Two of the major gaps between those living in poverty and those with higher incomes are gaps in access to health care and gaps in health. These disparities were considerably worse prior to the introduction of the Medicaid program, which was signed into law in 1965. In this paper I will review existing gaps in health care usage and, to the extent possible, document gaps in health, comparing those with incomes below the poverty line to those above it. The paper includes a systematic review of programs directed at helping those living in low-income families obtain health care from the demand and supply perspectives, beginning with the period just before the War on Poverty and at selected intervals after the initiation of the War on Poverty in January 1964. I will review Medicaid’s history, including the number of persons who use the program, and discuss its strengths and weaknesses both historically and contemporaneously. I will explore major components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which appear to be built upon the successful components of the Medicaid and Community Health Center programs of the War on Poverty.

The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems. Among these is a source of endogeneity in the second stage of Rosen's procedure that has proven difficult to overcome. In this paper, we outline a simple, likelihood-based estimation approach for recovering the marginal willingness-to-pay function in a parametric framework that avoids this endogeneity problem. Applying this estimator to data on large changes in violent crime rates, we find that marginal willingness-to-pay increases by ten cents with each additional violent crime per 100,000 residents. Accounting for the slope of the marginal willingness-to-pay function has significant impacts on welfare analyses.

This bachelor's thesis is about racial discrimination in the labor market in the United States. The first section provides theoretical findings about pay gaps and discriminatory theories. It also explains the gap and its decomposition. The second part is devoted to works that explore racial discrimination. In the third part there are created econometrics models that examine the wage gap. Subsequently is made decomposition of this gap. The last part is devoted to the results of the real pay gap and the distribution of labor in the labor market in the United States and the United States against discrimination.

Becoming a citizen is a component of a larger process of immigrant incorporation into US society. It is most often treated as an individual-level choice, associated with such personal characteristics as duration of residence in the US, age, education and language acquisition. This study uses microdata from Census 2000 in conjunction with other measures to examine aspects of the community and policy context that influence the choices made by individuals. The results confirm previous research on the effects of individual-level characteristics on attaining citizenship. There is also strong evidence of collective influences: both the varied political histories of immigrant groups in their home country and the political and community environment that they encounter in the US have significant impacts on their propensity for naturalisation.

This paper utilizes the 2009 and 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to examine spatial patterns of older adult in-migration. This focus area is timely given the Baby Boom generation entering retirement and the emergence of North Carolina as a select destination for older adults (see Vincent & Velkoff, 2010; and He & Schachter, 2003). Results from this paper reveal interesting trends, which can help shape policy relating to aging, health services, housing, and transportation. For example, the 65 and older population in North Carolina has increased from 10 to over 13 percent during the past, few decades (see Census Historical Decennial Reports, U.S. Census, 2002; and NC Office of State Budget and Management, 2010). If this trend holds, North Carolina may become demographically similar to Florida. More specifically, areas outside Asheville, Charlotte, and Greeneville have experienced large inflows and may become prime retirement communities. As Wilmoth (2010) succinctly states, geographic areas that receive these types of older migrants [i.e., comfort] should expect more demand on programs and services that promote engaged, active lifestyles (page 878).

Increasing income inequality has an asymmetric impact on society. Affluent households consume both more market and non-market goods. Middle-class households however, in order to minimize utility loss, must substitute away non-market goods in an effort to maintain proportional consumption of market goods. Utilizing standard Cobb-Douglas utility functions this paper models the resulting asymmetric impact on affluent and non-affluent households. Census data is then used to test these conceptual results within the context of urban sprawl.

Using a new, representative, longitudinal microdata sample that observes native-born white and black men in 1917 and in 1930 in rich detail, this dissertation investigates the determinants of World War I (WWI) draft probability, the effects of WWI military service on subsequent occupational and geographic mobility, racial variations in the effect of WWI service on labor mobility, and racial variation in Southern out-migrant self-selection during the Great Migration period. Examining how family structure, literacy, occupation, and race affected a man's probability of conscription during WWI, this dissertation finds that inductees were more literate and healthier than the rest of the draft pool. Marriage and having dependents reduced a man's probability of being drafted. Having an agricultural occupation reduced the probability of being drafted for Whites, but not Blacks. Overall, the draft mechanism seems to have functioned as intended and positively selected inductees.

