This paper provides an overview of alcohol and substance use issues in military spouses, and explore how the screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment(SBIRT) model may enable health care providers to identify individuals at risk for developing substance use related disorders. The information presented is based on a broad literature scan relating to the characteristics of the military lifestyle, health infrastructure, screening and intervention processes, and the uses of SBIRT in military and civilian settings. Current literature suggests that military spouses, and families, tend to be at different points in their life course than civilian families of similar ages. Marryingearlier and having children sooner coupled with militarylifestyle stressors place them at increased risk for developing adverse coping mechanisms, particularly duringdeployment. SBIRT has been recognized as an effective method among civilian patients although there is limited research on the efficacy of SBIRT for military spouses at risk of or experiencing substance use problems.

Although political and legal institutions are essential to any nation's economic development, the forces that have shaped these institutions are poorly understood. Drawing on rich evidence about the development of the American states from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, this book documents the mechanisms through which geographical and historical conditions--such as climate, access to water transportation, and early legal systems--impacted political and judicial institutions and economic growth.The book shows how a state's geography and climate influenced whether elites based their wealth in agriculture or trade. States with more occupationally diverse elites in 1860 had greater levels of political competition in their legislature from 1866 to 2000. The book also examines the effects of early legal systems. Because of their colonial history, thirteen states had an operational civil-law legal system prior to statehood. All of these states except Louisiana would later adopt common law. By the late eighteenth century, the two legal systems differed in their balances of power. In civil-law systems, judiciaries were subordinate to legislatures, whereas in common-law systems, the two were more equal. Former civil-law states and common-law states exhibit persistent differences in the structure of their courts, the retention of judges, and judicial budgets. Moreover, changes in court structures, retention procedures, and budgets occur under very different conditions in civil-law and common-law states.

The US immigration debate focuses overwhelmingly on immigrants from Latin America, particularly from Mexico and Central America. This is not surprising in light of the rapid growth in their numbers since 1970-a period during which the overall US immigrant population increased four-fold, and the Mexican migration from the Western Hemisphere and the ending of the guest worker programs of the mid-20th century, in combination with increased demand for low-skilled labor, have meant that a substantial share of the immigrant population from Mexico and Central America is unauthorized. The visibility of these new inflows has been further enhanced by the fact that more are settling in the states that previously had little or no immigration from this region (e.g. Georgia, Colorado, and North Carolina). Compared to the US born and other immigrant groups, Mexican and Central American immigrants are younger, more likely to be male, and more likely to be married with children, most of whom are native-born US citizens. They have lower education levels than the US born, and Mexicans in particular have the lowest levels of formal education of any immigrant group. Both Mexican and Central American immigrants also have lower levels of English language proficiency than other immigrants. Their workforce participation rates are very high, but concentrated in low-paying jobs; as a consequence, Mexican and Central American immigrants earn incomes lower than other foreign-born groups and substantially lower than their US-born counterparts. About a quarter of Mexican, Honduran, and Guatemalan immigrants live below the poverty line. The fact that a high proportion of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are unauthorized supersedes all other considerations for some stakeholders in the debate, and sharply constrains these immigrants' economic, social, and political opportunity structures.Second-generation Mexicans and Central Americans (those born in the country to first-generation immigrants) have higher education levels and higher household incomes than their parents. They also have somewhat lower labor force participation rates, and a smaller gender gap in employment. These trends make their labor market profile more similar (though not equal) to that of US-born non-Hispanic whites. There is evidence that second-generation Mexican Americans, in particular, lag behind their counterparts from other countries.

Given a set V of n vectors in d-dimensional space, we provide an efficient method for computing quality upper and lower bounds of the Euclidean distances between a pair of vectors in V . For this purpose, we define a distance measure, called the MS-distance, by using the mean and the standard deviation values of vectors in V. Once we compute the mean and the standard deviation values of vectors in Vin O(dn) time, the MS-distance provides upper and lower bounds of Euclidean distance between any pair of vectors in V in constant time. Furthermore, these bounds can be refined further in such a way to converge monotonically to the exact Euclidean distance within d refinement steps. An analysis on a random sequence of refinement steps shows that the MS-distance provides very tight bounds in only a few refinement steps. The MS-distance can be used to various applications where the Euclidean distance is used to measure the proximity or similarity between objects. We provide experimental results on the nearest and the farthestneighbor searches.

Arab-American (AA) populations in the US are exposed to discrimination and acculturative stresstwo factors that have been associated with higher suicide risk. However, prior work suggests that socially oriented norms andbehaviors, which characterize recent immigrant ethnic groups, may be protective against suicide risk. Here we explored suicide rates and their determinants among AAs in Michigan, the state with the largest proportion of AAs in the US.

