The study is devoted to analyzing the economic sustainability of the town of Amherst, MA. The city's top employer and core enterprise is the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with over 32,000 students and almost 2,000 staff members. Based on a literature review, a hypothesis was put forward that a university city should have a high level of economic sustainability. To assess economic sustainability, the USCESI Index was developed. It evaluates sustainability in three groups of parameters: society, economy, and ecology. The first group includes the level of racial diversity, the level of education of the population, and the access to medical services. The second group consists of the Gini coefficient by income level, the median cost of housing, and the unemployment rate. The environmental situation is assessed according to the Air Quality Index developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. For comparison, the town of Braintree, MA, was taken. The USCESI was calculated for both locations. The analysis showed that both Amherst and Braintree have a high degree of economic sustainability. However, it was revealed that proximity to a significant economic center has a more powerful positive impact on economic sustainability than the location of a large university.

From 1999 to 2019, IPUMS collaborated with genealogical organizations to develop massive individual-level census datasets spanning the 1790 through 1940 period, and we are currently working on the 1950 census. This research note describes how our genealogical collaborations came about. We focus on our collaborations with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Family and Church History Department (later known as FamilySearch) and the private genealogical companies HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com.

The prevailing view is that White/Black segregation has experienced modest declines in recent decades, while White/Hispanic and White/Asian segregation have remained stable. This consensus is based on the assumption that segregation measures, such as the ubiquitous dissimilarity index, are free of systematic bias on city compositions, a property known as compositional invariance. This property is necessary because, while the Black population has remained stable in the U.S., the Hispanic and Asian populations have experienced significant growth. In this paper, we demonstrate that the assumption of compositional invariance for the dissimilarity index is fundamentally flawed and propose an easily-implementable adjustment factor to facilitate meaningful segregation comparisons of cities over space and time. The implications of this adjustment are stark: we find that White/Hispanic and White/Asian segregation have substantially decreased, with Hispanic segregation declining more rapidly than Black segregation. Our findings also highlight the exceptional nature of Black segregation, with the gap in their measured dissimilarity - after adjusting for compositional changes - persisting when compared to White segregation with other racial/ethnic groups

