In the coming years, transportation planners and policy makers in the United States will need to shift their focus to acknowledge the needs of the growing aging population. A principal task that must be addressed is how to cope with meeting the demands of aging adults who may not be able to operate and maintain their own personal vehicles because of growing physical and financial constraints. Transit-oriented developments (TODs), typically defined by mixed-use and pedestrian-friendly development surrounding a transit stop, are places that might benefit aging populations and meet their transportation needs. This paper explores demographic trends and characteristics surrounding transit-oriented developments. To compare how the environment has changed in terms of socioeconomic characteristics, this study examined census attributes such as peoples age, income by age, and the number of various activities performed in TODs. Also investigated were trends in TOD road infrastructure and activity locations. It was found that TODs and their adjacent areas in 2010 had a higher density of road network characteristics compared with TODs in 2000. It was also observed that aging populations (65 years and older) were a lower proportion of the population residing in TODs for 2000 and 2010. If TODs are a possible solution to meeting the accessibility needs of aging adults, more research is required to understand better how to attract aging populations to these communities.

In the context of the digitization of manuscripts, transcription and annotation are often distinct, sequential steps. This could lead to difficulties in improving the transcribed text when annotations have already been defined. In order to avoid this, we devised an approach which merges the two steps into the same process. Text Encoder and Annotator (TEA) is a prototype application embracing this concept. TEA is based on a lightweight language syntax which annotates text using Semantic Web technologies. Our approach is currently being developed within the Clavius on the Web project, devoted to studying the manuscripts of Christophorus Clavius, an influential 16th century mathematician and astronomer.

The United States faces a forecast of continuing growth in the demand for health care and an insufficient supply of primary care physicians to meet this need. The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) grant pharmacies the ability to apply for a waiver (CLIA waiver) to perform routine medical testing on patients without direct physician supervision. In this study, we estimate the effect that the spread of CLIA waiver pharmacies has had on the labor markets for pharmacists and lab technicians. Our results suggest that the spread of waivers has had no measurable impact on the pharmacist and lab technician labor markets. Our results suggest that pharmacists and lab technicians are able to accommodate basic testing into their existing workload without needing to work more hours. If pharmacies can accommodate routine testing with little disruption, broadening the scope of practice for pharmacists may alleviate rising costs of providing health care in the United States.

On June 24, 1879, an “immense throng of people crowded” on a train platform in Salt Lake City to go on a much-anticipated excursion. The event had been planned for weeks as a gesture of appreciation for the elderly Mormons, and it was of no small proportions. Just over four hundred people “over 70 years of age” filled eleven train cars for their trip to American Fork. Most of the aged who boarded the train had known the “early days”: Joseph Smith, the gathering, the mobs, the first temple, the introduction of plural marriage, the Prophet’s assassination, the power shuffle after his death, the schisms, and the ascent of Brigham Young. This generation was slowly, but surely disappearing. The event was aimed at honoring the elderly. But it was clear that the event planners also sought to capture these elderly Saints’ evaporating memories. Mormons had lost many in their search for a center, but these “old folks” were the survivors and the faithful. They had successfully navigated the path from the . . .

Beneath the shadow of the aircraft and beyond the airport fence, communities wrestle with the impacts of airport expansion and operations. This dissertation builds scholarly foundations to explore the tensions between local residents who want to maintain healthy and stable communities and airport owners who want to grow operations and promote regional economic growth. The literature review contributes an overview of existing scholarship that investigates airports in an urban planning context, a realm of study I term aviation urbanism. To address gaps in aviation urbanism scholarship, I derived and investigated three research questions pertaining to neighborhood change, environmental justice outcomes, and the airport infrastructure planning process for airport-adjacent communities. The dissertation first asks: How has the population of historically marginalized groups living near airports changed with the rise of the jet age? The spatial analysis and descriptive statistics show that airport-adjacent communities in multi-airport regions generally increased persons of color and increased renters more than their respective metropolitan regions. Additionally, the communities often underperformed socio-economically with respect to their region. The second research question asks: Were hub airports more likely to expand if historically marginalized groups surrounded them? The exact logistic regression model, which was designed to be suitable for binary outcomes and small sample sizes, did not offer statistical evidence that environmental injustice is a concern at a systemic, institutional level for major airport expansion decisions. Next, I investigated environmental injustice on a case-by-case basis during the planning process, asking: How did the Federal Aviation Administration and airport owners frame and evaluate environmental justice in the planning process for airport expansion projects? After investigating the methodological framing of environmental justice in Environmental Impact Statements, I found that the methodological variation in comparison geography prevented the FAA and airport owners from recognizing and mitigating disproportionate impacts at two of the three airports with the most obvious and egregious levels of environmental justice concern. Overall, this dissertation contributes a methodological approach to define airport-adjacent communities and offers a basis for further inquiries into the relationship between airport infrastructure, airport-adjacent communities, and airport-centric activity centers.

