Objective The average BMI is rising even as the U.S. population grows increasingly diverse. Prior research by examining BMI trends in diverse groups including whites, blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who are U.S. born, recent immigrants, or long‐term immigrants was extended. Methods Cross‐sectional data from the 1989 to 2011 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (N = 989,273) have been pooled and linear regression models to examine trends in BMI among U.S. adults have been used. Results Annual increases in BMI are greatest among U.S.‐born Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and slowest among foreign born Chinese. Among the U.S. born in 2011, Chinese adults have an average BMI below the threshold for overweight, whereas blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans have average BMIs in the obese range. Foreign‐born adults average lower BMIs than U.S. born adults in most race/ethnic groups, and nativity disparities generally widen over time. BMI increases across calendar periods rather than birth cohorts. Conclusion Our results suggest that calendar period interventions may be particularly useful in reversing rising BMIs in the United States. However, interventions must be tailored to different race/ethnic and nativity groups in order to reduce disparities in body mass.

Does the availability of Common Law Marriage (CLM henceforth) in the U.S. help explain variation in the labor force participation, hours of work, hours of household production and leisure time of men and women over time and across states? Using Current Population Survey data for the period 1995-2011 this chapter identifies CLM effects on labor supply given that 3 of the 50 states abolished CLM over the period examined, whereas 11 states still had CLM laws as of 2011. Labor supply effects of CLM availability are negative for married women: for instance, weekly hours of work are reduced by almost two weekly hours. This CLM effect is limited to white and Hispanic married women and doesnt apply to their black counterparts. White married mens full-time employment is unaffected by CLM but black married men are 10% less likely to work full time if CLM is available. Marriage market analysis based on the concept of Work-In-Household (explained in Chap. 2) helps explain gender differentials in the effects of CLM on labor supply and why for blacks these differentials go in directions opposite from their effects for whites. The abolition of CLM could help explain some of the gender convergence in labor supply that has been observed in recent decades.

Linear classifiers, even though very simple, are pop- ular for classification tasks. By nature they can only differentiate between two classes. But it is possible to extend their usage into the domain of multi-class problems. These classifiers are known to perfrom very well for many practical scenarios (both binary and multi-class). In this paper, we examine and study the performance of linear classifiers across different data sets for multi-class clas- sification. Specifically, we compare the performance of Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Linear SVM, Weighted Majority and ECOC (Error Correcting Output Codes) constructed using Naive Bayes across various data sets. In addition to that, we show how these classifiers perform when the data sets have only numeric attributes, only nominal attributes and mixed attributes. We also study about the performance of these linear classifiers on large data sets and class imbalance problems. Our study shows that different linear classifiers perform better in different situations.

In the early 20th century, contraceptives were illegal and, for many, especially religious groups, taboo. But, in the span of just two years, between 1929 and 1931, many of the United States’ most prominent religious groups pronounced contraceptives to be moral and began advocating for the laws restricting them to be repealed. Met with ev- erything from support, to silence, to outright condemnation by other religious groups, these pronouncements and the debates they caused divided the American religious field by an issue of sex and gender for the first time. This article explains why America’s religious groups took the positions they did at this crucial moment in history. In doing so, it demonstrates that the politics of sex and gender that divide Ameri- can religion today is deeply rooted in century-old inequalities of race and class.

This paper investigates whether individuals are sufficiently informed to make reasonable choices in the health insurance exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We document knowledge of health reform, health insurance literacy, and expected changes in healthcare using a nationally representative survey of the US population in the 5 wk before the introduction of the exchanges, with special attention to subgroups most likely to be affected by the ACA. Results suggest that a substantial share of the population is unprepared to navigate the new exchanges. One-half of the respondents did not know about the exchanges, and 42% could not correctly describe a deductible. Those earning 100-250% of federal poverty level (FPL) correctly answered, on average, 4 out of 11 questions about health reform and 4.6 out of 7 questions about health insurance. This compares with 6.1 and 5.9 correct answers, respectively, for those in the top income category (400% of FPL or more). Even after controlling for potential confounders, a low-income person is 31% less likely to score above the median on ACA knowledge questions, and 54% less likely to score above the median on health insurance knowledge than a person in the top income category. Uninsuredrespondents scored lower on health insurance knowledge, but their knowledge of ACA is similar to the overall population. We propose that simplified options, decision aids, and health insurance product design to address the limited understanding of health insurance contracts will be crucial for ACA's success.

The guiding intuition behind democracy is that every citizen should have an equal voice in the political process, but gerrymandering the practice of drawing political boundaries to intentionally over-represent or under-represent some political group threatens this ideal in the United States today. Drawing congressional districts that meet legal requirements and reflect good political values is both mathematically and philosophically difficult. Additionally, large, detailed datasets must be compiled and used to generate districts that could be seriously recommended for public policy. To date there is no absolute consensus on the mathematical tools or political values that should be used to draw congressional districts. This thesis uses k-means clustering on a novel dataset to form coherent communities inside congressional districts, measure the legality of these districts and project election outcomes in these districts. Results show that this method represents public opinion well on the national level and constructs some good districts but additions to the algorithm are necessary before it can completely solve the redistricting problem. Additionally, these results provide interesting insights into minority representation, natural gerrymandering and other related public policy concerns.

Employment/wage polarization has been a popular topic in labor theory, given its important implication in equality and wealth distribution of the society. While the literature has focused on the demand side of labor market, the recent empirics require us to look at the supply of labor as well. Particularly, no clear explanation about why college enrollment (supply of skilled labor) is stagnant despite rising college wage premium has been provided. Using the theoretical framework of the sequential job search model, we analyze the optimal skill-upgrading decision of agents which are heterogeneous in skills, and provide a simple calibration to the United States' wage distribution over 3 decades to show that increasing polarization could hinder people's decision to upgrade their skills by worsening job prospect for lower-middle skill workers.

Does higher educational attainment lead to greater participation in self-employment? Available studies agree and disagree on this subject through various explanations. We invoke an empirical example from the experiences of immigrants moving from poor countries to rich countries. Further, ewe focus exclusively on the self-employment participation among south Asian immigration in the United States (using IPUMS data), white the related literature has clearly neglected thus far despite long traditions of successful business ventures. We establish that higher educational attainment for immigrants from south Asia reduces the likelihood of being self-employed. In fact, a South Asian immigrant with higher educational show that factors such as longer stay in the USA and being male, affect the likelihood of being self-employed positively. However, another interesting finding of our paper is that being a 'citizen immigrant' affects the probability of being self-employed positively. Though citizen probability is relatively higher in comparison to the non-citizen immigrant group with similar levels of education. This trend lends itself to a more than proportionate participation in self-employment by citizen immigrants and the difference with immigrant non-citizen group becomes statistically significant. These results have various static and dynamic implications for the native labor market in host counties.

While measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We review existing explanations for this puzzle and propose three new ones. First, we offer evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory-arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows. Second, we show that even if these increases were correctly measured, crosscountry regressions would have too little power to detect their effects on growth. Third, we point out that the greatest driver of rising remittances is rising migration, which has an opportunity cost to economic product at the origin. Net of that cost, there is little reason to expect large growth effects of remittances in the origin economy. Migration and remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty at the origin, on the welfare of migrants and their families, and on global GDP; but detecting their effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive.

This paper studies the impact of the minimum wage on immigration. A framework is presented in which inflows of immigrants are a function of the expected wage growth induced by the minimum wage. The analysis focuses on the US minimum wage increase of 1996 and 1997, using data from the Current Population Survey and the census. The estimation strategy consists of using the fraction of affected workers as the instrumental variable for the growth of expected wages. The findings show that States in which the growth of expected wages was relatively large (around 20%) exhibit inflow rate increases that are four to five times larger than States in which average wages grew 10% less. Placebo tests confirm that the policy did not affect the immigration of high wage earners.

