Several recent articles have reported conflicting conclusions about educational differences in life expectancy, and this is partly due to the use of unreliable data subject to a numerator-denominator bias previously reported as ranging from 20% to 40%. This article presents estimates of life expectancy and lifespan variation by education in the United States using more reliable data from the National Health Interview Survey. Contrary to prior conclusions in the literature, I find that life expectancy increased or stagnated since 1990 among all education-race-sex groups except for non-Hispanic white women with less than a high school education; there has been a robust increase in life expectancy among white high school graduates and a smaller increase among black female high school graduates; lifespan variation did not increase appreciably among high school graduates; and lifespan variation plays a very limited role in explaining educational gradients in mortality. I also discuss the key role that educational expansion may play in driving future changes in mortality gradients. Because of shifting education distributions, within an education-specific synthetic cohort, older age groups are less negatively selected than younger age groups. We could thus expect a greater concentration of mortality at younger ages among people with a high school education or less, which would be reflected in increasing lifespan variability for this group. Future studies of educational gradients in mortality should use more reliable data and should be mindful of the effects of shifting education distributions.

What is already known about this topic? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease are progressive neurodegenerative diseases that affect >1 million Americans. Factors consistently reported to be either positively or inversely associated with ALS and Parkinson’s disease are primarily demographic or behavioral. The role of occupation in these diseases is relatively understudied and poorly understood. What is added by this report? This study described the burden of ALS and Parkinson’s disease mortality by usual occupation in a large, complete, representative, and population-based sample in the United States and found higher ALS and Parkinson’s disease mortality among workers in occupations associated with higher socioeconomic status (SES). What are the implications for public health practice? Although the reasons for the findings of this study are not understood, it provides information for future targeted studies among workers in higher SES occupations to identify risk factors for ALS and Parkinson’s disease. These studies should use designs that provide evidence for causality, detailed exposure assessment, and adjustment for additional potential confounders.

Tuberculosis is a global public health issue with more than 2 billion people infected worldwide. It is also a serious public health concern within the United States with 9,557 cases of active disease diagnosed in 2015 alone [1]. In the U.S., specific sub-groups, such as foreign-born persons, persons with diabetes or persons living with HIV or other immunocompromising conditions are known to be at higher risk of TB disease. Among foreign-born residents in the U.S., persons born in high-morbidity countries are known to be at even higher risk of developing the disease. Yet, TB disease incidence rates by country of birth are not reported at the local, state or national level despite these large, known differences in risk by country of birth. This is part due to the complications of using country-of-birth-specific population estimates and technical challenges of using standard regression analysis with a communicable disease. This thesis aims to call attention to this notable gap and, in part, to fill it. Data on 5,447 diagnosed TB cases from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health TB Control Program were combined with stratified population estimates available from the Public Use Microdata Survey to calculate the incidence rate of TB disease for the years 2005 through 2011, stratifying by country of birth and other demographic factors. Bayesian models were used to account for the uncertainty in the number of diagnoses and the population estimates. Extending these models into spatial analysis required the use of a hierarchical Bayesian model. Prediction models were constructed using bootstrap backward elimination and stochastic variable selection. We estimated that the unadjusted incidence rate among persons born in the Philippines was 44.3 per 100,000 person-years and among persons born in Vietnam 38.7 per 100,000 personyears in comparison to 2.3 per 100,000 for U.S.-born persons. In spatial analysis, TB disease incidence was found to be spatially heterogeneous within Los Angeles County and remained so within high-risk countries of birth and when accounting for age, sex and years in residence. In prediction modeling, we found the addition of PUMA-level ecological variables did not improve the prediction of TB disease incidence beyond models using age, sex, country of birth and years in residence. With these three analytical approaches–non-spatial, spatial and prediction–we confirmed that TB disease incidence rates varied markedly by country of birth and showed that issues arising from the technical challenges of dependent outcomes, sparse data and uncertainty in population estimates can be ameliorated.

The relative incomes and education-levels of blacks and whites in the United States and Brazil are considered after Abolition, and framed by earlier disparities in their natural rates of increase. For the post-WWII period, the effects of demography, education, and regional migration on the black-white income gap are disentangled using census microdata and a single-equation form Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. These variables explain progressively less of income inequality over time: as others have suggested, factors like discrimination and school quality have become more-substantial determinants of relative earnings. Education, measured by literacy or primary- school completion, was the major factor in reducing income gaps during this period, followed by demography and migration. While both countries have made gains towards racial equality, their timing is entirely divergent: the best decade in these terms for the U.S. was the 1960s, and the worst, the 2000s; vice-versa for Brazil.

