This paper points to a sibsize revolution that occurred among children in lower status families in the United States in the closing decades of the twentieth century. It interprets that revolution as a source of social convergence in childrens family contexts that ran counter to trends towards social divergence caused by change in family structure and has implications for how we understand the impact of family change on social inequality. Using micro-data from the Census of Population and Current Population Survey, the paper presents new estimates of differentials in sibsize and family structure by race and maternal education in the United States for the period 1940-2012. The estimates suggest that as the share of lower status children living in mother-headed families rose in the 1970s and 1980s, their average sibsize declined. The paper discusses some substantive and methodological challenges for existing scholarship arising from these cross-cutting movements and points to questions for future research.

Several empirical studies have estimated a negative relationship between the share of an area's elderly population and per-pupil education spending. These findings have often been interpreted as evidence that an aging population has hindered the growth in per-pupil expenditures. We offer a reinterpretation of these oft-cited estimates and demonstrate that the population has aged in a way not reflected in these earlier studies empirical designs. After fully accounting for actual U.S. population trends, we demonstrate that a rise in the elderly share of the population has resulted in a rise in per-pupil education spending, not a decline.

Fear of falling (FoF) has predicted functional decline; however, few studies have examined the temporal impact of FoF on functional recovery after hip fracture. We hypothesized that greater FoF would be associated with worse changes in physical functioning during hip fracture recovery. Data come from the Baltimore Hip Studies 4th cohort (1998-2004), a study of 180 community-dwelling women aged 65+ with incident hip fractures enrolled in a RCT of an in-home exercise intervention. Interviewer-administered assessments captured information on FoF (no FoF vs. moderate FoF vs. high FoF) and variables selected a priori at 2 months follow-up (i.e., study baseline). Physical function assessments (Lower Extremity Gain Scale; LEGS; 0-36) occurred at 2, 6 and 12 months. Linear mixed effects models estimated the association between FoF and changes in physical functioning controlling for age, cognition, Charlson comorbidity index and intervention group (n=156). Crude mean LEGS scores at 2, 6 and 12 months were 22.4, 26.0 and 30.4, respectively. Adjusted LEGS scores were significantly worse in patients with high FoF compared to those with no FoF at 2 months (20.7 vs 24.1; p=0.003). Trajectory results indicated that patients with high FoF experienced clinically significant (2+ unit Δ LEGS) greater improvements in their LEGS scores compared to those with no FoF: adjusted mean changes were 9.2 [7.5, 10.8] versus 6.1 [4.1, 8.1] (p=0.03). Despite hip fracture patients experiencing FoF during the immediate post fracture period; ultimately, those with high FoF still achieved similar levels of functional recovery compared to the other groups.

Researchers have documented widening educational gradients in mortality in the United States since the 1970s. While smoking has been proposed as a key explanation for this trend, no prior study has quantified the contribution of smoking to increasing education gaps in longevity. We estimate the contribution of smoking to educational gradients in life expectancy using data on white men and women ages 50 and older from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (N = 283,430; 68,644 deaths) and the National Health Interview Survey (N = 584,811; 127,226 deaths) in five periods covering the 1980s to 2006. In each period, smoking makes an important contribution to education gaps in longevity for white men and women. Smoking accounts for half the increase in the gap for white women but does not explain the widening gap for white men in the most recent period. Addressing greater initiation and continued smoking among the less educated may reduce mortality inequalities.

