Employment growth is a common public policy goal, but it can lead to a number of unwanted environmental, social, and economic costs particularly in high growth communities due to its impact on peak-hour traffic. This paper examines the short-run impacts of rapid employment growth on travel time to work. We exploit exogenous variation in employment levels resulting from movements of military troops during the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) in order to identify the effect of employment growth on travel time using difference-in-difference-in-differences and instrumental variable methods. Our results show that for each additional 10 workers added per square kilometer, travel time increases by 0.171 to 0.244 min per one-way commute trip per commuter in the short run, which equates to $0.07 to $0.20 in travel time cost per commuter per day. Our estimates imply that the annualized short-run congestion costs of the 2005 BRAC were $79 to $761 million per year (in constant 2005 dollars) for military commuters and $3.15 to $6.3 billion per year (in constant 2005 dollars) for civilian commuters in BRAC-affected areas.

The educational gradient in life expectancy is well documented in the United States and in other low-mortality countries. Highly educated Americans, on average, live longer than their low-educated counterparts, who have recently seen declines in adult life expectancy. However, limiting the discussion on lifespan inequality to mean differences alone overlooks other dimensions of inequality and particularly disparities in lifespan variation. The latter represents a unique form of inequality, with higher variation translating into greater uncertainty in the time of death from an individual standpoint, and higher group heterogeneity from a population perspective. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990 to 2010, this is the first study to document trends in both life expectancy and S25the standard deviation of age at death above 25by educational attainment. Among low-educated whites, adult life expectancy declined by 3.1 years for women and by 0.6 years for men. At the same time, S25 increased by about 1.5 years among high schooleducated whites of both genders, becoming an increasingly important component of total lifespan inequality. By contrast, college-educated whites benefited from rising life expectancy and record low variation in age at death, consistent with the shifting mortality scenario. Among blacks, adult life expectancy increased, and S25 plateaued or declined in nearly all educational attainment groups, although blacks generally lagged behind whites of the same gender on both measures. Documenting trends in lifespan variation can therefore improve our understanding of lifespan inequality and point to diverging trajectories in adult mortality across socioeconomic strata.

Prior studies have examined the impact of immigration on native born wages. These studies have relied upon education-experience groups to define labor markets and identify the wage elasticity of supply of immigrants. However, evidence suggests that education is either of different quality or at least treated differently for immigrants leading to potentially biased conclusions. We utilize O*NET occupational characteristics to form a different set of labor markets. Our analysis finds higher impact on native born wages than prior work, as expected. While prior work finds that a 10% increase in immigrant workers results in a 2% decrease in earnings, our results suggest that a decrease of 4.5% to 6% is more likely.

This paper presents a review of the impact of the political parties of US governors on key economic outcomes. It presents the impact of Democratic versus Republican governors on pollution, spending, policies, and labor market outcomes, using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). It shows a lower level of pollution under Democratic governors and an increase in the share of spending on education and health. It also shows that blacks, immigrants, and other minorities have better labor-market outcomes relative to white natives under Democratic governors.

Because of national interest in the graying of the biomedical workforce, we examine aging and funding within the pool of NIH-funded investigators and applicants, particularly in the growing field of stem cell research. We provide evidence of a maturing and more competitive stem cell workforce and discuss policy implications.

Applying results from a first-of-its-kind national study, this Policy Brief estimates the impact that prevailing wage has had on military veterans working in Minnesotas construction industry. The national study, The Impact of Prevailing Wage Laws on Military Veterans: An Economic and Labor Market Analysis, was commissioned by VoteVets.org in May 2016 (Manzo et al., 2016a).

Background: Life expectancy at birth in the United States will likely surpass 80 years in the coming decade. Yet recent studies suggest that longevity gains are unevenly shared across age and socioeconomic groups. First, mortality in midlife has risen among non-Hispanic whites. Second, low-educated whites have suffered stalls (men) or declines (women) in adult life expectancy, which is significantly lower than among their college-educated counterparts. Estimating the number of life years lost or gained by age and cause of death, broken down by educational attainment, is crucial in identifying vulnerable populations. Methods and Findings: Using U.S. vital statistics data from 1990 to 2010, this study decomposes the change in life expectancy at age 25 by age and cause of death across educational attainment groups, broken down by race and gender. The findings reveal that mortality in midlife increased for white women (and to a lesser extent men) with 12 or fewer years of schooling, accounting for most of the stalls or declines in adult life expectancy observed in those groups. Among blacks, mortality declined in nearly all age and educational attainment groups. Although an educational gradient was found across multiple causes of death, between 60 and 80 percent of the gap in adult life expectancy was explained by cardiovascular diseases, smoking-related diseases, and external causes of death. Furthermore, the number of life years lost to smoking-related, external, and other causes of death increased among low- and high school-educated whites, explaining recent stalls or declines in longevity. Conclusions: Large segments of the American populationparticularly low- and high school-educated whites under age 55are diverging from their college-educated counterparts and losing additional years of life to smoking-related diseases and external causes of death. If this trend continues, old-age mortality may also increase for these birth cohorts in the coming decades.

Asian Indian immigration to the United States (U.S.) has had a distinguished history in the twentieth century, with the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act dividing this history into two distinct phases. Although the pre-1965 phase was characterized by exclusion, post-1965 was about progressive inclusion of the immigrants. With the economic restructuring causing a shift from manufacturing to services and quaternary sector in the U.S. during the later 1980s and early 1990s, Asian immigration was now characterized by high human capital. The authors establish that Asian immigration continues to increase in spite of recent setbacks caused by recession in the economy and some evidence of reverse migration. Drawing upon case studies from the metroplexes of Dallas–Ft. Worth, Metropolitan Phoenix, and Austin, Texas, the authors conclude that Asian Indian immigration represents a significant and continuing current wave of immigration to the United States.

Past research shows that time spent in developmental care activities has been increasing in the United States over recent decades, yet little is known about how this increase is distributed across parents with different levels of education. Have children born into different socioeconomic groups been receiving increasingly equal developmental care from their parents, or is the distribution of parental time investment becoming more unequal? To answer this question, the author analyzed the American Heritage Time Use Study (19652013) and showed that the gap between high- and low-educated parents' time investment in developmental child care activities has widened. An increasing absence of fathers in households with low-educated mothers has exacerbated the trend. This study documents growing inequality in parental time inputs in developmentally salient child care activities in the United States.

Purpose: To measure diversity within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded workforce. The authors use a relevant labor market perspective to more directly understand what the NIH can influence in terms of enhancing diversity through NIH policies. Method: Using the relevant labor market (defined as persons with advanced degrees working as biomedical scientists in the United States) as the conceptual framework, and informed by accepted economic principles, the authors used the American Community Survey and NIH administrative data to calculate representation ratios of the NIH-funded biomedical workforce from 2008 to 2012 by race, ethnicity, sex, and citizenship status, and compared this against the pool of characteristic individuals in the potential labor market. Results: In general, the U.S. population during this time period was an inaccurate comparison group for measuring diversity of the NIH-funded scientific workforce. Measuring accurately, we found the representation of women and traditionally underrepresented groups in NIH-supported postdoc fellowships and traineeships and mentored career development programs was greater than their representation in the relevant labor market. The same analysis found these demographic groups are less represented in the NIH-funded independent investigator pool. Conclusions: Although these findings provided a picture of the current NIH-funded workforce and a foundation for understanding the federal role in developing, maintaining, and renewing diverse scientific human resources, further study is needed to identify whether junior- and early-stage investigators who are part of more diverse cohorts will naturally transition into independent NIH-funded investigators, or whether they will leave the workforce before achieving independent researcher status.

Welfare use by immigrants has been a political issue since the inception of the United States. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was intended to cut immigrant welfare use. Since 1996, various studies have found conflicting evidence of the 1996 welfare reforms effectiveness when comparing immigrant welfare use to native use. This paper analyzes the individual use of Medicaid, a proxy for welfare, in 2014, by immigrants versus natives in the United States. The study, using a logit model, shows that in 2014 the probability of participating in Medicaid was lower for immigrants than natives.

In this project I used Bayesian multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP), and Python and [PyMC3](https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3) to adjust an unrepresentative sample of election preferences and predict the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election. My results don't match the survey from which I used the raw data, possibly because I haven't used enough predictors (in the interest of simplicity). Nonetheless, the code and explanation show an attempt at learning and applying MRP using a language and MCMC framework that I haven't found used for such a purpose before.

This article uses labor history and black history to highlight how labor education can be a crucial tool for unions to respond to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in a way that supports and re...

Latin American immigrants will continue to make up a large share of transit ridership, bicycling and walking in the United States for the foreseeable future, but there is relatively little research about them. This mixed-methods study compares the travel patterns of low-income immigrants living in the San Francisco Bay Area with that of other groups and investigates the barriers and constraints faced by low-income immigrants when taking transit and bicycling. Much of the previous work on immigrant travel has relied on national surveys and qualitative analysis, which underrepresent disadvantaged population groups and slower modes of travel, or are unable to speak to broader patterns in the population. We conducted interviews with 14 low-income immigrants and a paper-based intercept survey of 2,078 adults. Interviewees revealed five major barriers that made public transit use difficult for them, including safety, transit fare affordability, discrimination, system legibility, and reliability. Although crime was the most prominent issue in interviews, the survey results suggest transit cost is the most pressing concern for low-income immigrants. Low-income immigrants were less likely than those with higher-incomes to have access to a motor vehicle, and were less likely than higher-income immigrants or the U.S.-born of any income to have access to a bicycle or bus pass. Finally, although most barriers to public transit use were the same regardless of nativity or household income, low-income immigrants were much less willing to take public transit when they had the option to drive and less willing to bicycle for any purpose. The prevalence of concerns about transit affordability, crime, and reliability suggest transit agencies should consider income-based fare reductions, coordinated crime prevention with local law enforcement, and improved scheduling.

This paper explores the size of discrimination in the restaurant industry in Ohio in 1980 and 2010. I used OLS regressions in order to discover the differences in wages between different groups. From there, I used a set of Oaxaca decompositions to determine how much of the difference, if any, could be attributed to discrimination. I found that African American workers made 14.8% less than their white counterparts. Discrimination may be even worse than this wage gap allows: when comparing African American workers to a counterfactual treated with white coefficients, the African American workers make 17.8% less than the white coefficient counterfactual. This effect seems nonexistent when comparing Hispanic and white workers. When comparing men and women, women make significantly less in almost every case.

Recent initiatives that overstate health insurance coverage for well-being conflict with the recognized antagonistic facts identified by the determinants of health that identify health care as an intermediate factor. By using a network of controlled interdependences among multiple social resources including health insurance, which we reconstructed from survey data of the U.S. and Bayesian networks structure learning algorithms, we examined why health insurance through coverage, which in most countries is the access gate to health care, is just an intermediate factor of well-being. We used social network analysis methods to explore the complex relationships involved at general, specific and particular levels of the model. All levels provide evidence that the intermediate role of health insurance relies in a strong relationship to income and reproduces its unfair distribution. Some signals about the most efficient type of health coverage emerged in our analyses.

The U.S. biomedical scientific enterprise has a long, deep history of innovation, global leadership, and scientific advancements that have improved the health and wellbeing of humankind. Biomedical scientific careers ebb and flow with funding availability, and funding drives this workforce in terms of size and structure. The stakes are high for becoming a scientist because large amounts of time and capital investments are required to be competitive in this profession and because the labor market is heavily dependent on the availability of external funding. Ideally, students and postdocs will make career decisions based on market data regarding the potential for future advancement and career expectations. Young scientists are struggling today more than they ever have in finding productive tenure-track academic employment. The landscape has drastically changed as numerous young scientists take jobs in industry and government, some of them choosing these jobs over academia. We hope this paper, told with historical census data, empowers early career scientists and the senior investigators who mentor them with information about todays labor market that they can use to help young scientists make informed decisions about their career paths.

Today, many Americans rely on savings in 401(k)-type accounts to supplement Social Security in retirement. This is a pronounced shift from a few decades ago, when many retirees could count on predictable, constant streams of income from traditional pensions (see Types of retirement plans, below). This chartbook assesses the impact of the shift from pensions to individual savings by examining disparities in retirement preparedness and outcomes by income, race, ethnicity, education, gender, and marital status.The first section of the chartbook looks at retirement-plan participation and retirement account savings of working-age families. The charts in this section focus on families headed by someone age 3261, a 30-year period before the Social Security early eligibility age of 62 when most families should be accumulating pension benefits and retirement savings. The second section looks at income sources for seniors. Since many workers transition to retirement between Social Securitys early eligibility age and the programs normal retirement age (currently 66, formerly 65), the charts in the second section focus on retirement outcomes of people age 65 and older.

To date, research on the long-term effects of childhood participation in voucher-assisted and public housing has been limited by the lack of data and suitable identification strategies. We create a national level longitudinal data set that enables us to analyze how children’s housing experiences affect adult earnings and incarceration rates. While naive estimates suggest there are substantial negative consequences to childhood participation in voucher-assisted and public housing, this result appears to be driven largely by selection of households into housing assistance programs. To mitigate this source of bias, we employ household fixed-effects specifications that use only within-household (across-sibling) variation for identification. Compared to naive specifications, household fixed-effects estimates for earnings are universally more positive, and they suggest that there are positive and statistically significant benefits from childhood residence in assisted housing on young adult earnings for nearly all demographic groups. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of incarceration across all household race/ethnicity groups. Time spent in voucher-assisted or public housing is especially beneficial for females from non-Hispanic Black households, who experience substantial increases in expected earnings and lower incarceration rates.

Despite the introduction of multiple factors, multidimensional approaches cannot represent the complexity of the objective determinants of well-being (ODW). This paper proposes an alternative OWD model that adds a systemic approach, by using Bayesian networks algorithms to discover a directed two level network of variables nested in subnetworks of determinants. The network was inferred by using subsamples of the 2013 version of the American Community Survey. Network analysis methods applied to the model provided new insights concerning single ODW relevance and the roles that are useful to focus selective welfare interventions; they also offered a big picture that is fundamental to reason about the unpremeditated universal character of the selective US welfare policies.