Since the late 1970s, the profession of human resource management has grown in both size and influence. The number of human resource managers in 2010 is almost twice the number that existed in 1980. Furthermore, this profession has become increasingly feminized since the 1970s-today, around 60 percent of human resource managers are women. While previous research has found that womens presence in certain occupations can improve gender equity, there has yet to be an examination of whether the increased representation of women in human resource management has affected gender equity more broadly. In this article, I analyze data from the U.S. Census from 1980 to 2000 and from the American Community Survey for 2010 to explore whether the rise and feminization of human resources has affected womens representation in management. The findings reveal that the increased presence of both white and black women in human resources has been accompanied by greater representation of women in management, although the effects are much larger for white womens presence in human resources.

Increasing immigrant diversity, both in the number of immigrants and the diversity of sending countries, is helping reshape the economic landscape in many countries, most notably in their urban regions. This paper provides a succinct introduction to the existing research on the economic effects, particularly productivity, of immigrant diversity, focusing on a recent wave of empirical work. It identifies outstanding questions in the research, offering several ways to push current lines of inquiry ahead and suggesting areas as yet underexplored. To motivate these new directions for geographers to pursue, it presents empirical results that raise more questions than they answer. In doing so, it sets the stage for future work that can generate a deeper understanding of the role of immigrant diversity in shaping economic welfare in cities.

This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics which are self-contained and can be read independently of the others. The first essay investigates the existence of unemployment hysteresis effect in two different educational levels: high school or lower and college and higher. The study employs a panel analysis of non-stationary in idiosyncratic and common components (PANIC) model to compare the stochastic nature of unemployment in the two groups. The second essay measures the mismatch unemployment in the US economy. It improves an existing model in the literature and creates a mismatch index and measures the unemployment added by the mismatch in the economy over the time. The third essay studies the quit behavior of workers in the US industries and researches the role of nominal industry wages and aggregate wages in workers’ quitting decisions.

This paper develops double-cohort models to study the impact of demographic shifts on the aggregate commute mode choices in Los Angeles County, California from 2000 to 2010. Specifically, the models construct demographic cohorts by year of birth and immigration and study three commuting modes: automobiles, driving alone and carpooling. Using Integrated Public Use Microdata Seris (IPUMS) datasets on 2000 Census and 2009-2011 American Community Survey (ACS), the author found statistically significant effects on commuting mode choices across different cohorts in years 2000 and 2010. The trajectory charts show that the native-born younger generations are three-percent less possible to commute by automobiles than the older ones when reaching the same age levels, while the new immigrants staying in the US for less than ten years showed a strong increase in their expected probabilities of commuting by automobiles from 2000 to 2010. A simple projection shows that these two aforementioned demographic shifts: generational change and immigration assimilation push the aggregated preferences in commuting by automobiles to different directions. The projection shows there will be 82.5 to 84.0 percent of workers commuting by automobiles in 2020.

A major provision of the Affordable Care Act was the creation of Health Insurance Marketplaces, which began operating for the 2014 plan year. Although enrollment initially grew in these markets, enrollment has fallen recently amid insurer exits and rising premiums. To better understand these markets, we estimate premium elasticity of demand for Marketplace plans, using within-plan premium changes from 2014 to 2015, accounting for state-specific trends and simultaneous changes in generosity. Our preferred estimate implies that a one percent premium increase reduces plan-specific enrollment by 1.7 percent. We argue that this high elasticity reflects the rapid growth and high churn in this market, as well as the high degree of standardization and the availability of many close substitutes.

The memo describes the methods used to derive an estimate of the economic benefits of high-quality universal preschool over the lifespan of a cohort of students. This analysis has four steps: 1. Calculate total costs of high-quality universal preschool for a cohort of 4-year-old children, by state. 2. Calculate total benefits of high-quality universal preschool for a cohort of 4-year-old children, by state. 3. Calculate net benefits of high-quality universal preschool, by state. 4. Add together individual states’ net benefits to calculate national estimate of net benefits of preschool. This memo also describes a preliminary analysis used to calculate the difference between potential net benefits of universal preschool—as described above—and current net benefits.

How do individuals change their labor choices in response to new labor laws? The introduction of new laws and regulations may lead individuals to decrease their labor supply, or to change the quality and type of labor they supply. Rational and utility-maximizing choices may also lead to unexpected outcomes for lawmakers and individual suppliers. These empirical essays use identification for causal inference and models of individual decision making to analyze how labor market laws influence individuals’ labor choices.

