In the United States, a growing number of young people are failing to launch into self- sufficiency, a characteristic of adulthood recognized by most cultural groups. These “boomerang children” return home and interrupt the life course development of their “empty nest” mothers who must suspend plans for self-development. How mothers from different socioeconomic backgrounds cope with this countertransitional phenomenon while preparing their children for successful relaunch is not well known. Elder’s life course paradigm provided the theoretical framework for this phenomenological study. Perceptions were collected from an ethnically diverse group of 23 empty nest mothers with 30 boomerang children and seven boomerang grandchildren from five U.S. states, recruited using criterion-based convenience sample. Data were collected through recorded telephone interviews that were transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using Saldana’s codes-categories-emergent themes model. The findings revealed that boomerang children caused emotional and financial distress, a reassessment of parenting skills, and that boomerang grandchildren reinvigorated the mother’s prime identity as a caregiver. These findings were consistent regardless of ethnicity or socioeconomic status. This study contributes to the empirical literature by depicting the boomerang phenomenon as a shift in cultural expectations which represents a new phase in the life course development paradigm. Findings from this study can also guide the work of future researchers, assist mental health counselors who deal with these issues, and inform school guidance counselors who design career trajectories for students.

We recently completed the development of a linkage program to match microdata from the Canadian censuses to those from Quebec civil records found in the BALSAC population database. Procedures underlying this software are modeled on the basic principles used at BALSAC for the linkage of civil records. Several adjustments have been made however to take into account differences in the structures of the two types of data. Ongoing work covers three Quebec regions and two cities for seven modern nominal censuses (1852 to 1911). In this paper, we describe the program and analyse the results of linkage operations performed in the Saguenay region and the city of Trois-Rivières. In order to provide a critical assessment of these results, we investigate household and individual characteristics that could impact on linkage rates. We also illustrate the potential of the program by comparing linkage results among men and women. Lastly, we discuss the possibilities and limits involved in our approach The linkage program is at the heart of the construction of the Integrated Infrastructure of the Quebec Population Historical Microdata which will integrate all available historical microdata on the Quebec population, dating back to the beginning of European settlement, into a set of relational databases. The interconnection between civil records and the censuses, along with linkages across the censuses themselves, will substantially broaden and enrich the avenues of research in both the social and the biological sciences. Once linkage is completed, it will be possible to carry out studies based on individual trajectories within families, households and communities from intra- and inter-generational perspectives.

This study examined the extent to which physical activity policies may be associated with consistent disparities in meeting physical activity recommendations across racial/ethnic groups. The analyses found that policies were not consistently related to disparities in physical activity among adults. Black adults, who have the lowest rates of meeting physical activity recommendations, benefitted most from policies. Policies were both negatively and positively associated with meeting physical activity recommendations among Hispanic adults. White adults did not benefit from any policies examined here. This study suggests a larger need for research examining the effects of legislation on adults’ physical activity behavior, and why these differences by racial/ethnic group exist.

This paper offers a cultural perspective to the work absenteeism literature, by conceptualizing work absence at the U.S. state level of analysis, and by assessing absenteeism as a manifestation of regional cultures. First, I establish that absenteeism is a spatially dependent phenomenon, and demonstrate that the retest reliability of absenteeism increases at higher levels of aggregation (from individual-level to city-level to state-level), to provide evidence for absence as a state-level construct. Second, I hypothesize main effects of regional cultures on state-level work absenteeism (i.e., in the U.S. West). Third, I assess whether observed regional differences in state-level absence cultures in the West are attributable to (mediated by) regional differences in state-level social disorganization/anomie, while controlling for state-level variance in work industry (e.g., manufacturing), personality (Extraversion, Neuroticism), unemployment rates, and physical disabilities. Analyzing data spanning over 4 years and over 3 million people per year, this paper explains how absenteeism varies across states in the U.S.

