The Great Recession was a consequence of widening inequality and the growth of a tiered financial services system, in which the rich and the poor have access to vastly different tools for wealth accumulation. The spatial organization of these dynamics created neighborhoods vulnerable to predation on behalf of subprime lenders and other fringe service providers. This project seeks to understand the reproduction of institutional marginalization in consumer finance. Results show that racially isolated neighborhoods in New York City, where subprime lending and foreclosures were common, were uniquely vulnerable during the Great Recession and were communities where check cashing outlets (CCOs) sprouted, highlighting a mechanism for the reproduction of inequality over time. CCOs cost more per transaction than a checking account—potentially totaling tens of thousands of dollars over a career. The link between widening financial services inequality and the recession’s consequences provides a strong impetus for safety net and community investment policies.

Objectives: We used multilevel data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to identify factors that account for differences in risk of violent victimization among young Latino adults in new and traditional settlement areas. Methods: Area-identified NCVS data (20082012) were linked with census tract data from the decennial census and American Community Survey to study individual and community contributions to the risk of violent victimization. We analyzed total violence and violence specific to offense types and victim-offender relationship. The analyses were performed adjusting for the complex survey design. Results: Young Latino adults in new settlement areas have higher victimization rates than their counterparts in traditional areas for total violence and for the majority of violence types studied. Holding constant individual and other contextual factors, Latino population density is a key neighborhood characteristic that explains the observed area differences in victimization, yielding evidence for the hypothesis that co-ethnic support in a community helps protect young Latino adults and contributes to differences in victimization across areas. Also there is evidence that the protective role of Latino population density is stronger for violence involving non-strangers than it is for violence involving strangers. Moreover, we find that the concentration of Latino immigrants, which indicates the neighborhood potential for immigrant revitalization, is another neighborhood factor that protects young Latino adults in both new and traditional settlement areas. However, there is some but limited evidence that the neighborhood-revitalizing role of immigration might be smaller in some contexts (such as some new areas outside central cities), possibly because those areas are heterogeneous in their ability to promote the integration of immigrants. Conclusions: Our analysis of the NCVS shows the importance of neighborhood factors for the risk of violence among young Latino adults. It provides evidence consistent with co-ethnic support and immigrant revitalization theories. The findings also suggest that the effects of those neighborhood factors may be contingent upon violence type and the context in which they occur. These findings help us understand the difference in the safety of young Latino adults in new and traditional areas.

Purpose Unaccompanied youth homelessness is a serious concern. Response, however, has been constrained by the absence of credible data on the size and characteristics of the population and reliable means to track youth homelessness over time. We sought to address these gaps. Methods Using a nationally representative phone-based survey (N = 26,161), we solicited household and individual reports on different types of youth homelessness. We collected household reports on adolescents aged 13–17 and young adults aged 18–25, as well as self-reports from young adults aged 18–25. Follow-up interviews with a subsample (n = 150) provided additional information on youth experiences and enabled adjustment for inclusion errors. Results Over a 12-month period, approximately 3.0% of households with 13- to 17-year-olds reported explicit youth homelessness (including running away or being asked to leave) and 1.3% reported experiences that solely involved couch surfing, resulting in an overall 4.3% household prevalence of any homelessness, broadly defined. For 18- to 25-year-olds, household prevalence estimates were 5.9% for explicitly reported homelessness, 6.6% for couch surfing only, and 12.5% overall. The 12-month population prevalence estimates, available only for 18- to 25-year-olds, were 5.2%, 4.5%, and 9.7%, respectively. Incidence rates were about half as high as prevalence rates. Prevalence rates were similar across rural and nonrural counties. Higher risk of homelessness was observed among young parents; black, Hispanic, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) youth; and those who did not complete high school. Conclusions The prevalence and incidence of youth homelessness reveal a significant need for prevention and youth-centric systems and services, as well as strategies to address disproportionate risks of certain subpopulations.

The three chapters in this dissertation center on various types of inequality in the labor market. In Chapter 1, I show that sons crowd out the transmission of entrepreneurship from fathers to daughters. This appears to be driven by preferential treatment of sons in human capitalbuilding activities in the family business. In Chapter 2, I study how differences in earnings by college major relate to occupation-specific skill accumulation and utilization. I find that graduates with more specific majors experience a larger penalty to working in an unrelated occupation but are more likely than average to experience good major-job match quality, resulting in a small specificity premium. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of a popular yet controversial tool for the reduction of inequality: the minimum wage. I find that increases in the minimum wage lower employee separations by reducing the rate at which low-wage workers quit to take a different job.

