Objectives: This research contributes to the immigrant health paradox debate by testing the hypothesis that older age at migration is associated with the increased risk of poor health in later life. Method: Using the 19922008 Health and Retirement Study, I construct linear random-intercept models to estimate self-rated health (SRH) trajectories after age 50 for the native and foreign born by age at migration. Results: At age 50, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic foreign born report better SRH compared with their native-born counterparts, net of race, gender, and education. Non-Hispanic foreign born who migrated after age 35 and Hispanic foreign born who migrated after age 18, however, experience steeper decline in SRH after age 50, which results in a health disadvantage vis--vis the native born in old age. Education has a smaller protective effect on SRH for the foreign born, especially those who migrated as adults. Discussion: Age at migration is an important factor for understanding health status of older immigrants. Steeper health decline in later life of the foreign born who migrated in advanced ages may be related to longer exposure to unfavorable conditions in home countries and limited opportunities for incorporation in the United States.

Spousal exemptions from rape prosecution persist in many US states criminal codes thereby compromising womens rights to bodily self-control and personhood. Power resources theorywhich emphasizes that given limited resources, groups act strategically to achieve goalsand gender stratification perspectives guided an event history analysis of the likelihood of marital rape criminalization in US states between 1978 and 2007. Findings suggest criminalization is influenced by the expected marginal benefit of law reform, womens relative socioeconomic resources, and racial heterogeneity. This research highlights the importance of considering how existing laws, group resources, and intersecting social cleavages influence the expansion of womens rights.

The journey between work and home plays an important role in daily time use, acting as both a fixed time cost of labor force participation and as a constraint on time for other activities. Data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) offer the opportunity to examine commuting behavior and its relationship to demographics, labor market characteristics, and the amount of time spent on other activities. Previous analyses have been complicated by the difficulties of obtaining commuting time measures from the ATUS. Travel information can be difficult to interpret in the ATUS, and many commuting trips are likely misclassified using stock measures of work-related travel. To address this shortcoming, I review the strategies of previous researchers to reclassify travel. After surveying possible methodologies, I focus on applying to the ATUS a methodology applied to the National Household Transportation Survey (NHTS). Detailed time information in the NHTS allows me to compare both aggregate commuting measures and the timing of commuting in the two surveys. I further extend the analysis to compare to journey-to-work information in another commonly used dataset, the American Community Survey. These comparisons and the methodology provided serve to enable and validate further analysis of commuting behavior using the ATUS, leveraging the advantages of this dataset.

Large, recent migration streams from the non-Hispanic Caribbean islands and Africa have increased the share of U.S. blacks born outside of the U.S. Little is known about health patterns in these foreign-born populations. The purpose of this study is to compare obesity levels among self-identified U.S. blacks across birth regions and examine potential explanations for subgroup differences.

In light of several emergent trends among Black women in the U.S., including rising levels of college degree attainment, immigration, and household headship, scholars have begun to more thoroughly explore the factors impacting Black women’s labor market outcomes (e.g., employment status, earnings, and occupational prestige). Focusing on the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010, this dissertation applies theories of social and cultural capital, intersectionality, and social mobility to the examination of Black women’s labor market trajectories according to their nativity (U.S.- vs. foreign-born status) and level of educational attainment (college-educated vs. non-college-educated). Additionally, this dissertation examines recent national data to determine which independent variables predict earnings for full-time Black women workers. Using data from the Minnesota Population Center’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of the United States Census Bureau’s 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, and 2010-2012 American Community Survey (ACS), this study employs synthetic cohort analysis and multiple regression analyses to identify factors impacting labor market outcomes for Black women in the United States. The findings of this research confirm the positive impact of several factors on labor market outcomes for Black women across time, including college education, foreign-born status, and employment in the public sector. Implications and policy recommendations are discussed.

This paper shows that attracting tradable jobs to a city has a bigger positive impact on employment in the non-tradable sector in the same city when the unemployment rate is higher. Therefore it is efficient to stimulate firms in the tradable sector to locate and/or expand in cities with relatively high unemployment rate. This policy would also reduce disparity between cities. Finally the jobs created in the non-tradable sector due to this local multiplier effect from the tradable sector will employ relatively more current inhabitants in cities with a high unemployment rate, thus making this policy more attractive for local policy makers as well. A simple model illustrates the effect of a demand shock on employment in the non-tradable sector of a city. Empirically I consider the effect of demand from workers in the tradable sector on employment in the non-tradable sector in the same city using U.S. census data from 1980 to 2000. I find that 100 additional jobs in the tradable sector will increase employment in the non-tradable sector in the same city by employing 81 current residents and employing 28 workers that move to the city from other regions. I find that the size of this local employment multiplier depends on the local unemployment rate. Specifically, the multiplier for current residents increases, which drives the overall effect, but the multiplier for migrants decreases.

