Whether public policy affects electoral politics by altering the composition of the electorate is an enduring question with an elusive answer. We use variation in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act resulting from the Supreme Courts decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius to compare the political participation of otherwise similar counties in states that differ in terms of their decision to expand Medicaid. Using countylevel vote returns from the 2014 midterm elections, we show that counties in expansion states experience higher voter turnout compared to similar counties in non-expansion states. Moreover, this impact is largest in counties with above average poverty levels. The evidence is broadly consistent with claims that social policy programs can produce political impacts via increased turnout among likely recipients, and the impact is larger than would be expected based on a wealth effect alone.

The data presented below shows that any increase[2] in foreign-born arrivals in 2014 would have been the result of increases in temporary admissions and the return of former (largely legal) immigrants to the United States. The temporary workers and students will eventually leave, or some will adjust to LPR status (within the numerical limits). Strictly speaking, returning former immigrants are not new immigrants. Increases in these two categories do not support the CIS statement that “the scale of new immigration is clearly enormous.”

Housing policy can entrench the disadvantages of segregation in communities. We seek to identify and quantify economic disparities and neighborhood isolation associated with mortgage redlining. Mortgage redlining is a historical practice by which home loans were selectively denied to certain neighborhoods based on demographics using a system of residential security grades. We will quantify neighborhood isolation by applying a segregation index to three socioeconomic variables: home ownership rate, median household income, and median home value. We will repeat these steps for four time points to construct an analysis of neighborhood isolation over time. We will also conduct a series of ANOVA tests to determine if a neighborhood's residential security grade has a significant impact on the variation of the socioeconomic variables.

The advent of big data presents both opportunities and challenges for studying behavior and psychological processes. There are three features often used to characterize big data: volume, velocity, and variety (Laney, 2001). That is, big data provide an abundance of information, at a faster pace, and about more concepts than previously possible. However, these characteristics also mean that previous data analytic methods might become less feasible. Instead, methods are needed that address the specific defining features of big data. In this chapter, we offer an example of how massive information allows us to reveal new phenomena and discover how big data can be used to measure popular psychological constructs (e.g., job satisfaction) at the city level of analysis, which can then be used to predict related city-level concepts, as well as offer insight into new multi-level and macro-level hypotheses.

Are we too constrained in setting goals for promoting children’s optimal healthy development? Current events suggest that perhaps we should abandon caution and be far more ambitious in our targets. For example, Congress is now poised to approve The 21st Century Cures Act, a major biomedical innovation bill that includes nearly $5 billion in dedicated funding for major research initiatives at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Funding priorities include the Obama Administration’s Cancer Moonshot, to accelerate cancer research under the determined leadership of Vice President Joe Biden, and the Council for 21st Century Cures focused on innovative cures, treatments, and preventive measures. Similarly, philanthropic trends also encourage us to expand our thinking beyond initiatives that yield only incremental advances. BuzzFeeds’ Natasha Tiku describes . . .

Objectives/Hypothesis Prior studies have observed a high prevalence of psychosocial distress, including depression, in patients with voice problems. However, these studies have largely been performed in care‐seeking patients identified in tertiary care voice clinics. The objective of this study was to examine the association between depression and voice problems in the U.S. population. Study Design Cross‐sectional analysis of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data. Methods We identified adult cases reporting a voice problem in the preceding 12 months in the 2012 NHIS. Self‐reported demographics and data regarding healthcare visits for voice problems, diagnoses given, severity of the voice problem, and depression symptoms were analyzed. Results The total weighted sample size was 52,816,364. The presence of depressive symptoms . . .

