Background Postmenopausal breast cancer (PMBC) is the most commonly diagnosed and the second leading cause of cancer death among women in the US. Research examining the association between PMBC and education level has been inconsistent; no study in the US has examined how educational level impacts PMBC mortality in Asian American women, a largely immigrant population with above-average educational attainment. Methods California Vital Statistics data from 2012–2017 were analyzed to derive age-adjusted mortality rate ratios (MRRs) by education level (associates degree or above referred to as “higher education”, high school, less than high school) and race [Non-Hispanic White (NHW), Asian/Pacific Islander (Asian), and its two largest subpopulations: Chinese and Filipino] from negative binomial regression models. Results PMBC mortality for both NHWs and Asians was greater among women with higher education compared to those who did not complete high school: NHWs had 22% higher PMBC mortality (MRR 1.22; 95% CI: 1.14–1.31) and Asians had 2.6 times greater PMBC mortality (MRR 2.64; 95% CI: 2.32–3.00) than their counterparts who did not complete high school. Asians in the lowest education level had 70% lower mortality than NHWs (MRR 0.30; 95% CI: 0.27–0.34). This mortality advantage among Asians was greatly reduced to only 27% lower among the highest educated (MRR 0.73; 95% CI: 0.68–0.78). For higher educated Filipina women, no mortality advantage was evident compared to NHWs (MRR 0.96; 95% CI: 0.88–1.05). Conclusion PMBC mortality for higher educated Asian women is elevated in comparison to their counterparts with less education. Given that PMBC survival is greater among those with higher education, our findings strongly suggest an excess in the incidence of PMBC (more than double) among higher educated Asian women; this warrants more research into potentially modifiable causes of PMBC in this burgeoning population.

Over the past fifty years, school districts have consolidated in an effort to achieve economies of scale. While the determinants and effects of district mergers on operations have been studied (Gordon and Knight 2006; Duncombe and Yinger 2007; Jones et al 2008), the impact on communities has not. In small towns, schools not only educate, but also provide stable employment and are a cornerstone for community engagement and local identity. In this article, we examine whether district mergers have adverse effects on the community at large. We evaluate the effects of rural school district consolidations on town population size, number of schools, and property values using a propensity score matched difference-indifferences design, leveraging a 2003 Arkansas state law requiring reorganization using an enrollment cutoff. We estimate that the reform led to reductions in population, community schools, and property value assessments. Abstract: Over the past fifty years, school districts have consolidated in an effort to achieve economies of scale. While the determinants and effects of district mergers on operations have been studied (Gordon and Knight 2006; Duncombe and Yinger 2007; Jones et al 2008), the impact on communities has not. In small towns, schools not only educate, but also provide stable employment and are a cornerstone for community engagement and local identity. In this article, we examine whether district mergers have adverse effects on the community at large. We evaluate the effects of rural school district consolidations on town population size, number of schools, and property values using a propensity score matched difference-indifferences design, leveraging a 2003 Arkansas state law requiring reorganization using an enrollment cutoff. We estimate that the reform led to reductions in population, community schools, and property value assessments.

Despite the existence of legal markets for both medical and recreational marijuana in California, the illicit market for marijuana still represents the majority in the state. With strict regulations and financial requirements accompanying marijuana policies, many participants in the industry continue to buy and sell in the illegal market to avoid extra costs. However, these costs are realized indirectly through impacts on the social and ecological environment. This dissertation analyses the impact marijuana policies on local crimes, forest cover change, and on the racial composition of the prison population. My research suggests that local government officials must consider the varying impact each marijuana policy has on the social and ecological environment of the area to ensure that policies maximize potential benefits and minimize negative externalities. The first chapter examines whether medical and recreational marijuana legalization policies effectively induce changes in municipal crime rates by reducing drug crimes and the strain on local law enforcement. I find that medical marijuana legalization has significant reduction in property and violent crime rates from key policies. The second chapter of this paper analyzes the environmental impact of The Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act (Proposition 64) and Proposition 47. By allowing adults 21 and over to possess and grow specified amounts of marijuana for recreational use and legalizing sales, Proposition 64 decreased the incentive for many to illegally grow in forested areas. Proposition 47 reclassified some marijuana offenses from felony to misdemeanor. Using the Hansen forest cover data on forested areas in California, this chapter provides a look into the impacts of marijuana legalization on the surroundings. I find that municipalities that choose to legalize homegrowing indoors and home growing outdoor policies have increases in forest cover loss. The final section examines the impacts of California Propositions 64 (2016) and 47 (2014) on arrest rates within each county across the state. Using law enforcement reported arrest data from the California Department of Justice in conjunction with administrative government data on marijuana policies, I find heterogenous impacts of recreational policies from Proposition 64 and disproportionate impacts when the race of the arrestee is considered. This shows the importance of examining policy impacts on different populations and not passing broad policy. It also highlights the continued impacts of racial bias in arrests that lead to sustained racial disproportions in our prison systems. While the disparities in racial populations could be a result of disproportionate involvement in crimes, the differences in policy impacts on arrest rates as race changes suggests another driver of racial imbalance. This is an important issue to research as existing bias in law enforcement weakens the integrity of the legal system and its reliability in society.

