Using individual- level data from the United States, we empirically investigate the role of lower- tail income inequality in determining rates of early nonmarital childbearing among low socioeconomic status (SES) women. We present robust evidence that young low- SES women are more likely to have a nonmarital birth when they live in places with larger lowertail income inequality, all else held constant. We calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizeable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates. We propose a model of adolescent decision-making that facilitates the interpretation of our results.

We show that information revealed by the occupation choices of spouses predicts martial dissolution. Using a novel measure of occupational distance constructed from the O*Net Content Model, we find that spouses more closely matched in terms of their occupations' requisite knowledge are more likely to divorce. This supports the hypothesis that gains from division of labor within a household can render a marriage more durable. On the other hand, spouses that are dissimilar in terms of their occupations' activities are more likely to divorce. This suggests that each spouse brings an inclination toward certain activities to the marriage that reflects compatible preferences for joint consumption of household public goods.

This report examines the metropolitan geography of the working-age limited English proficient population and their labor force characteristics. It offers evidence for the economic benefits of investing in adult English instruction and presents data useful for tailoring interventions to the specific characteristics of an areas LEP population. It concludes with some options for enhancing investment in adult English instruction through increased funding, targeted outreach, and instructional innovations.

The debate about raising the retirement age of U.S. workers has revolved primarily around the longer life expectancy of the population and its impact on the solvency of Social Security; consideration of socioeconomic health disparities has been largely absent. In response to this gap we analyze educational differentials in health among middle-age and older adults and translate the results into age-equivalents. We use the nationally-representative 1997-2010 National Health Interview Surveys for data on general health and activity limitations among white and black men and women aged 40-74 (N=341,060). Using age-adjusted prevalence and nonparametric regression models, we determine health levels by age and education. Results vary slightly across health outcomes and demographic subgroups but generally show that college-educated white men report health levels at age 70 that are equivalent to the health reported by high school graduates about 15 to 30 years younger. High school dropouts report worse health at age 40 than the college-educated group at 70, a gap of over 30 years. The results show the enormous health disparities in intuitive age-equivalents and highlight the importance of considering the disparities in discussions about raising the retirement age, both in terms of fairness and feasibility.

In 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This legislation provided an increase in Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP) payouts of 15%, on average. Employing the Linear Probability, Logit and Ordered Logit Difference-­‐‑in-­‐‑Difference models, I estimate the impact of this payout increase on reported hunger. I use data from the Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey. The results show that increases in SNAP payouts have reduced the probability of being hungry at all in the previous month. Furthermore, when estimating the impact on the frequency of hunger, I find that those who are likely to report being hungry more often experience larger reductions in their probability of being hungry due to increases in SNAP payouts. These findings support the effectiveness of increased SNAP payouts during harsh economic times and further help identify the level of reported hunger for which increasing payouts is more significant.

For Hispanic children, the challenges of family poverty, cultural differences, and language proficiency are often interrelated and pose significant barriers to academic and personal success. The roots of the academic achievement gap are formed early in life; by age five, Hispanic children are, on average, four to five months behind white children in pre-reading skills, and this gap at kindergarten entry accounts for over 80% of the gap in reading skills between white and Hispanic fourth grade students. This brief is based on the data collected from a pilot study on Hispanic children and their access to early care education (ECE) in Washington, DC, that was completed in concert with DC Action for Children in the spring of 2014. It draws on existing research, census and school data, reports from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) and interviews with early childhood practitioners, administrators, and government officials with experience serving the Hispanic community. These interviews allowed for an exploration of the barriers to Hispanic access that are harder to quantify, or analyze through data alone, like cultural values.

The changes in women and men's work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50 years (1964-2013) of US Census Annual Demographic Files (March Current Population Survey) to track the changing returns to human capital (measured as both educational attainment and potential work experience), estimating comparable earnings equations by gender at each point in time. We consider the effects of sample selection over time for both women and men and show the rising effect of selection for women in recent years. Returns to education diverge for women and men over this period in the selection-adjusted results but converge in the OLS results, while returns to potential experience converge in both sets of results. We also create annual calculations of synthetic lifetime labor force participation, hours, and earnings that indicate convergence by gender in worklife patterns, but less convergence in recent years in lifetime earnings. Thus, while some convergence has indeed occurred, the underlying mechanisms causing convergence differ for women and men, reflecting continued fundamental differences in women's and men's life experiences.

