Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by impairments in social interaction, communication, and restricted or repetitive behaviors. This previously rare condition has dramatically increased in prevalence from 0.5 in 1000 children during the 1970s to 11.3 in 1000 children in 2008. Using data from the California Department of Developmental Services, we study how changes in the number of autism cases at each of the 21 regional development centers affected local wages and quantity of auxiliary health providers. We focus on this subset of health providers because, unlike physicians and psychologists who can diagnose autism, these workers cannot induce their own demand. If the incidence of autism is increasing independently of other mental disorders, then the demand for auxiliary health providers should increase, leading to higher wages and an increase in the number of these providers over time, else the increase in autism diagnosis is merely displacing other mental disorders. Using wages and provider counts from the American Community Survey, we find a 100% increase in the number of autism cases increases the wage of auxiliary health workers over non-autism health occupations by 8 to 11 percent and the number of providers by 7 to 15 percent the following year. Further, we find that four additional autism cases reduces the number of mild mental retardation cases by one, but is not found to have a statistically significant effect on the level of cerebral palsy or epilepsy.

This paper analyses the effect of emigration from Poland around the time of EU accession on the Polish labour market. We develop a simple model that guides our empirical specification and provides a clear interpretation for our estimates. Focussing on the 1998 2007 period for Poland, we use a unique data set that contains information about household members who are currently living abroad, which allows us to develop region-specific emigration rates and estimate emigrations effect on wages using within-region variation. Our results show that emigration from Poland was largest for workers with intermediate-level skills and that it is wages for this skill group that increased most. We also show that emigration led to a slight increase in wages overall but that workers at the low end of the skill distribution made no gains and may actually have experienced slight wage decreases.

In this paper, I study the potential negative consequences of beliefs about choice and control in the context of labor force type discrimination. I introduce and explore a form of discrimination that I term choice-based discrimination. With this form of discrimination, individuals are treated more negatively when the stigmatized characteristics they hold are believed to be controllable. I present a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that gay men, obese men and mothers are discriminated against more - in terms of hiring, salary recommendations and competence evaluations - when the traits they hold are perceived to be more voluntary. I propose that the normative evaluations and moral judgments associated with the perception of an attribute as voluntary legitimize the expression of biases and stereotypes against the person who holds the attribute and thus generate discrimination.

This paper investigates the impact on cohabitation behavior of the introduction and dispersion of the birth control pill in the USA during the 1960s and early 1970s. A theoretical model generates several predictions that are tested using the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households. Empirically, the causal effect is identified by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in state laws granting access to the pill to unmarried women under age 21. The evidence shows that the pill was a catalyst that increased cohabitations role in selecting marriage partners, but did little in the short run to promote cohabitation as a substitute for marriage.

We develop state-level proxies for informal employment using differences between measures of self-reported employment and officially sanctioned employment. In construction and landscaping, industries associated with under-the-table labor, we develop proxies for informal work based on productivity per officially sanctioned worker. We relate each set of proxies for informal employment to changes in immigrant population and composition. We find some evidence that immigration is associated with informal employment generally and in the construction industry when prevailing wages are low. States with high concentrations of low-skilled male immigrants have higher levels of informal employment in the landscaping industry.

We exploit exogenous variation in college completion induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War to examine the impact of college completion on adult mortality. Our preferred estimates imply that increasing college completion rates from the level of the state with the lowest induced rate to the highest would decrease cumulative mortality by 28 percent relative to the mean. Most of the reduction in mortality is from deaths due to cancer and heart disease. We also explore potential mechanisms, including differential earnings, health insurance, and health behaviors, using data from the Census, ACS, and NHIS.

Most scholarship on racial segregation in U.S. cities retraces the Great Migration, from the rural South to the urbanizing, industrializing North. Arlington County, Virginia, adjacent to the large, prosperous black community of Washington, D.C., provides a unique opportunity to study processes that transcended this dichotomy. During segregation blacks were limited to living and doing business in three of the Countys 38 census tracts. Using census data, telephone records, and interviews with black residents, this paper explores the black-owned businesses that grew in Arlington during segregation and the fate of those businesses following integration, concluding that the nature of the businesses was largely determined by the Countys unique context. The black neighborhoods were dispersed, lacking public transportation, with insufficient residents to support the self-contained business infrastructure found in many segregated cities of similar size. Conversely Arlingtons black residents were welcomed in the extensive black-owned business infrastructure of nearby Washington, D.C.

