We estimate the long-run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children's longevity, educational attainment, nutritional status, and income in adulthood. To do so, we collected individual-level administrative records of applicants to the Mothers' Pension program - the first government-sponsored welfare program in the United States (1911-1935) - and matched them to census, WWII, and death records. Male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers. They also obtained one-third more years of schooling, were less likely to be underweight, and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers.

The American middle class is finally seeing economic gains after more than a decade of declining economic security. Yet millions of Americans are still feeling the effects of a painful economic period.

In 2014, deaths among non-Hispanic whites exceeded births in more states than at any time in U.S. history. Seventeen states, home to 121 million residents or roughly 38 percent of the U.S. population, had more deaths than births among non-Hispanic whites (hereafter referred to as whites) in 2014, compared to just four in 2004. When births fail to keep pace with deaths, a region is said to have a natural decrease in population, which can only be offset by migration gains. In twelve of the seventeen states with white natural decreases, the white population diminished overall between 2013 and 2014. This research is the first to examine the growing incidence of white natural decrease among U.S. states and to consider its policy implications. Our analysis of the demographic factors that cause white natural decrease suggests that the pace is likely to pick up in the future. Over the last several decades, demographers have noted the growing incidence of natural decrease in the United States.1 More widespread natural decrease results from declining fertility due to the Great Recession, and the aging of the large baby boom cohorts born between 1946 and 1964. This senior population is projected to expand from nearly 15 percent of the total population in 2015 to nearly 24 percent in 2060.2 Much of this aging baby boom population is white, and so white mortality is growing. Together, growing white mortality and the diminishing number of white births increase the likelihood of more white natural decrease. In contrast, births exceed deaths by a considerable margin among the younger Latino population, and the combination of these very different demographic trends is increasing the diversity of the U.S. population.3 Though demographers have documented the growing incidence of natural decrease among the overall population in U.S. counties, little attention has been given to its occurrence among racial sub-groups at any level of geography. To address this gap, we use data from the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control to examine the annual volume of births and deaths among whites from 1999 to 2014 for each state.4 We focus on whites because they represent the largest share of the U.S. population and because their demographic profile increases the likelihood of natural decrease. We find a significant rise in the number of states experiencing white natural decrease in the last few years. The comparison of these states to others where white births exceed deaths helps us to understand what combination of demographic changes produce natural decrease. Though white natural decrease is clearly on the rise, only two states have more deaths than births in their total populations. This low incidence of overall natural decrease in U.S. states reflects the growing importance of Latino natural increase to overall U.S. demographic trends.

The decade 2003 to 2013 was a tough one for workers in the United States, 70 percent of whom saw their real (inflation-adjusted) wages decline. In New England, 50 percent of workers experienced a decline in real wages. Although that was less than workers nationwide, the changes were more extreme, with lower-wage workers experiencing deeper drops in their real wages and higher-wage earners making greater gains than in the nation as a whole.1 (See “Change in Real Wages, 2003–2013.”) The decline in employer-provided health insurance has exacerbated the pain, with the share of nonelderly New Englanders who receive insurance from their employer falling from 72.3 percent in 2003 to 67.8 percent in 2013.2 As job-based coverage has declined, more workers and their family members have enrolled in public health-care programs. Stagnating wages and decreased employer benefits are a problem not only for low-wage workers, who increasingly cannot make ends meet, but also for state governments, which help finance the public safety net that many workers and their families must use.

Analysis of direct and "ripple" effects of Oregon's recent minimum wage increase in the long-term care industry. Minimum wage proposals have dominated recent policy debate in Oregon, culminating in the February 2016 legislative session that included the passage of Senate Bill 1532, a three-tiered minimum wage increase to be phased in between 2016 and 2022. Barring changes in other states, the law will give Oregon the highest minimum wage in the country. While the immediate impacts of the law on workers earning near the minimum are substantial and relatively clear-cut, businesses face less certain outcomes as the delicate balance between labor costs, output prices, and hiring adjusts to the changes. The long-term care (LTC) sector, which includes nursing facilities, residential and assisted living facilities, and in-home care agencies, is comprised of many businesses that are highly exposed to minimum wage increases. In Oregon in 2014, roughly 5.3% of workers in the long-term care sector earned the state’s minimum wage, but many more earn near the minimum – in the range that will be covered by the proposed increases. At the same time, the sector’s ability to adjust to higher labor costs– through oft-predicted changes to prices, hiring, or service levels, is particularly constrained by multiple factors

