This study examined the association between acculturation and functional disability among Vietnamese-Americans ages 65 and older. Data came from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 of the U.S. Census data. This sample consisted of 2,610 older Vietnamese-Americans representing 5.2% of Vietnamese-Americans from the 2000 U.S. Census data. We examined three alternative structural equation models depicting the association between acculturation and functional disability while controlling for possible influences of selected covariates: age, sex, education, income, and length of residence in the United States. Findings indicated that the model depicting the effect of acculturation on functional disability had a better fit than the model depicting the effect of functional disability on acculturation. The non-recursive model, which tested the reciprocal association between acculturation and functional disability, provided strong evidence for the effect of acculturation on functional disability. Findings of the study suggest that researchers should examine the complexity of acculturation and functional disability in the context of immigrants/refugees age and pre-migration experiences. Where immigrants and refugees come from plays a key role in their acculturation and health status. Immigrant and refugee services should focus not only on general acculturation skills, but also on health acculturation skills.

The present paper analyzes fertility of Cuban women living in the USA, in the period 2005-2009, as to the level and structure of this variable. Similarly, it compares such indicator among women born in the USA and other non-Cuban foreigners in that country, and the Cuban women living in Cuba in the same period of time. The analysis is carried out dividing the population as to their places of residence, classified in two groups: Florida –with over 75 % of Cubans living in US– and the rest of the country. Considering those theories attempting to describe and explain immigrants’ reproductive behavior, the present article took into account three variables to assess the different peculiarities of immigrants´ fertility: time of residence in the USA, language spoken (Spanish or English) and life cycle of migration (before or after entering the reproductive period). To such aim, American Community Survey (ACS) was used, analyzing the stage between 2005 and 2009, available in Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) website. Results indicate that, in the analyzed period, fertility of Cuban women in the US is slightly higher, in terms of level, and older, in terms of structure, than Cuban women living in Cuba. On the other hand, as for destiny, similarities are greater in relation with those born in the US, than with the rest of the non-Cuban foreigners in that country

Using wages and migration histories of a large sample of college graduates in the 2000 U.S. Census data, this paper provides a new set of estimates that characterize the relationship between earnings profiles and cities for labor force entry. Results indicate that the workers who spend their early years in larger cities receive higher wages and experience more rapid wage growth, and this particular effect of city size on wage growth increases with individual ability. A new decomposition of the city-size wage premium suggests that the selection effect accounts for 12% of the city-size wage gap. The remainder of the percentage is attributed to wage level and wage growth effects at 60% and 28%, respectively.

The goal of direct observations of behavior is to produce quantitative descriptions of behavior in a variety of natural settings. This approach is relatively new and uncommon in anthropology compared to behavioral biology, where researchers cannot rely on informant accounts of behavior. As noted by Johnson and Sackett (1998), what people actually do on a daily basis and who they interact with are not accurately reported in standard ethnographic literature or textbooks, and this is especially true of the activities of women and children. To a large extent, the development of behavior observations has been initiated and developed by researchers who are ecologically and economically oriented. This is not surprising, given the importance of quantitative behavioral data (e.g., hours worked in various tasks) required for adequate descriptions and tests of hypotheses in those fields. Recently, the scope of behavioral research has broadened to examine non-economic topics such as child and caretaker interactions, doctor-patient dynamics, and visiting patterns.

While evidence about discrimination in U.S. labor markets typically implies preferential treatment for whites, recent studies document a substantial wage premium for black women (for example, Fryer 2011). Although differential selection of black and white women into the labor market has been a suggested explanation, we demonstrate that accounting for selection does not eliminate the estimated premium. We then incorporate two additional omitted variables recently documented in the literature: (1) local cost of living and (2) years of education attained, conditional on AFQT score. After controlling for these variables, we find no evidence of a wage premium for black women.

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary income support to workers who have lost their jobs and are seeking reemployment. This paper reviews the origins of the federal-state UI system in the United States and outlines its principles and goals. It also describes the conditions for benefit eligibility, the benefits themselves, and their financing through the UI payroll tax. The UI system is complex and includes many interested parties, including employers, worker advocates, state UI administrators, and the federal government. These parties differing views have led to controversies over benefit eligibility, adequacy, and whether the states or federal government should bear primary responsibility for UI. The Great Recession caused most states UI trust funds to become insolvent and has led to renewed debate over the structure and financing of the system.