Occupational licensing is the practice of government establishing minimum qualifications and requiring registration for practitioners of a given occupation (Kleiner and Vorotnikov 2017). It is often presented as a form of human-capital quality control — a barrier to entry to exclude those who cannot meet a desired minimum skill level (Timmons and Mills 2018). A requirement's stringency is a measure of how difficult or resource-intensive it is to obtain licensure, based on factors including fees, minimum level of education, required apprenticeships, and waiting periods. Occupational licensing is prevalent across the United States, impacting nearly 30 percent of all employees as of 2008 (Kleiner and Krueger 2013). Requirements are often directly set by, or set with the input of, a dedicated state board for each occupation. These boards contain a mixture of practitioners, other professionals, and laymen, and may exist independently within state governments or fall under the purview of a specific department. Occupational licensing is also the subject of extensive literature and debate, dating back to Adam Smith’s (1776) The Wealth of Nations, in which he is critical of its merits and its effects on the poor (Kleiner 2000). Much of the debate surrounds its stated purpose of raising the quality of services and protecting consumers. Many authors argue that it is instead industry interests that create and perpetuate these requirements to collect monopolistic rents in the form of higher wages by restricting supply (Friedman and Friedman 2002; Kleiner and Krueger 2010; Kleiner 2016; Timmons and Mills 2018). The literature on occupational licensing almost universally finds that licensure increases wages for practitioners (Kleiner 2000; Kleiner and Krueger 2010; Timmons and Thornton 2010; Timmons and Thornton 2013; Kleiner and Vorotnikov 2017; Kleiner 2017). The breadth of evidence for supply restriction is narrower, but similarly almost universal (Adams et al. 2002; Timmons and Thornton 2010; Kleiner et al. 2016; Kleiner and Vorotnikov 2017; Kleiner 2017). There are, however, some studies which do not support these theories. Zapletal (2019) finds no significant effects of stringency on prices or, along with Thornton and Weintraub (1979), supply of practitioners. This paper has a two-fold focus on both causes and the effects of stringency of occupational licensing requirements. First, I address the question of whether organizational and administrative characteristics of professional boards affect the stringency of requirements. In particular, does the membership composition of boards and the focus of the department under which they operate, if any, matter? Friedman and Friedman (2002) argues that professional boards create a perverse incentive by placing members of a profession in charge of the regulation of entry. This creates “direct economic interest … concerning admission requirements and the definition of standards…” (Gellhorn 1956, 106). Therefore, theory would predict that the greater the percentage of professionals on the board, the loftier the requirements the board produces. Another problem of incentives may also exist based on the department that oversees a given professional board, or lack thereof. A board with a departmental focus on public health may produce distinct and differentially-impactful standards than another with a focus on commerce, even within the same occupation. It may be easier for a health-focused board, compared to other boards, to impose more stringent requirements under the cover of its noble mission. Second, I focus on the effects of stringency on practitioners within a licensed occupation. The most simple supply and demand model of the labor economy indicates that any additional barrier to entry excludes some producers from the market. Such would be the case for a more stringent licensure requirement, be it a higher licensing fee or more examinations. Keeping some producers out of the market would, in turn, increase the equilibrium price. Does such a model hold in real-world conditions? In order to answer these questions, I focus on the field of cosmetology. As with most occupations in the United States, it is regulated exclusively by states, leading to great variation in the requirements across the country. The characteristics which make cosmetology particularly ripe for study are universal licensing requirements and its variation in administration across states. This presents the opportunity to examine the effects of administration, for example, by a public health-focused agency compared to a commerce-focused agency, on a state-by-state basis. Composition of state cosmetology boards, which exist in all but one state, also varies significantly. Mississippi’s board, for example, is entirely composed of cosmetologists; California’s board has a majority of laypeople, and only statutorily requires a single practicing cosmetologist.1 As far as I am aware, no study to date has examined administrative and organizational characteristics of professional boards as determinants of regulatory hurdles. Economic and political theory, however, indicate that such an effect may exist as a result of perverse incentives. Research in other disciplines, such as Weiss and Piderit (1999) and Desmidt (2016), have found that government agency mission statements affect school and employee performance. Such findings support the hypothesis that differences in professional board administration may lead to differential outcomes. Furthermore, literature examining the effects of stringency on the labor market, particularly with a focus on practitioners themselves, is relatively sparse compared to more general studies of licensing.

Suburbs across the US are experiencing demographic shifts with consequences for suburban schools. While scholars have expressed concern about rising segregation among suburban public schools, we extend this work by examining changes in racial/ethnic school segregation across a typology of suburban municipalities in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metropolitan area between 2007 and 2018. Our findings are mixed- contingent on the measure of segregation employed. We find that Black-white and Hispanic-white segregation in mature suburbs is rising, but is at least in part driven by shifting demographics. The results suggest intra-suburban variation in segregation, highlighting the connection between race and neighborhood change.

Background In low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), energy poverty has predominantly been studied from the unidimensional perspective of indoor air pollution. Acute respiratory infection (ARI) in children under 5 years of age is the most important disease associated with indoor air pollution attributable to solid fuel use in LMICs. This study aimed to extend the existing knowledge on the association between energy poverty and ARI among children under 5 years of age in LMICs, by adopting a multidimensional perspective. Methods Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 22 LMICs, data from 483 088 children were analysed (mean age 2.00 years (SD 1.41); 51.3% male). Energy poverty was measured using the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI) (range 0–1), which comprises five dimensions of essential energy services. Binary logistic regression models were conducted to study the association between MEPI and ARI, adjusting for child, maternal, household and environmental characteristics. Results A 0.1 increase in MEPI score was associated with greater odds of ARI (aOR 1.05; 95% CI 1.04 to 1.07). Likewise, MEPI indicators using biomass for cooking (aOR 1.15; 95% CI 1.07 to 1.23) and lack of access to electricity (aOR 1.17; 95% CI 1.10 to 1.26), entertainment/education appliances (aOR 1.07; 95% CI 1.02 to 1.13) and household appliances (aOR 1.12; 95% CI 1.04 to 1.21) were associated with greater odds of ARI. Conclusion Multidimensional energy poverty was associated with greater odds of ARI in children under 5 years of age living in 22 LMICs. Hence, our findings justify the design and implementation of interventions that address energy poverty from a multidimensional perspective, integrating energy affordability and accessibility.

