One of the best-known studies of West Virginia’s past is John Alexander Williams’ West Virginia: A History. The author, who grew up in Greenbrier County, initially wrote the book in conjunction with the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, although it is still in print. In that work, the author summarizes what many researchers and ordinary West Virginians have known for a long time: “Whether or not mountaineers were always free, they were almost always poor.”i It may be cold comfort in today’s hard times to reflect that the latest troubles are only the most recent of many, but that realization may help give West Virginians the perspective needed to move ahead. In this section, we will briefly examine some of the explanations of this . . .

In 1924, The Morton Salt Company began nationwide distribution of iodine-fortified salt. Access to iodine, a key determinant of cognitive ability, rose sharply. We compare outcomes for cohorts exposed in utero to iodized salt with those of slightly older, unexposed cohorts, across states with high versus low iodine deficiency rates prior to salt fortification. Incomes for cohorts who benefited from iodized salt access went up by 11%; labor force participation rose by roughly .75 percentage points; and the probability of working more than 50 weeks in a year went up by over 1 percentage point. These impacts were driven entirely by females. We find large impacts on economic outcomes early in women's adult lives and muted effects later in life. Women married at later ages and experienced a small increase in educational attainment.

The 2000s was a decade of transitions for teens and young adults. In comparison with previous generations of youth, those living in the developed world (i) faced the harshest economic climate in decades, (ii) lived with their parents longer and were more likely to return back home as young adults, (iii) used information and communication technologies (ICTs) extensively, and (iv) in the U.S., were subject to increasingly stringent graduated drivers licensing (GDL) regulations. All were dramatic societal changes to be sure, but how did they affect youth travel behavior? Some argue dramatically and enduringly, but usually with fragmentary evidence. We examine data from the three most recent U.S. national travel surveys and find that, with one exception, after controlling for personal, household, locational, and travel factors, the effects of factors associated with various societal trends on person-kilometers traveled (PKT) are surprisingly muted. The exception is that decreased employment is associated with substantially lower PKT; however, this effect is 32% greater among older (ages 2761) than younger (ages 2026) adults, suggesting that economic factors, rather than changes in youth travel preferences, were at the root of declines in personal travel in the U.S. during the 2000s.

Objectives. To examine changes over 40 years (19702010) in life expectancy, life expectancy with disability, and disability-free life expectancy for American men and women of all ages. Methods. We used mortality rates from US Vital Statistics and data on disability prevalence in the community-dwelling population from the National Health Interview Survey; for the institutional population, we computed disability prevalence from the US Census. We used the Sullivan method to estimate disabled and disability-free life expectancy for 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Results. Over the 40 years, there was a steady increase in both disability-free life expectancy and disabled life expectancy. At birth, increases in disabled life and nondisabled life were equal for men (4.5 years); for women, at birth the increase in life with disability (3.6 years) exceeded the increase in life free of disability (2.7 years). At age 65 years, the increase in disability-free life was greater than the increase in disabled life. Conclusions. Across the life cycle, there was no compression of morbidity, but at age 65 years some compression occurred.

One of the primary objectives of the community development financial institution (CDFI) industry (and an explicit objective of the New Markets Tax Credit [NMTC] program) is to increase the provision of capitalloans and investmentsto economically underserved communities across the country. These are communities, center city neighborhoods, innumerable small towns, and wide swaths of the nations rural landscape plagued by high rates of poverty, unemployment (or underemployment), and lag in economic development, especially in comparison with many communities in economically vibrant areas, where employment is plentiful, incomes are high, housing markets are healthy, and the economic future is bright. Distressed, economically backward areas, where CDFIs (and community development entities [CDEs] in the NMTC program) now focus their attention and energies, are communities largely underserved, or only sporadically so, by mainstream financial institutions. CDFIs, it is frequently noted by the leadership of the CDFI industry as well as by analysts that follow the industry, primarily act to step into the breach between the real and the perceived need and opportunity for economic and housing development initiatives in low-income, frequently minority communities and the actual flow of investments from mainstream, regulated financial institutions to these areas. Bluntly, CDFIs (and CDEs) seek to provide investments and finance a wide array of projectsresidential, commercial, and community development facilitiesin underserved areas across the country, to communities and populations that, as we documented in Chap. 1, suffer from one of many aspects of market failure.