The following dissertation asks: What is the material expression for the emergent middle class on the American prairie during 19th-century? It develops a model of a prairie-middle-class based on the material and documentary datasets at New Philadelphia, Illinois. These two datasets comprise a single historic-archaeological record that was created by people living in this town during the middle decades of the 19th century. New Philadelphia was a founder town, established by “Free” Frank McWorter, an African American, who was born into slavery but who purchased his freedom, along with 13 family members. Chapter 1 presents the research question: What is the material expression of the emergent middle on the 19th-century American prairie? Chapter 2 outlines the historical developments necessary for the emergence of the middle class on the American prairie during the 19th century. Chapter 3 presents the theoretical context for examining the historical archaeological record at New Philadelphia. Chapter 4 presents the methodology of historical materialism to explain social change through processes of change. A model for the expansion of the capitalist mode of production is stated. This model forms the basis for four hypotheses about the broad cultural experience with capitalist expansion. Each hypotheses leads to specific sub-hypotheses about the personal experiences at New Philadelphia. These sub-hypotheses are bridging arguments to connect the local manifestation to the wider process of capitalist expansion. Chapter 5 presents conclusions and suggestions for future work.

This dissertation consists of three essays on income and wealth inequality. The essays examine various aspects of this complex feature of the economic system. The first essay shows that the distribution of firm sizes in an economy is an important determinant of wage distribution. I use data from the U.S. Current Population Survey and the ExecuComp between 1992 and 2012 to construct a new dataset and estimate wage distribution and various measures of wage inequality. I decompose differences in wage inequality across firm sizes and over time by using semi-parametric methods. In 1992, wages were distributed more unequally in small than in large firms. A decomposition shows that this was solely due to inequality among workers with the same observed characteristics, i.e. residual inequality. Inequality due to the distribution of observed characteristics and returns to those characteristics was higher in large firms at that time. By 2012, inequality in small firms grew further, but not as fast as in large firms. Over the same period, employment share of large firms increased but this had little effect on changes in overall wage distribution. The second essay proposes a general equilibrium model suitable for studying wealth distribution. One of the challenges in modeling wealth distribution is reproducing the high concentration of wealth observed in the U.S. I build upon the benchmark model developed by Krusell and Smith (1998) by introducing firm heterogeneity and managerial class. I develop a model, propose a numerical method for solving it, simulate it, and compare the results with the data and the benchmark model. The simulated distribution fits the data well in the upper tail of the distribution. The third essay explores the role that changes in income inequality may play in households balance sheets. This is particularly important considering the high levels of household debt that was a key contributing factor in the financial crisis of 2008. I use a family of error-correction models to estimate long-run relationship between income inequality and household debt. Tests based on Westerlund (2007), Pedroni (1999, 2004) and Johansen (1988) are used on a panel of 14 developed countries. No evidence of cointegration between the time series for income inequality and household debt is found.

Lazarus-Black and Globokar examine the work both of foreign applicants to two LL.M. programs and of the law school administrators and faculty who decide "Who's in [and] Who's Out." The LL.M. admissions process is an increasingly important determinant of the overall volume and composition of law school enrollments. At stake are the futures not only of the individual applicants, but also of law schools. In this Comment, I extend Lazarus-Black and Globokar's analysis further downstream to consider the stakes for the U.S. Legal procession as a whole. Gatekeepers to LL.M. programs are doing far more than determining individual fates and collectively shaping the future of U.S. legal education. I will demonstrate in this Comment that their work helps shape - in concrete, measurable ways- the demographic composition of the U.S. legal profession. In so doing, I will contribute to the emerging field of legal demography, which refers to the study of lawyers through the analysis of data not collected for this specific purpose.

