Decarbonizing power systems is a critical component of climate change mitigation, which can have public health cobenefits by reducing air pollution. Many studies have examined strategies to decarbonize power grids and quantified their health cobenefits. However, few of them focus on near-term cobenefits at community levels, while comparing various decarbonization pathways. Here, we use a coupled power system and air quality modeling framework to quantify the costs and benefits of decarbonizing the Texas power grid through a carbon tax; replacing coal with natural gas, solar, or wind; and internalizing human health impacts into operations. Our results show that all decarbonization pathways can result in major reductions in CO2 emissions and public health impacts from power sector emissions, leading to large net benefits when considering the costs to implement these strategies. Operational changes with existing infrastructure can serve as a transitional strategy during the process of replacing coal with renewable energy, which offers the largest benefits. However, we also find that Black and lower-income populations receive disproportionately higher air pollution damages and that none of the examined decarbonization strategies mitigate this disparity. These findings suggest that additional interventions are necessary to mitigate environmental inequity while decarbonizing power grids.

Housing and residential outcomes in the United States are significantly stratified by ethnoracial group, but the extent to which disparities exist in affordable renting over time is less clear. In this study, I explore affordable housing disparities among White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian renters and test hypotheses regarding variation by education, local ethnoracial composition, and chosen measurement of affordability. Chiefly, I find that White households have higher rates of affordable housing than Black and Hispanic households with disparities remaining nearly identical between 2005 and 2019 and become larger when considering household's ability to afford other basic needs. Nevertheless, returns to education are not uniformly larger for White renters, in that Black and Asian renters experience larger marginal increases in residual income based affordable housing at higher levels of education. The effects of county ethnoracial composition effects are consistent with all groups—including White households—experiencing declining affordability when living in counties with large coethnic populations.

Motivating property owners to mitigate seismic risks for existing buildings is a major challenge for many earthquake-prone regions. This article identifies primary factors that may affect the adoption of seismic retrofit by owners of commercial and residential buildings, assesses the influence of economic, social, regulatory, and individual factors on retrofit implementation in three California cities, and discusses potential approaches to promoting seismic retrofits. Data for three retrofit programs are utilized to create predictive models for retrofit probability. The results suggest that ret-rofit probability for multifamily residential buildings may increase with building height, median housing value, educational attainment, and population density in the neighborhood , but may decrease with building age, building size, land value, and housing vacancy rate in the neighborhood. The retrofit decision for commercial buildings is strongly correlated with the number of stories and rooms, land value, vacancy rate, and population density, while the retrofit decision for residential buildings is highly associated with building age, number of rooms, land value, median housing value, median contract rent, and educational attainment. Overall, promoting seismic retro-fits requires careful consideration of different motivators and impediments to own-er's retrofit actions for commercial and residential buildings, and for older, taller, larger buildings, which tend to be more vulnerable but are associated with higher retrofit costs. In addition, neighborhood characteristics including median housing value and vacancy rate may be strong indicators of the retrofit probability among building clusters.

The role of ethnic immigrant networks in facilitating international trade is a well-established phenomenon in the literature. However, it is less clear whether this relationship extends to illegal trade and unauthorized immigrants. In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on the case of the heroin trade and unauthorized Chinese immigrants in the early 1990s United States. Between mid-1980s and mid-1990s, Southeast Asia became the dominant source of heroin in the US. Heroin from this region was trafficked into the US by Chinese organized criminals, whose presence across the country can be approximated by the location of unauthorized Chinese immigrants. Instrumenting for the unauthorized Chinese immigrant enclaves in 1990 with their 1900 counterpart, we first show that greater presence of unauthorized Chinese immigrants in a community led to a sizeable increase in local opiates-related arrests, a proxy for local heroin markets. This effect is driven by arrests for sale/manufacturing of the drugs. Next, we examine the consequences of Chinese-trafficked heroin by looking at its impact on US Vietnam-era veterans – a group particularly vulnerable to heroin addiction in the early 1990s. Using a triple-difference estimation, we find mostly small but statistically significant detrimental effects on labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans residing in unauthorized Chinese enclaves in 1990.

