As opportunities have opened for women, they have made strides in many societal domains. However, women remain more financially insecure than men by many measures. The greater likelihood of living in poverty and lower incomes creates insecurity not only for women, but for an increasingly large share of families that depend on their incomes. Texas is one of the largest states in the United States with a population of over 26 million. Analyzing Census and state agency data, the article identifies four “building blocks” of economic security for women: child care as a work support, education as a pathway to greater opportunities, health insurance as a critical protection, and housing as a financial anchor. Educational attainment and health insurance rates have improved for women, while housing and child care continue to be financial challenges. The analysis points to areas of investment that can help communities strengthen the economic security of women, and by extension, their families.

Peak hour car commuters have incomes almost double those who travel by transit, bike and foot. The Oregon Legislature has directed the state’s department of transportation to come up with a value pricing system for interstate freeways in the Portland metropolitan area. A key idea behind value pricing is that it would charge those who use freeways at congested peak hours a higher toll than at other times; tolls might even be zero in off-peak hours, giving travelers strong incentives to use the system when there was available capacity. One of the concerns that’s been raised about value pricing is that it will be an undue burden on the poor or low wage workers who might have little choice but to travel at the peak hour. Bike Portland‘s Jonathan Maus explains how this came up at a recent Portland City Council meeting, in testimony presented by . . .

Individualism appears to have increased over the past several decades, yet most research documenting this shift has been limited to the study of a handful of highly developed countries. Is the world becoming more individualist as a whole? If so, why? To answer these questions, we examined 51 years of data on individualist practices and values across 78 countries. Our findings suggest that individualism is indeed rising in most of the societies we tested. Despite dramatic shifts toward greater individualism around the world, however, cultural differences remain sizable. Moreover, cultural differences are primarily linked to changes in socioeconomic development, and to a lesser extent to shifts in pathogen prevalence and disaster frequency.

Purpose: Subjective well-being (SWB) in youths positively relates to family income, however its association with income during childhood is unclear. Using longitudinal data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 2234 adolescents, age 12–19 years), we examined whether the timing and duration of low family income in childhood was associated with adolescent SWB. Methods: We categorized family income during childhood into state-specific quintiles. Adolescent SWB was assessed using a 12-item questionnaire (score range 3–18). We used marginal structural modelling to test for sensitive periods of exposure to low income and tested cumulative effects of income by modelling the number of years spent in the poorest income quintiles. Results: A period in early childhood (age 0–2 years) was particularly sensitive to low family income. Adolescent SWB was 1.65 (95% CI 0.40, 2.91) points lower in those who grew up in the poorest income quintiles during early childhood compared with the top quintile. Further, each childhood year spent in the poorest income quintiles was associated with a 0.10 point (95% CI 0.04, 0.16) lower SWB score in adolescence. Conclusions: The timing and duration of low family income in childhood both predict individual differences in adolescent SWB. Further studies are needed to clarify the mechanisms of these models and inform public policies.

States make war, but can war also reshape a state’s citizenry? In this article, I develop a theory of how mass warfare can lead to lasting cultural legacies especially as they relate to gender. I argue that mass warfare reshapes the gendered nature of labor markets by pulling women into the labor force. Complementarities between labor markets and attitudes suggest that increasing the public role of women in the labor force should have social spillovers into egalitarian beliefs around gender roles. These beliefs can persist through processes of vertical and horizontal transmission. To test the theory, I use the United States’ involvement in WWI by combining data on mobilization rates with historical census and contemporary public opinion data. Using an instrumental variables identification strategy, I establish that historical war mobilization caused individuals today to become pro-choice, liberal, and identify with the Democratic Party. Results from a series of auxiliary tests provide evidence consistent with the causal mechanisms. At least in the United States, the march toward gender liberalization has bloody origins.

Conflicting data sources present very different pictures of young adult migration rates. The Pew Research Center presented an analysis of census data reporting that today’s young adults are less likely to move in a given year than were their predecessors. A new article from Pew concludes: “Americans are moving at historically low rates, in part because Millennials are staying put.” Only about 20 percent of 25-35 year olds moved in the previous year, a rate far lower than the 26 percent of GenXers who moved when they were the same age and 27 percent of late boomers, who moved when they were in this age group.

