Abstract Background Family child care is commonly used in the US by families, including by those receiving child care subsidies. Psychosocial influences upon the workforce and professional development participation of family child care providers (FCCPs) have implications for the investment of public dollars that aim to improve quality and stability of child care. Objective We examined psychosocial influences upon workforce and professional development participation of FCCPs. We hypothesized lower levels of psychosocial stress and higher levels of peer support would be associated with less consideration of exit. We hypothesized that those providers embracing a greater sense of themselves as ECE professionals and reporting the support of professional peers would have greater participation in professional development. Methods This study employed the use of administrative survey data in path modeling. Results Multivariate analyses of survey data indicated that psychosocial stress had a significant, positive association with consideration of exit. In contrast, perceived peer support had a significant, negative association with consideration of exit. A stronger sense of identity as an early care and education professional had a significant, positive association with professional development participation as measured by training hours completed in the past year. The support of professional peers was not observed to have a significant association with professional development participation. Conclusion Results suggest the importance of considering psychosocial factors in planning workforce development and educational programs for FCCPs. This may include developing supports to help FCCPs cope with the psychosocial stress of care work, build & Rebecca Anne Swartz rswartz@illinois.edu 1 Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA 2 Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA 123 Child Youth Care Forum DOI 10.1007/s10566-016-9353-2 professional identities, and connect with peer providers to promote stability and quality caregiving in the ECE workforce. We propose additional qualitative research aimed at understanding the context of FCC care as a mechanism for informing the development of these supports.

Housing-related poverty, which includes problems such as residential instability, unaffordability, and overcrowding, are common experiences among many low-income families. While a growing body of research examines the effects of housing-related poverty on children and families, we lack a thorough understanding of the extent to which housing problems impact families, and the mechanisms through which these potential impacts may occur. This body of research is critical for best directing policy efforts that aim to reduce incidences of housing-related poverty. This dissertation addresses this need for additional research on the impact of housing-related poverty as well as new policy considerations for its reducing its prevalence. Paper 1 uses data from Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (FFCW) to estimate associations between residential and school instability and child vocabulary skills and behavior problems in middle childhood. My results indicate that school instability is more strongly and consistently associated than residential instability with increases in internalizing and externalizing behavior. Paper 2 also uses FFCW data, and in combination with data from HUD I examine the association between three measures of affordability – individual housing cost burden, city-wide fair market rent levels, and city-wide availability of affordable housing – and risk of material hardship. I find that unaffordability as measured by individual cost burden and local rents are more consistently associated with hardship than affordable housing supply. Paper 3 uses data from the 2013 American Community Survey to estimate reductions in poverty and housing cost burden that would result from a federal renter’s tax credit program under different proposal scenarios. My results indicate that a generous and well-targeted benefit aimed at low-income renter households could reduce the incidence of poverty status and housing cost burden, primarily when combined with existing credit programs available to many low-income households.

Persons from Somalia constitute the largest group of immigrants and refugees from Africa among whom diabetes-related health disparities are well documented. As one of the first steps toward developing a behavioral intervention to address diabetes among Somali immigrants and refugees, we administered a face to face interview-based survey to Somali and Latino adults with diabetes in a single community to assess diabetes knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. Respondents (N = 78) reported several barriers to optimal diabetes management for physical activity and glucose self-monitoring, as well as a high burden of disease and negative perceptions of diabetes. High participant engagement in disease management, self-efficacy, and social support were important assets. Similarities suggest that the shared experiences of immigration and related systemic socioeconomic and linguistic factors play a significant role in the understanding and self-management of diabetes in these populations. Together with previously collected qualitative work, the survey findings will inform development of a behavioral intervention to improve outcomes and reduce diabetes-related health disparities among immigrant and refugee groups to the U.S.

