Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS), this report estimates the number of immigrants that would be impacted by ending TPS and examines the economic consequences of terminating TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti.

A highly configurable, interactive map for comparing gender ratios in the US, at PUMA granularity.

Big geospatial data is an emerging sub-area of geographic information science, big data, and cyberinfrastructure. Big geospatial data poses two unique challenges. First, raster and vector data structures and analyses have developed on largely separate paths for the last 20 years. This is creating an impediment to geospatial researchers seeking to utilize big data platforms that do not promote heterogeneous data types. Second, big spatial data repositories have yet to be integrated with big data computation platforms in ways that allow researchers to spatio-temporally analyze big geospatial datasets. IPUMS-Terra, a National Science Foundation cyberInfrastructure project, addresses these challenges by providing a unified framework of integrated geospatial services which access, analyze, and transform big heterogeneous spatio-temporal data. As IPUMS-Terra's data volume grows, we seek to integrate geospatial platforms that will scale geospatial analyses and address current bottlenecks within our system. However, our work shows that there are still unresolved challenges for big geospatial analysis. The most pertinent is that there is a lack of a unified framework for conducting scalable integrated vector and raster data analysis. We conducted a comparative analysis between PostgreSQL with PostGIS and SciDB and concluded that SciDB is the superior platform for scalable raster zonal analyses.

A family systems perspective directs attention to the potentially different experiences and perspectives of family members. This study examined parents' differential treatment (PDT) of siblings, discrepancies between parent and youth reports of PDT, and their links with relationships between adolescents and their mothers and fathers across three years. Participants were first- (Time 1 M age = 15.71, SD = 1.07) and secondborn (Time 1 M age = 13.18, SD = 1.29) siblings from 381, predominately white, working and middle class families. Analyses revealed that siblings' perceptions of being favored predicted less conflict with and greater warmth from both mothers and fathers, primarily for secondborn adolescents. Larger discrepancies between maternal and youth reports of differential affection were linked to more maternal conflict and less warmth for firstborns. These findings may suggest a hierarchy within families: parents may serve as referents for firstborns and firstborns as referents for secondborns.

In December 1904 the state of California charged two Chinese men with the statutory rape of two white sisters in the rural town of Loomis. A month later, all-white juries swiftly convicted Ah Lung of assaulting thirteen-year-old Hattie Lucas and Ah Woon of raping fifteen-year-old May Lucas. The men spent the next seven years in San Quentin State Prison, and the sisters spent the remainder of their youth at St. Catherine's Home and Training School for “delinquent” girls. In these bare facts lies little intrigue. At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, local policing of racial boundaries was at its height. The nation was deep into the Chinese exclusion era (1882–1943), a time when federal agents fought to end migration from China and when local white communities worked to segregate the Chinese in the U.S. West. According to historical scholarship, the Chinese were divided from the white community by a system of legal codes and cultural norms that constricted Chinese movement, conduct, and power based on their assumed racial difference. In other words, a color line existed: men such as Lung and Woon were not supposed to know girls such as May and Hattie, let alone know them intimately. In that context, the conviction and imprisonment of Lung and Woon seem utterly familiar: state officials, alerted to extreme infractions, successfully restored the racial regime.

In this paper, we study the labor supply effects and the redistributional consequences of the U.S. social security system. We focus particularly on auxiliary benefits, where eligibility is linked to marital status. To this end, we develop a dynamic, structural life cycle model of singles and couples, featuring uncertain marital status and survival. We account for the socio-economic gradients to both marriage stability and life expectancy. We find that auxiliary benefits have a large depressing effect on married women’s employment. Moreover, we show that a revenue neutral minimum benefit scheme would moderately reduce inequality relative to the current U.S. system.

The Supreme Court has recently struck down key provisions of the Voting Right Act mandating federal scrutiny over states with a history of black disenfranchisement. How significant was the VRA for black political empowerment? Surprisingly, the answer to this important question remains largely moot. Using a novel dataset on the universe of local elected officials, we show that the VRA significantly boosted black representation in the immediate aftermath of its introduction. To identify the effect of the act we exploit the fact that a coverage formula was used to place a group of jurisdictions in the South our treatment - under strict federal monitoring. Using non-covered counties of the former Confederacy as a comparison group, we find that larger pre-VRA shares of blacks led to a greater increase in black office holding in the treatment than in the control group. The impact of coverage was stronger in the presence of elections by single member districts. Finally, black representation led to greater provision of local public goods, particularly education.

