We hypothesized that patterns of elevated stroke mortality among those born in the United States Stroke Belt (SB) states also prevailed for mortality related to all-cause dementia or Alzheimer Disease. Cause-specific mortality (contributing cause of death, including underlying cause cases) rates in 2000 for United States-born African Americans and whites aged 65 to 89 years were calculated by linking national mortality records with population data based on race, sex, age, and birth state or state of residence in 2000. Birth in a SB state (NC, SC, GA, TN, AR, MS, or AL) was cross-classified against SB residence at the 2000 Census. Compared with those who were not born in the SB, odds of all-cause dementia mortality were significantly elevated by 29% for African Americans and 19% for whites born in the SB. These patterns prevailed among individuals who no longer lived in the SB at death. Patterns were similar for Alzheimer Disease-related mortality. Some non-SB states were also associated with significant elevations in dementia-related mortality. Dementia mortality rates follow geographic patterns similar to stroke mortality, with elevated rates among those born in the SB. This suggests important roles for geographically patterned childhood exposures in establishing cognitive reserve.

As policymakers consider how to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty in the United States, they are increasingly focusing on low-income women and the promise of their evolving role in the economy. The US Small Business Administration‟s Women‟s Business Center (WBC) program aims to train and assist women business owners who come from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This paper evaluates whether Women‟s Business Centers increase the rate of female entrepreneurship among low-income women. The answer to this question is critical to attaining a fuller picture of the program‟s benefits relative to its costs, which is especially important given the program‟s continual funding battles. Using the Current Population Survey and data provided by the Small Business Administration, I find no statistically significant effect on entrepreneurship rates among the target population. While it is conceivable that the lack of statistical significance accurately demonstrates that WBCs produce no effect on entrepreneurship, it is at least equally plausible that issues in the data are distorting the WBCs‟ true impact. Better data may be necessary to more accurately measure the effect of the WBC program on women‟s self-employment. In particular, a data source that could provide more detailed information on where women live in relation to the WBCs would help alleviate some of these concerns. Furthermore, endogeneity may have exacerbated the issue: the Metropolitan Statistical Areas that receive funds to establish Women‟s Business Centers may be systematically different from those that do not, in ways for which I have not accounted in my regressions. Therefore, it remains inconclusive as to whether the existence of WBCs causes more women to become entrepreneurs. Further research is recommended to assess this important question.

This article establishes the cyclical properties of a novel measure of worker reallocation: long-distance migration rates within the United States. Combining evidence from a number of data sets spanning the entire postwar era, we find that internal migration within the United States is procyclical. This result cannot be explained by cyclical variation in relative local economic conditions, suggesting that the net benefit of moving rises during booms. Migrationis most procyclical for younger labor-force participants.Therefore, cyclical fluctuations in the net benefit of moving appear to be related to conditions in the labor market and the spatial reallocation of labor.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is expected to lead to substantial increases in health insurance coverage, particularly through both Medicaid and nongroup plans offered through the new exchanges that will be established in 2014 (Elmendorf, 2011). To assess the impacts of the ACA, it will be critical to have valid estimates of how the distribution of health insurance coverage changes at the national, state, and local levels, overall and for different subgroups. While a number of surveys provide national coverage estimates, the American Community Survey (ACS) is the only survey with sufficient sample size to track coverage at the state and local levels on an annual basis. However, prior research suggests that ACS estimates of nongroup are too high and that estimates of Medicaid/CHIP coverage are too low (Turner & Boudreaux, 2010).In this paper, we summarize methods we developed to address misreporting of coverage on the ACS and show how their use appears to produce nongroup and Medicaid/CHIP estimates on the ACS with more face validity.

A new estimate of U.S. marital disruptions shows an increase in desertions relative to divorces after 1900. Desertions were the more volatile component of marital disruptions because of their greater responsiveness to general economic conditions. Large marriage cohorts, formed in the years of economic expansion, disrupted in greater numbers: an increase in the marriage rate by 10 per 1,000 unmarried women raised the proportion of disrupted marriages by 7.3 percentage points. Conversely, during years of recession, many poorer couples were discouraged from marriage; smaller marriage cohorts with more resilient marriages were formed and their lifetime marriage disruption rate was lower.

