Since the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that marriages of same-sex couples are legal in all states in the union, federal surveys have adapted to the shifting legal climate and included new measures that more directly identify same-sex and different-sex cohabiting and married couples. In this research note comparing the largest and most recent federal surveys—the 2019 American Community Survey and Current Population Survey—we find consistent levels of cohabitation and marriage across surveys. While the vast majority (90%) of different-sex couples were married, we report a more even split in cohabitation and marriage among same-sex couples. Our evaluation of sociodemographic characteristics of married and cohabiting couples indicates that differences were less prominent among same-sex couples than among different-sex couples, suggesting weaker sociodemographic selection into marriage among the former. However, factors affecting same-sex and different-sex couples' decisions to live together and marry may differ because of legal and social climates that still present unique obstacles for same-sex couples. Researchers need to acknowledge these differences in assessments of the implications of marriage for health and well-being.

As cities increase in size, total wages grow superlinearly, meaning that average wages are higher in larger cities. This phenomenon, known as the urban wage premium, supports the notion that urbanization and the growth of cities contribute positively to human well-being. However, it remains unclear how the distribution of wages changes as cities grow. Here we segment the populations of U.S. cities into wage deciles and determine the scaling coefficient of each decile’s aggregate wages versus city size. We find that, while total wages of all deciles grow superlinearly with city size, the effect is uneven, with total wages of the highest wage earners growing faster than all other deciles. We show that this corresponds with the predominance of high-wage jobs in larger cities. Thus, the effects of urbanization are mixed -- it is associated with higher average wages but with increasing inequality, thus inhibiting prospects for long-term sustainability.

Fathers are integral to family processes and children’s well-being. However, major social and economic changes in the United States over the last several decades have had profound impacts on the economic and social well-being of men of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and men of color, specifically Black, Latino, and Indigenous men. These changes have created stark disparities in the ability and capacity of fathers to be involved with their children. Social policies can be effective mechanisms for promoting and ensuring the well-being of fathers, but fathers are rarely the explicit target of policy efforts. Child support enforcement, the only national policy targeting fathers, has produced an inequitable system that disproportionately subjects low-SES fathers and fathers of color to a series of punitive enforcement mechanisms with minimal benefit to children. We provide evidence for the potential of a broad swath of social policies that have not traditionally been targeted at fathers to improve the well-being of fathers and facilitate their engagement with children. We propose that social workers are uniquely positioned to advocate for reforms and expansions to these policies that will improve father, child, and family well-being and promote economic, social, and racial justice.

How did Progressive era reforms affect the lives of urban residents across U.S. cities? The historical record is unclear. Some scholars argue that many of the progressive reforms were motivated by nativist and racist animus and explicitly designed to benefit white business elites at the expense of disadvantaged groups. Others point out that reformers often sought to improve urban living and working conditions and expand access to education, which generated new opportunities for social mobility. We inform this debate leveraging new data on 455 U.S. cities from 1900-1940 combining i) dates of adoption of reform-style government, ii) deanonymized census data, iii) data on political participation, and iv) detailed municipal budget data. Using a difference-indifferences design, we document the impact of Progressive reforms on political participation, public goods spending, and the relative socioeconomic well-being of black, immigrant, and working class residents visa -vis whites, natives, and business elites. Despite finding that voter turnout decreased in reformed cities, we uncover only a modest increase in earnings inequality across more and less advantaged groups and no significant differences in expenditure patterns as a consequence of reform. This approach provides a comprehensive portrait of the legacy of Progressive municipal institutions and suggests that, on average, the reforms of this era may have exacerbated political inequality more than economic inequality, at least in the first decades following their adoption.

