Utilizing the Current Population Survey, the study identifies that absences due to sickness decline following the legalization of medical marijuana. The effect is stronger in states with ‘lax’ medical marijuana regulations, for full‐time workers, and for middle‐aged males, which is the group most likely to hold medical marijuana cards.

On November 23 in 1887, the Los Angeles Herald published a news item on a 'Fierce Fight Between Negroes and Whites on a Louisiana Plantation'. Ten thousand sugar laborers stopped working in Thibodauz. They demanded to receive wages in currency instead of tokens. The strike was called "A Brisk Battle' and described as an 'Exciting Scene on a Louisiana . . .

Previous research documents a growing wage premium for elite financial workers since the 1980s. A second line of research finds substantial gender disparities in earnings and career mobility among elite financial workers. Yet little is known about whether women in finance still receive a wage premium compared with their nonfinance counterparts. In addition, few studies examine whether similar gender disparities exist among nonelite financial workers. This article examines how the wage premium for working in the financial sector varies by gender and parental status across the wage distribution. We report that women earn a greater wage premium than men in low-wage financial jobs, while almost all of the increase in wages in high finance is captured by elite men, particularly fathers. Consequently, the financial sector simultaneously exacerbates and mitigates gender inequalities at different locations of the labor market. Our findings highlight the significance of institutional context in amplifying and attenuating the reward and penalty associated with gender and parental status.

We present here an analysis of the pay and employment effects of the scheduled minimum wage increases to $15 by 2023 in California as a whole and in Fresno County, one of the poorest areas in the state. Critics of minimum wage increases often cite factors that will reduce employment, such as automation or reduced sales, as firms raise prices to recoup their increased costs. Advocates often argue that better-paid workers are less likely to quit and will be more productive, and that a minimum wage increase positively affects jobs and economic output as workers can increase their consumer spending. Here we take into account all of these often competing factors to assess the net effects of the policy. Our analysis applies a new structural labor market model that we created specifically to analyze the effects of a $15 minimum wage. We take into account how workers, businesses, and consumers are affected and respond to such a policy and we integrate these responses in a unified manner. In doing so, we draw upon modern economic analyses of labor and product markets. As we explain in the report, the main effects of minimum wages are made up of substitution, scale, and income effects. The figure below provides a guide to the structure of our model. Our data are drawn from the Census Bureaus American Community Survey and from other Census and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. We also make use of the extensive research conducted by economists-including ourselves-in recent years on minimum wages, and upon research on related economic topics. Our estimates of the effects of a $15 minimum wage are also based upon existing research on labor markets, business operations, and consumer markets. Our estimates compare employment numbers with the adopted policy to employment numbers if the policy had not been adopted. Other factors that may affect employment by 2023 are therefore outside the scope of our analysis. Our analysis does not incorporate recent laws that raise minimum wage in numerous California cities to $15 on a faster pace than the statewide policy. We do so to simplify the presentation and to focus on the overall statewide impact by 2023. We pay special attention to Fresno County because it is one of the poorest areas in the state. Many better-off and more expensive California cities have already examined the effects of higher minimum wages and enacted their own $15 laws. We consider here the effects of a $15 minimum wage in a less affluent and lower costs of living area of the state.

Existing research that studies individual health behaviors and conceive of behaviors as simplistically reflecting narrow intentions toward health may obscure the social organization of health behaviors. Instead, we examine how eight health behaviors group together to form distinct health behavior niches. Using nationally-representative data from U.S. adults aged 18 and over from the 20042009 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), we use Latent Class Analysis to identify classes of behavior based on smoking status, alcohol use, physical activity, physician visits, and flu vaccination. We identify 7 distinct health behavior classes including concordant health promoting (44%), concordant health compromising (26%), and discordant classes (30%). We find significant race/ethnic, sex, regional, and age differences in class membership. We show that health behavior classes are associated with prospective mortality, suggesting that they are valid representations of health lifestyles. We discuss the implications of our results for sociological theories of health behaviors, as well as for multiple behavior interventions seeking to improve population health.

Using Puerto Rican politics in New York City as a case study, particularly focusing on political elites, Puerto Rican Identity, Political Development, and Democracy in New York, 1960–1990 argues that ethnic identity is a positive force in political development. José E. Cruz suggests that in using ethnic identity to claim and exercise social and civil rights, to pursue representation, and to access resources and benefits, Puerto Ricans sustained and enriched liberal democracy in New York City. This book shows how in carrying out politics in this way, Puerto Rican political elites placed themselves out of the margins and into the mainstream of city politics as significant contributors to urban democracy.

