ike a roundtable discussion. If anyone asks a question of the group, and if you want to answer, just turn your name thing on edge or something like that so—you know, we may have a question and just throw it out, and whoever wants to answer it just put your name thing up. America’s working women have made incredible strides in the workplace. As women succeed, America succeeds, and our economy succeeds. But huge challenges remain. Too many working women are stuck in poor quality and low-wage jobs living at or near poverty and struggling to make ends meet. In addition, even as women have entered the workforce, they’re still usually the primary caregivers for children and elders. Yet our workplaces have not kept up with the changing times. Most women do not have access to the supports they need to be successful workers and caregivers. Here I’ll diverge a little bit. When my wife and I, right after she got elected—my wife was elected before I was. She was elected as . . .

Recent clinical research has studied weight responses to varying diet composition, but the contribution of changes in macronutrient intake and physical activity to rising population weight remains controversial. Research on the economics of obesity typically assumes a “calories in, calories out” framework, but a weight production model separating caloric intake into carbohydrates, fat, and protein, has not been explored in an economic framework. To estimate the contributions of changes in macronutrient intake and physical activity to changes in population weight, we conducted dynamic time series and structural VAR analyses of U.S. data between 1974 and 2006 and a panel analysis of 164 countries between 2001 and 2010. Findings from all analyses suggest that increases in carbohydrates are most strongly and positively associated with increases in obesity prevalence even when controlling for changes in total caloric intake and occupation-related physical activity. Our structural VAR results suggest that, on the margin, a 1% increase in carbohydrates intake yields a 1.01 point increase in obesity prevalence over 5 years while an equal percent increase in fat intake decreases obesity prevalence by 0.24 points.

OLAP queries are not normally formulated in isolation, but in the form of sequences called OLAP sessions. Recognizing that two OLAP sessions are similar would be useful for different applications, such as query recommendation and personalization; however, the problem of measuring OLAP session similarity has not been studied so far. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap. First, we propose a set of similarity criteria derived from a user study conducted with a set of OLAP practitioners and researchers. Then, we propose a function for estimating the similarity between OLAP queries based on three components: the query group-by set, its selection predicate, and the measures required in output. To assess the similarity of OLAP sessions, we investigate the feasibility of extending four popular methods for measuring similarity, namely the Levenshtein distance, the Dice coefficient, the tf-idf weight, and the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Finally, we experimentally compare these four extensions to show that the Smith-Waterman extension is the one that best captures the users' criteria for session similarity.

My dissertation primarily investigates the causal impact of economic inequality on marriage formation. I demonstrate how economic inequality among men affects an individual woman’s propensity to get married in both the U.S. and China. Based on the framework of Loughran (2002) and Gould and Paserman (2003), I identify the causal impact of male wage inequality on the marriage propensity among women in the U.S. using the 1990 and 2000 Censuses as well as the 2007 American Community Survey. I address the endogeneity and reverse causality problems by applying skill-biased technological shock as an instrument for the wage gap between high and low educated men following the example of Mocan and Unel (2011). I discover that a low educated woman’s marriage propensity becomes lower but a high educated woman’s marriage propensity becomes higher when there is an increase in the wage ratio between high and low educated men. Additionally, I examine whether in China the income inequality among men affects female marital decision making by utilizing the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the Gini coefficient of male income is associated with an increase in the probability of being “ever married” by 5.8 percentage points for urban women and by 6.9 percentage points for rural women aged 20 to 34 from 1989 to 2009.

BACKGROUND Rapid population aging and increasing racial/ethnic and immigrant/native diversity make a broad documentation of U.S. health patterns during both mid- and late life particularly important. OBJECTIVE We aim to better understand age- and gender-specific racial/ethnic and nativity differences in physical functioning and disability among adults aged 50 and above. METHODS We aggregate 14 years of data from the National Health Interview Survey and calculate age- and gender-specific proportions of physical functioning and two types of disability for each population subgroup. RESULTS Middle-aged foreign-born individuals in nearly every subgroup exhibit lower proportions of functional limitations and disability than U.S.-born whites. This pattern of immigrant advantage is generally reversed in later life. Moreover, most U.S.-born minority groups have significantly higher levels of functional limitations and disability than U.S.-born whites in both mid- and late life.

Occupational segregation, the differential distribution of groups of workers across occupations, provides one of the most important mechanisms for creating, maintaining and legitimating social inequality. In this study I examine trends in occupational race segregation from 1980 through 2009/2010 and use fixed-effects regression analysis to assess how changes in occupational characteristics such as earnings, benefits and demographic composition are associated with changes in the representation of black men and women. My findings show that after 1980 trends toward racial occupational integration slowed and after 2000 may have begun to reverse. Race and sex continue to be important for understanding the occupational distributions of black and white workers.

