This paper investigates the role of psychosocial traits in the occupational segregation of young workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields of study and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individuals have masculine traits and believe they are intelligent, while entry into male-dominated occupations is also related to the willingness to work hard, impulsivity, and the tendency to avoid problems. The nature of these relationships differs for men and women, however. Psychosocial traits (self-assessed intelligence and impulsivity) also influence movement into higher-paid occupations, but in ways that are similar for men and women. On balance, psychosocial traits provide an important, though incomplete, explanation for segregation in the fields that young men and women study as well as in the occupations in which they are employed.

This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to improve understanding of extreme heat vulnerability in cities. I first assess the current socio-spatial distribution of heat vulnerability among human groups. Second, I uncover the historical and geographical trajectories of urban development in the production of hazards and vulnerable populations. Finally, I formulate and evaluate a vegetation-based intervention to mitigate extreme heat. I draw on social and health sciences, GIS and remote sensing, critical geography, urban political ecology, environmental history, environmental justice, and urban climatology to construct three case studies illustrating different dimensions of climate change-induced vulnerability in urban environments.

A growing empirical literature in economics and sociology documents the existence of differences in social and economic outcomes between mixed-race blacks and other blacks. However, few researchers have considered whether the advantages associated with mixed-race status may have also translated into differences in mortality outcomes between subgroups of blacks and how both groups compared to whites. We employ previously untapped 1880 North Carolina Mortality census records in conjunction with data from the 1880 North Carolina Population Census to examine whether mulatto, or mixed-race blacks may have experienced mortality advantages over to their colored, or non-mixed race counterparts. For men between the ages of 20-44,estimates demonstrate that all black males are more likely than whites to die. Although our results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in mortality between mulatto and colored blacks, there are some indications that mulatto males may have enjoyed a slight mortality advantage compared to their colored counterparts. However, we find a substantial mortality advantage associated with mixed-race status among women. These findings indicate that mixed-race women, rather than men, may have accrued any mortality advantages associated with color and white ancestry.

Analysis of the 20082010 American Community Survey (ACS) indicates that 535,000 uninsured veterans and 174,000 uninsured spouses of veteransor four in 10 uninsured veterans and one in four uninsured spouseshave incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) and could qualify for Medicaid or new subsidies for coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Most of these uninsured414,000 veterans and 113,000 spouseshave incomes below 100 percent of FPL, and will therefore only have new coverage options under the ACA if their state expands Medicaid. However, fewer than half live in states in which the governor supports their state participating in the expansion, while the majority live in states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid or have not yet decided whether to expand. The extent to which uninsured veterans and their family members with incomes below the FPL will have access to new coverage options under the ACA will depend on whether they live in a state that adopts the Medicaid expansion.

This study evaluates CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) from a benefit-cost perspective. ASAP is designed to accelerate degree completion within three years at community colleges. This report builds on the CUNY evaluations of ASAP, which provide consistent evidence for the dramatic success of ASAP on increasing the timely completion of associate degrees. Although ASAP requires more resources per student than the traditional associate program, the cost per graduate was found to be lower because of its much higher effectiveness in producing graduates. The benefit-cost analysis of ASAP enables us to calculate the monetary costs and benefits of this intervention with particular emphasis on the financial returns to the taxpayer. We estimate the benefits arising from higher tax revenues and lower costs of spending on public health, criminal justice, and public assistance and compare them with the required investment for ASAP. The estimates show that there are large financial returns on ASAP investment for the taxpayer and for the students in the program. In all cases, the benefits exceeded the costs. For each dollar of investment in ASAP by taxpayers, the return was between three and four dollars and around twelve dollars for each dollar invested by the individuals, suggesting that ASAP is a very productive public and private investment. When applied to the much higher ability of ASAP to produce high graduation rates, the overall returns to the taxpayer are impressive. A cohort of 1,000 students enrolled in ASAP would generate fiscal benefits for the taxpayer of more than $46 million beyond those of investing an approximately equal amount in the conventional degree program. This is a very substantial monetary return for this educational intervention.

This paper presents a business cycle model capturing the stylized features of housing-market boom-bust cycles in developed countries. The model implies that over-optimism of mortgage borrowers generates housing-market boom-bust cycles, if mortgage borrowers are credit-constrained and savers do not share their optimism. This result holds without price stickiness. If price stickiness is introduced into the model, then the model replicates a low policy interest rate during a housing boom as an endogenous reaction to a low inflation rate, given a Taylor rule. Thus, monetary easing observed during housing booms are consistent with the presence of over-optimism causing boom-bust cycles.