Racist policies and practices that restrict Black, as compared to white workers, from employment may drive racial inequities in birth outcomes among workers. This study examined the association between structural racism in labor markets, measured at a commuting zone where workers live and commute to work, and low-birthweight birth. We found the deleterious effect of structural racism in labor markets among US-born Southern Black pregnant people of working age, but not among African- or Caribbean-born counterparts in any US region. Our analysis highlights the intersections of structural racism, culture, migration, and history of racial oppression that vary across regions and birth outcomes of Black workers.

Background Even though evidence shows that fertility transition has begun almost everywhere in sub–Saharan Africa, the decline has been slower than in other parts of the world. Researchshows that there is a positive relationship between fertility levels and desired family size. Therefore, many countries in the region are implementing family planning education campaigns targeting at influencing reproductive behaviour of women. Thus,this studyaimed at examiningthe extent to which exposure to family planning communication is associated withdesired family size in adolescencein sub-Saharan Africa. Methods This study used data extracted fromthe most recent Demographic and Health Survey datasets for 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Analyses were conducted on a pooled weighted sample of 87,950female adolescents’ aged 15-19 yearscaptured in respective country surveys. Multivariate logistic regression models were fitted in Stata version 16 software to examine the effects of exposure to family planning communication on adolescents desired family size. Results Findings show that regardless of the country,exposure to family planning communication among adolescentshad a significant effect on desire for fewer children. Average ideal family size among adolescents who had exposure to family planning communication was (3.8 children compared to 4.5 children;p<0.001) among those with no exposure.Marital status, wealth status, education level,contraceptive use and employment status were also significantly associated with adolescents’desiredfamily size.Country level differences were observed regarding desired family size among adolescents. Adolescents from West Africa Countries had higher desired family size. Conclusion Exposure to family planning communication has shown the potential to influence adolescents’ fertility behavior in the region. Desire for large family size is predominantly high among adolescents from West and Central African countries. Suggesting that high fertility remains a social concern in these regions. Furthermore, the study found sub-regional variations in determinants ofdesired family size among adolescents. Calling for the need to scale-up family planning education programmes especially in West and Central Africa countries.

This dissertation examines how a variety of demographic factors and policy instruments interact and affect the extent to which education remains inclusive and accessible to the needs of diverse students and families. The dissertation does so in a three-essay format, with each essay respectively aimed at three different stages of education (i.e., Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), Kindergarten, and K-12 schools) within the U.S. context. The first essay examines regulations in the context of child care market. Regulations are often justified as a mechanism to enhance quality of child care, but unintended labor market consequences could instead reduce the quantity and quality of services provided. Using a continuous and binary treatment difference-in-differences strategy that exploits unprecedented variation in child care regulations during the period surrounding COVID-19, this study finds that regulations reduced the demand for child care labor and motivated providers to substitute away from high-skilled labor. The second essay examines Arizona’s full-day kindergarten expansion between 2004-2010. This expansion implicitly acted as a subsidy for child care, by reducing the required number of after-school care hours. Using a differencein-differences framework, this study finds that the availability of full-day kindergarten increased employment among some subgroups of mothers with age-eligible children. Finally, the third essay is set in the context of immigration and K-12 demographics. The theory of native flight suggests that U.S. born subpopulations move away from neighborhoods which receive higher numbers of immigrants. Merging school level data with the U.S. census data over the years 2005-2019, I use an instrumental variable approach to find that U.S. born students show heterogeneous patterns of flight in response to immigration. The dissertation showcases the relevance of certain policy i variations and demographic characteristics in the context of affordability, diversity, and access in education.

Utah ranks last for female political participation in the United States, according to the Institute for Women's Policy and Research. This study seeks to understand what factors contribute to the political gender gap in this state. The primary analysis is based on quantitative models that combine general and primary election data, campaign finance records, census data, and Utah voter registration information to test for differences in outcomes between male and female candidates. The results of this study fail to support the claim that female candidates face bias in elections. Instead, the most measureable barriers to equal representation in Utah are the lack of female candidacy and the large number of male Republican incumbents.

