The children of different-sex married couples appear to be advantaged on a range of outcomes relative to the children of different-sex cohabiting couples. Despite the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, whether and how this general pattern extends to the children of same-sex married and cohabiting couples is unknown. This study examines this question with nationally representative data from the 2004–2013 pooled National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Results reveal that children in cohabiting households have poorer health outcomes than children in married households regardless of the sex composition of their parents. Children in same-sex and different-sex married households are relatively similar to each other on health outcomes, as are children in same-sex and different-sex cohabiting households. These patterns are not fully explained by socioeconomic differences among the four different types of families. This evidence can inform general debates about family structure and child health as well as and policy interventions aiming to reduce child health disparities.

This paper provides a detailed empirical assessment of the evolution of income inequality and the redistributive effects of the tax and transfer system following the 2007-2008 crisis. It focuses on the US case, drawing on data from the Current Population Survey for the period 2007-2012. Contrary to most existing studies, it uses a wide range of inequality indicators and looks in detail at several sections of the income distribution, allowing for a clearer picture of the heterogeneous consequences of the crisis. Furthermore, it analyses the contribution of different components of the tax and transfer system, beyond its overall cushioning action, which allows for a more refined assessment of its effectiveness. Results show that although the crisis implied income losses across the whole income distribution, the burden was disproportionately born by low to middle income groups. Income losses experienced by richer households were relatively modest and transitory, while those experienced by poorer households were not only strong but also highly persistent. The redistributive system had a crucial role in taming the increase in income inequality in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and during the GR years, particularly cash transfers. After 2010, however, its effect became weaker and income inequality experienced a new surge. The findings of this paper contribute to a better understanding of the distributional consequences of aggregate crises and the role of tax and transfer policies in stabilising the income distribution in a crisis aftermath.

In this thesis we present SIRUM: a system for Scalable Informative RUle Mining from multidimensional data. Informative rules have recently been studied in several contexts, including data summarization, data cube exploration and data quality. The objective is to produce a concise set of rules (patterns) over the values of the dimension attributes that provide the most information about the distribution of a numeric measure attribute. SIRUM optimizes this task for big, wide and distributed datasets. We implemented SIRUM in Spark and observed significant performance improvements on real data due to our optimizations.

We analyze the impact of expansion of higher education on student outcomes in the context of competition among colleges which differentiate themselves horizontally by setting curricular standards. When public or economic pressures compel less selective colleges to lower their curricular demands, low-ability students benefit at the expense of medium-ability students. This reduces competitive pressure faced by more selective colleges, which therefore adopt more demanding curricula to better serve their most able students. This stylized model of curricular product differentiation in higher education offers an explanation for the diverging selectivity trends of American colleges. It also appears consistent with the U-shaped earnings growth profile we observe among college-educated workers in the U.S.

The American West was a bastion of women's rights in the late 19 th and early 20 th Centuries, a fact that is perhaps surprising given the region's predominantly male population early in its history. Is it possible that improvements in women's legal status in the early American West may have arisen not in spite of, but rather because of imbalance in these states' gender composition? Primary evidence shows that frontier policymakers proposed the expansion of women's rights as a solution to the scarcity of women in the early American West. By providing women rights elusive elsewhere in the U.S., they argued, they could entice the female settlers necessary for sustainable communities. To examine whether these stated intentions in fact manifested in policy, we test whether states that were more heavily male-skewed in the marriage-age population granted women greater rights to political participation. Despite their professed motivations for conceding rights to women, we find little quantitative evidence-whether at the state or local level, or differentially by access to polity-that these policymakers' desire to attract female settlers drove expansion in women's suffrage or in women's participation as elected representatives. Acknowledgements: We are grateful to audiences at the 2015 World Economic History Congress and the University of Oxford for their comments, and to Holly J. McCammon for sharing data. 2

This dissertation contains three chapters, two which focus on health insurance and one focusing on migration. The first chapter examines how a policy expanding public health insurance for young children affected their parents' labor market and health insurance outcomes. I use variation in the initial income thresholds, children's age cutoffs and timing of implementation across states to estimate the effect of a person's youngest child gaining access to public health insurance on self-employment. I find that having a child become Medicaid eligible increases a father's self-employment and increases his business income. I find no significant effect on self-employment for mothers, but I find that the increasing eligibility is associated with a large negative effect on their probability of remaining in a wage job. The second chapter examines how expanding dependent health insurance for young adults affects the health insurance and labor market outcomes of those young adults and their parents. I exploit two sources of variations in the age at which young adults age out of their parents' health insurance: i) state reforms passed between 2000 and 2010 that extended the maximum age of health insurance dependents beyond 18 and ii) the Affordable Care Act that extended coverage for all young adults in the United States until their 26th birthdays. Using regression discontinuity, I find evidence . . .