Context: Land use change drives a host of sustainability challenges on Earth’s grasslands. To understand the relationship between changing land use patterns, human well-being, and ecosystem services, research is needed into land use transitions on privately-owned grasslands. Such inquiry lies at the intersection of land system science, landscape sustainability science and environmental governance. Objectives: This study investigated land use change in a mountain ranching community in the Sierra Nevada, California. The research objective was to highlight factors influencing land use transitions and corollary ecological outcomes on privately-owned grasslands in the Western US. Methods: This mixed methods case study integrated participant observation, 30 semi-structured interviews, and analysis of land cover and real estate data. Interviews were conducted with ranchers, public agencies, and conservation and real estate industry representatives, and analyzed with the constant comparison method using NVivo 12. Results: Land use transitions in the case study region include agricultural intensification, residential and solar development, and disintensification. These transitions were influenced by many factors including decreasing land access and water availability, amenity migration, intergenerational succession, and conservation policy. Conclusions: By highlighting factors influencing land use transitions on working lands, this study can be applied to improve the uptake of environmental policies. For the future, several approaches may support grasslands conservation: ensuring grazing lands access, income diversification, groundwater regulations, agriculture-compatible conservation easements, and land use policies supporting ownership transition to amenity purposes rather than low-density residential development.

The main purpose of this study is to observe and analyze the various impacts mental health has on a person’s labor participation and whether these impacts are exacerbated among veterans. Many war veterans struggle with mental well-being and have diffculties fnding work or purpose in their lives when transitioning to the civilian world. Additionally, the steady decrease of mental well-being across the United States among the general populace has generated concerns regarding a loss of labor due to burnout and suicide, particularly among teens and young adults. This study discusses the impact cognitive diffculties have on labor participation through a weighted logit model for 450 households from 2001 to 2020. The result from this model demonstrates the adverse impact cognitive diffculties have on a person’s willingness to participate in the labor force, especially among older individuals, but are not a signifcant factor in determining a veteran’s motivation to work.

Nuclear energy occupies a conspicuous place in the global energy transition. In the United States, civilian nuclear power plants are shutting down before their licenses expire, leaving nuclear host communities struggling to cope with the unexpected change. This study focuses on the socio-economic dimensions of the effects of nuclear power plant shutdowns in nuclear host communities in the United States. Our study attempts to strike a balance between intensive case studies, which often fail to disentangle place-specific factors from broader trends and to put observations in perspective, and large-sample-based quantitative analyses, which seeks a general impact of decommissioning without paying sufficient attention to local variations. We adopt a quasi-experimental approach, which compares communities with decommissioned plants to their control neighbors, to assess the diverse trajectories of socio-economic well-being of nuclear host communities before and after plant closure. These communities are analyzed in terms of their population, per capita income, education, poverty levels, and unemployment. The findings provide a starting point from which more detailed case studies can be conducted, and nuclear host communities can better navigate the decommissioning process.

The papers in this dissertation empirically estimate the causal effect of our social environment on our beliefs, preferences, and well-being. I present clear evidence that our decisions are not made in isolation. Rather, our very beliefs and preferences are shaped by our neighbors. Even our happiness may depend on the circumstances of those around us. The first paper reports evidence that neighbors with strong preferences or beliefs around politics, religion, or race are likely to shape our beliefs and preferences. In fact, the migration of individuals with strong preferences appears to be a key determinant of geographic patterns in political outcomes in contemporary America. The second paper shows how social context shapes reports of psychological well-being commonly used in important longitudinal surveys. Individuals understate the symptoms of depression and overstate their happiness when reporting directly to another individual. The final papers tests the relative income hypothesis showing that we are less happy when our neighbors become relatively richer. However, we find no evidence that individuals are averse to increases in income inequality.