Tensions between the demands of the knowledge-based economy and remaining, blue-collar jobs underlie renewed debates about whether schools should emphasize career and technical training or college-preparatory curricula. We add a gendered lens to this issue, given the male-dominated nature of blue-collar jobs and women's greater returns to college. Using the ELS:2002, this study exploits spatial variation in school curricula and jobs to investigate local dynamics that shape gender stratification. Results suggest a link between high school training and jobs in blue-collar communities that structures patterns of gender inequality into early adulthood. Although high school training in blue-collar communities reduced both men's and women's odds of four-year college enrollment, it had gender-divergent labor market consequences. Men in blue-collar communities took more blue-collar courses, had higher rates of blue-collar employment, and earned similar wages relative to otherwise comparable men from non-blue-collar communities. Women were less likely to work and to be employed in professional occupations, and they suffered severe wage penalties relative to their male peers and women from non-blue-collar communities. These relationships were due partly to high schools in blue-collar communities offering more blue-collar and fewer advanced college-preparatory courses. This curricular tradeoff may benefit men, but it appears to disadvantage women.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Black Sociology provides the most up to date exploration and analysis of research focused on Blacks in America. Beginning with an examination of the project of Black Sociology, it offers studies of recent events, including the Stand Your Ground killing of Trayvon Martin, the impact of Hurricane Katrina on emerging adults, and efforts to change voting requirements that overwhelmingly affect Blacks, whilst engaging with questions of sexuality and family life, incarceration, health, educational outcomes and racial wage disparities. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Boiss charge of engaging in objective research that has a positive impact on society, and organised around the themes of Social Inequities, Blacks and Education, Blacks and Health and Future Directions, this timely volume brings together the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a broad overview of the issues currently faced by Blacks in United States. A timely, significant research guide that informs readers on the social, economic and physical condition of Blacks in America, and proposes directions for important future research. The Ashgate Research Companion will appeal to policy makers and scholars of Africana Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Politics, with interests in questions of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social inequalities, health and education.

Over the past fifty years substantial changes in the demographic characteristics of women in the workforce have had a significant impact on their relative earnings. Black women's earnings first began to increase, relative to similarly situated White women, in the 1950s (King 1993; Sokoloff 1992; Blau and Beller 1992). One of the factors that contributed . . .

While there is growing evidence that educational inequality can be a driver of conflict (FHI 360, 2015) and that the education system can both promote and undermine sustainable peacebuilding processes (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Davies, 2004b; Smith, 2005), education systems are often marginalized in both peacemaking and peacebuilding processes (Novelli & Smith, 2011). This study explores the relationship between education sector management, inequality, conflict and peacebuilding in South Sudan. It examines the linkages between inequities in education, broader political economy dynamics which contribute to conflict pressures, and how education sector governance could support sustainable peace and development processes. South Sudan gained independence in 2011, following decades of civil war. However, conflict – linked to patterns of marginalization and inequity along interrelated political, ethnic, geographic, and economic lines - has persisted in the country. These patterns of inequity and pressures for conflict have been perpetuated (and reproduced) in South Sudan’s education system since . . .

This article reviews the evidence for duration dependence in job-finding rates and its implications for the unemployment duration distribution. The authors document duration dependence and show that it exists within nearly every demographic subgroup. Then, they examine the implications of duration dependence on unemployment duration, emphasizing that a uniform job-finding rate that does not incorporate duration dependence understates unemployment duration. Finally, they explore a composition-based approach to duration dependence, where they solve for the distribution of preexisting heterogeneity that is consistent with observed duration dependence. The authors look at how this distribution varies cyclically and, in particular, during the Great Recession. The largest changes occur at the low finding-rate tail of this distribution.