This dissertation combines three studies related to the welcome mat effect (WME) of the early Medicaid expansions under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, when CA, CT, DC, MN, NJ, WA expanded their Medicaid program to cover non-disabled adults. The WME is a spillover effect that indicates an increase in Medicaid enrollment of historically eligible groups after Medicaid expansions. In other words, individuals who had been eligible for Medicaid but did not enroll before expansions would be more likely to enroll in the program later because of increased program publicity, streamlined application process, or reduced welfare stigma.

The conventional explanation of raising income inequality is often referred to as the market forces hypothesis. Global forces have led to structural economic changes in which we now have a two-tiered economy: a highly skilled and highly paid economy at the top of the income distribution and a poorly skilled and poorly paid economy at the bottom of the income distribution. In recent years, however, the conventional theory has been called into question by what can be characterized as the public policy hypothesis that holds that it is because of public policy, both active and passive, that labor market institutions that served to bolster incomes of the poor and middle class deteriorated. As a consequence of this deterioration, income inequality has only risen. Through an examination of data from the Current Population Survey during the 2000s, this article seeks to address to what extent these two hypotheses are related. Although there is no question that the data does support the market forces hypothesis, the data also show that these forces may have been exacerbated by the deterioration of important labor market

On January 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. These restrictions have been suspended temporarily by courts. It is uncertain if they will be reinstated and what travel restrictions other groups of nationals will face. For now, we can examine the role recent immigrants from the executive order seven countries currently play in the US labor market as a means of assessing the potential impact of this policy.

We exploit the exogenous variation in regional credit market contestability brought on by banking deregulation in the United States to study the narrowing of the gender gap in local labor markets. We find that deregulation reduced the gender gap in labor force participation, as the subsequent increase in the demand for labor induced non-working women to enter the labor force. Deregulation also reduced wage inequality as women became more likely to work in the private sector, to enter high-paid "male" jobs, and to acquire higher education. Tests of contiguous MSAs sharing a state border corroborate a genuine deregulation effect.

The mass migration of African Americans out of the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century represents one of the most significant internal migration flows in U.S. history. Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants’ success in translating their geographic mobility into economic mobility. Due in part to the lack of a large body of longitudinal data, almost all studies of the Great Migration have focused on the migrants themselves, usually over short periods of their working lives. Using longitudinally linked census data, we take a broader view, investigating the long-term economic and social effects of the Great Migration on the migrants’ children. Our results reveal modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status for the African American children of the Great Migration relative to the children of southerners who remained in the South. In contrast, second-generation white migrants experienced few benefits from migrating relative to southern or northern stayers.

Texas’ education system is currently inadequate to meet the state’s future needs for millions of young Texans and there is much at stake for the state’s business and economic interests. Advocates for improving our system for all students – from major educational stakeholders to concerned parents wanting a bright future for their children in terms of economic stability and prosperity – are too-often unheard by our state’s governance and, sometimes, business leaders. These leaders face numerous challenges confronting our state and have not prioritized funding public education at the necessary levels. While it is true that our state has many needs, the main emphasis of this paper is to illustrate how much is at stake for the business community of Texas if we continue to under-educate our children and ill-prepare them for rewarding careers that allow them to properly contribute to both the state and nation’s economy. Educate Fir$t believes that, based on these realities, the business community must fully understand what is at risk from the perspective of their future ability to maintain our financial well-being. This paper seeks to emphasize the irrefutable link between the concerns of public education and those that pertain to the business sector. Education is an investment that affects everyone; it is not a special interest sector impacting only those who work or learn in schools and colleges across the nation. The quality of public education has a notable connection to the proliferation and survival of businesses. We are hopeful that this message will resonate with the business community as well as educational stakeholders, communities that rely on public education, and the legislators who are positioned to help usher in a new generation of better educated, more highly skilled Texans. Many factors in both Texas and the United States contribute to the problems facing public education and will have a major impact on the business community. Among them are a notable increase in the state’s already impressive child population, the constantly evolving technology required by our state’s businesses demanding a workforce with updated skill sets, and the decreased funding of higher education – a vital part of the educational pipeline that provides a link between public primary and secondary schools and the job market.

This paper invokes a theoretical model of immigrant membership exclusion to assess the political integration of second-generation Mexican Americans. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the migration status of parents, especially mothers, is associated with the political engagement, community engagement, and voting registration of their adult offspring. In each type of engagement, respondents whose mothers have remained unauthorized show lower overall levels of political incorporation. The effect is indirect in that it is mediated by the respondents’ educational level, in keeping with prior research showing that persistent unauthorized status by mothers reduces the years of schooling of children. This study thus contributes to the literature finding that the unauthorized status of parents has repercussions for the overall integration of their offspring.

This article reconstructs the story behind Freeman v. Pitts (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history in Freeman.