How and why travel contributes to our life satisfaction is of considerable import for transportation policy and planning. This paper empirically examines this relationship using data from the American Time Use Survey. It finds that, controlling for relevant demographic, geographic, and temporal covariates, travel time per day is significantly and positively associated with life satisfaction. This relationship is attenuated, but still significant, when the amount of time spent participating in out-of-home activities is controlled for. Time spent bicycling is strongly associated with higher life satisfaction, though it attains significance only in some models; time spent walking is also quite positive, though it is not significant. However, both walking and bicycling are positively and significantly associated with life satisfaction when time spent on purely recreational walking and bicycling is included. Life satisfaction is positively and significantly associated with time spent traveling for the purposes of eating and drinking, religious activities, volunteering, and playing and watching sports. Travel time exhibits a strong positive relationship with life satisfaction in smaller towns and cities, but in large cities the association weakens, and for very large cities travel time may actually not be associated with life satisfaction at all. This may be due to the costs of traffic congestion, which disproportionately exists in large cities. In all, while the associations between travel and life satisfaction are clear, the causal story is complex, with the positive relationships potentially being explained by (1) travel allowing us to access destinations that make us happy, (2) the act of travel itself being fulfilling, and/or (3) intrinsically happier people being more likely to travel. In all likelihood, all three factors are at play.

The Discount Foundation is excited to partner with Algernon Austin, Marc Bayard, Linda Burnham, Steven Pitts, and Sean Thomas-Breitfeld to share new research on the economic and employment barriers facing black workers and the grassroots organizing to build the political power of black workers to transform these conditions.

Household inequalities have been shown to play a crucial role in theories of intra-household resource allocation, income distribution as well as intergenerational mobility for decades. Chapter 1 of this dissertation considers parental inequalities as determinants of child outcomes and of child household inequalities. It investigates the intergenerational link in equalities on labor income, wage, and education, and highlights how gender role attitude and preference transmission can be relevant in the analysis of household problems. Using PSID data, it shows that married sons mimic their parents in family disparity more than married daughters. A large literature investigates various factors which influence the relationship between parental income and children’s outcomes, however little focuses on the heterogeneity in parents’ preferences. The heterogeneity is a reason why children’s outcomes are a function of parental bargaining power. Chapter 2 proposes a new theoretical model combining two economic issues: intergenerational mobility and intra-household resource allocation. In the empirical section, it uses the differences between parental, grand-parental educations and abortion legality as proxies for bargaining power to examine the impact of the power on children’s outcome and on the intergenerational linkages in labor earnings and education. The chapter points-out that female empowerment negatively affects son’s education and correlation between the parents’ income and their son’s outcomes. Chapter 3 investigates impact of the state custody reforms in the United States on family labor supply and some marital variables (incidence of divorce and marriage, fertility rates, age at PREVIEW iv marriage, child investment, and marital specific capitals) while considering these variables as avenues on the link between the reforms and married couples’ working behaviors. It proposes a very simple framework to connect the legalizations, the marital variables, and spousal labor supply. It verifies the connections empirically and indicates that the reforms lead to an increase in incidence of divorce and marriage, and overall and marital fertility, and a decrease in out-ofwedlock birth rate, timing of marriage of both sexes, and investment in children’s private schooling and in several marital specific capitals. Women’s labor force participation positively responds to the legalization while their husbands’ are negatively affected.

