A large body of research finds correlations between unemployment and health. This raises the question of whether unemployment benefit programs, which aim to alleviate financial stress associated with job loss, have their own health effects. Although existing studies indicate that receiving unemployment benefits is likely protective for health, most studies do not account for the potentially endogenous relationship between unemployment benefit receipt and individual characteristics. Since not all unemployed people are eligible for, or receive unemployment benefits, estimates of the health effects of unemployment benefits may be biased. This thesis aims to better understand whether unemployment benefits have a causal effect on health by taking advantage of quasi-experimental variations in unemployment benefit programs in the United States. In the first study, I investigate whether the presence of generous State unemployment benefit programs results in fewer suicides during labour market downturns. In the second study, I use longitudinal data to explore whether State unemployment benefit generosity buffers the impact of job loss on self-reported health. The third study examines whether unemployment benefit eligibility expansions lead to greater participation in physically active leisure. Lastly, I use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the self-reported health effects of receiving unemployment benefits. Across all four studies, I consistently find evidence that unemployment benefits have a health promoting effect in the short-term: unemployment benefits are associated with lower suicide rates, better self-reported health and increased physical activity. While the precise mechanisms remain uncertain, I argue that unemployment benefits may positively affect health by subsidizing income and leisure time, both of which can be beneficial for physical and mental health. Although unemployment benefits are unlikely to be a cost- effective approach to improve health, the results indicate that policymaker efforts to reduce or limit access to unemployment benefits may lead to unanticipated adverse health effects.

This thesis empirically analyzes the economic performance of Pakistani women immigrants in the US. I estimate a comparative model of earnings for a sample of Indian and Pakistani women immigrants. Each group represents diverse patterns within the US labor market. Secondary data from the American Community Survey (2008-2012) was analyzed by running OLS regressions. The findings support the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis as the analyzed immigrant groups appear to experience a wage differential across country of origin and social position categories. The results can be utilized to inform future research on the economic performance of Pakistani women immigrants in the US.

Migration is one of the main forces shaping our society as we know it. Focusing on the determinants of migration and its influence on local communities, this dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the thesis, covering the motivation for the research, the methodologies used, and policy implications. Chapter 2 estimates the impact of education on two key outcomes: migration probability and distance. Migration greatly affects the regional economy, and hence, the out-migration of highly educated workers has raised serious concerns for regional development. The OLS estimator indicates a small but positive effect of education on both outcomes, which is similar to other studies. However, using compulsory schooling law changes as an instrumental variable, the 2SLS estimator suggests that education increases migration distance but decreases the probability to migrate. To guide the analysis, this paper expands the basic migration model to include . . .

Construction workers across the Great Lakes region are well-compensated and can support a middle-class family. Road and bridge construction workers receive significant training in the Great Lakes states and, in turn, translate their increased human capital into higher levels of productivity for employers. Unfortunately, there are threats across the Midwest to weaken the institutions that are statistically correlated with increased worker efficiency, including prevailing wage laws and trade unions. If the Great Lakes region is to remain one of the nation's leaders in worker productivity on public construction projects, these institutions must be both defended and strengthened.

In the bicentennial year of 1976, the descendants of James Milton Pasko (1797– 1879) of Meridian, Cayuga County, New York, held a reunion at Cayuga Lake State Park, near Seneca Falls, New York. Following the reunion, several members of the family decided to research James M. Pasko’s ancestry in earnest. A quite complete family Bible-type record had been preserved in multiple branches of the family, giving the birth and death dates of James M. Pasko, his wife, children, brothers and sisters, and his parents, Abel and Sarah Pasko. As well, a fine tribute to James M. Pasko survived, which . . .

Patterns of daily activities situated in the context of the location, time of day, presence of others and emotional experiences which time diaries collect offer essential data enabling us to understand what factors drive long-term trends in behaviour, and to predict how policies might encourage desirable shifts in behaviour while avoiding simultaneous change that might undermine policy aims. As daily life offers an essential dimension to a vast range of research topics, time use surveys offer better value for money than most surveys considering the potential uses for the money expended on data collection. To achieve this value for money, however, researchers need to use the data. Even now, few universities offer training in the analysis of time use data. Making access to customised data subsets ready for analysis quickly matters to the success and continued expansion of this field. The IPUMS Time Use data extract builder suite is one tool delivering essential data resources to time use researchers. This timepiece details the release of the latest project in this collection of archives, the American Heritage Time Use Study Data Extract Builder (AHTUS-X).

What is the role of married women in immigrant households? Their contribution to the labor market has traditionally been considered of secondary importance and studied in the framework of temporary attachment to the labor force to support the household around the time of arrival. But this role has changed. Evidence from major immigrant-receiving countries suggests that married immigrant women make labor supply decisions similar to those recently observed for native-born married women, who are guided by their own opportunities in the labor market rather than by their spouses employment trajectories.