This study investigated ethnic-related heterogeneity in socio-economic status among Black persons in the United States. Guided by arguments from sociology's status attainment literature on the assimilation of ethnic groups, the study hypothesized ethnic and racial differences across seven measures of socio-economic status. The examination of data from the National Survey of American Life revealed differences between Caribbean Blacks and African Americans on five of the seven indicators of socioeconomic status, depending on Caribbean's 'country-of-origin, or duration-of-stay in the United States. A Caribbean advantage characteristically defined the nature of the differences shown. The few differences between Caribbean Blacks and non-Hispanic Whites, in contrast to the greater prevalence of African American and non-Hispanic White differences additionally supported the thesis of Black ethnic-related economic heterogeneity.

The article describes the rise of unmarried cohabitation in Latin American countries during the last 30 years of the twentieth century, both at the national and regional levels. It documents that this major increase occurred in regions with and without traditional forms of cohabitation alike. In addition, the striking degree of catching up of cohabitation among the better-educated population segments is illustrated. The connections between these trends and economic (periods of high inflation) and cultural (reduction of stigmas in ethical domains) factors are discussed. The conclusion is that the periods of inflation and hyperinflation may have been general catalysts, but no clear indications of correlation were found between such economic factors and the rise in cohabitation. The shift toward more tolerance for hitherto stigmatized forms of conduct (e.g., homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, single-parent household) is in line with the rise of cohabitation in regions of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil where cohabitation used to be uncommon. Further rises in cohabitation during the first decade of the twenty-first century are expected in a number of countries (e.g., mexico) despite conditions of much lower inflation.

We propose an approach for multiple imputation of items missing at random in large-scale surveys with exclusively categorical variables that have structural zeros. Our approach is to use mixtures of multinomial distributions as imputation engines, accounting for structural zeros by conceiving of the observed data as a truncated sample from a hypothetical population without structural zeros. This approach has several appealing features: imputations are generated from coherent, Bayesian joint models that automatically capture complex dependencies and readily scale to large numbers of variables. We outline a Gibbs sampling algorithm for implementing the approach, and we illustrate its potential with a repeated sampling study using public use census microdata from the state of New York, USA.

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper builds on prior research and documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings from 1950 through 2010 using data from the decennial census and American Community Surveys. Emphasis is given to annual rather than weekly or hourly earnings. Treatment of imputed earnings greatly affects measured outcomes. We take a quantile approach, providing evidence on medians and other percentiles of the distribution. Black male joblessness rose to over 40% in 2010, the median black-white earnings gap being the largest in at least sixty years. The experience of black men contrasts with that of Hispanic men during the last decade, who exhibited earnings growth similar to white men. Black men are being left behind economically, a process exacerbated by weak labor market conditions.

This article assesses the labor market implications of less-skilled migration to the United States. It emphasizes how recent social, demographic, and economic trends have reduced the availability of less-skilled native workers, while new low-education immigrant workers compete with other less-skilled immigrants for available lowskilledjobs. Declines in native fertility to substantially below replacement levels, together with native educational upgrading, have substantially reduced the size of theless-skilled native-born labor pool in the past 30 years, even below the level of need. This trend cannot be explained by declines in low-skilled manufacturing employment. Other factors also serve to exacerbate the size of the shortfall in the availability of less-skilled natives, including mismatches in the locations of low-education natives and less-skilled jobs. Nativity differences in health, physical disability, and substanceabuse also operate to widen the gap. The resulting void has largely been filled by increasing numbers of less-skilled immigrant workers. These patterns underscore the need for public policies that provide both less-skilled labor and reductions in social and economic inequalities in the United States.

