The San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Aging Policy Task Force and this final Report are products of a community effort to raise the profile of issues affecting LGBT seniors in San Francisco. The Task Force was established at the urging of LGBT community members following a community-led process that started in the San Francisco's Human Rights Commission's LGBT Advisory Committee.

While there is debate regarding the magnitude of the impact, immigrant inflows are generally understood to depress wages and increase employment in immigrant-intensive sectors. In light of the over-representation of the foreign-born in the childcare industry, this paper examines whether college-educated native women respond to immigrant-induced lower cost and potentially more convenient childcare options with increased fertility. An analysis of U.S. Census data between 1980 and 2000 suggests that immigrant inflows are indeed associated with increased likelihoods of having a baby, and responses are strongest among women who are most likely to consider childcare costs when making fertility decisions namely, married women with a graduate degree. Given that women also respond to immigrant inflows by working long hours, the paper ends with an analysis of the types of women who have stronger fertility relative to labor supply responses to immigrant-induced changes in childcare options.

Do married couples make joint labor supply decisions in response to each other’s wage shocks? The study on this question aids in understanding the link between the rising income instability and household insurance. Existing studies on household insurance either focus on consumption smoothing and take labor supply as a given, or only focus on wife’s labor responses to husband’s unemployment shocks. This article develops an intra-household insurance model that allows for insurance against permanent and transitory wage shocks from both partners. Estimation using the Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that wife increases labor supply in response to husband’s adverse wage shocks when both of them are working, and wife gets more nonlabor income when she is out of work. This intra-household insurance reduces earnings instability by about 2 to 9 %. These results suggest that joint labor supply decisions provide an extra smoothing effect on income instability.

In this dissertation I exploit observational and experimental data to study individual decision making when agents face social interactions or are described by non-standard neoclassical preferences. In the first chapter I study how social interactions, could explain occupational choice in an incomplete information setting. In a discrete choice framework I allow for group unobservables affecting decisions. I show that asymmetries in the peer influence enables to separately identify the effects from group members’ expected behaviour and the effects from their characteristics. I provide an empirical application to nineteenth century London. The results show that social networks were important in determining occupations but are somewhat lower than estimates which do not impose consistent beliefs nor allow for unobservables. Secondly, I implement an artefactual field experiment with small entrepreneurs. Subjects were given an initial amount of money to be invested across alternatives. Some of the subjects were informed about the possibility of getting either a high or a low income level. The income level was either predetermined or allocated after a fair lottery. Agents who started with a low income after the lottery were more risk loving. A model of reference–dependent preferences with multiple reference points, formed through recently held expectations on foregone and actual outcomes, fits most of the experimental results. In the last chapter I study game interactions in interdependent value auctions fol- lowing Kim (2003). Agents are asymmetrically informed in terms of how precisely they know the different aspects of the object’s value. Due to the mismatch of bidding strategies between these bidders, the second-price auction is inefficient. The English auction has an equilibrium in which bidders can infer information and attain efficiency. The increase in perfectly informed bidders increases the seller’s revenue. A laboratory experiment confirms key predictions about efficiency and revenues and reveals naive bidding.

We analyze Medicare's influence on private payments for physicians' services. Using a large administrative change in surgical relative to medical reimbursements, we find that private prices follow Medicare's lead. A $1 change in Medicare's relative payments moved private payments by $1.16. We estimate that private payments responded similarly to a set of across-the-board payment changes that varied across geographic areas. We further find Medicare's influence to be strongest in areas with concentrated insurers, competitive providers, and more small physician groups. Medicare's influences on system-wide resource allocation and cost extend well beyond the share of national health expenditures it finances directly.

We create a new dataset to test the influence of land inequality on long-run human capital formation in a global cross-country study and assess the importance of land inequality relative to income inequality. Our results show that early land inequality has a detrimental influence on math and science skills even a century later. We find that this influence is causal, using an instrumental variable (IV) approach with geological, climatic and other variables that are intrinsically exogenous. A second major contribution of our study is our assessment of the persistence of numerical cognitive skills, which are an important component of modern human capital measures. Early numeracy around 1820 is estimated using the age-heaping strategy. We argue that countries with early investments in numerical education entered a path-dependency of human capital-intensive industries, including skill-intensive agriculture and services. The combined long-run effects of land inequality and human capital path-dependence are assessed for the first time in this article.

The people of Leicester express a deep desire to see their rural way of life continue into the twenty-first century, and yet, like so many towns across the Commonwealth, a period of shrinking budgets has limited Leicesters capacity to meet even basic needs, such as clean drinking water and functional parks. This plan presents a set of strategies for rebuilding this capacity, aimed at restoring not only the capacity to meet basic needs, but ultimately at restoring the communitys capacity to realize its vision for the future: simply that Leicester remain a healthy, pleasant place to live, with quiet nights, working farms, healthy forests, clean air and water.

This paper explores how inflows of low-skilled immigrants impact the tradeoffs women face when making joint fertility and labor supply decisions. I find increases in fertility and decreases in labor force participation rates among high skilled US-born women in cities that have experienced larger immigrant inflows. Most interestingly, these changes have been accompanied by decreases in the strength of the negative correlation between childbearing and labor force participation, an often-used measure of the difficulty with which women combine motherhood and labor market work. Using a structured statistical model, I show that the immigrant-induced attenuation of this negative correlation can explain about 24 percent of the immigrant-induced increases in the joint likelihood of childbearing and labor force participation in the U.S. between the years 1980 and 2000.

Educations benefits for individuals health are well documented, but it is unclear whether health benefits also accrue from the education of others in important social relationships. We assess the extent to which individuals own education combines with their spouses education to influence self-rated health among married persons aged 25 and older in the United States (N = 337,846) with pooled data from the 19972010 National Health Interview Survey. Results from age- and gender-specific models revealed that own education and spouses education each share an inverse association with fair/poor self-rated health among married men and women. Controlling for spousal education substantially attenuated the association between individuals own education and fair/poor self-rated health and the reduction in this association was greater for married women than married men. The results also suggest that husbands education is more important for wives self-rated health than vice versa. Spousal education particularly was important for married women aged 4564. Overall, the results imply that individuals own education and spousal education combine to influence self-rated health within marriage. The results highlight the importance of shared resources in marriage for producing health.

Primary care physicians, chiropractors, and physical therapists (PTs) all may potentially treat patients experiencing back and neck pain. In this paper, we examine how changes in chiropractic scope of practice and PT direct access to patients influence the wages of each practitioner. Our results suggest that expansions in chiropractic scope of practice increase average chiropractor wages. Our results also suggest that PT direct access to patients increases physician wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, but slightly reduces physician wages at the top of the wage distribution.

While the ways in which fans interact and consume sports has evolved in response to new and broadcast media, the most profound change for cities from sports is its linkage to real estate development. This emerging dimension to the ability of sports to redistribute regional economic activity creates critical public policy, business, and urban planning outcomes and potential. This dissertation identifies the ways in which the sports business has changed and illustrates the ways in which these effects can be channeled to benefit cities. For desired outcomes to occur, however, management and administrative systems have to be created that permit cities to realize the possible advantages. It is also possible that the ways in which sports projects are explained and presented to voters also needs to be changed. These understandings are vital because the positive outcomes for cities from sports and real estate development cannot occur without new decision-making presentations and management systems. This dissertation contributes to a greater understanding of these new requirements and the relationship between sports and real estate development (and its effects on cities) through three separate studies centered on the issues of decision-making, urban planning, and economic and neighborhood development. The research is fashioned to examine processes, designs, and approaches that increase the probability of gains for both teams and the public sector in their development partnerships. The research efforts are interconnected in that they contribute to and expand upon an innovative, developing thread of scholarship in the spatial effects of sports for local economies. Each study covers an important segment of the sports and urban development process that frames this new approach to sport management. The studies focus on (a) voter preferences and reactions to public subsidies for sports facility construction, (b) planned and unforeseen outcomes of a master planned neighborhood anchored by a new ballpark, and (c) the formation of the needed organizational structures to ensure outcomes from a linkage of sports to real estate development can be facilitated to produce desired local effects.

