Given the labour market struggles of young adults in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Millennial generation is often portrayed as lacking the economic wherewithal to be the nation's next generation of homebuyers. Assessments of their economic situation sometimes do not go beyond references to student loan debt. This chapter sizes up the economic outcomes of households headed by young adults in the USA using basic measures of their well-being. It shows whether Millennials in the USA are in any more dire financial straits than members of Generation X, the Baby Boom, and the Silent generation were when they were young. The US Census Bureau has uniformly collected data on household income since the 1960s. This chapter analyses these and other long-running data series on household well-being to assess whether Millennials are faring better than prior generations when they were the same age as today's Millennials.

This paper investigates the occupational segregation of white women in the US at a metropolitan area level. Our results show substantial variation across areas and suggest that the national scale does not reveal the real situation of white women. The proportion of white women who would have to shift occupations to achieve zero segregation ranges between 20 percent in some areas and 40 percent in others. The consequences that occupational segregation has in terms of earnings also vary dramatically within the country, which suggests that in dealing with labour inequalities, local authorities should play an active role.

Using household and business data, we examine local labor markets in the U.S. and Canada. Wages and inequality increase less with city population in Canada, while skillsorting patterns contrast. French and Spanish language enclaves exhibit idiosyncrasies reflecting their associations. U.S. workers, particularly low-skilled, appear slightly more responsive to local labor demand shifts, but are slowed by housing-cost reactions. Manufacturing jobs in Canadian cities were affected by rising Chinese imports, much like in the U.S.. Synthetic matching of Canadian to U.S. cities by industry, population, and trends explains some differences in responses and that Canadian cities respond more to larger shifts.

In-work poverty became a prominent policy issue in the United States long before the term itself acquired any meaning and relevance in other industrialized countries. With America’s embrace of an employment-centered antipoverty strategy, the working poor have become even more of an issue. This paper reviews some key trends, drivers and policy issues. How much in-work poverty is there in the United States? How does the US compare to other rich democracies? Has America’s in-work poverty rate changed over time? Who are the in-work poor? What are the main drivers of levels and changes in in-work poverty? Finally, what are the prospects for America’s working poor going forward?

This paper is an exploration of factors impacting police pay. The goal of this paper is to isolate the impact of crime on police pay to measure the compensating wage differential resulting from on-the-job danger for police officers (as measured by violent crime rates). In addition, the analysis allows the estimated compensating differential to vary with the race of the individual police officer as well as with the demographic composition of the police departments and populations served. Previous work on the determinants of police pay informs the analysis, including the empirical measures, regression specification, and control variables.

This study investigates the long-term effect of fetal exposure to the 1974 Super Tornado Outbreak on health and socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. Using the 2008-2014 American Community Survey and a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate that, in the 30s, this stressful in-utero shock increases the probability of vision/hearing difficulty by 17 percent and cognitive difficulty by 8 percent, and lowers the socioeconomic status by 1 percent compared with unaffected cohorts. An estimate implies that the annual income loss from disaster-driven health problems was $136 million in 2014.

This article provides a new measure of state-level attitudes toward gender roles. Our series, gender equality mood, spans from 1972 to 2010 and is the first measure to capture variation in gender-role attitudes across states and over time. The series is created using two leading techniques for opinion estimation: multilevel regression and poststratification and survey aggregation. We conclude by discussing several research areas in which our measure of gender equality mood may be especially useful.

This article explores the social interactions of immigration, occupation, and wealth in two urban industrial cities of nineteenth-century New England that were largely built upon, and shaped by, immigration: the very rapidly growing factory town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and a more mixed-market and steadily growing nearby community of Northampton, Massachusetts. Both communities were emergent, rapidly industrializing, inland cities, providing a quite distinct immigration context than large established cities of the East Coast. Both were destinations for the same general ethnic immigration waves over the late nineteenth century, but with very different, and differently impacted, social spaces into which immigrants arrived. Contrasting and considering both these emergent cities allows us to ascertain the extent to which the occupational distribution and accumulation of wealth by immigrant groups supports the broad pattern of nineteenth-century assimilation, and reveals ways in which other migration processes may have been at odds, or intertwined, with the long-term historical assimilation of immigrants in such communities. Our findings support a traditional assimilationist perspective in emergent urban-industrial centers. However, they also reveal the role of universal immiseration in an industrial city dual-labor market in facilitating or forcing assimilation, the temporal advantages for ethnic groups of arriving early in growing settlements, and the more individualistic nature of economic enclaves in gaining advantages over time that did not manifest across broad immigrant or occupational groups.

