Democrats and Republicans state preferences for politically like-minded neighbors and community traits associated with their own party. Yet observational studies have not produced consistent evidence of partisan geographic sorting, the ongoing segregation of partisans into separate communities. In an original study of almost 5,000 self-identified Democrats and Republicans, we explain these divergent findings: preferences for co-partisan neighbors, while real, are low-salience. Three survey experiments reveal that partisans rarely prioritize politics when deciding where to live, instead turning to "valence" concerns such as home price and school quality. Partisans differ over urbanism, racial and partisan composition, and religion, but have few options to act on these preferences if they select first on neighborhood quality, or if resource constraints limit their mobility. Respondents' moving history shows that, except for Republicans exiting urban or racially diverse places, partisans do not, on average, sort. Partisan differences in residential preference seldom influence residential choice.

While increased life expectancy in the U.S. has been used as justification for raising the Social Security retirement ages, independent researchers have reported that life expectancy declined in recent decades for white women with less than a high school education. However, there has been a dramatic rise in educational attainment in the U.S. over the 20th century suggesting a more adversely selected population with low levels of education. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System and the U.S. Census from 1990-2010, we examine the robustness of earlier findings to several modifications in the assumptions and methodology employed. We categorize education in terms of relative rank in the overall distribution, rather than by credentials or years of education, and estimate trends in mortality for the bottom quartile. We also consider race and gender specific changes in the distribution of life expectancy. We found no evidence that survival probabilities declined for the bottom quartile of educational attainment. Nor did distributional analyses find any subgroup experienced absolute declines in survival probabilities. We conclude that recent dramatic and highly publicized estimates of worsening mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites who did not graduate from high school are highly sensitive to alternative approaches to asking the fundamental questions implied. However, it does appear that low SES groups are not sharing equally in improving mortality conditions, which raises concerns about the differential impacts of policies that would raise retirement ages uniformly in response to average increases in life expectancy.

Kenyan-born nurses (KBNs) continue to be an important part of the nursing workforce in the United States of America (USA). They bring their skills, knowledge, and experience to their new areas of nursing practice. Even though it may be challenging to adapt, Kenyan Nurse's skills, knowledge, and experiences may be enhanced by successfully integrating them in the American healthcare system. Some of these challenges include socio-cultural difference; structure of healthcare systems; technology; language such as abbreviations, expressions, and phrases; and new environment. This study will be conducted using a quantitative research method and purposeful survey of 20 KBNs using Cross Cultural Adaptability Inventory (CCAI) tool. By focusing on KBNs working in the US, this study will help US hospitals and nursing employers to better understand the transition process of KBNs. Transitioning programs bridges the practices gaps between . . .

Structural resources, including access to health insurance, are understudied in relation to the stress process. Disability increases the likelihood of mental health problems, but health insurance may moderate this relationship. We explore health insurance coverage as a moderator of the relationship between disability and psychological distress. A pooled sample from 2008 to 2010 (N = 57,958) was obtained from the Integrated Health Interview Series. Chow tests were performed to assess insurance group differences in the association between disability and distress. Results indicated higher levels of distress associated with disability among uninsured adults compared with their peers with public or private insurance. The strength of the relationship between disability and distress was weaker for persons with public compared with private insurance. As the Affordable Care Act is implemented, decision makers should be aware of the potential for insurance coverage, especially public, to ameliorate secondary conditions such as psychological distress among persons who report a physical disability.

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, the availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence the fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to assess the fertility implications of the fluctuations in both output (as argued by demographers) and grandmother-availability induced childcare costs over the period of 1920-1970. The model does a good job of mimicking the bust-boom-bust pattern during this period. When the child-care cost channel is shut down, the models performance weakens significantly; in particular, it fails altogether to capture the bust in the 1960s.

We study the effects of immigration on native welfare in a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a redistributive welfare state. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. These gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution. Immigration has increased native welfare in almost all countries. Both high-skilled and low-skilled natives benefit in two thirds of countries, contrary to what models without search frictions predict. Median total gains from migration are 1.19% and 1.00% for high and low skilled natives, respectively

In 1990, as Michael Sherraden was writing Assets for the Poor, the homeownership rate in the United States hovered around 64 percent, and concerns about the vitality of the US housing sector were growing. the 1980s had seen a drop in overall homeownership rates, in part due to stagnant incomes and declining affordability, and the Savings and Loan banking crisis had shaken the public's and policymaker's confidence in the financial stability of the home mortgage lending institutions. Racial and ethnic gaps in homeownership also loomed large; in 1989, only 42 percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Latinos owned their own home, compared with nearly 70 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Thus, the 1990s ushered in a renewed attention to homeownership policy, one that produced a wide range of initiatives designed to expand access to credit, and, in particular, to promote homeownership among lower-income and minority families.

Objectives: People with serious mental illness have increased risk for physical illness, suffer worse health outcomes and higher mortality rate. We assessed the national trends in healthcare utilization and barriers to medical care among adults with serious mental illness over the past 16 years. Methods: Using data from the National Health Interview Survey of 1997-2012, we selected samples of adults (n=16513) with serious mental illness (operationalized as K6 score 13). Chi-square test and logistic regression were used to examine the association of survey year with selected measures of medical care utilization (contact with a general doctor, hospitalization, emergency room visits) and barriers to care in the past 12 months. Results: There were no significant linear trends on the prevalence of contact with a general doctor or hospitalization in the past 12 months. However, the prevalence of having 2 or more visits to the emergency department increased from 24.2% in 1997 to 29.2% in 2012 (OR=1.02, p<.001). The prevalence of reported barriers to care also increased, including difficulty in getting an appointment (10.4%-18.4%, OR=1.03, p<.001), having forgone medical care (22.9%-36.7%, AOR=1.03, p<.001) or prescription medicines (26.4%-39.6%, AOR=1.04, p<.001) owing to cost. There were significant disparities in receiving care and reported barriers to care by socio-demographic characteristics, insurance coverage and count of medical conditions. Conclusions: Utilization of ambulatory and inpatient care among adults with serious mental illness remained largely unchanged in recent years, whereas emergency care use has been increased, along with barriers to care.

The chapters in this dissertation confer attention to the labor-market wage and health insurance outcomes of two specific immigrant groups in the United States. Specifically, I distinguish between immigrants who arrive in the U.S. as refugees and other documented immigrants. Economic studies using relatively large samples of refugees have been few and far between. In the following chapters, I use an innovative method to identify refugees in the U.S. Census data. This distinction in immigrant type is important as the two groups differ considerably in their pre-migration conditions and the manner in which the U.S. government treats them upon arrival. The 1996 Welfare reforms in the U.S. brought some important changes to the welfare eligibility laws with respect to immigration status. All immigrants entering the country after August 1996 are barred from welfare until naturalization. The only exceptions to this rule are refugee immigrants. The chapters . . .

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings from 1950 through 2010 using data from the decennial census and American Community Surveys. Emphasis is given to annual rather than weekly or hourly earnings. We take a quantile approach, providing evidence on medians and other percentiles of the distribution. Treatment of imputed earnings greatly affects measured outcomes. Hispanic men have exhibited earnings growth similar to white men over several decades. Black men have been left behind economically due in large part to increased joblessness, a process exacerbated by weak labor market conditions. By 2010, joblessness had risen to over 40 percent and the median blackwhite earnings gap was the largest in at least 60 years.

The preferences and behavior of economic agents is often highly nuanced and heterogenous, having large impacts on the costs and benefits of different methods employed to acheive environmental goals, such as the production of green energy and the efficient allocation of water to residential use. The first chapter of this dissertaion studies local housing and labor market effects around US nuclear power plants from 1970 to 2000 through three major events: initial construction of the power plant, the Chernobyl accident, and plant closings. Heavily effected by preference-based sorting and mirgration, nuclear power plant placement lowers unemployment, and increases the education and skill level within the local labor pool. However, nuclear power plants also pose negative externalities: conditional upon labor market improvements, housing values around 10 miles of the nuclear plants decrease with plant placement and increase with plant closures. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine serves as an information shock to US residents. Intercontinental spillover effects result in lower US home ownership rates around US plants and reductions in housing values in the plume exposure pathway. The final chapter examines the impact of non-pecuniary incentives stemming from the behavioral economics literature on water demand. In a randomized field experiment social comparisons are found to significantly decrease water demand with substantial heterogeneity both across and within utilities. Higher users are more responsive to the program and there are important interactions between social norms and existing utility conservation programs. Waster resources and energy supply face stress due to population growth, rising incomes, and climate change and these stressors will only increase in the future. This dissertation addresses key issues: influencing the demand for water and the side effects of commercial nuclear power supply and aims to increase knowledge and aid the public policy of both water management and the supply of green energy.