Having a criminal record and employers having access to that record pose a severe barrier to employment and other beneficial labor market outcomes. Recent research has primarily focused on evaluating Ban-the-Box policies implemented after 2000 that limit employer access to this information in hopes of improving outcomes for people with records. However, the initial labor market consequences of making this information available to employers starting in the 1970s has yet to be studied. In this paper, I use variation in the timing and geography of employers' inaugural access to criminal record information via state central repositories to estimate the e↵ect on labor force participation and employment for various race-gender-education groups. I find that employer access to criminal record information led to decreases in labor force participation and employment of non-college educated black men. However, these declines were primarily o↵set by increases for whites, chiefly white women. For black men, decreases in employment were smaller than decreases in overall labor force participation, which implies that these laws discouraged job seeking among groups most vulnerable to the criminal legal system.

Using loan-level data, this analysis attempts to connect the events of the subprime home loan boom to the current vacancy crisis in St. Louis, Missouri. Borrowers in Black areas in the north of St. Louis City and St. Louis County received subprime home loans at higher frequencies during the subprime boom period of 2003-2007 than those in White areas, with differences in balloon loans especially stark. Specifically, borrowers in Black neighborhoods received subprime loans more frequently than those with equal FICO scores in White neighborhoods. As a result of these differential loan terms, North City and inner ring “First Suburb” areas saw more foreclosure and borrower payment delinquency, which in turn were highly associated with home vacancy, controlling for other risk factors. However, foreclosure was no longer a significant predictor of home vacancy after controlling for demographic factors and FICO score, indicating that the unequal loan terms may have driven much of the increase in home vacancy in the St. Louis area since the Great Recession.

We examine the relationship between board diversity and a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in a novel way. The relation between visible forms of board diversity (gender, ethnic, age diversity) and CSR may arise endogenously due to visible diversity management. In contrast, we focus on cultural diversity (based on directors' ancestry), which is less visible. We demonstrate that cultural diversity, unlike visible diversity, is not considered in director replacements, consistent with cultural diversity not being affected by firms signaling their CSR commitment by ‘looking’ diverse. We show that board cultural diversity is positively related to CSR performance. This result holds when we control for visible board diversity, directors' foreignness and diversity in nationalities, and endogeneity. We also show that CSR performance decreases when a firm increases its visible board diversity at the cost of cultural diversity.

The current era of mass deportation has disrupted a record number of families and households in immigrant communities. In most cases, when a parent is deported, the rest of the family stays in the United States. Among those who remain in the US, deportations can have broad ramifications for housing stability. I use linear regression models with metro area and year fixed effects to examine metro residents responding to the Current Population Survey (2013- 2016) and merge these observations with contextual, administrative data from the implementation of a national immigration enforcement program (Secure Communities). I find metro residents in shared households (i.e., households with multiple families) are more likely to experience housing instability in high deportation areas. The positive association between instability and deportations holds only among residents in Hispanic households where noncitizens are present. By contrast, other residents – including those living with non-Hispanic noncitizens, Hispanic U.S. citizens, or non-Hispanic U.S. citizens – are not more likely to report instability in high deportation metros. I discuss possible explanations for these findings and the implications of this study for housing inequality.