Improving vaccination rates among marginalized populations is an important priority among public policy makers and healthcare providers in the United States of America (U.S.). Racial/ethnic minorities have a long history of reduced vaccination rates relative to white Americans (Khan, Hall, Tanner, & Marlow, 2018), while people with disabilities (PWD) have varied rates of vaccine use (Diab & Johnston, 2004; O’Neill, Newall, Antolovich, Lima, & Danchin, 2019). Yet, little is known about vaccine use among individuals who belong to both groups. This study examines the intersectional effects of race/ethnicity and disability on flu vaccine use. We used the 2015–2018 National Health Interview Survey to examine the odds of flu vaccine use by race/ethnicity, disability, and their interaction among adults aged 18+ in the U.S. non-institutionalized, civilian population stratified by age groups. For each unit increase in disability scores, we found a significant race-by-disability interaction for young black adults (18–39 years) who had higher odds of getting the flu vaccine compared to white adults in the same age group. A significant interaction occurred for middle-aged Hispanic vs. white adults (40–64 years) who had higher odds of getting the flu vaccine as their disability scores increased. Black vs. white adults were less likely to get the flu vaccine across all age groups irrespective of disability and other covariates, while results were more mixed among other racial/ethnic groups. Additionally, people with disabilities had higher odds of flu vaccination. Further, race/ethnicity had a moderating effect on the relationship between disability and flu vaccination and an interaction effect occurred between disability and certain racial/ethnic groups when stratified by age.

Much research has debated whether immigrants’ health advantages over natives decline with their duration at destination. Most such research has relied on (pooled) cross-sectional data and used years since immigration as a proxy for the duration of residence, leading to the challenge of distilling the duration effect from the confounding cohort-of-arrival and age-of-arrival effects. Because longitudinal studies tend to use self-rated health as the outcome, the changes they observed may reflect shifts in immigrants’ awareness of health problems. We illuminate the debate by examining how immigrants’ mortality risk—a relatively unambiguous measure tied to poor health—changes over time compared to natives’ mortality risk. Our analysis uses the National Health Interview Survey (1992–2009) with linked mortality data through 2011 (n = 875,306). We find a survival advantage for U.S. immigrants over the nativeborn that persisted or amplified during the 20-year period. Moreover, this advantage persisted for all immigrants, regardless of their race/ethnicity and gender or when they began their U.S. residence. This study provides unequivocal evidence that immigrant status’ health protection as reflected in mortality is stable and long-lasting.

In the 1960s, two landmark statutes-the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts-targeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. In their aftermath, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers remained stable for 15 years, leading many scholars to conclude the legislation was ineffectual. This paper revisits this conclusion using variation in legislative incidence across states and occupation-industry-state job classifications. We find that women's wages grew by 4-12 percent more on average in places or jobs where the legislation was more binding, with the effects concentrated among the lowest-wage employees. We find no evidence of short-term changes in employment but some suggestive evidence that firms reduced their hiring of women in the long-term.

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women’s labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women’s total hours worked fall by 11 percent, twice the decline among men. School closures for summer break—and corresponding lapses in implicit childcare—provide a unifying explanation for these patterns. The summer drop in female employment aligns with cross-state differences in the timing of school closures, is concentrated among mothers with young school-age children, and coincides with increased time spent engaging in childcare. Decomposing the gender gap in summer work interruptions across job types defined by sector and occupation, we find large contributions from both gender differences in job allocation and gender differences within jobs in the propensity to exit employment over the summer. Summer childcare constraints may contribute to gender gaps in career choice and earnings: women—particularly those with young school-age children—disproportionately work in the education sector, which offers greater summer flexibility but lower compensation relative to comparable jobs outside of education.