Are cyclists different from those who do not cycle in terms of individual and neighborhood characteristics? This article draws on a study of over 700 adults in three groups: those who had cycled in the past week, in the past 2 years, and non-cyclists. It examines their body mass index (BMI), physical activity, sociodemographics, environmental perceptions, and geographic information system (GIS)-measured neighborhood features. Those who cycled occasionally lived in similar environments to frequent cyclists but perceived some aspects differently. Those who cycled more demonstrated characteristics generally thought to indicate good health, but they did not perceive themselves as healthier.

Honduras is Central America’s second-largest country with a population of more than 8 million and a land area of about 112,000 square kilometers. The 20th century witnessed a profound economic transformation and modernization in Honduras. Honduras’ persistent poverty is the result of long-term low per capita growth and high inequality, perpetuated by the country’s high vulnerability to shocks. First, over the past 40 years the country has experienced modest growth rates marked by considerable volatility. Second, high levels of inequality have weakened the ability for growth to reduce poverty by limiting the extent to which a large segment of the population is able to fully access physical and human capital. Third, a large share of the population is vulnerable and exposed to regular shocks - both large and small which has exacerbated poverty by destroying or slowing asset accumulation. This systematic country diagnostic (SCD) explores the drivers of these development outcomes in Honduras, and reflects on the policy priorities that should underlie a development strategy focused on eradicating poverty and boosting shared prosperity. After identifying a number of critical factors affecting the country’s development outcomes, the SCD concludes that there is a need for a comprehensive agenda that tackles simultaneously the problems that have kept the country in a low development equilibrium for many decades, as well as emerging challenges that have the potential not only to prevent progress but also worsen the current situation. The SCD also argues that the policy agenda needs to be ambitious and move away from marginal interventions in order to move Honduras from a situation where its economic potentials are just potentials to another where they become actuals.

The purpose of this study is to see if labor parity between Asian women and native born white women has been achieved. To achieve this, a multivariable linear regression model is used to estimate the wage differentials between these two groups. The dependent variable in the analysis is wage and salary income. The independent variables include race, birthplace (nativity), education (level of attainment), family status, occupation, and English proficiency. Age is used as a control variable. The study found native born Asian women earn more than native born white women. Foreign born Filipino and Southeast Asian women earn more than native born white women. Foreign born Japanese and Asian Indian women earn less than native born white women.

Since Coleman (1966), many have questioned whether school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K12 education spending in US history. To study the effect of these school-finance-reform-induced changes in school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, as an exogenous shifter of school spending and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms, depending on place and year of birth. Event-study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all twelve years of public school leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25 percent higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty; effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families. Exogenous spending increases were associated with sizable improvements in measured school quality, including reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries, and longer school years.

Staying in school and graduating from high school is vital to young people's life chances. Research shows that completing high school not only increases lifetime earnings and the odds of successful experiences with college and career, but also decreases involvement with the criminal justice system (Bailey and Dynarski 2011; Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah 2013; Natsuaki, Ge, and Wenk 2008). In recent years, much of the policy conversation around mitigating the dropout crisis, particularly for low-income communities of color, has focused on disconnected youth, defined as young people who are not in school and not working (Shore and Shore 2009). However, another group of teens often falls under the radar: youth who are working and not in school.

Return migrants often come from either the top or bottom part of the foreign-born income distribution, leading to a U-shaped pattern of self-selection. A common explanation for the U-shape is that the low-earners return home because they fail in the labor market, while the high-earners return home because they quickly hit savings targets. However, a simple model demonstrates that the self-selection of return migrants is U-shaped if the costs of migration are higher for low-skilled individuals. I test this model using data on migrants' intentions to return home, which are formed prior to potentially failing in the labor market. In addition to proposing that this model explains the U-shape found in many contemporary data sets, I show that the U-shape exists for a sample of migrants entering Ellis Island during the early 20th century.

Over the past decade, the geography of poverty in the United States has seen a dramatic change, as now more Americans live below the poverty line in suburban areas than in our nation’s cities (Kneebone and Berube 2013, 3). This transformation is especially evident in the Bay Area, where alongside rising rent prices in San Francisco and Oakland, low income individuals have moved further into the suburbs in search of affordable housing. In fact, of all locations in the Bay Area, suburban areas have seen the greatest percentage increase of people living in poverty over the past decade (Soursourian 2012). The suburban community of Vallejo, located roughly 40 miles north of San Francisco on the San Pablo Bay, is a prime example of the new reality of suburban poverty. Troubled by the closing of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1996 and the city’s declaration of Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2008, Vallejo has maintained one of the highest poverty rates of all Bay Area suburbs. More than 12% of households in Vallejo live beneath the poverty line. Yet this figure still masks the inequalities that exist within Vallejo itself, under-representing the extent of poverty some neighborhoods in the city are experiencing.