Relying on data from the United States Census and the American Time Use Survey (2010–2017), we examine how residential segregation influences per capita discretionary time availability in Los Angeles, New York City and Miami. We find a sizable disadvantage of being Latinx for discretionary time availability. Non-Latinx Whites have 182 extra hours of per capita discretionary time per year than do Latinx individuals. Both within-neighbourhood and adjacent-neighbourhood influences matter. In most neighbourhoods, segregation is correlated with having more discretionary time. Individuals in highly segregated areas have approximately 80 more hours of discretionary time per year than those living in diverse areas. This suggests that in addition to socioeconomic, cultural and well-being benefits, ethnic enclaves may also impart temporal advantages. However, we find that there may be diminishing marginal returns with increasing segregation in surrounding areas. Sociodemographic characteristics explain over one-quarter of the variance between segregation and discretionary time availability.

In the first chapter, I explore the role of gender discrimination in children’s investments by parents. I specifically examine whether parents in urban China devote more household resources, specifically education, health, and total expenditures, to girls than to boys. The empirical literature has extensively examined trends in the sex ratio at birth and the effect of gender on the extensive margin of fertility. Much less of the existing literature has explored the impact of gender on the intensive margin of parental inputs mainly because of lack of individual child-level data, especially in urban China. This is an important area for economic research to help disentangle child gender bias and provide insight on the well-being of Chinese children. To answer my research question, I use unique data, Chinese Child Twin Survey (CCTS) that includes family expenditure information for individual children within the family. Estimating the causal effect of child gender on parental investments requires boys and girls to live in families with similar observable and unobservable characteristics. This assumption may be violated in China for two reasons.

This paper provides a unified framework for practitioners who wish to estimate alternative indices of multidimensional poverty. These alternative indices are used to estimate multidimensional poverty in the USA over the last decade with a focus on analyzing trends by race and ethnicity. Individual level data on five different dimensions of well-being are compiled over the last decade using annual Census surveys. We find that multidimensional poverty in the USA declined over time regardless of the index used. A higher incidence of multidimensional poverty was observed among Hispanics, American Indians and Blacks. Poverty ranking among racial/ethnic groups was robust to the indices used. Estimates of alternative indices highlight different aspects of multidimensional poverty and provide complementary information on poverty in the USA in the last decade.

It is widely believed that female students benefit from being taught by female teachers, particularly when those teachers serve as counter-stereotypical role models. We study education in rural areas of the US circa 1940--a setting in which there were few professional female exemplars other than teachers--and find that female students were more successful when their primary-school teachers were disproportionately female. Impacts are lifelong: female students taught by female teachers were more likely to move up the educational ladder by completing high school and attending college, and had higher lifetime family income and increased longevity.

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) and 22q duplication syndrome present a wide range of medical challenges. The health and well-being of pediatric patients with 22q11DS may be influenced by socioeconomic factors, which can significantly shape their healthcare experiences, access to services, and overall quality of life. The objective of this study is to identify what factors are correlated with no-show clinic visits for children with 22q11DS.

The sixth cycle of the octennial California Regional Housing Needs Assessment indicates that, over the next eight years, the City of Los Angeles needs to plan for the creation of nearly 260,000 homes for families earning 30 percent to 80 percent of area median income and for the creation of 197,000 units for families earning more than that amount. Meeting this goal would require the production of more than 100,000 homes per year over the next eight years, with more than 50 percent of them available at affordable rents. The magnitude of the region’s housing needs has led many policymakers and other stakeholders to call for an all-of-the-above approach to expanding the housing supply that includes increasing the production of both publicly funded affordable housing and market-rate housing, incentivizing increased density for infill housing projects, doubling down on such innovations as modular housing, and increasing support for the preservation of the existing affordable housing stock. In this report, we attempt to inform such an approach by focusing on one channel that could be an important part of the overall approach: the adaptive reuse (AR) of underutilized commercial real estate (CRE) as multiunit housing. The objectives of this report were to (1) generate evidence on the potential capacity of AR to bolster the supply of housing in the region, (2) assess how recent trends in prices and utilization rates of CRE affect the financial feasibility of AR, (3) explore how the geographic distribution of underutilized CRE coincides with social and environmental goals related to the siting of housing, and (4) assess how the distinct aspects of AR projects and relevant policy might affect the feasibility of this approach in terms of meeting regional housing goals. This research was conducted by the RAND Center for Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles (CHHLA), part of the Community Health and Environmental Policy Program within RAND’s Social and Economic Well-Being division. The CHHLA is focused on providing policymakers and stakeholders with timely research and analysis to address the dual crises of housing affordability and homelessness in the Los Angeles region and beyond. For more information, visit www.rand.org/chhla.

