The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of professional learning communities (PLCs) on elementary school students’ performance in reading and mathematics using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of 1998 (ECLS-K). This study also investigates whether PLCs have differential effects on student performance based on student characteristics such as socioeconomic status (SES), race, and whether they are academically at-risk and school characteristics such as school type, school size, minority enrollment, and percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL). PLCs are seen as a promising way of remedying the traditionally isolated nature of teachers’ work by facilitating a network through which teachers can share expertise, receive support, and disseminate effective practices. The underlying theory is that by facilitating teachers’ access to a network of their peers, they will be able to improve their instruction, which will ultimately lead to improved student achievement. This study addresses the need for more empirical evidence on the impact of PLCs on student performance using a large, national dataset. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to identify correlated PLC items from the ECLS-K teacher questionnaire. Hierarchical and cross-classified random effects modeling (HCM) was then used to analyze the impact of student-, teacher-, and organizational-level variables—including two PLC variables—on students’ reading and mathematics performance. The analysis found that teacher collaboration had a significant positive effect on growth in reading and math scores, while a positive school climate was associated with significantly higher initial reading scores. Rarely did either PLC variable show differential effects based on student- or school-level characteristics.

As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment across industries. Using this approach, we estimate large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones. We bolster this evidence by showing that the commuting zones most exposed to robots in the post-1990 era do not exhibit any differential trends before 1990. The impact of robots is distinct from the impact of imports from China and Mexico, the decline of routine jobs, offshoring, other types of IT capital, and the total capital stock (in fact, exposure to robots is only weakly correlated with these other variables). According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent.

This study seeks to understand social determinant correlates in relation to non-violent civil resistance tactics during the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in the American South and the contemporary Black Lives Matter Protests across the United States from 2014-2017? Using a sit-in dataset from 1960 and using systematic protest attendance data for the contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the paper seeks to examine how sociodemographic predictors of non-violent protest activity have both endured and evolved. Core research questions this paper addresses include 1.) What demographic, economic, organizational and policy variables explain the absence or presence of protest in the American South in 1960, and in the U.S from 2014–2017? 2.) What role did black movement organizations play in the diffusion and coordination of these respective protests? 3.) How does the presence or absence of labor unions affect the outcome of protest? 4.) Are cities with a legacy of sit-in activity in 1960 more likely to engage in contemporary protests?

Despite theoretical consensus that marriage markets constrain mate-selection behavior, few studies directly evaluate how local marriage-market conditions influence intermarriage patterns. Using data from the American Community Survey, the authors examine what aspects of marriage markets influence mate selection, assess whether the associations between marriage-market conditions and intermarriage are uniform by gender and across pan-ethnic groups, and investigate the extent to which marriage-market conditions account for group differences in intermarriage patterns. Relative group size is the most salient and consistent determinant of intermarriage patterns across pan-ethnic groups and by gender. Marriage-market constraints typically explain a larger share of pan-ethnic differences in intermarriage rates than individual traits, suggesting that scarcity of co-ethnic partners is a key reason behind decisions to intermarry. When faced with market constraints, men are more willing or more successful than women in crossing racial and ethnic boundaries in marriage.

From 1940 to 1960 across 20 large U.S. cities, rental housing's price fell, renters incomes rose, rent's share in household budgets fell, and, as expected, renters real housing consumption increased. From 1970 to 2010, rental housing's price increased, renters incomes decreased, but, unexpectedly, renters real housing consumption increased. We find neither demographics nor housing supply factors account for the anomalous post-1970 increase in renters housing consumption. We conclude that after 1970 there was a nationwide increase in renters preferences for housing consumption. With incomes falling, renters increased housing consumption by decreasing consumption of other necessities including food, clothing, and transportation.

We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new datasets to study the late 19th and early 20th century and combining them with modern data to cover the mid- to late 20th century. We find large disparities in intergenerational mobility, with white children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the distribution than black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important than the gap in parents’ status in proximately determining each new generation’s racial income gap. Evidence suggests that human capital disparities underpinned the mobility gap.

In response to the epidemic of falls and serious falls-related injuries in older persons, in 2014, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the National Institute on Aging funded a pragmatic trial, Strategies to Reduce Injuries and Develop confidence in Elders (STRIDE) to compare the effects of a multifactorial intervention with those of an enhanced usual care intervention. The STRIDE multifactorial intervention consists of five major components that registered nurses deliver in the role of falls care managers, co-managing fall risk in partnership with patients and their primary care providers (PCPs). The components include a standardized assessment of eight modifiable risk factors (medications; postural hypotension; feet and footwear; vision; vitamin D; osteoporosis; home safety; strength, gait, and balance impairment) and the use of protocols and algorithms to generate recommended management of risk factors; explanation of assessment results to the patient (and caregiver when appropriate) using basic motivational interviewing techniques to elicit patient priorities, preferences, and readiness to participate in treatments; co-creation of individualized falls care plans that patients’ PCPs review, modify, and approve; implementation of the falls care plan; and ongoing monitoring of response, regularly scheduled re-assessments of fall risk, and revisions of the falls care plan. Custom-designed falls care management software facilitates risk factor assessment, the identification of recommended interventions, clinic note generation, and longitudinal care management. The trial testing the effectiveness of the STRIDE intervention is in progress, with results expected in late 2019.

