This paper examines the role that having children, getting married, and educational attainment level play in affecting a women’s earnings and therefore her career by using five different econometric regression models. Data from IPUMS-CPS of June of 1990 and 1995 was used, and the results show that a woman does suffer a wage penalty due to motherhood. Not accounting for other variables, a one-year motherhood delay among women with a college degree increases her weekly earnings by $7.11. For women with no bachelor’s degree, a one-year increase in motherhood delay will increase her weekly earnings by $4.99. This leads us to conclude that college-educated mothers do not experience such a high wage penalty for having children than women who didn’t pursue a college degree, hence a positive relationship exists between a woman’s education level and her earnings. Similar to what Baxter et. al concluded in their study, this paper found little or no correlation between marriage delay and a women’s earnings. A possible explanation to this is that marriage does not usually imply childbearing for many women who have less liberal views on gender roles (Blount et. al, 2007). More black respondents in this study were single than white ones, which could motivate black women to be in the labor force for longer periods of time and served as a possible explanation as to why black mothers experience a lower wage penalty after childbearing than white ones. Earnings are also influenced by region, since the presence and quality of educational institutions and job opportunities vary from region to region. This may affect the education levels that women pursue as well as the job and industry that they work at, which can therefore influence their childbearing decisions and the effect of these in her career (Blount et. al, 2007).

Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, womens participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field grew, male migrant workers have primarily filled the new positions. Using only a gendered lens obscures the complicated racial and global dynamics of the tech workforce. I empirically examine three aspects of tech workers experience. First, I look at differences in wages by gender, race, and immigration status using decomposition techniques. I find that, despite the investment in recruiting women, there is a considerable wage gap that reflects the intersecting race, gender, and immigration inequalities. Second, I explore the kinds of work that tech workers do, and find that by mid-career many white women had moved into management position that emphasize interpersonal skills over technical skills. I call these positions translational as they are expected to translate technical information to management and business directives to technical teams. Finally, I examine how tech workers imagine the ideal engineer works. I find that many workers envision someone who is always at their computer working very long hours and constantly engaged in technical pursuits, but the workers I interviewed valued work/life balance. Managers had more control over their schedules but they also worked nights and weekends. Software developers and others in strictly technical positions worked closer to an 8-hour day. Meanwhile, technical work such as software development is increasingly done by migrant contract workers who work with legal restrictions that push them to work like the ideal engineer described in the interviews.

After the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, many have begun to doubt the continued relevance of candidate race in voter behavior. This study, however, hypothesizes that in low information elections, where candidates policy preferences are not widely known, voters will discriminate against candidates they perceive as racial or ethnic minorities. This thesis finds evidence of racial and ethnic bias in voter behavior in statewide low profile elections in Texas between 1992 and 2010. Expected candidate race and ethnicity is assigned using U.S. Census Genealogical data and linear regression analysis will be used to measure the change in vote share for the Democratic Party when the candidate race and ethnicity varies.

This article is drawn from the recent research by the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) on the evolving IT workforce needed to support contemporary models of IT service delivery and the emerging world of analytics. The research provides a general picture of the state of the IT workforce, as well as exp lores the roles, competencies, and career trajectories of incumbent (and aspiring) senior-most leaders in information technology, security and privacy, data, and IT architecture. The research will define professional competencies and lay the f oundation for tools that can guide professional development and career planning.

The number of grandparents caring for grandchildren experienced substantial growth following the last economic recession. Using data from the American Community Survey, we evaluate differences in the odds that coresident grandparents assume primary responsibility for grandchildren by race, gender, and family structure. Results indicate that African American and Native American grandparents are more likely to assume primary responsibility for grandchildren. However the difference between whites and Blacks, and part of the difference between whites and Native Americans is explained by variations in family structure, given their higher rates of absent parents. Economic hardship was also associated with higher odds of being primary caretakers. This finding attests to the importance of grandparents as caretakers for disadvantaged grandchildren. Coresident grandmothers are more likely than grandfathers to be primary caretakers, especially when mothers are absent. Family structure is the most significant factor explaining racial differences in the odds of becoming primary caretakers.