Research identifies strong concentrations of economic activity in dynamic, major city regions, whereas shifts in economic linkages between these and smaller, less-advantaged city regions have been less investigated. Using data on firms’ investment/disinvestment decisions between 1993 and 2017, we show that the majority of ‘relational hinterlands’ (smaller, non-contiguous city regions with at least 1 investment tie to a global centre in 1993) in the USA have become disconnected from major US ‘global centres’ (globally integrated city regions). Relational hinterlands which lost connectivity to the global centres are also disadvantaged in many other ways. While global centres have become increasingly connected to other global centres in the USA and abroad, relational hinterlands have become increasingly disconnected from centres of economic growth.

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a growing interest in the social and health impacts of food deserts. Simply defined, a food desert is a geographic area where people have limited access to affordable and nutritious food due to there being few or no grocery stores, supermarkets, or other sources of healthy food within a reasonable distance. This paper uses geospatial software, census data, and supermarket locations to explore the development and impact of food deserts in Denver, Colorado from 1990 to 2020.

Despite substantial legal and policy debates, whether immigrant arrest rates changed during the Trump presidency remains surprisingly understudied. This is partially because immigration status is rarely available in crime data. We address this gap by applying difference-in-differences (DD) and difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) estimations to detailed arrest data from Texas and California from 2015 to 2018. We find little evidence, descriptive or otherwise, to suggest that the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration had a meaningful impact on immigrant arrests, whether measured as violence, property, drug, or traffic offenses. These results suggest that the immigration enforcement initiatives under President Trump did not deliver on their crime reduction pledges, but they also provide little evidence of over-policing of immigrants in discretionary actions such as traffic arrests.

This paper presents a case study on the IPUMS NHIS database, which provides data from censuses and surveys on the health of the U.S. population, including data related to COVID-19. By addressing gaps in previous studies, we propose a machine learning approach to train predictive models for identifying and measuring factors that affect the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. Our experiments focus on four groups of factors: demographic, socio-economic, health condition, and related to COVID-19 vaccination. By analysing the sensitivity of the variables used to train the models and the variable effect characteristics (VEC) analysis on the variable values, we identify and measure importance of various factors that influence the severity of COVID-19 symptoms.

Although the literature on veteran differences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupational outcomes by gender is established and veteran/nonveteran differences in STEM outcomes are well studied, we fill a gap in the literature by examining the following two research questions in this study: (1) are rural veterans less likely than urban veterans to be employed in a STEM occupation and how does race/ethnicity modify this relationship; (2) among veterans in a STEM occupation, does total income vary by rural/urban location and race/ethnicity? We retrieved data on employed military veterans (n = 845,467) aged 18 to 65 years from the 2008–2020 American Community Survey. Results showed that rural-dwelling Black and Hispanic veterans were less likely than Whites to be employed in a STEM field. Among veterans employed in a STEM field, rural-dwelling Hispanics had lower annual incomes than Whites. As such, future STEM education programs should target rural-dwelling veterans of color.