Negative fiscal externalities produced by apartments and other small housing units are commonly cited as the justification for many local land-use restrictions, such as minimum lot requirements and limits on multifamily developments. Because these laws effectively limit the number of small dwellings that can be built within a community, proponents argue that restrictions of this type help to guarantee that new homes will pay for themselves by discouraging free-riding behavior within a system of property tax funded local governments. Critics, however, have maintained that such policies constitute a veiled attempt by suburban communities at restricting entry for low-income families. Focusing on the clear distinction between housing units located in multifamily structures (i.e., apartments) and single-family homes, this paper finds strong evidence that residential per-capita values, measured as value per person and value per child, are actually higher for apartments, not single-family residences. Consequently, communities' effective property tax rates decline as apartments' share of the housing stock rises, holding all else equal. These findings are contrary to the set of assumptions that are often used to justify many of today's land-use restrictions and raise serious questions regarding the efficacy of modern fiscal zoning as a tool for promoting efficient fiscal federalism.

For many multi-dimensional data applications, tensor operations as well as relational operations both need to be supported throughout the data lifecycle. Tensor based representations (including two widely used tensor decompositions, CP and Tucker decompositions) are proven to be effective in multi-aspect data analysis and tensor decomposition is an important tool for capturing high-order structures in multi-dimensional data. Although tensor decomposition is shown to be effective for multi-dimensional data analysis, the cost of tensor decomposition is often very high. Since the number of modes of the tensor data is one of the main factors contributing to the costs of the tensor operations, in this paper, we focus on reducing the modality of the input tensors to tackle the computational cost of the tensor decomposition process. We propose a novel decomposition-by-normalization scheme that first normalizes the given relation into smaller tensors based on the functional dependencies of the relation, decomposes these smaller tensors, and then recombines the sub-results to obtain the overall decomposition. The decomposition and recombination steps of the decomposition-by-normalization scheme fit naturally in settings with multiple cores. This leads to a highly efficient, effective, and parallelized decomposition-by-normalization algorithm for both dense and sparse tensors for CP and Tucker decompositions. Experimental results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed decomposition-by-normalization scheme compared to the conventional nonnegative CP decomposition and Tucker decomposition approaches.

We examine the potential effect of naturalization on the U.S. immigrants’ earnings. We find the earning gap between naturalized citizens and noncitizens is positive over many years, with a tent shape across the wage distribution. We focus on a normalized metric entropy measure of the gap between distributions, and compare with conventional measures at the mean, median, and other quantiles. In addition, naturalized citizen earnings (at least) second-order stochastically dominate noncitizen earnings in many of the recent years. We construct two counterfactual distributions to further examine the potential sources of the earning gap, the “wage structure” effect and the “composition” effect. Both of these sources contribute to the gap, but the composition effect, while diminishing somewhat after 2005, accounts for about 3/4 of the gap. The unconditional quantile regression (based on the Recentered Influence Function), and conditional quantile regressions confirm that naturalized citizens have generally higher wages, although the gap varies for different income groups, and has a tent shape in many years.

I use the non-public decennial censuses in 1970 to investigate the effect of the Head Start program on maternal labor supply and schooling in its early years. I exploit a discontinuity in county-level Head Start funding beginning in the late 1960s to explore differences in countylevel maternal employment and maternal schooling. The results provide suggestive evidence that the more availability of Head Start led to an increase the nursery school enrollment of children and a decrease in maternal labor supply. In addition, the ITT estimates imply a relatively large, negative effect of enrollment on maternal labor supply. However, the estimates are somewhat sensitive to addition of covariates and the standard errors are also large to draw firm inferences. and seminar participants at UIC for providing helpful comments. I thank Douglas Miller and Jens Ludwig for data on Head Start spending and the Chicago Census RDC for providing access to the restricted-use census files.Disclaimer: Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential information is disclosed.

Resumen Las altas tasas desempleo observadas en Estados Unidos durante la reciente crisis económica, que además son diferenciadas de acuerdo al origen étnico, hacen pertinente indagar acerca de cómo este problema se relaciona con la salud mental de los empleados y desempleados. Por tanto, en este artículo analizamos la relación entre desempleo y salud mental de los inmigrantes mexicanos, mexicanos nacidos en EE.UU, y otros hispanos en comparación con nativos blancos no hispanos y afroestadounidenses. Para alcanzar este propósito calculamos prevalencias, razones de prevalencias y razones de momios en la población entre 18 y 65 años en la fuerza laboral. Utilizamos información de la National Health Interview Survey (1999 y 2009). Encontramos que en tiempos de crisis aumenta la prevalencia de Tensión Psicológica no Específica (TPNE) en la fuerza laboral para todos los grupos étnicos. Las razones de prevalencias indican que los desempleados tienen mayor riesgo de presentar una TPNE que los empleados, particularmente los hispanos no mexicanos, en contraste, los inmigrantes mexicanos muestran riesgos más bajos.

