Objectives: We provide the most recent population-level estimates of time spent in health self-care (including activities such as taking medicine, giving oneself an injection, and wound care). Additionally, we determine when, where, and with whom this time is distributed. Study design: We analyze pooled cross-sectional data on individuals aged 21 years and older (n 36,033) from the nationally representative 2008, 2010, and 2012e2013 American Time Use Survey. Methods: We report the likelihood of any self-care, the mean minutes spent in self-care among those who report any, and the percentage distribution of self-care across the day, in the presence of others, and by place. We examine these trends overall and by sex, race/ethnicity, income, age, education, employment status, disability, and health. Results: Overall, 6.7% of the population reports any health self-care on an average day, among whom an average of 76.6 min is spent in care. Individuals are most likely to report self-care in the morning, perform 76.1% of their care alone, and 97% in their own homes. These trends vary across sex, race/ethnicity, age, income, education, employment, disability, and health. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate at the population level that self-care is a time-intensive form of health management that is not equally distributed by time, place, the availability of others, or by sociodemographic characteristics. It is important to consider these inequities in order to provide optimal support for patient care outside of health facilities.

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 nations 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 citys 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.

Public sector employees receive large fractions of their lifetime income in the form of deferred compensation. The introduction of the opportunity provided to Illinois public school employees to purchase additional pension benefits allows me to estimate employees’ willingness-to-pay for benefits relative to the cost of providing them. The results show employees are willing to pay 20 cents on average for a dollar increase in the present value of expected retirement benefits. The findings suggest substantial inefficiency in compensation and cast doubt on the ability of deferred compensation schemes to attract employees.

Marriages between immigrants and natives (intermarriages) are often associated with economic success and interpreted as an indicator of social integration. Intermarried immigrant men are on average better educated and work in better paid jobs than nonintermarried immigrant men. In this context, native spouses could deliver valuable insights into the host country and provide business contacts. However, intermarriage may not be the driving factor of economic success but instead be its byproduct, as better education and personal characteristics could be both economically beneficial and increase the likelihood of meeting natives. Intermarriage might also be more “suspense-packed” (positively and negatively) and can thus be associated with an increase in severe stress and a higher risk of divorce.

Policy interventions that increase insurance coverage for infertility treatments may affect fertility trends, and ultimately, population age structures. However, such policies have ignored the overall impact of coverage on fertility. We examine short-term and long-term effects of increased insurance coverage for infertility on the timing of first births and on women’s total fertility rates. Our main contribution is to show that infertility mandates enacted in the United States during the 80s and 90s did not increase the total fertility rates of women by the end of their reproductive lives. We also show evidence that these mandates induced women to put off motherhood.

This paper evaluates voting behavior on the Seahawk Stadium referendum in the State of Washington. For our empirical strategy, we implement both the linear probability model and a group logit model, which gives greater weight to voting areas with greater number of votes cast. We find that voting support was lowest among those living closest to the proposed stadium site, while voting support was highest among those within easy access of the stadium. This nonlinear distance effect differs from the typical proximity effect found in most professional sporting stadiums in the United States; however, it is consistent with a referendum-voting outcome for a professional soccer stadium in Germany and public projects such as national forests.

Modern research has found strong links between family structure and children's outcomes. One of the robust findings is that stepchildren and adopted children have worse adult outcomes compared to biological children. However, we know very little about how non-biological children fared historically. In this study, by linking adopted children across U.S. federal censuses in the first half of the 20th century, we create a new dataset that contains rich information on both their childhood households and adult outcomes. To control for household heterogeneity, we also follow (non-adopted) siblings of adopted children into their adulthood. This unique dataset enables us to compare the long-run outcomes of adopted children and biological children controlling for observable and unobservant household characteristics. Our preliminary analysis suggests that educational attainment, income, and marriage patterns of adopted children differed significantly from non-adopted children. Overall, our study brings new historical evidence to the research on family structure.

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 shiftshare 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 dissertation tests a theoretical framework relating house prices and the population composition of cities. If the income elasticity of demand for a primary residence is less than unity, the ratio of skilled to unskilled worker wages falls as housing cost rises. This changing wage ratio induces substitution in production across all industries causing the skill intensity of the labor force to rise. Secondly, any household type for which share of income spent on housing is smaller than average will tend to live in cities with higher than average housing prices. These are termed the income elasticity of demand and housing preference hypotheses, respectively, regarding the relation between house prices and the population composition of cities. The first two empirical analyses in the dissertation test the income elasticity hypothesis by demonstrating that the skilled wage ratio varies inversely, and the skill intensity ratio directly, with different measures of housing cost. Furthermore, the estimated elasticities of . . .

A consensus in economic history has held that fugitive slaves were rare, and thus not a significant threat to property rights in the U.S. South before the civil war. This research presents new data from over 29,000 fugitive slave advertisements posted in historic newspapers. The evidence shows that the number of fugitive slave advertisements is higher than the commonly used Census data on the number of fugitives, and that owners placing advertisements for runaways typically are not listed as having runaways in the Census. We document that there were relatively high numbers of ads and relatively high money rewards offered for fugitive recovery in border states. We also provide evidence of cases where plantation records document runaway slaves that are not reported in the individual-level Census manuscripts and/or are not observed in newspaper advertisements. We develop a model to describe the process determining whether an owner would place an advertisement for a runaway and whether a slave would choose to runaway. We use the model and historical evidence to provide new estimates of the rate of slave flight. We estimate that the true runaway rate was at least double, and possibly up to 10 times larger, than the rate reported in the census.