The Women’s Foundation commissioned researchers from the Center for Science Technology & Economic Policy at the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas to study the socioeconomic status of women in the states of Kansas and Missouri with a special focus on the Kansas City metropolitan area (KC Metro) and policy implications for the state of Kansas. Where relevant, we make comparisons on the status of women with other metro areas and with the U.S. as a whole. We compare women and men across a number of socioeconomic outcomes. Our report paints a statistical portrait of the status of women in the bi-state area.

Market Trends. Despite fluctuations in the price of oil and employment in the industry, the housing markets in the eastern Ohio region have remained relatively stable since 2012. Vacancy. Multifamily rental and owner vacancy rates indicate that markets are the tightest for low income renters, with little change in vacancy rates over time. Cost Burden. More than half of low-income renters and owners were cost burdened in 2014. The percentage of cost burdened renters declined since 2012, while the percentage of cost burdened homeowners increased. Sales Price. Median home sale price in the region was $80,000 in 2016. 60% of home sales were less than $100,000. The annual rate of increase has declined since 2014.

This paper argues that inequality can be both good and bad for growth, depending on what inequality and whose growth. Unequal societies may be holding back one segment of the population while helping another. Similarly, high levels of income inequality may be due to a variety of different factors; some of these may be good while others may be bad for growth. The paper tests this hypothesis by unpacking both inequality and growth. Total inequality is decomposed into inequality of opportunity, due to observed factors that are beyond the individuals control, and residual inequality. Growth is measured at different steps of the income ladder to verify whether low, middle, and top income households fare differently in societies with high (low) levels of inequality. In an application to the United States covering 1960 to 2010, the paper finds that inequality of opportunity is particularly bad for growth of the poor. When inequality of opportunity is controlled for, the importance of total income inequality is dramatically reduced. These results are robust to different measures of inequality of opportunity and econometric methods.

This brief examines the health insurance coverage experiences of fathers living with dependent children before and after implementation of the major coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014. Among these provisions were an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, new tax credits for plans purchased in ACA Marketplaces, and an individual mandate to maintain coverage. Our recent analysis showed that mothers who were living with dependent children experienced substantial declines in uninsurance between 2013 and 2014 (Karpman, Gates, Kenney, et al. 2016a). Although the share of children living with their fathers is lower than the share living with their mothers—just over 70 percent compared with 90 percent, respectively—there is still substantial potential for fathers’ coverage changes to have spillover effects on their . . .

This report and the accompanying Eastern Ohio Shale and Housing Dashboard (Appendix 1) were prepared by a team of researchers from Cleveland State Universitys Levin College of Urban Affairs (CSU) for the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to monitor the impact of the Utica shale development industry on housing affordability and availability in eight counties of eastern Ohio. The eight counties (Belmont, Carroll, Columbiana, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Monroe, and Noble) are home to the largest concentrations of shale activity in the state. The research team developed three indicators related to shale development (well count, potential employment, and oil price) and five indicators related to housing markets (number of home sales, median sale price, days on market, rent per square foot, and rental vacancy rate). These indicators are presented in the accompanying dashboard, which will be updated by the team on a quarterly basis for 2016. This report provides background information about the shale industry and housing market characteristics in the eight-county region to set the context for understanding the dashboard indicators. It also provides the detailed methodology used in creating the indicators so that OHFA can continue to monitor the shale industry and housing market in the region. This first iteration of the dashboard presents data for the first and second quarters of shale indicators and the first quarter of housing indicators for 2016. The data are presented by county and for the eight-county region as a whole. Consecutive updates of the dashboard will be released in October 2016 and January 2017.

Naturalization can have large economic and civic benefits for both immigrants and the native-born (Gonzalez-Barrera et al. 2013; Pastor and Scoggins 2012). Yet there are 8.5 million adults in the U.S. who are eligible to naturalize but have not. The barriers to naturalization are both individual, including Englishlanguage ability and fear of the citizenship test, as well as structural, including the cost of naturalization and the civic infrastructure that does (or does not) encourage citizenship. Given the recent revised fee proposal from the Department of Homeland Security1 (DHS) in which it newly introduces a reduced fee of $320 for naturalization applicants with family income greater than 150 percent and not more than 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines one of those barriers is being lowered. While it is not the only barrier, it is important psychologicallyin focus groups, many immigrants list it as a main concernand it is one of the factors most amenable to change in order to ease the naturalization process. The proposed fee change has come as a result of a regular process: the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) administration changes fees periodically and when doing so must first submit a comprehensive fee study and then eventually file final fee schedules with the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The last change to fees took effect in November 2010 (Preston 2010). It was then that USCIS provided a standard means for submitting fee-waiver requests on the naturalization application process. Before this, full fee waivers were applied on a case-by-case basis since the early 2000s. However, given that such waivers have been limited to individuals with household income at or below 150 percent of federal poverty guidelines, many near-poor or working poor families were left without needed assistance. Now, potentially 1 million adults would be eligible for partial fee waivers through this new action. The National Partnership for New Americans, along with many others, has advocated on behalf of many working poor LPRs who effectively were just beyond the cusp of financial assistance but also far from the realization of citizenship. New partial fee waivers for this important subset of price-sensitive eligible LPRs could have an important impact on naturalization rates across the country, particularly for those who are lower-income and for whom the fee has been seen as a significant barrier.