The current goals of the standards-based reform environment can be limiting to teachers’ freedom and creativity. This occurs at a time when immigrant diversity transforms U.S. cities and innovative pedagogical responses are increasingly necessary. The confluence of these two processes is underexplored. Ethnography in New York City and Los Angeles demonstrated how, in classrooms serving immigrant ELs often characterized as the forgotten, neglected “margins” (hooks, 1994) three teachers responded to their transnational, multilingual contexts by developing creative practices. Case studies describe teachers as designers who enacted (a) contextually relevant curriculum making, (b) epistemically open assessment, and (c) critical languaging. It is argued that teachers who work with immigrant ELs in complex contexts are provided with opportunities to be creative designers—an opportunity currently limited by the standards-based reform movement in schools.

"The energy paradox", which describes the rather slow adoption of energy-efficient products despite their savings potential, has been observed in the U.S. residential lighting market for LED products. With LED sales fall short of traditional incandescent bulbs, this paper looks at how uncertainty, specifically regarding lightbulb's probability of failing, could explain the paradox. We deploy a discrete choice model to replicate consumer's decision making, and then use Monte Carlo simulation to find income level of the consumer who is indifferent between buying incandescent and LED. With the presence of lightbulb failing uncertainty, we found that consumers who discount future by a little (with discount factor around 0.9) already prefer incandescent over LED for majority of times, resulting in the paradox. Predictions are made for average U.S. consumer's purchasing behavior, and future studies are suggested to validify our theoretical framework.

The theme of this collection is the intersection of individuals’ personal lives and economic lives. Personal traits may be influenced by gender, life events, and socioeconomic class. Personal traits can affect productivity and therefore are important in determining what happens in the labor market. In other words, what happens at work and what happens at home are not entirely separate. The first essay explores how sexual orientation and sexual experiences are related to individual income. Previous literature indicates that gay, lesbian, and bisexual (LGB) individuals experience an income differential when compared with heterosexuals. Recent data indicate that self-identification as an LGB individual and/or same-sex sexual behavior are still correlated with a lower income, however, not all of the results are statistically significant. In addition, there is a statistically significant negative income differential of 32% for men who report having had a same sex partner at some point, but identify as straight/heterosexual. The second essay analyzes parental divorce and how this may affect children later in life. Previous literature indicates that a multitude of issues exist for children whose parents divorced. The impact of parental divorce on children’s income later in life is tested. Results from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that negative income effects from parental divorce persist for young men, however, young women and older age groups do not experience negative impacts on income. The third essay investigates a relationship between student loan debt and probability of marriage. Using the Baccalaureate and Beyond Survey 2008-2012, and with gender differences in mind, the impact of student loan repayment burden on the probability of marriage occurring in the four years following graduation is tested. Results indicate that increased payment-to-income ratio on student loan debt is negatively related to the probability of getting married for women who indicate a delay in marriage due to education debt.

Research on daily time and how it is allocated has generally considered the time spent in specific activities. However, social theory suggests that time use is socially patterned whether by social organization, heterogeneity, and/or stratification. Drawing on four broad types of time (contracted, committed, necessary, and free), we use Multinomial Logit Latent Class Analysis to discuss eight daily temporal pathways and associations with individual characteristics. Our analysis highlights the variations and similarities across pathways, the impact of paid work in structuring daily life, the social patterning of sleep and leisure, and socio-demographic profiles of the pathways of working-age Americans.

This paper studies the economic implications for mothers of the changes in child custody law from maternal preference to joint custody using the 1960–2000 Census Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS). Variation in the timing of the joint custody reform across states provides a natural experimental framework to study the causal effect of shared custody on mothers’ economic outcomes. The results show that only single mothers experience a decrease in earnings as a consequence of the adoption of the joint custody law, exposing them to a higher risk of poverty. The paper discusses a possible explanation for these findings, namely that the higher child support payment the mother receives from the non-custodial father in case of joint custody might discourage her from looking for high paid jobs or investing in her career.