Research suggests that social cohesion partially mediates the health benefits of being exposed to the natural environment. However, past studies have relied on self-reported measures of social cohesion that have well-documented limitations. Therefore, we evaluate the impact of tree planting on social cohesion using voter-turnout data as an objective metric of social cohesion. Our study area is the 141 Census tracts in Multnomah County, Oregon that fall within (>50% area) the City of Portland. We used biennial primary and general-election turnout data from 2002 to 2020, and tree-planting data from the Portland based non-profit Friends of Trees. We estimated mixed models of voter turnout including tract-level random effects and controlling for socioeconomic status. Voter turnout and tree planting may be codetermined, so lagged tree-planting variables were used in all regression models. We found that each tree planted 10–11 years before an election was associated with a 0.020% (95% CI: 0.013–0.027) increase in general election turnout and a 0.016% (95% CI: 0.0089–0.023) increase in primary turnout. As the length of the planting lag decreased, the association between tree planting and voter turnout, in both primary and general elections, declined in significance and magnitude. Our results add to the body of evidence suggesting that social cohesion partially mediates the health benefits of exposure to the natural environment.

Residential distribution and location are subjects of interest to both social scientists and the lay person. This dissertation project quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes where same-sex households in the United States have been historically located and how those patterns have changed over the years, as well as how same-sex households make decisions about residential location, through three connected manuscripts. The first article finds that same-sex households have been historically located throughout the contiguous United States (though they have been unevenly distributed) and that the location of same-sex households does correlate with the location of knowledge workers at the state level, aligning with previous research and raising important questions about livability research. The second article finds that same-sex households are also presently distributed throughout the contiguous United States in most counties; socioeconomic factors such as religious adherence and the percentage of residents in a county who voted for President Trump negatively correlate with the percentage of same-sex households in an area. Finally, the third article reported on interviews with same-sex households in North Carolina, finding that couples considered sexuality as part of their residential selection process, but that where to live was a constrained choice with sexuality as one part of many factors affecting residential location. This dissertation provides updated data relating to where same-sex households live, underscoring that queer friendly services such as medical and eldercare must be available everywhere, not just large urban areas, moving forward.

There has been widespread concern about widening disparities in parental investments that may be associated with widening gaps in educational attainment. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this study examines parents’ investments and engagement in the college-going process for two cohorts of high school students, focusing on adolescents from low- and high-income families. Between the high school classes of 1992 and 2004, income gaps widened in financial preparation for postsecondary education expenses and student college-admissions test-preparation. In contrast, the income gap in parents-child conversations about the college-going process narrowed, due to a larger increase among low-income parents. I examined potential explanations for growing gaps and found evidence supporting both rising income inequality and changing associations between income and college-going activities. Implications for educational attainment gaps are discussed.

This dissertation studies the role family structure and processes play in the sociocultural outcomes and well-being of children from immigrant and non-immigrant households. Diverse immigrant groups and their families are constituting larger shares of the U.S. population, often sparking conversation on their children’s ability to fit into mainstream American culture. Immigrant families are one of the primary sources of socialization, and as such, the context of the family can affect how immigrant children are introduced into their host society. There is a growing body of literature that examines cultural outcomes of adolescents in the context of immigrant households. This study adds to this body of literature by examining three topics: whether family structure impacts adolescent sociocultural outcomes (e.g. primary language spoken at home, religious beliefs and behaviors, and dating activities) and well-being by generation, the extent to which family structure operates indirectly through family processes (e.g. parental attachment, involvement, communication, and control), and the manner in which generation paints the effects of family structure and processes on adolescent outcomes and well-being. To answer my research questions I analyzed Wave 1 (1994) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). The final sample consisted of 13,801 first- (n=1,008), second- (n=2,007), and third+ generation children (n=10,786) aged 12 – 17 with at least one biological parent. I used a variety of statistical approaches to test for direct and indirect effects of family structure (one vs two parent households) on three measures of sociocultural outcomes- primary language spoken at home, religious beliefs and behaviors, and dating activities – as well as three measures that make up well-being (e.g. depression, delinquency, and drinking/smoking). Indirect measures were assessed by testing mediating effects of parental attachment, involvement, communication, and control. Statistical approaches depended on the outcome variable of interest and included ordinary least square (OLS), binary logistic, negative binomial regression, and multinomial logistic regression. Analysis consisted of fully moderated regression models and increasingly complex regressions. I also test if generation modifies the effects of family structure and family processes on measures of interest. I found that the effects of family structure differed across generations, with the presence or absence of a parent playing less of a role for immigrant families. Similarly, the effects of family structure were less likely to operate indirectly via parental attachment, involvement, communication, or control in immigrant homes. And finally, there were minor differences between immigrant and non-immigrant family structures and their effects on primary language spoken at home, religious identity, and well-being, with first- and second-generation children from single-parent homes experiencing advantages relative to their third+ generation counterparts. Future research should explore how factors outside the home, including peers, neighborhoods, and schools, might contribute to adolescent sociocultural outcomes and well-being. This study concludes with theoretical, practical, and policy implications, as well as a brief discussion on the role public sociology can play in immigrant research.

