America is aging. By 2050, the number of adults aged 65 years and older will nearly double; the number of elders of color will more than triple.1 The notion of advancing public health for older Americans may seem contradictory in our youth-oriented culture, yet people aged 65 years have an average of almost 20 years or more remaining in their lives, an increase of more than 50% during the past century. Lower income adults become economically insecure older adults who do not have the resources to pay for a decent quality of life in those remaining years. A key lever to promote healthy aging in communities is affordable housing, especially for older adults who have limited incomes. As housing supply and quality decrease for low-income older adults, rising housing costs correspondingly impinge on family support, including availability of food, transportation, in-home assistance, and medical care. The problem is not new, but a rapid transition to an older society, with marginal assets in disadvantaged communities, highlights a problem requiring comprehensive public policy response. Older Americans’ health is shaped by their life course. Early and long-term exposure to detrimental environments and lifestyles results in a higher risk of health problems and disability at earlier ages. Recent economic trends have dramatized these patterns, with a report from the National Academies of Sciences showing a growing gap in US life expectancy between the lowest and highest quintiles of income, increasing from a five-year gap in 1980 to nearly 12 years in 2010.2 Women in the lowest income segments experienced decline in life expectancy and the poorest men experienced no increase in life expectancy, but wealthier groups had significant increases. This profile is consistent with abundant evidence of adverse health consequences of living in America in underresourced communities, especially for disadvantaged older Americans.3

In the second half of the 20 th century, regional income in the United States converged. Convergence was driven largely by neo-classical forces where capital flows from regions of high wages to regions of low wages in search of greater returns. The formal test for convergence, driven by the attractive and repulsive effects of wage levels, regresses changes in income against initial income levels. However, unearned and non-wage have become increasingly important components of income, yet their effects on the convergence process is largely unexplored. To add insight to their role in convergence, this paper deconstructs Per Capita Personal Income into its component parts – Wages and Supplements, Dividends, Interest and Rent, Transfer Payments, and Proprietor’s Income – and tests for unconditional convergence among Metropolitan/Micropolitan areas across three time periods. Results suggest consistent convergence stemming from wages and significant, localized effects stemming from the unearned, non-wage income streams.

Increasing cervical cancer screening has long been a social priority (Department of Health and Human Services, 2014 and Gardner, 2006). Since the 1990s, policymakers have used a variety of federal and state public policy approaches to encourage use of the Pap smear, the cervical cancer screening test. These approaches include a federal program to reimburse health care providers directly for the cost of providing Pap smears to low-income women (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014 and Bitler and Carpenter, 2014), state laws that mandate that insurers cover Pap smears (Bitler & Carpenter, 2012), and the addition of family planning servicesincluding Pap smearsto Medicaid coverage (Adams et al., 2013 and Wherry, 2013). These efforts successfully increased Pap smear use among key groups of women with low screening rates, such as the uninsured or low-income women (Adams et al., 2013, Bitler and Carpenter, 2012, Bitler and Carpenter, 2014 and Wherry, 2013). However, the scope of these public policy efforts was limited because they were implemented during a period when most women of reproductive age already received regular Pap smears (National Center for Health Statistics, 2009). Figure 1 traces the growth in Pap smear use among women aged 15 to 45 from 1959, the first year data were collected, to the present day. Between 1988 and 2010, the fraction of reproductive-age women who had a Pap smear every 3 years, as recommended by guidelines at the time (Waxman, 2005), remained between 85% and 90%. Similarly, the fraction of reproductive-age women who had ever had a Pap smear in their lifetime exceeded 90% throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast, both regular and lifetime Pap smear use grew dramatically between 1959, when fewer than one-fifth of all reproductive-age women had a Pap smear in the last year, and the mid-1970s. Between 1965 and 1976, the fraction of women receiving a Pap smear in the last year, as recommended by guidelines at the time (Waxman, 2005), increased from 42% to 70%. Lifetime use of the Pap smear also increased from 70% in 1970, the first year this information was collected, to 95% in 1976.

The 2016 presidential campaign is well under way, and debates concerning immigration have taken on ominous tones. Candidates from both major parties have talked about enforcement along the border, but the view of immigrants among Republicans vying for their party’s nomination is darker. Candidates promise to end “illegal” immigration, to track immigrants like FedEx packages (Spodak and Scott 2015), to dramatically increase the deportations of those in the United States without papers, and to reverse the executive order signed . . .

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether geographic access to family planning services is associated with a reduced female high school dropout rate. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study. We merged the location of Planned Parenthood and Title X clinics with microdata from the 2012–2013 American Community Surveys. The association between female high school dropout rates and local clinic access was assessed using nearest-neighbor matching estimation. Models included various covariates to account for sociodemographic differences across communities and male high school dropout rates to account for unmeasured community characteristics affecting educational outcomes. RESULTS: Our sample included 284,910 16- to 22-year-old females. The presence of a Planned Parenthood clinic was associated with a decrease (4.08% compared with 4.83%; relative risk ratio 0.84, P<.001) in female high school dropout rates. This association was consistent across several model specifications. The presence of a Title X clinic was associated with a decrease (4.79% compared with 5.07%; relative risk ratio 0.94, P=.03) in female high school dropout rates, an association that did not remain significant across model specifications. CONCLUSION: Local access to Planned Parenthood is associated with lower high school dropout rates in young women.