We investigate the effects of housing regulations designed to correct a wedge between privately-and socially-optimal construction in areas at risk of flooding in Florida. Using a spatial regression discontinuity around regulatory boundaries and an event study around the policy's introduction, we document that floodplain regulation reduces new construction in high-risk areas and increases the share of newly-built houses that are elevated. Embedding these effects in a model of residential choices with elastic housing supply, we find that the policy reduces expected flood damages by 60%. One-quarter of this reduction is driven by relocation of new construction to lower-risk areas, and three-quarters is driven by elevation of houses remaining in risky areas. However, this second-best policy achieves at best about one-tenth of possible welfare gains because of poor targeting. It overcorrects in many areas, inducing more consumers to elevate and relocate than is socially-optimal, while still allowing inefficiently-high construction in the riskiest places. By contrast, a flexible corrective tax on flood risk would achieve substantial welfare gains of more than $2,700 per newly-developed house.

Prior research using the Current Population Surveys (CPS) documents a dramatic equalization in U.S. college enrollments based on family income starting in 2014. However, the measurement of income for independent young adults is problematic; we correct for this by imputing their incomes. We complement our reanalysis of CPS data with data from the Panel Study for Income Dynamics-Transition into Adulthood (PSID-TA). Both data sets show moderate, nonsignificant reductions in the income gap in college enrollments for cohorts coming of age during and after the Recession. Extending the CPS analysis to examine inequalities during the COVID pandemic, we show more or less unchanged inequalities for the cohort coming of age in 2020. Using the PSID-TA to examine degree attainment, we again find stable income inequalities in obtaining any degree and a bachelor’s degree for pre-Recession and Recession-era cohorts.

Opioid consumption, both legal and illicit, has risen precipitously in the U.S. over the past few decades, as has the number of deaths due to the use and misuse of opioids. Exposure to green spaces may help to alleviate the problematic levels of opioid use. Such exposure has been tied to health benefits relevant to opioid use. To explore the potential influence of green space on opioid-related health outcomes, we analyzed the association between tree canopy cover and mortality attributable to opioid use and abuse using 2008–2018 death rate data on a county level (n = 3087) across the contiguous U. S. We fitted spatial general additive model while controlling for socioeconomic factors, healthcare access measures, opioid prescription rates, and particulate air pollution. Contrary to expectations, canopy cover was positively associated with opioid mortality. A sensitivity analysis with forest land cover showed similar results while a sensitivity analysis with total greenness (NDVI) was nonsignificant. Stratified models by urbanicity level suggested suburban and rural counties drove the positive associations observed in the nationwide models. The findings for forest and canopy cover are unexpected, given the myriad health benefits of green spaces, yet might be explained by heavily forested areas (i.e., Appalachia) being home to injury-prone natural resource extraction employment sectors. The steady decline of these industries has created poor socioeconomic conditions that exacerbate the already elevated risk of opioid use and misuse. Alternatively, the magnitude of the protective effects of greenspace on pain reduction are insufficient to counter opioid demand. Further research is warranted, especially in studies with individual-level data. Entities with responsibility or interest in reducing the incidence of deaths from opioids are cautioned that green spaces might not be a viable option for reducing opioid mortality.

The record percentage of workers who are quitting their jobs, known as the “Great Resignation,” is not a shift in worker attitudes in the wake of the pandemic. Evidence on which workers are quitting suggests that it reflects the strong rebound of the demand for younger and less-educated workers. Historical data on quits in manufacturing suggest that the current wave is not unusual. Waves of job quits have occurred during all fast recoveries in the postwar period.

Significant scholarly and policy debate has focused on the measurement of affordable housing, with emphasis on what is an appropriate threshold of affordability. However, this threshold is only one component of affordable housing measurement, with accurate and substantively appropriate measurements of income and households also being needed. In this study, I produce a series of estimates of affordable housing among low-income households in the United States under unique combinations of income, providers of income within the household, and thresholds of affordability. I find that these alternative measures yield a broad range of estimates ranging from a majority of households (69.8%) to a low of 20.2%. When examining how individual criteria affect estimates, I find that focusing on wage income alone and using residual income both drastically influence estimates. Ethnoracial disparities are also affected, with alternative measurements often muting—but never completely explaining—disparities between White and non-White households.

