The study employs hierarchical binomial models to test the effect of poverty and the concentration of poverty within a state and a variety of other factors on the attainment of seventeen-year-old census respondents across six samples from 1960 through 2010. The state level predictors remain important in most models. These measures, taken as a whole, account for substantial variability between the states in all but one sample year. 1960 is the exception. The state level poverty variable was found to produce a negative effect of statistical significance in three of the six samples. Of the control variables, the black population in a state has a negative effect in two samples and the Asian population in a state produces a positive effect in four of the six samples. Family poverty status predicts lower attainment in all six samples. The effect yields the most powerful adjusted odds coefficient in 2010 and the weakest in 1980. One other variable, family size, has a negative effect on the attainment outcomes in each studied sample. Paternal cultural capital predictors and female gender have positive effects in all six samples. The importance of regional differences, historical trends, and emerging policy considerations are also explored.

After weathering tumult in its energy and manufacturing sectors in 2015, a diversified Texas economy is poised for slow growth this year. The biggest risk to the outlook: If oil prices average below $30 per barrel, overall job losses could result.

My dissertation examines how rural Southern farmers responded to exogenous changes to household incomes during the early twentieth century. I use a range of statistical approaches: Ordinary and Two Stage Least Squares, Probit, and instrumental variable Probit. Critically, the proxy for household incomes, cotton yields, is predicted using weather fluctuations. In chapter one, I find credit constrained households have lower school attendance rates following negative income shocks. In chapter two, I find the probability of farm wage work is negatively correlated with incomes in credit constrained households. In both chapters, I use black and tenant farmers as proxies for credit constrained households. In the final chapter, I find the probability of a lynching occurring in the local community increases after household incomes fall.

Although Immigrant children represent approximately 3 percent of total U.S. child population, they remain the most vulnerable group in terms of access to public health insurance since the enactment of the “five-year-ban” for legal immigrants in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Children Health Insurance Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009 provided states an option to receive federal funds to expand eligibility for immigrant children regardless of their length of residency. In this paper, we utilize the cross-state variation in policy environment before and after the adoption of CHIPRA to compare the differences in access to public health insurance among the low-income immigrant children. We find that adoption immigrant child option of CHIPRA has resulted 8 percentage points increase in health coverage for the target group, almost entirely contributed by equal increase in coverage through public health insurance. Our measure of estimated treatment effect is lower than what existing literature reports. We attribute the difference to the existing state-funded programs to support immigrant children among majority of the CHIPRA states. Increase in coverage entirely comes from the ranks of previously uninsured children; no evidence . . .

We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are endogenous. Two key assumptions are made: marriage requires a fixed cost and married couples cannot study simultaneously. This simple model can replicate the aforementioned stylized facts and is consistent with our empirical result that exogenous delays in marriage age caused by minimum age laws decreased the educational difference within a couple while increasing their educational attainment.

In this paper, I examine the time men spent on childcare during the recession of 2007-2009. The recession provides a sudden change in the employment opportunities of men relative to women in the United States. Using the American Time Use Survey and the linked Current Population Survey, I show that his lopsided shock to employment opportunities was accompanied by an increase in the average amount of time men spent on childcare. In particular, men's average time on physical care for children increased during the recession; this is an element of childcare that men perform less than women. I decompose the total change in average time on childcare into behavioral, compositional, and between group change. A behavioral change among employed men accounted for the majority of the total increase in the average time spent on childcare; among men who are out of the labor force, the increase is entirely due to compositional changes.

Social scientists regularly rely on population estimates when studying change in small areas over time. Census tract data in the United States are a prime example, as there are substantial shifts in tract boundaries from decade to decade. This study compares alternative estimates of the 2000 population living within 2010 tract boundaries to the Census Bureau's own retabulation. All methods of estimation are subject to error; this is the first study to directly quantify the error in alternative interpolation methods for U.S. census tracts. A simple areal weighting method closely approximates the estimates provided by one standard source (the Neighborhood Change Data Base), with some improvement provided by considering only area not covered by water. More information is used by the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), which relies on a combination of areal and population interpolation as well as ancillary data about water-covered areas. Another set of estimates provided by the National Historical Geographic Information Systems (NHGIS) uses data about land cover in 2001 and the current road network and distribution of population and housing units at the block level. Areal weighting alone results in a large error in a substantial share of tracts that were divided in complex ways. The LTDB and NHGIS perform much better in all situations but are subject to some error when boundaries of both tracts and their component blocks are redrawn. Users of harmonized tract data should be watchful for potential problems in either of these data sources.