Support for gender equality is rising – globally, but especially in cities. Urban (rather than rural) residents are more likely to support gender equality in education, employment and leadership. This holds even when controlling for individual- and national-level variables over time. Drawing on cross-national quantitative analysis of data from 45 countries between 1991 and 2016, and qualitative research in Cambodia, we suggest why cities often disrupt gender inequalities. First, cities often raise the opportunity costs of gender divisions of labour – due to higher living costs, more economic opportunities for women, and the current precarity of male employment. Second, cities facilitate the spread of ideas. People living in interconnected, heterogeneous, densely populated areas are typically more exposed to women demonstrating their equal competence in socially valued, masculine domains. Such exposure reinforces growing flexibility in gender divisions of labour. Third, urban women tend to have better access to health and police services – so are more able to control their fertility and secure external support against gender-based violence. However, none of the above hold necessarily. The impact of urban residence is mediated by occupational status; macro-economic context; sectoral composition of job growth; government policies; quality of services; and transnational flows.

Unlike economic assimilation -- the process of immigrants' wages converging to those of natives -- cultural assimilation -- the process whereby people adopt specific beliefs, languages, or modes of daily life to conform to those around them -- has not been studied in depth using economic tools. This thesis examines cultural assimilation and cultural change as processes resulting from human capital investments. Unlike past studies, where assimilation is viewed as a passive process or as serving to signal identity in a static world, a human capital approach to assimilation emphasizes the productive aspects of culture and nests assimilation into a framework of supply and demand, with intertemporal constraints and forward-looking actors. I focus on three aspects of assimilation that have not been fully examined: the theory of cultural change, empirical evidence for different qualitative types of cultural change, and the proper measurement of cultural human capital. In the first chapter, I develop a learning-by-doing theory of cultural assimilation, in which an individual's cultural identity is determined by past investments in culture-specific social capital. The model incorporates several empirically relevant aspects of assimilation that have been difficult to explain in past models. The mechanism in my model yields two possible qualitative outcomes of the assimilation process, depending on the intertemporal complementarities of investment. The first, in which individuals become more homogeneous over time, has been used to explain immigrants' wage assimilation. The second, in which individuals become more heterogeneous as some assimilate and some do not, has vastly different implications for immigration and integration policies. As a purely theoretical exercise, the chapter offers a new model of group formation: rather than emerging from individuals forming and erasing costly bonds in a multi-period game, social networks can form endogenously via investment in productive capital. In the second chapter, I use detailed datasets from three immigrant destination countries to evaluate whether assimilation patterns adhere to the predictions of the first or second type of process from Chapter 1. The data provide a variety of evidence from linguistic, identity, and religiosity measures that cultural assimilation (in contrast to economic assimilation) most closely resembles the second type of process. The regressions typically used on cultural survey data are ordered probit or logistic regressions, or studies will collapse ordinal variables into binary data. A major point of this chapter is that such regressions may be statistically inappropriate, and at the very least can miss important information about the second moment of the distribution -- for example, the fact that there is a long tail of individuals who assimilate very slowly, and who are possibly the most important targets of policy interventions. In Chapter 3, I construct new measures of linguistic human capital. Using the same data from Chapter 2, I show that different measures of linguistic skills (such as speaking, writing, and reading) measure different dimensions of language fluency. Thus, a proper measure of linguistic skill must incorporate multiple dimensions of evidence. I estimate a continuous latent trait for linguistic skill using a set of 11 survey questions. The methodology comes from the psychometrics literature, designed specifically for analyzing ordinal test data of the sort used to measure language skills. The measures control for systematic differences in the ways different groups answer questions (Differential Item Functioning, or DIF) across groups. I use different latent factor constructs along with standard measures of past studies (binary variables or simple averages of reading/speaking/writing/understanding) to re-estimate the determinants of language skills and the wage premium for learning a language. I show that the results are not sensitive to the exact form of the latent factor, but they are quite different from the results using only binary or discrete variables. In particular, past studies have mis-estimated the wage premium for language skill; I find that there is a premium for speaking, and an additional premium (of almost the same size) for reading/writing in addition to speaking.