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experimentto estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among those with the lowest ex ante probability of attending college, the effect is 11 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the likelihood of earning a college degreeby 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM(science, technology, engineering and medicine), business and economics. We confirm the standard finding that test score effects fade out by middle school, but show that test score effects at the time of the experiment are an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. We compare the costs and impacts of this interventionwith other tools for increasing postsecondary attainment, such as Head Start and financial aid, and conclude that early investments are no more cost effective than later investments in boosting adult educational attainment.

Half of todays US workforce is employed by firms that conduct some form of drug testinga dramatic increase from near-zero levels of testing in the early 1980s. This paper examines the labor market impacts of this large policy change. I incorporate drug testing into a standard Roy model and derive predictions concerning sorting of drug users and demographic groups across the testing and non-testing sectors. Consistent with the model, I find increased employment of non-users in the testing sector following the advent of drug testing. The increase was larger for blacks, a group with higher perceived use rates. Using state-level variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation, I also find labor market impacts for blacks that are consistent with discrimination against them in the absence of reliable drug testing. The adoption of pro-testing legislation increases the share of blacks working in the testing sector by 8 to 25%, with the largest shifts among low skilled black men. It also increases blacks benefits coverage (which is associated with firm testing) and raises low skilled black mens wages by at least 4%. Results from antitesting states suggest that employers substitute white women for blacks in the absence of testing.

Background: Although nearly 112 million residents of the United States belong to a non-white ethnic group, the literature about differences in health indicators across ethnic groups is limited almost exclusively to Hispanics. Features of the social experience of many ethnic groups including immigration, discrimination, and acculturation may plausibly influence mortality risk. We explored life expectancy and age-adjusted mortality risk of Arab-Americans (AAs), relative to non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites in Michigan, the state with the largest per capita population of AAs in the US. Methodology/Principal.Findings: Data were collected about all deaths to AAs and non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites in Michigan between 1990 and 2007, and year 2000 census data were collected for population denominators. We calculated life expectancy, age-adjusted all-cause, cause-specific, and age-specific mortality rates stratified by ethnicity and gender among AAs and non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites. Among AAs, life expectancies among men and women were 2.0 and 1.4 years lower than among non-Arab and non-Hispanic White men and women, respectively. AA men had higher mortality than non-Arab and non-Hispanic White men due to infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and homicide. AA women hadhigher mortality than non-Arab and non-Hispanic White women due to chronic diseases.Conclusions/Significance: Despite better education and higher income, AAs have higher age-adjusted mortality risk than non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites, particularly due to chronic diseases. Features specific to AA culture may explain some of these findings.

In response to three Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s numerous court-ordered desegregation plans have been terminated. Using a unique dataset and an event study research design, this paper explores the impact of these terminations. The results suggest that termination produces a moderate increase in racial segregation. Outside of the south, dismissal also increases the rate at which black students drop out of school and attend private school. In the south, in contrast, there is no change in the school attendance patterns of blacks. Finally, evidence is presented that whites re-enter dismissed districts in large numbers in the south.

Puerto Ricans have an intermarriage rate of 38.5 percent, the highest among Mexican, Cubans, Dominicans, European Americans, and African Americans in the United States. What govern the process of Puerto Rican intermarriage? Who do Puerto Rican intermarry with? And, do these intermarriages affect Puerto Rican ethnic identity? Traditional theories of intermarriage use a one dimensional explanation for intermarriages and for many posit an eventual ethnic identity transition. I propose the use of an intersectionality paradigm that incorporates a multidimensional approach, specifically race, gender, class, and space to explain Puerto Rican intermarriage and to test Puerto Rican ethnic identity transformation through the process of intermarriage by measuring the ethnic identity options of the natural children of Puerto Ricans in mixed relationships. I analyze this multidimensional approach by creating one dataset of Puerto Ricans and their spouses and a second dataset of the children of intermarried Puerto Ricans using the 2000 5% Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample. Race, gender, class and space all contribute to our understanding of Puerto Rican intermarriage. However, the results confirm the appropriateness of using race, gender, class and space through a multidimensional paradigm to explain Puerto Rican intermarriage and in addition, the analysis indicates that Puerto Rican ethnic identity is maintained for the children of Puerto Rican intermarried couples.

This paper uses micro data from the American Community Survey to examine how the recent housing bust affected households employment, homeownership, home values, and housing costs. To separate dynamics of the housing bust from those of the aggregate downturn, we differentiate between metropolitan areas that did and did not experience bubbles. We find that, for most measures, deteriorations in well-being were more severe in bubble metros than elsewhere, and for several measures, differential effects on less-educated households were also more severe. This underscores the importance of keeping housing markets from overheating, as burdens of adjustment fall differentially on people not well prepared to bear them.