Territorial presumptions about culture have been challenged by research on interconnected histories, borderlands, and oceans.¹ Drawing on that work, I contend that food traditions are as much a matter of movement and emplacement, as they are of roots. National figures often excise migrants from their cultural sphere with arguments about belonging, yet the construction of place-based food cultures, developed without acknowledging the significance of immigrant habitation, can produce virulent locavorism. For instance, Northern Leaguers in Italy mobilize around slogans of “polenta, not couscous” to exclude doner kebab sellers from the city-center in Lucca, and Mikkel Dencker, of the Danish People’s...

O mercado de locação é significativo na região da América Latina e do Caribe: uma em cada cinco famílias atualmente aluga a casa que ocupa, apesar de as políticas públicas favorecerem a aquisição da casa própria. Essa proporção vem aumentando há 10 anos na maioria dos países, inclusive, e de forma mais expressiva nas áreas urbanas, sobretudo nas cidades de maior porte, onde representa mais de 40%. Isso é crucial em uma região em que a população urbanizada já ultrapassa os 80%, índice que continuará a crescer nos próximos anos. A oferta de habitação para locação apresenta melhores condições em matéria de infraestrutura e materiais de construção que a propriedade informal da habitação, assemelhando-se às da habitação formal, inclusive para os quintis de renda mais baixa. Assim, o aluguel pode tornar-se uma alternativa eficiente e eficaz em função dos custos . . .

Executive SummaryTax benefits to owner-occupied housing provide incentives to consume housing, offsetting weaker disincentives of the property tax. These benefits also help counter the penalty federal taxes impose on households who work in productive high-wage areas, but reinforce incentives to consume local amenities. We simulate the effects of these benefits in a parameterized model, and determine the consequences of various tax reforms. Reductions in housing tax benefits generally increase efficiency in consumption, but reduce efficiency in location decisions, unless they are accompanied by tax rate reductions. The most efficient policy would eliminate most tax benefits to housing and index taxes to local wage levels.

While the study of privacy preserving data publishing has drawn a lot of interest, some recent work has shown that existing mechanisms do not limit all inferences about individuals. This paper is a positive note in response to this finding. We point out that not all inference attacks should be countered, in contrast to all existing works known to us, and based on this we propose a model called SPLU. This model protects sensitive information, by which we refer to answers for aggregate queries with small sums, while queries with large sums are answered with higher accuracy. Using SPLU, we introduce a sanitization algorithm to protect data while maintaining high data utility for queries with large sums. Empirical results show that our method behaves as desired.

Household energy transitions in low and middle-income countries can play an important and often immediate role in improving human welfare in various dimensions. Residential use of kerosene, particularly as a lighting fuel in inefficient lamps, is one such energy use with the potential for significant improvements and benefits. I present measurements and analyses investigating characteristics of kerosene use, pollutant emissions from its use for household lighting and how distal drivers affecting price and access to electricity influence household consumption. Towards informing household air pollution assessment methodologies, a comparison of markers of complex pollutant mixtures is performed in the context of residential sources of combustion in Nepal. Laboratory and field measurement showed that 7-9% of kerosene consumed by widely used simple wick lamps is converted to carbonaceous particulate matter that is nearly pure black carbon. Combined with estimates of bottom-up fuel consumption from survey- based estimates of user prevalence, these high emission factors increase previous black carbon emission estimates from kerosene by 20-fold, to 270 Gg/year (90% uncertainty bounds: 110, 590 Gg/year). Applying consumption and lighting device stock estimates from a recent UN assessment approximately doubles the central emissions estimate. Estimated global BC emissions from kerosene lighting sources are approximately one eighth of residential biomass BC emissions and one sixth of those from diesel. As a source, the net effect of pollutant emissions from kerosene lamps on climate would be positive (warming) given the relatively small cooling effect of co-emitted pollutants. Indoor area measurements during operation of cooking and lighting appliances indicated that trends in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and elemental carbon did not always reflect trends in standard markers of pollution, suggesting that their use as supplemental markers could provide added information. The most pronounced difference was observed from area concentrations during use of the sawdust stove, where total PAH concentrations were measured to be three times greater than from the second highest PAH source, the traditional biomass-burning chulo stove, but sawdust stove PM2.5 concentrations were three times lower than from the chulo. Kerosene stove measurements showed average retene concentrations to be ten times higher than from the highest biomass source, adding to existing skepticism over the use of retene as a source marker of softwood combustion. From an analysis of residential kerosene use in India, lighting was found to account for over 60% of residential kerosene consumption. The electrified household population constituted an approximately equal share of kerosene demand as the non-electrified household population. Impacts resulting from kerosene lighting activities were also substantial, providing a potential opportunity to improve population welfare while also alleviating economic burdens associated with government subsidies. Reductions in ambient primary PM2.5 resulting from the abatement of kerosene as a lighting source were estimated to avert between 0.27-1.6 million years of life lost in 2030. Early PM2.5 control costs to replace kerosene with pico-solar lighting devices were estimated to yield a net savings of $3.5 billion in 2030, principally due to reductions in kerosene purchases. Kerosene demand for lighting was found to be highly price sensitive, so that in a scenario in which current subsidies are phased out by 2030, kerosene demand drops by 97% compared to the Baseline. The economic inefficiency implied results in an estimated deadweight loss from the kerosene subsidy of $950 million in 2005, with over three quarters attributed to its use as a secondary lighting source. The most effective measures for reducing kerosene burden would be those that address use as a secondary lighting fuel.

