This brief assesses Medicaid/Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP) participation rates and the number of uninsured children who are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP using the most recent data available from the American Community Survey. Since 2008, Medicaid/CHIP participation rates have risen by 5.5 percentage points among children, increasing to 87.2 percent in 2011; in that year, 19 states and the District of Columbia had participation rates at or above 90 percent and four states had rates below 80 percent. These findings suggest that the increased state and federal policy efforts aimed at reducing the number of eligible-but-uninsured children have been yielding results and that there is potential for more progress, by increasing participation in the lower-performing states. However, despite the potential for further progress, there is uncertainty about how childrens coverage will change in the coming years.

This paper compares earnings disparities between persons with disabilities and able-bodied persons in the United States and in China, two countries with widely differing public policies regarding employment of persons with disabilities. In doing so, the paper provides readers with a unique comparative perspective on both the nature of disability policies in China and the United States and on the impacts of these policies. Data from the China Household Income Project Survey (CHIPs) and the US Current Population Survey (CPS) are used to estimate earnings equations in China and the US to test the hypothesis that the adverse impacts of disability on earnings differ between the two countries. The disability rates in the two samples are comparable as are the percentage differences in earnings between persons with disabilities and able-bodied persons. However, the estimated impacts of disability on wage and salary incomes are larger in the United States, where disability policy is essentially an anti-discrimination policy than they are in China, where disability policy includes an affirmative action requirement mandating that employers hire a quota of employees with disabilities against a threat of fines and penalties. The analysis has broad implications for understanding how and why anti-discrimination policies may not be enough to narrow earnings gaps between persons with disabilities and the able-bodied.

Substance abuse treatment providers commonly provide services for men and women involved in sex work. Sex workers often present to treatment with a complicated array of challenges (M. L. Burnette et al., 2008a; D. C. Ling, W. C. W. Wong, E. A. Holroyd, & S. A. Grayson, 2007; M. Young, C. Boyd, & A. Hubbell, 2000), and, while many scholars have posited the need for adapted interventions for sex workers (L. Nuttbrock, A. Rosenblum, S. Magura, C. Villano, & J. Wallace, 2004; A. Weiner, 1996), there is still a lull in the development of comprehensive, tailored services for sex workers seeking substance abuse treatment (L. Nuttbrock et al., 2004). Augmenting this gap is the lack of a clear framework through which to understand the challenges that sex workers endure and how their challenges may differ from treatment-seeking non-sex workers. In order to address this gap, the current study explored the utility of a social justice framework, namely the Capability Approach, in predicting sex work involvement among a substance-abusing sample. We hypothesize that increased challenges to achieving capability will predict sex work involvement among a substance-abusing sample. Results suggest that the Capability Approach is a useful framework that can be used to differentiate between sex workers and their substance-abusing counterparts and that sex workers experience greater challenges to achieving capability. As such, the current findings support recent calls in the literature for the development of tailored services to meet the needs of this population.

This thesis studies the transmission of human capital across generations. Intergenerational mobility explains the link between parent and child outcomes and is analyzed in this study using the human capital transmission models of Becker and Tomes (1986, 1979) and Solon (2012); and the child labor and school attendance model of Orazem and Funnarsson (2004). Data for this study comes from the IPUMS Linked Representative Sample years 1880-190 where school attendance and occupation were analyzed for the primary linked male as well as their father, mother spouse, and children. Analysis of the data suggests significant determinants of a child attending school are the fathers level of human capital, where the child lives, nativity of the child, and nativity of the parent. Significant determinants of the primary linked males occupational income score are the fathers occupational income score, school attendance, where the male lives, the males nativity, as well as the parents nativity.

The factors that influence the socioeconomic position of individuals and groups within industrial societies also influence their health (1,2). Socioeconomic position has continuous and graded effects on health that are cumulative over a lifetime. The socioeconomic conditions of the places where persons live and work have an even more substantial influence on health than personal socioeconomic position (3,4). In the United States, educational attainment and income are the indicators that are most commonly used to measure the effect of socioeconomic position on health. Research indicates that substantial educational and income disparities exist across many measures of health (1,5–8). A previous report described the magnitude and patterns of absolute and relative measures of disparity in noncompletion of high school and poverty in 2005 and 2009 (9). Notable disparities defined by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic factors, disability status, and geographic location were identified for 2005 and 2009, with no evidence of a temporal decrease in racial/ethnic disparities, whereas socioeconomic and disability disparities increased from 2005 to 2009. The analysis and discussion of educational attainment and income that follow are part of the second CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report (CHDIR) and update information on disparities in the prevalence of noncompletion of high school and poverty presented in the first CHDIR (8). The 2011 CHDIR (9) was the first CDC report to describe disparities across a wide range of diseases, behavioral risk factors, environmental exposures, social determinants, and health-care access. The topic presented in this report is based on criteria that are described in the 2013 CHDIR Introduction (10). The purposes of this analysis are to discuss and raise awareness about group differences in levels of noncompletion of high school and poverty and to motivate actions to reduce these disparities.

