Educational behaviour varies by age. One implication of this fact is that the value of aggregate education indicators such as enrolment ratios is influenced by the age structure of the population through a pure composition effect. This phenomenon is not generally acknowledged in educational statistics, much less accounted for. The scant treatment the question of age distribution has received in this context has been limited to examining it as a source of measurement error when comparing administrative and survey data sources. By using an agestandardization technique, the authors show how this very common demographic tool can straightforwardly be applied to educational metrics and how doing so alters the results. They conclude that the effect on net and gross participation ratios is moderate in general, but where comparisons are made between contexts with different cohort growth or school attendance profiles, lack of attention to population structures could bias conclusions

We began by presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the determinants of disability at the population level and among U.S. racial and ethnic groups. We next provide a review of recent evidence on racial and ethnic differences in disability, focusing on studies that have used data from nationally representative surveys and the U.S. census. We then focus on evidence for those aged 50 and above.

We study the extent to which manufacturing decline and local housing booms contributed to changes in labor market outcomes during the 2000s, focusing primarily on the distributional consequences across geographical areas and demographic groups. Using a local labor markets design, we estimate that manufacturing decline significantly reduced employment between 2000 and 2006, while local housing booms increased employment by roughly the same magnitude. The effects of manufacturing decline persist through 2012, but we find no persistent employment effects of local housing booms, likely because housing booms were associated with subsequent busts of similar magnitude. These results suggest that housing booms “masked” negative employment growth that would have otherwise occurred earlier in the absence of the booms. This “masking” occurred both within and between cities and demographic groups. For example, manufacturing decline disproportionately affected older men without a college education, while the housing boom disproportionately affected younger men and women, as well as immigrants. Applying our local labor market estimates to the national labor market, we find that roughly 40 percent of the reduction in employment during the 2000s can be attributed to manufacturing decline and that these negative effects would have appeared in aggregate employment statistics earlier had it not been for the large, temporary increases in housing demand.

It has become increasingly apparent that providing copious off-street parking has deleterious effects on urban form and function. This study compares parking policy in New Haven, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts that have pursued very different types of parking policies that have resulted in different outcomes in terms of land use. Since 1951, off-street parking provision has increased by nearly 400% in New Haven, meanwhile both employment and residential population have declined in the city. In contrast, off-street parking provision in Cambridge has risen around 140% since 1952, while employment and residential populations in the city have increased by 50% and 67 % respectively. The turning point in these trends occurs in the 1980s, when the city of Cambridge adjusted its transportation priorities. Cambridge had been following a similar trajectory to New Haven in terms of parking provision and automobile dependency until this point in time. From the 1980s onward, parking facility proliferation stabilized or decreased in Cambridge while residential and employment populations became denser and automobile dependency decreased. New Haven exhibited the opposite trends; residential and employment populations became more sparse while automobile dependency increased. This study builds on these alarming observations by analyzing the financial aspects of parking facilities in New Haven and Cambridge. The paramount finding of this study was the wide disparity in the property taxation of parking facilities in the two cities. In illustrating this finding, this study aims to alert cities to the incentivization of parking facility proliferation ingrained within parking tax policies.

Much of the literature regarding the employability of African-American women focuses on how demographic factors like single parenthood, limited social capital, and low levels of education diminish their employment options. This study engages this literature by exploring the role that institutional factors, including state action and cost-cutting strategies in the workplace, play in shaping the structure of job opportunities available to high school-educated African-American women. Focusing on department store workers in the San Francisco Bay area, this case study highlights how shifts, including the increasing contingency of employment between 1970 and 2000, have constrained African-American womens experience and progress in this low-skilled workplace.

We evaluate the effects of Social Security and Medicaid reform on individual behavior, fiscal expenditures and welfare in an environment with idiosyncratic risk in labor earnings, medical expenses, spousal death, and survival. In our model, a progressive Social Security program and means-tested transfer program (Medicaid/SSI) provide insurance against lifetime earnings, health expense, survival and spousal death risks. We document important interactions between Social Security and means-tested welfare programs for the elderly. Eliminating Social Security would nearly double the fraction of retired households who choose to rely on means-tested transfers to finance medical care and consumption in old-age. Despite this, newly formed households would prefer to be in an economy with no Social Security. Newly formed households like Medicaid and would prefer to be in an economy with a more generous program that is funded by a higher payroll tax. Medicaid, insures health and medical expense risk and also provides partial insurance against spousal death and longevity risks.

This chapter explores the lifecycle effects of changes in the timing of initial family formation for US women. It first documents the key trends of increasing marriage and motherhood delays since the baby boom and then investigates the links between the timing of a womans initial family formation and her well being later in life. The chapter presents new evidence of a lasting association between delayed initial family formation and higher earnings over decades, as well as greater asset accumulation well into retirement age. The separate impacts of motherhood and marriage delays on income (own and spousal) and wealth (assets, debt, and net wealth) are explored in a multivariate regression framework using data on women born between 1922 and 1954. Delays in marriage and motherhood are each associated with improved economic status, but the effects for motherhood delay are substantially larger. The median change in maternal age at first birth between 1960 and 2006 was about five years. The estimates imply that this five-year delay in motherhood was associated with increased wealth of $62,000 (in 2010 dollars) for women in their fifties, $41,000 for women in their sixties, and $59,000 for women in their seventies. These values represent increases of 15 percent to 27 percent relative to the average wealth of women in those age groups. The results indicate that small shocks to demographic outcomes early in lifesuch as shifting fertility a few years earlier or latercan have substantial and lasting economic effects.