Telecommuting came roaring to the forefront of the American workplace in the spring of 2020. While no more than 8% of work was done remotely in 2019, shutdowns and social-distancing policies introduced at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed more than 1 out of every 3 American workers to telecommute. To reflect this shift, the research team aimed to update the spatial modeling toolbox to allow remote employment and develop a quantitative framework capable of analyzing the full range of reallocations, both within and across cities, which may result from its increasing popularity. The researchers build a quantitative spatial model in which some workers can substitute on-site effort with work done from home. The team quantifies their framework to match the distribution of jobs and residents across 4,502 U.S. locations. A permanent increase in the attractiveness of telework results in a rich non-monotonic pattern of reallocations within and across cities. Workers who can telecommute experience welfare gains, and those who cannot suffer losses. Additionally, broader access to jobs reduces inequality across residential locations. The framework robustly predicts changes in residents and housing prices observed 2019— 2021.

Diabetes imposes a major burden on society, especially in the state of Florida, in the form of increased medical costs, lost productivity, early mortality, and intangible costs in the form of diminished quality of life. Access to diabetic care affects health administration in Florida by impacting the overall cost of treating the condition. Limited access to care can lead to an increased risk of complications resulting in a higher cost of treatment. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether access to care dependent variables (access to doctors and length of time since last routine checkup) were associated with Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) independent variables (race, education level, economic stability, and location) among patients with diabetes in Florida. Using the social–ecological model as the framework, the study examined the extent to which SDOHs were associated with delayed access to doctors and length of time since last routine checkup among Floridians. The participants (n=2014) consisted of adult men and women ages 18 and older residing in the state of Florida who have been diagnosed and treated for diabetes using the 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey. A logistic regression analysis revealed collectively that the SDOH race, education level, economic stability, and location were not significantly associated with length of time since last routine checkup. Significant associations were found between SDOH and access to doctors. This research has positive social change implications for key stakeholders (i.e., policy makers and healthcare administrators) concerned about access to diabetes care. Findings could have implications for positive social change and could be used to better understand the needs of Floridians’ with little or no access to care.

Although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers fluoridation of community water systems (CWSs) to be a major public health achievement responsible for reducing dental disease, recent epidemiologic evidence suggests that chronic exposure to population-relevant levels of fluoride may also be associated with adverse child neurodevelopmental outcomes. To our knowledge, a nationally representative database of CWS fluoride concentration estimates that can be readily linked to US epidemiologic cohorts for further study is not publicly available. Our objectives were to evaluate broad regional and sociodemographic inequalities in CWS fluoride concentrations across the US, and to determine if county-level racial/ethnic composition was associated with county-level CWS fluoride. We generated CWS-level (N = 32,495) and population weighted county-level (N = 2152) fluoride concentration estimates using over 250,000 routine compliance monitoring records collected from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Third Six Year Review (2006–2011). We compared CWS-level fluoride distributions across subgroups including region, population size served, and county sociodemographic characteristics. In county-level spatial error models, we also evaluated geometric mean ratios (GMRs) of CWS fluoride per 10% higher proportion of residents belonging to a given racial/ethnic subgroup. 4.5% of CWSs (serving >2.9 million residents) reported mean 2006–2011 fluoride concentrations ≥1500 µg/L (the World Health Organization’s guideline for drinking water quality). Arithmetic mean, 90th, and 95th percentile contaminant concentrations were greatest in CWSs reliant on groundwater, located in the Southwest and Eastern Midwest, and serving Semi-Urban, Hispanic communities. In fully adjusted spatial error models, the GMR (95% CI) of CWS fluoride per a 10% higher proportion of county residents that were Hispanic/Latino was 1.16 (1.10, 1.23). We find that over 2.9 million US residents are served by public water systems with average fluoride concentrations exceeding the World Health Organization’s guidance limit. We also find significant inequalities in community water system fluoride concentration estimates (2006–2011) across the US, especially for Hispanic/Latino communities who also experience elevated arsenic and uranium in regulated public drinking water systems. Our fluoride estimates can be leveraged in future epidemiologic studies to assess the potential association between chronic fluoride exposure and related adverse outcomes.