Despite major demographic changes over the past fifty years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changed, or not changed, in the United States. Using time use survey data from 1965-2012, we examine trends in couples shared time in the United States during a period of major changes in American marriages and families. We find that couples without children spend more total time together and time alone together now than they did in 1965, both peaking in 1975. For parents, time spent together increased continually over the period, most dramatically for time spent with a spouse and children. Decomposition analyses show that changes in behavior rather than changing demographics explain these trends, and we find that the increases in couples shared time are primarily concentrated in leisure activities.

This study examines labor productivity convergence across the U.S. states for seven major economic sectors from 1987 to 2013. We follow two different approaches; the first one uses cross-section techniques such as beta and sigma convergence analysis and the second adopts panel methods (stochastic convergence) taking advantage of recent developments in panel unit root tests. The results from beta-convergence analysis show evidence of convergence for Mining, Construction, Manufacturing, Transportation and Trade while, according to sigma convergence approach only Construction has a clear trend of convergence. The results from panel methods are contradictory for the Construction sector when our last and more modern unit root test is employed. Finally, Manufacturing seems to exhibit the strongest evidence of convergence in respect to beta and stochastic convergence methods followed by Mining.

Signs are commonly used in the foodservice industry to portray food safety messages. However, many of these signs do not consider employee preferences or current needs in the industry. Employee perceptions can provide crucial information about the design of effective food safety messages. Surveys were conducted with meat and poultry processing employers in the mid- Atlantic region to determine food safety needs in the industry. Follow-up focus groups in both English (5) and Spanish (5) were conducted based on language availability and size. The most important food safety topics were hand washing (60.9%), cleaning/sanitizing (78.3%), and cross contamination (69.9%). Employees believe that color, text, and multiple language options could increase employee recognition and retention of intended messages. New, employee-driven hand washing signs were developed from the information in the focus groups. Signs were evaluated by video observation through five hand washing practice behaviors (soap use, complete wash, time to wash, complete rinse, and towel use) at two different poultry processing facilities in the mid-Atlantic at three different time points (baseline, short term, and long term). Soap use significantly increased at both facilities when baseline data was compared to short term and long term time periods. Facility B showed a significant increase in washing, time, and rinsing when baseline data was compared to short term, which indicates that a new sign could increase hand washing compliance. Sign color had a significant effect on behavior for washing and time of washing, while time had a significant effect on behavior for four of five variables tested. New signs could be a useful way to encourage compliance to food safety message for multicultural employees; however, they may need to be frequently changed as workers tend to refer back to old habits.

In this paper, we examine the effect of the EITC on the employment and income of single mothers with children. We provide the first comprehensive estimates of this central safety net policy on the full distribution of after-tax and transfer income. We use a quasi-experiment approach, using variation in generosity due to policy expansions across tax years and family sizes. Our results show that a policy-induced $1000 increase in the EITC leads to a 7.3 percentage point increase in employment and a 9.4 percentage point reduction in the share of families with after-tax and transfer income below 100% poverty. Event study estimates show no evidence of differential pre-trends, providing strong evidence in support of our research design. We find that the income increasing effects of the EITC are concentrated between 75% and 150% of income-to-poverty with little effect at the lowest income levels (50% poverty and below) and at levels of 250% of poverty and higher. By capturing the indirect effects of the credit on earnings, our results show that static calculations of the anti-poverty effects of the EITC (such as those released based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Short 2014) may be underestimated by as much as 50 percent.

Black men born in the Cotton South during the turn of the twentieth century attended school for three and half fewer years relative to their white counterparts. To explain why blacks received fifty percent less schooling than whites, recent research examines the role of the southern cotton industry in explaining schooling differences. Based on a model of opportunity costs and the value of child labor, researchers have previously found a negative relationship between black school attendance and cotton production. However, I observe a positive correlation while using individual level data from US Censuses from the early twentieth century. A positive relationship between black school attendance and cotton production is consistent with a model of consumption smoothing.

Anthropogenic forces widely influence the composition, configuration, and trend of land use and land cover (LULC) changes with potential implications for surface water quality. These changes have the likelihood of generating non-point source pollution with additional environmental implications for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Monitoring the scope and trajectory of LULC change is pivotal for region-wide planning, tracking the sustainability of natural resources, and meeting the information needs of policy makers. A good comprehension of the dynamics of anthropogenic drivers (proximate and underlying) that influence such changes in LULC is important because any potential adverse change in LULC that may be inimical to sustainable water quality might be addressed at the anthropogenic driver level rather than the LULC change stage. Using a dense time stack of Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper images, a hydrologic water quality and socio-geospatial modeling framework, this study quantifies the role of anthropogenic drivers of LULC change on total suspended solids and total phosphorus concentrations in the Lower Chippewa River Watershed, Wisconsin, at three time steps1990, 2000, and 2010. Results of the study demonstrated that proximate drivers of LULC change accounted for between 32 and 59 % of the concentration and spatial distribution of total suspended solids, while the extent of phosphorus impairment attributed to the proximate drivers ranged between 31 and 42%.

