To provide economic security and stability work should pay a living wage, provide workers with sufficient hours of work (full-time, full-year employment), and provide access to health insurance, a pension, and the flexibility for working women and men to balance work and family. To capture the extent to which women’s jobs in Mississippi meet these criteria, IWPR created a job quality index and applied it to the jobs held by Mississippi’s working women and men. The results show that just 3 percent of Mississippians work in jobs that meet the criteria for ‘best’ job quality occupations, and men are more likely than women to be in these ‘best’ quality jobs whereas women are more likely than men to be in the ‘worst’ quality jobs. Median earnings for all workers in Mississippi are $15,224 below the minimum needed in Mississippi to provide economic security for a family with two small children according to one measure of basic needs—the Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST). Women’s median earnings are even lower than the earnings for all workers with Black and Hispanic women having particularly low earnings.

This paper examines local labor market outcomes from an oil and gas boom. We examine two main outcomes across gender, race, and ethnicity: the probability of employment in the oil and gas industry and the log wages of workers employed outside the oil and gas industry. We find that men and women both gain employment in the oil and gas industry during booms, but such gains are much larger for men and are largest for black and Hispanic men. We also find positive income spillovers for workers in other industries that are similar in magnitude across demographic groups.

This paper examines the long-term labor market effects of extending the school day for elementary and secondary school students. Exploiting cross-city variation covering the introduction of longer school days in Chile over a fourteen year period, we find exposure to more time in school increases educational attainment and earnings when students are in their 20s and 30s. Increases in earnings are especially pronounced for lower-income students, a group most likely to attend a treated school. In addition, we find evidence of delayed childbearing among women, and some evidence of occupational upskilling. These findings suggest that educational reforms may have lasting effects not captured by short-term test score performance.

La question des migrations que pourrait induire le changement climatique (CC) fait l’objet de recherches depuis une trentaine d’années et le nombre d’études de cas s’est fortement accru récemment (Guélat et al., 2016). On s’accorde à considérer l’Afrique subsaharienne comme tout particulièrement exposée au CC et à ses conséquences (IPCC, 2014). Trois synthèses de littérature permettent de faire un premier bilan des acquis de la recherche sur le continent et démontrent la complexité du lien environnement-migration.

Comprehensive zoning is ubiquitous in U.S. cities, yet we know surprisingly little about its long-run impacts. We provide the first attempt to measure the causal effect of land use regulation over the long term, using as our setting Chicago's first comprehensive zoning ordinance adopted in 1923. Our results indicate that zoning played a central role in establishing residential neighborhoods free of industrial and commercial uses. The separation of uses established by the zoning ordinance persists to the present day and is reflected in housing prices, the location of polluting industrial sites, and population density.

This paper examines the impact of migration on earnings inequality using 1940?2015 data from the U.S. census and American Community Survey. Despite measurement challenges, I successfully replicate existing findings regarding national trends in earnings inequality and migration, and subsequently analyze regional and state patterns. Using 1940 birthplace information to instrument for migration, I find that recent immigration mildly increases the top decile earnings share, while recent in-migration and out-migration have no significant effects on such inequality. I estimate that immigration contributed 5.8 percent to the observed rise in U.S. earnings inequality from 1950 to 2015, primarily through a non-migrant channel.

This article examines the impact of Phoenix’s light rail system, which opened in 2008, on new firm formation in specific industries. Individual business data from 1990–2014 are used in a quasiexperimental adjusted-interrupted time series (AITS) regression to compare the impact of the transit system’s construction on new business starts in ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ areas before and after the opening of the line. Findings show that the transit adjacency is worth an 88% increase in knowledge sector new starts, a 40% increase in service sector new starts and a 28% increase in retail new starts at the time the system opened, when compared with automobile-accessible control areas. However, the light rail also appears to suffer from a ‘novelty factor’ – after the initial increase in new establishment activity in adjacent block groups, the effect diminishes at the rate of 8%, 6% and 7% per year, respectively. The results also provide insight into the spatial extent of light rail impacts to new business formation, with areas 1 mile from stations observing 21% fewer retail new business starts and 12% fewer knowledge sector new starts than areas within a quarter of a mile of stations.

