In February 2005, Illinois became the first U.S. state to grant home-based child care providers (HBCPs) the right to form a labor union in order to bargain collectively with the state government. This policy inspired similar efforts across the country and represents a potentially important direction for child care policy. To date, the implications of labor unions for the cost, type, and availability of subsidized child care have not been evaluated empirically. In this study, we examine the impact of granting Illinois HBCPs the right to form a labor union on (a) the type of child care (licensed vs. license-exempt/home-based vs. center-based) used by subsidy-receiving Illinois infants and toddlers; (b) the per-child cost of subsidized child care for infants and toddlers; and (c) the percentage of Illinois infants and toddlers who use child care subsidies. To conduct these analyses, we combine data from the Current Population Survey with Child Care and Development Fund administrative records on U.S. infants and toddlers whose families received child care subsidies during the period from 2002 to 2008. We use both a traditional difference-in-differences as well as a comparative case study with a synthetic control group approach. The synthetic control group approach improves on traditional comparative case studies by providing a transparent, empirical approach for constructing the counterfactual, documenting comparison units contribution to the synthetically created control group and detailing the degree to which the synthetic control group is, or is not, similar to the treated unit on preintervention measures of the outcome as well as on other selected characteristics. We find that subsidy-receiving Illinois infants and toddlers spent an average of between 6.4 and 7 percentage points more hours in licensed care settings, as compared to license-exempt settings, in the three years following child care unionization. We also find that between 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points fewer Illinois infants and toddlers used child care subsidies following unionization.

This public economics dissertation examines the effects resulting from government intervention in the electricity and health insurance markets. The first chapter analyzes the impact on residential electricity prices by studying a once regulated market in which government regulators withdrew from in hopes of allowing a free and competitive market to flourish. The second chapter analyzes the resulting effects on employment and other forms of health insurance that occur when the government tightens the income limits to qualify for Medicaid. The third and final chapter studies employment, health insurance, health, and emergency room usage effects when the government gives subsidies to employers providing health insurance to their employees.

A compilation of research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on housing markets experiencing foreclosure and/or a large number of vacant properties which sheds light on a wide range of housing markets. It provides possible policy solutions applicable to both regional and national policy discussions.

Human societies have learnt to cope with flood risks in several ways, the most prominent ways being engineering solutions and adaptive measures. However, from a more sustainable point of view, it can be argued that societies should avoid or at least minimize urban developments in floodplain areas. While many scientists have studied the impact of human activities on flood risk, only a few studies have investigated the opposite relationships, i.e. the impacts of past flood events on floodplain development. In this study, we make an initial attempt to understand the impact of the occurrence of flood disasters on the spatial distribution of population dynamics in floodplain areas. Two different methodologies are used to uncover this relationship, a large-scale study for the USA and a case-study analysis of the 1993 Mississippi flood. The large-scale analysis is performed at county level scale for the whole of the USA and indicates a positive relationship between property damage due to flood events and population growth. The case-study analysis examines a reach of the Mississippi river and the territory, which was affected by flooding in 1993. Contrary to the large-scale analysis, no significant relationship is found in this detailed study. However, a trend of dampened population growth right after the flood followed by an accelerated growth a decade later could be identified in the raw data and linked to explanations found in the literature.

Social engagement is theorized to promote health, with ages 55 to 75—what some call “encore” adulthood—potentially being a time for ongoing engagement or social isolation. We use the American Time Use Survey (N = 11,952) and a life course perspective to examine associations between paid work, resources, relations, and healthy time use for men and women in the first (55–64) and second (65–74) halves of the encore years. Work limits sufficient sleep (full-time working men) and television watching (all workers) but also time spent in physical activity (full-time workers). College-educated and healthy encore adults—across age and gender divides—are more likely to exercise and watch less television. Marriage and caregiving encourage socializing and limit television watching, despite differential effects on physical activity and sleep. These findings fit well with a gendered life course perspective suggesting socially patterned (by work, resources, relationships, gender, age) health behaviors.

In this ethnography (described in greater detail later in this chapter) we sought to understand the life course experiences of 256 African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white low-income mothers of young children in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio over a 6-year period following the implementation of welfare reform. We begin this discussion with a brief overview of the features of ethnography that render it a viable life course method for gathering accurate and detailed data about physical and sexual abuse in women's lives. We then describe the processes involved in uncovering women's abuse experiences in the Three-City Study ethnography. In doing so, we illustrate the degree to which experiences of physical and sexual abuse permeate the lives of low-income mothers, and present methodological and ethical challenges to ethnographers. Our process of uncovering abuse in women's lives was characterized by distinctive respondent disclosure patterns evoked by certain trigger topics, recent crisis events in respondents' lives, and ethnographers' direct inquiries. The disclosure experiences also involved ethnographers' own emotional reactions and ethical responsibilities toward the respondents. The implications of these disclosure processes for research designs and methodological issues concerning life course research on low-income women are also discussed.