The prevalent need for publicly available datasets, coupled with the spate of privacy-related incidents pertaining to the release of such data, have spurred the need to develop resilient and accurate methods of privacy-preserving data publishing. In this dissertation, we consider the problem of private data publishing while satisfying the robust notion of differential privacy. In particular, we consider the scenario in which a trusted curator gathers sensitive information from a large number of respondents, creates a dataset where each tuple corresponds to one entity, and publishes a privacy-preserving synopsis of the dataset. The diverse nature of the datasets of interest prevents the development of a single general method of data publishing that works in all situations. We therefore develop differentially private synopsis mechanisms for various types of data. We start with the simplest data publishing scenario: publishing a single-dimensional histogram. We explore hierarchical approaches to publishing histograms and propose various optimizations. Next we consider two-dimensional datasets and propose grid-based approaches for publishing geospatial datasets. For datasets with more than just a few dimensions, we propose a framework for publishing k-way marginals and contingency tables while guaranteeing accuracy and consistency. Furthermore, for high-dimensional datasets, we propose a framework for frequent itemset mining while guaranteeing differential privacy. Finally, we explore relaxations to differential privacy in light of an adversary's uncertainty about the dataset.

Dramatic fertility swings over the last 100 years have been the subject of large literatures in demography and economics. Recent research has claimed that the post-1960 fertility decline is exceptional enough to constitute a “Second Demographic Transition.” The empirical case for a Second Demographic Transition, however, rests largely on comparisons of the post-1960 period with the baby boom era, which was itself exceptional in many ways. Our analysis of the U.S. instead compares the fertility decline in the 1960s and 1970s to the earlier 20th century fertility decline, especially the 1920s and 1930s. Our findings affirm that both periods experienced similar declines in fertility rates and that the affected cohorts averaged the same number of children born over their lifetimes. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the mean age of household formation (by marriage or non-marital cohabitation) and first birth are almost identical for women reaching childbearing age in the 1920s and 1930s and today. Three features, however, distinguish the post-1960 period: (1) the convergence in the distribution of completed childbearing around a two-child mode and a decrease in childlessness; (2) the decoupling of marriage and motherhood; and (3) a transformation in the relationship between the educational attainment of mothers and childbearing outcomes. These three features of the 20th century fertility decline have implications for children’s opportunities, children’s educational achievement, and widening inequality in U.S. labor markets.

Underneath Stockton, Californias popular depiction as a dangerously violent metropolis is a new urban-environmental crisis involving the spatial concentration of low-income, racialized, and foreign-born populations, as well as heightened risk of exposure to food insecurity, air-toxic contamination, climate-related sea-level rise and flooding, and home foreclosure in its risky neighborhoods. This dissertation seeks to answer two primary research questions: To what extent does the Stockton case represent the dynamics of a new urban-environmental crisis unfolding throughout the continental United States? What historical processes and events contribute to patterns of demographic stability and change in Stockton's risky neighborhoods? This study uses a quantitative spatial analysis of secondary data to characterize variation in segregation levels of risky neighborhoods in Stockton, 34 comparable crisis metropolitan areas, and other non-crisis areas in the continental United States.

For households that face a possibility of moving across MSAs, the risk of home owning depends on the covariance of the sale prices of their current houses with the purchase prices of their likely future houses. We find empirically that households tend to move between highly correlated MSAs, significantly increasing the distribution of expected correlations in real house price growth across MSAs, and so raising the "moving-hedge" value of owning. Own/rent decisions are sensitive to this hedging value, with households being more likely to own when their hedging value is greater due to higher expected correlations and likelihoods of moving.

As metropolitan governments explore density-promoting “smart growth” policies, finer analysis is needed to quantify the impact of such changes on households’ transportation and housing costs. Existing research suggests that households in urban areas face a trade-off between living in areas with higher housing costs and lower transportation costs or the reverse, but does not explore how density changes explicitly impact this balance. This paper uses the 2000 Census Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) data from twenty-three of the nation’s most densely populated states to identify the impact of increased population density on household rents, housing unit values and monthly mortgage payments. The project additionally explores the possibility of a negative relationship, or trade-off, between what households spend on housing and the transportation options they face. Results suggest increased population density is a strong driver of higher housing costs even after controlling for available transportation variables. Results also confirm previous research that suggests households utilizing fixed route transit systems pay a premium for that access.