Whether immigration increases crime has long been a source of political debate and scholarly interest. Despite widespread public opinion to the contrary, the weight of evidence suggests the most recent wave of U.S. immigration has not increased crime, and may have actually helped reduce criminal violence. However, with recent shifts in immigrant settlement patterns away from traditional receiving destinations, a series of contemporary studies suggests a more complicated immigration-crime relationship, whereby Latino immigration is said to increase violence in newer immigrant destinations (but not in established destinations) and has varied effects for different racial/ethnic groups. With few exceptions, these more recent studies rely on cross-sectional analyses, thus limiting their ability to examine the longitudinal nexus between Latino immigration and violent crime. This study brings to bear the first longitudinal data set to test the relationship between immigration and racial/ethnic homicide in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2010. Results from bivariate longitudinal associations and multivariate fixed effects models are contrary to recent findings - Latino immigration is generally associated with decreases in homicide victimization for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in both established and non-established immigrant destinations, though these associations are not significant in all cases.

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family policies ever since the end of the nineteenth century and then turn to the details regarding family policies currently in effect across high-income nations. We sketch a framework concerning the effects of family policy to motivate our country- and micro-level evidence on the impact of family policies on gender outcomes. Most estimates of the impact of parental leave entitlement on female labor market outcomes range from negligible to weakly positive. There is stronger evidence that spending on early education and childcare increases labor force participation of women and reduces gender gaps.

Uninsured rates for children in American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families have dropped quickly in the past eight years, but they still remain high and will likely rise if substantial cuts are made to the Medicaid program, according to the report, Coverage Trends for American Indian and Alaska Native Children and Families.

Recent public discussion has focused on inequality and its adverse effects on economic growth. One theory is that inequality causes greater differential fertility; the difference in fertility between the poor and rich. Differential fertility yields fewer educated children, as the poor invest less in their numerous children. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has flattened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as the rich increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship between income and fertility. We show this result both theoretically and quantitatively, after disciplining the model on US data. Without marketization the model yields a quantitatively significant biased estimate of inequality’s impact on education through differential fertility. Policies, such as the minimum wage, that affect the cost of marketization, have a large effect on the fertility and labor supply of high income women. We apply the insights of this theory to the literatures of the economics of childlessness and marital sorting.

Some people in the United States are at least twice as likely as the general U.S. population to be hungry and/or experiencing poverty. They belong to some of the country’s major demographic groups: African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, households led by single women, undocumented immigrants, and people returning from prison. The United States has made a new commitment to leaving no one behind as the country moves toward a goal of ending hunger and poverty by 2030. Accomplishing this goal will require increased support for these groups, which is outlined in the recommendations below. To reduce hunger and poverty among these communities, Congress and the administration should . . .

In this paper I discuss population aging, increased participation of seniors in the labor force in the United States (and reasons for this), and how these trends are making the struggles of older workers in the labor market increasingly policy relevant. I discuss evidence examining if age discrimination, especially age discrimination against older women (“sex-plus-age” discrimination), as a barrier for seniors as they try to increase their work lives through the common practice of “bridge” or “partial retirement” jobs. After discussing the evidence that measures age discrimination, I discuss eco- nomics and legal research that seeks to determine to what extent the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act and state-level age discrimination laws prevent age and “sex-plus-age” discrimina- tion. I conclude that while age discrimination laws seem to help mitigate some age discrimination faced by older men, older women face more age discrimination, and current age discrimination laws do a poor job of protecting older women, who are even more economically vulnerable.

Given the widely-accepted finding that countries with greater income inequality also experience less income mobility across generations (Corak, 2013; Krueger, 2012), it is expected that American mobility has decreased with rising income inequality in recent decades (Aaronson & Mazumder, 2008; Corak, 2013; Mazumder, 2012). However, mobility has remained unchanged (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, 2014), and is unresponsive to changes in income inequality (Bloome, 2015). These findings raise questions as to why intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. has not fallen during the periods when income inequality has sharply risen. To address these questions, the dissertation focuses on two aims. The first aim is to examine the association between intergenerational income mobility and income inequality in the United States. The second aim is to examine intergenerational income mobility with respect to income inequality and government spending. . .