It is widely believed that the addition of sex to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was a joke, and the ultimate extension of protection against employment discrimination to women a fluke. According to conventional lore, southern Democrats, desperate to maintain the region’s racial hierarchy, pushed the sex clause to demonstrate the absurdity (as they saw it) of nondiscrimination efforts and sap political support for the Civil Rights Act. This paper challenges this received wisdom. My analysis shows that attention to women’s rights issues had been rising in the years leading up to 1964. And while the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in support of the sex amendment might seem odd from a contemporary perspective, it was not unusual by contemporaneous standards—it was consistent with broader patterns of support for extensions of women’s rights in the early to mid twentieth century. This elite pattern reflected similar trends in the electorate. Taken together, these findings suggest there was political will to pass the sex amendment to Title VII, undermining the conventional wisdom on this subject.

Fine resolution spatial variability in pneumonia hospitalization may identify correlates with socioeconomic, demographic and environmental factors. We performed a retrospective study within the Fairview Health System network of Minnesota. Patients 2 months of age and older hospitalized with pneumonia between 2011 and 2015 were geocoded to their census block group, and pneumonia hospitalization risk was analyzed in relation to socioeconomic, demographic and environmental factors. Spatial analyses were performed using Esri's ArcGIS software, and multivariate Poisson regression was used. Hospital encounters of 17 840 patients were included in the analysis. Multivariate Poisson regression identified several significant associations, including a 40% increased risk of pneumonia hospitalization among census block groups with large, compared with small, populations of ⩾65 years, a 56% increased risk among census block groups in the bottom (first) quartile of median household income compared to the top (fourth) quartile, a 44% higher risk in the fourth quartile of average nitrogen dioxide emissions compared with the first quartile, and a 47% higher risk in the fourth quartile of average annual solar insolation compared to the first quartile. After adjusting for income, moving from the first to the second quartile of the race/ethnic diversity index resulted in a 21% significantly increased risk of pneumonia hospitalization. In conclusion, the risk of pneumonia hospitalization at the census-block level is associated with age, income, race/ethnic diversity index, air quality, and solar insolation, and varies by region-specific factors. Identifying correlates using fine spatial analysis provides opportunities for targeted prevention and control.

This paper develops and tests a simple model to explain the origins of municipal segregation ordinances. Passed by cities between 1909 and 1917, these ordinances prohibited members of the majority racial group on a given city block from selling or renting property to members of another racial group. Our results suggest that prior to these laws cities had created and sustained residential segregation through private norms and vigilante activity. Only when these private arrangements began to break down during the early 1900s did whites start lobbying municipal governments for segregation ordinances.

Clustering is an unsupervised kind of grouping of data points based on the similarity that exists between them. This paper applied a combination of particle swarm optimization and K-means for data clustering. The proposed approach tries to improve the performance of traditional partition clustering techniques such as K-means by avoiding the initial requirement of number of clusters or centroids for clustering. The proposed approach is evaluated using various primary and real-world datasets. Moreover, this paper also presents a comparison of results produced by the proposed approach and by the K-means based on clustering validity measures such as inter- and intra-cluster distances, quantization error, silhouette index, and Dunn index. The comparison of results shows that as the size of the dataset increases, the proposed approach produces significant improvement over the K-means partition clustering technique.

The analysis presented here compares the characteristics and integration outcomes of five large refugee groups (Burmese, Cubans, Iraqis, Russians, and Vietnamese) in four states that vary widely in the generosity of their public welfare programs and that are home to a sufficient number of refugees to permit the kind of disaggregation carried out in this report. The states are California, Florida, New York, and Texas. All told, the study groups in these states account for approximately one-third of the nation's 3 million refugees. The results of this analysis indicate that a lottery effect based on state placement may not be as pronounced as previously thought. A number of integration outcomes - including employment, rates of underemployment, and incomes - did not vary widely within refugee groups across states. These findings may point instead to the importance of refugees' resilience, the positive mediating effects of the wide network of nongovernmental organizations engaged in their resettlement, and the effects of the refugee program's "work-first" policy, among other factors.

