The cost of mental health services has always been a great barrier to accessing care for people with mental health problems. This article documents changes in insurance coverage and cost for mental health services for people with public insurance, private insurance, and no coverage. In 200910 people with mental health problems were more likely to have public insurance and less likely to have private insurance than in 19992000. Although access to specialty care remained relatively stable for people with mental illnesses, cost barriers to care increased among the uninsured and the privately insured who had serious mental illnesses. The rise in cost barriers among those with private insurance suggests that the current financing of care in the private insurance market is insufficient to alleviate cost burdens and has implications for reforms under the Affordable Care Act. People with mental health problems who are newly eligible to purchase private insurance under the act might still encounter high cost barriers to accessing care.

Does regulation impede or facilitate immigrant participation in the labor market? To answer this question we focus on the growing, and increasingly regulated, Canadian health sector. On the one hand, occupational regulation may facilitate immigrant entry into the labor market as it imposes standards based on credentials, and recent immigrants tend to be highly skilled. On the other hand, provincially designated authorities often enforce regulatory standards, and their selection criterion may unwittingly penalize those with foreign credentials or expertise. Using a longitudinal data set combining information on the regulation of nine Canadian health care occupations and the Canadian Census from 1991 to 2006, we test whether the introduction of regulation places a greater burden on the immigrant population relative to the native born. Specifically, we employ a difference in methodology, exploiting variation across provinces and over time in whether an occupation is regulated to identify its effect on the ration of immigrants to native born-workers employed in that occupation. The results indicate that, on average, a province's introduction of occupational regulation increases the participation of immigrants relative to the native born by 20%.

Between 1940 and 1980, the rate of homeownership among African-American households increasedby 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that risingblack homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white households to the suburban ring, which reduced the price of urban housing units conducive to owner-occupancy. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that 26 percent of the national increase in black homeownership over the period is explained by white suburbanization.

A lately privacy preservation for numerical data has attracted great attention. The concept of (,m)-anonymity was proposed and solved the problem of data privacy preservation for numerical sensitiveattributes, but it made no progress for categorical sensitive attributes. In this paper, we address theproblem of proximity privacy in publishing categorical sensitive data. When applying the traditionalapproach to anonymize the data and generalize the QI-groups, some sensitive attribute values withsemantical proximity may exist in the same QI-group, and thus lead to privacy leakage. To remedy thisissue, the concept of m-Color constraint is introduced and a method based on the m-Color constraintis proposed to prevent such kind of privacy leakage. To improve the data utility of anonymized table,the properties of m-Color constraint and related generalization algorithm are also given. Extensiveexperiments on real data are provided to explain practicality and efficiency of the algorithm proposedin this paper.

If unobserved ability is a signiÖcant portion of the college education premium, then a signiÖcant portion of the observed complementarity be- tween the college and non-college educated is due to changes in the ability composition of those groups, overestimating the elasticity of complemen- tarity up to 20%. If college attainment rose to over 50%, this e§ect would reverse, as is illustrated with high school attainment rates. If there is little ability bias, the distribution education related ability is nearly degenerate, with the awkward implication that the most productive individuals would earn barely more on average without a college education than the least.

This thesis presents the position that waste management policies impact the physical urban fabric of a place, as well as its ecological environment, and cultural significance. It illustrates that landfills have shaped the built environment. Landscapes are often perceived as natural, though the reality is man has shaped many of them. The physical environment and how it changes is the result of the influence of our culture. A specific example of this is landfills, which are manipulated and manufactured landscapes at a large scale. Landfills are land use anomalies in the urban fabric. This work is not about fixing or remediating landfills, but rather understanding why places exist the way they do by examining waste management policies. The St. Louis Metropolitan area is the focus area for the study to demonstrate the impact of waste management policies on landfills, and the built environment. Research was conducted on four existing landfill sites that each represent key factors in the built environment. The steps involved entailed the studying of federal and local waste management policies as an effect of landfills, showing a clear connection of the evolution of public policies being an integral role in the impact and outcome of landfills on the built environment. This pattern is supported by a series of inventory maps that illustrate the relationship of landfill development in the metropolitan area to the physical and ecological environment. Further investigation examined the relationships of individual landfills and their relationship to the physical, demographic, environmental, and cultural context.

WWII induced a dramatic increase in female labor supply, which persisted over time, particularly for women with higher education. Using Census micro data we study the qualitative aspects of this long term increase through the lenses of the occupations women held after the war. Almost two decades after its end, we find that WWII had lasting, albeit complex but interesting effects on the occupational landscape. It led to a significant increase in the presence of young women, who were of working age at the time of the war, in manufacturing and professional/managerial occupations, while it entailed a decrease in the presence of older cohorts in clerical. Though differently, the effects surprisingly extended to the next generation of women who were too young to be working at the time of the war. For this cohort, the increase was concentrated in clerical and manufacturing. The entry of this very young cohort in clerical jobs and the exit of the older, suggests within-gender crowding-out; the increased presence of both cohorts in manufacturing, that the legacy of the wartime Rosies permeated occupational choices.