The economic characteristics of one’s childhood neighborhood have been found to deter mine long-term well-being. Policies enacted dur ing child hood may change neighborhood trajectories and thus impact long-term outcomes for children. We use individual-level data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the enduring consequences of childhood exposure to local-area New Deal emergency employment work-relief activ ity. Our out comes include ado les cent cog ni tion, edu ca tional attain­ment, mid­life income, health behav­iors, late-life cog­ni­tion, and mor­tal­ity. We find that children (ages 0–3) living in neighborhoods with moderate work-relief activity in 1940 had higher adolescent IQ scores, had higher class rank, and were more likely to obtain at least a bach­e­lor’s degree. We find endur­ing ben­e­fits for mid­life income and late-life cognition for males who grew up in areas with a moderate amount of work relief. We find mixed results for males who grew up in the most dis­ad­van­taged areas with the highest levels of work-relief activity. These children had similar educational outcomes as those in the most advantaged districts with the lowest work-relief activity but had higher adult smok­ing rates. Our find­ings pro­vide some of the first evi­dence of the long-term consequences of New Deal policies on children’s long-term life course outcomes.

As we enter yet another phase of a pandemic that has highlighted the essential nature of early care and education (ECE) services, California’s ECE sector is experiencing dire staffing shortages (Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, 2022) due in part to the low wages of ECE providers. As of this writing, California has 7,200 fewer child care slots and 7,000 fewer child care jobs than in February 2020, before the onset of the pandemic (Assembly Budget Committee, 2022; BLS Beta Labs, 2022). Throughout the state, administrators cite compensation as a main barrier to recruiting and retaining staff (Kim et al., 2022). The low wages and lack of benefits for the California ECE workforce are increasingly recognized and decried (McLean et al., 2021; Gould et al., 2019; Whitebook et al., 2014). But ECE jobs are not just low wage, they are among the worst-paid jobs in the United States. Although early educators provide the foundation for quality ECE programs and are the backbone of the economy, the wages of child care workers rank in the bottom 2 percent of all occupations, averaging $11.65 per hour nationally (McLean et al., 2021). In the State of California, the ECE workforce is largely women of color (Powell, Kim, et al., 2022). For centuries, care work, the work of women, and the work of people of color have been undervalued in our country (Gould et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2019). This reality, coupled with insufficient public funding and a reliance on parents to shoulder most costs of ECE services, has debilitated the sector. The result is a system in which the vast majority of the workforce does not earn a living wage, with dire consequences for their well-being. Furthermore, this arrangement does not work well for families that struggle to find and afford the care they want and need for their children. This report draws on findings from the California Early Care and Education Workforce Study to report income and benefits of licensed family child care (FCC) providers and center-based directors, teachers, and assistant teachers. This study is the first comprehensive examination of California’s workforce in 15 years. Despite a growing understanding of the importance of early learning and development and the expansion of quality improvement initiatives during this time, little has been done to address the economic well-being of educators themselves. Early educators’ wages are still low. In fact, we estimate that teachers with bachelor’s degrees working in California child care centers saw a decline in actual wages of 1 to 2.5 percent between 2006 and 2022, despite a 35-percent increase in the minimum wage over the same period. To better understand variations and inequities in the system, we examine compensation by educator role and education level as well as program type and funding. We also provide findings by region, when sample sizes allow (see Appendix 2 for map of study regions).

