The US labor force participation rate for people aged 25–64 has continued to fall since the Great Recession. Much of the improvement in the US unemployment rate is due to an increasing number of people not being counted as working or looking for work, as reported by Papadimitriou, Hannsgen, and Nikiforos (2013). Our analysis shows that while virtually all groups have suffered in terms of employment rates and real wages, the impact of declining labor force participation has not been uniform across all groups—some groups have experienced greater declines than others, while rates for some groups have actually increased—just as the declines in real wages have not been uniform across demographic groups (Rios-Avila 2015). This policy note examines the trends in labor force participation rates since 1989 for the US population aged 25–64. Although it is commonly understood that part of the broader decline in US labor force participation is due to the aging of the population, this is not the only significant demographic transformation that has been affecting the participation rate. This policy note presents. . .

Policymakers have struggled with the question of how best to increase the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce. U.S.-educated immigrants and the U.S.-born children of immigrants may hold the key to understanding the role of comparative advantage in entering STEM fields. Both groups are more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree in STEM fields compared with natives with U.S.-born parents. Using data on recent college graduates from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Survey of 2008, I find that measures of English proficiency fully explain the STEM obtainment gap between U.S.-educated immigrants and natives with U.S.-born parents, as well as about 40 percent of the gap between U.S.-born children of immigrants with two foreign-born parents and natives with U.S.-born parents, conditional on demographics, mathematical ability, and college preparation. Using data on adults from the American Community Survey from 2009 to 2012, I also find that measures of English proficiency fully explain the STEM obtainment gap between U.S.-educated immigrants and U.S.-born adults, conditional on demographics. There is little supporting evidence that academic preparation, mathematical ability, or country effects are creating the intergenerational gaps. I also investigate the post-undergraduate outcomes of STEM graduates and how they differ between immigrants and natives. Using data from the American Community Survey from 2009 to 2013, I find that about 68 percent of all STEM majors are not employed in a STEM occupation. Natives are about 3 percentage points more likely to be employed outside of a STEM field than immigrants. Male STEM graduates . . .

We use household data from the Current Population Survey to calculate how the real value of the so-called marriage tax or marriage subsidy in the federal individual income tax has changed over the period 1969 to 2009. We examine three issues: the magnitude of the marriage tax/subsidy and its evolution over time, its effects on the distribution of income (including the effects of different demographic characteristics on the magnitudes and trends), and the causal factors in its evolution (e.g., tax changes, demographic changes). We find that the tax treatment of the family has changed significantly over time, from a large average marriage bonus in 1969, to a large marriage tax in much of the 1990s and early 2000s, to a large marriage subsidy since 2003. We also find that the marriage tax varies significantly and systematically by income level, as well as by the number of children in the family, the earnings ratios of the spouses, the race of the family, and the age of the household head. Finally, we find that changes in income and family composition have influenced the magnitudes and trends of marriage taxes and subsidies, but that adjustments in the federal income tax code account for most of the observed changes.

The vast majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted first names that were common among natives. The rate of adoption of an American name increases with time in the US, although most immigrants adopt an American name within the first year of arrival. Choice of an American first name was associated with a more successful assimilation, as measured by job occupation scores, marriage to a US native and take-up of US citizenship. We examine economic determinants of name choice, by studying the relationship between changes in the proportion of immigrants with an American first name and changes in the concentration of immigrants as well as changes in local labor market conditions, across different census years. We find that high concentrations of immigrants of a given nationality in a particular location discouraged members of that nationality from taking American names. Poor local labor market conditions for immigrants (and good local labor market conditions for natives) led to more frequent name changes among immigrants.

Shifting markets can cause unexpected, stochastic changes in rural landscapes that may take local communities by surprise. Preferential siting of new industrial facilities in poor areas or in areas with few regulatory restrictions can have implications for environmental sustainability, human health, and social justice. This study focuses on frac sand miningthe mining of high-quality silica sand used in hydraulic fracturing processes for gas and oil extraction. Frac sand mining gained prominence in the 2000s in the upper midwestern United States where nonmetallic mining is regulated primarily by local zoning. I asked whether frac sand mines were more commonly sited in rural townships without formal zoning regulations or planning processes than in those that undertook zoning and planning before the frac sand boom. I also asked if mine prevalence was correlated with socioeconomic differences across townships. After creating a probability surface to map areas most suitable for frac sand mine occurrence, I developed neutral landscape models from which to compare actual mine distributions in zoned and unzoned areas at three different spatial extents. Mines were significantly clustered in unzoned jurisdictions at the statewide level and in 7 of the 8 counties with at least three frac sand mines and some unzoned land. Subsequent regression analyses showed mine prevalence to be uncorrelated with land value, tax rate, or per capita income, but correlated with remoteness and zoning. The predicted mine count in unzoned townships was over two times higher than that in zoned townships. However, the county with the most mines by far was under a county zoning ordinance, perhaps indicating industry preferences for locations with clear, homogenous rules over patchwork regulation. Rural communities can use the case of frac sand mining as motivation to discuss and plan for sudden land-use predicaments, rather than wait to grapple with unfamiliar legal processes during a period of intense conflict.