The historical dynamics of the geographic distribution of economic activity across the eastern United States between 1820 and 2010 are examined using the smallest feasible geographic entities, counties, as units of analysis. The region first experienced increasing spatial concentration of population and manufacturing, with inequality peaking early in the twentieth century. Population and manufacturing have since become more dispersed. Agriculture showed the opposite pattern: initial dispersion followed by increasing concentration. Initially, counties with a high manufacturing density also had a high agricultural density. Eventually, agricultural production moved to outlying areas while manufacturing remained concentrated near where it originated.

Growth in spending per beneficiary in the fee-for-service portion of Medicare has slowed substantially in recent years. The slowdown has been widespread, extending across all of the major service categories, groups of beneficiaries that receive very different amounts of medical care, and all major regions. We estimate that slower growth in payment rates and changes in observable factors affecting beneficiaries’ demand for services explain little of the slowdown in spending growth for elderly beneficiaries between the 2000–2005 and 2007–2010 periods. Specifically, available evidence does not support a finding that demand for health care by Medicare beneficiaries was measurably diminished by the financial turmoil and recession. Instead, much of the slowdown in spending growth appears to have been caused by other factors affecting beneficiaries’ demand for care and by changes in providers’ behavior. We discuss the contribution that those factors may have made to the slowdown in spending growth and the difficulties in quantifying those influences and predicting their persistence.

Following more than 30 years of rising incarceration rates, the United States now imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any country in the world. In contrast to previous research, this paper argues that an increasingly punitive public was a primary reason for this prolific expansion. To test this hypothesis, I introduce a state-level measure of public support for being tough on crime that extends from 1953 to 2010. The analysis shows that, controlling for the crime rate, inequality, the party in power, and state demographic characteristics, since 1953 punitive attitudes have been a fundamental determinant of changes in state incarceration rates.

This paper studies how advances in home production technologies affect female employment and investment in children. To study these relationships, I develop a Beckerian model of home production. I show that household modernization has an ambiguous immediate impact on female employment, but generates increased investment in daughter's human capital, ultimately causing a rise in employment for subsequent cohorts of women. I examine these predictions empirically, exploiting substantial cross-country and cross-state variation in the timing of household electrification in the US for the period 1930 to 1960. To address potential endogenity in the decision to modernize, I estimate instrumental variables regressions, based on a newly assembled dataset that provides information on the construction of over 1,000 power plants during this period. Identification relies on plausibly exogenous changes in the cost of supplying power to different communities based on their location. The empirical results support this intergenerational mechanism. Household electrification had no immediate impact on female employment, but is associated with increased school attendance, particularly on teenage daughters. Meanwhile, females raised in modern households were significantly more likely to work as adults. The results suggest that the diffusion of modern technology into the home during the first half of the 20th century can account for a large fraction of the rise in female employment after 1950.

The importance of understanding work-family issues for both public and private school personnel cannot be understated, as much of what goes on in and around schooling is mandated. Indeed teachers and administrators do not have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the school day, and everyone who is involved with the school community as a whole is affected by these government regulations, whether they are at the local, state, or federal level...

This paper uses new data on the task content of occupations to present a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent computerization episode, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a "hollowing out" of the skill distribution whereby workers in the middle of the distribution lost out to those at the extremes. OLS estimates show that electrification increased the demand for clerical, numerical, planning and people skills relative to manual skills while simultaneously reducing relative demand for the dexterity-intensive jobs which comprised the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, early twentieth century technological change was unskill-biased for blue collar tasks but skill-biased on aggregate. These results are in line with the downward trend in wage differentials within U.S. manufacturing up to 1950. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The brick cabins of the Magnolia Plantation Quarters in Derry, Louisiana, were occupied continuously from the early to mid 1840’s through the late 1960’s where 7.5 of the brick cabins stand today. In contrast the cabins at the Levi Jordan Plantation in Brazoria County, Texas were occupied from the early to mid 1840s only until the late 1880s when archaeological evidence indicates that they were abandoned and left to decay. The investigation by Kenneth Brown of both sites yielded historical, oral and archaeological evidence of both antebellum and postbellum tenant communities. The research presented in this thesis examines the enslaved and tenant children of these communities using historical evidence and the material record they left behind, including toys and school related artifacts. In previous studies, children have often been treated as a minor component of an overall research project. This study attempts to place the focus directly on the children by asking questions specific to them.

This paper reviews and analyzes the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market and workforce and the supply of high-skill temporary foreign workers, who serve as “guestworkers.” It addresses three central issues in the ongoing discussion about the need for high-skill guestworkers in the United States: