Little research examines lack of health insurance among elderly Black immigrants in the US. We use data from the 2008 American Community Survey to describe variation in insurance coverage and conduct multivariate logistic regression analyses of uninsurance. Among elderly Blacks, 1.7 % of the US-born were uninsured, compared to 8.4 % of the Latin American and Caribbean-born, 23.2 % of the African-born, and 9.3 % of those born in other regions. In multivariate models, relative to the US-born, the odds of being uninsured were significantly higher among each immigrant group. Among immigrants, the odds of being uninsured were 3.80 times higher among African-born than Latin American and Caribbean-born immigrants net of demographic and socioeconomic controls. This difference was explained by the inclusion of either year of immigration or length of residence. Relative to Latin America and Caribbean-born immigrants, the odds of being uninsured were significantly higher among immigrants from other regions only in the model that included the immigration-related variables. This suppression effect was evident when either length of residence or citizenship was controlled. Recently-arrived, elderly Black immigrants fall through the cracks of insurance coverage. Results are discussed in relation to public and private safety net options.

This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.

Wide spread urban development and its associated conversion of natural and agricultural lands to land use types dominated by impervious surfaces such as motorways, car parks, and structures has had and continues to have significant impacts on drainage basin hydrology and fluvial ecosystems. As a drainage basin becomes increasingly developed, the ratio of basin discharge in response to rainfall events increases, leading to a greater frequency and intensity of flood events. The purpose of this study was to develop a population density-based model to forecast discharge-precipitation ratios for drainage basins undergoing changes in degree of urbanization. This model, with its use of population density as an indicator for level of urbanization, relates the impacts of human-induced landscape modification on surface hydrology from a planning perspective and in a context that is aimed to resonate with a broader audience. This study examined this relationship for 18 Midwestern drainage basins. The discharge- precipitation ratios of warm-season large rainstorm events of drainage basins for the time period between 1948 and 2014 were related to the population densities of the respective basins at the time of the event. Rainfall events greater than or equal to 5.1 cm occurring within a 48-hour period over the basin from April 1st through October 31st were defined as warm-season large rainstorms. As expected, the study indicated no significant changes in the discharge- precipitation ratios for rural drainage basins, however there were significant increases in the ratio of discharge to precipitation for the six urban drainage basins. A non-linear, positive relationship was found between discharge-precipitation ratios of large rainfall events and population density in the urban basins. This resulting model demonstrates to what degree planners may expect variations in the level of development to impact drainage basin hydrology and provide them with information to consider while implementing drainage system designs, flood management policies, green infrastructure, and building code.

Perhaps no city in the United States has a longer and more vibrant history of racial conflict than Detroit. It is the only city where federal troops have been dispatched to the streets four times to put down racial bloodshed. By the 1990s, Detroit was the quintessential Chocolate City-Vanilla Suburbs metropolis. In 2013, Detroit became the largest city to enter bankruptcy. It is an oversimplification and inaccurate to argue that racial conflict and segregation caused the bankruptcy of Detroit. But racial issues were deeply intertwined with fundamental population shifts and employment changes that together diminished the tax base of the city. Consideration is also given to the role continuing racial disparity will play in the future of Detroit after bankruptcy.

Realistic acting surrounds us on television, movies and on stages. It is the dominant form of play seen in Western culture, and yet we do not have a psychology of how children and adults understand the dual nature of actingthe actor and his/her character. In a two studies, we investigated how adults and children understand the personality, skills, emotional states and physical characteristics of actors while they portray characters, and if they confuse actors with their characters. We explored when children develop the capacity to distinguish actors from the characteristics they portray and how and when adults continue to confuse actors and characters. Children do not seem to understand acting until at least five years old, when they begin to distinguish how and when traits transfer. Adults too judge that states and traits transfer, but distinguish between different kinds of characteristics in their judgments.

Do banks matter for growth, and if so, how? This paper examines the effects of national banks in the United States from 1870 to 1900. I use the discontinuity in entry caused by a large minimum size requirement to identify the effects of banking. For the counties on the margin between getting a bank and not, gaining a bank increased production per person by 10%. National banks in rural areas improved agriculture over manufacturing, moving counties toward geographic comparative advantage. Since these banks made few long-term loans, the evidence suggests that the provision of working capital and liquidity matters for growth.