Background: Previous reports suggest outcome differences following surgery for colorectal cancer (CRC) based on specialist and volume-related metrics. We sought to compare community and tertiary centers in an equal access system.Materials and methods: Patients treated for CRC at Department of Defense medical facilities were stratified by care at tertiary (MEDCEN) versus community (MEDDAC) medical centers. Disease-free and overall survival outcomes were calculated, including Cox multivariate analysis.Results: A total of 6438 patients met inclusion criteria. Overall, 3347 operations were performed at MEDCENs and 3091 operations at MEDDACs. By stage, 25.6% were stage 1, 27.1% stage 2, 29.1% stage 3, and 18.2% stage 4. Mean number of lymph nodes harvested were 11.3 +/- 10.2, with no difference between facilities. Disease-free survival at 5 y was similar between the two cohorts (mean 88.1%). Overall 5-y survival was 52.7% (MEDDAC) versus 46.8% (MEDCEN), P < 0.001, due to significant differences in stage 2 patients. Cox regression and logistic regression analysis identified stage 2 patients as independently associated with significantly increased 5-y mortality risk at MEDCEN.Conclusion: Outcomes following surgery for CRC in an equal access system are improved in stage 2 patients treated at MEDDACs compared to high-volume, specialist-centered MEDCENs. Further evaluation into factors impacting improved overall survival at MEDDACs, including adjuvant therapy utilization, is warranted to optimize outcomes. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. An effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency.

Access control mechanisms protect sensitive information from unauthorized users. However, when sensitive information is shared and a Privacy Protection Mechanism (PPM) is not in place, an authorized insider can still compromise the privacy of a person leading to identity disclosure. A PPM can use suppression and generalization to anonymize and satisfy privacy requirements, e.g., k-anonymity and l-diversity. However, the protection of privacy is achieved at the cost of precision of authorized information. In this thesis, we propose an accuracy-constrained privacy-preserving access control framework for static relational data and data streams. The access control policies define selection predicates available to roles and the associated imprecision bound. The PPM has to satisfy the privacy requirement along with the imprecision bound for each selection predicate. We prove the hardness of problem, propose heuristics for anonymization algorithms and show empirically that the proposed approach satisfies imprecision bounds for more queries than the current state of the art. We also formulate the problem of predicate role mining for extraction of authorized selection predicates and propose an approximate algorithm. The access control for stream data allows roles access to tuples satisfying an authorized predicate sliding window query. The generalization introduces imprecision in the authorized view of stream. This imprecision can be reduced by delaying the publishing of stream data. However, the delay in sharing the stream tuples to access control can lead to false negatives. The challenge is to optimize the time duration for which the data is held by PPM so that the imprecision bound for maximum number of queries are met. We present the hardness results, provide an anonymization algorithm, and conduct experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm.

We present new evidence on the effects of merit aid scholarship on residential migration and educational attainment using Census data on all 24 to 32 year olds in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. Eligibility for merit aid programs slightly increases the propensity of state natives to live in-state, while also extending in-state enrollment into the late twenties. These patterns notwithstanding, the magnitude of merit aid effects is of an order of magnitude smaller than the population treated, suggesting that nearly all of the spending on these programs is transferred to individuals who do not alter educational or migration behavior.

This article focuses on settlement trends of immigrants during the periods that bookend the twentieth century, both eras of mass migration. It compares settlement patterns in both periods, describing old and new gateways, the growth of the immigrant population, and geographic concentration and dispersion. Historically, immigrants have been highly concentrated in a few places. Between 1930 and 1990, more than half of all immigrants lived in just five metropolitan areas. Since then, the share of these few destinations has declined, as immigrants have made their way to new metro areas, particularly in the South and West. During the same period, immigrants began to choose the suburbs over cities, following the decentralization of jobs and the movement of opportunities to suburban areas. There are now more immigrants in U.S. suburban areas than cities.

The impacts of homicides committed by organized crime have affected northern Mexico in a high profile manner between 2008 and 2011. This article examines the impacts of those crime waves on retail activity in the six largest northern border metropolitan economies of Mexico. Retail losses due to violence of this nature are quantified forall six cities. Potential gains related due reductions in organized crime homicides are also calculated.

Parental time with children increases with the education of both the mother and the father. As the education of parents increases, the gap between childcare supplied by mothers relative to that supplied by fathers decreases. A two steps semi-cooperative marital decision model is proposed to explain these two facts. First, parents collectively choose the amount of labor to supply and, in a second step, each of them chooses the amount of childcare as the outcome of a Cournot game. This framework gives rise to indeterminacy of the equilibrium and four selection criteria are proposed: one of a machist society, one of a feminist society, one of a random equilibrium and a last one that estimates the degree of social gender bias towards men. The semi-cooperative theoretical frameworks with the random selection criterion and the criterion that estimates the bias towards men provide the best match with the data.

We uncover interpersonal violence as a dimension and a mechanism of the resource curse. We rely on a historical natural experiment in the United States, in which mineral discoveries occurred at various stages of governmental territorial expansion. "Early" mineral discoveries, before full-fledge rule of law is in place in a county, are associated with higher levels of interpersonal violence, historically and today. The persistence of this homicide resource curse is partly explained by the low quality of -subsequent- judicial institutions. The speci city of our results to violent crime also suggests that a private order of property rights did emerge on the frontier, but that it was enforced by high levels of interpersonal violence. The results are robust to state-speci c e ffects, to comparing only neighboring counties, and to comparing only discoveries within short time intervals.