Con el desarrollo de esta investigación se pretende analizar el comportamiento reproductivo de las generaciones de mujeres que en los censos de 1973, 1985, 1993 y 2005 se encontraban en edad fértil, teniendo en cuenta su estatus migratorio y en el contexto nacional y territorial. Así como también, determinar las probabilidades de agrandamiento de las familias de las generaciones de mujeres nacidas en Colombia entre 1916 y 1955, desde las diferencias presentadas cuando se considera el territorio y el estatus migratorio. El estudio del comportamiento reproductivo de las mujeres en Colombia se ha desarrollado desde las medidas de fecundidad del momento y desde los determinantes, en el contexto nacional, posponiendo el seguimiento al comportamiento reproductivo en las regiones, y no es más que el resultado de restricciones en las fuentes de datos. Los vacíos de información en Colombia han limitado los estudios de fecundidad en el nivel regional, esta razón nos impulsó a utilizar una fuente poco explorada, que ofrece información retrospectiva del comportamiento reproductivo de las mujeres a nivel de departamento, que además permite la reconstrucción de la fecundidad de las generaciones por edad y que nos ofrece la posibilidad de observar la fecundidad según el estatus migratorio de las mujeres. Esta fuente es los censos de población, de los cuales se ha tabulado las respuestas a la pregunta sobre hijos nacidos vivos incluida a partir de 1973 y que se ha mantenido en los censo de 1985, 1993 y 2005.

Desde 1896 hasta 1954 se segregaron la mayoría de las escuelas públicas de Estados Unidos, ya sea por ley en el Sur o de facto en el resto del país. El juicio Brown v. Board of Education de 1954 califica la división racial de las escuelas de inherentemente desigual y la declara inconstitucional. En este trabajo, a partir de la base de Welch y Light (1987) y de una especificación en triple diferencia en diferencias, se confirman los resultados de Guryan (2004) del aumento de la tasa de asistencia escolar de los negros a nivel de educación secundaria y se muestra un efecto nulo de la desegregación a nivel universitario. Esta alza en el stock de capital humano no es suficiente para generar un aumento en los indicadores de cambio tecnológico, y, más aún, las industrias innovadoras disminuyen su oferta de empleos, tanto a los blancos como a los negros, en las zonas que implementaron planes de desegregación.

American private nonprofits and government both provide large shares of many of the same goods and services, such as education, health care, and human services. This dissertation examines how government and private nonprofits interact through the charitable contr...

Millions of U.S. adults are recipients of the high school (HS) equivalency (General Education Development [GED]) diploma. Virtually nothing is known about the health of this large group, although literature suggests GED recipients are considerably worse off than HS graduates in numerous economic and social outcomes. We analyze general health among working-age adults with a HS diploma, GED recipients, and HS dropouts.

An analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) finds that approximately 40 percent of workers living in Albany County, New York lack even a single paid sick day. This lack of access is even more pronounced among low-income and part-time workers. Access to paid sick days promotes safe and healthy work environments by reducing the spread of illness1 and workplace injuries,2 reduces health care costs, and supports children and families by helping parents to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities.3 This briefing paper presents estimates of access to paid sick days for workers in the private sector in Albany County by sex, race and ethnicity, occupation, part/full-time employment status, and personal earnings through analysis of government data sources, including the 2010–2012 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and the 2010–2012 American Community Survey (ACS).