Since the Great Recession peaked in 2010, the economic picture has steadily improved, and in 2013, GDP increased relative to 2012 and the unemployment rate fell but remained fairly high at 7.4 percent. In addition, the uninsured rate decreased slightly (0.1 percentage point) in 2013, continuing the trend from 2011 and 2012. Despite these improvements, rates of coverage through employer sponsored insurance have declined since 2010, though more slowly in recent years than at the height of the recession. Gains in coverage since 2010 have been largely due to increases in coverage through public programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Population changes also affected insurance coverage patterns between 2008 and 2013. The only income group with net population growth between 2008 and 2013 was families at or below 138 percent of poverty, which grew by 17.6 million. In contrast, the population with family incomes above 400 percent of poverty shrank by 8.3 million. There were also fewer workers in 2013 (138.0 million) than in 2008 (140.4 million), with a low point of 133.1 million workers in 2010. In addition, national population growth between 2008 and 2013 was concentrated in the South and West, which gained 4.3 million and 1.9 million people, respectively. These regions tend to have lower rates of employer coverage and lower Medicaid eligibility thresholds for adults. It is important to understand the effect of these population shifts and economic forces on coverage to assess the impact of the ACA. Many of the health insurance coverage expansions in the ACA went into effect on January 1, 2014, making 2013 the final baseline year against which to measure coverage changes under the ACA. Though 2013 is not a perfect baseline (several smaller coverage expansions under the ACA went into effect in 2010, including allowing dependents to stay on their parents’ plan until age 26, and a handful of states fully or partially expanded eligibility for their Medicaid programs in 2010 or 2011), understanding trends in coverage during the recession and recovery will help disentangle the effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage from demographic and economic factors. In this brief, we examine coverage patterns for the nonelderly population from 2008 through 2013 using data from the American Community Survey. While prior research on this topic has frequently relied on the Census Bureau’s March Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), long planned improvements to the insurance questions for that survey resulted in a break in trend between the 2013 CPS and the 2014 CPS, which collected data on coverage in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Therefore, in order to examine trends from 2008 to 2013, we focused our analysis on the American Community Survey.

This paper examines the relationship between skills prices (wage premiums) and inequality in migrant sending countries (mainly from Latin America) and explores the implications for education policies. Most of the evidence is based on the case of Mexico, a Latin American country that is also an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member. Despite the belief that Latin American countries tend to pay less for their skilled workers than developed countries, they invest a considerable amount of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in education and sometimes in scholarships abroad. Therefore, our main question is: Are skill prices really so proportionately low in Latin America? Likewise, what are the impacts of skills prices on migration in Latin America, and Mexico in particular? And, what is the importance of “brain drain” in terms of the relationship between migration and education? We find that despite the enormous inequality in the region, skills prices are not low. Furthermore, high expenditures on education combined with low skills prices do not necessarily result in brain drain. Other factors, such as perceptions of insecurity and corruption, have a stronger effect on the migration of Mexican professionals. Likewise, although high skills prices may lead to economic development, they may also increase social inequality, leading to greater brain drain. Therefore, the expansion of higher education is recommendable even if it reduces salaries and wage premiums in the short term.

Quality of life (QoL) for vulnerable elders has been a focus of gerontological research for decades. Much attention has been given to defining and measuring QoL both subjectively and objectively and in relating QoL to variables such as psychological characteristics, family relationships, or health status. Relatively little attention has been given to QoL from a cross-cultural perspective, the community or institutional contexts in which people live, or the influence of race or ethnicity. The purpose of this symposium is to shed light on these issues.We will share findings from studies our research groups – the Spanish Research Group on Quality of Life and Aging and US colleagues. The objectives of the symposium are to: (a) compare perspectives on QoL in the two nations with their different cultures and long-term care delivery systems; (b) address contextual issues of care setting, community, and ethnic and racial diversity QoL research for vulnerable elders, and (c) point to new research directions and priorities.First, we draw cross-cultural comparisons of QoL profiles of vulnerable elders in Spain and the US. Second, we delve into racial/ethnic differences in QoL for older adults and the importance of looking beyond individual predictors. Third, we draw comparisons in QoL between community dwelling and institutional elders. Fourth we describe organizational correlates of quality of life for nursing home residents with dementia. Finally, we have a panel discussion of the implications of results and areas for future research. The panel will involve all presenters and we will invite audience participation.