Clearinghouses were private organizations that not only had the power to audit member banks' balance sheets and levy fines, but also provided emergency liquidity during large-scale financial panics. This paper studies how clearinghouses affected bank composition and solvency during stable periods as well as panics. An annual database of all national bank balance sheets from 1865 to 1914 indicates that national banks grew larger after the creation of a clearinghouse. Relative to the rise in assets, banks reduced their cash reserves and individual deposits and increased their loans, circulation, and interbank deposits. The analysis also shows that while clearinghouse members were less likely to fail during panics, they were more likely to fail in other periods, particularly those in non-financial centers. In this way, clearinghouses seem to have freed up additional resources during stable periods and delayed bank failures until the potential for contagion was removed.

There are large differences in the labor force participation rate of women compared with men across the world. Many commentators suggest that in some countries, this is due to the importance of extractive industries such as oil mining, which tend to be biased towards male employment. Using data from the early 20th century oil boom in the American South, Stephan Maurer and Andrei Potlogea find that the female labour force participation rate and the employment rate are largely unaffected in a county after oil is discovered, and that the same is true for the average numbers of hours that women work. They write that this may be due to an expanding service sector associated with a growing oil mining industry, which can be an important employer for women, as well as increasing average wages across both genders.

La emigración es la tendencia actual de la migración internacional hondureña, que inicia principalmente en la década de los noventa, simultáneamente con la implementación de las políticas neoliberales que deprimen algunos sectores económicos y propician que jóvenes sin empleo o cuentapropistas, busquen oportunidades de empleo en el exterior. Otro factor que influyó significativamente en los flujos migratorios fue el desastre natural de 1998, a la vez que hace visible la emigración, a partir de ese momento se entroniza en la población como estrategia de vida, aunque este fenómeno es considerado tardío en comparación con los países vecinos, pero es continuo, creciente y ya con diversos destinos en cuanto a los emigrantes. En los últimos años se identifican factores estructurales que influyen en la migración, como la presión demográfica, la elevada pobreza y los problemas de empleo; y factores coyunturales, como las crisis económicas, efectos de desastres naturales, la violencia generalizada, la proliferación de grupos de asociación ilícita, narcotráfico y crimen organizado, crisis políticas y la formación de culturas migratorias. Estados Unidos de América (EUA) es el principal destino migratorio hondureño, su comunidad ocupa el octavo lugar entre la población de origen hispano en ese país. Los censos de población estadounidenses han mostrado un elevado aumento de empadronados de origen hondureño que alcanzan los 633,401 en el 2010 comparado con los 282,850 que habían en el censo del 2000. Otra fuente de datos es la Encuesta de la Comunidad América (ACS) que recoge anualmente información de la población que vive y reside en EUA, entre ella las personas de origen hondureño y los que nacieron en Honduras (más cercanos a los migrantes), que se utilizará como dato principal del presente trabajo, con el objetivo de conocer sus condiciones sociodemográficas ese país y los cambios que han ocurrido en la última década. 1 Trabajo presentado en el VI Congreso de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Población, Lima, Perú, del 12 al 15 de agosto de 2014.

Objectives. This study assessed possible associations between recessions and changes in the magnitude of social disparities in foregone health care, building on previous studies that have linked recessions to lowered health care use. Methods. Data from the 2006 to 2010 waves of the National Health Interview Study were used to examine levels of foregone medical, dental and mental health care and prescribed medications. Differences by race/ethnicity and education were compared before the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, during the early recession, and later in the recession and in its immediate wake. Results. Foregone care rose for working-aged adults overall in the 2 recessionary periods compared with the pre-recession. For multiple types of pre-recession care, foregoing care was more common for African Americans and Hispanics and less common for Asian Americans than for Whites. Less-educated individuals were more likely to forego all types of care pre-recession. Most disparities in foregone care were stable during the recession, though the African American–White gap in foregone medical care increased, as did the Hispanic–White gap and education gap in foregone dental care. Conclusions. Our findings support the fundamental cause hypothesis, as even during a recession in which more advantaged groups may have had unusually high risk of losing financial assets and employer-provided health insurance, they maintained their relative advantage in access to health care. Attention to the macroeconomic context of social disparities in health care use is warranted.

Even well intentioned supervision and regulation can lead to ruin if not uniformly applied across the financial system. This paper studies the double-sided effect of historical U.S. clearinghouses. Clearinghouses were private organizations capable of auditing member banks balance sheets, levying fines, and providing emergency liquidity during financial panics. At the same time, their selective nature and membership costs left many banks unprotected. This paper studies how clearinghouses affected the composition and solvency of both members and non-members. Anannual database of national and state bank balance sheets from six states between 1880 and 1910 indicates that those member banks had a lower closure rate and non-member banks had a higher closures rate after a clearinghouse entered. The results suggest that the lack of universal protection might have led to the same instability clearinghouses were trying to trying to prevent.