We examine trends in the Hispanic longevity advantage between 1990 and 2010, focusing on the contribution of cigarette smoking. We calculate life expectancy at age 50 for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites between 1990 and 2010. We use an indirect method to calculate the contribution of smoking to changes over time in life expectancy. Among women, the Hispanic advantage in life expectancy grows from 2.14 years in 1990 (95 % CI 1.99-2.30 years) to 3.53 years in 2010 (3.42-3.64 years). More than 40 % of this increase reflects widening differences in smoking-attributable mortality. The advantage for Hispanic men increases from 2.27 years (2.14-2.41 years) to 2.91 years (2.81-3.01 years), although smoking makes only a small contribution. Despite persistent disadvantage, US Hispanics have increased their longevity advantage over non-Hispanic whites since 1990, much of which reflects the continuing importance of cigarette smoking to the Hispanic advantage.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain and rate the importance of factors which were perceived by school board members as pivotal in their decisions to consolidate their school districts with one or more other school districts. Additionally, this study intended to determine whether or not school board members serving at the time of a school districts consolidationcontinued to agree with the value of that consolidation decision and if so, the comparative strength of their perceptions of the outcomes of consolidation of the school district at the time of consolidation and the degree to which those perceptions continued to hold true at the time of the conduct of this study. Data from select Minnesota school board members serving on governing Boards at the time of a school district consolidation vote. The sample included school board members from among the 11 different school districts which voted to consolidate into five school districts between the years 2000 and 2006. Data were gathered from two sample groups. Quantitative data were gathered from the aggregate sample of school board members. Qualitative data were gathered from a subset of the aggregate sample to provide a more detailed examination of the experiences and perceptions related to the research questions. The study found that declining student enrollment ranked highest among selected factors by responding school board members as the factor most influencing their votes in favor of school district consolidation. The factors declining programs, services, staffing and/or courses and an imbalanced or declining general fund were second or third most influential depending upon the type of analysis. As many as fifteen years after respondents voted in favor of consolidating their school districts, strong levels of agreement remained with the votes in favor of the consolidations. The study of factors influencing votes in favor of Minnesota public school consolidation is important because consolidation of school districts nationally and in Minnesota has occurred over the past one hundred-fifty years (Minnesota School Law, 1849). Despite this fact, consolidation is a reform choice that has rarely been examined in Minnesota public school districts. Given existing fiscal constraints at the state level, increasing expectations for accountability and changing demographics - largely evidenced by declining student enrollment - among a large majority of Minnesota school districts, consolidation likely will remain a viable option for consideration in the foreseeable future and, thus, merits comprehensive study.

Capturing human movement patterns across political borders is difficult and this difficulty highlights the need to investigate alternative data streams. With the advent of smart phones and the ability to attach accurate coordinates to Twitter messages, users leave a geo- graphic digital footprint of their movement when posting tweets. In this study we analyzed 10 months of geo-located tweets for Kenya and were able to capture movement of people at different temporal (daily to periodic) and spatial (local, national to international) scales. We were also able to capture both long and short distances travelled, highlighting regional connections and cross-border movement between Kenya and the surrounding countries. The findings from this study has broad implications for studying movement patterns and mapping inter/intra-region movement dynamics.

In this paper,we construct an equilibrium search model of the labor market augmented to include lump sum taxes that nance government expenditures. Using the model, we can decompose the decline in labor force participation (LFP) into the policy eect and that of other factors such as declining economic output. Using census data for the state of Ohio, we learn that declining LFP and the increase in public assistance spending were caused by weaker economic output that led to an increase in the claimant count. Our results indicate that if the economy resembled the pre-crisis period, the Kasich administration would have led to an increase in LFP of approximately 0.6 percentage points. This eect goes up to 2% if all inactive workers are assumed to claim welfare income.

Two common practices in modeling of crime when crime data is available for multiple years are using single-year crime data corresponding to census data and taking the average of crime rate (or count) over multiple years. Current theoretical and empirical literature provides little, if any, rationale in support of either practice. Averaging multiple years is purported to reduce heterogeneity and minimize the measurement error in the year-to-year emergence of crime. However, it is unclear how useful the analysis of averaged and smoothed data is for revealing the relationship between crimes and socio-demographic and economic characteristics of every single year. In order to more clearly understand these two approaches, this paper applies a seemingly unrelated regression model to assess the temporal stability of model parameters. The model accounts for spatial autocorrelation among crime rates and social disorganization variables at the block group level.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers are fundamental inputs for innovation, the main driver of productivity growth. We identify the long-run effect of STEM employment growth on outcomes for native workers across 219 US cities from 1990 to 2010. We use the 1980 distribution of foreign-born STEM workers and variation in the H-1B visa program to identify supply-driven STEM increases across cities. Increases in STEM workers are associated with significant wage gains for college-educated natives. Gains for non-college-educated natives are smaller but still significant. Our results imply that foreign STEM increased total factor productivity growth in US cities.