Though the Great Recession came to a close in June 2009, workers are still feeling its effects due to continued high rates of underemployment and long-term unemployment. The long-term unemployed are more marginally attached to the labor force than their short-term unemployed peers, yet less is known about how people sort into long-term unemployment or cope with this status, nor why African Americans are disproportionately represented in this group. Using data from qualitative interviews with a diverse group of individuals who experienced job loss between 2007 and 2011, this study identifies the important role private safety nets play in ameliorating the scarring effects of unemployment in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Private resources, which are unequally distributed along racial lines, connect job losers to satisfactory jobs, provide high quality retraining opportunities, and facilitate more comfortable labor force exits. Private resources also augment the living conditions of individuals who find themselves long-term unemployed or underemployed, buffering them from the potential negative consequences of the decline in the quality of their employment situation. Because these resources are unequally distributed along racial lines, African Americans who lose their jobs experience worse labor market outcomes and greater decreases in their wellbeing than their White counterparts. These results suggest that job loss is a turning point in the life course-like incarceration, eviction, or high school completion-in which racial inequality is magnified and reproduced.

Poverty status is an important factor influencing household production and the unpaid work time associated with it due to the role of household production as a coping strategy in mitigating the impact of economic downturns. In this paper, we examine the presence of poverty-based asymmetries in the unpaid work time changes of men and women during the Great Recession. Using the 2003-2012 American Time Use Survey, we find that these changes indeed varied by poverty status. In particular, nonpoor women drove the reduction in unpaid work time among women. Among men, the lack of the change in unpaid work time masked the increase in poor men's time and the decrease in nonpoor men's time. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions of the changes in the unpaid work time reveal that shifts in own and spousal employment status largely account for the gender-based difference in these changes, while shifts in the household structure partially explain the poverty-based differences. Nevertheless, sizable portions of the changes in time use remain unexplained by the shifting individual and household characteristics. The latter finding supports the hypothesis of poverty-based variation in the unpaid work time adjustments in that poor and nonpoor individuals appeared to have responded to the recession in different ways.

Using War Relocation Authority records linked to the Social Security Death Index, I investigate whether the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII affected the life spans of male internees who were incarcerated during early childhood. Using un-interned Japanese Hawaiians as a control group, difference-in-differences estimates suggest that internees incarcerated within the first four years of life died approximately two years earlier. Furthermore, the internees from low socioeconomic status families and internees incarcerated in cold climates drive almost the entire effect. Additionally, NCHS cause-of-death data suggest that early childhood incarceration increased the incidence of circulatory diseases by 7 percentage points. Data on Chinese Americans suggest that the identifying assumption is satisfied.

This study examines the effects of military base closures on educational expenditures and student outcomes with a national panel data set of school districts between 1990 and 2002. We adopt difference-in-differences estimation in combination with propensity score matching and instrumental variables techniques to estimate these effects. We find that per-pupil spending increases by 25.2 percent in the first year, where it remains. We also find a substantial decrease in graduation rates, but an improving trend occurs in the years after the closure.

This study examines intermarriage patterns of Puerto Ricans who reside in the United States (referred to as stateside Puerto Ricans) and discusses the implications of these patterns for practice with this community. Because Puerto Ricans experience higher levels of intermarriage than other Latino groups, an analysis of out-marriage factors for Puerto Ricans yields important considerations for the future of Latino integration within U.S. society.

