Existing literature demonstrates disagreement over the relationship between hate crime and terrorism with some calling them “close cousins,” whereas others declare them “distant relatives.” We extend previous research by capturing a middle ground between hate crime and terrorism: extremist hate crime. We conduct negative binomial regressions to examine hate crime by non-extremists, fatal hate crime by far-rightists, and terrorism in U.S. counties (1992-2012). Results show that counties experiencing increases in general hate crime, far-right hate crime, and non-right-wing terrorism see associated increases in far-right hate crime, far-right terrorism, and far-right hate crime, respectively. We conclude that hate crime and terrorism may be more akin to close cousins than distant relatives.

Intermarriage between a native and immigrant can affect the households supply of labor hours. Spouse selectivity on the basis of human capital, distribution of bargaining power and labor supply coordination within the household can differ by type of marriage and gender of the immigrant - and, consequently, affect how spouses supply labor to the market. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, a household labor market specialization index is created. Raw two-limit Tobit estimates show lower specialization in intermarried households for both genders, compared to their intra-married counterparts. The finding for intermarried female households is reversed, and gender-based specialization increases, when controls for human capital are introduced. The role of immigrant education for both intermarried men and women is underscored specialization differences, by type of marriage, are insignificant when the immigrant has post-college education. At lower levels of immigrant education, native spouses supply more market labor. Intermarriage may also skew bargaining power in favor of native husbands in immigrant female households.

Volunteerism and work are topics which academics in several disciplines research. This study is an examination of the intersection of work and volunteerism via the lens of role theory. According to role theorists, the term role refers to behaviors which are either a result of social position or expectations (Biddle 1986). Cognitive role theorists use vocabulary such as “role conflict” and “role overload” to identify incongruences sometimes found in roles individuals have in their lives (Biddle 1986). These incongruences are primarily examined as they relate to individual level consequences. This research explores volunteerism and work as they relate to role theory. I hypothesize that younger volunteers and volunteers with children at home will be more likely to perform parallel tasks in their work and volunteerism when compared to older volunteers and volunteers without children, respectively. Moreover, due to pressures placed upon people who are asked to volunteer, there is a reasonable expectation to see similar tasks being performed at both volunteer sites and worksites for those populations versus people who volunteer on their own accord so the volunteers may negate any potentially harmful consequences of conflicting roles. These analyses are performed using binary logistic regression. Additionally, hypothesizing that employment status plays a significant role in availability to volunteer leads me to the final test performed in this research. Examining the differences between the number of hours employed individuals volunteer versus the number of hours unemployed people volunteer, this analysis is performed using an ANOVA (two-way between groups). The findings in this research are mixed and show that failing to reject the null is the result for both the volunteer age factor and the factor in which if a volunteer has children at home is considered.

Data from several recent years of the American Community Survey (hereafter ACS) allow us to study the intersection of marriage, migration, and citizenship among cross-border marriages in the United States. We use information on year of migration and year of marriage to identify immigrants whose timing of migration is closely linked to their timing of marriage (i.e., those who marry in their home country or marry in the same year they enter the US). We compare these marriage migrants to immigrants who marry after residing in the US for more than a year. We also extend the literature on immigrant marriage patterns in the US by considering the citizenship status of a migrant's spouse rather than simply the spouse's nativity. Emerging research suggests that “the citizenship status of the marriage partner is crucial” in understanding the experiences of immigrants and that “marriages involving one or more non-citizens are qualitatively different from marriages joining partners who share a secure status in their country of residence” (Williams 2010, p. 24). This is a clarifying distinction because citizenship, regardless of nativity status, offers many advantages related to economic opportunity and civil liberties (Aptekar 2015).

We explore a nonlinear, “notched” pricing structure in a novel market—urban bikesharing—to identify how inframarginal price changes affect consumer behavior. By observing cyclists extending their trips to avoid a discontinuous price increase, we are able to estimate a time-for-money trade-off directly for both commuting and recreational trips. Although our estimation strategy reveals an estimate of consumers’ opportunity cost of time under neoclassical assumptions, we find that a 400% price increase does not affect behavior in a meaningful way. This result suggests consumers respond more strongly to quantity signals, which has direct implications for nonlinear pricing in other settings.

