While the labor market woes of low-skilled male workers in the United States over the past several decades have been well documented, the academic literature identifying causal factors leading to declines in labor force participation (LFP) by young, low-skilled males remains scant. To address this gap, I use the timing and characteristics of welfare-reform policies implemented during the 1990s and fixed-effects, instrumental variable regression modeling to show that policies seeking to increase LFP rates for low-skilled single mothers inadvertently led to labor force exit by young, low-skilled single males. Using data from the Current Population Survey and a bundle of work inducements enacted by states throughout the 1990s as exogenous variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find that the roughly 10 percentage point increase in LFP for low-skilled single mothers facilitated by welfare reform resulted in a statistically significant 2.8 percentage point decline in LFP for young, low-skilled single males. After conducting a series of robustness checks, I conclude that this result is driven entirely by white males, who responded to welfare-reform policies with a 3.7 percentage point decline in labor supply. Young black males, as well as other groups of potentially affected workers, appear to be uninfluenced by the labor supply response of less-educated single mothers to welfare reform. Impacts on young, single white males are large and economically significant, suggesting that nearly 150,000 males departed the formal labor market in response to directed welfare-reform policies.

Many major government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor. In this paper, we shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the Old Age Assistance Program (OAA), a means-tested and state-administered pension program created by the Social Security Act of 1935. Using newly available Census data on the entire US population in 1940, we exploit the large differences in OAA programs across states to estimate the labor supply effects of OAA. Our estimates imply that OAA reduced the labor force participation rate among men aged 65–74 by 5.8 percentage points, nearly half of its 1930–40 decline. However, both reduced-form evidence and an estimated structural model of labor supply imply that the welfare cost to recipients of the high tax rates implicit in OAA's earnings test were small. The evidence also suggests that Social Security could account for at least half of the large decline in late-life work from 1940 to 1960.

Following the implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the enactment of affirmative action policies in the United States, both the educational level and the relative income of black men and women rose steadily. Consequently, earnings disparities between blacks and whites declined; this trend continued until the end of the 20th Century, for both genders. But from the turn of the new millennium, however, the trend reversed for the first time since 1970, for both men and women. Given the continual convergence in pay between blacks and whites and the gender differences in the size and in the sources of the pay gaps, the reversal of the trend among both gender groups is most intriguing. Our analysis – based on the IPUMS Census and ACS data – covers the period following the Civil Right Act (1970), and stretches into the new millennium, beyond the 2008 economic crisis and up until 2013. Our findings give firm support to several expectations, while leaving others open to debate. First, as shown in Figure 1 below, our expectation of much smaller racial gaps between women than between men was firmly supported. In addition, the unexplained portion of the pay gap – the indicator . . .

Recently, income inequality has been rising in many parts of the world. This is creating some serious concerns among policymakers, as higher levels of income inequality can lead to various social ills. However, little is known about the role of historical factors in explaining the current level of inequality. I use the model of Durlauf (1996) as reference to create an econometric model to estimate this impact. I use current and historical data of US states to study the effect of different socio-economic factors on inequality, and I find that illiteracy rate in 1920 has a strong positive influence on current level of inequality. Higher illiteracy indicates a lower level of human capital, and that can affect income distribution. Through the intergenerational transmission of income, this income distribution is exacerbated in the future, leading to higher levels of inequality.

An estimated 4.5 million U.S. born children of undocumented immigrant parents face an uphill path towards integration as a consequence of their parents legal status. Since 1996, immigration policy has taken a sharp turn towards restriction, decreasing viable paths towards citizenship while at the same time expanding the legal definition of undocumented immigrants subject to deportation. As a result, U.S. immigration policys family reunification principle has been left in the background, while giving way to a massive deportation regime. This has an impact on the assimilation process of citizen children whose parents have been deported or who have no possibility of legalizing their immigration status. Children with undocumented parents are confronted by educational, socio-economic, and cultural challenges regardless of their U.S. citizenship. The main source of information were databases from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, obtained through IPUMS-USA. The quantitative information presented was complemented with in depth interviews of immigrant families in Worthington, Minnesota.

Because the US Census Bureau changed the way they reported workers' marital status, the subfield of US women's labor history unwittingly perpetuated a key misinterpretation of women's labor force participation, allowing historians to believe that women in the workforce between 1880 and 1920 were overwhelmingly young and single women: the daughters of their families rather than the mothers and wives. This change in census reporting was reinforced and promulgated by Joseph A. Hill's 1929 work, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870-1920. Why was this change made? This article argues that this change came about because of a confluence of various factors, including the Census Bureau's continual struggles with organizational and technological changes, the beginning of World War I, and reformers' arguments about the efficacy of pushing for maternity insurance for women workers. The story of this change once again reminds us that statistics are never neutral nor apolitical.