Objectives. We assessed the impact of unemployment benefit programs on the health of the unemployed. Methods. We linked US state law data on maximum allowable unemployment benefit levels between 1985 and 2008 to individual self-rated health for heads of households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and implemented state and year fixed-effect models. Results. Unemployment was associated with increased risk of reporting poor health among men in both linear probability (b=0.0794; 95% confidence interval [CI]=0.0623, 0.0965) and logistic models (odds ratio=2.777; 95% CI=2.294, 3.362), but this effect is lower when the generosity of state unemployment benefits is high (b for interaction between unemployment and benefits=0.124; 95% CI=0.197, 0.0523). A 63% increase in benefits completely offsets the impact of unemployment on self-reported health. Conclusions. Results suggest that unemployment benefits may significantly alleviate the adverse health effects of unemployment among men. Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302253

This article examines the concentration of Asian Americans in the STEM and health-care fields of study and occupations by generation, ethnic group and gender, compared to white Americans, based on the 200911 American Community Surveys. By making a generational comparison, it suggests that the selective migration of Asian immigrants is the most important factor to their concentration in these fields of study and occupations. Asian immigrants as a whole are highly selective in these fields of study and occupations, compared to white Americans, with some Asian groups showing much higher levels of concentration. While younger-generation Asian groups whose immigrant generations have an extremely high concentration have experienced significant reductions in STEM, the other groups have experienced moderate or significant increases. All younger-generation Asian groups apart from Filipino have significantly or moderately higher levels of representation in non-nurse health-care occupations than their immigrant counterparts.

The gender wage gap is common in Latin America and the Caribbean countries where women have been getting more years of education than men. This research analyzes the case of the Dominican Republic and presents evidences of the gender wage gap using econometric models with data from the Central Bank of Dominican Republic. Results show that there exists a gender wage gap in the Dominican Republic with discrimination against women and key determinants of wage are age, education, type of occupation, marital status and number of children. The ordered logit model shows that the log-odds of belonging to a high wage group is lower by 1.12 for women in this country. Higher (college) education narrows the degree of the gender wage gap, the hourly wage for college educated women is 8% less than the hourly wage for college educated men, compared with 24-32% less in other levels of education groups. Thus public policies should focus on facilitating access to higher (college) education for women.

Cities have always been important centers of growth throughout history. Various economics papers have looked into the factors that contribute to growth of a city. However, very little is known on the economic spillovers a city creates to its neighboring areas. In this paper, I look at the effect of the growth of different socio-economic factors of a city on its surrounding non-city counties. The results show that the impact of a city on its surrounding is mainly negative although increases in income of a city leads to a slight increase in income of the neighboring non-city counties, increases in human capital of a city and the proximity of a city near a water-body can reduce the income of a neighboring non-city county.

The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter. Chapter 2 is a survey of the literature on crime and labour markets. In that chapter, I discuss the seminal work that has been undertaken in that field of research and discuss the advances in the theoretical and empirical literature. Reviewing the literature, I identify open research questions. Some of these questions are addressed in subsequent chapters of this dissertation. Chapter 3 builds on the literature which provides evidence of long-term consequences for workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns. Using a range of data sources from the U.S. and UK, we demonstrate a substantial long-run effect of recessions on criminal behaviour: We find that youth who enter the labour market during recessions are significantly more likely to become criminal than those who graduate into a stronger labour market. Chapter 4 investigates the contemporaneous relationship between unemployment and crime in the context of increasing unemployment durations in the U.S. I employ quasi-experimental estimation techniques to study the impact of temporary unemployment benefit extensions on crime, and to establish the causal link between unemployment, unemployment durations and crime. The results support the hypothesis that the relationship between unemployment and crime depends on the duration of unemployment. Chapter 5 studies the impact of the stop-and-frisk policy in New York City as a policy that explicitly aims at crime deterrence. Using a range of data sources and quasi-experimental estimation techniques, we estimate the overall impact of the policy on crime in New York City. Further, we provide evidence that supports the hypothesis of racial bias and in particular claims that Afro-Americans face a disproportional probability of a stop-and-frisk encounter. Yet, our estimations suggest that there is no knock-on effect on crime. Chapter 6 is a concluding chapter.