This research studies the effects of state laws banning access to in-state resident tuition (ISRT) rates and other educational benefits for unauthorized immigrant students (UIS) in five states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, and Ohio. It measures the overall effect of policies denying ISRT that were implemented between 2005-2012 in the United States. Three potential effects are evaluated. First, the study estimates the policy effects on the college enrollment of UIS. Because the policy does not deny access to higher education institutions, the possibility exists for this population to attend public or private colleges. However, facing higher costs (i.e., out-of-state tuition) can deter them from continuing their educational plans. Second, considering the potential dynamic effects of policies banning access to ISRT for UIS, the research evaluates the policy effects on school drop out rates among unauthorized immigrants. The lack of real opportunities to attend higher education might demotivate secondary UIS, thus prompting them to drop out of school. Finally, the research estimates the effects of banning ISRT access for UIS on the enrollment of citizens and legal residents in higher education. To answer the research questions a multivariate regression difference-in-differences identification strategy is advanced through the construction of a natural quasi-experiment using as the main data source the American Community Survey. The research finds significant negative policy effects on the college attendance rates of Hispanic foreign-born non-citizens who are highly likely to be unauthorized immigrants in policy states compared to their peers in non-policy states. The results also indicate that among the groups analyzed, policies have mainly affected recent high school graduates. With regard to dropping out of school, no-statistically significant evidence was found to support the hypothesis of dynamic effects of the policies on the enrollment of unauthorized immigrants in secondary education. This research finds no evidence of college attendance benefits for U.S.-born citizens associated with the ISRT policy, save for suggestive evidence for a subgroup of Black men. Suggestive evidence of moderate benefits among two subgroups of naturalized citizens is also found.

We use a life-cycle model of household savings and female labor market participation decisions to evaluate several reforms of the US Social Security pension system. In our model returns to labor market experience apply, so participation decisions affect not only current earnings and Social Security pension eligibility but also future earnings. We measure the effect of removing spousal benefit, removing the survivor's pension and extending from 35 to 40 the number of periods preceding retirement that are considered to calculate each worker's pension benefit. We find that the effects are substantial on female labor market participation from age 35. 2

We ask whether shifting male and female employment patterns can help to explain why the US college boom between 1981 and 2005 was dominated by women. We make three contributions. First, we show that while a massive feminization of high-wage, high-skill occupations plausibly contributed to the female college boom, general, structural movements of labor (undifferentiated by gender) from industrial work into education-intensive services should have encouraged male rather than female college attendance. Previous work has suggested that both types of employment shifts would have contributed to the female college boom. Second, we show that women’s occupational upgrading was too large and ubiquitous to be explained by their growing educational advantage. This is consistent with a causal connection running from gendered employment trends to a female college boom. Third, we show that gender specializations in many occupations deepened, with college educated women gravitating towards jobs offering institutionally protected wages.

In this article, we use local indicators of spatial association (LISA) and other spatial analysis techniques to analyze the distribution of centers with high employment density within metropolitan areas. We examine the 359 metropolitan areas across the United States at three points in time (1990, 2000, and 2010) to provide a spatio-temporal panoramic of urban spatial structure. Our analysis highlights three key findings. (1) The monocentric structure persists in a majority of metropolitan areas: 56.5% in 1990, 64.1% in 2000, and 57.7% in 2010. (2) The pattern of employment centers remains stable for most metropolitan areas: the number of centers remained the same for 74.9% of metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000 and for 85.2% between 2000 and 2010. (3) Compared with monocentric metropolitan areas, polycentric metros are larger and more dense, with higher per-capita incomes and lower poverty rates.

A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes statistical discrimination from taste-based discrimination. Responses from over 14,000 rental inquiries with varying applicant quality show that landlords treat identical information from applicants with African American and white-sounding names differently. This differential treatment varies by neighborhood racial composition and signal type in a manner consistent with statistical discrimination and in contrast to patterns predicted by a model of taste-based discrimination.

To minimize barriers to entry, massive open online course (MOOC) providers collect minimal demographic information about users. In isolation, this data is insufficient to address important questions about socioeconomic status (SES) and MOOC enrollment and performance. We demonstrate the use of third-party datasets to enrich demographic portraits of MOOC students and answer fundamental questions about SES and MOOC enrollment. We derive demographic information from registrants geographic location by matching self-reported mailing addresses with data available from Esri at the census block group level and the American Community Survey at the zip code level. We then use these data to compare neighborhood income and levels of parental education for U.S. registrants in HarvardX courses and the U.S. population as a whole. Overall, HarvardX registrants tend to reside in more affluent neighborhoods. U.S. HarvardX registrants on average live in neighborhoods with median incomes approximately .45 standard deviations higher than the U.S. population. Parental education is also associated with a higher likelihood of MOOC enrollment. For instance, a seventeen year-old whose most educated parent has a bachelor's degree is more than five times as likely to register as a seventeen year-old whose most educated parent has a high school diploma.