This study used GIS-based spatial analysis to examine the sociodemographic patterns of census block groups in Illinois, particularly those within a 5 kilometer (5km) radius of federally and state owned outdoor recreation lands. Using the environmental justice framework, this study aimed to determine any possible inequalities in access to federally and stated owned outdoor recreation lands in Illinois. Sociodemographic variables of race, gender, median household income, median household value, median retirement income, education, and occupation were examined. The socio-demographics of census block groups within a 5 km radius of federally or state owned outdoor recreation lands were compared to census block groups outside the 5 km radius. The results show a stronger presence of a high income retired population, and a high income white non-college degree holding population within 5 km of federally or state owned outdoor recreation lands. These populations have the best access to the use and non-use benefits of outdoor recreation lands, while populations located further from these lands, such as minorities and low-income populations, have limited access, if any, to the use and non-use benefits of these lands.

Early malnutrition can have adverse long-term effects, leading to poor health across generations. In this paper, using exposure to the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine as an exogenous shock, I examine the inter-generational health effects of early exposure to famine. Linking the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey with the 1984 Ethiopian Census, I show that both in utero and early childhood (age 0-3) exposure to the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine increases the probability of stunting and reduces the height-for-age z score of the next generation. The inter-generational health effects of the famine are severe on the pre-famine and maternal cohort than the famine and paternal cohort. This finding suggests that a policy intervention that aims to reduce childhood malnutrition can have a return that transfer across generations.

Although the ratio of higher educated lifetime earnings relative to primary-educated lifetime earnings (skill premium) is higher in poor than rich countries, poor countries have a substantially lower fraction of individuals with higher education (skilled individuals). Why? In a sample of 52 countries, we document that the unemployment rate of the skilled net of that of the unskilled decreases with a country’s level of development. We argue that the cost of opening and operating a business is a first order determinant of these unemployment rates and can reconcile a lower skill acquisition in front of a higher skill premium in poor compared to rich countries. To formalize our argument, we write and quantify a matching model of endogenous occupational choice and skill acquisition. A country’s business cost, schooling cost and skill-productivity profile determine its fraction of skilled individuals, skill premium and unemployment rates by skill level. We infer a higher business cost for poor countries and, via counterfactual experiments, find that disparities in the business cost account for about one third of the cross-country correlation between skill premium and fraction of skilled individuals.

Residential segregation by race grew sharply during the early twentieth century as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities. The existing literature emphasizes collective action by whites to restrict where blacks could live as the driving force behind this rapid rise in segregation. Using newly assembled neighborhood-level data, we instead focus on the role of “flight” by whites, providing the first systematic evidence on the impact of prewar population dynamics within cities on the emergence of the American ghetto. Leveraging exogenous changes in neighborhood racial composition, we show that white departures in response to black arrivals were quantitatively large and accelerated between 1900 and 1930. Our preferred estimates suggest that white flight can explain 34 percent of the increase in segregation over the 1910s and 50 percent over the 1920s. A key implication of these findings is that segregation could have arisen solely as a consequence of flight behavior by whites.

This paper considers the implications of two types of technological change for the income distribution in a model in which agents choose to supply either unskilled labor or human capital. Type A technological change allows unskilled labor to produce more output per unit of time, thereby increasing the unskilled wage. Although it has no direct effect on the return to human capital, it increases this return via a general equilibrium effect by an amount that is larger than the rise in the unskilled wage, thereby increasing overall income inequality. Type B technological change expands the scale of operation for workers in certain occupations and is modeled as an increase in the extent to which an occupations production technology displays Increasing Returns to Scale. By enlarging the production capacity of each worker this type of technological progress intensifies competition between workers, driving the least endowed workers out of the occupation and reducing the earnings of the next least endowed workers, thereby raising inequality within the occupation. We compare the theoretical results with U.S. and Chinese data and find support for the predictions.

Policy might partly shape the English-language acquisition of Hispanics migrating to the U.S. mainland, particularly policies related to limited-English-language disability benefits and immigration reform. Using data from the American Community Survey, we find that island-born Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland, as U.S. citizens, may have lower incentives to learn English than Hispanic immigrants because of their higher participation in LEP disability programs. However, among Mexican immigrants, recent immigration reform aimed at interior enforcement might have increased incentives for Mexican immigrants to learn English to reduce their probability of detection, if speaking English proxies for undocumented status.

In demographic datasets, researchers frequently want to identify how members of a household are related. In 1995, IPUMS constructed family interrelationship variables indicating the line numbers (or "location") of each person's co-resident parents and spouse. These variables enabled researchers to examine household and family structure in a new way, including attaching the characteristics of a persons spouse or parents as new variables. However, the original IPUMS family interrelationship variables have become outdated because of changing family structure and changes in how families are enumerated in datasets. In this study, develop a new method of estimating parental and spousal relationships using data on fertility patterns and family interrelationships. The improved method includes cohabiting and same-sex couples and is comparable across all modern US IPUMS data projects. A detailed variable indicates how the relationship was inferred and the level of ambiguity around that inference. The new IPUMS family interrelationship variables are very accurate, matching self-reported spouse/partner location for 99.99% and parent location for over 99.00% of respondents. Among those identified as same-sex couples, we match self-reported spouse/partner location for 100% of respondents, 87.57% of whom self-identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. We further demonstrate that the new family interrelationship variables closely track temporal variation in teenage fertility.