This research provides an extended profile of the social and economic well-being of rural Pennsylvania women. Using highly credible secondary data sources, the research describes the life circumstances of contemporary rural women. Rural Pennsylvania women, grouped into three broad age categories, are compared to their urban counterparts as well as to both rural men and urban men in the state. Trends spanning about a decade are depicted, and contextual measures and geographic considerations provide depth to the profiles of these women’s lives.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the lives of people globally, widening longstanding inequities. We examined the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on employment conditions by race/ethnicity, gender, and educational attainment and the association between such conditions and well-being in older adults in the United States. Methods: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study respondents interviewed between May 2020 and May 2021 when they were ≥55 years of age, we examined intersectional patterns in COVID19-related changes in employment conditions among 4,107 participants working for pay at the start of the pandemic. We also examined the compounding nature of changes in employment conditions and their association with financial hardship, food insecurity, and poor self-rated health. Results: Relative to non-Hispanic White men with greater than high school education (>HS), Black and Latinx men and women were more likely to experience job loss irrespective of education; among those who did not experience job loss, men with ≤HS reporting Black, Latinx, or ―other‖ race were >90% less likely to transition to remote work. Participants who experienced job loss with decreased income or continued in-person employment with decreased income/shift changes had greater prevalence of financial hardship, food insecurity, and poor/fair self-rated health than others. Discussion: The impact of COVID-19 on employment conditions is inequitably patterned and is associated with financial hardship, food insecurity, and adverse health in older adults. Policies to improve employment quality and expand social insurance programs among this group are needed to reduce growing inequities in well-being later in life.

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded the mortgage security of urban US neighborhoods. In doing so, the HOLC engaged in the practice, imbued with racism and xenophobia, of “redlining” neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” for lenders. Redlining has caused persistent social, political and economic problems for communities of color. Linkages between redlining and contemporary food access remain unexamined, even though food access is essential to well-being. To investigate this, we used a census tract-level measure of low-income and low grocery store food access from the US Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas, redlining data from Mapping Inequality Project, and demographic data from the American Community Survey. We employed generalized estimating equations with robust covariance estimates to analyze data pertaining to 10,459 census tracts in 202 US cities. Tracts that the HOLC graded as “C” (“decline in desirability”) and “D” (“hazardous”) had reduced contemporary food access compared to those graded “A” (“best”). Increases in contemporary census tract proportions of Black, Hispanic, or other racial/ethnic minority residents, as well as disabled residents, were associated with reduced food access. Increases in contemporary proportions of residents age 75 years and older or those without a car were associated with better food access. Tracts that underwent housing redevelopment since being graded had better food access, while those undergoing gentrification had reduced food access. Results suggest that issues of redlining, housing discrimination, racism, ableism, displacement, and food inaccessibility are deeply intertwined.

OBJECTIVES: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the lives of people globally, widening long-standing inequities. We examined the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on employment conditions by race/ethnicity, gender, and educational attainment and the association between such conditions and well-being in older adults in the United States. METHODS: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study respondents interviewed between May 2020 and May 2021 when they were ≥55 years of age, we examined intersectional patterns in COVID-19-related changes in employment conditions among 4,107 participants working for pay at the start of the pandemic. We also examined the compounding nature of changes in employment conditions and their association with financial hardship, food insecurity, and poor self-rated health. RESULTS: Relative to non-Hispanic White men with greater than high school education (>HS), Black and Latinx men and women were more likely to experience job loss irrespective of education; among those who did not experience job loss, men with ≤HS reporting Black, Latinx, or "other" race were >90% less likely to transition to remote work. Participants who experienced job loss with decreased income or continued in-person employment with decreased income/shift changes had greater prevalence of financial hardship, food insecurity, and poor/fair self-rated health than others. DISCUSSION: The impact of COVID-19 on employment conditions is inequitably patterned and is associated with financial hardship, food insecurity, and adverse health in older adults. Policies to improve employment quality and expand social insurance programs among this group are needed to reduce growing inequities in well-being later in life.