Was the European marriage pattern an important contributor to England’s precociouseconomic development? This article examines this question by embedding thepossibility in a historically substantiated demographic-economic model, supportedby both cross-section and long time series evidence. Persistent high mortality andpowerful mortality shocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lowered lifeexpectations. Subsequently increased life expectancy reduced the number of birthsnecessary to achieve a given family size. Fewer births were achieved by a higher age atfirst marriage of females. Later marriage not only constrained population growth butalso provided greater opportunities for female informal learning, especially through‘service’. In a period when the family was the principal institution for socializingfuture workers, such learning was a significant contributor to the intergenerationaltransmission and accumulation of human capital. This article shows how, over thecenturies, the gradual induced rise of human capital raised productivity and eventuallybrought about the industrial revolution. Without the contribution of late marriage tohuman capital accumulation broadly interpreted, real wages in England would nothave increased strongly in the early nineteenth century and would have been muchlower than actually achieved for several centuries.

Welfare reform in 1996 created a new, large disparity in Food Stamp eligibility between documented non-citizen immigrants and natives. Subsequent policies restored eligibility for most of these immigrants at different times in different states, and I use these changes to estimate the effect of program access on the labor supply of immigrants– a policy-relevant population. The Food Stamp program is one of the largest safety net programs today, and my analysis provides one of the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of the modern Food Stamp program on adult labor supply. I find strong evidence of labor supply disincentives, and the magnitude and margin of this response varies across demographic groups. Access to the program reduces the employment rates of single women by about 6%, whereas married men continue to work but reduce their hours of work by 5%. These findings confirm the predictions of traditional labor supply theory regarding the response to a means-tested program.

This paper examines the impact of gender empowerment on labor market performance of U.S. married immigrants across different family types. Three types of families are defined based on the nationality of immigrants’ spouses; ‘Home-country Marriage’ where both spouses come from the same home-country, ‘Native Marriage’ where one spouse is an immigrant and the other is a Native, and ‘Foreign Marriage’ where both spouses are immigrants, but each comes from a different country of origin from the other. Recognizing the role of gender ideology across different family structures, this study provides empirical evidence of the impact culturally based gender status has on immigrants across family types. Labor market performance is measured by wages and the labor force participation decision of immigrants, using the Ordinary Least Squares and Logit models. The gender empowerment measure is utilized to reflect different cultural and institutional conditions, which shape gender status in the immigrants’ home countries. Results indicate the positive effect of gender equality on women’s earnings and labor force participation, as well as that home-country gender status strongly influence women’s labor force participation and earnings when they share the same cultural norms as their husbands. Interestingly, women are more influenced by their spouses’ gender norms than men when immigrants come from a different cultural gender norm than their spouse.

This article assesses the impact of rapid recent immigration on the nation's demographics,laborforce and public schools.' Recent immigration flows have exceeded those in any decade in the nation's history, with an estimatedfifteen million immigrantsenteringthe country during the 1990s. The number of immigrants passed thirty-five million in 2005, and theirshare of the U.S. populationmore than doubledfrom less than 5% in 1970 to over 12% in 2005. A significant and growing share of all immigrants - now at least 30% - are unauthorized, creating complexities for the labor market, socialfabric, and political environment of the United States. The vast majority of immigrants come to the United States for work, and unauthorized men are the most likely to work-their employment rate exceeds 90%.2 Immigrants comprise one seventh of all U.S. workers, but almost a quarter of low-wage workers and 44% of workers without a high school education. Immigrants fill important niches in industries such as construction, agriculture and manufacturing, but their relatively low educational attainment and limited English skills present barriers to their economic mobility. This aside, there are some small groups of immigrants, who are more highly educated than U.S.-born natives and do better than natives in the workforce.The number of children with immigrant parents is also rising. By 2005, one-fifth of all U.S. children and one quarter of low-income children were children of immigrants. Many children of immigrants begin school at a disadvantage due to their low incomes, lack of English proficiency, and the low educational attainment of their parents. The federal No ChildLeft BehindAct provides incentives for schools to focus on the education of immigrants' children because the Act mandates schools improve test score averages for Hispanic, black, low-income and limited English proficient children.