Historians of the American mental hospital still do not firmly grasp who mental hospital patients were. Although the field's signature debate on the nature of the mental hospital as "repressive" or "humanitarian" involves the characterization of the patients-based on their demographic traits-as victims of repression or beneficiaries of humanitarianism, there has actually not been a thorough demographic analysis of the patients. This article ascertains and examines the defining characteristics of the patient population within the context of that enduring debate. It first identifies demographic groups that were more prone to institutionalization than would have been expected from their susceptibility to insanity. They symbolized the patient population in the late nineteenth century when insanity did not necessarily result in institutionalization. This article then discovers essentially the same demographic groups ended up in mental hospitals in both the hinterland and metropolitan areas of the North from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It also finds a protective effect that marriage had against institutionalization operated in a socially conservative way. Finally, it weaves together the demographic traits of the patients deemed indicative of the mental hospital's repressiveness and the ones considered reflective of its humanitarianism into a panoptic portrayal that presents the patients as both victims and beneficiaries of the mental hospital. This article's analysis of the patients as a complex, multifaceted population helps transcend the binary framework of the debate on the nature of the mental hospital and deepen our understanding of who they were.

Models often assume that migrants move to the host country either permanently or for a short period before returning home permanently; however, this ignores over three million reentries into the United States in the early 20th century. Using ship manifests and congressional records, I show that repeaters were distinct from first-time arrivals and return migrants. Repeat entrants were less responsive to United States business cycles, were similarly skilled to the migrant stock and more skilled than return migrants. Further, New and Old source country return migrants had similar rates of re-entry despite different rates of returning home.

Introduction: To better understand the impact of the state-level tobacco environment (eg, tobacco control policies, attitudes towards smoking) on cigarette smoking, we examined whether the relationship of state tobacco environments to smoking is modified by individual-level vulnerability factors. Methods: In a nationally representative sample of US adults (N = 34 638), past-year smoking and heavy smoking were examined. State-level tobacco environment was defined by tobacco-related control policies and attitudes, ranging from permissive to restrictive; individual vulnerability was defined by childhood maltreatment and/or parental substance problems. Additive interaction tested differences in state-level tobacco environment effects on smoking and heavy smoking by individual-level vulnerability. Results: Significant interactions (P values < .01) indicated that the state tobacco environment had the strongest relationship to smoking outcomes among individuals with greatest individual vulnerability. For example, among respondents with childhood maltreatment and parental substance problems, those in states with permissive tobacco environments had 13.3% greater prevalence of smoking than those in restrictive states. Among respondents with neither individual-level risk factor, those in permissive states had 2.8% greater prevalence than those in restrictive states (interaction P value = .0002). Conclusions: Further restricting states’ smoking environments could help reduce the prevalence of smoking and heavy smoking, particularly among those at increased individual risk in the general population. Implications: This study shows that the protective effect of restrictive state-level tobacco environments on smoking or heavy smoking was stronger among those especially vulnerable due to individual-level risk factors (parental substance problems, childhood maltreatment). Thus, public health campaigns to influence attitudes towards smoking or legislation to strengthen tobacco control could have a broad effect, particularly impacting those with vulnerability to smoking, which may help decrease smoking prevalence and reduce the massive public health burden of tobacco related morbidity and mortality.

Introduction: This report investigates the trends in childhood poverty rates between 1990 and 2014 in the United States. Methods: Data were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Trends in childhood poverty rates are examined by children’s sex, race/ethnicity, nativity, and among the five largest Latino national subgroups. This report also compares current state-level childhood poverty rates using the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau. These 2014 state-level childhood poverty rates are mapped to illustrate the distribution of childhood poverty rates across the United States. Results: Childhood poverty rates were higher than overall poverty rates that include adults between 1990 and 2014. Foreign-born children experienced higher poverty rates than their domestic-born counterparts. In 2014, 26.9% of foreign-born children were living in poverty, compared to 22.5% of domestic-born children. Among all racial/ethnic groups, Latino children had the second highest childhood poverty rates between 1990 and 2014. Childhood poverty rates were concentrated in the Southeastern and Southern United States. In particular, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico had some of the highest rates across the different sub-populations examined in this report. Discussion: Despite a common narrative that Latinos in poverty are concentrated in states that share the Mexico-U.S. border, the highest Latino childhood poverty rates were actually located farther North. Still, childhood poverty rates in Border States are higher compared to the Nation’s overall childhood poverty rate. Policymaking aimed at reducing poverty may consider focusing on non-Hispanic black and Latino populations, which had the higher poverty rates among all racial/ethnic groups.