The educational expansion that most countries in the world have witnessed in recent decades has been accompanied by a reduction of the gender gap in educational attainment. The consequences of this unprecedented phenomenon have yet to beexplored in many of the dimensions of social life. In this paper we examine the impact that the advances in women's education has had on gender symmetry in union formationand, more specifically, on female educational hypergamy (women's tendency to marry men with a higher educational attainment than themselves). We use newly integrated IPUMS census micro-data from 103 samples and taken in 38 countries. Results from multilevel linear regression models show that female educational hypergamy is lower in societies with a lower gender gap in education and that where the gender gap reverses female hypogamy becomes the norm. Thus, if current trends in education are to continue, the pervasiveness of hypergamy will tend to disappear.

This paper examines the residential location and school choice responses to the desegregation of large urban public school districts. We decompose the well documented decline in white public enrollment following desegregation into migration to suburban districts and increased private school enrollment and find that migration was the more prevalent response. Desegregation caused black public enrollment to increase significantly outside of the South, mostly by slowing decentralization of black households to the suburbs, and large black private school enrollment declines in southern districts. Central district school desegregation generated only a small portion of overall urban population decentralization between 1960 and 1990.

This paper documents the key stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in the last forty years in three countries: United-States, United-Kingdom and France. We develop a statistical decomposition that provides bounds on changes at the extensive and intensive margins. This decomposition is also shown to be coherent with the analysis of labour supply elasticities at these margins. We use detailed representative micro-datasets to examine the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins in explaining the overall changes in total hours worked.

After six months of collecting data through surveys, interviews and community forums, the results indicate that the Vietnamese American community is a vibrant, close-knit community. However, the results indicate that there are specific needs within the community that should be addressed in order to improve its overall health and wellness.

This chapter seeks to set out what economists have learned about the effects of early childhood influences on later life outcomes, and about ameliorating the effects of negative influences. We begin with a brief overview of the theory which illustrates that evidence of a causal relationship between a shock in early childhood and a future outcome says little about whether the relationship in question is biological or immutable.We then survey recent work which shows that events before five years old can have large long term impacts on adult outcomes. Child and family characteristics measured at school entry do as much to explain future outcomes as factors that labor economists have more traditionally focused on, such as years of education. Yet while children can be permanently damaged at this age, an important message is that the damage can often be remediated. We provide a brief overview of evidence regarding the effectiveness of different types of policies to provide remediation. We conclude with a list of some of the many outstanding questions for future research.

If there was any time to expect a large peace-time multiplier effect from federal spending in the states, it would have been during the period from 1930 through 1940. Interest rates were near the zero bound, and unemployment rates never fell below 10 percent and there was ample idle capacity. We develop an annual panel data set for the 48 states from 1930 through 1940 with evidence on federal government grants, loans, and tax collections and a variety of measures of economic activity. Using panel data methods we estimate a multiplier, defined as the change in per capita economic activity in response to an additional dollar per capita of federal funds. The state per capita personal income multiplier with respect to per capita federal grants was around 1.1. Some point estimates for multipliers for nontransfer grants and nonfarm grants were higher but not statistically significantly different from one. There is some evidence that AAA farm grants had negative or no effect on personal income. Federal grants had stronger effects on consumption than on personal income, but they . . .

Measuring health inequities across social groups is crucial for allocating public- health resources, and for designing policy and organizing strategies to mitigate inequities and improve population health.1,2 Measuring absolute (versus relative) inequities in risks (versus rates) of adverse outcomes may be most useful for resource allocation and meaningful to stakeholders.3–6 Nonetheless, defining and measuring absolute inequities in risks of adverse outcomes can be challenging in settings with competing events, which are events, like cancer mortality, that preclude the occurrence of the event of interest, like cardiovascular-disease mortality.5,7 For example, the naïve Kaplan-Meier estimator targets the conditional risk: the cumulative probability of the event of interest in a hypothetical population in which competing events are eliminated but the hazard of the event of interest is unaltered. Meanwhile, the Aalen-Johansen (AJ) estimator targets the unconditional risk: the cumulative probability of the event of interest among the population observed at baseline, with no change to the hazard of competing events. While either type of risk may be suitable depending on the research question, the unconditional risk targeted by the AJ estimator may be more interpretable and policy relevant, as it corresponds to the realistic setting in which only population members who do not experience competing events can experience the event of interest, rather than to a hypothetical world with vastly different disease burdens.