I study the cultural transmission of fertility preferences among second generation immigrant women observed in U.S. Censuses from 1910 to 1970. As hypothesized by [Bisin & Verdier, 2001], the transmission of preferences can be vertical or horizontal. Using a unique source documenting the variation in fertility behavior in Europe before and after the first demographic transition (1830-1970), I unpack the influence of parents (measured by source-country fertility at the time of departure from Europe) versus the influence of peers (measured by fertility of the same-age cohorts living in the source country and transmitted by same-age recent immigrants). I find that the transmission mechanism is crucially affected by the number of foreign born immigrant peers living in the same MSA. On one hand, the vertical channel of transmission is stronger in places where there are few newly arrived foreign born immigrant couples from the same source countries. On the other hand, fertility choices of second generation women are strongly correlated with marital fertility choices measured over peer cohorts in the source countries whenever they live in MSAs densely populated by recently arrived immigrants

After generations of loyalty, Southern whites left the Democratic party en masse in the second half of the twentieth century. To what extent did Democrats' 1960s Civil Rights initiatives trigger this exodus, versus Southern economic development, rising political polarization or other trends that made the party unattractive to Southern whites? The lack of data on racial attitudes and political preferences spanning the 1960s Civil Rights era has hampered research on this central question of American political economy. We uncover and employ such data, drawn from Gallup surveys dating back to 1958. From 1958 to 1961, conservative racial views strongly predict Democratic identification among Southern whites, a correlation that disappears after President Kennedy introduces sweeping Civil Rights legislation in 1963. We find that defection among racially conservative whites explains all (three-fourths) of the decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980 (2000). We offer corroborating quantitative analysisdrawn from sources such as Gallup questions on presidential approval and hypothetical presidential match-ups as well as textual analysis of newspapersfor the central role of racial views in explaining white Southern dealignment from the Democrats as far back as the 1940s.

The evolution of personal income distribution (PID) in four countries: Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA follows a unique trajectory. We have revealed precise match in the shape of two age-dependent features of the PID: mean income and the portion of people with the highest incomes (2 to 5% of the working age population). Because of the U.S. economic superiority, as expressed by real GDP per head, the curves of mean income and the portion of rich people currently observed in three chasing countries one-to-one reproduce the curves measured in the USA 15 to 25 years before. This result of cross country comparison implies that the driving force behind the PID evolution is the same in four studied countries. Our parsimonious microeconomic model, which links the change in PID only with one exogenous parameter - real GDP per capita, accurately predicts all studied features for the U.S. This study proves that our quantitative model, based on one first-order differential equation, is universal. For example, new observations in Canada, New Zealand, and the UK confirm our previous finding that the age of maximum mean income is defined by the root-square dependence on real GDP per capita.

Income inequality is a critical issue in both political and public debate. Educational attainment is a key causal factor of continuing inequality, since it influences human capital accumulation and, as a consequence, the unequal distribution of earnings. Educational inequality displays a racial dimension that is particularly persistent and difficult to eradicate through policy measures. Its roots lie in the colonial institution of slave labor, which was widespread in the US and Latin America up until the 19th century. However, the influence of slavery differs significantly across countries and between regions.

With the changing demographics nationwide of Latinos moving from urban traditional settlements sites to non-traditional settlement sites such as Arkansas (Pew Hispanic Research Group, 2013; Smith, 2014; Smith and Furuseth, 2005) Arkansas is now part of the new south or El Nuevo South (Smith and Furuseth, 2005). Although Arkansas is a non-traditional receiving state it is one of the states with the largest growing Latino population (Pew Hispanic Research Group, 2013). Northwest Arkansas in particular has the largest concentration of Latinos to date with the area being host to some of the largest companies in the United States, such as Wal-mart, Tyson Chicken, and JB Hunt. The focus of this study was to evaluate how the K-20 public institutions of interest in an understudied and non-traditional settlement site have responded to the Latino students and their families. By looking at an array of data, in particular, enrollment and graduation rates, district and state policies, educational services and resources, and informant interviews were collected in an attempt to ascertain how they are meeting the academic needs of their Latino students. The researcher found that schools are creating and implementing programs and services for their Latino and ELL students. The districts in question are graduating Latino students at a higher rate than the national average. The two higher education institutions are creating and implementing services and resources for the K-12 community with a focus on 5-12. The areas public university provides coursework and programs at the higher education level for undergraduates as well as students studying to be educators. Informant interviews with local educators who provide instruction, resources, services and programs for Latino and ELL students provide a narrative to the documented data.

Somewhere between professional occupations and low-paid service occupations lay the group of workers known as middle-skilled. They are varying called trades workers, technicians, blue collar workers, or craft professionals. Here, I will refer to them as skilled technical workers. Compared to other groups, there is little research on skilled technical workers. Labor economists overwhelmingly focuses on workers at the highest and lower pay levels and typically distinguishes those with a bachelors degree from those with a high school diploma. The limited research may partly be the result of government data collection. For example, the two largest and most regular surveys of individualsthe Census Bureaus American Community Surveys and Current Population Surveysdo not ask workers about their informal (or non-degree yielding) training, nor do they ask people about their field of study for two-year or lower levels of post-secondary education, even as they do collect this information for bachelors degree fields. Informal training and sub-bachelors level higher education are the two most common pathways to a skilled technical career.