We present a nonparametric framework for modeling an evolving sequence of (es- timated) probability distributions which distinguishes the effects of sequential pro- gression on the observed distribution from extraneous sources of noise (i.e. latent variables which perturb the distributions independently of the sequence-index). To discriminate between these two types of variation, our methods leverage the under- lying assumption that the effects of sequential-progression follow a consistent trend. Our methods are motivated by the recent rise of single-cell RNA-sequencing time course experiments, in which an important analytic goal is the identification of genes relevant to the progression of a biological process of interest at cellular resolution. As existing statistical tools are not suited for this task, we introduce a new regression model for (ordinal-value , univariate-distribution) covariate-response pairs where the class of regression-functions reflects coherent changes to the distributions over increas- ing levels of the covariate, a concept we refer to as trends in distributions. Through simulation study and extensive application of our ideas to data from recent single- cell gene-expression time course experiments, we demonstrate numerous strengths of our framework. Finally, we characterize both theoretical properties of the proposed estimators and the generality of our trend-assumption across diverse types of un- derlying sequential-progression effects, thus highlighting the utility of our framework for a wide variety of other applications involving the analysis of distributions with associated ordinal labels.

Over the past four decades, bicycle ownership has been documented in various countries but not globallyanalyzed. This paper presents an effort tofill this gap by tracking household bicycle possession. First, wegather survey data from 150 countries and extract percentage household bicycle ownership values.Performing cluster analysis, we determined four groups with the weighted mean percentage ownershipranging from 20% to 81%. Generally, bicycle ownership was highest in Northern Europe and lowest inWest, Central and North Africa, and Central Asia. We determine worldwide household ownership pat-terns and demonstrate a basis for understanding the global impact of cycling as a sustainable transitmode. Furthermore, wefind a lower-bound estimate of the number of bicycles available to the world'shouseholds. We establish that at the global level 42% of households own at least one bicycle, and thusthere are at least 580 million bicycles in private household ownership. Our data are publicly available andamenable for future analyses.

This case study investigates what prompts male Millennials to join the historically stereotyped feminized library profession. The study addresses social, cultural, economic, and/or political factors that influence male Millennials to become professional librarians; the influence of technology on male Millennials currently enrolled in library and information science (LIS) graduate programs decisions to become professional librarians; and professional stereotypes male Millennials currently enrolled in LIS graduate programs encounter. To gather data, surveys were conducted with 231 participants enrolled in 37 LIS graduate programs across the United States, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 volunteers who participated in the surveys. Findings have implications for LIS graduate program recruitment and retention practices and suggest extending the scope of literature in the areas of professional librarianship and gender roles.

This paper uses empirical evidence drawn from newly constructed datasets to assess the impact of geographic clustering on the assimilation and occupational mobility of Irish immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It finds that geographic clustering was quite pronounced for Irish immigrants in this time period. Irish immigrants were primarily drawn to the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast, reflecting the importance of these areas as points of entry to the US, areas of prior settlement by previous generations of Irish immigrants, as well as major centres for employment for new immigrants. This paper also finds that higher levels of geographic clustering were associated with both lower degrees of assimilation and lower occupational outcomes. The benefits of geographic clustering in the job market often described in this literature do not appear to have existed for Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth century. These results would also support the view that living in a more ethnically concentrated community, though perhaps improving the initial starting position of Irish immigrants in America, may have come at the expense of slower subsequent assimilation and reduced occupational mobility.

Black men born in the Cotton South during the turn of the twentieth century attended school for three and half fewer years relative to their white counterparts. To explain why blacks received fifty percent less schooling than whites, recent research examines the role of the southern cotton industry in explaining schooling differences. Based on a model of opportunity costs and the value of child labor, researchers have previously found a negative relationship between black school attendance and cotton production. However, I observe a positive correlation while using individual level data from US Censuses from the early twentieth century. A positive relationship between black school attendance and cotton production is consistent with a model of credit constraints and consumption smoothing.

Faster technological progress has long been considered a key potential benefit of agglomeration. Physical proximity to others may help inventors adopt new ideas in their work by increasing awareness about which new ideas exist and by enhancing understanding of the properties and usefulness of new ideas through a vigorous debate on the ideas' merits (Marshall, 1920). We test a key empirical prediction of this theory: that inventions in large cities build on newer ideas than inventions in smaller cities. We analyze the idea inputs of nearly every US patent granted during 18362010. We find that a larger city size provided a considerable advantage in inventive activities during most of the 20th century but that in recent decades this advantage has eroded.