Research shows that food insecurity rates and experiences vary by subpopulation. This dissertation examines the rates and experience of food insecurity across subpopulations using a wide variety of sociodemographic factors, thus expanding the current research on social determinants of food insecurity. Subtopics surrounding the current food insecurity research are also explored. These topics include determinants of food deserts, SNAP (or food stamps) utilization, and household adaptation strategies. This research shows that current measurements of food insecurity lack the detail needed to understand why households are food insecure besides lacking income. Using Bourdieus four forms of capital, this study considers factors beyond income to understand the determinants of food insecurity. Quantitative analyses utilize nationally representative data from the 2013 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement, as well as representative food security data collected for Orange County, FL and state of Florida. Qualitative interviews were conducted to examine adaptation strategies of households with children. This research finds that a number of determinants besides income contribute to household food insecurity and encourages policymakers to move beyond income as the major determinant of food insecurity and consider other household and demographic characteristics as equally important to understanding the problem of food insecurity in the US today.

Complete Streets policies are potentially a useful tactic for increasing rates of active travel among a variety of populations. Currently, rates of active travel are particularly low among the general population in the United States. Understanding how these policies influence travel behavior, health, and health disparities will inform future research and improve policy development. Accordingly, this dissertation aims to (1) develop and implement an appropriate checklist for examining Complete Streets policy quality, (2) identify how the presence of policies, policy language, and time since policy implementation influence the aforementioned outcomes, (3) investigate how leaders in communities with and without Complete Streets policies perceive the aforementioned outcomes. A new policy checklist was created for this study. Both this new checklist, as well as an existing checklist, were used to examine policy quality among county-level Complete Streets policies (n=52). These scores were then used to examine the association between policy quality and active travel, health outcomes, healthcare access, gathered from national datasets. Next, Complete Streets counties (n=52) were matched with control counties (n=52), to quantitatively examine differences in travel behavior, health, and healthcare access by county type, race/ethnicity, and income level. Finally, interviews . . .

This dissertation contains three chapters covering relationships between mortality, health, migration. Using a discrete time failure model via pooled logistic regression, chapter one shows that self-rated health is a significant predictor of mortality in rural Malawi, a context that differs greatly from those in most previous studies. This indicates that the well-established relationship between self-rated health and mortality extends to even the most resource poor settings. In chapter two, life tables are created for each state in the United States that allow for the measurement of migration over the full life course. The results show that migrants are generally positively selected on their health, and more importantly that migration reduces inequality in mortality between states. This is a contrast to other research on geographical inequality in mortality, which typically does not point to migration as a driver of other observed mortality trends. Finally, using a marginal model through generalized estimating equations, analysis in chapter three shows the varying degree to which internal migrants in the United States are selected on their health. Individuals were selected most significantly on measures of disability, and analyzing only married couples gave the strongest results by showing how individuals can be selected on a spouse’s health. Since couples often move together, marriage is an important dimension of health selective migration on the individual level in the United States.

Welfare reform in 1996 dramatically reduced immigrants’ eligibility for Food Stamps, creating a new disparity in access between immigrants and natives. Subsequent policies restored eligibility for most immigrants at different times in different states, and this paper uses these changes to estimate the effect of the program on the labor supply of a specific, policy-relevant population. The Food Stamp program is among the largest safety net programs today, and my analysis provides one of the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of the modern Food Stamp program on adult labor supply. I find strong evidence of labor supply disincentives, and the magnitude and margin of this response varies across demographic groups. Access to the program reduces the employment rates of single women by about 6%, whereas married men continue to work but reduce their hours of work by 5%. These findings confirm the predictions of traditional labor supply theory regarding the response to a means-tested program.

This report highlights how working Vermonters and their families were faring economically at the end of 2015the latest year for which most data are availableand how conditions have changed, for better or worse, in recent years. It is based on data released by the U.S. Census, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other state and federal agencies in 2016. State of Working Vermont 2016 is published in readable chartbook format with brief explanatory captions.

This paper empirically revisits the impact of multiculturalism (as proxied by indices of birthplace diversity and polarization among immigrants, or by epidemiological terms) on the macroeconomic performance of US states over the 1960-2010 period. We test for skill-specific effects of multiculturalism, controlling for standard growth regressors and a variety of fixed effects, and accounting for the age of entry and legal status of immigrants. To identify causation, we compare various instrumentation strategies used in the existing literature. We provide converging and robust evidence of a positive and significant effect of diversity among college-educated immigrants on GDP per capita. Overall, a 10% increase in high-skilled diversity raises GDP per capita by 6.2%. On the contrary, diversity among less educated immigrants has insignificant effects. Also, we find no evidence of a quadratic effect or a contamination by economic conditions in poor countries.