It is often claimed that standard measures overestimate the extent ofinequality and poverty on the grounds that poorer people tend to work less. The paper points to a number of reasons to question this claim. To illustrate, the laborsupplies of single American adults are shown to have a positive income gradient, but with considerable heterogeneity, generating (horizontal) inequality. Using equivalent incomes to adjust for effort reveals either higher inequality or a small increase in inequality, depending on the measurement assumptions made. With even a modest allowance for leisure as a basic need, the effort-adjusted welfarepoverty rate rises

We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group‐level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor, 1981. Because of the presence of group‐level unobservables, standard quantile regression techniques are inconsistent in our setting even if the treatment is independent of unobservables. In contrast, our estimation technique is consistent as well as computationally simple, consisting of group‐by‐group quantile regression followed by two‐stage least squares. Using the Bahadur representation of quantile estimators, we derive weak conditions on the growth of the number of observations per group that are sufficient for consistency and asymptotic zero‐mean normality of our estimator. As in Hausman and Taylor, 1981, micro‐level covariates can be used as internal instruments for the endogenous group‐level treatment if they satisfy relevance and exogeneity conditions. Our approach applies to a broad range of settings including labor, public finance, industrial organization, urban economics, and development; we illustrate its usefulness with several such examples. Finally, an empirical application of our estimator finds that low‐wage earners in the United States from 1990 to 2007 were significantly more affected by increased Chinese import competition than high‐wage earners.

Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) and a novel method for measuring changes in educational attainment we examine the link between educational attainment and shale oil and gas extraction for the states of Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The three states examined are economically-small, relatively more rural, and have high levels of shale oil and gas reserves. They also are varied in that West Virginia is intensive in shale gas extraction, while the other two are intensive in shale oil extraction. We find significant reductions in high school and college attainment among all three states’ initial residents because of the shale booms.

Traditionally the inference on trimmed means, Lorenz Curves, and partial AUC (pAUC) under ROC curves have been done based on the asymptotic normality of the statistics. Based on the theory of empirical likelihood, in this dissertation we developed novel methods to do statistical inferences on trimmed means, Lorenz curves, and pAUC. A common characteristic among trimmed means, Lorenz curves, and pAUC is that their inferences are not based on the whole set of samples. Qin and Tsao (2002), Qin et al. (2013), and Qin et al. (2011) recently published their researches on the inferences of trimmed means, Lorenz curves, and pAUC based on empirical likelihood method, where they treated the cutting points in the samples fixed at the sample quantiles. They concluded that the limiting distributions of the empirical likelihood tests had scaled chi-square distributions under the null hypotheses. In our novel empirical likelihood methods, we treat the cutting points as the nuisance parameter(s). We conduct the inferences on trimmed means, Lorenz Curves, and pAUC in two steps. First, we make inferences on the parameter interested (trimmed means, Lorenz curves, or pAUC) and the nuisance parameter(s) (the cutting point(s) in the samples) simultaneously. Then we profile out the nuisance parameter(s) from the test statistics. Under the null hypotheses, the limiting distributions of our empirical likelihood methods are chi-square. We innovate a computational algorithm ELseesaw to accomplish our empirical likelihood method for the inference on pAUC. Eventually, we contribute a R package to implement our empirical likelihood inferences on trimmed means, Lorenz curves, and pAUC. The R package we have developed can be downloaded free-of-charge on the internet at http://www.ms.uky.edu/~mai/EmpLik.html.

Many macroeconomists argue that productivity is low in developing countries because of frictions that impede the adoption of modern technologies. I argue that in the retail trade sector, developing countries rationally choose technologies with low measured labor productivity. My theory is that the adoption of modern retail technologies is optimal only when household ownership of complementary durable goods, such as cars, is widespread. Because income is low in the developing world, households own few such durables. The theory implies that policies that increase measured retail productivity do not necessarily increase welfare.

This research documents the racial-ethnic hierarchy in six Deep South states by focusing on native- and foreign-born groups and key socioeconomic outcomes including labor force participation, employment status, and poverty. The proportion of immigrants from Latin American countries entering these states has increased dramatically over the last 20 years; this is true to a lesser extent for immigrants from Asian nations. Using Public Use Microdata Samples and American Community Survey data, we find that although whites remain dominant demographically and economically, native- and foreign-born Asians are beginning to share in that economic position. Results also indicate that African Americans and Hispanic immigrants are often at the bottom of the hierarchy, but that the order of the groups can shift depending on the context and measure. Overall, the white-black framework of race relations may be slowly transforming into a complicated, multifaceted racial hierarchy but blacks still remain considerably disadvantaged in the Deep South.

