geographic characteristics. For example, the recent stagnation in life expectancy at birth in the United States is largely a consequence of worsening outcomes for males in young-adult age groups (Kochanek et al. [2017]). It is essential to understand differences across groups to better inform and target effective health policies. As such, studying mortality disparities across key subpopulations has become an important area of research. Recent studies in the United States have looked at mortality inequalities across income (Chetty et al. [2016]; Currie and Schwandt [2016]), education (Hummer and Lariscy [2011]; Masters et al. [2012]; Hummer and Hernandez [2013]) and race (Murray et al. [2006]; Case and Deaton [2017]), finding evidence for increasing disparities across all groups.

Do immigrants assimilate in response to an exogenous shock in anti-immigrant sentiment? This paper investigates this question by examining the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a natural experiment. I generate an index for the America-nization of first names from the 1900-1930 censuses and merge this index with records from the universe of Japanese-American internees during WWII. Regression discontinuity design estimates suggest that Japanese Americans born in the days after Pearl Harbor were more likely to have an Americanized first name relative to children born in the days before December 7th, 1941. JEL codes: J15, N12, Z13

Female prison admissions grew 62% between 1990 and 2010, while arrests for females over the same period only increased by 14%. As a larger portion of arrested women have been sent to prison over time, it seems that increased prison admissions over time are not due only to more women committing crimes, but also to more severe punishment for arrested females. Using data on arrests, prison admissions, and county characteristics, I examine factors in the increased arrest rate and imprisonment rate for females and males according to offense type over 1990 to 2010 using panel regressions with county and state-time fixed-effects. The results indicate that female arrests for violent and property crimes increase in counties with a higher percentage of female-headed households with no husband present, and that prison admissions for females are lower in counties with higher median incomes. The presence of a treatment facility in the area does not appear to significantly affect changes in imprisonment when controlling for arrests.

Richard Matheson explores the demography of vampirism in a hybridic last human on earth and vampire apocalypse novella, I Am Legend (1954). The sur- vivor Robert Neville explores the legend and science of vampirism, grappling with the rhizomatic ontology of the gothic creatures; in turn, Matheson offers a dual portrait of monstrosity of the predator vampires and of Neville as a gothic hunter and slayer of vampires. Narratively, imagistically, and thematically, Matheson presents a Malthusian demographic dynamic (and struggle) as Neville deepens his understanding of vampirism, allowing him to refine his vampire- slaying techniques.