It is now widely recognized (e.g., Lichter and Johnson 2009; Painter and Yu 2010) that immigrants are moving in large numbers to almost every metropolitan area and select rural areas in the country. This transformation has happened rapidly, and research is only beginning to assess the extent of immigrant integration and outcomes in these newer destinations. In the midst of these changes, the country has experienced a profound recession. To date, there has been little research on the impact of the recession on immigrants across the country. In this paper, we assess how the recent economic crisis has affected immigrants with respect to three housing outcomes- residential mobility, homeownership, and household formation. Although immigrants have been rapidly expanding their presence in newly emerging destinations and making fast in-roads into the housing markets, they may also be likely to be vulnerable because of the economic downturn. Because the impacts are likely to be diverse, we examine how the effects of the housing downturn vary by geography and by immigrant group. These effects will then be compared to U.S.-born residents to determine whether immigrants that live in metropolitan areas with different immigrant networks experience different effects that do the native populations.We use the 2006 and 2009 American Community Survey microdata to compare housing outcomes at two important time points in the recent economic cycle. After summarizing trends between groups and between metropolitan areas, we use multivariate models to control for individual characteristics and a number of important contextual variables at the metropolitan level. The results suggest the early impact of the recession has not been as hard on immigrants as one might expect. In particular, the places where immigrant populations are newest have not experienced reductions in homeownership as those in the large immigrant gateways. Even in the established gateways, the decline in homeownership has been smaller for immigrants than fornative born households. Regression results suggest that the negative impacts from the recession are strongest in the gateway metropolitan areas, and that have to controlling for residence in the hardest hit areas, changes in unemployment rates and increases in metropolitan level default rates have a negative impact on homeownership rates.

본 연구의 목적은 한국인 이민자가 미국노동시장에서 사회경제적으로 적응하는 과정을 1980년부터 2010년까지의 시간적 범위를 바탕으로 살펴보는데 있다. 본 연구에서는 미국 태생의 미국시민집단에 비해 한국이민자 집단이 노동시장에 진입했을 때 사회경제적 차이가 존재하는 지, 이민기간이 길어짐에 따라 그 차이는 점차 감소하는지, 보다 최근에 미국으로 이민을 온 집단의 질적인 변화는 존재하는지를 중점적으로 살펴보았다. 이민자의 사회경제적 지위를 반영한 고용확률, 상위직종 종사비율, 자영업 종사비율, 소득의 차이를 각각 분석한 결과, 진입 초기에 노동시장에서의 미국 태생의 미국인 집단과의 격차는 분명히 존재했으며 이민기간이 길어짐에 상위직종에 종사할 확률과 소득의 차이가 점차 감소하는 것을 발견할 수 있었다. 자영업 종사확률은 10년의 이민기간이 지나면 오히려 증가하는 모습을 보여 노동시장의 경험을 바탕으로 종사상 형태의 전환을 시도하는 모습을 발견할 수 있었다. 이민자 집단의 질적 변화는 이민 초기에 보다 동등한 소득을 받으며 상위직종에 종사할 확률과 봉급을 받으며 종사할 확률이 점차 높아져 미국 노동시장에 필요한 능력을 이미 보유한 사람들의 이동이 최근에 주를 이루고 있음을 살펴볼 수 있었다. (In this paper, we empirically investigate the socioeconomic adaptation process of Korean immigrants in the United States by analyzing a population of census data from 1980 to 2010, focusing on their employment, occupational attainment, earning attainment, and working status. Korean immigrants have shown the highest rate of self-employment among immigrants since 1965. We have paid attention to three effects; The results of this study are summarized as follows: (1) The results of the intervention are summarized as follows: (2) period had become longer. At the time of entry, Results show that Korean immigrants were less likely to be employed in high-level occupations, more likely to be trapped in self-employed jobs and earn much less than the natives. As they stayed longer, the gaps of employment opportunity, occupational attainment and earning tended to decrease with different paces. Because new immigrants after 1990 were fared better in terms of occupational attainment and were less self-employed than before, we could find some evidence that the changing cohort had a significant effect on immigrant society. occupational attainment and earning tended to decrease with different paces. Because new immigrants after 1990 were fared better in terms of occupational attainment and were less self-employed than before, we could find some evidence that the changing cohort had a significant effect on immigrant society. occupational attainment and earning tended to decrease with different paces. Because new immigrants after 1990 were fared better in terms of occupational attainment and were less self-employed than before, we could find some evidence that the changing cohort had a significant effect on immigrant society.)