As the first wave of Millennials became adults, they encountered a starkly different landscape of housing opportunitites than their parents did when they were young. Housing prices and rents increased much faster than their earnings, and many adult Millennials moved back in with their parents or stayed home rather than striking out on their own (Fry, 2015). Some have slightly pessimistically argued that Millennials have fared far worse than previous generations in the housing market (Myers, Painter, Lee, & Park, 2016; Goodman, Pendall, & Zhu, 2015). Others point optimistically toward the growing stock of smaller condominium units and Millennials' increasing educational attainment, which could bode well for their future housing consumption (see Chapters 2, 4, and 5). This chapter provides an empirical analysis to help inform this debate.

Programs aiming to ease the transition from military to civilian life have increasingly focused on specific occupation areas where veteran skills might overlap with civilian job requirements. This research uses the American Community Survey to examine the occupations and industries that veterans tend to work in as well as how veteran incomes compare to similar nonveterans in each area. Results show that veterans tend to seek civilian occupations where military experience is likely to apply, as areas of veteran overrepresentation echo technical military functions. Furthermore, veterans generally tend to earn higher incomes than similar nonveterans in these areas of potential military–civilian overlap, but most income differences are relatively moderate. The results imply that programs encouraging transitioning military members to find a civilian occupation that is similar to their military experience may better assist those in military occupations with clear civilian applications.

There are vast differences in homeownership rates across countries. We show that, both within and across countries, people’s decision to buy versus rent is strongly affected by macroeconomic shocks that they have experienced over their lifetimes so far. In a simple model with experience-based learning, we show that households are more likely to own their homes if they have experienced high inflation or high growth in the housing market. Using household-level data from 20 countries in the European Central Bank’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), we find that a 1 pp increase in experienced inflation predicts an increase of 8 percentage points in homeownership at the national level, and an increase of 45 percent in the odds of homeownership at the individual level. The results are robust to including a vast array of . . .

One of the first concepts taught in undergraduate economics is that there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency, between fairness and economic growth. Much of that argument is rooted in the stylized experience of long-term economic development, including Kaldor’s (1977) argument that high levels of savings among the rich—in order to invest in industries with large sunk costs—was a prerequisite for rapid growth, as well as the infamous “Kuznets curve,” which suggests that inequality will rise in the early phases of economic growth (Kuznets 1955). In either case, the message is that interfering too early to promote...

We provide new evidence on the presence and distribution of racial bias in the criminal justice system. In many states, the punishment for speeding increases discontinuously with the speed of the driver, exhibiting large jumps in fine amounts. It is a common practice for officers to reduce the charged speed to just below this jump, avoiding an onerous punishment for the driver. Using data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we find evidence of significant bunching in ticketed speeds below a jump in punishment for all drivers but significantly more for whites than for blacks and Hispanics. We estimate the bias of each officer by comparing his lenience towards whites and non-whites, allowing us to recover the full distribution of bias. The total disparity in lenience across races can be explained by a small percentage (∼20%) of officers. Officers tend to favor drivers of their own racial group, and younger, female, and college-educated officers are less biased. We then estimate a model that allows for both heterogeneity in officer preferences and driver speeds across races. Because minorities tend to live in areas where officers are harsher to all drivers, policies targeting bias have little effect on the aggregate speed gap. We find that racial bias in lenience explains 16% of the minority-white speed gap, and spatial differences in race-blind lenience explain 30% of the gap. JEL Classification: J71, K42

Objectives. To understand where transmission of Zika virus has the highest likelihood to occur in the contiguous United States with regard to its transmission both sexually and via Aedes aegypti mosquito bites. Methods. We evaluated the 2 routes of transmission risk with predictors of sexually transmitted infections (percentage women of childbearing age, birthrate, gonorrhea and chlamydia rates, concentrated disadvantage) as a surrogate for unprotected sexual activity and the demographic distribution of the A. aegypti mosquito across 3108 counties in the contiguous United States. Results. We found that 507 counties had the highest risk of virus exposure via mosquito vector or unprotected sexual activity; these were concentrated in southern states extending northward along the Atlantic coast and southern California, with the highest predicted risk in Mississippi counties. Conclusions. Identifying areas with higher transmission risk can inform prevention strategies and vector control, and assist in planning for diagnosis and treatment.