Objective: During the Great Recession in America, African-Americans opted to forgo healthcare more than other racial/ethnic groups. It is not understood whether disparities in forgone care returned to pre-recession levels. Understanding healthcare utilization patterns is important for informing subsequent efforts to decrease healthcare disparities. Therefore, we examined changes in racial disparities in forgone care before, during, and after the Great Recession. Design: Data were pooled from the 2006–2013 National Health Interview Survey. Forgone medical, mental, and prescription care due to affordability were assessed among African-Americans and Whites. Time periods were classified as: pre-recession (May 2006-November 2007), early recession (December 2007-November 2008), late recession (December 2008-May 2010) and post-recession (June 2010-December 2013). Multivariable logistic regressions of race, interacted with time periods, were used to identify disparities in forgone care controlling for other demographics, health insurance coverage, and having a usual place for medical care across time periods. Adjusted Wald tests were performed to identify significant changes in disparities across time periods. Results: The sample consisted of 110,746 adults. African-Americans were more likely to forgo medical care during the post- recession compared to Whites (OR = 1.16, CI = 1.06, 1.26); changes in foregone medical care disparities were significant in that they increased in the post-recession period compared to the pre-recession (OR = 1.17, CI = 1.08, 1.28 and OR = 0.89, CI = 0.77, 1.04, respectively, adjusted Wald Test p-value < 0.01). No changes in disparities were seen in prescription and mental forgone care. Conclusion: A persistent increase in forgone medical care disparities existed among African-Americans compared to Whites post-Great Recession and may be a result of outstanding issues related to healthcare access, cost, and quality. While health insurance is an important component of access to care, it alone should not be expected to remove these disparities due to other financial constraints. Additional strategies are necessary to close remaining gaps in care widened by the Great Recession.

This project was completed as part of the 2017-2018 Resilient Communities Project (rcp.umn.edu) partnership with the City of Ramsey. The City of Ramsey’s housing plan was last updated in 2008. The plan identified numerous strategies for achieving the City’s housing goals, including increased housing density, redeveloping underutilized land, and engaging underserved populations. Since then, the City has made some progress in terms of achieving its workforce and senior housing goals, but has room to improve in these and other areas. Students in Dr. Becky Yust's Housing and the Social Environment course conducted a post-occupancy evaluation to better understand the current conditions of low-income housing in Oak Terrace Estates, a manufactured home park on U.S. Highway 10; and investigated available housing opportunities and barriers in the community for several key demographic groups, including young adults, single parents, low-income residents, seniors, and renters. The students’ final presentations and reports are available.

While increases in women's labor force participation might be expected to reduce breastfeeding, prior research results for low and middle income countries are mixed. This study advances knowledge in this area by linking data on women’s employment from IPUMS-International (Minnesota Population Center 2017) with data on breastfeeding from IPUMS-DHS (Boyle, King, and Sobek 2017). We utilize a multilevel ordered logit of data on children drawn from four African DHS: in Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, and Zambia. We test the effect not only of mother's own employment but also the level of female employment overall and in agriculture at the second administrative level. We find that women’s individual employment has no effect on length of breastfeeding, but greater levels of female employment are associated with increases in the length of breastfeeding within regions.

We develop an experimental methodology that values ”free” digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing‐ and advertising‐supported content and find that the impact of ”free” digital content on U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) has accelerated in recent years, particularly since 2005. However, the explosion in ”free” digital content is partially offset by a decrease in ”free” print content like newspapers. Including these, real GDP growth would grow at 1.53 percent a year from 2005 to 2015 rather than the official growth rate of 1.42 percent, a tenth of a percent faster. Thus, there is a substantive impact on 2005 to 2015 real growth, even when we do not measure the full consumer surplus benefits of free goods. In addition, from 1995 to 2005, real GDP growth, including ”free” content, would grow 0.07 percentage point faster, and in the earlier period, from 1929 to 1995, 0.01 percentage point faster. We further find that the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and core PCE deflators would have risen about 0.1 percentage point slower from 2005 to 2015. To analyze the impact of ”free” content on measured private business total factor productivity (TFP) growth, we account for inputs of ”free” content used in production. We find that TFP would grow faster by 0.07 percentage point per year from 2005 to 2014 and faster by 0.07 percentage point from 1995 to 2005.

I employ the twin-first methodology to analyze the exogenous relationship between fertility, gender composition, and mothers’ marital status and labor supply. The regressions are based on the combination of genders and fertility in the first birth. The results show that white mothers with first birth as single boy are more likely to be involved in marriage than those with single girl. Comparing with non-twin mothers, holding the same gender, twin mothers have lower probabilities of marital dissolution, and they are less likely to participate in the labor market when the children were under 6. There is no impact of gender composition on mothers’ labor supply. Among twin mothers, there is no significant impact of gender composition on either mothers’ marriage stability or labor supply. For black mothers, neither the gender composition, nor birth of twins has impact on mothers’ marriage stability and labor supply.

We measure where and to what end parties take control of Congressional redistricting, which lets them redraw districts to favor their own candidates. We exploit the discontinuous change in a party’s control of redistricting triggered when its share of seats in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent. Parties capture redistricting in states where they have suffered recent losses, which are temporarily reversed by redistricting. Opposition candidates are 11 percentage points less likely to win House elections just after redistricting. Consistent with recent Supreme Court rulings, African Americans are more likely to be segregated into overwhelmingly black districts under Republican redistricting.