Do policies and institutions that promote women’s economic empowerment have a long-term impact on intimate partner violence? We address this question by exploiting a natural experiment of history in Cameroon. From the end of WWI until 1961, the western territories of today’s Cameroon were arbitrarily divided between France and the United Kingdom, whose colonial regimes opened up divergent economic opportunities for women in an otherwise culturally and geographically homogeneous setting. Women in British territories benefited from a universal education system and gained opportunities for paid employment. The French colonial practice in these domains centered around educating a small administrative elite and investing in the male employment-dominated infrastructure sector. Using a geographical regression discontinuity design, we show that women in former British territories are 30% more likely to be victims of domestic violence than those in former French territories. Among a broad set of possible channels of persistence, only one turns out statistically significant and quantitatively important: women in former British territories are 30% more likely to be in paid employment than their counterparts in former French areas. These results are incompatible with household bargaining models that incorporate domestic violence but they are accommodated by theories of male backlash.

How can we promote people-centered governance in Africa? Cell phones/ information and communications technology (ICT) are shown to be linked to neoliberal understandings of more democratic governance structures, defined by the Worldwide Governance Indicators as: the rule of law, corruption-control, regulation quality, government effectiveness, political stability/no violence, and voice and accountability. However, these indicators fall short: they do not emphasize gender equity or pro-poor policies. Writing from an African feminist scholar-activist perspective, Assata Zerai emphasizes the voices of women in two ways: (1) she examies how women’s access to ICT makes a difference to the success of people-centered governance structures; and (2) she demonstrates how African women’s scholarship, too often marginalized, must be used to expand and redefine the goals and indicators of democratic governance in African countries. Challenging the status quo that praises the contributions of cell phones to the diffusion of knowledge and resultant better governance in Africa, this book is an important read for scholars of politics and technology, gender and politics, and African Studies. Assata Zerai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Her interests have included maternal and child health (MCH), health activism, safe water and sanitation, ICT in Africa and the African Diaspora, and making the intellectual work of African women scholars and activists more accessible; as well as U.S.-based studies of MCH, Black feminist praxis, and diversity and LGBTIQ inclusiveness in Protestant congregations. Her recent books include Safe Water, Sanitation and Early Childhood Malnutrition in East Africa: An Africana Feminist Analysis of the lives of Women and Children in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda (Zerai and Brenda N. Sanya, eds, Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2018); Intersectionality in Intentional Communities: The Struggle for Inclusivity in Multicultural U.S. Protestant Congregations (Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2016); and Hypermasculinity and State Violence in Zimbabwe: An Africana Feminist Analysis of Maternal and Child Health (Africa World Press, 2014).

Flows of US immigrants are concentrated at the extremes of the skill distribution. We develop a dynamic political economy model consistent with this observation. Individuals care about wages and the welfare of their children. Skill types are complementary in production. Voter support for immigration requires that the children of median-voter natives and of immigrants have sufficiently dissimilar skills. We estimate intergenerational transition matrices for skills, as measured by education, and find support for immigration at high and low skills, but not in the middle. In a version with guest worker programs, voters prefer high-skilled immigrants but low-skilled guest workers.

This study examines the impact of cultural attitudes on the fertility decisions of women who were born in the U.S. To distinguish the economic and institutional effects from the cultural effects on fertility decisions, this study employs data from second-generation immigrant women who kept their heritage languages in the U.S. Total fertility rate (TFR) from the woman’s heritage country is defined as a cultural proxy for fertility decisions. The results of the models indicate that second-generation immigrant women who kept their heritage languages and whose parents emigrated from countries with higher/lower TFR have more/fewer children in the U.S., respectively. Heritage cultures have positive and statistically significant impact on women’s fertility decisions. The two main findings indicate that first, culture has quantitative effects on a woman’s fertility decisions and second, culture slowly shifts over time. The results also demonstrate the importance of cultural transmission from one generation to the next, which can be used by policy makers. © 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Economic Society of Australia, Queensland.