The Trump administration is renegotiating NAFTA, the free trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Little research has quantified the potential effects of such a renegotiation. To evaluate these effects, we use a dynamic trade model adapted from Caliendo, Dvorkin, and Parro. The model, which considers both input-output linkages and migration/trade frictions, can estimate how leaving NAFTA will change employment and welfare across 23 sectors and 87 regions. We find that leaving NAFTA decreases aggregate U.S. welfare by 0.03%, while decreasing aggregate Mexican and Canadian welfare by 0.15%. U.S. non-employment increases by 0.09%, or 45,000 people. For particular U.S. industries, the shock of leaving NAFTA can be large: employment in textiles rises by 0.49%, and employment in transportation equipment manufacturing falls by 0.25%. Trade between NAFTA countries is significantly affected: trade from Canada and Mexico to the U.S. falls by 14%, while trade in the opposite direction falls by 7%.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations direct federal agencies and departments to compare their workforce demographics with those of the civilian labor force (CLF). This process provides indicators of where there might be barriers to equal opportunity that are amenable to personnel policy changes. Persistent discrepancies between employees who work for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and workers in the CLF prompted the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity to ask the RAND Corporation to perform a formal analysis of these workforce differences and potential barriers therein. Previous RAND work examined DoD’s relatively low proportion of Hispanic employees in depth (Matthews et al., 2017). This report represents an exploratory effort examining the relatively low level of women’s representation and testing the utility of alternative methods in better understanding workforce dynamics.

Although the UK research assessment system initially mainly prioritised traditional academic outputs, more recently it has also promoted non-academic impact and engagement, which historical geography research is well suited to achieve provided detailed local knowledge can be widely disseminated, which is only possible via the world wide web. However, this is best done not via online GIS (geographical information systems) but through geo- -semantic systems, supporting web pages about named entities linked by explicit relationships. Although the resulting systems are in some senses gazetteers, they differ from most existing gazetteers by focusing not on landscape features but on administrative units defined in law, and on “places” which are defined through the study of place naming. The final section of the paper briefly describes the Great Britain historical GIS and the web site based on it, “A Vision of Britain through Time”, and then presents data on how it performs in place name-based Google searches.

Sea level rise is a growing concern to human populations and, subsequently, population scientists have an obvious interest in investigating the population impacts of this environmental change. Moreover, demographers are uniquely positioned to make significant contributions to the study of the population-environment nexus. Coastal populations are especially vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise, which include an increase in the frequency and severity of flooding, associated storm surges, shoreline erosion and salt water contamination of fresh water supplies. The potential human impacts of sea level rise can be mitigated through adaptation and planning, and accurate population estimates are essential for effective planning and implementation. Understanding specific populations at risk as well as the magnitude of risk must become a high priority in population science. This chapter provides a review of the unique conceptual and technical challenges confronting population scientists pursuing this vital research area. Specifically, the chapter discusses analytical approaches and data sources currently used by population scientists to evaluate the human impacts of sea level rise, and highlights ways future researchers may address existing limitations to further advance study of this critical area.

This paper investigates the implications of heterogeneous price rigidities across sectors for the distributional and aggregate effects of monetary policy. First, we identify and characterize analytically a new set of earnings and expenditure channels of monetary policy that emerge in the presence of sectoral heterogeneity. Second, we establish empirically that (i) prices are more rigid in sectors selling to college-educated households, (ii) prices are more rigid in sectors employing college-educated households, and (iii) sectors that employ college-educated households also sell more to these households. These new facts suggest that monetary policy stabilizes sectors that matter relatively more for college-educated households, due to an expenditure channel (from (i)), an earnings channel (from (ii)), and their amplification by feedback loops (from (iii)). Finally, we develop a multi-sector incomplete-markets Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model, in which households of different education levels work and consume in different sectors. We quantify the aggregate and distributional effects from heterogeneous price rigidities using this model. In the baseline calibration, we find that the consumption of college-educated households is 22% more sensitive to monetary policy shocks as that of non-college households, while the aggregate real effect of monetary policy is 5% stronger than with homogeneous price rigidities.