Local intra-suburban heterogeneity implies the possibility of redistribution through local public taxes and expenditures, yet there are no studies of the extent of such transfers. This paper provides evidence that local redistribution in the property-tax-financed school systems in suburban Chicago is substantial, amounting to $2.3 billion or two-thirds of property-tax-financed school expenditures. Most of those transfers fl ow from households with no children enrolled in local public schools to those with children in the local public schools, rather than from households with high-value homes to those with lower-valued homes.

Objective: This article examines health disparities between older Blacks/Whites by recognizing the importance of health services utilization. Although previous studies have examined health and utilization independently, this is among the first to (a) model its endogenous relation with utilization, and (b) use a continuous measure for health. Data: Household Component files from Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2004 and 2005, with 1,369 observations (1,169 for White and 200 for Black) between the ages of 61-69. Methods: The methods employed are two-equation modeling where Medicare eligibility functions as the identification criterion and also as an exogenous shock. Results: The results show older Blacks continue to remain in poorer health despite access to care and insurance status. The author shows underutilization accounts for some of this observed disparity and offers novel approaches to overcome this issue. Conclusion: With the baby-boom cohort approaching retirement, this area of research is timely. This work is also practical because the Department of Health and Human Services has launched various projects examining health care issues for Americans. One major project, Healthy People 2010, provides a framework for prevention for the Nation [and is] designed to identify the most significant preventable threats to health and to establish national goals to reduce these threats (http://www.healthypeople.gov/About/). Of the 28 areas, this article complements objectives relating to (a) disability and secondary conditions, and (b) access to quality health services. This article also supports Healthy People 2020, which sets a high priority on access to health care (one of 12 topic areas) and categorizes health disparities as part of the Leading Health Indicators Framework.

This report focuses on the analysis of a Basic Health Program using Milliman pricing models for the purpose of assisting the Work Group with making a recommendation as to whether the State of Connecticut should offer a BHP. Our work is focused on the financial implications of a BHP and we understand that policy decisions would need to be made following a review and understanding of this analysis.We do not specifically provide a response to the scope questions; rather this report provides the information necessary such that the State can answer these specific questions using the results of our analysis. We do not recommend or promote any particular decision related to the BHP.

This paper investigates Mexican immigrant incorporation by examining labor force participation and schooling among Mexican-origin adolescents in the United States. Theoretical perspectives on immigrant incorporation, labor migration-related cultural repertoires and adolescent development considered together imply that studying ethnoracial differences in schooling among adolescents without taking work into account can yield mis-leading pictures of Mexican-origin non-high school completion patterns, thus hampering the assessment of incorporation theories. To avoid this, we analyze Mexican-origin generational differences in the relationship between schooling and workforce participation among adolescents compared to non-Hispanic whites and blacks. Using micro-data from the 2000 US Census, we find that Mexican immigrant boys who are not enrolled in school are more likely to be in the workforce, and conversely that those who are enrolled in school are much less likely to be in the workforce, compared to whites and blacks. Such relative differences in school/work specialization, as predicted, diminish across Mexican-origin generations. Moreover, based on supplementary analyses, we find similar patterns for a cohort of young adults who failed to complete high school during the 1990s. Overall, the results are consistent with the idea that cultural orientations growing out of the nature and experience of Mexican labor migration are important for assessing school enrollment patterns among Mexican-origin youth and for gauging their implications for educational policy and immigrant-group incorporation.

Little is known about registered nurses geographic mobility after they earn their first professional degree and become licensed to practice. Through a cross-sectional mailed survey of newly licensed registered nurses in fifteen states, we found that 52.5 percent work within forty miles of where they attended high school. Our complementary analysis of Census Bureau data shows that next to teaching, nursing is one of the least mobile professions for women, for reasons that remain unclear. To ensure that underserved areas have an adequate workforce of registered nurses, policy makers should expand the number of educational programs in these areas; fund programs that provide incentives to young people from these areas to attend nursing programs; consider supporting extension programs from accredited nursing schools; and review admission policies for nursing programs and the financial aid they offer. If states find it difficult to retain out-of-state graduates, giving preference to in-state applicants may make sense. Finally, programs and policies that offer financial incentives to attract registered nurses to underserved areas, such as the National Health Service Corps and the Area Health Education Centers, are critically important. When sufficiently funded, such programs could serve to offset the low mobility of new registered nurses that we observed.