This dissertation contains three chapters and focuses on the optimal design of fiscal policy and multi-item auction mechanisms where there is an informational friction in the economy. In the first chapter, I examine the optimal taxation of families in an environment in which (i) the earning abilities and child tastes of parents are private information, and (ii) child-rearing requires both parental time and goods. The optimal tax system combines an income tax schedule for childless families with tax credits for families with children. These components insure parents against low income and high taste for children draws respectively. The parental time and cost of goods involved in child-rearing have distinct impacts on the shape of optimal child tax credits. In the quantitative part, I estimate these costs and show that they translate into a pattern of optimal credits that is U-shaped in income. As a result, the credit to one (two) child families is decreasing over the first 40% (50%) of the income distribution. In addition, the credit for the second child is not equal to the credit for the first, owing to economies of scale in child-rearing. For medianincome families, the credit for the second child equals 44% of the credit for the first child. Finally, I offer a simple linear-income dependent credit policy that achieves most of the welfare gain from the optimum. In the second chapter (joint with Laurence Ales and Christopher Sleet), we considers the normative implications of technical change for tax policy design. A task-to-talent assignment model of the labor market is embedded into an optimal tax problem. Technical change modifies equilibrium wage growth across talents and the substitutability of talents across tasks. The overall optimal policy response is to reduce marginal income taxes on low to middle incomes, while raising those on middle to high incomes. The reform favors those in the middle of the income distribution, reducing their average taxes while lowering transfers to those at the bottom. In the third chapter (joint with Isa Hafalır), we consider multi-unit discriminatory auctions where ex-ante symmetric bidders have single unit demands and resale is allowed after the bidding stage. When bidders use the optimal auction to sell the items in the resale stage, the equilibrium without resale is not equilibrium. We find a symmetric and monotone equilibrium when there are two units for sale, and, interestingly, show that there may not be a symmetric and monotone equilibrium if there are more than two units.

This brief examines the coverage experiences under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of mothers living with dependent children. Focusing on mothers is important because just over 90 percent of children live with their mother, including about one-third who live with their mother and no other parent.1 Improving the health and well-being of mothers may indirectly benefit children—for example, reducing maternal depression could improve parenting behaviors and children’s health and development outcomes (Cummings and Kouros 2009; Lovejoy et al. 2000). Though no published research focuses on coverage changes for mothers under the ACA, evidence is available on coverage patterns for all parents. In the years leading up to the passage of the ACA in 2010, the share of parents without insurance coverage had been rising . . .

The United States continues to have an ever-increasing Hispanic population, and the Midwest is no exception. In 2014, there were over 55 million Hispanics/Latinos (referred to as Hispanics) living in the East North Central Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, referred to as the Midwest), an increase of 5 million since 2010. Ohio had the largest increase in Hispanic population in the Midwest from 2010 to 2014, growing at a faster rate than the United States as a whole. While the Hispanic population is growing, the Midwest is home to just under 7% of the U.S. Hispanic population.

During the U. S. Civil War (1861-65) surgeons performed a vast number of surgical procedures. The efficacy of surgery has been continually debated since the war began, in part because of lack of evidence for the (in)effectiveness of surgery. I analyze data gathered by Dr. Edmund Andrews, a surgeon with the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. The data can be arranged as observational data on surgery and recovery, with controls for wound location and severity, and with instruments for surgery. Analysis of the data using bivariate probit and a switching regression suggests that surgery was effective, was applied selectively by surgeons, and increased the probability of survival with an average treatment effect of 0.06-0.25 points. Results also suggest that surgeons applied surgery selectively and in situations in which it was likely to be beneficial; among those receiving surgery, I find an average treatment effect of 0.25-0.28 points.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between potential worker supply, measured through sex ratios, and commuting times in the United States. Using the American Time Use Survey 2003-2014, we analyze the relationship between commuting times and sex ratios by state and age, and show that the proportion of males to females is negatively related to the commuting times of both male and female workers. Furthermore, this result applies to both private and public sector employees, but does not apply to the self-employed. To the extent that employers compensate their workers for their commutes, our results are important for employers. Given the negative effects of commuting on wellbeing and health, our results imply that individuals living in areas with higher sex ratios may have comparatively better health and well-being outcomes than workers living in areas with lower sex ratios.

While the social science literature on Latinos in the United States is quite vast, the literature on Latin Americans in Canada is much sparser. With that, the scholarship on smaller Latino populations, such as Dominicans is even more limited. This research brief by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute offers a brief profile of the Latino population in Canada, with a particular focus on Dominicans, in an attempt to develop wider interest and more scholarly research on the subject.

