High-speed Internet access is becoming more common and less expensive, but an expanding digital divide has potentially serious implications for existing economic inequalities, such as the wage ratio between men and women. This paper examines the relationship between women’s economic outcomes and access to high-speed Internet access. I study the factors that influence predicted wages for men and women and find that high-speed Internet use at home reduces the wage discrimination that a woman is predicted to face. I collected and matched data from the July 2011 Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Study and the March 2010 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Study. The dataset was restricted to only include respondents employed full-time and year-round, and aged 16 or older in accordance with previous research analyzing the gender wage gap. I constructed a two-step regression model, which first predicted male wages based on demographic, geographic, and workforce variables. I used the results from the first stage regression to conduct an out-of- sample prediction and derive the residual wage differential attributed to discrimination, which serves as the dependent variable for the second stage regression. The second stage regression included the same demographic, geographic and workforce variables to correct for endogeneity, and added the key policy variable of interest, high-speed Internet use at home. The existence of a relationship between the gender wage gap and high-speed Internet has implications for government policies that seek to expand Internet access and adoption. My research provides an original contribution to the literature on the benefits associated with high-speed Internet use and advocates leveraging limited resources to further expand both access the Internet and to the field of research in this subject area.

Based on Bourdieu's social capital theory, two studies were conducted to investigate potential social capital and psychological distress for intermarried persons. Study 1 investigated potential social capital for intermarried persons. Study 2 examined the association between potential social capital and psychological distress. The two studies utilized the same data - the 2001 IHIS - including 11,483 intramarried persons and 1,392 intermarried persons. Generalized linear models were used for analyses.Study 1 found that interracial married persons were likely to have less potential social capital than intramarried persons. Study 2 found that the association between potential social capital and psychological distress was stronger for interracial married persons and intermarried persons with non-White spouse than for intramarried persons. The association was weaker for intermarried persons with White spouse than for intramarried persons. The study findings partially supported the previous literature raising a concern about a lack of potential social capital and consequent psychological distress for intermarried persons. The results supported the context-dependent nature of social capital posited by Bourdieu (1986).

Recent economic and health policy changes may have affected the ability of chronically ill patients to afford their medications. We assessed changes in cost-related nonadherence to medication (CRN) before and after the implementation of Medicare Part D in 2006.We used data from the National Health Interview Survey, an annual, population-based survey of community-dwelling, noninstitutionalized US adults, to estimate CRN in 8,673 stroke survivors aged 45 years or older, representing 4.8 million survivors, for the years 1999 to 2010. The main outcome measure was CRN, defined as self-reported inability to afford prescribed medication within the past 12 months....

More than two decades age, Smith and Welch (1959) used the 1940 through 1980 census files to document important relative black progress, but this progress did not continue, at least among men. Since 1980, prison populations have grown tremendously in the United States. Here, we show that, at least for the eight states that provide fairly reliable National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) data, this growth was driven by a move toward more punitive treatment of those arrested in each major crime category. These changes have had a much larger impact on black communities than white because arrest rates have historically been much greater for blacks than whites. Further, the growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after

OBJECTIVE: To compare risks for adverse obstetric events between females who did and did not receive trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine during pregnancy. METHOD: This retrospective, observational cohort study was conducted at seven Vaccine Safety Datalink sites. Pregnancies were identified from administrative and claims data using a validated algorithm. Females vaccinated while pregnant from 2002 to 2009 were matched one-to-two with replacement to unvaccinated pregnant females. Using a generalized estimating equation method with a Poisson distribution and log link, we evaluated the association of trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine with 13 outcomes. Given our large sample size and multiple comparisons (19 contrasts), a cutoff for significance of P<.005 was selected a priori. RESULTS: Our cohort included 74,292 vaccinated females matched on age, site, and pregnancy start date with 144,597 unvaccinated females. We did not observe increased risks within 42 days of vaccination for hyperemesis, chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, proteinuria, or urinary tract infection. Using a risk window from vaccination through pregnancy end, we did not observe increased risks after vaccination for proteinuria, urinary tract infection, gestational hypertension, preeclampsia or eclampsia, chorioamnionitis, puerperal infection, venous complications, pulmonary embolism, or peripartum cardiomyopathy. A reduced risk for gestational diabetes after vaccination was detected (adjusted hazard rate ratio 0.88, 95% confidence interval 0.83–0.93), likely as a result of healthy vaccine bias or earlier detection among vaccinees. CONCLUSION: In this large cohort, influenza vaccination during pregnancy was not associated with increased risks for medically attended adverse obstetric events.