A 2014 U.S. Department of Justice Best Practices Report advocates that states eliminate HIV-specific criminal penalties except under 2 conditions: when a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive person intentionally commits a sex crime or transmits the virus by engaging in behavior that poses a significant risk of transmission, regardless of actual transmission. We assess the premise of these exceptions to understand whether these best practices are based on scientific evidence about the population at risk of infection and the risk of sexual violence by HIV-positive individuals. We employ nationally representative, cross-sectional survey data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Survey of Inmates in State, Federal, and Local Jails (SISFLJ), and the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES). Data from the CPS, SISFLJ, and NHANES are weighted and combined to analyze bias in the population at risk of HIV. Linear probability models are employed to estimate the likelihood that HIV-positive inmates are incarcerated for violent or sexual offenses, net of socioeconomic factors. We find significant measurement bias in HIV prevalence rates. The selection of national surveys for population denominators distorts contemporary estimates of HIV prevalence by 7% to 20%. Our findings also illustrate that HIV-positive inmates are 10 percentage-points less likely to be incarcerated for violent offenses than HIV-negative inmates. National best practice guidelines may undermine effective social policy that aims to curtail stigma within HIV-positive communities because scientific evidence neither include inmates into prevalence denominators (as a measure of the population at risk) nor assess the likelihood that HIV-positive inmates commit violent or sexual crimes.

The term cultural geo-history describes the specific connection of the culture in a given area to their environment and geographic space. For this project, the Peoples of Washington (POW) historical archive was cataloged based on GIS techniques, geocoding protocols, and the Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) to create an intuitive and familiar tool for historical researchers and archivists to better understand the cultural geo-history of Washington State. The resulting tool, the Peoples of Washington Historical Geographic Information System (POWHGIS), combines a geodatabase and a web application to provide access to a small portion of the cultural history of Washington State as well as supplemental data from the Washington State Geospatial Portal and the U.S. Census. The application was beta-tested by users in order to evaluate the functionality of the tools, to provide adequate validation of the POWHGIS project and procedures. The POWHGIS project demonstrates that archival standards are useful in creating an accurate, informative, and usable HGIS tool that can increase the knowledge of and access to Washington States cultural geo-history.

Positive assortative matching in terms of traits such as ethnicity and race has been prevalent in marital formation. One possible explanation for this is that spouses in endogamous marriages possess complementary skills and tastes that increase marital surplus. This paper aims to estimate the effects of ethnic assortative matching on a variety of household outcomes by using the exogenous variation in immigrant flows in the USA during the period 19001930 to disentangle the selection effect of partners. The major finding is that the complementarities in home production from same ethnic marriage enhances investment in household public goods such as childrearing and home ownership and reduces the market labor supply of wives. The OLS estimates of the sizes of these effects appear to be substantially biased downward, indicating positive selection into intermarriage in terms of unobservable traits that increase marital surplus.

Human rights describe moral norms or moral standards which are understood as inalienable fundamental rights of every human person. Human rights encompass a wide variety of rights, including but not limited to the right to a fair trial, protection of physical integrity, protection against enslavement, the right to free speech, and the right to education. The protection of human rights is certainly one of the most important aspects of development. Nevertheless, it receives much less attention than other aspects, presumably in part because it is so very hard to measure. If one is interested in empirically studying the protection of human rights, it is not enough to count countries that ratify human rights treaties; instead, the quantitative study of human rights aims to determine whether or not certain human rights are protected in practice.