The entry of baby boomers into the labor market in the 1970s slowed growth for physical and human capital per worker because young workers have little of both. Thus, the baby boom could have contributed to the 1970s productivity slowdown. I build and calibrate a model a la Huggett et al. (2011) with exogenous population and TFP to evaluate this theory. The baby boom accounts for 75% of the slowdown in the period 1964-69, 25% in 1970-74 and 2% in 1975-79. The retiring of baby boomers may cause a 2.8pp decline in productivity growth between 2020 and 2040, ceteris paribus.

Proponents of the devaluation hypothesis claim that occupations experiencing a significant inflow of female workers are devalued, both in status and in pay. We suggest that devaluation is an essentially cultural phenomenon that can be subject to change over time and that is not constant with varying contexts. Our theoretical model connects changing gender compositions in occupations with the formation of occupational gender stereotypes. In combination with a cultural bias that attributes less value to female work, these stereotypes can lead to devaluation. This is a novel view on the mechanics at play in the devaluation process. With US census data from 1960 to 2010, we show that devaluation was restricted to sometimes very specific contexts. A trend toward declining or disappearing devaluation is observed over the entire time span. Given potential cultural inertia and the stability of stereotypes, this result could, however, be an artifact of a deficient testing strategy that focuses solely on changes in occupational gender compositions without taking into account the normative power of the past.

Taking into account the well-being losses or gains that each gender-race/ethnicity group has associated with its occupational sorting, this paper explores the social welfare loss that each U.S. large region experiences due to the different circumstances faced by these groups in each regional labor market. To analyze the period 1980–2012 in those terms, we use novel measures that aggregate the well-being losses or gains of the groups consistently with the literature on deprivation. To take into account that disparities among regions may arise from differences in characteristics, this papers uses a propensity score procedure that allows controlling for gender and racial/ethnic composition, immigration profile, educational level, and industrial structure.

Using difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference designs, we studyCalifornia’sPaidFamilyLeave(CA-PFL)program,thefirstsourceofgovernmentprovided paid parental leave available to fathers in the Unites States. Relative to the pre-treatment mean, fathers of infants in California are 46 percent more likely to be on leave when CA-PFL is available. In households where both parents work, we find suggestive evidence that CA-PFL increases both father-only leave-taking (i.e., father on leave while mother is at work) and joint leave-taking (i.e., both parents on leave at the same time). Effects are larger for fathers of first-born children than for fathers of laterborn children.

This paper jointly considers the impact of the minimum wage on both labor and product markets using detailed store-level scanner data. I provide empirical evidence that a 10% increase in the minimum wage raises grocery store prices by 0.6%-0.8%, and suggest that the minimum wage not only raises labor costs but also affects product demand, especially in poorer regions. This points to novel channels of heterogeneity in pass-through that have distributional consequences, with key implications for real wage inequality, residential segregation, and future minimum wage increases. I also find that price rigidity within retail chains ameliorates these effects, reducing the pass-through elasticity for retail prices by about 60%.

We study gentrification at a micro-geographic scale using information on residents and businesses in New York from 1990 to 2010. We exploit atypical location decisions of businesses to identify the sectors that usually locate in wealthy neighborhoods but are overrepresented in poor soon-to-gentrify areas. These pioneer sectors - mostly cultural, recreational, and creative industries - help us to better predict gentrification at its early stage: including the presence of pioneers improves the accuracy of the prediction of future gentrifying spots by up to 200 meters. We show that pioneers foster gentrification through the types of workers they hire, their signal as to the future prospects of a neighborhood, and their effect on the subsequent arrival of consumption amenities.

Alternative Work Arrangements (AWAs) are contract forms commonly associated with less attachment , lower wages, and fewer worker benefts. Even though AWAs are theoretically cheaper for frms, they continue to account for only 10% of employment. I explore why AWAs are not more widely used, given their purported economic beneft for frms. Legal rules suggest that while AWAs have lower fxed costs of employment, they may be less productive than standard employment and likely attract lower-type workers. In this instance, AWAs are used as a mechanism for frms to reduce fxed labor costs in response to a shock. Testing this prediction, I provide the frst evidence that competition shocks, specifcally trade shocks, causally increase the use of AWAs across a number of contract forms. Using micro-level data, I show that competition shocks appear to increase the probability of manufacturing workers being hired by temporary-help agencies, and decrease the probability of manufacturing workers becoming independent contractors. This suggests workers may have shifted towards AWAs in non-manufacturing industries. I also show that AWAs are associated with lower wages and fewer benefts after conditioning on industry and occupation, and are associated with higher rates of inequality.