This article uses a political developmental approach to examine African American poll-tax registration and voting in Virginia from 1940 to 1954. Using the concept of multiple orders, the article traces how changes in the state's political system of managed race relations created an opening for African American political mobilization. The Virginia Voters League (VVL), in alliance with other African American political, civic, and social organizations, conducted voter education and poll-tax payment campaigns in order foster political efficacy among the state's disenfranchised black voters. The VVL met with mixed success, affected by past political mobilizations, the impact of NAACP mobilization, and local and statewide political competition between the state's main political machine and insurgents. The VVL campaign was successful in achieving short-term victories, including the election of a few African Americans to local office. By 1954, the VVL's internal weakness coupled with the emergence of “massive resistance” stymied further black electoral mobilization through politics and made protest a more viable option for achieving political and civil rights for black Virginians. By tracing the path from politics to protest, this article shows how a political developmental approach can be successfully used to develop a nuanced understanding of the emergence of the civil rights movement and Southern politics in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era.

Discussions of poverty in the United States often mistakenly focus on urban areas. While urban poverty is a unique challenge, rates of poverty have historically been higher in rural than urban areas. In fact, levels of rural poverty were often double those in urban areas throughout the 1950s and 1960s. While these rural­urban gaps have diminished markedly, substantial differences persist. In 2015, 16.7 percent of the rural population was poor, compared with 13.0 percent of the urban population overall – and 10.8 percent among those living in suburban areas outside of principal cities. . . .

Using data from the 2015 National Health Interview Survey, this article explores the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES), nativity, and health in white, black, and Latino Generation Xers. It finds that the rates of non-communicable, chronic disorders, disability, and mental health vary across groups, with Latinos and blacks having the worst health outcomes. The authors' research findings lend support to the Immigrant Health Paradox in that U.S.–born groups tend to have worse health than foreign-born groups, and results confirm the Hispanic Middle Class Health Paradox, in that low SES foreign-born Latinos have better health than U.S.–born middle-class co-ethnics.

Mexican immigrants have lower smoking rates than US-born Mexicans, which some scholars attribute to health selection -that individuals who migrate are healthier and have better health behaviors than their non-migrant counterparts. Few studies have examined smoking selectivity using binational data and none have assessed whether selectivity remains constant over time. This study combined binational data from the US and Mexico to examine: 1) the extent to which recent Mexican immigrants (< 10 years) in the US are selected with regard to cigarette smoking compared to non-migrants in Mexico, and 2) whether smoking selectivity varied between 2000 and 2012a period of declining tobacco use in Mexico and the US. We combined repeated cross-sectional US data (n = 10.901) on adult (ages 2064) Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexicans from the 1999/2000 and 2011/2012 National Health Interview Survey, and repeated cross-sectional Mexican data on non-migrants (n = 67.188) from the 2000 Encuesta Nacional de Salud and 2012 Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutricin. Multinomial logistic regressions, stratified by gender, predicted smoking status (current, former, never) by migration status. At both time points, we found lower overall smoking prevalence among recent US immigrants compared to non-migrants for both genders. Moreover, from the regression analyses, smoking selectivity remained constant between 2000 and 2012 among men, but increased among women. These findings suggest that Mexican immigrants are indeed selected on smoking compared to their non-migrating counterparts, but that selectivity is subject to smoking conditions in the sending countries and may not remain constant over time.

I study the effect of heterogeneity, in both the level and composition of wealth, in a dynamic stochastic overlapping-generations economy where households face uninsurable unemployment, earnings, and liquidity risk. Households pay transactions costs when they adjust savings held in high expected return assets, which make such savings illiquid. They also hold liquid, lower return assets. I show that household-level disparities in liquidity are important for understanding differences in their behavior, as well as aggregate changes in consumption and investment, over the Great Recession. When I allow for a rise in both unemployment and disaster risk, reducing households’ expected income and the expected return on their illiquid savings, aggregate consumption and investment fall to levels seen in the recession. The response of aggregate consumption is sensitive to the behavior of wealth poor households with a high marginal utility of consumption. Facing a large possible fall in earnings, they build precautionary savings in liquid assets. However, in a typical incomplete markets model with a single asset, all households would respond to the fall in the expected return on savings following a rise in disaster risk. The resulting substitution effect would offset much of the negative wealth effect on aggregate consumption. In contrast, when much of wealth is illiquid, many households do not respond to a fall in its expected return, substantially dampening the substitution effect. Moreover, wealthier households, more likely to adjust their portfolios, increase their shares of liquid assets. This results in a large fall in aggregate investment.