Purpose: An accurate accounting of persons with Down syndrome (DS) has remained elusive because no population-based registries exist in the United States. The purpose of this study was to estimate this population size by age, race, and ethnicity. Methods: We predicted the number of people with DS in different age groups for different calendar years using estimations of the number of live births of children with DS from 1900 onward and constructing DS-specific mortality rates from previous studies. Results: We estimate that the number of people with DS living in the United States has grown from 49,923 in 1950 to 206,366 in 2010, which includes 138,019 non-Hispanic whites, 27,141 non-Hispanic blacks, 32,933 Hispanics, 6,747 Asians/Pacific Islanders, and 1,527 American Indians/American Natives. Population prevalence of DS in the United States, as of 2010, was estimated at 6.7 per 10,000 inhabitants (or 1 in 1,499). Conclusion: Until 2008, DS was a rare disease. In more recent decades, the population growth of people with DS has leveled off for non-Hispanic whites as a consequence of elective terminations. Changes in childhood survival have impacted the age distribution of people with DS, with more people in their fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of life.

Improvements in agricultural productivity are often claimed to aid industrialisation at low levels of development. However, empirical evidence for this is limited. This paper uses a natural experiment to show that Chinas 1978 to 1984 agricultural reforms promoted industrial development by increasing the supply of capital. Variation in agricultural productivity comes from the fact that the reforms liberalised the planting of cash crops. Counties with land agro-climatically suited to those crops thus benefitted more from the reforms. Frictions in Chinese capital markets meant that rural savings were often invested locally. Consistent with a simple two-sector model linking the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors through the supply of capital, counties benefitting more from the reforms had faster post reform growth in savings, investment and non-agricultural output. Data from the 1995 industrial census also indicates that firms in these areas faced relatively low capital costs. Additional results indicate linkages through other channels cannot explain the growth in non-agricultural output. The results of this paper thus suggest that agricultural surpluses can provide an important source of capital for low income countries.

My dissertation finds new evidence that public policy can be used to reduce poverty, increase economic opportunity, and encourage egalitarian social attitudes in the United States. I focus on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a wage subsidy that has become one of the most important parts of the U.S. social safety net. By 2013, the EITC redistributed $66 billion to over 28 million low-income households and lifted 9.4 million individuals out of poverty. I show that the EITC affects mothers’ labor-market outcomes, the education and earnings of children of EITC recipients, marriage and fertility decisions, and social attitudes towards working women. Chapter 1: The rise of working mothers radically changed the U.S. economy and the role of women in society. In one of the first studies of the 1975 EITC, I find that this program increased maternal employment by 7 percent, representing one million mothers. The EITC can help explain why the U.S. has long had such a high fraction of working mothers despite few childcare subsidies or parental-leave policies. This influx of working mothers likely had subsequent effects on the country: I find evidence that the EITC affected social attitudes and led to higher approval of working women. Chapter 2: Using four decades of variation in the federal and state EITC, we estimate the impact of the EITC on education and employment outcomes on children exposed to EITC expansions in childhood. Reduced-form results suggest that an additional $1,000 in EITC exposure when a child is 13 to 18 years old increases the likelihood of completing high school (1.3 percent), completing college (4.2 percent), being employed as a young adult (1.0 percent), and earnings by 2.2 percent. Instrumental variables analysis reveals that the primary channel through which the EITC improves these outcomes is increases in pre-tax family earnings. Chapter 3: There has long been a concern that public assistance programs in the U.S. discourage marriage among lower-income couples. The EITC provides a marriage bonus to some couples but a marriage penalty to others, and encourages some households to have more children but others to have less. The overall average effect of the EITC is therefore theoretically ambiguous and existing empirical evidence has been mixed. Using over 30 years of household panel data – and a novel approach that controls for current fertility and marital status – I find that state EITC expansions have positive average effects on both fertility and marriage. Marriage effects are largest for currently unmarried adults and give pause to concerns about the negative effects of the EITC on marriage. These results also imply that some estimates in the EITC literature may be biased, since endogenous switching from the control to the treatment group (defined by marital status or number of children) would violate the stable-group-composition condition required by difference in differences.

Despite long-standing recognition of the importance of family background in shaping life outcomes, only recently have empirical studies in demography, stratification, and other areas begun to consider the influence of kin other than parents. These new studies reflect the increasing availability of genealogical microdata that provide information about ancestors and kin over three or more generations. These data sets, including family genealogies, linked vital registration records, population registers, longitudinal surveys, and other sources, are valuable resources for social research on family, population, and stratification in a multigenerational perspective. This article reviews relevant recent studies, introduces and presents examples of the most important sources of genealogical microdata, identifies key methodological issues in the construction and analysis of genealogical data, and suggests directions for future research.

In the 1950s and 1960s there was an unprecedented marriage boom in the United States. This was followed in the 1970s by a marriage bust. Some argue that both phenomena are cohort effects, while others argue that they are period effects. The study reported here tested the major period and cohort theories of the marriage boom and bust, by estimating an age-period-cohort model of first marriage for the years 1925-79 using census microdata. The results of the analysis indicate that the marriage boom was mostly a period effect, although there were also cohort influences. More specifically, the hypothesis that the marriage boom was mostly a response to rising wages is shown to be consistent with the data. However, much of the marriage bust can be accounted for by unidentified cohort influences, at least until 1980.

Although intermarriage is a commonly used indicator of immigrant integration into host societies, most research has focused on how individual characteristics determine intermarriage. This study uses the 1910 IPUMS census sample to analyze how contextual factors affected intermarriage among European immigrants in the United States. We use newly-available complete-count census microdata to construct contextual measures at a much lower level of aggregation than in previous studies. Our results confirm most findings in previous research relating to individual-level variables. We also find important associations between contextual factors and different marital outcomes. The relative size and sex ratio of the origin group, ethnic diversity, the share of the native born white population, and the proportion of life time spent by immigrants in the U.S. are all associated with exogamy. These patterns are highly similar across genders and immigrant generations.

I analyze whether variation in rainfall risk played a role for the speed of the demographic transition among American settlers. The underlying hypothesis is that children constituted a buffer stock of labor that could be mobilized in response to income shocks. Identification relies on fertility differences between farm and non-farm households within counties and over time. The results suggest that in areas with a high variance in rainfall the fertility differential between farm households and non-farm households was significantly higher than in areas with a low variance in rainfall. This channel is robust to other relevant forces such as income, education and children’s survival as well as the spatial correlation in fertility levels. The analysis also shows that this effect was reduced and finally disappeared as irrigation systems and agricultural machinery emerged. Hence, access to risk-mitigating devices significantly contributed to the demographic transition in the US. These findings also have potentially important implications for Sub-Saharan Africa, especially for those areas where income risks are a major threat to households and where fertility is still high and only slowly declining or not declining at all.

We critique existing literature on the rise of precarious work because of its inattention to the historical organization of work by race and gender. We use intersectional theory to develop a racial–gender lens on precarious work, asking how do race, gender, and educational attainment shape exposure to insecure work. Historically, Blacks pursued education to mitigate against labor market discrimination with uneven success. Education has traditionally protected against exposure to precarious employment, but this association has weakened in recent years and the persistence of differential returns to human capital suggests that the relationship between education and insecure work may be racially contingent. We assess risk of exposure to precarious nonstandard work for racial and gender groups from 1979 to 2015 using data drawn from the CPS-MORG. We find that education is not equally protective across demographic groups and over time, contributing to inequality in access to stable, standard employment.

This paper explores the migration processes and labor incorporation of two professional groups of Mexicans in the United States: engineers and nurses. Certification standards, the ability of migrants to act as agents, and the involvement of various actors in the migratory process are analyzed in order to understand how differentiated labor paths are built within and between each occupational group in the US labor market. Other structural factors that helped to understand the processes studied were the motivations to migrate, family and professions networks, and gender.

The nationalistic rhetoric adopted by the newly-elected president’s administration along with the public’s climaxing anti-immigrant hysteria has recently forced Mexican immigration intervention to the top of the U.S. agenda. Misconceptions regarding Mexicans’ role in stealing jobs, threatening cultural and ethnic traditions, and straining public welfare, educational, and healthcare resources have spurred a fear among the American people. This politically-fabricated “schizophrenia” has ceased the political and economic collaboration between the two nations and has resulted in the unilateral militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. In this evaluation of the U.S. government’s immigration policies, the proposed economic theories related to Mexicans’ motivations in crossing the border, and the data collected from border-crossing participants, it is evident new policy measures need to be implemented to reflect these nuanced trends which stand contrary to conventional wisdom. This research examines the motivations of Mexican immigrants to cross into the U.S. using data collected by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in collaboration with several Mexican government agencies. These parties conducted qualitative surveys with Mexican migrants that evaluate the dynamic, magnitude, and characteristics of the migratory flow across the U.S.-Mexico border. The analysis aims to evaluate if economic motivations are moderated by U.S. or Mexican macroeconomic conditions and if a trade-off exists between motivations for crossing, specifically if economic motivations and those related to social capital theory are substitutes and uphold an inverse relationship. Results indicate a classic trade-off does exist among motivations to cross under specific U.S. macroeconomic conditions and both economic and non- economic motivations to migrate are influenced by U.S. but not Mexican macroeconomic indicators. Based on these findings, an analysis of specific policy reform measures and binational solutions needs to be considered for future legislation to help resolve this multifaceted reality in the long-term.

Economists broadly agree that the economic burden of corporate taxes is not entirely borne by shareholders, but also borne in part by workers or consumers. We theoretically examine corporate tax avoidance in a setting where shareholders do not bear the entire economic burden of the corporate tax. We show that the relation between corporate tax avoidance and the share of the tax burden borne by shareholders is ambiguous, but we derive several testable predictions and their conditions. Using empirical analyses, we find that firms whose shareholders bear less of the economic burden of corporate income taxes engage in less tax avoidance than other firms, and that the results are strongest under conditions predicted by our model. Our findings suggest that maximizing after-tax profits might entail less tax avoidance if shareholders do not entirely bear the corporate tax burden.

Immigration to the United States is at the center of many debates. The issue is not new, not only in the U.S. but in many other parts of the world, as evidenced in the many discussions in the media, as well as in political and academic circles. For this paper, we looked at U.S. data across states to assess the connection between immigration and labor market outcomes. We were prompted by the argument that immigrants make life harder for workers who already are U.S. citizens. Specifically, we investigated the correlation between immigration and the unemployment rate and between immigration and wages. We used state-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010 for wages and immigration figures. Immigrants are defined as those who are foreign-born.1 For wages, we used inflation-adjusted pretax wages and salary incomes of the employed population between the ages of 18 and 60. Finally, we used the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally adjusted unemployment rate.

Background: This study aims to characterize the role of county-specific legacy of slavery in patterning temporal (i.e., 1968–2014), and geographic (i.e., Southern counties) declines in heart disease mortality. In this context, the U.S. has witnessed dramatic declines in heart disease mortality since the 1960s, which have benefitted place and race groups unevenly, with slower declines in the South, especially for the Black population. Methods: Age-adjusted race- and county-specific mortality rates from 1968–2014 for all diseases of the heart were calculated for all Southern U.S. counties. Candidate confounding and mediating covariates from 1860, 1930, and 1970, were combined with mortality data in multivariable regression models to estimate the ecological association between the concentration of slavery in1860 and declines in heart disease mortality from 1968–2014. Results: Black populations, in counties with a history of highest versus lowest concentration of slavery, experienced a 17% slower decline in heart disease mortality. The association for Black populations varied by region (stronger in Deep South than Upper South states) and was partially explained by intervening socioeconomic factors. In models accounting for spatial autocorrelation, there was no association between slave concentration and heart disease mortality decline for Whites. Conclusions: Nearly 50 years of declining heart disease mortality is a major public health success, but one marked by uneven progress by place and race. At the county level, progress in heart disease mortality reduction among Blacks is associated with place-based historical legacy of slavery. Effective and equitable public health prevention efforts should consider the historical context of place and the social and economic institutions that may play a role in facilitating or impeding diffusion of prevention efforts thereby producing heart healthy places and populations.

Prior research on the “Great American Migration Slowdown,” which refers to the declining rate of U.S. internal migration in recent years and decades, has ignored the spatial manifestations of migration slowdown. This misses an important part of the story because, as we show in this paper, U.S. counties became increasingly connected to one another by migration over the past two decades, with gains in migration “connectivity” helping to partially offset the Great American Migration Slowdown. Using county-to-county migration flow data from the Internal Revenue Service and an innovative application of Das Gupta’s demographic standardization and decomposition procedures, we estimate that changes in the rate of U.S. internal migration since the early 1990s would have been between 1.7 and 10.4 points lower (depending on the year) than observed changes had U.S. counties not become increasingly connected to one another by migration. We subsequently examine the unique spatial manifestations of the Great American Migration Slowdown for each of eight types of inter-county migration flows across the rural-urban continuum. We conclude by reflecting on the substantive implications of these changes and why these changes are likely to continue in the future.