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socio-economic status conveyed by first names can be used to create a pseudo-link not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers and daughters. The latter is typically not possible with historical data. We find that the father-son elasticity in economic status grows throughout the sample period. Intergenerational elasticities for daughters follow a broadly similar trend, but with some differences in timing. We argue that most of the increase in the intergenerational elasticity estimate in the early part of the 20th Century can be accounted for by the vast regional disparities in economic development, with increasing returns to human capital contributing to explain the residual. Other mechanisms such as changes in fertility, migration, and investment in public schooling, appear to have had only a minor role in explaining the trends.

BACKGROUNDThe family migration literature presumes that women are cast into the role of the tied migrant. However, clearly identifying tied migrants is a difficult empirical task, since it requires the identification of a counterfactual: who moved but did not want to?OBJECTIVESThis research develops a unique methodology to directly identify both tied migrants and tied stayers in order to investigate their frequency and determinants.METHODSUsing data from the 1997 through 2009 U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), propensity score matching is used to match married individuals with comparable single individuals to create counterfactual migration behaviors: who moved but would not have moved had they been single (tied migrants) and who did not move but would have moved had they been single (tied stayers).RESULTSTied migration is relatively rare and not limited just to women: rates of tied migration are similar for men and women. However, tied staying is both more common than tied migration and equally experienced by men and women. Consistent with the body of empirical evidence, an analysis of the determinants of tied migration and tied staying demonstrates that family migration decisions are imbued with gender.CONCLUSIONSAdditional research is warranted to validate the unique methodology developed in this paper and to confirm its results. One line of future research should be to examine the effects of tied staying, along with tied migration, on well-being, union stability, employment, and earnings.

This study assesses whether government supported Healthy Marriage Initiatives (HMIs)educational programs to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages and relationshipshave had a measurable impact on population-level family outcomes. We compiled data on funding for these initiatives between 2000 and 2010 and aggregated these data to the state level for each year. We employed pooled time-series regression with fixed state and year effects to estimate the effects of funding on population-leveloutcomes taken from the American Community Survey. Cumulative per capita funding for HMIs between 2005 and 2010 was positively associated with small changes in the percentage of married adults in the population and children living with two parents, and it was negatively associated with the percentage of children living with one parent, nonmarital births, and children living in poverty. These results were diminished, however, when an influential outlierWashington, DCwas removed from the analysis. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.

Internal migration rates in the United States have been steadily declining for at least twenty-five years: In 1984, 6.4 percent of the population moved between counties but by 2006well before the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depressionannual intercounty migration rates had already declined to 4.7 percent and by 2010 to 3.5 percent. Despite the implications of the migration decline, it is poorly recognized and understood. The analysis shows that over the last thirty years, three broad trends have combined to pull migration rates dramatically lower: an increase in dual-worker couples, increased household indebtedness, and the widespread rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The first two are probably linked, as households have responded to decreasing real income over the last quarter-century through greater female labor force participation and maintaining current levels of consumption by borrowing ever more heavily from the equity in their homes. Thus, although this analysis shows that the decline in migration rates is not directly linked to the Great Recession, the migration decline is surely linked to the broader macroeconomic shifts that gave rise to it. With respect to the role of ICTs, it is not surprising that as ICTs have transformed nearly everything else across society, their use has affected migration rates. It is presumed that ICTs are providing new forms of mobility that are substituting for migration.

Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems. Legacies of the War on Poverty, drawing from fifty years of empirical evidence, documents that this popular view is too negative. The volume offers a balanced assessment of the War on Poverty that highlights some remarkable policy successes and promises to shift the national conversation on poverty in America.

In recent years, many approaches to differentially privately publish histograms have been proposed. Several approaches rely on constructing tree structures in order to decrease the error when answer large range queries. In this paper, we examine the factors affecting the accuracy of hierarchical a pproaches by studying the mean squared error (MSE) when answering range queries. We start with one-dimensional histograms, and analyze how the MSE changes with different branching factors, after employing constrained inference, and with different methods to allocate the privacy budget among hierarchy levels. Our analysis and experimental results show that combining the choice of a good branching factor with constrained inference outperform the current state of the art. Finally, we extend our analysis to multidimensional histograms. We show that the benefits from employing hierarchical methods beyond a single dimension are significantly diminished, and when there are 3 or more dimensions, it is almost always better to use the Flat method instead of a hierarchy.

近代日本では鉄道敷設や河川改修，陸上交通の発達などの影響により，河川舟運を取り巻く運輸環境が著しく 変化した.特に明治中期は，舟運から鉄道への移行期と考えられているものの，地域によって衰退時期が異なる. 本研究では明治期に編纂された「徴発物件一覧表」のなかでも，明治 23 年版に掲載された「船舶表」を用いて， 全国レベルの船舶データベースを構築する.船舶表には，船舶の種類のみならず，船舶定繋地の住所が記載され ているため，河岸や浜，港単位のミクロな分析が可能である.本稿では淀川流域を事例に，船舶 GIS データベー スの構築過程や分析例を提示するとともに，今後の活用方法について検討したい.