Several recent studies find that as of 2015, a significant share of working-age adults in the United States participates in nonstandard work arrangements. Such arrangements tend to lack long-term employment contracts and are often referred to as “gig economy” jobs. This paper investigates the implications of nonstandard or “informal” work for the measurement of employment status and labor market slack. Using original survey data, we find that as of 2015 roughly 37 percent of nonretired U.S. adults participated in some type of informal work, and roughly 20 percent participated in informal income-generating activities that did not exclusively involve renting out their own property or selling their own goods. The survey also elicits an individual’s employment status according to the definitions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). While not the majority, a significant share of those who engage in informal work are classified as not being in the labor force; if all informal workers were counted as employed, the U.S. labor force participation rate (as of 2015) would have been 2 percentage points higher. In addition, individuals who are classified as working “part-time for economic reasons”—those who would like a full-time job but cannot obtain full-time hours—have the highest participation rate in informal work and the highest average hours per month. This latter finding suggests that informal work embodies labor market slack, and we offer several pieces of evidence that support the thesis that workers engage in informal work as a way to compensate for weak labor demand and may therefore drop informal work as formal labor market conditions improve. To estimate the amount of labor market slack embodied in informal work, we convert the total hours of informal work performed by those classified as employed part-time into a number of full-time job equivalents. This exercise yields a figure that ranges from roughly 275,000 to roughly 400,000, depending on the specifics of the calculation. At the same time, we point out that a significant share of informal work hours offer higher wages than what the same individuals earn in their formal jobs. Therefore, formal wages may need to increase by a relatively large margin moving forward in order to attract additional labor into the formal sector.

We analyze children of immigrants' healthy immigrant effect using parental year of arrival and region of birth. Using data from Integrated National Health Interview Survey 2008-2014, we evaluate children of immigrants' health status by using obesity rates and the number of visits to the doctor versus their native counterparts. Consistent with their parents, children of immigrants' health status declines the longer their parents, remain in the United States. Meanwhile, there is an increase in the number of visits to the doctor the more years their parents, have resided in the country. The convergence rate differs by immigrant group.

While the gender pay gap continues to decline, gender occupational segregation in the labor market has changed little in recent decades. Research from a number of fields provides lab evidence of gender differences in sensory, motor and spatial aptitudes. We provide evidence that these skills, as captured by DOT codes, strongly predict the occupational choices of men and women, in the directions indicated by this research. We estimate that if selection on these skills were eliminated, the Duncan index of gender based occupational segregation would be roughly 23 percent lower than its actual level, in both 1970 and 2012.

In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Ericksons Making the Unequal Metropolis presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in factvia land-use decisions, curricula, and other toolshelped sustain inequality. Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.

This tool helps to put today’s diverse workers—from women to LGBTQ individuals to people of color—at the center of the conversation about economic policy. From questions about paid sick days to increasing the minimum wage to non-discrimination, we’ve found the latest data that incorporate race, gender, and sexuality, and created questions that can be used in a variety of contexts this election season.

Public debate and prior scholarship tend to emphasize the link between gentrification and high-end chain retail, underscoring the importance of taste cultures tied to social class in making sense of gentrifications impact on neighborhood identity. In this study, we present evidence from 10 years of change in the businesses of Brooklyn, New York City, a period of extensive gentrification across a wide variety of neighborhood and census-tract level contexts. Adopting census tracts clustered in neighborhoods as the units of analysis, we model the effects of institutional and demographic change on two separate outcomes: chain retail density and homogeneity in the types of goods and services available. We argue that changes in consumer culture embedded in broader processes of gentrification are neither chaotic nor unitary but are segmented according to local spatial and demographic context, taking two discrete forms: institutionally facilitated corporatization; lifestyle-driven homogenization.

This dissertation takes the position that a scientific theory ought to be general and parsimonious and apply this rule to Daron Acemoglus theory of directed technical change to show that the theory provides useful structure for our knowledge of human capital and wages. The first chapter estimates the shape of labor demand and the strength of technical bias by age group in the US while taking account of changes in directed technology that shift relative demand for worker age groups. The data are consistent with demand shifts produced from the theory of directed technical change when the elasticity of substitution between worker age groups in the United States is slightly above 2, the threshold for strong technical bias. Instrumenting for labor supplies with lagged populations gives similar results. The report illustrates how ignoring technical bias can produce higher estimates seen in past work. The second chapter proposes a new macroeconomic mechanism for generating concavity in age-earnings profiles based on directed technical change. The mechanism does not depend on changes in the human capital of the individual as proposed by Ben-Porath and Mincer; rather changes in the relative human capital of age groups affect the profitability of age-specific technologies, biasing innovation toward improving the productivity of younger workers. Using new data, I estimate that on average a worker at the beginning of the career can expect a yearly wage increase of 6.2% while a worker at the end of a career with 40 years of experience can can expect a yearly wage increase of 2.1%. The theory generates maximal earnings at a later age than observed by some past work with macroeconomic data but is consistent with some micro estimates. The theory should be taken as supplemental torather than replacinghuman capital-based theories of age-earnings profiles.