Youth mental health and health-risk behaviors that are left unattended may have detrimental consequences for personal and social wellbeing in the long-run. Thus, the examination of social relationships associated with adolescent behavioral health conditions is critical, as it can present knowledge to effectively guide prevention and intervention programs. In response to such research needs, this three-essay dissertation analyzes two unique panel datasets concerning first and second generation immigrant youth in the U.S. and adolescents in South Korea.Grounded in the ideas of social stress theory, Chapter 2 explores the plausibility of the presence of a systematic relationship between exposure to perceived discrimination and the mental health response to discrimination among youth of immigrant backgrounds. In the study, adolescents who were most likely to be exposed to perceived discrimination showed a smaller mental health response, possibly through mechanisms of adjustment, coping, and resiliency development. Results underscored the need to tailor interventions such that they incorporate mechanisms that effectively account for differential response to stressors across youth.Chapter 3 investigates the different magnitudes of the marginal change in conditional depressive symptoms scores associated with the experience of perceived discrimination among a sample of immigrant youth. Results suggested that estimates of the discrimination-depression association that focus on the average individual would have understated the potential harm of perceived discrimination on depressed moods in the high end of the conditional depression distribution. Findings may provide important implications for understanding stressful social relationships and its association with depressive symptoms particularly in the most marginalizing conditions.Finally, Chapter 4 examines the role of social capitalan informal mechanism of social control embedded in youth relationships with the family and communityin preventing the onset of health-risk behaviors among Korean adolescents. The strong association between family-level social capital and youth outcomes highlighted the importance of informal family-based prevention and intervention practices. Relational resources in the community were also proven important, but only for health-risk behaviors that often occur in communal areas. Results underscored the value of informal family and community mechanisms of control, alongside formal legislative forms of control in preventing the onset of youth health-risk behaviors.

Mexico has experienced a demographic transition which has led to the ageing of its population. Thus, ageing has become a major concern in Mexico particularly as it relates to health and care issues. This concern is complicated given that Mexican migration to the United States is selective of young workers, especially sons who represent the main support for elderly care. In this context, families span across Mexico and the United States or family members become transnational migrants. The aim of this chapter is to identify strategies and mechanisms that families of Mexican origin develop on both sides of the border to tend to the physical and mental health needs of older parents. Qualitative data are used to conduct the analysis. The results show the use of a combination of local and transnational strategies to deal with the needs of elderly parents. The analysis also identifies demographic, socioeconomic, and health-related factors that are related to the strategies used.

The diversity of housing-unit supply in suburban areas has been a central concern for planners and policy makers for at least 50 years. Absence of census cross-tabulation data on housing unit structure-type by unit-size (number of bedrooms), has limited our understanding of the historical and regional evolution of relative suburban housing-unit diversity. I use census microdata to estimate measures of relative housing diversity between cities and suburbs, including the housing-unit portfolio compositions, and availability ratios of diverse housing-unit types. Data are presented for the US, regions, metropolitan areas, and across different time periods. Effects of housing-unit supply on household structure and location are estimated. Results indicate that suburban areas, while growing in terms of the absolute number of diverse housing units constructed, are relatively undersupplying diverse housing units, thereby constraining households housing opportunities.

One of the major reasons hypothesized for the tepid economic recovery thus far is the ongoing "deleveraging" process. From 2009:Q3 to 2011:Q3, aggregate household debt declined by about $1.5 trillion in real terms, with mortgage debt falling by about $1 trillion. Other than defaults, the factors driving the decline in aggregate debt are not precisely understood, in large part because the necessary data are not widely available. This paper draws on panel data consisting of individual credit records to better understand why mortgage debt has declined. I decompose changes in aggregate mortgage debt over two-year periods spanning the past decade into inflows (from individuals whose mortgage debt increases during a given two-year period) and outflows (from those who reduce or eliminate their mortgage debt over a period). The principal finding is that the drop in outstanding mortgage debt has more to do with shrinking inflows than with expanding outflows, including defaults. Even if outflows had not grown at all, mortgage debt would have declined over the past two years because inflows have been so weak. One factor dampening inflows is historically weak first-time homebuying, especially among those with less-than-excellent credit scores, suggesting tight credit supply has limited debt accumulation even among those who have little debt. On the outflows side, most of the expansion can be traced to financially distressed borrowers and mortgage defaults, with real estate investors playing a disproportionate role. Otherwise, there has not been much of an increase in outflows, implying that borrowers generally are not paying down their balances more aggressively than in the past.