This dissertation presents an approach for recommending OLAP sessions, in a collaborative filtering context, and based on similarity measures between queries and sessions.After briefly reviewing classical techniques for usage mining in Web Page Recommendation, a study of recommender systems in Databases and Data Warehouses allows to identifyseveral shortcomings. Indeed, sequential aspects are rarely addressed in these works and no approach ever considered to recommend sessions. Besides, queries are rarely synthesized for the recommendation and are often chosen among past queries. This dissertation answers these shortcomings by proposing a set of requirements to take into account in arecommendation context. Since the recommender system is based on a similarity measures, a study of classical measures in information retrieval is also presented. Afterward several similarity measures are extended in an OLAP context and are organized in a three-level approaches between OLAP logs. Similarity measures between logs depend on similarity measures between sessions that depend on similarity measures between queries. Then, a recommender system based on similarity measure between sessions is proposed. Three phases compose this system. The first phase aligns the log sessions with the current session and identifies possible recommendations. The second phase ranks each recommendation by identifying densest areas of similar queries in the log sessions. The last phase adapts the recommendation, ranked first to the current session, using patterns extracted from the log and the current session, and recommends it. Also, the recommender system is assessedin terms of efficiency and effectiveness with sessions coming from synthetic log generations or logs whose sessions have been devised by Masters students in Business Intelligence.

This paper studies the impact of state funded higher education scholarship plans on interstate migrationpatterns of college educated individuals between 1980 and 2009. We find that these plans increase thein-state enrollment rate, but have no positive impact on the subsequent number of graduates. While aggregatemigration trends remain unaffected as a result of these plans, we find the out-migration rate of youngcollege educated individuals decreases 3 to 5 years after the adoption of a plan, but this effect is counteredby an increase in the out-migration of older college educated adults in later years.

The prevalence of behavioral health problems is higher for low-income individuals, yet this population is less likely to receive behavioral health treatment. Community health centers have their advantages as behavioral health-care providers because they serve a majority low-income population and are located in medically underserved areas. Their role in providing behavioral health care is expected to expand under health reform as they are expected to double their patient capacity, and due to increased insurance coverage for individuals with behavioral health problems. However, the ability of community health centers to provide behavioral health care is compromised by provider shortages and funding shortfalls.

Every year Muslims worldwide fast during the Islamic month of Ramadan. In 2010 alone, more than 1.2 billion Muslims globally, and 155 million Muslims in Indonesia, were potentially exposed to their mother’s fasting. My first paper uses longitudinal data (the Indonesian Family Life Survey) to study the persistent effects of in utero exposure to Ramadan over the life cycle. The exposed children have lower birth weights, they study fewer hours during elementary school, do more child labor, score 7.8 percent lower on cognitive tests and 5.9 percent lower on math test scores. As adults, the exposed children work 4.5 percent fewer hours and are more likely to be self-employed. In my second chapter, which is joint work with Jorge Aguero, we look at the role which conflict plays in perpetuating inequalities. The identification of the effect of wars on human capital tends to focus on the population of school age children at the time of the conflict. Our paper introduces a methodology to estimate the effect of war on the stock of human capital by examining the changes in the presence of educated people after the Rwanda genocide. We find that the genocide reduced the stock of human capital in Rwanda severely. The before-and-after results show that highly educated individuals (i.e., those with primary education or more) are “missing” at a rate that is 19.4% higher than the less educated. Moreover, Rwanda’s average years of schooling is lower by 0.37 years. When comparisons with Uganda are made, these estimates more than double suggesting that, if anything, the previous finding were biased downwards. Interestingly, when the cross-sectional variation within Rwanda variation in intensity of genocide is exploited there is no evidence of statistically significant differences. This suggests that the losses in the stock of human capital due to the Rwandan genocide were aggregate in nature. In my third chapter, I review the most recent literature from developing countries on parental investment response to child endowment shocks. I find that parents tend to reinforce fetal shocks. Moreover, there seems to be a gender bias in parental investments. However, there is much heterogeneity over the life cycle, with little work done on prenatal investments and none on investment response for adult children. The most attention being drawn on those between 5-15, with a particular interest in schooling time and expenditure. These changes in turn can have significant impacts on the children as they grow up due to externalities, uncertainties and changes in parental investment behavior.

Victor Green's travel guide stands as one illustration of tools used by African Americans to survive in the contested and disputed landscape of Jim Crow segregation. The Green Book as a symbol of the civil rights movement further represents the discourses and politics of automobility that both limit and empower resistance. The Green Book is an under-utilized source available to historical geographers for researching the numerous barriers to tourism. Racial discrimination is one that is especially under-analyzed. This research advances the field of digital humanities and historical GIS as well as pushing close the epistemological qualitative-quantitative discord over using geographic information systems to support geo-analytic approaches in human geography.