We model hysteresis in the labor market as resulting from a strategic complementarity in firms wage setting and workers job search strategies. Strategic complementarity results in a continuum of possible equilibria with higher-wage equilibria welfare dominating lower-wage equilibria. Further, we specify a protocol for revelation of the new equilibria following shocks such that the model exhibits (1) periods of endogenous rigidity in wages and participation, (2) persistent changes in wages, participation, and output in response to transitory movements in labor productivity, (3) sluggish recoveries including both a jobless phase and a wageless phase. Furthermore, regardless of the history, expansions are insufficiently robust in the sense that misallocation remains even during expansions.

Background: Latinos born in the US, 36 million, comprise 65% of all US Latinos. Yet their cancer experience is nearly always analyzed together with their foreign-born counterparts, 19 million, who constitute a steady influx of truly lower-risk populations from abroad. To highlight specific cancer vulnerabilities for US-born Latinos, we compare their cancer mortality to the majority non-Latino white (NLW) population, foreign-born Latinos, and non-Latino blacks. Methods: We analyzed 465,751 cancer deaths from 2008 to 2012 occurring among residents of California and Texas, the two most populous states, accounting for 47% of US Latinos. This cross-sectional analysis, based on granular data obtained from death certificates on cause of death, age, race, ethnicity and birthplace, makes use of normal standardization techniques and negative binomial regression models. Results: While Latinos overall have lower all-cancers-combined mortality rates than NLWs, these numbers were largely driven by low rates among the foreign born while mortality rates for US-born Latinos approach those of NLWs. Among Texas males, rates were 210 per 100,000 for NLWs and 166 for Latinos combined, but 201 per 100,000 for US-born Latinos and 125 for foreign-born Latinos. Compared to NLWs, US-born Latino males in California had mortality rate ratios of 2.83 (95% CI: 2.52–3.18) for liver cancer, 1.44 (95% CI: 1.30–1.61) for kidney cancer, and 1.25 (95% CI: 1.17–1.34) for colorectal cancer (CRC). Texas results showed a similar site-specific pattern. Conclusions: Specific cancer patterns for US-born Latinos, who have relatively high cancer mortality, similar overall to NLWs, are masked by aggregation of all Latinos, US-born and foreign-born. While NLWs had high mortality for lung cancer, US-born Latinos had high mortality for liver, kidney and male colorectal cancers. HCV testing and reinforcement of the need for CRC screening should be a priority in this specific and understudied population. The unprecedented proximity of overall rates between NLWs and US-born Latino populations runs counter to the prevailing narrative of Latinos having significantly lower cancer risk and mortality. Birthplace data are critical in detecting meaningful differences among Latinos; these findings merit not only clinical but also public health attention.

Accidental drowning is a leading cause of death among young persons. It is the third leading cause of accidental death world-wide, the second leading cause of accidental deaths among persons 1–14 years of age in the United States and the leading cause of accidental deaths among persons 1–14 years of age in China (WHO, 2017). In the United States, there are wide racial and ethnic disparities in drowning rates among persons under 29 years of age (Gilchrist and Parker, 2014). American Indians and African Americans under 29 years old are 1.95 and 1.44 times more likely to be victims of fatal drownings than are whites. In the 10- to 14-year age group, African Americans are an astonishingly 3.7 times more likely to drown than whites. Overall, Hispanics are only slightly more likely to drown than whites (1.04 times). But, in the 20–24 year age group, Hispanics are 1.39 times more likely to drown than are whites.