Children of more-educated mothers tend to be healthier than children of less-educated mothers. However, in the United States, evidence for this relationship largely focuses on summary measures of health, such as subjective health status, birth weight, and height. Few studies have examined the relationship between mothers' education and children's reported conditions, the health metric that underlies many policy decisions concerning population health. Contrary to stylized facts about socioeconomic gradients in health, higher detection and reporting rates may lead to higher reporting rates among children of more-educated mothers, despite their better underlying health. This reporting pattern that might not mirror gradients for summary health measures. To examine this possibility, I investigate the association between maternal education and nine health conditions in the 1998-2014 National Health Interview Surveys (n = 176,097). I consider variation in the maternal education gradient across the specific reported conditions that children experience, paying particular attention to how patterns differ across children's ages. Results suggest that, unlike for the income gradient in child health, the relationship between maternal education and reported conditions varies in magnitude and direction across conditions. With some exceptions, the probability of reporting a diagnosed condition increases with maternal schooling. For some diagnoses, like asthma, this relationship is curvilinear, with an inverse gradient for children of the most educated mothers. However, the probability of reporting conditions that require neither diagnosis nor substantial parent-child involvement for detection tends to be flat across maternal education. Contrary to expectations, these relationships tend to be more pronounced for children who are 6 years of age or older than for younger children. These results expand understanding of the production and reporting of early-life health inequalities and illustrate limitations of an oft-used health metric. Reported conditions may underestimate socioeconomic inequalities in children's health.

We show that the process of employment polarization in the U.S. is largely generated by women entering the labor market during a period of sustained skill-biased technological change and rise of the services economy. For women, employment shares increase both at the bottom and at the top of the skill distribution, generating the typical U-shape polarization graph, while for men employment shares decrease in a similar fashion along the whole skill distribution. We extend the canonical model of skill-biased technological change by introducing three building blocks: a gender dimension, an endogenous market/home labor choice and a multi-sector environment. In the calibrated model, technological change induces a higher participation to the labor market of educated women who, in turn, reduce work time at home and increase the demand for low skilled services, generating a higher participation of uneducated women to the labor market. The model performs well in replicating polarization graphs by gender, marital status and sector and is consistent with several empirical observations of the U.S. economy that are not calibration targets.

This paper examines the effect of New Jerseys Paid Family Leave Insurance (PFLI) on maternity leave taking. Using Current Population Survey Data and a difference-in-difference approach, I analyze the effect of New Jerseys PFLI. The findings suggest that the program did not significantly increase leave taking among most new mothers. Specifically, I find a 5.7-6.3 percentage point increase in leave taking for women with some college but no increases in leave taking for other groups.

Since the 1970s, many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force. Evaluations reveal that these policies can increase maternal employment in the short term and may continue to do so even after the child is no longer in preschool by enabling mothers to gain more job skills and increase their attachment to the labor force. However, their effectiveness depends on the policy design, the country context, and the characteristics of mothers of preschoolers.

When immigrants enter the US they typically access a marriage market with a larger supply of educated spouses compared to the marriage market in their home countries. Absent any selectivity bias, this access should increase the likelihood that migrants ‘marry-up’ in terms of education. We combine survey data on British and German immigrants in the US with data on natives in Britain and Germany to estimate the causal effect of migration on educational mobility through cross-national marriage. To control for selective mating, we instrument educational attainment using government spending on education in the years each person was of school-age. To control for selective migration, we instrument the migration decision using inflows of immigrants to the US during puberty and early adulthood. We find strong selectivity effects that work against the positive prospects of the US marriage market. All migrants give up spousal education in exchange for US entry and assimilation. Migrant men also give up spousal education because they cannot compete with native men as bread-earners. Migrant women have some advantage in the US marriage market, as they can compete with native women in home production.

To understand how high school students substitute time between human capital building activities, we use data from the 2003 - 2014 waves of the American Time Use Survey to estimate the causal effect of work time on extracurricular time. Our paper estimates heterogeneous effects by household income to test whether low-income students, who may be more likely to work during high school to supplement household income, are more likely to substitute time away from extracurriculars. We find that working has a negative effect on the likelihood of and minutes engaged in extracurriculars, though the effect is primarily due to engagement in work rather than minutes worked. While students in lower income households are less likely to engage in extracurriculars, we find no evidence of heterogeneous effects of working on extracurriculars by income. These findings are important for policy makers and school administrators who are promoting after school activities, as well as those who are interested in understanding the full impact of high school employment.