Why have women surpassed men in terms of educational attainment, even though they appear to have less incentives to go to college? The aim of this paper is to set up a basic theoretical life-cycle model in order to study the potential role of gender differences in the benefit of education in explaining the college gender gap reversal. Its main contribution is to show under which conditions the mode can generate a reversal in college graduation rates, and to highlight the importance of the curvature of the utility function and the presence of subsistence constraints in this respect. In particular, I show that the labor market benefit of education for women can be higher than for men even if they have the same college wage premium if the elasticity of the marginal utility of wealth is greater than unity or there are fixed costs. Initially this might be dominated by a lower marriage market return, but a decrease in the probability of marriage can induce women to overtake men in educational attainment.

Church attendance is usually measured in surveys by asking a direct question about frequency of churchgoing over a preset period of time, which is typically a year. Different studies have cast doubt over the validity of this indicator as it tends to overestimate actual attendance to a significant degree. The aim of this article is to compare data on church attendance provided by two different types of research conducted in the United States between 1975 and 2010: survey data (GSS) and data obtained from time use surveys (ATUS). This comparison has three main objectives: (1) to confirm the hypothesis that survey data tend to overestimate actual attendance; (2) to show that this overestimation is not constant over time and space, but tends to vary in an erratic and unpredictable way; and (3) to demonstrate that data provided by time use surveys are more reliable than the frequencies of churchgoing provided by traditional surveys when the objective is to identify trends in religiosity in a population.

This dissertation examines the interaction between amenities, earnings, and city prices. The first essay uses three different methodologies to investigate whether, given a fixed level of amenities, workers are fully compensated, in terms of higher wages, for higher price levels across cities. In the first, I use the overall city price level and aftertax earnings as endogenous variables in a two-stage least squares (2SLS) system and find that owners and renters are not fully compensated for higher city price levels. In the second, I split city price levels into housing prices and non-housing goods prices and use housing prices and aftertax earnings as endogenous variables in a 2SLS system. Using this method, I find that highly-educated homeowners and renters are fully compensated for higher housing prices while less-educated homeowners and renters are not fully compensated for higher housing prices. I also find that all homeowners and renters of all education levels are fully compensated for higher non-housing good prices. Finally, I assume that homeowners and renters are fully compensated for higher nonhousing goods prices and use housing prices and aftertax earnings as endogenous variables in a 2SLS system. Using this method, I again find that highly-educated homeowners and renters are fully compensated for higher housing prices while less-educated homeowners and renters are not fully compensated for higher housing prices. In addition, I determine implicit prices for 13 different amenities for both owners and renters with different education levels. While I am not the first to calculate these implicit prices, I am the first to differentiate these implicit prices among education levels and ownership status. In the second essay, I use the implict price results from the first essay to create a city ranking. There are two main approaches in the city ranking literature. The implicit price of amenity approach uses implicit amenity prices as weights that are multiplied by the amount of each amenity in each city. The sum of the "market values" of a city's amenities can then be used to create a city ranking. The real wage approach involves finding the logarithmic difference in nominal wages across areas and subtracting this from the logarithmic difference in housing prices across areas, using either a rent-based or housing-value based index. The idea behind this approach is that, after typical housing characteristics and worker characteristics are accounted for, the differences in rents and wages must reflect differences in local amenities. I use similar methodologies to both of these approaches, but I improve upon what I view as shortcomings in both strands of the literature. First, I include the effect of educational attainment, income inequality, and job growth. Second, I look at how city rankings differ by level of education and by ownership status. Third, I add new components to the existing literature on firm rankings. All of these additions give a richer, more accurate view of how workers and firms view cities. In the third essay, I look at the same issues from the first essay, but I shift the focus to how the results differ by gender, marital status, and the presence of children in the household. The first question deals with how well compensated people are, in terms of higher wages and better amenities, for higher housing prices. I find that single people fare better than married people, and people without children fare better than parents. Also, I find little difference between men and women overall. The second question deals with the implicit price of amenities. I find significant differences in the price people are willing to pay for amenities by gender, marital status, and the presence of children in the household.