Massive Internet of Things (IoT) data sets are possessed by big institutions serving daily life because IoT devices are widely used in our daily life such as wearable devices and smart home devices. Publishing these data sets among various institutions causes an increasing number of users to concern their personal privacy. Differential privacy is the state-of-the-art concept of privacy preservation, but it suffers from the low accuracy. In this article, we improve differentially private mechanisms including the Laplace mechanism as well as the sample and aggregation mechanism by bringing the personalized sampling technology into these mechanisms so that IoT data sets can be privately published through differentially private mechanisms. In particular, improved mechanisms assign a personalized sampling probability to each data record in a way that their accuracy can be improved. We analyse improved mechanisms in terms of their privacy and accuracy. Then, we empirically demonstrate that the performance of improved mechanisms is better than original mechanisms through extensive experiments on synthetic data sets and real-world data sets.

This paper exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of child’s access to public health insurance on labor market outcomes of parents. The results imply that extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to positive contemporaneous labor supply responses of both parents. The estimated effects are concentrated among mothers with non-white children and fathers with white children.

This study uses Current Population Survey 2016-2021 data to analyze household joblessness across metropolitan areas in the United States during the COVID19 pandemic. We first use shift-share analysis to decompose the change in household joblessness into changes in individual joblessness, household compositions, and polarization, i.e., the unequal distribution of joblessness across households. Household joblessness US metropolitan areas rises during the pandemic largely due to individual joblessness. But polarization contributes to household joblessness, indicating accumulation of employment risks in households. Second, we use metropolitan area-level fixed effects regressions to explain the large cross-labor market variance in household joblessness and polarization, focusing on the labor market make up of metropolitan areas reflected in the educational profile of the population. We measure three distinct features: educational levels, educational heterogeneity, and educational homogamy. Household joblessness is strongly correlated to educational levels. How polarization contributes to household joblessness is shaped by educational heterogeneity and homogamy

We evaluate the causes of the wage gap at the intersection of race, ethnicity and gender over time in the United States. We analyse the wage gaps for women of colour along three dimensions: relative to White women, relative to men of their respective race/ethnicity, and relative to White men. Using the American Community Survey, we replicate earlier findings based on the Current Population Survey data which show that, on average, Black women face an unexplained wage gap relative to White men that goes beyond the simple addition of the separate unexplained gender and racial wage gaps. This can be seen persistently between 1980 and 2019, and we find it is true across the entire wage distribution but especially notable at higher centiles. From 1990 through 2019, Black and Hispanic women saw stalled progress, while White women continued to make steady progress closing the wage gap relative to White men.

In this article, we ask whether macro-level changes during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to changes in the levels of discrimination against women and Black job-seekers at the point of hire. We develop three main hypotheses: that discrimination against women and Black job-seekers increases due to a reduction in labor demand; that discrimination against women decreases due to the reduced supply of women employees and applicants; and that discrimination against Black job-seekers decreases due to increased attention toward racial inequities associated with the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. We test these hypotheses using a correspondence audit study collected over two periods, before and during the early COVID-19 pandemic, for one professional occupation: accountants. We find that White women experience a positive change in callbacks during the pandemic, being preferred over White men, and this change is concentrated in geographic areas that experienced relatively larger decreases in women's labor supply. Black women experience discrimination pre-pandemic but receive similar callbacks to White men during the pandemic. In contrast to both White and Black women, discrimination against Black men is persistent before and during the pandemic. Our findings are consistent with the prediction of gender-specific changes in labor supply being associated with gender-specific changes in hiring discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. More broadly, our study shows how hiring decision-making is related to macro-level labor market processes.