Studies of mass political attitudes and behavior before the 1950s have been limited by a lack of high-quality, individual-level data. Fortunately, data from public opinion polls conducted during the late New Deal and World War II periods are available, although the many difficulties of working with these data have left them largely untouched for over 60 years. We compiled and produced readily usable computer files for over 400 public opinion polls undertaken between 1936 and 1945 by the four major survey organizations active during that period. We also developed a series of weights to ameliorate the problems introduced by the quota-sampling procedures employed at the time. The corrected data files and weights were released in May 2011. In this article, we briefly discuss the data and weighting procedures and then present selected time series determined using questions that were repeated on 10 or more surveys. The time series provide considerable leverage for understanding the dynamics of public opinion in one of the most volatile-and pivotaleras in American history.

This paper explored factors contributing to homeownership among single Vietnamese American adults aged 25-64 using the 1980,1990, and 2000 census data. The data were stratified into two subsamples based on age (25-49 and 50-64). Logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify which of the 10 selected variables had statistically significant association with homeownership in each age group across the three censuses. The results revealed that among single Vietnamese Americans adults there was a healthy trend of changes in homeownership throughout these three decades of resettlement. Two factors that had somewhat consistent measures of association with homeownership were personal income and number of siblings. Despite the limited variation in samples sizes for the older single adults aged 50-64, this study provided some valuable preliminary insights into the homeownership of one of the newly established immigrant communities in the United States. The results highlight the role of economic achievement and family support in impacting the successful assimilation of newly-arrived immigrants or refugees.

This article considers urban spatial structure in US cities using a multi-dimensional approach. We select six key variables (commuting costs, density, employment dispersion/concentration, land-use mix, polycentricity and size) from the urban literature and de ne measures to quantify them. We then apply these measures to 359 metropolitan areas from the 2000 US Census. The adopted methodological strategy combines two novel techniques for the social sciences to explore the existence of relevant patterns in such multi-dimensional datasets. Geodesic self-organizing maps (SOM) are used to visualize the whole set of information in a meaningful way, while the recently developed clustering algorithm of the max-p is applied to draw boundaries within the SOM and analyze which cities fall into each of them.

This workshop was designed to provide expert advice to the Census Bureau on the development of a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) at the state level using the American Community Survey (ACS). Academics and researchers participated, including experts that have implemented the SPM using the ACS for eight different areas (participant names are included as exhibit 1). The Center on EconomicOpportunity (CEO) implemented the measure for New York City, New York State researchers implemented a SPM for NYS, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin implemented the measure for Wisconsin, and researchers at the Urban Institute implemented the measure for Minnesota, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, and Massachusetts. While these researchers have all generally followed Census Bureau SPM measurement procedures, based on the original National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and subsequent modifications, specific implementation procedures differ. Exhibit 2 summarizes key variations. The Census Bureau wants to encourage dialogamong those implementing the SPM and eventually hopes to develop centralized recommendations for the SPM measure to avoid the proliferation of 51 different SPM measures.

Retaining or hyphenating one's premarital surname among brides marrying in Hawaii in 2006 was significantly correlated with average income of women and the average income of men in the bride's state of residence. Only the average women's income in the bride's state of residence, however, was a marginally significant predictor, where both that of men and women were used as regression predictors of retention or hyphenation. Older brides were more likely to hyphenate or retain their premarital surnames upon marriage in Hawaii in 2006. Raw data concerning 28,680 marriages celebrated in 2006 in the state of Hawaii were provided by Brian Horiuchi, of the Hawaii State Department of Health.

This study examines the extent to which high school students respond to education and labor market incentives when making decisions about homework. Student and state fixed effects estimators are used to control for unobserved individual and geographic heterogeneity and selection. I find that students choices about homework respond to unemployment rates and changes in the minimum wage, butnot to changes in the price of higher education. These responses are not constant throughout the population: female students, low income students, and low achievingstudents in particular increase their homework time in response to a higher minimum wage, while male students are more responsive to changes in the unemployment rate.