As the uncertainty is inherent in a wide spectrum of applications such as radio frequency identification (RFID) networks and location-based services (LBS), it is highly demanded to address the uncertainty of the objects. In this paper, we propose a novel indexing structure, named U-Quadtree, to organize the uncertain objects in the multidimensional space such that the queries can be processed efficiently by taking advantage of U-Quadtree. Particularly, we focus on the range search on multidimensional uncertain objects since it is a fundamental query in a spatial database. We propose a cost model which carefully considers various factors that may impact the performance. Then, an effective and efficient index construction algorithm is proposed to build the optimal U-Quadtree regarding the cost model. We show that U-Quadtree can also efficiently support other types of queries such as uncertain range query and nearest neighbor query. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our techniques outperform the existing works on multidimensional uncertain objects.

The most important development in labor markets, in all industrialized countries was the increase in the entry of women, in particular married women, into the labor force. The economic literature associates the increasing labor force participation of women with the changes in the wage structure, either in terms of the gender wage gap or the elasticity of the female labor supply to changes in their own wages or their husband's wages and with the changing fertility behavior of women. In this …

Three great transformations can be observed in the history of the university. The first transformation turned the Christian university into the modern, secular university. The second transformation is known as the emergence of the research university in the nineteenth century. The third transformation opened general access to higher education institutions. This last transformation has been taking place since the beginning of the twentieth century, and is still underway worldwide (Trow, 2010). The US system of education is in the lead, and so is the admired model of very competitive human capital investments and of social equity politics in education, particularly in higher education institutions (Altbach, 1991; Altbach et al., 2005). Rothblatt and Wittrock, observing the rapid worldwide transfer and implementation of the US model, critically argue against this trend hurried through in a rush of enthusiasm. ‘Developments which in countries such as the United States took the better part of a century to accomplish have been hurried along by both market forces and state interest. The resulting hurly-burly of events, programmes and ideologies is bewildering’ (Rothblatt and Wittrock, 1993, p.9).

Minnesota was ranked 6th in the United States for total sales of agricultural product, with just over $13 billion in sales in the year 2011. Only 1.1% of Minnesotas workforce was employed in agriculture for the year 2011. However, this small portion of Minnesotas workforce has one of the highest work-related fatality rates, with 28 (40%) of the 70 work-related deaths that occurred in the year 2010 associated with agriculture. While the number of agricultural fatalities that have occurred in Minnesota is well documented and counted, the number of non-fatal injuries is not. To address this issue the Minnesota hospital discharge data set was used to create counts, rates, and trends of agricultural injury for the years 2000-2011. These counts were used with the Cost of Illness model to create estimates of the economic burden of agricultural injuries in Minnesota for the years 2004-2010.

Starting in 2014, many low-income adult residents of statesthat forgo the Affordable Care Acts expansion of Medicaid would be eligible for that program if they moved to a state that had chosen to expand its coverage. Some of these people may migrate to receive coverage, thereby increasing costs for states that have expanded the program. This is known as the welfare magnet hypothesis, a claim that geographic variation in social programs induces the migration of welfare recipients to places with more generous benefits or eligibility. To investigate whether such spillover effects are likely, we used data from the Current Population Survey to examine the migration patterns of low-income people before and after recent expansions of public insurance in Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York. Using difference-indifferences analysis of migration in expansion and control states, we found no evidence of significant migration effects. Our preferred estimate was precise enough to rule out net migration effects of larger than 1,600 people per year in an expansion state. These results suggest that migration will not be a common way for people to obtain Medicaid coverage under the current expansion and that interstate migration is not likely to be a significant source of costs for states choosing to expand their programs.

A significant number of immigrants fail to realise their full potential in the US labour markets, as evidenced by those working in occupations requiring skill levels far below their own level of education. While previous studies have studied immigrant underemployment with a focus on individual labour force characteristics, the spatial dimensions of immigrant underemployment have been largely overlooked. Using microdata from the 20062010 American Community Survey and a multilevel research design, this study examines the interaction of metropolitan labour market characteristics with individual labour forces underemployment experiences, and explores how these interaction effects differ between the foreign-born and the native-born. Results suggest that the probability of individual labour forces underemployment within any metropolitan area is highly contingent on metropolitan labour market characteristics including ethnic diversity, the proportion of its foreign-born population, the economic structure, and the level of educational attainment of the labour force, in addition to individual characteristics.