In 2009 the Center for American Progress released The New Breadwinners, a chapter in The Shriver Report: A Womans Nation Changes Everything. The report describes howwomens movement out of the home and into the paid labor force has changed everything about how our families live and work today. While our lives have changed as aresult of this dramatic transformation, the institutions surrounding us have not necessarily kept up. In The New Breadwinners, CAP Senior Economist Heather Bousheyillustrated how women have made great strides and are now more likely to be economically responsible for themselves and their families, but there is a still a long way to go.In this brief we update the numbers from The New Breadwinners to reflect the most recent data available based on family income, race, age, and motherhood, and show how the trends identified in the 2009 piece have only grown stronger in the ensuing years.We find that there are more wives, and women generally, supporting their families economically now than ever beforeand there could not be a more important time toensure that working women receive the pay they deserve. The typical woman only earns an average of 77 cents to the male dollar. It is not difficult to imagine how many morewomen would be breadwinnersand how much better off our families would beif the gender wage gap were closed.

This exploratory descriptive study looks at the characteristics of immigrant children in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area who participate in organizations associated with their parents’ country of origin. By drawing on the 2004 Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey dataset, I bring together aspects of the participation and assimilation literatures in order to better understand who participates in ethnic organizations. Results provide evidence that ethnic organization participants differ from the full sample and from respondents who participate in community organizations; they exhibit more ethnic resource characteristics. Significant determinants of participation in ethnic organizations include having a larger numbers of close relatives in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, literacy in their parents’ native language, higher education levels, and being married. These findings indicate that ethnic resources are more important to immigrant children who participate in ethnic organizations than attaining dominant characteristics or straight-line assimilation in society

A skyline query returns a set of candidate records that satisfy several preferences. It is an operation commonly performed to aid decision making. Since executing a skyline query is expensive and a query plan may combine skyline queries with other data operations such as join, it is important that the query optimizer can quickly yield an accurate cardinality estimate for a skyline query. Log Sampling (LS) and Kernel-Based ( KB) skyline cardinality estimation are the two state-of-the-art skyline cardinality estimation methods. LS is based on a hypothetical model A(log(n)) B . Since this model is originally derived under strong assumptions like data independence between dimensions, it does not apply well to an arbitrary data set. Consequently, LS can yield large estimation errors. KB relies on the integration of the estimated probability density function (PDF) to derive the scale factor Ψ ds . As the estimation of PDF and the ensuing integration both involve complex mathematical calculations, KB is time consuming. In view of these problems, we propose an innovative purely sampling-based (PS) method for skyline cardinality estimation. PS is non-parametric. It does not assume any particular data distribution and is, thus, more robust than LS. PS does not require complex mathematical calculations. Therefore, it is much simpler to implement and much faster to yield the estimates than KB. Extensive empirical studies show that for a variety of real and synthetic data sets, PS outperforms LS in terms of estimation speed, estimation accuracy, and estimation variability under the same space budget. PS outperforms KB in terms of estimation speed and estimation variability under the same performance mark.

The debate over market/individual regulation and freedom is not a new discussion. However, a clear understanding of the freedoms (or the lack of freedoms) and their economic consequences on early black Americans provides an informative understanding to the freedoms (or the lack of freedoms), and their economic consequences on other, modern ethnic groups. Leon Litwick (1961) and Ira Berlin (1974) provide the most comprehensive historical accounts of free blacks in the north and south, respectively. This study attempts to build upon their successes by presenting one of the first national studies that combines the legal, demographic and economic experiences of free blacks, with an extended analysis of antebellum wealth inequality. In doing so, I investigate the link between the social asymmetry and economic asymmetry among early blacks and whites in the United States of America. For the empirical study, I used cross-sectional variables from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS), I developed informative conditional ratios, and I employ least squares statistical analyses. This study finds that economic differences among ethnic groups, as measured by differences between early blacks and whites, are intertwined with asymmetrical freedoms.

According to the culture of honor hypothesis, the high prevalence of homicides in the South of the United States originates from the settlement by herders from the fringes of Britain in the 18th century. This paper confirms that historical Scot or Scots-Irish presence is associated with higher contemporary homicide, particularly by white offenders, and that the culture of honor was transmitted to subsequent generations; but only in the South and, more generally, where historical institutional quality was low. The interpretation is that the culture of honor prevailed and persisted as an adaptive behavior to weak institutions. The influence of the culture of honor is also found to be fading over time. The results are robust to controlling for a large number of historical and contemporary factors and state fixed effects as well as to the use of instrumental variables for historical settlements and for the quality of historical formal institutions. The results are also specific to a particular type of homicide and background of settlers.

The quality of spouse a woman is willing to marry varies signifi cantly over her lifecycle, first increasing rapidly then falling more slowly as she ages. Men have a similar but less pronounced pattern. We document this and other facts on the quality of chosen spouses depending on the age of marriage. We then interpret these facts in the framework of a non-stationary sequential search model, which points to declining frequency of marriage opportunities and declining utility from unmarried life as the main determinants of these patterns. For men, only the former seems to be responsible.