In this article, we investigate public attitudes toward combat veterans returning from Iraq. Using data from a nationally representative survey that incorporates an experimental design, we assess the extent to which attitudes toward military veterans and private contractors differ, and whether public attitudes toward men vary based on combat and warzone experience. Drawing on social psychology and military sociology, we test hypotheses derived from a conceptual model of stigma and from research on the cultural injunction to "support the troops." Consistent with the first portion of the stigma model, members of the public are not surprised to learn that men who went to a warzone behave according to stereotypes that imply that such men have problems with mental health, substance abuse, and violent behavior. Yet they do not discriminate against these men. Instead they favor men who went to Iraq compared to those who stayed in the United States. They also favor veterans compared with contractors. While combat veterans may be stereotyped, they are not stigmatized. They benefit from symbolic capital, which outweighs the effect of stereotypes on discrimination.

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in womens employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on womens employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married womens employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing womens employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married womens employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award.

The relationship between crime and land use is the subject of considerable debate among scholars and professional planners, but empirical study has been stymied by difficult identification and measurement issues. This examines the impact of mixed land use and residential density on crime using unique high-resolution dataset from Chicago over the period 2008-2013. I employ a novel instrumental variable strategy, using the city's 1923 zoning code as an instrument for modern land use. I also apply a spatial matching approach which allows me to identify the impact of specific commercial activities. I find that commercial uses, especially liquor stores and late-hour bars, lead to more street crime in their immediate vicinity, with relatively weak spillover effects. Higher residential density leads to lower per capita crime rates and ameliorates the criminogenic effects of commercial activity. I discuss the implications for zoning policy and policing strategy, drawing upon insights from the experimental literature on hot sports policing.

This report examines how the neighborhoods along the Metro Blue line have changed over the past two decades, and reflects on the current emerging issue in Transit oriented development (TOD), which is promoting equitable transit neighborhoods. The primary study area includes the route of the Metro Blue line through Los Angeles County where the most economically disadvantaged and marginalized communities are located in the county. In order to investigate the impact of the rail line effectively, the concept of Walksheds are used as the units of analysis, which is defined as the area within a half-mile walking distance from the transit station. Focusing on social equity impact of the transit system operation, the comparison analysis between Los Angeles County and the twenty-two Walksheds of each station in the line evaluates the changes in the close-by neighborhoods while also looking at various social demographic indicators that can reflect demographic shifts using decennial Census data of 1990, 2000, and 2010. While looking at the change through time series data analysis vertically, the performance of each station area is examined horizontally. Therefore, comparative analysis is conducted in four stages to figure out the extent to which the neighborhoods have changed, how rapidly the change occurred and whether the neighborhood change occurred in a positive way or not. The result from the four comparative analyses indicates that the Metro Blue line did not work as a catalyst for promoting economic opportunity in the region in spite of the initial expectations of its advocates. In the beginning of the rail operation of 1990, the neighborhoods along the rail line were excluded and poverty was widespread in the region. However, even after two decades, the twenty-two Walksheds along the Metro Blue Line still remain as undesirable places to live and marginalized as compared to the rest of the county. Moreover, the neighborhood change in the twenty-two Walksheds is negatively linked to the Walksheds based on the result of the comparative analysis.

We analyze the labor market effects of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program. The largely unstudied DC program currently provides income and health insurance to approximately four million veterans of military service who have service-connected disabilities. We study a unique policy change, the 2001 Agent Orange decision, which expanded eligibility for DC benefits to a broader set of covered conditions in particular, type II diabetes to Vietnam veterans who had served in-theater (with Boots on the Ground or BOG). Notably, the Agent Orange policy excluded Vietnam era veterans who did not serve in-theatre (Not on Ground or NOG), thus allowing us to assess the causal effects of DC eligibility by contrasting the outcomes of BOG and NOG veterans. Our results indicate that the policy-induced increase in DC enrollment reduced labor force participation by 18 percentage points among BOG veterans who enrolled in the DC program as a result of the policy change. We also find evidence of program spillovers, with DC recipients significantly more likely to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.

Much attention has been paid to the overall banking industry in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis but not much to black-owned banks (BOBs). What has been their approach to banking since 2008? What has been their role in communities? Past literature focused on minority-owned banks efficiency relative to other banks, with some authors finding insignificant differences, and others suggesting nonminority-owned banks were more efficient. Later work showed that minority-owned banks, BOBs in particular, paid higher interest rates on certificates of deposit (CDs) than nonminority-owned banksusing CD rate premiums to help insulate customers from the effects of the recession. That is part of a pattern in which BOBs have been known to serve their neighborhoods as sources of credit and other support.