In 2015 virtually the entire US mortgage market is subsidized by US taxpayers. When the Federal Government took control of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the summer of 2008, US tax payers assumed responsibility for the vast majority of outstanding mortgage debt in the country. This dissertation examined the historical development and contemporary activity of the secondary mortgage market to understand the way the secondary market contributes to the reproduction of place-based inequality in American cities. Specifically, this dissertation analyzed the political-economic history of the secondary mortgage market to ground a contemporary analysis of the impact of secondary mortgage market activity on neighborhood change in the Philadelphia region at the turn of the 21st century. Throughout the study period (1996 – 2007), the GSEs concentrated the vast majority of all their purchasing activity buying conventional loans in the more affluent areas of the region. On the other hand, private institutions steadily eroded GSE market share in the conventional market, represented virtually the entire secondary market for subprime loans, and were considerably more active purchasing loans made to borrowers in communities that had been historically excluded from the primary mortgage market. Secondary market activity from 1996 to 2007 was significantly associated with changes along key housing and socio-economic conditions from 1990 to 2010. GSE market share was significantly associated with changing homeownership levels in neighborhoods throughout the region from 1990 to 2010. Higher levels of GSE market share were associated with net increases in homeownership in neighborhoods throughout the region. In a similar way, GSE-informed changes in homeownership levels were subsequently associated with significant changes in the percentage of residents living in poverty in neighborhoods throughout the region from 1990 to 2010, particularly on the Pennsylvania side of the region. Unlike the relationship between secondary market purchasing and homeownership, the relationship between secondary market purchasing and poverty levels functions through housing - either by virtue of more affluent residents moving in, or poor residents moving out of these areas. In both instances, GSE market share, and GSE-informed changes in homeownership sharpened differences between the different communities depending on where the GSEs concentrated their purchasing activity. The region’s urban centers, where GSE market share was lowest, experienced the greatest reductions in home ownership throughout the region, and the greatest increases in neighborhood poverty levels. In addition, the spatial relationships between individual neighborhoods exerted significant influences on changes in each of the housing and socio-economic indicators assessed. These findings suggest that space itself, and the spatial relationships between neighborhoods, exerted a significant influence on both secondary market activity and changing neighborhood conditions throughout the Philadelphia region. Over the twenty year period observed in this study, the types of differences between neighborhoods in the region have remained largely the same, while the degree of these differences has intensified during this time. In this way, the spatial distribution of neighborhood types in the Philadelphia region informed secondary market at the turn of the 21st century, which in turn contributed to the intensification of the differences between neighborhood types throughout the region. The findings presented in this study point to a number of key implications for theorists seeking to explain the role of space and place in the (re)production of patterns of uneven-development in metropolitan regions, and for understanding the financializaiton of space. In addition, these findings also point to key insights for policy makers currently developing legislation to reform the secondary mortgage market. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This master thesis reports an applied machine learning research internship done at digital library of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The way an authors name may vary in its representation across scientific publications creates ambiguity when it comes to uniquely identifying an author; In the database of any scientific digital library, the same full name variation can be used by more than one author. This may occur even between authors from the same research affiliation. In this work, we built a machine learning based author name disambiguation solution. The approach consists in learning a distance function from a ground-truth data, blocking publications of broadly similar author names, and clustering the publications using a semi-supervised strategy within each of the blocks. The main contributions of this work are twofold; first, improving the distance model by taking into account the (estimated) ethnicity of the authors full name. Indeed, names from different ethnicities, for example Asian versus Arabic names, should be processed differently. This added feature led to a better clustering evaluation. It also got a high contribution percentage in the feature importances analysis. The second main contribution was to decide on a thresholding strategy to form a flat clustering from the agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Six different strategies were evaluated to estimate the number of clusters in each block. The strategy that provides the best evaluation results was using a blocking function that groups signatures with common last name and first name initial, then applying the semi-supervised clustering on the blocks that contains samples from the ground truth. The blocks that do not have any labeled sample will form a single cluster. A smaller contribution also made to the distance model including feature engineering and pairs sampling. Overall, the model accuracy is 98% compared to 94% if we only disambiguate on the common normalized last name and first name initial. My work contributed to raise the accuracy from 97% to slightly more than 98%. This is equivalent to reduce the error rate by about 35%. During the project, I have also contributed to an open source project which will eventually be deployed in the high-energy physics digital library of CERN (http://inspirehep.net). There were many factors that led to achieve such an accurate disambiguation model. A key factor was having a ground-truth data which allowed us to design a very good semi-supervised clustering. Another factor was learning an accurate distance model with an appropriate feature engineering in which we manage to incorporate an external knowledge of the name ethnicity.