This report illustrates the 14 universities contribution to the Pennsylvania workforce and the economic outcomes of all Bachelors degree-holders working in the Commonwealth. Detailed information on State System degree production, as well as median earnings and total employment for Pennsylvania workers with a Bachelors degree or higher is presented, with breakdowns by aggregate and detailed majors and occupations. This analysis builds on previous work by the Georgetown Center that details the employment and earnings outcomes of Bachelors degree-holders by field of study and occupational cluster.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the application of Transformed Ordinal Quantile Regression (TORQUE) developed by Hong and He (2010). TORQUE is based on jittered response, a nonparametric link function, a semiparametric quantile estimation. When the response variable is categorical an application of the standard quantile regression is not optimal. TORQUE technique generalizes ordinary quantile regression, and as a semiparametric method it is more robust than Maximum Likelihood Estimators.

Past research shows that income segregation between neighborhoods increased over the past several decades. In this article, I reexamine income segregation from 1990 to 2010 in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, and I find that income segregation increased only among families with children. Among childless householdstwo-thirds of the populationincome segregation changed little and is half as large as among households with children. I examine two factors that may account for these differences by household composition. First, I find that increasing income inequality, identified by past research as a driver of income segregation, was a much more powerful predictor of income segregation among families with children, among whom income inequality has risen more. Second, I find that local school options, delineated by school district boundaries, contribute to higher segregation among households with children compared to households without. Rising income inequality provided high-income households more resources, and parents used these resources to purchase housing in particular neighborhoods, with residential decisions structured, in part, by school district boundaries. Overall, results indicate that children face greater and increasing stratification in neighborhood contexts than do all residents, and this has implications for growing inequalities in their future outcomes.

The Remaining Uninsured Access to Community Health Centers (REACH) Project was a mixed-methods study to examine the impact of changes under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the ability of community health centers (CHCs) to serve the remaining uninsured.

This article considers the relevance of language policy and planning (LPP) for language education in the United States in relation to the country's longstanding and continuing multilingualism. In reflecting on the U.S. context, one striking feature is the absence of a guiding overarching explicit national educational language policy. Language policies and practices may either promote or restrict the teaching of languages. Thus, whether having such a policy would be desirable for promoting the learning of languages depends on a number of factors such as the features of the policy and the extent to which it was adequately resourced, understood, valued, and implemented effectively, just to mention a few. Explicit language planning and policy making in the United Stateswhen it does occurtends to be done at the state, local, or institutional levels, or within rather limited domains of federal priorities, such as those related to defense or national security. Beyond formal policies, implicit language practices sometimes have more influence on language behavior. Even when policies are intended to promote languages, they may not always be well conceived, received, resourced, or implemented. Given some of these issues, it is useful to consider the role of agency in language planning and policy (LPP). Even when guided by national or state top-down policy agendas, policies can be interpreted and reinterpreted, by policy intermediaries, agents, administrators, or arbiters (Johnson, 2013). Moreover, within the context of school language policies, at the level of implementation, teachers, parents, and the students themselves help to determine the effectiveness of policies in practice (Menken & Garca, 2010). Beyond the schools, parents and stakeholders in the community can play significant roles in creating practices that have the force of policy from the bottom up. Given these considerations, this article weighs the role of policy and the legacy of past policies and their consequences; assesses some of the strengths and weaknesses of current policies and practices, both in schools and families and communities; and considers prospects for a more promising future that involves embracing the fundamental multilingualism of U.S. society, communities, and families. In so doing, the article reflects on alternatives to U.S. language education policy that would transcend national conceptions of languages so as to leverage speakers actual linguistic competence.

Vast literature exists documenting the history of gun control legislation and recent firearm export, import and firearm manufacture information, but lack of current research exists evaluating the impact of implementing gun-restrictive policies. By utilizing quantitative analytical methods, this paper studies in-depth the effectiveness of expanded background checks in regulating the firearm market and further understanding public behavior when these regulatory policies are expanded or put in place. This research evaluates the relationship between expanded background checks, and differing outcomes of interest, while controlling for various demographic factors including race, employment status, partisan composition (gubernatorial political party in power) and number of simple assaults (without a weapon). By running fixed effects models, this analysis found that an expanded background check was associated with a 1,095 increase in registered machine guns per 100,000 inhabitants (p-value = .817), as well as, a 12.55 decrease in aggravated assaults with a weapon per 100,000 inhabitants (p value = .001) and a 104.9873 decrease in the number of . . .