The “Great Recession” gripped the American economy starting in 2008 and though it officially ended in 2009, many experienced its lingering consequences as late as 2010. With the recession came high levels of unemployment and experiences of economic insecurity across both the United States and the broader global economy. My dissertation investigated the effect of the Great Recession and being unemployed on time spent engaging in healthy behaviors, sleeping, and with family members, including how such patterns differed by gender, life stage, spouse’s employment status, and education. I drew on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to examine the time use patterns of a sample of respondents in the United States between the ages of 23 and 55. Through this research I found that unemployment was critical for how individuals spent their time. Though the unemployed had worse outcomes for sleep, they also spent more time in healthy behaviors and more time with family members. In addition to employment status, state economic conditions and the recessionary time period were also related to how people spent their time. Poor state economic conditions were related to positive indicators of sleep and more time spent in healthy behaviors while also predicting being more likely to spend time with family members. Respondents interviewed during the Great Recession reported worse sleep outcomes but more likely to engage in active travel and eat breakfast. During the recession respondents also spent more time with children and spouses/partners while also spending less time with extended family members. Many questions remain regarding the implications of this increased time available for alternative activities besides work in part because it is unclear if greater time spent in healthy behaviors or with family members . . .

Household financial decisions are important for both households and the greater economy. Yet, our understanding of the process of financial decision-making is limited. Applying standard and two-sample instrumental variables strategies to census and credit bureau data, we provide the first precise, causal estimates of the effects of education on financial behavior. Education has large effects on financial market participation and smaller, but statistically and economically significant effects on financial management. We find that education improves credit scores, and dramatically reduces the probability of declaring bankruptcy or suffering foreclosure during the financial crisis. Examining mechanisms, we show that cognitive ability increases financial participation, and discuss how education may affect decision-making through: attitudes, borrowing behavior, discount rates, risk-aversion, and the influence of coworkers and neighbors.

Coming out of the Great Recession, slow economic recovery has plagued U.S. communities. Cities and regions are seeking strategies that will grow jobs in the short term and improve standards of living over the long term. This paper examines how geographic regions can invest in the human capital and economic advancement of immigrants who are already living in their jurisdictions, to help boost short- and long-term growth. It highlights programs and partnerships that work to unlock skills of immigrants with foreign credentials and to build skills of immigrants who could advance in the market with targeted programs.

Recent evidence documents a wage premium for black women (e.g., Fryer, 2011). However, we find no strong evidence of a premium after accounting for selection into the labor market; years of education attained, conditional on ability; and local cost of living. We find modest evidence of heterogeneous effects by education—small premiums for highly educated black women and penalties for black women with less education. Controlling for actual experience yields estimates at the low end of previously published premiums, but the possibility of discrimination in hiring and firing implies that controls for actual experience may be inappropriate.

Introduction: Breast cancers are increasingly recognized as heterogeneous based on expression of receptors for estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Triple-negative tumors(ER-/PR-/HER2-) have been reported to be more common among younger women, but occurrence of the spectrum of breast cancer subtypes in adolescent and young adult (AYA) women aged between 15 and 39 years is otherwise poorly understood.Methods: Data regarding all 5,605 AYA breast cancers diagnosed in California during the period 2005 to 2009,including ER and PR status (referred to jointly as hormone receptor (HR) status) and HER2 status, was obtained from the population-based California Cancer Registry. Incidence rates were calculated by subtype (triple-negative; HR+/HER2-; HR+/HER2+; HR- /HER2+), and logistic regression was used to evaluate differences in subtype characteristics by age group.Results: AYAs had higher proportions of HR+/HER2+, triple-negative and HR-/HER2+ breast cancer subtypes and higher proportions of patients of non-White race/ethnicity than did older women. AYAs also were more likely to be diagnosed with stage III/IV disease and high-grade tumors than were older women. Rates of HR+/HER2- and triple-negative subtypes in AYAs varied substantially by race/ethnicity.Conclusions: The distribution of breast cancer subtypes among AYAs varies from that observed in older women,and varies further by race/ethnicity. Observed subtype distributions may explain the poorer breast cancer survivalpreviously observed among AYAs.

We analyze the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between 1991 and 2011. Gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, yet have declined by around 50 percent over the past 20 years. We show that micro data rule out many popular explanations for this decline, including aging of the population, the rise of two-earner households, othercompositional changes, regional changes, and the rise in real incomes. We argue instead that the fall in migration is due to a decline in the geographic specifi city of occupations and an increase in workers' ability to learn about other locations before moving there, through both information technology and inexpensive travel. We develop a theory to formalize these ideas and show that a plausibly calibrated version is consistent with cross-sectional and time-series patterns of interstate migration, occupations, and incomes.

A key step in validating a proposed idea or system is to evaluate over a suitable data set. However, to this date there have been no useful tools for researchers to understand which datasets have been used for what purpose, or in what prior work. Instead, they have to manually browse through papers to find suitable datasets and their URLs, which is laborious and inefficient. To better aid the data discovery process, and provide a better understanding of how and where datasets have been used, we propose a framework to effectively identify datasets within the scientific corpus. The key technical challenges are identification of datasets, and discovery of the association between a dataset and the URLs where they can be accessed. Based on this, we have built a user friendly web-based search interface for users to conveniently explore the dataset-paper relationships, and find relevant datasets and their properties.