Cancer is the second leading cause of morbidity and death in the United States corresponding to more than 1.7 million incident cases and responsible for more than 550,000 deaths annually. In addition, hospitalized cancer patients are nearly 10 times more likely to develop sepsis when compared to participants with no cancer history. As treatments and therapies for cancer continue to improve, the average 5-year survival is approaching 70% overall among the US population; however, to date there is very limited research that has examined the association between patients with a history of cancer and future risk of sepsis among a longitudinal cohort of community-dwelling adults. Therefore, the objectives of this dissertation were to use data from years 2003 through 2012 of the large national REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) cohort to: 1) determine the risk of sepsis after cancer survivorship compared with participants with no cancer history and 2) whether these differences were modified by race, 3) examine the mediating effects of indicators of frailty, and 4) examine the mediating effects of community characteristics. In our first study, there were a total of 1393 first sepsis events, and sepsis risk was higher for cancer survivors than for participants with no cancer history participants (adjusted HR: 2.60, 95% CI: 2.30 – 2.95). However, risk of sepsis after cancer was similar for both Blacks (adjusted HR: 2.87, 95% CI: 2.27 – 3.62), and Whites (adjusted HR: 2.51, 95% CI: 2.17 – 2.91) (p value for race and cancer interaction = 0.63). These results suggest that regardless of race or personal-level characteristics, cancer survivorship of any cancer type is very important risk factor for sepsis, and tremendous care should be provided to cancer survivors once hospitalized with suspected infection. The second study of the current dissertation observed that while cancer survivors had more than a two-fold increased of sepsis, the mediation effects of frailty on the log-hazard scale were very small: weakness (0.57%), exhaustion (0.31%), low physical activity (0.20%), frailty (0.75%), and total number of frailty indicators (0.69%). In our third study, community-level mediation effects were very weak with income (% mediated = 0.07%) and prevalence of adult smoking (% mediated = 0.21%) being the only significant mediators. In conclusion, these results suggest that cancer survivors are at a very high risk of sepsis and that more cautious care be taken with cancer survivors once admitted for any infection.

Introduction The prevalence of key forms of morbidity such as obesity, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease have increased dramatically in the U.S. and elsewhere for decades. Hypertension is etiologically related but its prevalence has been reduced through improved treatment. These diseases are known to have higher than expected rates of comorbidity, but it is not known whether and how these cluster together differentially by race, nor the degree to which they contribute to racial disparities in mortality. Methods Using data from the National Health Interview Survey mortality follow-up (1997-2009, analyzed in 2016), this paper modeled interdependencies between each combination of these four types of morbidity, overall and net of demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral controls. It then analyzed whether these diseases mediate the relationship between race/ethnicity and mortality risk using discrete time complementary loglog survival models. Results American Indians and blacks had significantly elevated rates of comorbidity compared with whites, and Asians and Pacific Islanders rates were often significantly lower than whites. Controlling for these diseases significantly moderated the mortality risk disparity between African American, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islanders and whites. This remained true when individual health behaviors and neighborhood fixed effects were statistically adjusted for. Notably, the full controls model statistically eliminated the association between African American race and mortality risk. Conclusions These diseases contribute significantly to racial/ethnic mortality disparities, particularly between blacks and whites. Future research should consider the mediating role of these diseases for the relationship between social conditions and mortality risks.

This article examines housing insecurity within manufactured housingthe single largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States, home to about 18 million low-income residents. A large portion of manufactured housing is installed in mobile home parks, which can legally close at any time, displacing entire communities. Based on two years living within and being evicted from closing mobile home parks in two states, this comparative ethnography of mass eviction juxtaposes sites of distinctive state practices for managing the forced relocation of park residents. I analyze the experience of eviction in Florida, a site of explicit intervention and model legislation for mobile home park closures, in light of the experience in Texas, where the state has adopted a hands-off approach. I describe the paradoxical effects of Floridas protective, yet market-oriented, state housing interventions, which produced both a cottage industry of mobile home relocation services and a more protracted, pernicious eviction for displaced residents. I outline the specific mechanisms through which this paradox of state intervention occurred and consider the implications not only for mobile home parks but also for a variety of other state programs that are currently being delivered through an adaptive reliance on the private sector.