Housing costs in major coastal metropolitan areas nationwide have skyrocketed, impacting people, the economy, and the environment. Land-use regulation, controlled primarily at the local level, plays a major role in determining housing production. In response to the mounting housing crisis, scholars, policymakers, and commentators are debating whether greater state involvement in local land-use decision-making is the best path forward. We argue here that there are good reasons to believe that continuing on the current path-- with local control of land-use regulation as it is-- will lead to persistent underproduction of housing. The benefits of housing production are primarily regional, including improved job markets, increased socioeconomic mobility, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But the costs associated with producing more housing are often local, felt at the neighborhood level. Local government whose voters are impacted by the local negative impacts of housing and will usually have less incentive to consider those regional, and national, benefits and approve housing. Recent political science, planning, economics, and legal research shows that smaller local jurisdictions tend to produce less housing, and when political institutions decentralize control over housing to the sublocal (e.g. neighborhood) scale, less housing is approved. A central theory in academic research in land-use regulation and local government law has been the idea that competition among highly fragmented local governments can produce more efficient outcomes in public services and land-use regulation, even if there may be significant inequities across local jurisdictions in outcomes. Our analysis shows that this theory no longer accurately describes how fragmented local governance affects economic efficiency. Indeed, our analysis makes clear that fragmented local governance is both inequitable and inefficient, at least in the context of land-use regulation. Our analysis also raises questions about local government law scholarship contending that increased local government power can effectively address the dysfunctions of metropolitan areas in the United States. We present a range of policy proposals to address the problems we identify. First, greater state intervention in local land-use regulation is necessary. While a greater state role need not (and probably should not) entirely displace local control, it is essential to ensure that the larger-scale benefits of housing are appropriately considered. Secondly, we note that the highly fragmented local land-use regulatory system imposes challenges for housing production, in part, because variation among local regulatory practices creates barriers to entry for new housing across jurisdictions. Accordingly, we advocate for a state role to increase the standardization of local land-use regulatory tools as a key step to help advance greater housing production, even where local control is maintained.

This research examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on labour market outcomes of union workers, based on nationally representative data. I employ the difference-in-difference estimation to identify the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the employment, labour earnings and other labour market outcomes of union workers, relative to non-union workers. I find that, compared to non-union workers, union workers experienced greater job security, and the pre-pandemic union wage premium remained largely unchanged during the pandemic. There exists a large heterogeneity in the union effect on employment and real wages by worker characteristic. I also find that union workers, compared to non-union workers, were less likely to work remotely but more likely to receive pay for hours not worked due to COVID-19. The results suggest that unions provided workers with employment stability and an economic buffer during the pandemic-led recession.

Despite considerable improvements in electricity coverage, millions of people are still lacking the access to electricity. Residential electricity access is a prerequisite for numerous aspects of increased well-being and quality of life. The aim of this paper is to identify key household characteristics that are linked to the energy poverty measured as access to electricity. Literature on financial and general poverty showed mixed results on household size and characteristics as a driver of poverty. We argue that household size and proportion of children in households are key variables associated with energy poverty in developing countries with lowest levels of electricity coverage. Our research approach treats electricity access as economic good and focuses on demand side – households. By utilizing census microdata across 69 non-OECD countries, our research provides large-scale analysis on household size and characteristics as a driver of energy poverty. We found that, in majority of low-income countries, same principles for general or financial poverty apply to energy poverty which is represented by negative effect of household size and proportion of children on energy poverty.

I show that firm location decisions create barriers to accessing high-wage employers for students at distant universities. I collect office locations and campus recruiting strategies for more than 70 banking and consulting firms from 2000 to 2013. After firms open an office, students at nearby universities are nearly four times more likely to have on-campus access to the firm. Access increases for universities across a wide range of selectivity. Additional data from universities, LinkedIn, and mobility report cards suggest effects on hires and longer-run income success.