The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North entailed a significant change in the health environment, particularly for infants, during a time when access to medical care and public health infrastructure became increasingly important. We create a new dataset that links individual infant death certificates to parental characteristics to assess the impact of parents migration to Northern cities on infant mortality. The new dataset allows a number of key innovations. First, we construct infant mortality rates specific to migrants and also for a period (1915-1920) prior to the registration of births in many of the states. Second, the microdata allow us to control for the selection into migration and assess a number of potential mechanisms for the migrant health effect. Conditional on parents pre-migration observable characteristics and county-of-origin fixed effects, we find that black infants were more likely to die in the North relative to their southern-born counterparts in 1920, but that gap disappeared by 1940. We do not find any evidence of migrant selection. The initial migrants faced higher mortality rates than northern-born blacks, but this gap eventually vanished by 1930. Our results are consistent with differentials in mortality being driven by differences between cities and rural areas. Given that infant health has a long-lasting impact on adult outcomes, the results shed light on whether and how the Great Migration contributed to African Americans secular gains in health and income during the 20th century.

The unemployment insurance system in the U.S. does not provide incentives to look for jobs outside local labor markets. In this paper I introduce relocation subsidies as a supplement to unemployment benefits, and study their effects on unemployment, productivity and welfare. I build a job search model with heterogeneous workers and multiple locations, in which migration is impeded by moving expenses, cross-location search frictions, borrowing constraints, and utility costs. I calibrate the model to the U.S. economy, and then introduce a subsidy that reimburses a part of the moving expenses to the unemployed and is financed by labor income taxes. During the Great Recession, a relocation subsidy that pays half of the moving expenses would lower unemployment rate by 0.36 percentage points (or 4.8%) and increase productivity by 1%. Importantly, the subsidies cost nothing to the taxpayer: the additional spending on the subsidies is offset by the reduction in spending on unemployment benefits. Unemployment insurance which combines unemployment benefits with relocation subsidies appears to be more effective than the insurance based on the benefits only

The recent literature on the welfare cost of income taxation (eg, Feldstein, 1999; Chetty, 2008) extends analysis of the scope of distortions from a traditional labor supply distortion to tax avoidance and evasion and debates the importance of “tax-sheltering” activities . The resulting implication is that the welfare cost of income taxation may not be substantial, lending support to high optimal tax rates (eg, Saez, 2001). We reexamine this implication from a long-term perspective: by considering a neglected distortion in human capital investment, we present that leaving out human capital investment would understate the true welfare cost of income taxation. Our survey of the related literature combined with our analysis of the CPS data reveals that underestimation of the welfare cost is substantial indeed, given a non-negligible price elasticity of investment in schooling. Our findings, based on a sufficient statistics approach, suggest the following: (i) the long-run welfare cost is larger than existing estimates, by more than 60%; and (ii) the share of the distortions arising from overall supply-side behaviors is larger than implied in the existing literature. Another form of skill formation, learning-by-doing (LBD), is also found to have similar implications.

The link between the uptake of preventive healthcare services and poor health status continues to be an area of interest in the consideration for immigrants health. Data for 580 female African immigrants were extracted from the National Health Interview Survey/Integrated Health Interview Series dataset for years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2013. A logistic regression model was fitted to determine associations between age, level of education, socioeconomic status, marital status, perceived health status, healthcare providers recommendation for Pap smear test, and the lifetime uptake of the Pap smear tests. The mean age of sample participants was 39.78 12.54 years. In this sample, the prevalence of the lifetime uptake of the Pap smear test was lower among female African immigrants (87%) compared to females born in the United States (97.2%), Europe (95.4%), or South America (93.5%). The results showed a statistically significant association between the lifetime uptake of the Pap smear test and educational attainment (Adjusted Odds Ratio [AOR] = 6.196, 95% CI [2.509, 15.298], and healthcare providers recommendation for the Pap smear test (AOR = 14.837, 95% CI [4.710, 46.733]. Culturally-tailored public health programs are needed to increase the rates of cervical cancer screening. Early detection of cervical cancer in female African immigrants may reduce the incidence and mortality rates from cervical cancer and improve health equity.