The non-marital fertility rate (NMFR) in the United States has risen more or less steadily for the last 40 years. The separation of childbearing from marriage has often been viewed as an indicator of moral decay, as a key mechanism in the reproduction of inequality, and as the bulwark against population decline. The rise in the NMFR has been attributed to compositional effects, to limited economic opportunity, and to a lack of contraceptive adherence and efficacy. Since 2008, however, the NMFR appears to have fallen consistently. This drop is large and unprecedented in the last half century. We draw on national and statelevel vital statistics as well as individuallevel data from the American Community Survey to describe this turn-around. We find that changes to contraceptive use and effects of the Great Recession best explain the decline.

Using data from the CPS this paper examines the role of birth-country networks on immigrants' unemployment duration from 2001 to 2013. We find that networks significantly lower unemployment duration for all immigrants. Varying the effect of networks over duration categories we find that networks are more effective in lowering duration for immigrants unemployed for 1-2 months than immigrants who are unemployed for longer periods and this effect is further strengthened during the post recession period. This supports the Calvo-Armengol and Jackson hypothesis which posits that longer the agent is unemployed, less effective are her social networks in job search. Our findings are robust to different specifications.

Combining the existing occupational mobility and task literature, this paper develops a unique tech- nique for estimating how likely workers are to reallocate their skills across occupations. Existing literature on occupational mobility studies how the variation in worker human capital determines workers’ propensity to reallocate their stock of skills to another occupation. This paper builds upon this literature by using variation in specific occupational task characteristics to estimate hetero- geneity in the costs associated with skill allocation through workers’ preferences to perform tasks. Specifically, I frame the problem in a discrete choice framework where occupational choice in period t + 1, is conditional on the task distance between a worker’s occupation in period t and all potential alternative occupations in t + 1. The focus of this paper is to show that distance in tasks between the current occupation and potential alternative occupation is an important determinant of occupa- tional choice. Controlling for occupational pairwise wage differences has little impact on the effect task distances have on occupational choice. The implication of the results is that heterogeneous costs associated with task specific skill reallocation is a major mechanism in determining workers’ occupational choice. Costs are greatest in low-skilled task distances and lowest in middle-skilled cognitive task distances. The findings in this paper suggest that workers are choosing occupations that are less task intensive than the previous occupation. Additionally, there is heterogeneity in costs of skill reallocation across task distances between female and male workers, younger and older workers, and by educational attainment.

To date, most empirical studies of industrial agglomeration rely on data where observations are assigned an industry code based on classification systems such as NAICS in North America and NACE in Europe. This study combines industry data with occupation data to show that there are important differences in the spatial patterns of occupation groups within the widely used industry definitions. We focus on workers in manufacturing industries, whose occupations almost always fit into three groups: production, administrative, or R&D. We then employ two approaches to document the spatial distributions of each group within an industry. First, we calculate the distribution of employment shares across local labor markets and second, we calculate a version of the Duranton and Overman (2005) agglomeration index. Both approaches reveal appreciable differences in the spatial distribution of occupation groups within most manufacturing industries. These differences have important implications for our understanding of the sources of industrial agglomeration, the spatial agglomeration of innovation, the effectiveness of local economic development initiatives, and the spatial properties of particular industries.

Population aging is widely assumed to have detrimental effects on economic growth yet there is little empirical evidence about the magnitude of its effects. This paper starts from the observation that many U.S. states have already experienced substantial growth in the size of their older population and much of this growth was predetermined by historical trends in fertility. We use predicted variation in the rate of population aging across U.S. states over the period 1980-2010 to estimate the economic impact of aging on state output per capita. We find that a 10% increase in the fraction of the population ages 60+ decreases the growth rate of GDP per capita by 5.5%. Two-thirds of the reduction is due to slower growth in the labor productivity of workers across the age distribution, while one-third arises from slower labor force growth. Our results imply annual GDP growth will slow by 1.2 percentage points this decade and 0.6 percentage points next decade due to population aging.