The 2016 presidential election was the first such contest since 1964 to take place in the absence of a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, namely Section 5 of the Act. Since the Supreme Court controversially suspended implementation of Section 5 in 2013, many states and localities have been transforming the legal and administrative frameworks of their elections, with dramatic implications for voter turnout and access to the franchise, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. The stakes are high: along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act dismantled the legal foundations of white supremacy in the southern United States, and its vigorous enforcement enfranchised millions of black and poor white voters. Section 5 required that covered jurisdictions obtain prior approval from the federal government for certain changes to its electoral institutions or election administration. In its 2013 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the formula for determining which jurisdictions were covered by Section 5. The coverage formula was originally based on the use of discriminatory “tests or devices,” and voter participation rates in the 1964 presidential election. The formula was renewed four times by Congress, with minor revisions. Overturning this formula in 2013, the Supreme Court in effect suspended the application of Section 5 across 15 states that were covered completely or in part. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that it was “irrational for Congress to distinguish between States in such a fundamental way based on 40-year-old data, when today’s statistics tell an entirely different story. And it [was] irrational to base coverage on the use of voting tests 40 years ago, when such tests have been illegal since that time” (Shelby County v. Holder 2013). Do current “statistics tell an entirely different story?” This dissertation examines how Section 5 affected election-related outcomes in a single but important state, North Carolina. North Carolina is a critical case to investigate because it has a distinctive pattern and scope of Section 5 coverage and unusually rich registration and turnout records stretching back decades. The findings are unambiguous. Section 5 had a positive, independent, and statistically significant effect on voter turnout and registration at its outset and also over time, including in the period just before its suspension. These effects were particularly strong among black North Carolinians. Moreover, the data show that suspending Section 5 in 2013 depressed turnout in the 2016 statewide elections in North Carolina, especially for black voters. The dissertation also investigates the mechanisms for the effectiveness of Section 5 coverage in protecting the franchise, including improved registration rates and polling places per 10,000 voting age persons. Submission patterns suggest that the frequency of county requests to the Department of Justice is positively associated with improved voter access in the covered jurisdictions. The findings of this dissertation have significant implications for theories of U.S. political development, democratization, political behavior, racial politics, and federalism.

The prior literature measuring factor misallocation depends on the restrictive assumption that output elasticities are constant across production units. Such approaches cannot provide credible evidence on misallocation across industries. This paper develops more robust methods to measure misallocation and applies them to investigate the capital and labour allocation across 473 U.S. manufacturing industries. This reveals substantial factor misallocation across industries with potential output gains from an efficient reallocation of 22 − 64%. The degree of misallocation varies over time and increased during the Great Recession, which contributed about 10 − 60% to the observed decline in manufacturing output. JEL codes: E23, E32, O11, D61

Data mining techniques have been proven to be effective in many fields with the valuable information they provide. Those techniques can be deployed to lower crime rate by finding the patterns and links between the vast available data. Predictive policing is one of the areas that extensively depends on manual data analysis while it can benefit from these powerful techniques. Burglary is one of the most common crimes in Chicago and caused a loss of millions of dollars. The challenge in burglary prediction modeling is to develop a model that estimates the burglary rate based on a micro geographical level and to identify the contributing factors. In this thesis, data was collected from the city of Chicago data portal and the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). In addition to the demographic data, new data related to house characteristics and crime history was explored to study its effects on burglary rate. Based on these three categories, four experiment setups were designed to monitor the impact of each one on the model’s accuracy. A model which is based on micro geographical level, block groups, was developed to predict the burglary crime rate in Chicago. Four algorithms were compared and the Random Forest based model was the one with the highest accuracy. A time series approach was also used to develop a prediction model by using the moving average concept. However, the Random Forest based model was more accurate. Crime history data was found to have the biggest impact on the model outcome, while house characteristics data affected the model moderately. Sensitivity analysis and crime reduction strategies were included in this study for future planning. The proposed model addressed the challenge, estimated the burglary rate accurately and identified the . . .

This quarterly update of the Housing Impact of Shale Drilling Study and Dashboard (Appendix 1) includes indicators measuring oil and gas shale development activities in the fourth quarter and indicators measuring the housing market in third quarter of 2016. As with previous reports and dashboards, the companion documents were prepared by a team of researchers from Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs (CSU) for the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to monitor the impact of the Utica shale development in Ohio on housing affordability and availability in eight counties of eastern Ohio where the core upstream and midstream activities of shale development are concentrated. The eight counties include Belmont, Carroll, Columbiana, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Monroe, and Noble.

African American children are growing up in dramatically smaller families than they were 50 years ago.At a postwar peak in 1960, the average black child was one of 6.53 siblings, but today he or she is one of 3.18 (see Box 1). This measure has also dropped, but less dramatically, for the average white child, for whom “sibsize” was 4.1 in 1960 and today is 2.93. When we compare children of poorly educated and well-educated mothers, whatever their race, we find a similar pattern of falling sibsize and reduced differences in sibsize over the past 50 years.

In this article, we explore these shifts in the American labor force and workplace. We show that the identity, education and occupations of the average American worker have all been changing. We also show that there are big changes in who does what, especially in the higher-skilled and higher-paying occupations.

Popular discourses about the crises of Black family, marriage, and economic stability are refracted through the failure of low-income Black men. But, the academic discussion is also tinged by the “taint of the ghetto,” in which sociologists have tended to analyze the diverse experiences of Black relationships through a reductionist frame based on poverty and family disorganization. Black middle-class (BMC) men also carry the weight of these class-specific narratives (e.g., the absentee father, philanderer, drug dealer, or gang member)—not just because there is a dearth of knowledge about BMC heterosexual relationships but because everyone else—from single mothers, never married women, social commentators, and pundits—are speaking for Black men, except themselves. Based on in-depth interviews, this dissertation seeks to enrich the debate surrounding Black relationships by including the perspectives of BMC men. It asks one overarching question that is often debated, yet never directly asked of the BMC men in question: How do heterosexual BMC men perceive and negotiate their relationships against the backdrop of dominant narratives that foreground their alleged failure? I find that withinclass differences, specifically, the trajectory of BMC men’s social mobility patterns, timing of exposure to predominately white social environments, and racialized dating experiences are the three factors necessary to understand how BMC men experience intimate relationships.