In 2021, the economy added more jobs than it had in nearly two decades. Despite the fact that women’s labor force participation rates have approximately returned to pre-pandemic levels,1 working-class women and mothers are still lagging behind. Women who stay in low-wage jobs or who are employed in the service sector may experience volatile hours, affecting their take-home pay, not to mention the stress they may bring home to their children. Overall economic gains did not flow to the working class, exposing the deep veins of inequality that run through the US economic system. Higher rates of job switching during the recovery phase of the pandemic recession may signal a critical need to develop more responsive, family-based economic policies and workplace practices that can transform bad jobs into better jobs. Specifically, policies and practices need to ensure greater income security, better pay, and more stable scheduling that helps stabilize the week-to-week or month-to-month family financial situations. Historically, women’s poverty rates have been higher than men’s for nearly all races and ethnicities, whether measured using the official poverty measure or the supplemental poverty measure (SPM).2 3 This is despite increased overall female participation in the labor force over the last half century and the consistently high frequency of nonwhite mothers’ employment, which has increased considerably over the past few decades. Even in 2020, a year with massive government economic response to the pandemic, women still had a higher SPM poverty rate relative to men nationwide, even with a poverty measure that accounts for all sources of government transfers and net of tax.4 The intersection of educational attainment, family structure, and the low-wage labor market may jointly shape women’s economic well-being. In 2020, nearly five-in-nine workers in the US were paid hourly wages as opposed to annual salaries.5 More than 77 percent of wage workers do not hold a bachelor’s degree (as compared to only 36.7 percent of salaried workers).6 Although pay levels have long affected the financial well-being of workers, particularly those employed in the service sector, the prevalence of unstable working hours is drawing new attention from researchers and policy makers. Besides those in food service and retail, service sector jobs may include work in health care, building cleaning or maintenance, and care work—a sector where women are overwhelmingly employed. Adding a child to these families may pose additional financial challenges, especially to sole caregivers (mostly mothers). High childcare costs often push families with young children into poverty.7 It is not uncommon for these families to have insufficient resources and liquid assets to buffer the negative consequences of work volatility. This brief examines three aspects of economic security facing women in recent years: poverty, instability in working hours, and a lack of financial savings, with special attention paid to lesseducated women with children.

How uneven is the proximity to public amenities like libraries and schools among racial groups, or children and older people? This paper uses a catchment area approach to evaluate walkable proximity to four common public amenities (parks, libraries, schools, and transit stops), looking at four racial categories and a set of variables that one might reasonably expect proximity to be related to (e.g., population density). For each of the 10 largest US cities examined, location quotients for each amenity (libraries, parks, schools, and transit stops) were calculated at three distances (0.25 miles, 0.5 miles, and 1 mile). Across all amenities, the racial group whose LQ had the greatest increase when comparing net median change between distance bands (i.e., between .25 miles and 1 mile) was Black Americans. There were large differences between the location quotient means and medians in non-White racial groups for each amenity, indicating a large amount of skew. In most cities and with most amenities, the difference between mean and median was considerably smaller in White populations, indicating a more normal curve and fewer outliers. Proximity, in other words, seems to be more homogenous in White populations. The LQs were also significantly higher in White populations across cities. Further, in all cities except Los Angeles, Asian populations were generally the most under-represented group for each catchment area around each amenity. The fact that non-White residents predominantly had lower LQs and therefore lower access (with some exceptions, for example, in the case of schools) is a generalized and problematic finding that adds to the body of evidence documenting the spatial injustices that American cities continue to manifest.

Previous economic downturns have led to increases in applications for and, eventually, receipt of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits. In the pandemic-induced recession of 2020 and its aftermath, however, SSDI applications did not increase. One important factor may have been the prolonged closure of SSA field offices, since previous research finds that field office closures lead to persistent declines in SSDI beneficiaries in the surrounding communities. In this case, there may be pentup demand for SSDI benefits as normal operations resume in areas where the economy has not fully recovered. Nevertheless, unemployment insurance expansions and other government support programs were materially different than in past recessions, which appears to have enabled people to weather the downturn and avoid applying for SSDI benefits. In this paper, we draw on prior research and recent federal statistics to discuss the unfolding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the SSDI program and its beneficiaries.