What are the benefits and costs of attending a selective public research university instead of a less-selective university or college?This study examines the 2001-2011 Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) program, which guaranteed University of California admission to students in the top four percent of California high school classes. Employing a regression discontinuity design, Iestimate that ELC pulled 8 percent of marginally-admitted students into four "Absorbing'' UC campuses from less-competitivepublic institutions in California. Those ELC compliers had lower SAT scores and family incomes than their eventual peers; almosthalf were under-represented minorities (URM), and 65 percent came from the state's bottom SAT quartile of high schools.Nevertheless, marginally eligible students became more than 20 percentage points more likely to earn a university degree within5 years, though URM and less-prepared students became less likely to earn STEM degrees. Students' net expected earnings conditional on university completion, major, and gender substantially increased across subgroups, and linked state employment records suggest an increase in URM students' average early-career earnings.

Improving the well-being of young children is one of the most important investments a community can make. Infancy and toddlerhood are periods of rapid physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. During these years, children need nurturing care and appropriate stimulation from their family and friends, as well as community-, state-, and national-level programs and services to ensure positive present and future outcomes. Conversely, we know that negative early experiences (such as poverty), insufficient nurturing and stimulation, poor access to health care, and a lack of other important family supports can have lasting harmful impacts. Philadelphia has taken bold steps that acknowledge the importance of children’s earliest years to ensure a positive future for the city. New initiatives, led by both municipal government and the private, nonprofit sector, are elevating Philadelphia’s profile as a leader in lifting young children to the top of the civic agenda. Through these initiatives, leaders are working to foster crosssector collaboration to improve the long-term outcomes for young children. At the same time, the city and its residents continue to face stiff challenges. This is a time of transition for Philadelphia in many respects, as the city is experiencing changes in demographics, economic growth, housing patterns, and access to education. Philadelphia is simultaneously becoming a richer and poorer city. While poverty and deep poverty continue unabated, Philadelphia is experiencing residential growth (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2017a)...

Increasing family diversity during the past half century has focused national attention on how children are faring in nontraditional family structures. Much of the limited evidence on children in same-sex couple families suffers from several shortcomings, including a lack of representative data. We use the National Health Interview Survey (2004–2012) and the National Survey of Children's Health (2011–2012) to identify children in different-sex married and cohabiting families, never and previously married single-parent families, and same-sex couple families. Considering important characteristics such as the child's race or ethnicity and adoption status, household socioeconomic standing, family stability, and parent health, we examine the relationship between family type and parent-rated overall child health. The results suggest that poorer health among children in same-sex couple as well as different-sex cohabiting couple and single-parent families appears to be largely the product of demographic and socioeconomic differences rather than exposure to nontraditional family forms.

We study optimal spatial policies in quantitative trade and geography frameworks with spillovers and sorting of heterogeneous workers. We characterize the spatial transfers that must hold in efficient allocations, as well as labor subsidies that would implement them. Assuming homogeneous workers and constant-elasticity spillovers, a constant labor tax over space restores efficiency regardless of micro heterogeneity in fundamentals. Place-specific subsidies are needed to attain optimal sorting if there are spillovers across different types of workers. We show how to quantify optimal spatial transfers, and apply the framework to data across U.S. cities. Under existing estimates of the spillover elasticities, optimal spatial allocations feature stronger redistribution towards low-wage cities, lower wage inequality in larger cities, and weaker spatial sorting by skill than what is observed.

Sociologists interested in the effects of genes on complex social outcomes claim environmental conditions structure when and how genes matter, but they have only studied environmental moderation of genetic effects on single traits at a time (gene-by-environment interactions). In this article, we propose that the social environment can also transform the genetic link between two traits. Taking the relationship between educational attainment and smoking as an exemplary case, we use genome-wide methods to examine whether genetic variants linked to education are also linked to smoking, and whether the strength of this relationship varies across birth cohorts. Results suggest that the genetic relationship between education and smoking is stronger among U.S. adults born between 1974 and 1983 than among those born between 1920 and 1959. These results are supported by replication in additional data from the United Kingdom. Environmental conditions that differ across birth cohorts may result in the bundling of gen...

This project explores the causes behind the recent decline in the Labor Force Participation (LFP) rate. The analysis examines the evolution of the LFP rate for different demographic groups to gauge the effect of demographic changes. An integral part of the project is an investigation of the flows of workers into and out of the labor force to determine whether the LFP rate has been declining because more workers are leaving or because fewer workers are entering the labor market. The project also studies the evolution of wages and finds that the decline in the LFP rate is often accompanied by a declining real wage, which is indicative of the relative importance of demand versus supply factors.