Until now, most discussion of racial profiling has given only fleeting consideration of its causes. Those causes are overwhelmingly psychological. In Suspect Race, social psychologist and public policy expert Jack Glaser leverages a century's worth of social psychological research to provide a clear understanding of how stereotypes, even those operating outside of conscious awareness or control, can cause police to make discriminatory judgments and decisions about who to suspect, stop, question, search, use force on, and arrest. Glaser argues that stereotyping, even nonconscious stereotyping, is a completely normal human mental process, but that it leads to undesirable discriminatory outcomes. Police officers are normal human beings with normal cognition. They are therefore influenced by racial stereotypes that have long connected minorities with aggression and crime. Efforts to merely prohibit racial profiling are inadequate. Additionally, Glaser finds evidence that racial profiling can actually increase crime, and he considers the implications for racial profiling in counterterrorism, finding some similarities and some interesting differences with drug war profiling. Finally, he examines the policy landscape on which racial profiling resides and calls for improved data collection and supervision, reduced discretion, and increased accountability. Drawing on criminology, history, psychological science, and legal and policy analysis, Glaser offers a broad and deep assessment of the causes and consequence of racial profiling. Suspect Race brings to bear the vast scientific literature on intergroup stereotyping to offer the first in-depth and accessible understanding of the primary cause of racial profiling, and to explore implications for policy.

This dissertation consists of three chapters on di fferent aspects of economic inequality. In the fi rst chapter, I study the aggregate implications of health risk and access to health care. At the individual level, health influences earnings potential, while income aff ects access to medical care. I investigate how this interaction shapes the joint dynamics of inequality in health and earnings over the life cycle, and I measure the redistributive impact of policies that improve access to health care. For that, I introduce health shocks and health care spending in an incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents. Earnings risk is partially determined within the model due to the health-income feedback, and negative shocks may drive agents into a low income-low health trap, thus magnifying inequality along the life cycle. I estimate the process for health shocks and I calibrate the key parameters of the model using survey data. The calibrated model successfully reproduces the joint dynamics in health and earnings inequality in the life cycle. Like in the data, it predicts that life cycle inequality in health is driven by a sharp decline in health status for the lowest percentiles of the health distribution. I nd that the health-income feedback accounts for 9 percent of total earnings inequality at retirement age as measured by the coefficient of variation of earnings, and that it increases by almost seven times the persistence of shocks to productivity. I also find that health care policies that facilitate access to health care have redistributive e ffects, mostly through earnings improvements for those at the bottom of the earnings distribution.

We examine, from a gender and marital status perspective, the effect of duration of residence in the US on the quality and amount of time Mexican immigrant parents spend with their children. For our estimation, we use the American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2010 and compare the childcare behaviors of Mexicanborn parents to those of three separate groups of US natives. We measure the quality of care by the time spent on primary and secondary childcare activities that differ by the degree of involvement of the parent while the activity is undertaken. We further divide primary care into developmental and nondevelopmental activities according to their influence on the childs intellectual, physical, and social development. Our estimates indicate that, at the time of arrival married immigrant mothers and nonmarried fathers spend less time on developmental childcare and more time on secondary care than comparable US natives. We also find that married immigrant fathers spend less time on developmental care than nonHispanic (NH) whites but the same time as comparable NH blacks and MexicanAmericans. Finally, we find overall evidence that duration of residence improves the childcare behaviors of Mexican immigrants.

The shift towards more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the U.S. is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We go beyond prior work on parenthood and well-being to assess the multidimensional nature of mothers and fathers subjective well-being in time with children. Our emphasis on parenting (activities) as opposed to parenthood (status) draws attention to how the nature and context of time use contribute to differences in parents happiness, meaning, sadness, stress, and fatigue. We posit that time with children may elicit more positive and negative feelings than time without children, particularly among mothers, whose greater investments in childrearing may be associated with more strain but also more meaning. Relying on nationally representative time diary data from the 2010 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey (N = 23,282), we find that parents consistently report more positive affect in time with children than without. Mothers report less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue (but not more meaning) in time with children than fathers, and their greater fatigue is not explained by mediating factors such as the quality and quantity of sleep and leisure, activity type, or solo parenting.