Health insurance coverage through the Marketplaces increased in 2015, with more nonelderly adult enrollees insured all year and fewer reporting health care affordability problems than in 2014. In 2015 more Marketplace enrollees in Medicaid nonexpansion states reported trouble paying family medical bills, compared to those in expansion states (23 percent versus 15 percent).

In this paper, we compare estimates of the black-white male earnings gap using selfreported earnings from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) and reported earnings from the Social Security Administration’s Detailed Earnings (DER) File. We find that using self-reported earnings data from the CPS masks the magnitude of inequality between black and white earnings and that research using imputed earnings with self-reported data has the potential to skew earnings gap estimates generated from self-reported household survey data compared to administrative records. Overall, our results provide informative and relevant information for understanding the extent to which self-reported earnings data and reported earnings from administrative records influences the estimation of the black-white earnings gap. The results will also help inform the potential for improvements to official national inequality estimates and measurements.

This research aims to study the fertility of Cuban women residing in the United States in the period 2000-2014, based on the databases available in the American Community Survey (ACS). With this information, were calculated indicators that assess the level and structure of fertility in the period, separating the sample by place of residence: residents in Florida and residents in the rest of the country. Thus, the fertility of the Cuban migrants in the United States is compared with that of the Cuban women in Cuba during this period. The results suggest that, in general, migration to the United States does not change the level of Cuban fertility but its structure. Even though residents outside Florida have slightly higher fertility values tan in this state, a more mature calendar of fertility is observed throughout the country, especially among Cuban adolescents, who in the United States show values almost fie times lower than in Cuba. Thus, the study provides a vision of the fecundity of Cuban women outside of Cuba that was not previously explored and opens gaps for further research.

Where did my ancestors live? On the surface, this question is fairly straight forward. In order to visualize where my ancestors lived in a clear manner using computers and maps, most people tend to use latitude and longitude coordinates. This works fairly well for cities because they do not tend to move around. With very few exceptions, cities tend to stay put once they are created. Although the tectonic plates of earth constantly move, the approximate location of a given city, say Rome, is approximately where it was when it was founded. On the other hand, countries, states, and other large political boundaries do not behave nearly as nicely. Knowing exactly where they are at a particular time in history can be difficult and is an active research area in cartography. Even knowing exactly the boundaries of modern-day countries . . .

Approval for interracial marriages in US society has increased drastically in the past 25 years, and Asians are at the forefront of this trend; one third of Asian marriages in the US are interracial. Jennifer Lee writes that because of the selectivity of Asian immigrants towards the highly educated, Asians as a group have gone from being denied basic rights such as citizenship and the right to marry, to being perceived as desirable marriage partners. She argues that this shift should not be mistaken for true equality with White Americans; Asian Americans are racialized as a ‘model minority’, and the shift towards their perception as ‘marriageable’ only covers Asian women – reflecting how this group is exoticised and stereotyped in gender-traditional ways.

We consider a competitive equilibrium growth model where technological progress is embodied into new jobs which are assigned to workers of different skills. In every period workers decide whether to actively participate in the labor market and if so how many hours to work on the job. Balanced growth requires that the job technology is complementary with the worker's total labor input on the job, which is jointly determined by his skill and his working hours. Since lower skilled workers can supply longer hours, we show that the equilibrium features positive assortative matching (higher skilled workers are assigned to better jobs) only if differences in consumption are small relative to differences in worker skills. When the pace of technological progress accelerates, wage inequality increases and workers participate less often in the labor market but supply longer hours on the job. This mechanism can explain why, as male wage inequality has increased in the US, labor force participation of male workers of different skills has fallen while their working hours have increased.

The fraction of U.S. college graduate women who ever marry has increased relative to less educated women since the mid-1970s. In contrast, college graduate women in developed Asian countries have had decreased rates of marriage, so much so that the term “Gold Misses” has been coined to describe them. This paper argues that the interaction of rapid economic growth in Asia combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes causes the “Gold Miss” phenomenon. I present a simple dynamic model then test its implications using U.S. and Asian data on marriage and time use.

La Administración de Seguros de Salud (ASES) fue creada como parte de la reforma del sistema de salud de 1993, con el propósito de implantar, administrar y negociar, mediante contratos con aseguradores, y/u organizaciones de Servicios de Salud un sistema de seguros de salud que le brinde a todos los residentes de la Isla acceso a cuidados médico de calidad, en especial a la población médico indigente. La ley también otorga a la ASES la capacidad de negociar, contratar y gestionar los beneficios de salud para empleados públicos. Al 31 de julio de 2015, el Plan de Salud del Gobierno (PSG) aseguraba a 1,565,019 de beneficiarios. Para esa misma fecha, la ASES también cubría el seguro de 63,990 beneficiarios platino, que corresponden al grupo de doble elegibilidad (Medicare y PSG), cuyos seguros se negocian con los planes advantage aprobados por Medicare.