Abortion funding in the U.S. is highly restricted, thus many women seek assistance from private abortion funds. This analysis examines factors associated with qualification for funding.Methods: This is a secondary analysis using medical chart data from a Wisconsin abortion facility. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to assess predictors of qualification for abortion funding. Results: Lower income women, nonwhite women, and women with less education were more likely to qualify. Women who were firm in their decision and who obtained their abortion were more likely to qualify.Conclusion: Many women seeking abortions need financial assistance that is not currently available. Though not a sufficient solution, private abortion funds were created to address this need. Various factors are associated with funding qualification.

Traditional rank-aware processing assumes a dataset that contains available options to cover a specific need (e.g., restaurants, hotels, etc) and users who browse that dataset via top-k queries with linear scoring functions, i.e., by rank- ing the options according to the weighted sum of their at- tributes, for a set of given weights. In practice, however, user preferences (weights) may only be estimated with bounded accuracy, or may be inherently uncertain due to the inability of a human user to specify exact weight values with abso- lute accuracy. Motivated by this, we introduce the uncertain top-k query (U T K ). Given uncertain preferences, that is, an approximate description of the weight values, the UTK query reports all options that may belong to the top-k set. A second version of the problem additionally reports the ex- act top-k set for each of the possible weight settings. We develop a scalable processing framework for both UTK ver- sions, and demonstrate its efficiency using standard bench- mark datasets.

The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is the newest method to paint a more accurate picture of the scope of poverty in the United States than the Official Poverty Measure (OPM). In doing so, the SPM includes many sources of income, including income from work and in-kind government supplemental policies. The purpose of this thesis was to use data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) to determine the child poverty rate in Oregon, understand which demographic groups are at greatest risk for poverty, and identify which programs of the social safety net were most effective in mitigating poverty. This data was subsampled to include Oregonians under the age of 18, which was then analyzed to determine poverty rates among race, age, family size, and citizenship categories. Additionally, hypothetical poverty rates were created to assess how overall rates of poverty would change without a program in place, showing its impact on child poverty rates. Overall, it was found that American Indian children and children with small family sizes were impoverished at greater rates than other Oregon children. Additionally, tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, and food subsidies, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, had the most positive effects on reducing rates of poverty among all Oregon children, while out-of-pocket child care and work expenses increased the prevalence of poverty.

This study examines the effect of food stamps on health. Specifically, we use the county-level rollout of the Food Stamp Program from 1961 to 1975 as a source of variation in access to food stamps in order to examine food stamps’ single-year and multi-year effects on various county- year level mortality rates using fixed effects models. We consider aggregate mortality rates, subgroup rates for sex, race groups, and age groups, and rates for specific causes of death to examine the mechanisms through which food stamps affect health. We find mixed results for the entire 1969 to 1978 county sample that indicate small or zero overall effects of access to food stamps on mortality rates. However, among subsamples of poorer counties, we find that food stamps tend to reduce most mortality rates over time.

The gap between white and Hispanic poverty has remained stable for decades despite dramatic changes in the size and composition of the two groups. The gap, however, conceals crucial differences within the Hispanic population whereby some leverage education and smaller families to stave off poverty while others facing barriers to citizenship and English language acquisition face particularly high rates. In this paper, we use Decennial Census and American Community Survey data to examine poverty rates between Hispanic and non-Hispanic, white heads of household. We find the usual suspects stratify poverty risks: gender, age, employment, education, marital status, family size, and metro area status. In addition, Hispanic ethnicity has become a weaker indicator of poverty. We then decompose trends in poverty gaps between racial and ethnic groups. Between 1980 and 2010, poverty gaps persisted between whites and Hispanics. We find support for a convergence of advantages hypothesis and only partial support (among Hispanic noncitizens and Hispanics with limited English language proficiency) for a rising disadvantages hypothesis. Poverty-reducing gains in educational attainment alongside smaller families kept white–Hispanic poverty gaps from rising. If educational attainment continues to rise and family size drops further, poverty rates could fall, particularly for Hispanics who still have lower education and larger families, on average. Gains toward citizenship and greater English language proficiency would also serve to reduce the Hispanic–white poverty gap.