This text provides up-to-date, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive information about aging among diverse racial and ethnic populations in the United States. It is the only book to focus on paramount public health issues as they relate to older minority Americans, and addresses social, behavioral, and biological concerns for this population. The text distills the most important advances in the science of minority aging and incorporates the evidence of scholars in gerontology, anthropology, psychology, public health, sociology, social work, biology, medicine, and nursing. Additionally, the book incorporates the work of both established and emerging scholars to provide the broadest possible knowledge base on the needs of and concerns for this rapidly growing population.

Mexicans are among the top five immigrant groups in 43 states. In nine states, Mexicans make up more than 40 percent of the immigrant population, and up to nearly 60 percent in states such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This population is made up predominantly of adults between 18 and 64 years old and contributes to the country economically through work and consumption and socially through culture and community life. Through work, they also pay taxes programs that benefit all Americans, including Social Security and Medicare. Despite these significant contributions, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are poorly integrated and face high levels of social exclusion, with many not benefiting from existing health and social protection programs. Mexican immigrants' naturalization rates are far below those of other immigrant groups, and they are more likely to have low incomes, live in poverty, and many among their ranks are undocumented. These social characteristics contribute to their lack of health insurance and access to care, and have negative consequences for their health in terms of chronic disease and overall well-being. This report examines the health services implications of the social integration of Mexican immigrants in the United States, with special emphasis on the impact of the health system for nonelderly adults where access is heavily shaped by private insurance that is largely obtained through employment. This report is a result of binational collaboration between Secretariat of Government of Mexico, through National Population Council and Migration Policy Unit, and the University of California, through its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

This paper studies how the schooling system may be impacted by the number and skill type of immigrants. When the number of low-skilled immigrants is large, the education regime tends to become segregated. Wealthy locals are more likely to choose private schools and vote for a lower tax rate to finance public education. In contrast, high-skilled immigrants tend to reinforce the public system. The optimal immigration policy is highly skill-biased. The admission of high-skilled immigrants expedites redistribution toward the less-skilled local households through both a stronger fiscal support for public education and a reduction in the skill wage premium.

Chapter 1 investigates the impact of weather-related income shocks on infant mortality in rural Ecuador. I find that favorable weather conditions during the growing season have a negative effect on infant survival rates when the harvest takes place during the first and third trimester of pregnancy, and the first trimester following birth. My results suggest that the negative effects of an increased ma- ternal labour supply, following a positive agricultural productivity shock, during pregnancy and the first trimester after birth outstrip the positive effects resulting from the consequent higher income when considering year-to-year weather fluc- tuations. I also find that favorable weather during the growing season reduces -via maternal time- prenatal care, skilled assistance at birth, and breastfeeding duration and frequency. Chapter 2 explores the presence of spillover effects on schooling outcomes from the Colombian welfare program, “Familias en Acción”, on ineligible households in rural areas. The program provides cash subsidies to poor families conditional on children school attendance. I find that ineligible chil- dren — those living in a household that has not been classified as poor—residing in targeted areas are more likely to stay in the school during the transition pe- riod between primary and secondary school. My results suggest that peer effects might play an important role in schooling decisions as the increased grade com- pletion rate of the peer group increases the individual completion. Chapter 3 uses a randomized experiment to examine the causal effect of improving hous- ing conditions on child health, and adult mental health. We find that replacing floors, upgrading toilets, kitchen, and play areas has no impact on child health but these results are subject to a high level of non-selective attrition on children. We also find that the program improves caregiver’s mental health as measured by the CES-D depression score.

Objective: To describe data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), both the annual core survey and periodic occupational health supplements (OHSs), available for examining national trends in worker health. Methods: The NHIS is an annual in-person household survey with a cross-sectional multistage clustered sample design to produce nationally representative health data. The 2010 NHIS included an OHS. Results: Prevalence rates of various health conditions and health behaviors among workers based on multiple years of NHIS core data are available. In addition, the 2010 NHIS-OHS data provide prevalence rates of selected health conditions, work organization factors, and occupational exposures among US workers by industry and occupation. Conclusions: The publicly available NHIS data can be used to identify areas of concern for various industries and for benchmarking data from specific worker groups against national averages.

The Obamacare Rate Map, a product of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress, is a tool for policymakers, researchers, and ordinary Americans to understand the ways in which the Affordable Care Act affects the individual market for health insurance. The Map presents three categories of information on a state-by-state basis: (1) the gross impact of the ACA on health insurance premiums in the individual market; (2) the percentage of overall and uninsured Americans who qualify for subsidized coverage on the ACA's insurance exchanges; and (3) the net impact of premium changes and subsidies on Americans of different ages.