Background: Son preference is a phenomenon characterized by a greater valuation of male versus female children that can manifest through discriminatory behaviors in the prenatal or postnatal period. While the phenomenon is well-researched in India, limited research attention has been given to the persistence of son preference ideology among the growing Indian immigrant population in the U.S. This dissertation explores what the male and female perspectives of son preference and daughter neglect are among Punjabi Sikh immigrants in Northern California, and what professionals have encountered with regard to the phenomenon. Methods: This study utilized qualitative research methods to collect data from members of the Punjabi Sikh community residing in Northern California. In phase one of this project, key informant interviews were conducted with professionals in health, education, social services, and community organizing (n=17). In phase two, in-depth interviews were conducted with unmarried sons (n=11) and daughters (n=14) age 18-24 years who were born in the U.S. or migrated here at a young age, and married males (n=2) and females (n=6) who were born in North India, were age 21 and over, and had at least two children. An inductive thematic analysis was followed for data analysis that encompassed coding the data, combining codes into broader categories and themes, and then noting relationships among categories to make descriptive comparisons. Results: Son preference in Punjabi Sikh families continues to persist in both subtle and overt ways, most predominantly in the form of emotional abuse. While both males and females recognized instances of discriminatory treatment towards girls and women throughout the community, women and girls perceived more inequality in . . .

As life expectancy at birth in the United States approaches eighty years of age, educational differentials in adult mortality are greater than ever. One of the key sociological insights of our time is that these two processes are fundamentally interrelated. As society gains greater social capacity to control health and disease socioeconomic status (SES) becomes increasingly important for shaping healthy social environments and lifestyles, which reduce the risk of mortality. Of all SES indicators, educational attainment is perhaps the single most important predictor of mortality in the United States. Not only do low-educated Americans have shorter lifespans compared to their college-educated counterparts, on average, but they have recently suffered absolute declines in life expectancy. However, debates surrounding the extent, causes, and even validity of those trends continue. This dissertation makes several unique contributions to our understanding of lifespan inequality by educational attainment in the United States. First, using vital statistics data, it documents trends in life expectancy and lifespan variation—a unique dimension of lifespan inequality—by educational attainment for black and white Americans of both genders from 1990 to 2010. Second, it decomposes those trends by age and cause of death in order to understand the proximate causes of the educational disparity in adult mortality. Third, it evaluates the extent to which changes in the composition of education groups account for the rising education-mortality gradient. The findings reveal that the gap in life expectancy at age 25 between the low educated (having fewer than twelve years of schooling) and the college educated has doubled among men and more than tripled among women over the study period; that life expectancy declined among low-educated white men and women (by 0.6 and 3.1 years, respectively); and that much of these trends is attributed to an increase in premature deaths from smoking-related diseases and external causes. While both sides of the selection-causation debate have merit, changes in group composition do not fully account for the increase in mortality among low-educated Americans, for whom economic circumstances have worsened. Overall, the association between educational attainment and adult mortality is pervasive, enduring, and increasing in magnitude.

An estimated 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants resided in the United States in 2012 according to the Pew Hispanic Center (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera 2013). Reforming the U.S. immigration system is a clear policy priority for President Barack Obama, and an agenda item for the 113th Congress (U.S. Congressional Research Service 2013). Based on prior legislation, processing of immigrants for legalization is likely to be a complex and time consuming task, necessitating the involvement of nonprofit and public infrastructure. The goal of this study was to design a research methodology for estimating the unauthorized population at the census tract level, as a means for visually representing the relative densities of the unauthorized population in a way that would be useful for planning where to provide services for the unauthorized populations within a community. Using statistical methods, the relationships between the dependent and independent variables was defined at the state level. The state level relationships were then applied to census tract level data in order to make census tract estimates. The results of the analysis were displayed as relative densities using the dot density renderer in ArcGIS Desktop. The performance of this model was verified by comparing the results generated in this study to those of other studies. Based on this verification method, the performance of the model varied by geography, with the western states, in particular, California seeming to have performed the best. The states that appear to have performed the worst are primarily located in northeastern United States and include six out of the eight states with the lowest number of unauthorized persons (<3,000). Within California, between a 0.02 (Orange County) and 3.4 (Bay Area) percentage point difference was found when comparing the regional distribution estimated in this study with those of other studies.

Previous studies show that immigrants married to natives earn higher wages than immigrants married to other immigrants. Using data from the 1980-2000 U.S. censuses and the 2005- 2010 American Community Surveys, we show that these wage premiums have increased over time. Our evidence suggests that the trends cannot be explained by changes in the attributes of immigrants that tend to marry natives but are instead most likely a result of increasing returns to the characteristics of immigrants married to natives. Because immigrants married to natives tend to have more schooling, part of the increasing premium can be explained by increases in the returns to a college education. However, we find increasing intermarriage premiums even when allowing the returns to schooling as well as English-speaking ability to vary over time. We believe these patterns are driven by changes in technology and globalization which have made communication and management skills more valuable in the U.S. labor market.