This article explores recent racial and ethnic inequalities in poverty, estimating the share of racial poverty differentials that can be explained by variation in family structure and workforce participation. The authors use logistic regression to estimate the association between poverty and race, family structure, and workforce participation. They then decompose between-race differences in poverty risk to quantify how racial disparities in marriage and work explain observed inequalities in the log odds of poverty. They estimate that 47.7% to 48.9% of Black–White differences in poverty risk can be explained by between-group variance in these two factors, while only 4.3% to 4.5% of the Hispanic–White differential in poverty risk can be explained by these variables. The findings underscore the continued but varied association between racial disparities in poverty and labor and marriage markets. Clear racial differences in the origin of poverty suggest that policy interventions will not have uniformly effective impacts on poverty reduction.

Social media, web search logs and online purchases are only some of the sources used my private and public organizations to collect information about individuals. While, the aggregated data are valuable for research and commercial use, they can pose a direct threat to a user’s privacy. The field of privacy preserving data sharing has emerged, in order to create tools, that can enable institutions and companies to shares their clients’ information, while protecting their privacy. Differential privacy (DP) has been recognized as the de-facto privacy framework for interacting with private information. In this thesis, we continue the work on release histograms with formal privacy guarantees. Particularly, we investigate the effect of sorting as a technique for improving the accuracy of the final approximation. We identify the right settings to use it, and when to avoid it. DP aims to protect users’ records from every possible type of inference attack. As a result, the DP is a very pessimistic and considers every piece of information as sensitive. In the context of this thesis, we will relax the previous requirement. We propose one-sided privacy (OSP) a novel privacy framework that is able to handle data that can be classified as sensitive or non-sensitive. Our empirical results show that OSP can support new types of application, and offers meaningful utility, in cases that DP is known to perform poorly.

Health in the United States is stratified significantly. The stratification in health mirrors broader social inequality, with the socially advantaged generally living longer and healthier lives. While the extreme stratification in health and life expectancy in the United States is well documented, comparatively less research has analyzed how large-scale institutions such as the military and criminal justice system can influence population health and processes of health inequality. Indeed, the military and prisons are especially important for population health and health inequality due to their size, composition of disadvantaged men, high degree of regulation/social control, and ability to shape the life course within the institutions and subsequently. Neighborhoods, are also critically important to shaping health and population health disparities. Thus, the following dissertation analyzes how the military, prisons, and neighborhoods shape population health and health disparities. Using the National Health Interview Survey and the corresponding Linked Mortality file, Chapter 2 shows that black/white inequality in risk of death is smaller among veterans than non-veterans. These findings were net of socioeconomic and behavioral health factors. Additionally, this Chapter shows that the smaller inequality in mortality is concentrated in cohorts who served in the All-Volunteer era. Using the National Health Interview Survey and the Survey of Inmates in State and Correctional Facilities, Chapter 3 shows that the extent to which chronic health conditions vary by educational level is smaller among the incarcerated than non-incarcerated. However, the extent to which infectious diseases differs by educational attainment is significantly larger among the incarcerated population. Chapter 4 uses the Maternal and Infant Health Assessment and the Geographic Research on Well-being study to analyze how long-term neighborhood poverty predicts mother’s reports of their child’s sleep. The findings indicate that children who consistently lived in neighborhoods characterized by long-term high neighborhood poverty had much greater odds of not sleeping the prescribed amount for their age. This was even net of important child, mother, and household characteristics. Overall, the findings stress the importance of considering institutions and neighborhoods when analyzing population health inequality.