The literature in social sciences on identity, stratification, and intersectionality has long shown the importance of group identity in explaining the persistence of income inequality over time. However, methodological individualism and marginalism in economics mean that income inequality is still assessed from the perspective of the individual with individual income as dependent variable, individual characteristics as control variables, and a time trend to asses the path-dependency of inequality. By taking a group perspective to individuals, the contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, the paper extends the fair wage-effort hypothesis to the macroeconomic and societal levels in order to define ethical earnings according to the nature of their long-run trend vis-a-vis the long-run trend of national income. Second, the paper presents a long-run methodology to uncover ethical and unethical earnings which reveals the cumulative effects of income inequality by group over time. This methodology is then applied to the US income stratification by race, ethnicity and gender identities at the occupation level between 1970 and 2011. Results show that rent-seeking behaviour is a group phenomenon which extends to most of the US labor force.

The school desegregation efforts following the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision represent one of the most important social policy initiatives of the 20th century. Despite a large research literature that shows many positive effects of desegregation on educational outcomes, its effect on the lives of individuals outside of the educational domain are still not fully understood. In this article, we examine the effects of desegregation on the fertility of teenagers. In contrast to previous findings, our analysis suggests that desegregation did not reduce the fertility of non-White teens, and, if it had any effect at all, it likely increased birthrates among non-White teens in counties with small to average-sized non-White populations.

All individuals face some risk of ending up old, sick, alone, and poor. Is there a role for social insurance for these risks, and if so what is a good program? A large literature has analyzed the costs and benefits of pay-as-you-go public pensions and found that the costs exceed the benefits. This paper, instead, considers means-tested social insurance programs for retirees such as Medicaid and food stamp programs. We find that the welfare gains from these programs are large. Moreover, the current scale of means-tested social insurance in the United States is too small in the following sense: If we condition on the current Social Security program, increasing the scale of means-tested social insurance by one third benefits both the poor and the affluent when a payroll tax is used to fund the increase.

If millionaires in the United States formed their own political party, that party would make up just three percent of the country, but it would have a majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, a 5:4 majority on the Supreme Court, and a man in the White House. If working-class Americanspeople employed in manual-labor and service-industry jobswere a political party, that party would have made up more than half of the country since the start of the twentieth century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before getting into politics) would never have held more than two percent of the seats in Congress. In the last few years, scholars of US politics have started taking a renewed interest in what I call white-collar government, the disproportionate numerical representation of wealthy people and white-collar professionals in our political institutions. Political scientists are once again asking how government by the upper class affects public policy in the United States. And theyre starting to ask why our representative process consistently gives us such economically unrepresentative slates of politicians.

Background: Triatoma infestans, the main vector of Trypanosoma cruzi (causative agent of Chagas disease) has been successfully eliminated over much of its original geographic distribution over the southern cone countries of South America. However, populations of the species are still infesting houses of rural communities of the Gran Chaco region of Argentina and Bolivia. This study reports for the first time a large-scale effect of a vector control intervention using a microencapsulated formulation of organophosphates and insect growth regulator on house infestation by T. infestans, in the southwestern region of Santa Cruz de la Sierra Department, within the Bolivian chaco. Methods: The vector control intervention included the treatment and entomological evaluation of 1626 individually coded and georeferenced houses with the microencapsulated formulation. House infestation by T. infestans was evaluated by active searches with fixed capture effort carried out before and after two, 16 and 32 months of the treatment application. Results: House infestation prevalence was 30.5% before the intervention, spatially aggregated in two clusters of 38 and 25 localities that showed 41% and 38% house infestation by T. infestans. Infestation prevalence was reduced to 2.4% two months after the intervention and remained very low (1.7%) until the end of the study after 32 months of the control intervention, without any other additional vector control intervention. Conclusions: The obtained results show an important long lasting effect on house protection against triatomine infestation in a region of known pyrethroid resistant populations of T. infestans, as the result of the slow release of the active ingredients, protected by the formulation microcapsule.

How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between a task's engineering complexity and its training requirements. When two tasks are equally complex, firms will automate the task that requires more training and in which labor is hence more expensive. Under quite general conditions this leads to job polarization, a decline in middle wage jobs relative to both high and low wage jobs. Our theory explains recent and historical instances of job polarization as caused by labor-replacing technologies, such as computers, the electric motor, and the steam engine, respectively. The model makes novel predictions regarding occupational training requirements, which we find to be consistent with US data.