What explains the partisan divide between Democratic urban areas and their Republican peripheries? This project develops one explanation: that spatial policies --those that shape geographic space--change politics by manipulating the geographic distribution of citizens. This argument is developed by focusing on the impact of the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in American history, on American political geography. Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative historical data, I show that transportation networks like the Interstate Highway System catalyze processes by which Democrats and Republicans sort into separate communities. This partisan geographic divergence culminates in a growing partisan gap in place-based policy interests. Highways' contribution to geographic partisan sorting is tested through two empirical analyses that apply matching, regression, and other methods of causal inference to GIS data. Exploiting a database containing project histories from every segment of the Interstate Highway System, the first analysis shows that suburban counties in which Interstate highways were built became more Republican than they would have been otherwise. The second analysis shows that these suburban changes gave rise to a larger urban-suburban partisan gap in metropolitan areas with dense Interstate highway networks. Survey data from the 1970s and 1980s suggest that highways operated through an individual mechanism in which partisan differences in preference for suburban residence were facilitated by the new transportation infrastructure. The final chapters build upon these key findings to examine highways' additional social and policy implications. The first of these chapters shows that highways affected a range of socioeconomic correlates of partisanship, both in suburban areas and across the urban-suburban divide. A final chapter explores whether this partisan divide extends to attitudes towards highways and their alternatives. Contrary to the bipartisan adage that "there are no Republican roads or Democratic roads," national and local opinion surveys reveal that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor spending on highways over their alternatives, and this partisan gap is larger when respondents are forced to make a tradeoff between different transportation options. Changes in the geographic distribution of partisans thus have coincided with a partisan gap around the very policies that contributed to partisan geographic polarization.

Dried blood spots (DBS) are collected uniformly from US newborns to test for metabolic and other disorders. Because evidence exists for prenatal origins of some diseases, DBS may provide unique prenatal exposure records. Some states retain residual DBS and permit their use in aetiological studies. The primary study aim was to assess the feasibility of obtaining residual DBS from state newborn screening programmes for paediatric and adolescent cancer patients nationwide with parental/subject consent/assent. Families of leukaemia and lymphoma patients aged 21 years diagnosed from 1998 to 2007 at randomly selected Children's Oncology Group institutions across the US were questioned (n = 947). Parents/guardians and patients aged 18 years were asked to release DBS to investigators in spring 2009. DBS were then requested from states. Overall, 299 families (32%) released DBS. Consenting/assenting patients were born in 39 US states and 46 DBS were obtained from five states; 124 DBS were unobtainable because patients were born prior to dates of state retention. State policies are rapidly evolving and there is ongoing discussion regarding DBS storage and secondary research uses. Currently, population-based DBS studies can be conducted in a limited number of states; fortunately, many have large populations to provide reasonably sized paediatric subject groups.

This paper evaluates the impacts of unpaid maternity leave provisions of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) on childrens birth and infant health outcomes in the United States. My identification strategy uses variation in pre-FMLA maternity leave policies across states and variation in which firms are covered by FMLA provisions. Using Vital Statistics data and difference-in-difference-in-difference methodology, I find that maternity leave led to small increases in birth weight, decreases in the likelihood of a premature birth, and substantial decreases in infant mortality for children of college-educated and married mothers, who were most able to take advantage of unpaid leave. My results are robust to the inclusion of numerous controls for maternal, child, and county characteristics, state and year fixed effects, and state-year interactions, as well as across several different specifications.

This paper reports findings from a national random sample survey of more than 600 young Americans, asking them for their views on jobs, college, and their own economic prospects. The survey was designed to shed light on questions such as these: (1) How do young Americans think about college and jobs as they become working-age adults and begin building their lives and careers?; (2) What circumstances shape and guide their decisions about college and jobs?; (3) Given the demonstrable benefits of getting a degree, what obstacles keep so many of them from accomplishing that goal?; and (4) And in a tougher, more confusing economy for everyone, how are the nation's young people faring? Are they optimistic that they can build economically secure lives? Do they see getting a higher education credential as the key to that security? Containing more than 100 questions, the study compares and contrasts the perspectives of young people who complete degrees in four-year, two-year, and technical certification programs to those of high school graduates who either never attended college or left before completing their course of study. Findings of this study include: (1) Compared to young people with degrees, high school graduates are less confident about their financial prospects and much less likely to be on a solid career path; (2) Despite their worries about the future and mixed experiences with jobs, most high school graduates believe there are still ways to succeed at work without additional education; (3) High school graduates are less likely to say it's a good idea to borrow money to go to college; (4) High school graduates are more skeptical about the motives of higher education institutions than college graduates; and (5) High school graduates have gaps in knowledge that could undercut their own ability to get a college degree in the future.