New water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eliminate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We examine how this affected human capital formation using early-life typhoid fatality rates to proxy for water quality. We merge city-level data to individuals linked between the 1900 and 1940 Censuses. Eliminating early-life exposure to typhoid fever increased later-life earnings by one percent and educational attainment by one month. Instrumenting for typhoid fever using typhoid rates from cities that lie upstream produces results nine times larger. The increase in earnings from eliminating typhoid fever more than offset the cost of elimination.

Does school starting age policy have an impact on the propensity of individuals to commit crime as adults? Using microdata from the U.S. Census, we find that a higher school starting age cutoff leads to lower rates of incarceration among both those directly affected by the laws and those only indirectly affected. However, the reduction in incarceration among those directly affected is smaller in magnitude, implying that the delay itself was harmful with respect to crime outcomes. These findings provide further support for early childhood interventions influencing future criminal activity.

Although trends in the racial segregation of schools are well documented, less is known about trends in income segregation. We use multiple data sources to document trends in income segregation between schools and school districts. Between-district income segregation of families with children enrolled in public school increased by over 15% from 1990 to 2010. Within large districts, between-school segregation of students who are eligible and ineligible for free lunch increased by over 40% from 1991 to 2012. Consistent with research on neighborhood segregation, we find that rising income inequality contributed to the rise in income segregation between schools and districts during this period. The rise in income segregation between both schools and districts may have implications for inequality in students access to resources that bear on academic achievement.

This paper analyzes the argumentative style and the characteristics of writers of newspaper letters to the editor. Writers are more likely to be White, male, older, more politically active, and less likely to be politically moderate than the local population. Inequality in political participation persists in this forum. Gender and sense of local political efficacy influence how letter writers make their points. Letters to the editor mostly display inequalities similar to other forms of political participation.

Chapter 1 investigates the labor market implications of single fatherhood. Samples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics reveal that men experiencing single fatherhood after marital separation experience dramatic decreases in both labor hours and income. I identify the eects of marital separation for men with and without children and show that the decrease in income and hours for single fathers goes beyond those experienced by other separated men, likely due to the additional constraints on time and scheduling faced by single fathers. Chapter 2 estimates the eects of recent half day state Pre-Kindergarten programs on school attendance and mothers' labor supply. I show that state Pre-K programs have succeeded in increasing school attendance for some 4-5 year olds, and in this way have succeeded in their stated goal. However, I show that the introduction of these programs is also associated with decreased labor hours for mothers of eligible children.I show that the decrease in labor hours can be explained by the xed costs of childcare which cause may cause some mothers to decrease work from full-time hours to avoid having to pay for and arrange supplementary childcare after Pre-K has ended. Chapter 3 analyses the effetiveness of . . .

In the information age, vast amounts of sensitive personal information are collected by companies, institutions and governments. A key technological challenge is how to design mechanisms for effectively extracting knowledge from data while preserving the privacy of the individuals involved. In this dissertation, we address this challenge from the perspective of differentially private data publishing. Firstly, we propose PrivPfC, a differentially private method for releasing data for classification. The key idea underlying PrivPfC is to privately select, in a single step, a grid, which partitions the data domain into a number of cells. This selection is done using the exponential mechanism with a novel quality function, which maximizes the expected number of correctly classified records by a histogram classifier. PrivPfC supports both the binary classification as well as the multiclass classification. Secondly, we study the problem of differentially private k-means clustering. We develop techniques to analyze the empirical error behaviors of the existing interactive and non-interactive approaches. Based on the analysis, we propose an improvement of the DPLloyd algorithm which is a differentially private version of the Lloyd algorithm and propose a non-interactive approach EUGkM which publishes a differentially private synopsis for k-means clustering. We also propose a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of the improved version of DPLloyd and EUGkM. Finally, we investigate the . . .

Learning at work is usually seen as beneficial for the professional and personal lives of workers. In this article, we propose that learnings relationship to worker well-being may be more complicated. We posit that learning can become a burden (instead of always being a benefit) in occupations that are learning intensive and tightly associated with the postindustrial economy. Results of analyses using data from the General Social Survey suggest that learning lessens workfamily conflict by increasing job satisfaction, but at the same time, learning makes workfamily conflict worse by leading people to work longer hours and exacerbating work-related stress.