New Philadelphia, Illinois, is thought to be the first town in the US formally established by an African American. Among founder Free Frank McWorters priorities was that members of his family attend school, years before state law supported education for children not classified as white. It is well established that a later schoolhouse, built around 1874, was racially integrated. However, conflicting interpretations of available evidence, such as oral histories and written reminiscences, raise questions about the way in which the earliest schools served the African American and European American families of the town. The authors use archaeological and documentary evidence to search for the location of the schoolhouse and reveal how residents of this multiracial town challenged prevailing norms of common school education. The written and material traces are faint, but qualitative and quantitative analyses of the available materials demonstrate the schools significance for the residents of this communityon the Midwestern frontier.

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decrease in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to wealthy places. These changes coincide with (1) an increase in housing prices in productive areas, (2) a divergence in the skill-specific real returns to living in productive places, (3) a redirection of low-skilled migration and (4) diminished human capital convergence due to migration. We develop a model where falling housing supply elasticity and endogenous labor mobility generates these patterns. Using a new panel measure of housing supply regulations, we demonstrate the importance of this channel. Income convergence continues in less-regulated places, while it has stopped in more-regulated places.

The study of complex systems is limited by the fact that only a few variables are accessible for modeling and sampling, which are not necessarily the most relevant ones to explain the system behavior. In addition, empirical data typically undersample the space of possible states. We study a generic framework where a complex system is seen as a system of many interacting degrees of freedom, which are known only in part, that optimize a given function. We show that the underlying distribution with respect to the known variables has the Boltzmann form, with a temperature that depends on the number of unknown variables. In particular, when the influence of the unknown degrees of freedom on the known variables is not too irregular, the temperature decreases as the number of variables increases. This suggests that models can be predictable only when the number of relevant variables is less than a critical threshold. Concerning sampling, we argue that the information that a sample contains on the behavior of the system is quantified by the entropy of the frequency with which different states occur. This allows us to characterize the properties of maximally informative samples: within a simple approximation, the most informative frequency size distributions have power law behavior and Zipf’s law emerges at the crossover between the under sampled regime and the regime where the sample contains enough statistics to make inferences on the behavior of the system. These ideas are illustrated in some applications, showing that they can be used to identify relevant variables or to select the most informative representations of data, e.g. in data clustering.

This paper examines the U.S. labor market performance of East Asian migrants, from Korea, Japan and China, from a gendered perspective. Analyzing the motivating factors behind migration, this paper compares the status of development and women’s empowerment and subsequent labor market outcomes. Labor market performance is measured by immigrants’ wages, and the Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure are employed to compare institutional conditions that shape gender status and economic development in the home countries. The results show human capital factors and home country gender equality play significant roles in shaping outcomes for U.S. immigrants from East Asia.

In this study, the concept of transportation ecoefficiency (TE) is described, and it is argued that this concept offers coherence to theoretical discussions of the environmental impact of transportation. A TE measure using readily available data is proposed, with four components: (1) percentage of commuters driving to work; (2) percentage of commuters taking public transit; (3) percentage of commuters walking or riding a bicycle; and (4) population density. A confirmatory factor analysis suggests that these components are useful for measuring TE and consistent in their relationships over time. This TE index is used to analyze TE in metropolitan areas in the United States (19802008) and in the United Kingdom (19812001): TE is decreasing in both countries despite very different starting points, with worrisome implications for climate change and other transportation related environmental impacts. The paper concludes with a discussion of some uses for the TE metric in empirical research and planning practice, and how the concept could enhance the literature on transportation and the environment.

Women Talk Too Damn Much! is the innovative blueprint of self and relationship actualization. It doesn't encourage women to think like men, but rather encourages women to understand themselves, while giving men a blueprint to understanding women in all of their complexities. Through uncovering the gender differences and disconnects between women and men that lead to disappointments, heartbreaks, break-ups, and even divorce, not through blame, but through the art of awareness, this work forces each to take a hard look at how we can subconsciously become counterproductive to reaching our own relationship goals. Women Talk Too Damn Much paves the way toward awareness, healing, actualization, and the ultimate connection and has proven to be equally relevant and exciting for women and men. It is a must read for anyone who is seeking true understanding and growth, and isn't afraid to get "gut punched" on the way. But most importantly it is a must read for anyone who is

The School Attendance Boundary Information System is a social science data infrastructure project that assembles, processes, and distributes spatial data delineating K through 12th grade school attendance boundaries for thousands of school districts in U.S. Although geography is a fundamental organizing feature of K to 12 education, until now school attendance boundary data have not been made readily available on a massive basis and in an easy-to-use format. The School Attendance Boundary Information System removes these barriers by linking spatial data delineating school attendance boundaries with tabular data describing the demographic characteristics of populations living within those boundaries. This paper explains why a comprehensive GIS database of K through 12 school attendance boundaries is valuable, how original spatial information delineating school attendance boundaries is collected from local agencies, and techniques for modeling and storing the data so they provide maximum flexibility to the user community. An important goal of this paper is to share the techniques used to assemble the SABINS database so that local and state agencies apply a standard set of procedures and models as they gather data for their regions.