The history of legal segregation, from Jim Crow to discriminatory lending practices, fundamentally shapes the racial residential structure of the United States (Rothstein 2017). Fiftyyears after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, metropolitan areas across the nation display durable patterns of racial segregation (Logan and Stults 2011). However, this attention to metropolitan segregation neglects the structure of residential patterns at different spatial scales and the possibility of integration in more local contexts. Analyzing central cities, suburbs, exurbs, and nonmetropolitan places separately may offer new insights regarding the geography of race relations and may help inform policy for the maintenance of integration. New forms of settlement stemming from “new destination” communities (e.g., Riosmena and Massey 2012) and the continual expansion of urban spaces (Lichter and Ziliak 2017) may offer new opportunities for integration. While a third of immigrants still live in traditional gateways like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, much of the remainder has dispersed throughout the Midwest and South (Frey 2015). Native-born black migrants also show settlement in nonmetropolitan areas (Frey 2015). In the 21st century, the “chocolate city/vanilla suburbs” dichotomy no longer exists—as of 2010, most metropolitan people of color (Frey 2015) and immigrants (Singer 2011) live in the suburbs. The class composition of suburbs varies widely and the majority of poor metropolitan people live in the suburbs (Kneebone and Berube 2014). These changing dynamics allow for new possibilities for integration at a spatial scale no longer centered on the metropolitan area...

The standard assumption in growth accounting is that an hour worked by a worker of given type delivers a constant quantity of labor services over time. This assumption may be violated due to vintage effects, which were shown to be important in the United States since the early 1980s, leading to an underestimation of the growth of labor input (Bowlus and Robinson, 2012). We apply their method for identifying vintage effects to a comparison between the United States and six European countries. We find that vintage effects led to increases of labor services per hour worked by high-skilled workers in the United States and United Kingdom and decreases in Continental European countries between 1995 and 2005. Rather than productivity growth advantage of the US and UK, the primary difference with Continental European countries was human capital vintage effects instead.

Background: Reduced funding to public health care systems during economic downturns is a common phenomenon around the world. The effect of health care cost on family members of the patients has not been established. This paper aims to explore the relationship between affordability of health care and vulnerability of family members to distress levels. Methods: Data of a total of 262,843 participants were obtained from 17 waves (1997–2013) of the United States National Health Interview Survey. Multinomial logistic regression was used to investigate psychological distress level as a result of having family members who experienced unmet medical needs due to cost. Results: Among participants without family members who experienced unmet needs for medical care due to cost, risks of having ‘moderate’ (score of 5–12) or ‘serious’ (score of 13 or above) level of psychological distress were 1.0% and 11.5%, respectively. Risks of having ‘moderate’ or ‘serious’ level of psychological distress were 3.1% and 23.4%, respectively among participants with family members who experienced unmet needs. The adjusted relative risk ratio of ‘moderate’ and ‘serious’, as compared to ‘normal’ level of psychological distress, were 1.58 (95% confidence interval: 1. 47–1.69) and 2.09 (95% confidence interval: 1.78–2.45) if one’s family members experienced unmet medical needs. Conclusions: Unmet medical needs due to cost increases risk of distress levels experienced by family members. Careful planning and adequate funding to public health care system could be implemented to prevent any unnecessary detrimental effect on mental health among family members of the unwell and any further increment of the prevalence of mental illnesses. This recommendation aligns with the World Health Organization Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020.

Since 1989, most states have faced “adequacy” lawsuits that target state constitutions’ education clauses in aiming to boost funding provided to disadvantaged districts – which should reduce overall inequality in school funding. Using pooled time-series data on 44 states over 19 years spanning the adequacy era, this study examines how adequacy lawsuits affect inequality in total per-student revenue within states. Three main findings emerge from the analyses. First, across all states on average, inequality in revenue declined from 1990 to 2000 but then rose steadily from 2001 onward. Second, revenue inequality was substantially lower in years following the filing of an adequacy lawsuit compared to years preceding the lawsuit. Third, the inequality-reducing impact of adequacy litigation was limited to the years 1990–2000; litigation had no significant impact on revenue inequality during the period 2001–2011. I conclude that 1990–2000 was a much more active and impactful period compared to 2001–2011 in terms of adequacy litigation, raising questions about the future of school finance litigation.

At a time when policy-makers in many developed countries continue to justify farm support on the basis of relatively low and unstable incomes, this chapter shows that incomes of farm households are not particularly lower on average compared to those of non-farm households in most of the ten selected OECD member countries. What is however striking is that income disparity and poverty are greater in the farm community compared to the non-farm community in most of the selected countries. This analysis questions therefore the continuation of indiscriminate farm income support. It also calls for the need of collecting farm household data that would allow a more effective targeting of farm support and for revising fundamentally public interventions towards the agricultural sector.