This thesis consists of three papers studying the relationship between democratic reform, expenditure on sanitation public goods and mortality in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period decisions over spending on critical public goods such as water supply and sewer systems were made by locally elected town councils, leading to extensive variation in the level of spending across the country. This dissertation uses new historical data to examine the political factors determining that variation, and the consequences for mortality rates. The first substantive chapter describes the spread of government sanitation expenditure, and analyzes the factors that determined towns’ willingness to invest. The results show the importance of towns’ financial constraints, both in terms of the available tax base and access to borrowing, in limiting the level of expenditure. This suggests that greater involvement by Westminster could have been very effective in expediting sanitary investment. There is little evidence, however, that democratic reform was an important driver of greater expenditure. Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of extending voting rights to the poor on government public goods spending. A simple model predicts that the rich and the poor will desire lower levels of public goods expenditure than the middle class, and so extensions of the right to vote to the poor will be associated with lower spending. This prediction is tested using plausibly exogenous variation in the extent of the franchise. The results strongly support the theoretical prediction: expenditure increased following relatively small extensions of the franchise, but fell once more than approximately 50% of the adult male population held the right to vote. Chapter 4 tests whether the sanitary expenditure was effective in combating the high mortality rates following the Industrial Revolution. The results show that increases in urban expenditure on sanitation—water supply, sewer systems and streets—was extremely effective in reducing mortality from cholera and diarrhea.

Although it is an essential aspect of one of the most common forms of entertainment, psychologists know almost nothing about how children understand the act of portraying a character in a realistic mannerrealistic acting. Do children possess the sort of meta-theory of acting that adults possess? In two studies we find that, unlike adults, children between the ages of 35 do not think that a realistic actor is better at portraying a characteristic than a nonrealistic actor, nor do they prefer one to the other. As they develop, they come to understand that realistic acting is different from nonrealistic acting, but unlike adults, children think that a nonrealistic, pretense-like portrayal is more difficult to achieve than a realistic representation of an emotional or physical state. These findings show that childrens metarepresentational understanding of acting is relatively immature at age 5, and that their understanding of this specific domain of pretense lags behind their understanding of pretense in general.

This report explores how the state of Minnesotathe governors administration together with the Minnesota Legislaturecan partner with regional networks to foster economic growth and extend prosperity to greater numbers of Minnesotans. The trends and recommendations in this report emerged from a multiyear collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and regional partners throughout the state. The report sets out a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the challenges and opportunities confronting Minnesotas regionsfrom the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul metro to the regions in Greater Minnesota that anchor the states health care, manufacturing, and agricultural assets. It highlights new approaches the state of Minnesota can deploy to empower leaders and institutions in these regions to develop and execute solutions tailored to their communities. As regions are the building blocks of the state economy and the locus of opportunity for workers and families, the state of Minnesota must embrace an asset-based, regional approach to growth and opportunity if it is to nimbly adapt and prosper going forward.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review naturally gives rise for reflection upon how the demographic characteristics of the American workforce have dramatically changed. One of the most obvious examples is the structural increase in the presence of women in the labor force. Even in the past quarter of century, data from the 1990 and 2014 Current Population Survey (CPS) indicate that the growth rate in the number of women civilian workers ages 16 and above outpaced that for men (29.0 percent versus 21.4 percent).

Older American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) constitute a population that will grow substantially over the next 30 years. Such growth follows an increase over the previous decade that is nearly three times more than other races. Numbers of AI/ANs ages 65 and over will triple, and the oldest cohort (ages 85 and over) is projected to increase more than sevenfold by 2050. The socioeconomic and health coverage disparities that have historically characterized their lives remain, to a large extent, unresolved. This report outlines the demographics of this growing cohort and concludes with recommendations for coordinating programmatic resources to better serve it.

The U.S. is experiencing a new oil boom, threatened by the sharp decline of the price in 2014. How long does it take for the U.S. local labor markets to reach a new equilibrium after an oil shock hits? Are these adjustments symmetric during booms and busts, and what are their welfare consequences on the local population? In this project I estimate both the dynamic responses and the long-run (decennial) oil price elasticities of immigration, employment, earnings, and transfer payments at the Commuting Zone level between 1969 and 1999. Using Census micro-data I pin down the welfare incidence of the shocks by skill group, as well as the distributional effects on wages. Preliminary results show that oil rich markets benefit in terms of employment and experience large migration inflows during the boom. The impact of the 1980s bust is symmetric both in terms of jobs lost and average income decline, but it persists throughout the 1990s. The results complement the recent literature by providing the welfare effects of natural resources specialization.

Most California school employees in classified positions such as teacher assistants, childcare workers, janitors, and office clerks struggle to support their families with incomes that are often inadequate to pay for food, housing and health care. The median annual earnings of classified workers in 2012 was only $20,700, well below self-sufficiency standards.1 When schools across the Golden State close for summer vacation, happy children pour out of classrooms into the sun for the warm months. However, for many adults who work to keep the schools clean and the students fed, summer is a cruel time. . .