This study presents empirical evidence that a health improvement program-privatization of municipal water services-in Argentina during the 1990s has a negative effect on long-term human capital accumulation. Exploiting variations across regions and cohorts, I find that early childhood exposure to the program reduces years of schooling by around 0.5 years. The negative effect is more pronounced for males. I further use the previous census to examine the identical cohorts when they were at their school age. I find that they are more likely to drop out of school and participate in the labor force after the program, and the effect is again more marked for boys. The finding is consistent with families prefer healthier children to go to work after improvements in health status.

College-educated workers entering the labor market in 1940 experienced a 4-fold increase in their labor earnings between the ages of 25 and 55; in contrast, the increase was 2.6-fold for those entering the market in 1980. For workers without a college education these figures are 3.6-fold and 1.5-fold, respectively. Why are earnings profiles flatter for recent cohorts? We build a parsimonious model of schooling and human capital accumulation on the job, and calibrate it to earnings statistics of workers from the 1940 cohort. The model accounts for 99% of the flattening of earnings profiles for workers with a college education between the 1940 and the 1980 cohorts (52% for workers without a college education). The flattening in our model results from a single exogenous factor: the increasing price of skills. The higher skill price induces (i) higher college enrollment for recent cohorts and thus a change in the educational composition of workers and (ii) higher human capital at the start of work life for college-educated workers in the recent cohorts, which implies lower earnings growth over the life cycle.

A central aim of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase health insurance coverage. In a previous brief, we documented that, through 2015, coverage gains for workers under the ACA were largest in occupations with lower baseline coverage rates, employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) coverage rates, hourly wages, and weekly earnings.1 These findings indicated that coverage gains were well-targeted to workers and their dependents who most needed the assistance. In this brief, we assess whether coverage gains from 2010 to 2016 were associated with changes in labor market outcomes across occupations. We show how employment, hours worked per week, and weekly earnings changed, by occupation group, and how these changes differed for occupations experiencing larger and smaller coverage gains under the ACA. We also examine whether occupations experiencing increased coverage through nonemployment sources (i.e., through Medicaid or individual plans purchased on the ACA’s Marketplace exchanges) also experienced offsetting declines in ESI coverage. Widely cited predictions that the coverage provisions of the ACA would lead to reduced employment and work hours did not materialize, nor did predictions that employer-based coverage rates would fall as employers dropped coverage. Millions of workers gained insurance coverage under the ACA without the adverse effects on labor markets that some had forecasted.

Adolescents spend most of their time interacting with people, and family, social, and community interactions play a prominent role in long-run adolescent development. However, little is known about how adolescents feel as they interact with others. This study identifies the immediate emotional response of adolescents as they spend time with parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, mentors, and other adults in their community. Relying on nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey from 2003-2016, we find that adolescents in non-nuclear families particularly benefit from spending time with older siblings and nonresident parents. In addition, spending time with mentors and adult acquaintances improves well-being for some but not all adolescents, suggesting a need for care when designing policies aimed at adolescent involvement in communities.

Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions—those deemed perniciously politically discriminatory to minorities—to preclear changes to their voting practices with the Department of Justice. By exploiting the use of a federally imposed threshold for how Section 5 coverage was applied in North Carolina, this article estimates the effect of coverage using a difference-in-differences design. This article finds that Section 5 coverage increased black voter registration by 14–19 percentage points, white registration by 10–13 percentage points, and overall voter turnout by 10–19 percentage points. Additional results for Democratic vote share suggest that some of this overall increase in turnout may have come from reactionary whites. This article finds that Section 5 coverage had a statistically and substantively meaningful effect on enfranchisement, although an effect consistent with the more modest of extant estimates in the literature.