Considerable literature supports the desirability of studying individuals in the context of their immediate social unit, the household. Focused studies of household composition reveal that households in economically disadvantaged populations with low homeownership rates are particularly likely to experience additions, subtractions, and substitutions among members. This article examines the methodological challenges associated with defining, tracking, and explaining mobility at the household level. We describe a retro-active approach for linking individual household members across waves that was employed for the Making Connections survey, a cross-sectional and longitudinal study of 10 low-income urban communities. Our method involved comparing individuals at three different points in time using a combination of probabilistic matching software, data queries, and human review. The process produced personal identifiers that could be integrated with the household-level data to identify changes beyond numerical shifts in household size. We use the combined data to examine mobility across a gradient of stability in household composition. Our work advances past studies in two ways. First, our definition of adding or losing individuals is calculated based on the presence or absence of a specific person, rather than numerical change in the number of adults and children in the household. Second, we demonstrate a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of household mobility by examining various types of change in household compositiongaining, losing, or replacing individuals, or being repopulated entirely with new occupantsin combination with physical relocation during a 6-year period. A series of maps compares the patterns of residential movement and household compositionchange within a specific territory.

This research seeks to shed light on the relationship between a key aspect of incorporation, immigrant naturalization, and a key health-related measure, namely having a functional limitation. Focusing on U.S. immigrants aged 50 and over, it examines specifically how incorporation and selection dynamics variously influence the salience of naturalization atalternative points in the incorporation lifecourse. Older immigrants constitute an advantageous group to study because they are more subject to health-related functional limitations and have greater need for healthcare access naturalization can provide. We find that among immigrantswho come after age 50, those who naturalize are more likely to report functional limitations(worse health) than those who do not naturalize, whereas the opposite is true for those who arrived in the country as children or young adults. These results support the idea that position inthe incorporation lifecourse influences the salience of alternative kinds of naturalization benefits for immigrants.

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, against identity and attribute disclosure. However, the protection of privacy is achieved at the cost of precision of authorized information. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving access control framework. The access control policies define selection predicates available to roles while the privacy requirement is to satisfy the k-anonymity or l-diversity. An additional constraint that needs to be satisfied by the PPM is the imprecision bound for each selection predicate. The techniques for workload-aware anonymization for selection predicates have been discussed in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the problem of satisfying the accuracy constraints for multiple roles has not been studied before. In our formulation of the aforementioned problem, we propose heuristics for anonymization algorithms and show empirically that the proposed approach satisfies imprecision bounds for more permissions and has lower total imprecision than the current state of the art.

This paper exploits variation in the mandated insurance coverage of assisted reproductive technology (ART) across U.S. states and over time to examine the connection between increased access to ART and female marriage timing. Since ART increases the probability of pregnancy for older women of reproductive age, greater access to ART will make marriage delay lest costly for younger single women of reproductive age. To examine the effects increased access to ART on women's marriage timing, linear probability models are estimated that show the effects of ART state insurance mandates on changes in marital status of women in different age groups using the 1977-2010 samples from the Current Population Survey from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. Results show that greater access to ART is associated with marital delay for white (but not for black) women: white women in states with an ART insurance mandate are significantly less likely to marry between the 20-24, 25-29, and 30-34 age ranges, but significantly more likely to marry between the 30-34 and 35-39 age ranges. 2

Using data from the 2000 census and the 2001-08 American Community Surveys, this paper examines the impact of 9/11 on the earnings of US veteran men. Our hypothesis is that the surge in patriotism after 9/11 improved their relative earnings, but this earnings effect was short-lived. In addition, we further consider whether this effect was equally felt across race/ethnicity and along regional dimensions. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a significant short-term improvement in the relative earnings of US veteran men following 9/11. However, additional analyses suggest that this earnings effect did not evenly occur across demographic and geographic dimensions.

When choosing his speed, a driver faces a trade-o between private benefi ts (time savings) and private costs (fuel cost and own damage and injury). Driving faster also has external costs(pollution, adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers). This paper uses large-scale speed limit increases in the western United States in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions. First, do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social (private plus external) costs? Second, do the private benefi ts of driving faster as a result of higher speed limits exceed theprivate costs? Third, could completely eliminating speed limits improve efficiency? I fi nd that a 10 mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3-4 mph increase in travel speed, 9-15% more accidents, 34-60% more fatal accidents, and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14-25% (carbonmonoxide), 9-16% (nitrogen oxides), 1-11% (ozone) and 9% higher fetal death rates around the aff ected freeways. I use these estimates to calculate private and external benefits and costs, and fi nd that the social costs of speed limit increases are three to ten times larger than the social benefi ts. In contrast, many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefi t from driving faster. Privately, a value of a statistical life (VSL) of $6.0 million or less justifi es driving faster, but the social planner's VSL would have to be below $0.9 million to justify higher speed limits. The substantial diff erence between private and social optimal speed choices provides a strong rationale for having speed limits. Although speed limits are blunt instruments that di ffer from an ideal Pigovian tax on speed, it is highly unlikely that any hidden administrative costs or unforeseen behavioral adjustments could make eliminating speed limits an efficiency-improving proposition.