Widespread public-sector unionism emerged only in the 1960s, as individual states opened the door to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers. In this study, the author exploits differences in timing of legislative reforms across states to construct estimates of the causal effects of public-sector collective bargaining rights on pay, benefits, and employment for teachers, firefighters, and police. Perhaps surprisingly, estimates that allow for state fixed effects and state-specific trends show little effect on teachers' pay, benefits, or employment, despite significantly increasing union presence among teachers. for firefighters, the results show a substantial positive effect on wages. for police, the wage effect was more modest but the workweek was significantly shortened.

The work reported here assesses the coverage achieved by two sales-based approaches to distributing a complementary food supplement (KOKO Plus TM) to infants and young children in Ghana. Delivery Model 1 was conducted in the Northern Region of Ghana and used a mixture of health extension workers (delivering behavior change communications and demand creation activities at primary healthcare centers and in the community) and petty traders recruited from among beneficiaries of a local microfinance initiative (responsible for the sale of the complementary food supplement at market stalls and house to house). Delivery Model 2 was conducted in the Eastern Region of Ghana and used a market-based approach, with the product being sold through micro-retail routes (i.e., small shops and roadside stalls) in three districts supported by behavior change communications and demand creation activities led by a local social marketing company. Both delivery models were implemented sub-nationally as 1-year pilot programs, with the aim of informing the design of a scaled-up program. A series of cross-sectional coverage surveys was implemented in each program area. Results from these surveys show that Delivery Model 1 was successful in achieving and sustaining high (i.e., 86%) effective coverage (i.e., the child had been given the product at least once in the previous 7 days) during implementation. Effective coverage fell to 62% within 3 months of the behavior change communications and demand creation activities stopping. Delivery Model 2 was successful in raising awareness of the product (i.e., 90% message coverage), but effective coverage was low (i.e., 9.4%). Future programming efforts should use the health extension / microfinance / petty trader approach in rural settings and consider adapting this approach for use in urban and peri-urban settings. Ongoing behavior change communications and demand creation activities is likely to be essential to the continued success of such programming.

Immigration to democratic nations generates new groups of potential voters. This paper investigates how the electorate share of immigrant groups influences their likelihood of becoming politically mobilized, focusing on the mechanism of coalition formation with the Democratic Party. Using newly assembled data on ethnic enclaves in American cities at the start of the twentieth century, I show immigrants were more likely to mobilize politically as their share of the local electorate grew larger. This effect is driven by political mobilization in voting districts where the Democratic Party likely needed an immigrant group's vote to win elections. I also consider the shape of the electorate share effect, showing it is nonlinear and consistent with a political economy model of coalition formation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law nearly seven years ago. Today the number of Americans lacking health insurance stands at a historic low, and the ACA is credited with reducing the number of uninsured by about 20 million. In this brief, we take stock of who has gained coverage since 2010 and where they live. Using data from the American Community Survey, we examine health insurance coverage changes from 2010 to 2015 by demographic groups based on age, gender, race/ethnicity, education status, and state. Our main findings are as follows . . .

Increasing urbanization augments impervious surface area, which results in increased run off volumes and peak flows. Low Impact Development (LID) approaches present a decentralized alternative for sustainable urban stormwater and provide water conservation opportunities. They also provide a wide array of ecosystem services and foster community building by enhancing neighborhood aesthetics, increasing property value, and providing shared green spaces. While projects involving sustainability concepts and environmental design are favored in privileged communities, marginalized communities have historically been located in areas that suffer from environmental degradation. Underprivileged communities typically do not . . .

Early supporters of the minimum wage couched their arguments in terms of achieving greater productivity and efficiency. Some of the early management theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor talked about how overall efficiency could be improved if management undertook to make second-class workers into first-class workers. The efficiency wage argument put forth by Sidney Webb held that a minimum wage would actually encourage managers to invest in their workers human capital. This paper refocuses the debate on the issues that the minimum wage really speaks to: the type of society that we want to be. On the basis of CPS data, I show that the effective minimum wage population is considerably larger than commonly supposed, and that todays unskilled workers are no different than the unskilled industrial workers during Taylors time. Therefore, Taylors argument about making second-class workers into first-class workers through efficiency wages still has application to todays growing low-wage labor market.

Zoning policies can have marked impacts on the spatial distribution of people and land use, yet there is little systematic evidence on their origin. Investigating the causes of these regulations is complicated by the fact that land use and zoning have been co-evolving for nearly a century. We employ a novel approach to overcome this challenge, studying the factors underpinning the introduction of comprehensive zoning in Chicago. We find evidence consistent with a precursor to exclusionary zoning as well as support for the hypothesis that industrial use zoning was disproportionately allocated to neighborhoods populated by ethnic and racial minorities.