This paper investigates the role of intergenerational mobility in internal migration decisions of families. Geographic variation of intergenerational mobility suggests that if families value their children's human capital accumulation and future outcomes, they consider intergenerational mobility in migration decisions. Families' migration choice to an area is assumed to maximize children's expected outcomes and parents' utility. We apply the method of semiparametric maximum score estimation to our empirical model, which yields consistent estimators even when families choice sets are partially observed, as is the case in our dataset. We find that highly educated families with school-aged children choose areas that favor upward mobility. Our welfare analysis indicates that a unit increase in the absolute mobility of a commuting zone is equivalent to approximately $685 higher mean wage from the local labor market. JEL: C14, D10, J62, R23

The words Great Recession are no longer daily headline news. While the Great Recession officially began in December 2007, housing prices began to decline in 2006. Since then, media attention increasingly focused on the burst of the housing bubble, families facing foreclosure, rising unemployment, and a decline in the stock market decimating family savings. Job growth was limited and poverty was on the rise, especially among families from minority groups. In 2010 we began to hear about the recovery from the Great Recession, as if the country had suffered through a bad case of the flu and now was back to good health. But how significant has the recovery been? Who has truly recovered? This report asks those questions and puts a spotlight on the issue of whether and how much women have recovered in New England. Much of the research on the differential impact of the Great Recession has focused on the poor, the jobless, and the job seekers who have given up looking. Research on the recovery also documents the rebound of large financial institutions and the ability of stock market investors to make gains again. But what has happened to working women in general, and minority women in particular?

Considering heterogeneous responses by skill group to material and service offshoring, we examine the relationship between offshoring and the individual wages of workers in the U.S. labor market. We find that offshoring has been beneficial for high-skill workers but detrimental for middle- and low-skill workers. In particular, service offshoring, which has been widespread since 2000, has severely affected the labor market, compared to material offshoring.

Past cross-national comparisons of socioeconomic segregation have been undercut by lack of comparability in measures, data, and concepts. Using IRIS data from the French Census of 2008 and the French Ministry of Finance as well as tract data from the American Community Survey (2006–2010) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Picture of Subsidized Households, and constructing measures to be as similar as possible, we compare socioeconomic segregation in metropolitan areas with a population of more than 1 million in France and the United States. We find much higher socioeconomic segregation in large metropolitan areas in the United States than in France. We also find (1) a strong pattern of low-income neighborhoods in central cities and high-income neighborhoods in suburbs in the United States, but varying patterns across metropolitan areas in France; (2) that high-income persons are the most segregated group in both countries; (3) that the shares of neighborhood income differences that can be explained by neighborhood racial/ethnic composition are similar in France and the United States; and (4) that government-assisted housing is disproportionately located in the poorest neighborhoods in the United States but is spread across many neighborhood income levels in France. We conclude that differences in government provision of housing assistance and levels of income inequality are likely important contributing factors to the Franco-U.S. difference in socioeconomic segregation.

The recent housing crisis offers the opportunity to understand the effects of unique indicators of macroeconomic conditions on health. We linked data on the proportion of mortgage borrowers per US metropolitan-area who were at least 90 days delinquent on their payments with individual-level outcomes from a representative sample of 1,021,341 adults surveyed through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) between 2003 and 2010. We estimated the effects of metropolitan-area mortgage delinquency on individual health behaviors, medical coverage, and health status, as well as whether effects varied by race/ethnicity. Results showed that increases in the metropolitan-area delinquency rate resulted in decreases in heavy alcohol consumption and increases in exercise and health insurance coverage. However, the delinquency rate was also associated with increases in smoking and obesity in some population groups, suggesting the housing crisis may have induced stress-related behavioral change. Overall, the effects of metropolitan-area mortgage delinquency on population health were relatively modest.