The current structure of the tax and transfer system in the United States makes it particularly challenging for low-income married couples with children to work their way into the middle class. Specifically, the tax and transfer system has an inherent secondary-earner penalty that discourages work efforts and reduces the return to work for a second earner within a married couple. When children are present, a spouses work efforts often brings associated child-care costs, making the return to work even lower. Our estimates suggest that under the current federal tax and transfer system, and assuming standard child-care costs, a family headed by a primary earner making $25,000 a year will take home less than 30 percent of a spouses earnings. We propose a secondary-earner deduction for low- to moderate-income families. This incremental modification to the tax code would increase disposable income for affected families.

This is an account of Greek Americanstheir history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. Blending sociological insight with historical detail, Peter C. and Charles C. Moskos trace the Greek-American experience from the wave of mass immigration in the early 1900s to today. This is the story of immigrants, most of whom worked hard to secure middle-class status. It is also the story of their children and grandchildren, many of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of Americas most successful ethnic groups.

The emergence and diffusion of fertility control strategies as part of the demographic transition are usually not occurring randomly in space and time. Next to individual-level characteristics also prevailing socio-economic contextual conditions as well as geographic characteristics such as distance to centers of the decline seem to be relevant. However, most existing studies on the fertility decline focus either on macro-level trends or on micro-level studies with limited geographic scope. Much less attention has been given to the interplay between individual characteristics and contextual conditions including geographic location. With this paper we aim to contribute to close this existing research gap. We use 100% individual-level samples of the Swedish censuses in the years 1880, 1890 and 1900 which include detailed information on socio-economic status. Multi-level models are applied to link these individuals to contextual information on the local parishes they were living in. Our main research question is whether in this initial phase of the fertility decline in Sweden social distance or spatial distance were more relevant as constraints for the diffusion process. Did people adopt the behavior from nearby persons independent of social class differences, or were they more likely to adopt it from persons with similar social status, even if they were not living in the same location? Our preliminary results suggest that in this initial phase of the decline social class differences were putting higher constraints on the diffusion of the fertility decline compared to spatial distances. This is in line with theoretical considerations by Szreter (1996) on “communication communities”.

Over the past half century the gap in mortality across education levels has grown in the United States, and since the mid-1980s, the growth has been especially pronounced among white women. The reasons for the growth among white women are unclear. We investigated three explanationssocialpsychological factors, economic circumstances, and health behaviorsfor the widening education gap in mortality from 1997 to 2006 among white women aged 45 to 84 years using data from the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File (N = 46,744; 4,053 deaths). Little support was found for social-psychological factors, but economic circumstances and health behaviors jointly explained the growing education gap in mortality to statistical nonsignificance. Employment and smoking were the most important individual components. Increasing high school graduation rates, reducing smoking prevalence, and designing work-family policies that help women find and maintain desirable employment may reduce mortality inequalities among women.

In recent decades, growth in New England’s college-educated workforce has lagged behind that in the nation as a whole.1 Attraction and retention of college graduates, especially those trained in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, is therefore a policy priority. As noted by Sasser Modestino (2013), New England has both a higher share of students coming to college from outside the Census division and a lower retention rate of out-of-division students than other divisions. How do foreignborn college students and graduates fit into this picture?

Policymakers have been slow to implement price-based congestion policies due in part to how little is known about the effects of policies that influence more than simply an individual’s commuting method. An individual can also alter her commute by choosing to travel from a different location. I develop a discrete choice structural model of the joint decisions of family residence and individual commuting modes, given the characteristics of the housing market and commuting options. I use rich individual-level data that allow me to include numerous unobserved heterogeneity terms; this strengthens the validity of my results relative to more aggregate analyses that are often undertaken. I am in the process of using model estimates to simulate the full set of effects of transportation policies that alter the financial and time costs of commuting. These policies include congestion pricing schemes, fuel or carbon taxes, and increased parking fees. I estimate my model using individual-level Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data from the 2005-2008 American Community Survey (ACS) for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The PUMS data requires that I randomly assign individuals home and work locations, but the Census Bureau has granted me access to precise information on where individuals live and work from the restricted-access version of the ACS that I am currently using to improve the analysis. I augment the information in the ACS with data I have painstakingly assembled on the structure of the transportation network to map each individual’s optimal commute from each home and by each commuting method in the choice set. To do this, I use geographic information system (GIS) network analysis. The mappings allow me to create a unique dataset of individual commute options and characteristics that I use to estimate the trade-offs that individuals make among consumption, housing amenities, and leisure when choosing a home and commuting mode pair. I also develop and plan to implement a methodology that (unlike previous literature) does not require that I treat groups of individuals living together as if they have a single set of preferences. Instead, I use a collective model of the household to account for the fact that spouses rarely commute to the same work location. This allows me to model the interplay between residential and commuting mode choices when spouses consider the proximity of their home to both work locations. I allow family members to have caring preferences, and I treat characteristics of the home as a family public good. The collective model requires observing individual consumption of at least one private good in the household to identify bargaining outcomes, and I use a novel assignable private good: the method and duration of each commute. This work is both an extension of the collective model to the residential choice and travel literatures as well as an application of the collective model to a problem with discrete choices and a rich error structure.