Regional policy-makers have long sought to attract highly-educated workers with a view to stimulating economic growth and vibrancy. Previous studies over the decades leading up to the new millennium show human capital divergence across cities, where the share of college graduates grew faster in cities that had larger initial shares of college-educated workers. However, labour markets have changed significantly post-2000, likely affecting migration decisions of highly-skilled workers. Additionally, past studies have not controlled for important changes in industry education levels and overall industry composition that may influence city-level college graduate growth. We use detailed 4-digit NAICS industry employment data combined with public micro-data to construct measures of industry skill upgrading and changes in industry composition to control for their effects on human capital growth. We find agglomeration forces, rather than initial graduate share, explains college-graduate share growth post-2000. We also decompose graduates into bachelors and postgraduate degree holders to determine whether different forces are at play on growth of graduates at different education levels.

Little is known about couples' shared time and how actual time spent together is associated with well-being. In this study, the authors investigated how work and family demands are related to couples' shared time (total and exclusive) and individual well-being (happiness, meaningfulness, and stress) when with one's spouse. They used individual-level data from the 20032010 American Time Use Survey (N = 46,883), including the 2010 Well-Being Module. The results indicated that individuals in full-time working dual-earner couples spend similar amounts of time together as individuals in traditional breadwinnerhomemaker arrangements on weekdays after accounting for daily work demands. The findings also show that parents share significantly less total and exclusive spousal time together than nonparents, though there is considerable variation among parents by age of the youngest child. Of significance is that individuals experience greater happiness and meaning and less stress during time spent with a spouse opposed to time spent apart.

For one hundred years, per capita incomes in poorer U.S. states have grown more rapidly than incomes in richer states, narrowing the gap between them. Over the past three decades, though, the rate of convergence has slowed sharply. It has become more difficult for poorer states to catch up with richer states. The authors attribute this slowdown in convergence to increasingly tight land use regulations in wealthy areas. Their argument: Historically, much of the convergence in income across states was driven by the migration of labor from poorer states to wealthier states. This migration held down wage growth in richer states and boosted wage growth in poorer states. This historical pattern was disrupted by increasingly strict land use regulations. Regulation boosted housing costs in richer states so that migration was no longer an attractive option for lowskill, low-wage workers. But migration remained attractive for high skilled workers, and they continued to move to wealthy places. The authors link this changing migration pattern to local housing regulation using an innovative measure of land use regulation drawn from state appeals court records. They show that in higher income places where land use regulations were not tightened, convergence continued at its historical rate. The authors also contend that, the divergence in the migration patterns of skilled and unskilled households contributed to rising income inequality. Specifically, they calculate that the increase in hourly wage inequality from 1980 to 2010 would have been approximately 10% smaller if convergence in economic growth across states had maintained the pace observed from 1940 to 1980. This research is among the first to highlight the important channel played by land use regulation in explaining regional migration patterns, slowing convergence, and increasing inequality.

I investigate the role of national institutions on the persistence of cultural norms and traditions. In particular, I examine why the harmful tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) persists in certain African countries while in others it has been successfully eradicated. I argue that people are more willing to abandon their institutions and traditions if they are sure that the government is durable enough to set up long term replacements for them. If the regime is weak, people revert to their traditional cultural norms. I exploit the fact that ethnic groups in Africa were artificially partitioned by national borders and, using a country-ethnicity panel dataset, I show that one standard deviation in political regime durability explains at least 14% of the standard deviation of the share of circumcised women. The results are robust to an array of control variables and robustness checks. I confirm that the results are unlikely to be spurious by using within nation variation in regime durability induced by leaders' deaths from natural causes.

This article examines how African Americans who grew up in middle-income households during the modern post-Civil Rights Era conceptualize their opportunities to get ahead and how they explain downward mobility. Drawing upon 70 in-depth interviews with African American men and women, it identifies a dual consciousness that shapes respondents understandings of who gets ahead and why. While the majority of respondents believe that African Americans face persistent structural inequality, they also believe that members of their group are responsible for their own outcomes. They emphasize the importance of employing individualistic mobility strategies for advancement. They also draw upon broad definitions of success to support an understanding that everyone can achieve some level of success if they work hard enough. When assessing their own mobility trajectories and the mobility trajectories of others they know, respondents tend to attribute individual-level factors to movement up and down the socioeconomic ladder.