Prior to the Affordable Care Act, the majority of states in the U.S. had already implemented state laws that extended the age that young adults could enroll as dependents on their parent's employer-based health insurance plans. Because of the fundamental link between health insurance and employment in the U.S., such policies may effect the labor supply decisions of young adults. Although the interaction between labor supply and health insurance has been extensively studied for other subpopulations, little is known about the role of health insurance in the labor supply decisions of young adults. I use the variation from the implementation and changes in state policies that expanded dependent health insurance coverage to examine how young adults adjusted their labor supply when they were able to be covered as a dependent on their parent's plan. I find that these state mandates led to a decrease in labor supply on the intensive margin.

The U.S. experienced an unprecedented increase in marriages rates and a decrease in the age of marriage after World War II. Marriage rates increased by 25 percent from 1930 to 1950 and the average age of marriage fell by two years. These marriage trends were an important contributor to the rising birth rates of the period (the baby boom). This paper argues that growth in the supply of housing after World War II contributed to the expansion of marriage during this period. Specifically, the paper estimates the effect of additional building permits (a proxy for housing supply) at the city level on individual marriage outcomes. An instrumental variable approach is used to address endogenous permit location. I construct an annual level instrument using the national permit series in conjunction with a citys geographical constraints, region and average temperature. I find a standard deviation increase in permits to a city increased the probability of marriage in that city by 6 to 7.5 percent over a two-year period. The estimates suggest that the growth in housing supply in the late 1940s can explain about 32 percent of the difference in marriage rates between 1930 and 1950.

The overarching theme of the dissertation is to examine the impacts of government assistance programs on the economic behaviors of disadvantaged groups such as low-income or single headed households in the U.S. It is crucial to expand our understanding of how government assistance has helped them to overcome economic barriers to labor force participation or to expand household resources. My dissertation chapters primarily focus on the two largest government safety net programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I show that public assistance programs play a pivotal role by interacting with economic choices made by vulnerable households, such as labor supply, health, or household expenditures. Exploiting the variation in specific aspects of welfare program or the changes made to program parameters, I study how the policies have altered the life circumstances and opportunities faced by disadvantaged households.

+ Migration from Mexico to the United States fell from 1.9 million in 2003-2007 to 819,000 in 2008-2012, a drop of 57 percent. + The top states for Mexican migration shifted noticeably between the 2003-2007 and 2008-2012 periods. + Mexicans migrating to the United States tend to have higher socioeconomic status, are older, are more likely to be women, have greater English-language fluency, and are somewhat less likely to be connected to the workforce than Mexicans who migrated in the early to middle 2000s.

Racial and ethnic diversity is spreading far beyond the coasts and into surprising places across the USA, rapidly changing how Americans live, learn, work and worship together and even who our neighbors are. Cities and towns far removed from traditional urban gateways such as New York, Miami, Chicago and San Francisco are rapidly becoming some of the most diverse places in America, an analysis of demographic data by USA TODAY shows.

This thesis develops Bayesian latent class models for nested categorical data, e.g., people nested in households. The applications focus on generating synthetic microdata for public release and imputing missing data for household surveys, such as the 2010 U.S. Decennial Census. The first contribution is methods for evaluating disclosure risks in fully synthetic categorical data. I quantify disclosure risks by computing Bayesian posterior probabilities that intruders can learn confidential values given the released data and assumptions about their prior knowledge. I demonstrate the methodology on a subset of data from the American Community Survey (ACS). The methods can be adapted to synthesizers for nested data, as demonstrated in later chapters of the thesis. The second contribution is a novel two-level latent class model for nested categorical data. Here, I assume that all configurations of groups and units are theoretically possible. I use a nested Dirichlet Process prior distribution for the class membership probabilities. The nested structure facilitates simultaneous modeling of variables at both group and unit levels. I illustrate the modeling by generating synthetic data. . .

Employment among adults aged 21-55 (henceforth, “prime-aged”), has fallen substantially since 2000, with virtually all of the decline coming from those without a Bachelor’s degree (henceforth, “non-college”). Data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) indicate that the employment rate for prime-aged, less-educated men hovered around 85 percent from 1980 to 2000, then started to fall in the early 2000s.1 Besides its concentration among the relatively less-educated, another defining feature of the decline in employment since 2000 is that most of it occurred during the Great Recession, with rates falling from 83 percent to 75 percent, and from 68 to 63 percent between 2007 and 2010 for primeaged non-college men and women, respectively. The overwhelming majority of the active literature attempting to explain the recent decline in employment has studied alternative “cyclical” explanations for the sharp decline in employment during the recession. One strand of this work studies the role of the negative shocks to household balance sheets and bank balance sheets that arose from the recession. This decline accelerated . . .

We investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Acts dependent coverage mandate on insurance premiums. The expansion of dependent coverage under the ACA allows young adults to remain on their parents private health insurance plans until the age of 26. We find that the mandate has led to a 2.52.8 percent increase in premiums for health insurance plans that cover children, relative to single-coverage plans. We are able to conclude that employers did not pass on the entire premium increase to employees through higher required plan contributions.

I examine the impact of the Great Depression on marriage outcomes and find that marriage rates and local economic conditions are positively correlated. Specifically, poor labor market opportunities for men negatively impact marriage. Conversely, there is some evidence that poor female labor markets actually increase marriage in the period. While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods.

Strengths Connecticut has inherent economic strengths. It is an advanced state economy with a per capita Gross State Product that is 31% higher than the U.S. average and one of the highest in the nation. It has a highly educated workforce; 39.6 percent persons between the ages of 25 and 60 have a bachelor’s degree or higher and ranks second to Massachusetts. 21 percent of Connecticut’s workforce is employed in the high-productivity, high-earnings knowledge-based industries, where Connecticut’s workers annual earnings average $105,000 in 2013. (19 percent of the U.S. workforce is in knowledge-based industries; the figure is 25 percent for Massachusetts. The comparable earnings figure in these same industries for the U.S. overall is $77,000.) Knowledge industries are located throughout the MSAs in Connecticut. All three of Connecticut’s MSAs have about 21 percent of their employment in knowledge-based industries. Since 2012 the Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford MSA has had a higher employment growth rate for knowledge-based industries than the other two MSAs in Connecticut. The high earnings industries also have a large multiplier and create as many as five local service jobs for each high earning job. Moretti (2010). At the same time, Connecticut has a diverse economy, and with exceptions, its economy is structured like New York and Massachusetts.

Las oportunidades educativas - el acceso a la enseñanza de alta calidad- son un aspecto crítico de la movilidad social y de la integración social en los Estados Unidos. Este informe de política ofrece un retrato demográfico de los niños con ascendencia centroamericana enfocándose en sus oportunidades educativas. Se describen los logros educativos, así como algunas de las condiciones institucionales y las circunstancias familiares asociadas a las oportunidades educativas. Cerca de 1.7 millones de niños (de 0 a 17 años) vivían en los Estados Unidos en 2011. Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras son los orígenes con mayor representación dentro de este grupo. Si bien las familias centroamericanas se asientan a lo largo de todos los Estados Unidos, California, Texas, y Florida son los principales estados de acogida de esta población. La mayoría de los niños de origen centroamericano han nacido en Estados Unidos (86%), y viven en hogares de inmigrantes con uno o más padres nacidos en el extranjero (82%). Los niños de este origen son más propensos a tener un padre indocumentado (40%) que el resto de sus pares latinos. El tener un padre indocumentado se asocia con menos oportunidades educativas; por ejemplo, a menor educación de los padres, mayor pobreza y menores tasas de cobertura de asistencia sanitaria. En general, los niños de origen salvadoreño, guatemalteco y hondureño, tienen menores oportunidades de recibir una educación de calidad que el resto de centroamericanos. Estas diferencias se asocian con las desigualdades sociales pre-existentes dentro de las comunidades de origen, con la selectividad de los migrantes frente a los no migrantes en los países de origen, y con las desigualdades estructurales del sistema escolar de Estados Unidos. La integración de los niños de origen centroamericano en Estados Unidos, y la de los niños inmigrantes de otros orígenes latinos, es un proceso intergeneracional. Sin embargo, muchos niños de la tercera generación con ascendencia centroamericana aún no se encuentran integrados. La pobreza, el hacinamiento, y las bajas tasas de cobertura de asistencia sanitaria son semejantes entre los inmigrantes documentados y aquellos con padres nacidos en Estados Unidos. Concluimos con cuatro recomendaciones de política para mejorar las oportunidades educativas de los niños de origen centroamericanos.

In this paper we propose and quantify a channel by which income inequality may yield a rise in growth through its effects on differential fertility. The conventional wisdom has been that, given the historically negative relationship between income and fertility, increasing inequality will tend to result in relatively more children being born to poorer households, and thus receiving less education. However, since 1980 there has been a stark rise in inequality with a simultaneous flattening of the relationship between fertility and income. We reconcile standard models with the empirical reality by arguing that greater inequality lowers the effective cost of childcare and home good substitutes for high income mothers. By outsourcing much of home production, high income women can raise fertility rates without sacrificing their childrens educational attainment. The net result is for the subsequent generation to have, on average, higher human capital, and therefore a greater standard of living.