Using the American Community Survey data 2012-2013, I study married and cohabiting same-sex couples. I show that gay couples exhibit more specialization and less similarity than lesbian couples, while marriage makes gay and lesbian couples more alike than cohabiting couples, in terms of larger earnings differences for lesbians, and more positive sorting by education for gays. Education does not increase the odds of marriage among same-sex couples, contrary to heterosexual couples; lesbians are instead similar to heterosexual couples in their education being negatively associated to the number of children.

The degree of delegating authority to non-managerial and non-supervisory workers substantially varies across countries and industries. By examining worker-level data from 14 countries, I empirically explain this variation by region-specific social capital that proxies worker' degree of self-centeredness and the industry-specific need for coordination. The empirical results of this study confirm the theoretical predictions by Alonso et al. (2008) for the first time: the negative association between coordination needs and decentralization is mitigated in regions with lower self-centeredness of workers. In particular, when self-centeredness of workers (respectively, need for coordination) is very low, the degree of delegation is always high regardless of the level of the need for coordination (self-centeredness of workers). Positive associations between delegation and its benefits, including job satisfaction, wages (proxy for higher productivity), and skill upgrading of workers, are also found. These results imply that people's degree of self-centeredness affects a country's development patterns by changing the degree of decentralization and its benefits.

Historically, minority women have made up a disproportionate percentage of the low-income population who receive safety net benefits. However, there has been no previous research that assesses how alternative poverty measures could impact these isolated groups of women. This study aims to determine which groups of people would receive the largest benefit if state and federal agencies used the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) rather than the official poverty measure (OPM) to determine eligibility for various safety net programs. In addition, this study assesses the intersectional effect of gender and race on poverty using the SPM and the official U.S. poverty measures. This study draws on data from the 2010-2015 Annual Social and Economic Supplements ASEC of the Current Population Survey CPS and estimates logistic regression models that predict the likelihood of living in poverty for various racial and gender groups. The results show that Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic women would benefit the most if state and federal agencies used the SPM to determine benefit eligibility rather than the OPM. Additionally, use of the SPM would increase womens and mens eligibility for programs such as SNAP, WIC, Medicare, and Medicaid. The increase in safety net eligibility could assist marginalized groups and reduce economic inequality in the U.S.

The U.S. Geological Survey developed a groundwater flow model for the Northern Atlantic Coastal Plain aquifer system from Long Island, New York, to northeastern North Carolina as part of a detailed assessment of the groundwater availability of the area and included an evaluation of how these resources have changed over time from stresses related to human uses and climate trends. The assessment was necessary because of the substantial dependency on groundwater for agricultural, industrial, and municipal needs in this area.

Objectives—Greater patient activation, defined as having the knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage one’s health, is associated with cancer control behaviors. Cancer risk beliefs may be associated with patient activation, and delineating this relationship could inform cancer control interventions across diverse patient subgroups. This study examines associations between cancer risk beliefs, language preference, and patient activation within a multi-lingual urban primary care setting. Design—Patients aged 18 and older within a New York City public hospital serving a large proportion of non-native born Americans were surveyed regarding their cancer risk beliefs and patient activation in Haitian Creole, Spanish, or English based on language preference during a health care visit. Results—The sample (N=460) included 150 Haitian Creole speakers, 159 Spanish speakers, and 151 English speakers, and was primarily non-white (92%). Most participants (84%) had not been born in the United States. Cancer risk beliefs differed across language preference. Beliefs that cancer could be avoided by minimizing thoughts about cancer risk were significantly higher in Haitian Creole speakers compared to others; reported negative emotion when thinking about cancer risk was higher in Spanish and English versus Haitian Creole speakers. These cancer risk beliefs were positively related to patient activation, even when controlling for language preference. Conclusion—Cancer risk beliefs differ across language preference, and are related to patient activation, making them potential important in cancer control. Consideration of language represents important demographic stratification for understanding the frequency and relevance of different beliefs about cancer and patient activation.