This paper documents a number of key facts about the evolution of mortgage debt, homeownership, debt burden and subsequent delinquency during the recent housing boom and Great Recession. We show that the mortgage expansion was shared across the entire income distribution, i.e. the flow and stock of debt rose across all income groups (except for the top 5%). The mortgage expansion was especially pronounced in areas with increased house prices, and the speed at which houses turned over (churn) in these areas went up significantly. However, the average loan-to-value ratios (LTV) at origination did not increase over the boom period. While homeownership rates increased for the middle and upper income households, there was no increase in homeownership for the lowest income groups. Finally, default rates post-crisis went up predominantly in areas with large house price drops, especially for high income and high- FICO borrowers. These results are consistent with a view that the run up in mortgage debt over the pre-crisis period was driven by rising home values and expectations of increasing prices.

Using the text from job ads, we construct a new data set of occupational content from 1960 to 2000. We document that within-occupation task content shifts are at least as important as employment shifts across occupations in accounting for the aggregate decline of routine tasks. Motivated by these patterns, we first apply our new task measures to a reduced-form statistical decomposition. We then embed our measures in an equilibrium model of occupational choice. These two exercises indicate that shifts in the relative demand for tasks account for much of the increase in 90-10 earnings inequality observed over our sample period.

The United States middle class has become a major topic of discussion and debate over the past several years, playing an intricate part in economic and political policies today. The reasoning behind this is due to the acknowledgement of the average American household struggling to maintain their standard of living with rising costs of goods and services along with stagnating wages. Unemployment is still relatively high and the economy is continuing to struggle with recovery from the 2008 recession. Starting with the Golden Age for the middle-class households in 1960, the middle class is analyzed over time and ends with the 2010 census. Although the consensus is that the middle-class households are struggling today, the extent of this struggle is not universally agreed upon and open for new research. This paper attempts to expand the discussion on the topic of the United States middle class and what is occurring to the household within this class. Analysis will also be on households living below the poverty line and households in the top 1% of income earners. Based on real household income, cost of education, homeownership, and purchasing a new car will be compared against stagnating wages. Using micro level data, households will be created and variables transformed for an in-depth analysis using basic regressions and statistics in order to capture what is occurring to America’s middle class.

Immigration is arguably among the most divisive global and national issues at present. In the U.S., undocumented persons (the DREAMers) who arrived to the U.S. as children have been the central focus of legislation and debate. As of 2013, the undocumented population has increased from less than a million in 1980, then reaching 12.2 million in 2006, to an estimated population of 11.3 million (Passel, Cohn, Krogstand, & Gonzalez-Barerra, 2014) just a few short years ago. For the numerous undocumented students who have excelled academically and socially, and make positive contributions to their communities, the goal of obtaining a college degree is naturally the next step after high school. While undocumented students face intractable challenges in the areas of residency/citizenship, the college admission process, and financing their education, many still find their way on college campuses seeking degree completion. Academic advisors are uniquely positioned to support the persistence and graduation of students, especially undocumented students. Therefore, this research examined perspectives and behaviors of advisors concerning their interactions with undocumented students in public universities utilizing the framework of Michael Lipsky’s (1980) understanding of street-level bureaucracy to determine the discretionary behaviors exercised by academic advisors who advise undocumented students. Study participants included college advisors located in the middle southern and western regions of the United States, where undocumented populations are highest. A qualitative methodology with a case study research design was used in this phenomenological guided research to determine two major study findings: (a) academic advisors are exercising discretionary behavior in advising undocumented students and general population students and (b) the academic advising needs of undocumented students differ from other students. This study has contributed to public administration and higher education advising literature by providing insight into how advisors understand their roles, implement policy, and participate in divergence to meet the needs of students.

Since Georgia enacted its widely acclaimed merit aid HOPE policies, many states have followed suit, ostensibly due to its large, positive, and significant impact on college enrollment. There has been muted interest in the impact of the policy on high school graduation of both students who will go on to college and those who will not. Using a differences-in-differences methodolog y, I contrast high school graduation rates in Georgia against similar states and found the enactment of the HOPE Scholarship has increased the probability of graduating high school by 12.5%. When viewed in light of a 7% point jump in college enrollment due to HOPE Scholarships (Cornwell et al., 2006), I conclude that the policy has increased the graduation rates—by about 5%—of students who will not be immediately enrolling in college after graduation from high school.

In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that 11% of births worldwide (an estimated 16 million) occurred among teenage women between the ages of 15 and 19 years. According to Clifton and Hervish (2013) the global teenage birth rate in 2013 was 52 births per 1 000 women aged 15 to 19. Developed countries accounted for only 5% of these births, where the average teenage birth rate was 17 births per 1 000 women aged 15–19 years. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of teenage pregnancy in the world. Births to teenage mothers, which are estimated at 101 births per 1 000 women aged 15 to 19, account for more than half of all the births in the region (United Nations Population Fund 2013). Within the region, however, the . . .