Do corporate tax increases destroy jobs? And do corporate tax cuts boost employment? Answering these questions has proved empirically challenging. We propose an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states. Comparing contiguous counties straddling state borders over the period 1970 to 2010, we find that increases in corporate tax rates lead to significant reductions in employment and wage income, while corporate tax cuts only boost economic activity if implemented during recessions. Our spatial- discontinuity approach permits a causal interpretation of these findings by both establishing a plausible counterfactual and overcoming biases resulting from the fact that tax changes are often prompted by changes in economic conditions.

As the largest and fastest-growing minority population in the United States, Hispanics have become an increasing focus of survey research. The vast body of Hispanic research evidences myriad options regarding sampling, data collection, and weighting, each of which can affect the resulting data about this population. Typical survey designs feature simple random samples (sometimes obtained as part of larger omnibus or general-population surveys), stratified RDD, top market, and surname designs. In addition, some studies obtain interviews in English only, while others offer both English and Spanish but make choices regarding the use and allocation of bilingual interviewers. Finally, there are a range of considerations in the weighting of Hispanic survey data. Utilizing data from a national omnibus survey, the General Social Survey, and the Pew Hispanic Center National Survey of Latinos, this article explores these three foci: sampling, interviewing language, and weighting. We report on what we find to be best practices and the implications of failing to enact these practices, as measured by bias and variance in survey estimates of Hispanics.

Objectives. This study delineates activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) blackwhite disparity trends by age, period, and cohort (APC) and explores sociodemographic contributors of cohort-based disparity trends. Method. We utilized multiple cross-sectional waves of National Health Interview Survey data (19822009) to describe APC trends of ADL and IADL disparities using a cross-classified random effect model. Further, we decomposed the cohort-based disparity trends using Fairlies decomposition method for nonlinear outcomes. Results. The crossover ADL and IADL disparities (whites > blacks) occurring at age 75 increased with age and reached a plateau at age of 80, whereas period-based ADL and IADL disparities remained constant for the past 3 decades. The cohort disparity trends for both disabilities showed a decline with each successive cohort except for ADL disparity among women. Discussion. We examined the role of aging on racial disparity in disability and found support for the racial crossover effect. Further, the racial disparity in disability will disappear should the observed pattern of declining cohort-based ADL and IADL disparities persist. Although education, income, and marital status are important sociodemographic contributors to cohort disparity trends, future studies should investigate individual behavioral health determinants and cohort-specific characteristics that explain the cohort-based racial difference in ADL and IADL disabilities.

In migration research marriage markets play a decisive role in the process of integration. Intermarriage is a crucial, probably the crucial, mechanism of ethnic intermingling. Intermarriage can serve both as a measure of acculturation and as an agent producing it. Yet while intermarriage of different groups is widely recognized as an indicator for social integration, few historical analyses attempt to integrate gender aspects into their research design. I am trying to redress this gap by examining these historical processes and describing marriage markets of migrants from Austria-Hungary and how these changed from 1900 up to 1930. According to previous studies, the so called new migrants from Southern and East-Central Europe tended to be more segregated from natives than were older European groups. And further, these migrants tended to be more segregated from one another. But what if, in an unknown environment, it might even have become more important to stick to the same community and marry within ones group?