How do emotions like happiness, pain, stress, sadness, and fatigue vary during travel and by travel mode? Understanding the relationship between how we travel and how we feel offers insight into ways of improving existing transportation services, prioritizing investments, and theorizing and modeling the costs and benefits of travel. Drawing on the American Time Use Surveys well-being module, which surveyed over 13,000 respondents about mood during randomly selected activities, we address these questions using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effects panel regression. Controlling for demographics and other individual-specific attributes, we find that, contrary to the common perception that travel is an onerous, derived demand, mood is generally no worse during travel than on average. However, compared to other influences, travel has only a small total impact on how we feel. The estimated relationship between mood and mode tends to be weak and often not statistically significant. Nevertheless, we find that bicyclists have the most positive affect. Next happiest are car passengers, and then car drivers, though when controlling for the pleasure typically derived from interacting with others, drivers are at least as happy as passengers. Bus and train riders experience the most negative emotions, though a small part of this can be attributed to the fact that transit is disproportionately used for the unloved work trip. Our findings suggest that bicycle use may have benefits beyond the typically cited health and transportation ones, and that improving transit riders emotional experience may be as important as improving traditional service features such as headways and travel speeds. Our findings are ambiguous as to whether the joy of driving will limit the appeal of autonomous vehicles.

Subjective cultural meanings were once central to occupational stratification research. However, attempts to operationalize cultural meanings associated with occupations have been widely criticized, leading contemporary stratification scholars to largely abandon subjective measures in favor of objective characteristics. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how inequality is generated and maintained because Weber ([1958]) theorized that status, a form of social symbolic power based on cultural beliefs, represents one of the fundamental bases of inequality. Without an adequate method of operationalizing occupational symbolic meanings, the extent to which cultural beliefs influence stratified life outcomes remains largely unknown. To address this, I used affect control theory, a quantitative general theory of social action, and its measurement model, the semantic differential scale, to examine three issues regarding the relationship between cultural beliefs and stratified outcomes. Symbolic meaning was quantified into EPA ratings that measure three universal, affective dimensions: evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus weak), and activity (lively versus quiescent). Despite extensive support within structural social psychology, this approach has not been widely used in the field of stratification. In addition to providing a quantitative framework, because symbolic meanings are comprised of multiple dimensions, affect control theorys multidimensional construction v allows for novel approaches not possible using unidimensional measures. The three chapters that follow use affect control theory and ratings of occupational meanings from a newly collected dictionary of affective meaning to address the occupational gender wage gap, the effect of occupational status on life chance outcomes, and the development and testing of a new measure of occupational status. The first chapter examines one of the most fundamental questions in gender stratification research: why do occupations that employ more women pay less on average than occupations that employ more men? Explanations of this phenomenon remain divided, with devaluation scholars arguing that gender norms play a central role in socializing women into lower-paying occupations, while human capital scholars counter that investments in education and training, not cultural beliefs, account for pay differentials. I argue that a multidimensional model is required to explain how cultural beliefs can simultaneously socialize women into lower-paying occupations while having no direct effect on income. I found that feminine meanings are concurrently high in evaluation but low in potency, with only the power dimension directly affecting wages. This conflation of evaluation and potency allows wage setting to be based on competence, prerequisites, and skills, while cultural gender norms contribute indirectly to the gender wage gap by socializing women to enter occupations with less power and lower skill requirements, particularly skills involving complex problem solving. The second chapter explores the relationship between occupational status and a broad set of stratified life outcomes. Weber defined status as cultural beliefs based on positive or negative estimations of respect, worthiness, and value to society, but the predominant measure of status, occupational prestige scores, has been criticized for reflecting objective characteristics rather than subjective cultural beliefs. I argue that the evaluation dimension of EPA profiles is a theoretically sound operationalization of Webers definition. I then explored how ratings of evaluation predict, net of sociodemographic controls, twenty-five life-chance outcomes grouped into traditional work- and income-related life-chance measures, cultural consumption, institutional participation, and political and social attitudes. Results indicate that status, operationalized by evaluation, is significantly predictive of work- and income-related measures, institutional participation, and political and social attitudes. Contrary to other measures of status that primarily posit an association between status and lifestyle, I find little to no significant associations with any of the lifestyle measures. I argue that this difference is due to the fact that other measures are based on the potency dimension that reflects objective class differences, whereas a measure that more closely reflects status based on cultural beliefs produces a different set of relationships. Given the widespread criticism that prestige scores do not adequately operationalize occupational status beliefs, in the third chapter I developed and tested a new measure of occupational status. Based on theoretical assertions that status is constructed and diffused through deference behavior, I used affect control theory to model the likelihood that one occupation would defer to another. The predicted affective dissonance, or deflection, created when one occupational actor performs the action defers to provides an indicator of the status associated with an occupation. A status deflection score is computed by using affect control theory to predict the mean deflection created for a matrix of all possible combinations of occupations. Higher deflection scores indicate greater status, and those occupations would be less likely to defer relative to other occupations. Because status is based on widely held cultural beliefs, data from Harris Poll surveys were used to test for construct validity. The results show that deflection is more predictive of status rankings from poll data than occupational prestige scores. Criterion validity was tested using five theoretically relevant workplace outcomes: subjective attachment, job satisfaction, general happiness, the importance of meaningful work, and respect. The results found deflection scores to be significantly associated with all five measures net of controls.