Although national authorities declared an end to the Great Recession in June of 2009, the economic downturn has continued to have negative repercussions in Wisconsin and beyond. Wisconsin experienced further job reductions in 2010 and no substantial job growth in 2011. Official poverty statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that poverty in the state actually increased in 2010 compared to 2009, indicating that Wisconsin residents generally had lower levels of pre-tax cash resources during the period considered. Given the substantial loss of market income in Wisconsin, the findings of the 2010 Wisconsin Poverty Project are quite surprising. When we estimate poverty using our alternative measure, the Wisconsin Poverty Measure (WPM), we find that state poverty actually dropped between 2009 and 2010, from 11.1 percent to 10.3 percent. Behind this surprising story is the impact of tax-related provisions and near-cash benefits from programs that government officials augmented to offset increased economic hardship due to the recession. The official poverty measure considers only pre-tax cash income as a resource, and therefore fails to fully capture the effects of national and local . . .

The current paper analyzes the role of the individual and regional knowledge context in forming university students entrepreneurial intentions. As access to knowledge resources is crucial for the growth and survival of knowledge-based start-ups, we argue that an individuals decision in favor or against becoming an entrepreneur should critically depend on the multilevel context providing her with access to strategically relevant knowledge. A unique dataset for German students and regions allows us to analyze a variety of personal and regional determinants of entrepreneurial intentions among students. At the individual level we find that role models facilitating the transfer of tacit knowledge and the expectation that strong ties will provide know-how and know-who positively impact entrepreneurial intentions. At the regional level we find that a high regional start-up rate in knowledge-based industries and a high growth rate of regional knowledge production positively influence entrepreneurial intentions.

In this paper, we test whether the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest and fastest growing federal program for subsidized, low-income housing, a ffects the incidence of homelessness in the U.S. If rates of homelessness are driven at least in part by shortages of low-cost housing, and if LIHTC positively influences the supply of such housing, we would expect a negative relationship between LIHTC and homelessness prevalence in local markets. As a source of identifying variation, we exploit a discontinuous increase in the amount of tax credits that are available to projects placed in certain high-poverty census tracts. The differential benefi t of LIHTC development within such "qualified census tracts" generates a plausibly exogenous allocation of LIHTC projects across otherwise similar neighborhoods. Using counts of the home-less population from the 2000 U.S. Census complemented with information on LIHTC projects placed in service from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, we estimate the relationship between LIHTC projects and homelessness incidence. We find that LIHTC project installation has no significant impact on local area rates of homelessness. This result persists when accounting for the potential mobility of the homeless population across census tracts, as well as possible measurement error in homelessness counts. LIHTC development does appear, however, to significantly improve the housing quality of the housed population.

The state of education in the U.S. is declining. While education spending has skyrocketed for the past three decades, the high school graduation rate has stagnated. Perhaps of more concern, the U.S. high school graduation rate currently ranks 21st among OECD countries. Three potential factors that could affect teenage schooling decisions are the minimum wage, compulsory schooling laws, and minimum competency testing. The education policies would seem to have an obvious relationship to this outcome. The effects of the minimum wage on schooling decisions, however, have not been documented as extensively. A change in the wage could have a direct effect if an increase in the minimum wage causes teenagers to reevaluate their labormarket prospects and then choose to leave school if they feel they can find a higher-paying job, or stay in school if they see fewer jobs being made available. This thesis utilizes three decades of American Community Survey data to perform a quasi-natural experimental analysis that examines the effects of the minimum wage, compulsory schooling laws, and minimum competency testing on teenage schooling decisions. I find that an increase in the minimum wagehas little effect on the high school dropout rate, but it encourages some students to enter the labor force after graduating from or completing high school rather than going on to tertiary education. Additionally, compulsory schooling laws increase high school graduation rates, but exit examinations, it turns out, have a counterproductive effect, inducing some students to drop out or take the GED rather than submit to the requirement.