Community colleges are an important part of the higher education landscape in the United States, but completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. Much of the existing policy and research attention to this issue has focused on addressing academic and financial challenges. However, there is ample reason to think that non-academic obstacles might be key drivers of dropout rates for students living with the burden of poverty. This study examines the impact of a comprehensive case management intervention that is designed specifically to help low-income students overcome the multitude of barriers to college completion. We evaluate the impact of this intervention through a randomized controlled trial evaluation (RCT) conducted between 2013 and 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. Eligible students were randomly assigned to a treatment group that was offered comprehensive case management, including emergency financial assistance (EFA), a separate treatment group offered only EFA, or a control group. Data from school administrative records indicate that the comprehensive case management program significantly increases persistence and degree completion, especially for women. Estimates for the full sample are imprecise, but the estimates for women imply that the case management intervention tripled associate degree receipt (31 percentage point increase).We find no difference in outcomes between the EFA-only treatment arm and the control group. A back-of-the-envelope calculation using average earnings gains associated with community college completion implies that program benefits exceed program costs ($5,640 per student for three year program) after only 4.25 years in the workforce post schooling.

Is the difficulty of purchasing health insurance as an individual or small business a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the USA? I answer this question by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Acts dependent coverage mandate, which allowed many 19-25 year olds to acquire health insurance independently of their employment. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, I find that the dependent coverage mandate did not increase self-employment among young adults overall, but increased self-employment among disabled young adults by 19-23%.

The science and engineering workforce has aged rapidly in recent years, both in absolute terms and relative to the workforce as a whole. This is a potential concern if the large number of older scientists crowds out younger scientists, making it difficult for them to establish independent careers. In addition, scientists are believed to be most creative earlier in their careers, so the aging of the workforce may slow the pace of scientific progress. We develop and simulate a demographic model, which shows that a substantial majority of recent aging is a result of the aging of the large baby boom cohort of scientists. However, changes in behavior have also played a significant role, in particular a decline in the retirement rate of older scientists, induced in part by elimination of mandatory retirement in universities in 1994. Furthermore, the age distribution of the scientific workforce is still adjusting to this policy change. Current retirement rates and other determinants of employment in science imply a steady state mean age 2.3 years higher than the 2008 level of 48.6.

The enlistment process begins when an interested candidate meets with an Army Recruiter. At this initial meeting, a recruiter will discuss the general qualification needed for enlisting in the Army and conduct several basic screening tests and background checks. Based on these initial tests, the recruiter will discuss a candidates overall eligibility and the types of occupations within the Army for which she may be eligible. If the candidate passes the initial basic screening and remains interested, the recruiter schedules an appointment for the candidate at the nearest Military Entrance Processing Station. Here a candidate takes the Armed Forces Qualification Test and undergoes a more thorough background check and medical examination, as well as applies for any necessary waivers. Once complete and deemed qualified, a candidate is presented with her set of occupational choices that are the result of both the candidates eligibility for any specific job and the Armys current need for the specific occupation. A recruit at this point can choose to enlist in the military by selecting from the set of occupations offered and signing an enlistment contract or exit the enlistment process.

A common problem associated with evaluating dominance relationships between distribution functions and their moments is the lack of resolution regarding the direction of dominance as a result of the functions crossing, prevalent in empirical applications. This paper proposes a method of examining the difference between (Generalized) Lorenz curves over the entire support of the variables, an idea first proposed by Anderson and Leo (On providing a complete ordering of non-combinable alternative prospects. University of Toronto Discussion Paper, 2017) and formalized by Anderson et al. (Somewhere between utopia and dystopia: choosing from multiple incomparable prospect. University of Toronto Discussion Paper, 2017) for the case of stochastic dominance. The method provides a way of ordering all the (Generalized) Lorenz curves under consideration. The paper also provides the exact limit distribution of these associated measures, which in consequence of the results due to Politis and Romano (Ann Stat 22(4):2031–2050, 1994), permits inference via subsampling, in lieu of the crossing of empirical (Generalized) Lorenz curves. We show that due to the relationship between the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient, the same can be said of the latter. An example is provided to demonstrate its application.