Income inequality is highest in Fairfield County, CT, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Detroit. Overall, the most imbalanced U.S. metros tend to have worse housing affordability and slower job growth. But the trend is clear: the gap between the rich and poor has increased in 94 of the 100 largest metros since 1990 and has even accelerated in the past few years.

We propose an approach for multiple imputation of items missing at random in large-scale surveys with exclusively categorical variables that have structural zeros. Our approach is to use mixtures of multinomial distributions as imputation engines, accounting for structural zeros by conceiving of the observed data as a truncated sample from a hypothetical population without structural zeros. This approach has several appealing features: imputations are generated from coherent, Bayesian joint models that automatically capture complex dependencies and readily scale to large numbers of variables. We outline a Gibbs sampling algorithm for implementing the approach, and we illustrate its potential with a repeated sampling study using public use census microdata from the state of New York, U.S.A.

We use 20th-century data to examine how community economic conditions at the time of birth influenced various measures of socioeconomic success as adults. Our analysis focuses on the worst downturn ever experienced in the United States: the Great Depression. We merge individual information reported by respondents in the U.S. Censuses of 1970 and 1980 with information on state per capita income during the individual's year of birth in their state of birth. Results indicate that the effect of state income per capita in the birth year on income and disability later in life varies with changes in income levels. Individuals born in the trough of the Depression in low-income states had substantially lower incomes and higher work disability rates later in life than workers born in those states in the peak year of 1929. However, the effect of being born during the trough of the Depression in states with higher incomes during the first half of the 20th century was much weaker on income and disability later in life.

Venomous snakes are rarely considered by humans as a major conservation concern, yet in Northeastern Illinois the indigenous eastern massasauga rattlesnake has seen a rapid decline in numbers over the last twenty years. This snake species is considered a keystone species in the prairie wetlands ecosystem in Northeastern Illinois. Looking at historical population statistics of the area’s largest city, Chicago, and its various suburbs there is a visible suburbanization trend that began about fifty years back. With rising population in the suburban areas of Chicago comes an increase in housing developments as well as an increase in urban land cover. Even with the protection of the wetlands of Illinois, all of these factors seem to be directly effecting the existing populations of eastern massasugas in Northeastern Illinois. These specialist rattlesnakes require both the prairie wetlands for hibernation, as well as adjacent dry uplands in order to survive. All in all, suburbanization and urban sprawl in the Chicago area can be correlated with the decimation of the once healthy population of eastern massasauga rattlesnakes in Northeastern Illinois.