Smoking and obesity are two leading risk factors that account for the current US lags in advances in health and longevity compared to other wealthy nations. This dissertation consists of three independent studies of the impacts of smoking and obesity on population health outcomes among older adults in the United States. The first study estimates the effects of the recent smoking decline on future all-cause mortality, based on the association observed between cohort smoking pattern and cohort death rates from lung cancer. We find that change in smoking is expected to have a large effect on U.S. mortality. However, compared to men, women are expected to have smaller increase in future life expectancy, because of their lagged decline in smoking. The second study extends the first one and estimates the joint effects of smoking and obesity on both mortality and disability. A multistate lifetable approach is applied to estimate the transition rates between different health states, which are in turn projected up to 2040 using a modified Lee-Carter model that incorporates cohort histories of smoking and obesity. The results indicate men and women both are expected to experience compression of disability, with increasing proportions of their future gain in life expectancy likely to be disability free. Nevertheless, due to gender difference in smoking history and in response to obesity, men will likely to have an advantage over women in health improvement in the next three decades. The third study investigates the direct effects of both obesity and weight change on mortality. A dynamic causal model is applied to adjust for reverse causality that is attributable to illness-associated and smoking-associated weight loss in a time-dependent fashion, a problem that prior studies often fail to adequately handle. This study demonstrates that both the confounding by illness and by smoking lead to overestimates of the effects of being underweight and of weight loss, but underestimates the effect of being obese. Moreover, not only being underweight or severe obese, but also sharp weight fluctuations are associated with excess mortality risk.

This article explores whether two popular policy initiatives are compatible or conflicting strategies for enhancing educational equality in diverse large urban centers. These two initiatives are (1) charter school expansion and (2) improvement of resource equity across urban public school systems through policies often referred to as weighted student funding formulas. In this article, we focus on New York and Houston, two cities where districts have adopted initiatives to improve equity of the distribution of school site funding and have concurrently experienced significant expansion of charter schooling. We find that charter schools have the tendency to amplify student population differences across schools by disability, language, and low income status, and that charter schools’ access to financial resources varies widely. Nevertheless, we find that in very large urban districts like New York City, where charter market share remains small, the overall effects of charters on system-wide inequity remain small.

The United States government devotes about $40 billion each year to means-tested housing programs, plus another $6 billion or so in tax expenditures on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). What exactly do we spend this money on, why, and what does it accomplish? We focus on these questions. We begin by reviewing the history of low-income housing programs in the U.S., and then summarize the characteristics of participants in means-tested housing programs and how programs have changed over time. We consider important conceptual issues surrounding the design of and rationale for means-tested housing programs in the U.S. and review existing empirical evidence, which is limited in important ways. Finally, we conclude with thoughts about the most pressing questions that might be addressed in future research in this area.

In the US, income equality has been an issue discussed throughout the years. Some say the gap between the rich and the poor is steadily growing with racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately occupying the poorer categories. Empirical analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics March 2013 Current Population Survey (CPS) reveals that a statistically significant gap in hourly wages exists between Blacks and Hispanics in comparison to Whites. This paper statistically investigated the relationship between race and wages controlling for variables such as age, children, citizenship, education, gender, location type, and marital status. Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition was used to further investigate which components contributed to the gap in income and how those components varied across Blacks and Hispanics in comparison to Whites. Results indicated that for Blacks, the pure group effect contributed more heavily towards the wage differential while for Hispanics, the endowment effect was the greatest contributor. This indicates that to tackle wage inequality a possible solution may be to diversify policy recommendations for both groups with an emphasis on policies that target systemic discrimination for Blacks and market-valued skills for Hispanics.

The Rouge River watershed, a highly urbanized watershed in southeast Michigan, has substantial impervious surface coverage, relatively high population density, and modified stream network (e.g., stream straightening and burial, dams, and underground retention). The number of stream channels and order decreases, increasing flooding, reducing water quality, and decreasing aquatic species. This study defines, identifies, and describes the progression of the geographic pattern of urban stream desertsdefined as those areas within a watershed that exhibit no surface stream channels due to the effects of human development and population growth. Urban stream deserts are identified and characterized using three data sets: (1) historical aerial imagery, (2) historical census boundary and tables, and (3) stream network data. Flowlines digitized off aerial photos from 1949 are compared against 2013 flowlines to identify areas of the watershed now devoid of stream channels. In the Rouge River watershed, stream density has decreased since 1949, which coincides with a rapid population increase and systematic burial of urban streams. Urban stream deserts in the Rouge River watershed constitute 23 percent of the watershed area, but these areas included as much as 66 percent of the watershed population in 1950 (as the urban stream deserts were developing) and dropped to 41 percent in 2010. This conceptual model of urban stream deserts is applicable to many urban and industrialized areas that have replaced stream channels with infrastructure during periods of economic growth, only to experience depopulation, aging infrastructure, and, as a result, degraded, modified, or altogether buried stream networks.