Although parental academic socialization may be a product of culture, ethnic/racial minority status may play a significant role, above and beyond the impact of culture, in shaping parental academic socialization and its implications for youth adjustments. This study examined Korean youth living in South Korea (N = 524, M age = 14.98, SD = 1.45, 50.1% female), China (N = 267, M age = 15.24, SD = 1.66, 58.9% female), and the U.S. (N = 408, M age = 14.76, SD = 1.91, 47.3% female) who share the same heritage culture but have different social positions (majority or minority). Korean youth as an ethnic/racial minority in the U.S. or China reported higher parental academic socialization than those in South Korea, supporting a significant role of social positions in how parents practice academic socialization. This study also found that the distinct practices of academic socialization function differently in youth adjustment. Parental commitment to education, parental involvement, and autonomy support were positively associated with youth’s school engagement, but achievement-oriented psychological control was associated with more depressive symptoms and antisocial behaviors. These associations did not differ across the three samples. Some nuanced differences also emerged. Parental commitment to education was associated with higher grades in Korean Chinese (but not Korean American) youth, and achievement-oriented psychological control was associated with lower school engagement among Korean Chinese (but not South Korean) youth and higher grades among South Korean (but not Korean American) youth. These findings highlight the role of academic socialization as an adaptive strategy for ethnic/racial minorities to succeed in host societies and the generally universal role of parental academic socialization in youth adjustments.

BACKGROUND: Improving mental health is recognized as an important factor for achieving global development goals. Despite strong evidence that neighborhood greenery promotes better mental health, there are environmental justice concerns over the distribution of neighborhood greenery. Underlying these concerns are present-day consequences of historical discriminatory financial investment practices, such as redlining which was established by the U.S. Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s. The impacts of redlining on environmental and health disparities have been researched extensively. However, the influences of redlining on the associations between neighborhood environment and health outcomes have not been fully assessed. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to examine whether associations between residential tree cover and depressive symptoms vary across areas subject to HOLC practices. METHODS: Depressive symptoms were defined by the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale collected during the period 2008-2012 for 3,555 women in the Sister Study cohort residing in cities subject to HOLC practices across the United States. HOLC rating maps were obtained from the Mapping Inequality Project, University of Richmond, with neighborhoods graded as A (best for financial investment, green), B (still desirable, blue), C (declining, yellow), and D (hazardous, red-known as redlined). Tree cover within 500 m and 2,000 m from residences was estimated using 2011 U.S. Forest Service Percent Tree Canopy Cover. Mixed model using climate zone as the random effect was applied to evaluate the associations with adjustments for potential covariates. Analyses were stratified by HOLC grade. RESULTS: Tree cover was significantly higher in neighborhoods with better HOLC grades. A 10% increase in tree cover was associated with reduced odds of depressive symptoms for the full study population, with adjusted odds ratios (AORs) of 0.93 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.88, 0.99], and 0.91 (0.85, 0.97) for 500-m and 2,000-m buffer, respectively. Across HOLC grades, the strongest associations were observed in redlined neighborhoods , with respective AORs of 0.72 (95% CI: 0.52, 0.99) and 0.63 (95% CI: 0.45, 0.90) for 500-m and 2,000-m buffer. DISCUSSION: Findings support a remediation strategy focused on neighborhood greenery that would address multiple public health priorities, including mental health and environmental justice.