This paper studies the secular behavior of worker reallocation across occupations in the US labor market. In the empirical analysis, we use 45 years of microdata to construct consistent time-series and document that the fraction of employment reallocated annually across occupations is remarkably stable in the long run. We go beyond description and use an equilibrium model to uncover potential changes in the factors that affect worker reallocation, namely productivity shocks and mobility costs. We uncover their joint evolution by deriving a simple mapping between data and the model. We find little changes overall, except in the period surrounding the Great Recession where both the volatility of productivity shocks and the cost of switching occupations are found to increase.

Though 70% of land in the contiguous U.S. is privately owned, land conservation discourses have focused more on public protected areas than on private land policy. U.S. private land policy is generally implemented by local governments through comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances. While most cities have adopted these policies many non-metropolitan jurisdictions remain unzoned. In this study we investigated factors predicting zoning adoption in rural and exurban Michigan townships. Results from a logit model showed that likelihood of zoning adoption between 1998 and 2003 was higher for townships with more developed land, fewer conservative voters, higher household income, more zoned neighbors, and township-level planning rather than county-level planning. We quantified thresholds at which development levels correlated with zoning adoption. Overall, townships had greater than a 50% probability of adopting zoning when 9% or more of their land base had been developed, but this threshold was higher in townships with no planning (12%) and highest where planning was implemented at the county level (19%). In high-growth townships forestland was negatively correlated with zoning adoption. However, model results showed socioeconomic variables to be better predictors of zoning adoption than natural resource variables. These results highlight the importance that planning and zoning occur at the same level of government, and the importance of multiple policy options in jurisdictions unlikely to adopt zoning. Gaining insight into reasons for land-use policy adoption, or lack thereof, is important for achieving common planning goals, including preserving rural livelihoods, conserving forests and farmlands, and maintaining rural landscape characteristics.

Variability of household water-use costs across different sociodemographic groups in Puerto Rico is evaluated using census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Multivariate analyses such as multiple linear regression (MLR) and factor analysis (FA) are used to classify, extract and interpret the household water-use costs. The FA results suggest two principal varifactors in explaining the variability of household water-use costs (64% in 2000 and 50% in 2010), which are grouped into a soft coefficient (social, economic and demographic characteristics of household residents, i.e., age, size, income, education) and a hard coefficient (dwelling conditions, i.e., number of rooms, units in the building, building age). The demographic profile of a high water-use household in Puerto Rico tends to be that of renters, people who live in larger or older buildings, people living in metro areas, or those with higher education level and higher income. The findings and discussions from this study will help decision makers to plan holistic and integrated water management to achieve water sustainability.

Infants who are underweight at birth earn less, score lower on tests, and become less educated as adults. Previous studies have found mixed evidence that socioeconomic status mitigates these effects. In this paper, we reconcile these findings using a unique data set in which adoptees were quasi-randomly assigned to families. We find that median income within a zip code mitigates the effects of low birth weight, as in Currie and Moretti (2007). Interactions between low birth weight and other family characteristics are not statistically significant, which is consistent with Currie and Hyson (1999). These results cannot be explained by differences in genetics, prenatal health care, or neonatal health care.

Land use regulations are one of the primary ways in which state and local governments influence the urban landscape, affecting where people live, how much they commute and the impact they have on the environment. Using a new, novel data on the stringency of land use regulation in the U.S. over the past decades, we study the effect of local regulation on the individual commuting times. Paired with demographic data from the U.S. Census, we examine whether land use policies disproportionately affect particular socioeconomic or demographic groups and find a positive relationship between land use regulation and commuting time. In addition, we show that this relationship increases disproportionately for workers with a Bachelor's degree or more, and that these impacts could be mitigated by the establishment of a public transit system.

Location and its corollary, distance, are critical concepts in social computing. Recommender systems that incorporate location have generally assumed that the utility of location- awareness monotonically decreases as entities get farther apart. However, it is well known in geography that places that are distant “as the crow flies” can be more similar and connected than nearby places (e.g., by demographics, expe- riences, or socioeconomic). We adopt theory and statistical methods from geography to demonstrate that a more nu- anced consideration of distance in which “far can be close” – that is, grouping users with their “distant neighbors” – mod- erately improves both traditional and location-aware rec- ommender systems. We show that the distant neighbors approach leads to small improvements in predictive accu- racy and recommender utility of an item-item recommender compared to a “nearby neighbors” approach as well as other baselines. We also highlight an increase in recommender utility for new users with the use of distant neighbors com- pared to other traditional approaches.