This dissertation defines early commitment scholarship programs and their theoretical impact on college enrollment and outcomes in general. In addition, it analyzes the effects of one state-wide early commitment program for low-income students, Oklahomas Promise. The impact of the expansion of Oklahomas Promise on college enrollment rates and college level educational outcomes will be reviewed. When compared with all US states, many of which were also implementing programs to increase college enrollment, Oklahomas Promise was not found to have any significant effect. However using the preferred control group, results show the program increased college enrollment among low-income youth by 4.4 percentage points when compared to states with no scholarship program. In regards to college level educational outcomes, Oklahomas Promise increased the probability of earning a college degree in five years or less, in not dropping out of college, and of earning a two-year college degree compared with students that signed the pledge and enrolled in college without the scholarship. The program was also found to have increased the state-wide, low-income, Associates degree attainment rate by 4.5 percentage points. A benefit-cost analysis of the program shows that the net present value of the benefits to the taxpayer of the program for just the 2003 cohort was at least $88 million. Over the life of the program, the benefits are expected to be much more. The benefits of enrolling in college through the program far exceeded the costs to the students, regardless of whether or not they ultimately earned a degree.

Countercyclical variation in individuals' idiosyncratic labor income risk could generate substantial welfare costs. Following past research, we infer income volatility - the variance of permanent income shocks, a standard proxy for income risk - from the rate at which cross-sectional variances of income rise over the life cycle for a given cohort. Our novelty lies in exploiting cross-state variation in state economic conditions or state sensitivity to national economic conditions. We find that income volatility is higher in good state times than bad; during good national times, we find volatility is higher in states that are more sensitive to national conditions.

Occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grew tremendously in regional U.S. labor markets from 1980 to 2000. Using U. S. Census data, we examine the extent to which this growth is attributed to network effects by studying the relationship between the occupational choice ofrecently arrived immigrants with those of established immigrants from the same country, We find strong evidence of network effects. First,new arrivals are choosing the same occupations as their compatriots, a decision that is operating at the regional level. Second, individualswho choose the most common occupation of their compatriots enjoy a large and positive earnings effect.

Orphanhood methods estimate the mortality of adult women and men indirectly from data on the survival status of respondents’ mothers and fathers respectively. In order to apply the method, at least one census or single-round survey of the population must have included the questions ‘Is your mother alive?’ and ‘Is your father alive?’. Mortality can be estimated from the answers to these questions without requiring respondents to recall the dates when deaths occurred or the ages at death of deceased individuals. Since respondents’ mothers must have been alive when the respondents were born, the duration over which they have been exposed to the risk of dying equals the age of the respondents. By allowing for the mean age at which the mothers gave birth in the population concerned, it is possible to predict life table survivorship from age 25 to age 25 plus a rounded number of years (n) based on the age group of the respondents (l25+n/l25) from the proportion of respondents in each age group whose mother is alive. Similarly, by adjusting for the mean age at which the fathers have children, one can predict life table survivorship of adult men from the proportions of respondents with living fathers. As men tend to be older than their wives and other partners, their survivorship is measured between a base age of 35 and age 35 +n where n is again linked to the age group of the respondents. If mortality has changed over time, the estimated survivorship ratios reflect the mortality rates that have prevailed at a range of ages and dates. A ‘time location’ method has been developed that estimates how many years prior to inquiry each cohort survivorship ratio equalled the period survivorship ratio. These intervals increase with the age of respondents, ranging between about 4 and 14 years before the collection of the data. Thus, if the survivorship ratios estimated from the reports of different age groups of respondent are translated into a common index of mortality in adulthood (such as 45q15) using a 1-parameter system of model life tables, these statistics will refer to different dates and can be used to infer the broad trend in mortality over time. One advantage that orphanhood methods have over questions about household deaths is that only censuses or unusually large surveys can capture information on enough deaths in households in the year before the inquiry to yield mortality estimates that are sufficiently precise to be useful. The orphanhood method can be used in much smaller inquiries, although all methods for the estimation of adult mortality require data on thousands of households. Moreover, the method does not assume that the population is closed to migration. However, the results from the method will not be representative for small states or sub-national areas in which a substantial proportion of the population are in-migrants or have emigrated.

This paper critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce and the dissolution of cohabiting unions in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data led some analysts to conclude that divorce risk has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in divorce risk between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over 35. Among younger adults, marital dissolution risks are stable or declining. The leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 may reflect increasing selectivity of marriage. Even among the youngest cohorts, however, the stabilization of divorce rates is more than offset by the increasing number of dissolutions of cohabiting unions. In sum, divorce risk has risen sharply in recent years, but if current trends continue it could level off or even decline over the next few decades. Nevertheless, we expect that overall union instability will continue to increase because of the rise of cohabitation. 2