Using a massive, new, matched employer-employee database that we construct for the United States, we show that the rise in earnings inequality between workers over the last three decades has primarily been a between-firm phenomenon. Over two-thirds of the increase in earnings inequality from 1981 to 2013 can be accounted for by the rising variance of earnings between firms and only one-third by the rising variance within firms. This rise in between-firm inequality was particularly strong in smaller and medium-sized firms (explaining 84% for firms with fewer than 10,000 employees). In contrast, in the very largest firms with 10,000+ employees, almost half of the increase in inequality took place within firms, driven by both declines in earnings for employees below the median and sharp rises for the top 50 or so best-paid employees. Finally, examining the mobility of employees across firms, we find that the increase in between-firm inequality has been driven by increased employee segregationhigh- and low-paid employees are increasingly clustering in different firms.

Kentucky is one of only two southern states, at the time of this writing, to have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The expansion raised Medicaid eligibility levels as a means to mak...

In the past three decades, the elderly population in the United States experienced increase in life expectancy (LE) and disability-free life expectancy (LEND), but decrease in life expectancy with disability (LED). Smoking and obesity are two major risk factors that had negative impacts on these trends. While smoking prevalence continues to decline in recent decades, obesity prevalence has been growing and is currently at a high level. This study aims to forecast the healthy life expectancy for older adults aged 55 to 85 in the US from 2011 to 2040, in relation to their smoking and obesity history. . .

This dissertation studies the effect of scientific discoveries, regulation, and changes in market access on the American and Japanese brewing industries over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Breweries adapted to these shocks by switching to new technologies, products, and geographical markets. In the long run, this adaptation process shaped the structure of the brewing industry and introduced competition and new production techniques in the soft-drink and biotechnology industries. Using detailed data at the brewery-level, coupled with natural experiments, I study the repercussions of this adaptation mechanism across industries and over time. In the first chapter, I study how private trade costs affect the relocation of industries in response to market integration. I focus on the relocation of the American brewing industry during the late nineteenth century, when migration and the expansion of the American railroad network reduced the costs of reaching consumers throughout the US. Using a brewery-level database that I constructed, I show that the endogenous adoption of bottling –a private reduction in marginal trade costs that required the payment of a one-time cost– amplified the effect of market integration on the relocation of the brewing industry from the East Coast to the Midwest of the United States. In the second chapter, I study whether early exposure to demand reductions improves the performance of firms during future demand shocks. I focus on the American brewing industry during prohibition in the early twentieth century. Some breweries faced early reductions in demand when nearby counties introduced prohibition at the local level. Other breweries were insulated from local prohibitions until the start of federal prohibition, when the entire US prohibited the production and distribution of alcoholic drinks. I follow 1,300 breweries throughout both local and federal prohibitions, using firm-level data that I collected. Breweries that faced early reductions in demand were 12% more likely to survive the full prohibition period, from before local prohibition until the end of federal prohibition, than breweries that did not face early reductions in demand. This increase in survival occurred because a group of breweries made early investments in machinery that later facilitated product switching into soda and other foodstuffs.

We study the determinants of season of birth of the first child, for White nonHispanic married women aged 25-45 in the US, using birth certificate and Census data. The prevalence of good season (quarters 2 and 3) is significantly related to mothers age, education, and smoking status during pregnancy, as well as to receiving WIC food during pregnancy and to pre-pregnancy body mass index. Moreover, those who did not use assisted reproductive technology (ART) present a higher prevalence of good season births. The frequency of good season is also higher and more strongly related to mothers age in states where cold weather is more severe, and varies with mothers occupation, exhibiting a particularly strong positive association with working in education, training, and library. Remarkably, this relationship between good season and weather disappears for mothers in education, training, and library occupations, revealing that season of birth is a matter of choice and preferences, not simply a biological mechanism. We estimate the compensating wage differential for mothers who work in jobs other than education, training, and library, which allows us to provide an upper-bound to the life-time value of good season of birth of about USD 1,000,000. Finally, we present evidence that good season of birth is positively related to health at birth conditional on several maternal characteristics.

My research aims to examine how and why gender influenced the San Francisco Freeway Revolts of the 1950s and 1960s. This includes determining the extent and impact of female participation in these protests, San Francisco freeways connection to the environment, and how gender roles affected neighborhood activism. While there have been many analyses of these Revolts, rarely have any given more than a cursory glance at gender as a foundational concept within San Francisco. To accomplish this, I scoured local newspaper archives and personal correspondence while conducting interviews with former activists to establish a previously unseen picture of genders importance in this activism. I then incorporated this information on a conceptual level to genders relationship with home, space, and the environment.

With 41.3 million immigrants in 2013, making up 13 percent of the total US population, the United States is the top receiving country of migrants world-wide (US. Census Bureau DP02; Connor, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera 2013). Between 2012 and 2013 alone . . .