Healthcare costs in the U.S are the highest among countries and are continuing to increase. Contributing to these costs is medical adherence, a measure of if a patient is taking their medications or following doctors’ orders correctly. Medical nonadherence represent 3-10% of all U.S healthcare costs (Iuga & McGuire, 2014). Chronically ill patients have a higher nonadherence rate of around 50% (Chisholm-Burns & Spivey, 2003). Chronic patients with asthma especially have a high medical nonadherence rate of between 30-70% and consist of eight percent of the U.S population. Being such a large proportion of the U.S, changes in healthcare policies concerning asthma patients have a great effect on many Americans. In 2010 the Affordable Care Act (ACA) led to major restructuring in the health insurance market; new requirements led customers to look elsewhere in the market for better prices resulting in insurance plan switches, called churning. From 2015 to 2016 two thirds of the 12.7 million people with insurance through Healthcare.gov changed their health insurance plan from the previous year (Avalere Health, 2016). Now, in 2016, a new president has been elected that threatens the ACA of being repealed or replaced in the coming years. Many evolving proposals for replacement feature consumer choice as a key factor which implies plan switching may continue or increase. It is important to examine the effects churning would have. One group of researchers found that stronger patient-provider relationships in HIV patients were associated with higher medical adherence (Schneider et. al, 2004). When patient-provider relationships are disrupted because of churning, medical adherence is likely to decrease. With asthma patients consisting so much of our population, it is especially important to examine how churning can affect their medical adherence. This study will investigate if changing insurance plans negatively affects medical adherence for asthma patients.

The recent literature on intergenerational mobility has shown that attitudes and preferences are an important pathway for the intergenerational transmission of economic outcomes. We contribute to this literature by documenting that intergenerationally transmitted gender role attitudes also explain economic outcomes of individuals other than immediate relatives. Focusing on daughters-in-law, we examine whether the gender role attitudes of foreign-born mothers-in-law a ect the fertility and labor supply decisions of native US women. Our results reveal that women’s labor market participation is signi cantly positively related to the gender role attitudes in her mother-in-law’s country of origin. Employing a new identi cation strategy, we show that this nding is due to the intergenerational transmission of gender roles rather than other unobservable characteristics of the mother-in-law’s country of origin. These results suggest that the cultural values held in their source country do not only in uence the behavior of immigrants and their descendants, but can also a ect the labor force participation of native women. We do, however, not nd any evidence that intergenerationally transmitted gender role attitudes a ect the fertility behavior of native women.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of location choice with social interactions where mortgage approval rates determine household-specific choice sets that differ across neighborhoods and years in observable and unobservable dimensions. Existence and local uniqueness of city equilibria enable comparative statics estimates of the impact of changes in borrowing constraints on neighborhood-level prices and demographics. Estimation the model using micro data on property transactions, household demographics, neighborhood amenities, mortgage applications, and bank liquidity for the San Francisco Bay area, reveals that the price sensitivity of borrowing constraints explains about two-thirds of the price elasticity of neighborhood demand. General equilibrium estimates of the impact of the relaxation of lending standards on prices and neighborhood demographics bring two out-of-sample predictions for the period 2000-2006: (i) an increase in house prices accompanied by a compression of the price distribution and (ii) a reduction in the isolation of Whites in line with evidence of gentrification in the San Francisco Bay. Both predictions are supported by empirical observation.

Using newly licensed individual-level data from Gallup between 2008 and 2017, this paper provides microeconomic evidence that sentiments about economic activity played an important role in amplifying and propagating the Great Recession. First, after controlling for aggregate shocks, a 1pp rise in county employment and housing price growth is associated with a 0.30sd and 0.67sd rise in perceptions about the current state of the economy and a 0.12pp and 0.27pp rise in perceptions the economy is improving. Second, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the 2016 Presidential election, consumption of non-durable goods grew by 4.2%, concentrated with a 10-12% rise among conservatives. The causal effect of sentiment on consumption is robust to three separate instrumental variables strategies: a state Bartik-like measure of gasoline price shocks, county fluctuations in daily temperature, and exposure to different housing price shocks through social networks. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the decline in sentiment can account for 34-68% of the decline in consumption during the Great Recession and an additional 14-43 months of delayed recovery.