The ABCD twin study will elucidate the genetic and environmental contributions to a wide range of mental and physical health outcomes in children, including substance use, brain and behavioral development, and their interrelationship. Comparisons within and between monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs, further powered by multiple assessments, provide information about genetic and environmental contributions to developmental associations, and enable stronger tests of causal hypotheses, than do comparisons involving unrelated children. Thus a sub-study of 800 pairs of same-sex twins was embedded within the overall Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) design. The ABCD Twin Hub comprises four leading centers for twin research in Minnesota, Colorado, Virginia, and Missouri. Each site is enrolling 200 twin pairs, as well as singletons. The twins are recruited from registries of all twin births in each State during 2006–2008. Singletons at each site are recruited following the same school-based procedures as the rest of the ABCD study. This paper describes the background and rationale for the ABCD twin study, the ascertainment of twin pairs and implementation strategy at each site, and the details of the proposed analytic strategies to quantify genetic and environmental influences and test hypotheses critical to the aims of the ABCD study.

A large body of research documents the relationship between health and place, including the positive association between neighborhood cohesion and health. However, very little research has examined neighborhood cohesion by sexual orientation. This paper addresses that gap by examining differences in perceived neighborhood cohesion by sexual orientation. We use data from the 2016 National Health Interview Survey (n = 28,164 respondents aged 18 years and older) to examine bivariate differences by sexual orientation in four measures of neighborhood cohesion. We then use ordered logistic regression models to assess the relationship between sexual orientation and a scaled measure of neighborhood cohesion, adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics, living arrangements, health status, region, and neighborhood tenure. We find that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults are less likely to say that they live in a close-knit neighborhood (54.6 vs. 65.6%, p < 0.001), they can count on their neighbors (74.7 vs. 83.1%, p < 0.001), they trust their neighbors (75.5 vs. 83.7%, p < 0.001), or people in their neighborhood help each other out (72.9 vs. 83.1%, p < 0.001), compared to heterosexual adults. Even after controlling for socio-demographic factors, neighborhood cohesion scores are lower for LGB adults compared to heterosexual adults (odds ratio of better perceived neighborhood cohesion for sexual minorities: 0.70, p < 0.001). Overall, LGB adults report worse neighborhood cohesion across multiple measures, even after adjusting for individual characteristics and neighborhood tenure. Because living in a cohesive neighborhood is associated with better health outcomes, future research, community-level initiatives, and public policy efforts should focus on creating welcoming neighborhood environments for sexual minorities.

This article provides estimates of the potential anti-poverty impacts of eight proposals presented in this double issue of RSF. Using the 2016 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey and the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Supplemental Poverty Measure, we first discuss the simulation approach taken for each proposal and then provide a consistent set of poverty estimates across proposals that include reductions in the poverty and deep poverty rates and the poverty gap; demographic differences; and net direct government costs. Anti-poverty impacts are largest for the most costly proposals, but less costly and more targeted proposals still have substantial potential impacts for key subgroups.

Undocumented people are often described as living and working “in the shadows.” This framing identifies the illegality of migrants as an individual characteristic. Yet federal, state, and local policies are structural features that shape the meaning and consequences of being unauthorized in the United States. Latinas have increasingly joined migration streams and now constitute 46 percent of unauthorized people in the United States. In this dissertation, I identify the constraints and opportunities for Latina immigrant workers in North Carolina, a new destination state. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 48 women from five North Carolina counties as well as a focus group, I analyze women’s experiences with work, family, and migration across the life course. Women’s accounts revealed that workers’ identities were frequently formed through early labor force participation in their countries of origin. Once in the United States, women’s labor force participation was increasingly constrained by employment restrictions targeting the undocumented at the same time that they faced the pull of family demands as they married and had children. In response to these constraints, women turned to work in so-called “nonstandard” employment relationships such as subcontracted work and self-employment. In some cases, these arrangements represent a survival strategy associated with exploitation and poor job quality. In other cases, nonstandard employment suggests a “strategy of resistance” in which women create mobility pathways associated with improved job quality and the achievement of work-family balance. Findings contribute to understanding the macro- and micro-level forces shaping intersectional inequality for U.S. immigrant populations and hold policy implications at state and federal levels.