South Americans, one of the fastest growing Latino and immigrant groups in the United States, are an understudied group. To examine South Americans’ integration into US society, I focus on racial and ethnic identities as proxies of assimilation. Assimilation involves the absorption of one group into another group, denoting how people identify with and have solidarity to racial and ethnic groups (Rumbaut 2011). However, assimilation theories have neglected gender and thus, I utilized intersectionality to explore the ways selected South American groups racially and ethnically identify and assimilate into US society. The dissertation adhered to a mixed methods approach. In the first stage, I examined the selection of racial categories by people of South American origin using the American Community Survey data. Secondly, I conducted semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with Colombians, Peruvians and Argentinians in Ohio. Ohio was selected because it is one of the states besides Illinois that have the largest population of South Americans in the Midwest (Pew Hispanic Center 2013). Through the mixed methods approach and intersectional analysis, I not only found that national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, class, documentation status and phenotypic differences in the selection of racial and ethnic categories, experiences of racialization, but also in the meanings and identities of South Americans. While their Latinidad is associated by others as foreigner, inferior, and Mexican, South Americans express their identities and group membership as culture, language, origins, unity, empowerment, and commonalities in experiences including racialization as a minority group.

Though labor market conditions steadily improved following the Great Recession, underemployment among recent college graduates continued to climb, reaching highs not seen since the early 1990s. In this paper, we take a closer look at the jobs held by underemployed college graduates in the early stages of their careers during the first few years after the Great Recession. Contrary to popular perception, we show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of knowledge and skill. We also find that the likelihood of being underemployed was lower for those with more quantitatively oriented and occupation-specific majors than it was for those with degrees in general fields. Moreover, our analysis suggests that underemployment is a temporary phase for many recent college graduates as they transition to better jobs after spending some time in the labor market, particularly those who start their careers in low-skilled service jobs.

This paper is an analysis of the spatial distribution of housing vacancies in Detroit in four census years: 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Our analysis is largely grounded in the contexts of race and class. We use both cartographic and statistical methods to illustrate the distribution of vacancies at the census tract level and to model the conditions that contribute to vacancy rates. A cartographic analysis of the spatial distribution of housing vacancies over time in Detroit indicates that a weak general pattern of outward diffusion occurred from 2000 to 2010. A regression analysis indicates there is a structural pattern of race and class characteristics at the tract level, as measured respectively by percent Whitetied to the potential for White flightand by unemployment ratestied to financial factors of housing abandonment, that are good predictors of housing vacancy rates over fairly long time periods. Other good predictors are a tracts percentage of rental housing and, to a lesser degree, the age of a tracts population.

Over time, automobile ownership in the US has increased. Yet low-income households remain less likely to have access to automobiles than higher-income households. Today, given the continued dispersion of US metropolitan areas and the growing number of jobs, as well as low-income families living in the suburbs, the evidence suggests that low-income women who do not have access to automobiles are increasingly disadvantaged. To engender greater economic and social sustainability, the evidence suggests that low-income women would benefit from policies to increase their access to automobiles.

Despite an overall decrease in residential mobility after the 2007 housing crisis, many households, particularly those that are low income, continue to move in pursuit of a better life. Traditional theories of residential mobility suggest that mobility will occur when housing and transportation costs are cumulatively greater than the cost of moving to a new location. At the same time, the influence of these factors is not likely to be uniform across geographic contexts or for moves up or down the metropolitan hierarchy. Our analysis examines how well affordability measures explain patterns of county-level residential mobility. Specifically, we contrast conventional measures of affordability focused on the ratio of income to housing expense with measures of location affordability that factor in both housing and transportation costs. We find that whereas households tend to move from lower to higher cost locations, transit affordability at the destination plays an important role in mobility decisions.