This paper documents relationships between age at marriage and labor-market outcome reflected by personal income as well as relationships between age at marriage and marriage-market outcome reflected by spousal income for Americans born from 1900s to 1970s, and motivated by these documented relationships, provides a theory based on human capital investments and differential fecundity to explain these relationships, gender differences in these relationships, as well as the changes of these relationships over time, improving the predictions by the seminal theories of Becker (1973, JPE) and Bergstrom and Bagnoli (1993, JPE).

Objectives/Hypothesis Quantify the relationships between tinnitus, and anxiety and depression among adults. Study Design Cross‐sectional analysis of a national health survey. Methods Adult respondents in the 2007 Integrated Health Interview Series tinnitus module were analyzed. Data for tinnitus symptoms and severity and reported anxiety and depression symptoms were extracted. Associations between tinnitus problems and anxiety, depression, lost workdays, days of alcohol consumption, and mean hours of sleep were assessed. Results Among 21.4 ± 0.69 million adult tinnitus sufferers, 26.1% reported problems with anxiety in the preceding 12 months, whereas only 9.2% of those without tinnitus reported an anxiety problem (P < .001). Similarly, 25.6% of respondents with tinnitus reported problems with depression, whereas only 9.1% of those without tinnitus reported depression symptoms (P < .001). Those reporting tinnitus symptoms as a “big” or “very big” problem were more likely to concurrently report anxiety (odds ratio [OR]: 5.7; 95% CI: 4.0‐8.1; P < .001) and depression (OR: 4.8; 95% CI: 3.5‐6.7; P < .001) symptoms. Tinnitus sufferers reported significantly fewer mean hours of sleep per night (7.00 vs. 7.21; P < .001) and greater mean days of work missed (6.94 vs. 3.79, P < .001) compared to those . . .

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 puts sub-Saharan Africa’s economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth, poverty, and human development indicators. We identify key weaknesses, including lack of structural transformation and the slow rate of employment growth. We refer to global shocks that have played a critical role in sub-Saharan Africa’s economic performance alongside domestic events, policies, and governance. Finally, we discuss a set of critical challenges requiring effective management for subSaharan Africa to realize its considerable development potential.

This book analyzes the status of African American men in the U.S. labor market during the Great Recession. The book outlines how African American male representation in major occupational categories almost universally declined during the recession, and utilizes Census data to illustrate how African American men sought to insulate their group from job losses by increasing their educational attainment However, this strategy failed as black men became further marginalized in the American workforce.

The use of health information and health information technology by consumers is a major factor in the current healthcare systems effort to address issues related to quality, cost, and access. Patient engagement in the healthcare process through access to information related to diagnoses, procedures, and treatment has the potential to improve health outcomes. In this study we analyzed a dataset that was representative of the U.S. population. Despite the efforts to increase the use of patient-focused technologies, there is an overall low level of use of personal healthcare management and these studies indicate that there are significant disparities in the use of health information and technology by American adults by demographic, socioeconomic, and health-related factors. Individuals with one or more chronic conditions have an increased likelihood of using personal healthcare management than individuals with no chronic conditions. Similarly, individuals with a cancer diagnosis are more likely to use personal healthcare management than individuals with no chronic conditions. Education was the factor that was most strongly associated with personal healthcare management across all populations investigated in this research. U.S. adults reporting college level education were up to 2.8 times more likely to use personal healthcare management than those with less than college level education. Similar disparities were found related to personal healthcare management use based upon family income, access to a usual place for receiving healthcare, and insurance coverage.

Large-scale climate events can have enduring effects on population size and composition. Natural disasters affect population fertility through multiple mechanisms, including displacement, demand for children, and reproductive care access. Fertility effects, in turn, influence the size and composition of new birth cohorts, extending the reach of climate events across generations. We study these processes in New Orleans during the decade spanning Hurricane Katrina. We combine census data, ACS data, and vital statistics data to describe fertility in New Orleans and seven comparison cities. Following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%. The largest share of births now occurs to white women. These fertility differences-beyond migration-driven population change-generate additional pressure on the renewal of New Orleans as a city in which the black population is substantially smaller in the disasters wake.

Changes in childbearing affect almost every aspect of human existence. Over the last fifty years, American women have experienced dramatic changes in the ease and convenience of timing and limiting childbearing, ranging from the introduction of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion to more recent availability of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). This article chronicles these changes, provides descriptive evidence regarding trends in use, and reviews the literature linking them to changes in childbearing and women’s economic outcomes.