We develop a new nonparametric approach for discrete choice and use it to analyze the demand for health insurance in the California Affordable Care Act marketplace. The model allows for endogenous prices and instrumental variables, while avoiding parametric functional form assumptions about the unobserved components of utility. We use the approach to estimate bounds on the effects of changing premiums or subsidies on coverage choices, consumer surplus, and government spending on subsidies. We find that a $10 decrease in monthly premium subsidies would cause a decline of between 1.8% and 6.7% in the proportion of subsidized adults with coverage. The reduction in total annual consumer surplus would be between $62 and $74 million, while the savings in yearly subsidy outlays would be between $207 and $602 million. We estimate the demand impacts of linking subsidies to age, finding that shifting subsidies from older to younger buyers would increase average consumer surplus, with potentially large impacts on enrollment. We also estimate the consumer surplus impact of removing the highly‐subsidized plans in the Silver metal tier, where we find that a nonparametric model is consistent with a wide range of possibilities. We find that comparable mixed logit models tend to yield price sensitivity estimates toward the lower end of the nonparametric bounds, while producing consumer surplus impacts that can be both higher and lower than the nonparametric bounds depending on the specification of random coefficients.

The number of Boston renters earning more than $150,000 a year doubled between 2015 and 2020, according to a report listing database RentCafe released Friday, but another Massachusetts city saw a whopping 125% increase.

Building upon previous research examining the socioeconomic effects of abortion laws, this study explored how U.S. abortion legality following the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) impacted the income of post-policy cohorts. Previous studies have suggested that children born under accessible and legal abortion will experience differential outcomes from those born under abortion restriction. Researchers theorize that when women are able to effectively plan the timing of their motherhood, those who deem themselves financially illprepared can delay or forgo parenthood; the selection of unprepared women away from parenthood equates to a greater proportion of children raised in households with sufficient support and resources. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data, I conducted a stratified difference-in-differences regression model that analyzed the 2019 incomes of cohorts born the year before and the year after the policy change, accounting for the presence of several U.S. state laws that had legalized abortion before 1973. I find that Roe-era constitutional abortion protections had a largely insignificant impact on income across my post-policy cohorts. However, income effects were substantial and highly significant for the Hispanic cohort. PostRoe legalization increased annual income for Hispanics by $19,506 in 2018, equating to a roughly one-third increase in the average income for Hispanics in that year. These results suggest that legal abortion access is a significant determinant of future income for Hispanic Americans.

This dissertation aims to address three research questions that give us a deeper understanding of new shared micromobility to encourage accessibility, affordability, and safety for underserved communities. Firstly, this dissertation reveals the causal relationship between shared dockless escooters and first-and last-mile (FLM) connectivity to public rail transit after controlling confounding built environment and socioeconomic variables using a quasi-experimental design: propensity score matching and difference-in-difference regression. As a result, increasing the intensity of e-scooter trips around rail stations can increase the connected use of rail transit services. Planning and transportation agencies can encourage active use of e-scooters through street design guidelines, or transit-oriented development with high density, mixed land use, and pedestrian-friendly environments, thereby promoting better integration of shared dockless e-scooter programs with built environment. Secondly, this dissertation explores the nonlinear relationship between shared dockless e-scooters and housing + transportation (h+t) affordability of neighborhoods using random forest modeling. Our results suggested that economic variables have greater explanatory power than sociodemographic variables. In the partial dependency plots, neighborhoods spending more than 35% of their income on housing costs had higher e-scooter usage. On the other hand, when transportation costs took up more than 9% of household income, the e-scooter trip density decreased. Thus, higher e-scooter use in areas where h+t is lower, like in compact areas where users have more discretionary income due to lower h+t costs. Users presumably have more discretionary income in these areas, and e-scooters for some users may be a form of recreation rather than transportation, competing with other goods and services for consumer dollars. Lastly, this dissertation addresses complex relationships between the built environment, risk, exposure, and micromobility crashes. The findings suggest that pedestrian volume significantly impacts micromobility crash rates depending on the average vehicle speeds of transportation analysis zone (TAZ). When vehicle speed was higher, pedestrian volume was positively associated with crash rates, whereas the opposite association was found in TAZ with lower vehicle speed. It implies that safety-in numbers are effective and conditional on lower vehicle speed. Overall, this dissertation contributes to understanding shared dockless e-scooter travel behavior and its implications for FLM, affordability, and safety.