When communities are impacted by a natural disaster, damage to the local economy can keep the community in a state of crisis long after the disaster itself. Although this vulnerability has considerable implications for communities, it is unclear which organizations or entities have the responsibility and capacity to address the issue. Economic development and emergency management are often isolated from each other, resulting in emergency plans that do not serve the business community as well as they might otherwise, and economic development plans that do not address business needs related to disasters. One way to think about strengthening the local economy and reducing its vulnerability to disruption from hazards is through the lens of resilience, or the ability of a system to anticipate, absorb, recover from and adapt to stresses. This study explores the potential role of economic development plans in addressing the resilience of local economies to natural hazards. Through the evaluation of ten economic development plans from a three-county region and supporting interviews, this study analyzes how well economic development plans currently address economic resilience to hazards, and how they might address it in the future. The results indicate that economic development plans have an overall existing alignment with resilience principles that can be built upon both within the plans themselves and through supporting activities.

In this paper we present important correlations between immigration and labor market outcomes of native workers in the US. We use data on local labor markets, states and regions from the Census and American Community Survey over the period 1970-2010. We first look at simple correlations and then we use regression analysis with an increasing number of controls for observed and unobserved factors. We review the potential methods to separate the part of this correlation that captures the causal link from immigrants to native labor outcomes and we show estimates obtained with 2SLS method using the popular shift-share instrument. One fact emerging from all the specifications is that the net growth of immigrant labor has a zero to positive correlation with changes in native wages and native employment, in aggregate and by skill group. We briefly review the literature on the channels and the mechanisms that allow local economies to absorb immigrants with no negative (and possibly positive) impact on the labor demand for natives.

This paper provides evidence of local innovation spillovers, i.e. innovation by one firm fostering innovation by neighboring firms. First, I document that exogenous shocks to innovation by listed firms affect innovation by private firms in the same geographical area. I also find that such local innovation spillovers decline rapidly with distance. Second, I find that local innovation spillovers stem at least in part from knowledge diffusing locally through two channels: learning across local firms and inventors moving from their employer to both existing firms and newly started spin-outs. Finally, I study the two-way relationship between innovation spillovers and the availability of capital. I find that local innovation spillovers lead venture capital funds from outside the area to invest more in the local area, and that conversely capital availability amplifies local innovation spillovers.

Education is a crucial factor that determines labor market outcomes, especially for immigrants. This paper specifically examines the undergraduate major choice for Chinese immigrants and its relationship to their labor market outcome. Compared to other Asian groups and the mainstream society, Chinese immigrants are uniquelycongregated in business and science categories. The level of popularity to a major is positively related to their labor market outcome. This finding reveals the currentpremarket educational investment pattern for Chinese immigrants and adds to the existing literature by focusing on how detail education quality in terms of major relatesto labor market performance.

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital and skill using variation across U.S. counties in immigration-induced skill-mix changes between 1860 and 1930. We find that capital began as a q-complement for skilled and unskilled workers, and then dra- matically increased its relative complementary with skilled workers around 1890. Simulations of a parametric production function calibrated to our estimates imply the level of capital-skill complementarity after 1890 likely allowed the U.S. economy to absorb the large wave of less- skilled immigration with a modest decline in less-skilled relative wages. This would not have been possible under the older production technology.

Research shows that where you go to school makes little difference to future financial success or quality of life; personal qualities such as ambition, perseverance, and a sense of purpose are all more important. Kristin M. White has helped hundreds of parents and students look beyond the dream-school hype and focus on what's most important. Now, in It's the Student, Not the College, she shows how to avoid unrepayable debt and set yourself up to grow, excel, and enjoy yourself at any school. Instead of obsessing over GPA cutoffs and SAT scores, students will learn how to build a personal "Success Profile" by adopting the traits that help stellar students make the grade in school and life. Expensive, elite colleges have too much sway over the minds and bank accounts of students and parents. It's the Student, Not the College breaks that stranglehold and reveals the real secrets of success. Part one: The truth about college, selectivity, and success. Busting the elite-college mystique ; Examining the link between top colleges and success ; Realities of college life today -- Part two: The success profile-- what it is, and how to develop it. What is the success profile? ; Developing the success profile in high school ; When high school isn't enough: How to go above and beyond in developing the success profile ; Developing the success profile in college ; Putting the success profile to work: How to get a great job after (or during) college -- Part three: What you should consider when choosing a school. Useful criteria for selecting a college ; Finding a financial fit ; College in the future ; Myths and misunderstandings about college and admissions.