This article investigates the effect of urban sprawl, as measured by employment decentralization, on minority housing consumption gaps since the housing bust. Previous research contends that sprawl contributes to reducing the Black–White housing consumption gap by increasing the supply of land in housing markets and thereby increasing affordability. Antisprawl policies may therefore exacerbate the Black–White housing disparity. This research makes two contributions to the literature. First, the article examines how changes in sprawl may have varying influences on the Black–White housing gap, a previously unexamined facet of this relationship. In the vast majority of metropolitan areas in this sample, sprawl is predicted to exacerbate the Black–White housing gap until sprawl reaches a threshold. Only in a limited number of high-sprawl metropolitan areas does sprawl contribute to reducing the Black–White housing gap. Second, the article examines differences in housing gaps for three distinct minority groups—Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics—using recent data from the 2009 American Housing Survey. For Blacks, sprawl continues to have varying effects on housing consumption. For Asians, urban sprawl yields significant gains in housing consumption relative to Whites. However, no significant results occur for Hispanics. This article demonstrates that the independent effect of urban sprawl on U.S. minority housing consumption is a highly uneven process in the post–Great Recession economy. As such, arguments that antisprawl policies reduce minority gains in housing should be treated with considerable skepticism.

The Current Population Survey is used to investigate effects of Common Law Marriage (CLM) on whether young US-born adults live in couples in the U.S. CLM effects are identified through cross-state and time variation, as some states abolished CLM over the period examined. Analysis based on Gary Beckers marriage economics helps explain why CLM affects couple formation and does so differently depending on education, sex ratios and parent status. CLM reduces in-couple residence, and more so for childless whites and where there are fewer men per woman. Effects are larger for college-educated men and women without college.

Healthcare occupations account for a large and growing share of the workforce and span the education and earnings continuum. Although many discussions of the healthcare workforce focus on doctors and other occupations requiring advanced degrees, the healthcare system would not function without pre-baccalaureate workersthose with less than a bachelors degree. These workers perform a variety of clinical, assistive, and administrative tasks, and like all healthcare staff, should be working at their full level of competence in order to achieve the triple aim of improving the experience of care, improving health outcomes, and reducing per capita costs. While individuals with less than a bachelors degree work in multiple healthcare occupations, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in a subset of occupations. This report identifies the 10 largest pre-baccalaureate healthcare occupations, those in which substantial shares of workersranging from 39 percent to 94 percenthave less than a bachelors degree, and focuses on those workers in the 10 occupations, unless otherwise noted. Using labor market and American Community Survey data from 2000 and 2009-2011, this report examines the pre-baccalaureate healthcare workforce in the nations 100 largest metropolitan areas.

How does globalization affect the income gaps between the rich and the poor? This paper presents a new piece of empirical evidence showing that access to the global market, either through exporting or through multinational production, is associated with a higher executive-to-worker pay ratio within the firm. It then builds a model with heterogeneous firms, occupational choice, and executive compensation to model analytically and assess quantitatively the impact of globalization on the income gaps between the rich and the poor. The key mechanism is that the "gains from trade" are not distributed evenly within the same firm. The compensation of an executive is positively linked to the size of the firm, while the wage paid to the workers is determined in a country-wide labor market. Any extra profit earned in the foreign markets benefits the executives more than the average worker. Counterfactual exercises suggest that this new channel is quantitatively important for the observed surge in top income shares in the data. Using the changes in the volume of trade and multinational firm sales, the model can explain around 33percent of the surge in top income shares over the past two decades in the United States.

For many decades prior to the American Civil War, records show that slaves in the Upper South sold at a significant discount compared to slaves in the Deep South. This regional variation in slave prices has been attributed to agricultural productivity differences by the existing literature. This paper tests that claim by proposing an additional explanation for the price gap: regional variation in the risk of slave escape. That is, if slaves in each area were equally productive, would there have been any interregional slave trade? Under the assumption that escape to the North was easier for slaves who were closer to the Mason-Dixon line (the dividing line between Slave and Free states), available data suggests that between 25 and 33% of regional slave price heterogeneity was eliminated after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The 1850 Act had numerous provisions which made successful escape less likely. Interestingly, because the Act reduced rather than eliminated the potential for successful slave escape, the observed regional price convergence can only be considered a lower bound on how the risk of slave escape affected prices. These results imply that even if productivity were somehow equalized across regions, the varying likelihood of escape in the Upper and Deep South could have resulted in transportation of slaves between regions.