Since a significant portion of second generation immigrants only have one parent that was born abroad and one native parent, this portion of the second generation population may have the advantage of having human capital influences from both the U.S and from abroad. Comparing the economic success of this population to that of second generation immigrants who have two parents that were born abroad and therefore less of a culturally balanced environment might give insight into what family structure and therefore what kind of environment is most conducive to the economic success of second generation immigrants. By comparing the effect of having two immigrant parents with the effect of having an immigrant father and native mother, and vice versa, this research will evaluate the effect of parental nativity status of second generation immigrants on their earnings.

Scholars have long analyzed the persistence of Appalachian poverty in counties, but less is known about the dimensions of poverty at smaller geographic levels. This paper builds upon the concept of spatial inequality, which explains how socio-economic disadvantage is segregated across residential space based on race and class. I extend the study of spatial inequality to Appalachia by investigating how local poverty is stratified across the region. The literature suggests two historical processes that could lead to spatial stratification in Appalachia: (1) the concentration of local economic opportunity in county seat cities, and (2) historical economic development processes that emphasized growth and marginalized the most rural areas of the region. Therefore, I analyze whether distance to a county seat influences poverty rates in Appalachian neighborhoods. The results indicate that distance to a county seat has a curvilinear "U-shaped" relationship with poverty: the poorest neighborhoods, on average, are likely to be closest and farthest away from county seats. While data limitations exist, these findings emphasize the importance of place-based, subcounty initiatives . . .

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced several new policies in 2014, including an individual mandate, expanded Medicaid eligibility, and subsidized private coverage. Private subsidies include advance premium tax credits (APTCs) and cost-sharing reductions (CSRs). Individuals gain eligibility for APTCs and CSRs at 100% (138% in Medicaid expansion states) of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), lose eligibility for CSRs at 250% FPL, and lose eligibility for the APTCs at 400% FPL. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) and a regression discontinuity design, this study exploits the exogenous differences in subsidy eligibility in 2014 at three cutoffs to identify the separate and combined effects of the APTCs and CSRs on private insurance coverage. I estimate a 4.8 to 5.4 percentage point increase in private insurance coverage just above 138% FPL in Medicaid expansion states and a smaller effect above 100% FPL in non-expansion states attributable to the combined incentives. I calculate a demand elasticity for health insurance of -0.65 to -0.58, which is higher than most estimates in the literature, suggesting low-income individuals may be relatively more price responsive. There is no evidence of an effect on private health insurance at 250% FPL, attributable solely to the CSRs, and suggestive effects at 400% FPL, attributable to only the APTCs. Coverage increases do not appear to be driven by adverse selection, and there is no evidence of crowding-out or income manipulation around the cutoffs. APTC and CSR levels would need to be raised at higher incomes to induce more participation.

This paper shows how the Computer Revolution of the 1980s shifted the economic trajectories of U.S. cities. Examining the emergence of new occupational titles in official census classifications, we document a sharp reversal in the skill content of new jobs. While technological change was biased towards routine skills throughout the 1970s, new job titles mainly appeared in occupations and industries that required abstract skills after 1980. This reversal is also reflected in the geography of new jobs. Following the Computer Revolution, the creation of new jobs shifted towards cities with endowments of analytical and interactive skills. Our results suggest that the recent divergence of U.S. cities can in part be explained by the complementarities between new technologies and skill endowments.

Residential segregation remains a lasting scar on many urban centers. Past research has connected segregation to lower educational attainment, higher crime, and worse economic outcomes in black communities. However, many analyses on the effects of segregation suffer from omitted variable bias. In this paper, I use an instrumental variable approach to test the causality of residential segregation on the use of alternative financial services (AFS) by urban black households using the configuration of railroad tracks to isolate exogenous variation in segregation for cities outside of former slave states. Estimates using this instrumental approach demonstrate that residential segregation increases the use of AFS by black households.

Previous research has found differences in characteristics of beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare fee-for-service versus Medicare Advantage (MA), but there has been limited research using more recent MA enrollment data. We used 1997-2005 National Health Interview Survey data linked to 2000-2009 Medicare enrollment data to compare characteristics of Medicare beneficiaries before their initial enrollment into Medicare fee-for-service or MA at age 65 and whether the characteristics of beneficiaries changed from 2006 to 2009 compared with 2000 to 2005. During this period of MA growth, the greatest increase in enrollment appears to have come from those with no chronic conditions and men.

This memo explains the method we at the University of Southern California (USC) Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) use to estimate the eligible-to-naturalize population in the United States. This necessarily involves a rather lengthy discussion of estimating the undocumented population; that is the first and most crucial step to estimating the eligible-to-naturalize since once that group is determined, the remainder of the non-citizen foreign-born residents are mostly Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and the criteria that can then be applied to that group to determine LPRs eligible to naturalize is fairly straightforward.