This paper examines how important the occupational sorting of individuals in same-sex couples is in explaining the economic position of lesbians and gays beyond controlling for occupation in the estimation of their respective wage gaps. The analysis reveals that the distribution of partnered gay men across occupations brings them a remarkable positive earning gap (11% of the average wage of partnered workers), whereas the occupational sorting of partnered lesbian women only allows them to depart from the large losses that straight partnered women have since their earning gap, although positive, is close to zero. The results show that if gay men had the same educational achievements, immigration profile, racial composition, and age structure as straight partnered men have, the advantages of this group associated with their occupational sorting would disappear completely. Likewise, if lesbian women had the same characteristics, other than sex and gender orientation, as straight partnered men have, the small advantage that these women derive from their occupational sorting would not only vanish but would turn into disadvantages, leaving them with a loss with respect to the average wage of coupled workers similar to the one straight partnered women have after their corresponding homogenization. It is their higher educational attainments and, to a lower extent, their lower immigration profile, that prevents workers living in same-sex couples from having a disadvantaged occupational sorting, since neither do gay men seem to enjoy the privilege of being partnered men nor do lesbian women appear to be free from the mark of gender.

Los países del Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica: Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras, abarcan una extensión territorial de 242.4 mil km2 y en las últimas seis décadas han incrementado ostensiblemente su población, pasando de 6.8 millones en 1950 a 30.9 millones en el 2015, incrementándose en 4.5 veces. En la actualidad los países del Triángulo Norte generan los mayores flujos migratorios hacia los Estados Unidos de América, en el siguiente orden: El Salvador, Guatemala y Honduras, contribuyendo con alrededor del 85% de la población de origen hispano centroamericano (siendo 4 millones de personas en el 2012) residen en ese destino. Este trabajo quiere mostrar un panorama actual de la migración internacional de los países del Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica hacia los Estados Unidos de América, siendo una sistematización de información del fenómeno migratorio de los países de la subregión, tomando en cuenta las fuentes de datos e información desde el origen, el tránsito y el destino, desde la perspectiva de la demografía. Las fuentes de información secundarias utilizadas son las bibliográficas, los informes, memorias, artículos, reportajes y otras experiencias de investigación, aunque la perspectiva demográfica conduce que las principales fuentes de datos son estadísticas y nuestro enfoque está en la búsqueda, clasificación, obtención, generación y análisis de los datos, localizadas en los países de origen, en tránsito y destino, tales como los Censos de Población, Encuestas de Hogares, Estadísticas Migratorias, Estadísticas de Aprehensión y Deportación, Encuestas Especiales de Migración y las Estimaciones de Población Migrante en tránsito y en el destino como también los no autorizados y los posibles aplicantes a programas de regularización.

Jurisdictions across the United States have adopted "ban the box" (BTB) policies preventing employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the job application process. Their goal is to improve employment outcomes for those with criminal records, with a secondary goal of reducing racial disparities in employment. However, removing information about job applicants' criminal histories could lead employers who don't want to hire ex-offenders to try to guess who the ex-offenders are, and avoid interviewing them. In particular, employers might avoid interviewing young, low-skilled, black and Hispanic men when criminal records are not observable. This would worsen employment outcomes for these already-disadvantaged groups. In this paper, we use variation in the details and timing of state and local BTB policies to test BTB's effects on employment for various demographic groups. We find that BTB policies decrease the probability of being employed by 3.4 percentage points (5.1%) for young, low-skilled black men, and by 2.3 percentage points (2.9%) for young, low-skilled Hispanic men. These findings support the hypothesis that when an applicant's criminal history is unavailable, employers statistically discriminate against demographic groups that are likely to have a criminal record.

We assess the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) serves as an automatic stabilizer to mitigate the economy's sensitivity to shocks. Using a local labor market design based on heterogeneity in local benefit generosity, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in generosity attenuates the effect of adverse shocks on employment growth by 7% and on earnings growth by 6%. Consistent with a local demand channel, we find that consumption is less responsive to local labor demand shocks in counties with more generous benefits. Our analysis finds that the local fiscal multiplier of unemployment insurance expenditure is approximately 1.9.

This paper finds that US employment changed differently relative to output in the Great Recession and recovery than in most other advanced countries or in the US in earlier recessions. Instead of hoarding labor, US firms reduced employment proportionately more than output in the Great Recession, with establishments that survived the downturn contracting jobs massively. Diverging from the aggregate pattern, US manufacturers reduced employment less than output while the elasticity of employment to gross output varied widely among establishments. In the recovery, growth of employment was dominated by job creation in new establishments. The variegated responses of employment to output challenges extant models of how enterprises adjust employment over the business cycle.