In the current digital age, data are everywhere and are continually being created, collected and otherwise captured by a range of users for a variety of applications. Curating digital content is a growing concern both for business users and academic researchers. Selecting, collecting, preserving and archiving digital assets, especially research data sets, are important steps in the research life cycle and can help expand the boundaries of research by allowing data to be reused. Creating research data sets often starts with selecting input data sources; in this age of new or "big" data, that choice set keeps expanding, thereby making it more difficult and time consuming to discover and understand the vast data landscape when beginning an empirical research project. This paper proposes an approach to make finding and learning about data easier and less time-consuming for researchers. While cognizant of the role of digital curation for research data sets, we focus on the traditional "museum" definition of curation to outline how data-oriented content curation can support research. The process of selecting, evaluating and presenting information about potential data inputs can help researchers more easily understand how certain data sets are used and better determine which data sources might be fit for their purposes. Although the paper draws on examples from economics citing U.S. data, the techniques could be used across disciplines and countries.

Public employee compensation should be set at the level necessary to attract and retain required employees. Appropriate compensation levels for government employees can be approximated by analyzing how workers with similar levels of education, experience and other earningsrelated attributes are paid in the private sector. • Rising budgetary costs for public employee pensions and health programs have caused public employee compensation to be a matter of policy debate and public concern. Connecticut is ranked second in the nation for the ratio of combined public debt and unfunded pension and retiree health liabilities to state GDP. The Connecticut State Employee Retirement System (SERS) is among the most-poorly funded pension plans in the country. This study compares the salaries and benefits of . . .

What made a motet appropriate for performance on a particular occasion in the sixteenth century? Previous studies have demonstrated that motets performed on a given day generally drew their texts from the liturgy of that day. Yet many of the eighty-five motets assigned to the Sundays and major feasts of the year in Johannes Rühling's Tabulaturbuch (1583) do not. What mattered to this Lutheran organist was not a motet text's previous liturgical association but its ability to gloss—sometimes in surprising ways—the Gospel or Epistle lesson of the day. His approach has strong parallels in a tradition of Lutheran preaching grounded in exegesis of the assigned lessons. The same exegetical approach figures, moreover, in Catholic use of the motet, exemplified both in musical sources, such as Andreas Pevernage's Cantiones sacrae (1578 and 1602), and in performances recorded in the diaries of the Sistine Chapel.

The challenges usually associated with an ageing population are the financial burdens of pensions and on health services. However, there are equally important daily considerations, such as housing conditions, access to public services and the physical and social environment in which older persons live. Studies on this subject have shown that safety at home can protect health by reducing the number of accidents and lowering stress, which can add to quality of life at any age. Accordingly, this article explores aspects of housing and access to public services for the older population in Latin America. We selected Latin American countries that are at intermediate or advanced stages of the demographic transition, and Spain, which is advanced in the demographic transition and shares cultural roots with some of the countries selected.

Paper for a statistics class reproducing an earlier study on the effects of working in the US versus Mexico for Mexican Immigrants living in the border regions.

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that educational achievement strongly predicts economic growth across U.S. states over the past four decades. Based on projections from our growth models, we show the enormous scope for state economic development through improving the quality of schools. While we consider the impact for each state of a range of educational reforms, an improvement that moves each state to the best-performing state would in the aggregate yield a present value of long-run economic gains of over four times current GDP.