Young adults, ages 25 to 35, who live in the same neighborhoods as their parents experience stronger earnings recoveries after a job displacement than those who live farther away. This result is driven by smaller on-impact wage reductions and sharper recoveries in both hours and wages. We show that geographic mobility, different job search durations, housing transfers, and ex-ante differences between individuals are unlikely explanations. Our fi ndings are consistent with a framework in which some individuals living near their parents face a better wage-offer distribution, though we fi nd no direct evidence of parental network effects.

We analyze the impact of trade-induced income shocks on the size of local government and the provision of public services. Areas in the United States with declining labor demand and incomes due to increasing import competition from China experience relative declines in housing prices and business activity. Since local governments are disproportionately funded through property and sales taxation, declining property values and a decrease in economic activity translate into less revenue, which constrains the ability of local governments to provide public services. State and federal governments have limited ability to smooth local shocks, and the impact on the provision of public services is compounded when local income shocks are highly correlated with shocks in the rest of the state. The outcome is a relative decline not only in incomes but also in the quality of public services and amenities in trade exposed localities.

I provide new evidence on the relative “powers” of contraception and abortion policy in effecting the dramatic social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Trends in sexual behavior suggest that young women’s increased access to the birth control pill fueled the sexual revolution, but neither these trends nor difference-in-difference estimates support the view that this also led to substantial changes in family formation. Rather, the estimates robustly suggest that it was liberalized access to abortion that allowed large numbers of women to delay marriage and motherhood.

Education is strongly related to participation in the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program. To explore this relationship, we describe the correlation between education and DI participation, and then explore how four factors related to education - health, wealth, occupation, and employment - feature in this correlation. We label these four factors pathway variables. We find that a large component of the relationship between education and DI participation - more than one-third for men, and over two-thirds for women - can be attributed to the correlation of education with health, and of health with DI receipt. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study for the 1992-2012 period to explore the corresponding roles for each of the pathway variables, and also to study how changes over time in these variables, such as the widening gap between the health status of those with high and low educational attainment, have affected DI participation.

Although the female labor force participation rate of women has been steadily rising in the United States, there is substantial variation across cities. Previous cross-county studies find that gender inequality in employment reduces economic efficiency hindering growth. This result is examined in a regional context, across metropolitan areas in the United States. Throughout multiple model formulations including instrumental variables approaches, higher initial female labor force participation rates are positively related to subsequent wage growth in metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2010. Specifically, every 10 percent increase in female labor force participation rates is associated with an increase in real wages of nearly 5 percent.

The pattern of racial identification among Puerto Ricans is not uniform. It varies depending on where they live. Most identify as white, but more do so in Puerto Rico than in the USA. This paper addresses the impact that living alternatively in the USA and in Puerto Rico has on racial identification among Puerto Ricans. Using Public Use Microdata Sample data from the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey 2006–2008, I find that while there is no single pattern of impact, those more grounded on the island's racial system are more likely to identify as white in the USA, while those less grounded in Puerto Rico are more likely to identify as multiracial or by another racial descriptor. On their return to the island, they revert to the prevalent pattern of racial identification, while still exhibiting effects of their sojourn on their racial identity.

This study provides plausibly causal estimates of the effect of public insurance coverage on the employment of non-elderly, nondisabled adults without dependent children ("childless adults"). We take advantage of the sudden imposition of an enrollment cap in Wisconsin, comparing the labor supply of enrollees to eligible applicants placed on a waitlist using a regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences methods. We find enrollment into public insurance leads to sizable and statistically meaningful reductions in employment, with an estimated effect size of just over 5 percentage points, a 12 percent decline. Confidence intervals rule out positive and large negative effects.

This paper examines the effect of wildfire smoke on labor markets. Wildfire smoke travels hundreds and even thousands of miles from its source, generating plausibly exogenous air pollution events in distant cities. Using annual income data, we find that workers experience earnings losses of 10% of one days income per day of smoke exposure. The effects at the national level aggregate to 0.3% of annual labor income, nearly 10 times expenditures on fire prevention and suppression. We find modest non-linearities, and the largest responses in well-off areas, measured by income or unemployment rates. As well, we document extensive margin and retirement responses, a novel channel in the literature. Although they affect a small share of people, extensive margin effects appear to explain a large share of the income response to air pollution events. We examine the implications for wildfire policy.