This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time.

The recent literature on the welfare cost of income taxation (e.g., Feldstein, 1999; Chetty, 2008) extends analysis of the scope of distortions from a traditional labor supply distortion to tax avoidance and evasion and debates the importance of tax-sheltering activities.We further extend the scope to include the distortion in human capital investment and show that leaving out human capital investment would understate the true welfare cost of income taxation. Our survey of the related literature and our analysis of the CPS data reveal that theunderestimation of the welfare cost is substantial indeed, with a non-negligible price elasticity of investment in schooling. Our findings, based on a sufficient statistics approach, suggest the following: (i) the long-run welfare cost is larger than existing estimates, at least by more than 60%; and (ii) the share of the distortions arising from overall supply-side behaviors is larger than implied in the existing literature. Another form of skill formation, learning-by-doing (LBD), is found to have similar implications.

This paper evaluates the impacts of unpaid maternity leave provisions of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) on children's 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, year, and month fixed effects, and state-year interactions, as well as across several different specifications. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

How does public access to criminal records affect crime? Economic theory suggests that expanding access to criminal information may increase the cost of crime to potential criminals by endangering their future work prospects and thus act as a deterrent. However, increased provision ofinformation could also obstruct ex-convicts from finding legal employment and lead to higher recidivism rates. I exploit the state and time variation in the introduction of state-maintained online criminal databases which represent a sharp drop in the cost and effort of gaining criminal background information on another person to empirically investigate the theoretical tradeoff between deterrence and recidivism. I find that online criminalrecords lead to a small net reduction in property crime rates, concentrated among burglary and larceny, but violent crime rates are not significantly affected. At the same time, I observe a marked increase of approximately 3.6 percentage points in the probability of recidivism among ex-offenders.

The term "brain drain" dominates popular discourse on high-skilled migration, and for this reason, we use it in this article. However, as Harry Johnson noted, it is a loaded phrase implying serious loss. It is far from clear that such a loss actually occurs in practice; indeed, there is an increasing recognition of the possible benefits that skilled migration can offer both for migrants and for sending countries. This paper builds upon a recent wave of empirical research to answer eight key questions underlying much of the brain drain debate: 1) What is brain drain? 2) Why should economists care about it? 3) Is brain drain increasing? 4) Is there a positive relationship between skilled and unskilled migration? 5) What makes brain drain more likely? 6) Does brain gain exist? 7) Do high-skilled workers remit, invest, and share knowledge back home? 8) What do we know about the fiscal and production externalities of brain drain?

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. Importantly, these improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention pneumonia mortality rates, the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. While men and women show similar improvements on most indicators, only the estimates for the former are robust to the inclusion of birth state specific time trends. With the exception of cognitive disabilities for men and, in some specifications, family income for men and women, estimates for African Americans tend to be smaller in magnitude and less precisely estimated than those for whites. We speculate that this may be due to barriers in translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment in the pre-Civil Rights Era.

Most research on U.S. hunger and food insecurity is at the household level, where it occurs. Because policy to address food insecurity is created and implemented at the national and state level, hunger research at the state level provides important contextual information. By including weather data with state level economic and demographic characteristics, this study attempts to explain the variation in food insecurity rates at the state level. Using ordinary least squares regression analysis, this research estimated the relationships between state‐level food insecurity rates and explanatory variables which include demographic characteristics as well as weather‐ related variables. Including the July Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index in the model, a “cool or eat” effect was shown to exist at the state level. High energy demand in July, associated with comparatively warmer weather, has a positive effect on food insecurity at the state level. This analysis was unable to capture a definitive “heat or eat” effect at the state level. One model using the deviation in December Heating Degree Days showed that in colder December weather, food insecurity increases, suggesting that a “heat or eat” effect exists at the state level. However, when a “December Shock” variable capturing the effect of the coldest years was included in the model, food security improved with more severe weather. The unexpected negative relationship between a cold shock in December and food security could be due to the success of programs in place to mitigate the effects of extreme weather. Innovative state programs coordinating LIHEAP and SNAP benefits hold promise to improve food security and bring more federal money to low‐income people.

Transforming care for children and the elderly from a private to a public domain engenders a series of benefits to the economy that improve our standard of living. We assess the positive impacts of social care from both receivers and providers points of view. The benefits to care receivers are various, ranging from private, higher returns to education to enhancing subjective well-being and health outcomes. The economy-wide spillovers of the benefits are noteworthy. Early childhood education reduces costs of law enforcement and generates higher long-termeconomic growth. Home-based health care lowers absenteeism and job losses that otherwise undermine labor productivity, providing adequate care at a lower cost and delaying admission into high-cost institutional care. Social care improves mothers labor-market attachment with higher lifetime income; it also lowers physical and psychological burdens of elder care that are becoming more prevalent with an aging population. Social care investment creates more jobopportunities than other public spending, especially for workers from poor households and with low levels of educational attainment. The broad contributions of social care to our standard of living should be recognized in the public discourse, particularly in this era of fiscal austerity.

This article investigates how changes in educational assortative mating affected the growth in earnings inequality among households in the United States between the late 1970s and early 2000s. The authors find that these changes had a small, negative effect on inequality: there would have been more inequality in earnings in the early 2000s if educational assortative mating patterns had remained as they were in the 1970s. Given the educational distribution of men and women in the United States, educational assortative mating can have only a weak impact on inequality, and educational sorting among partners is a poor proxy for sorting on earnings.

The authors examine the impact of globalization on the domestic labor market for low-skilled workers. Whereas existing research typically focuses on the effects on labor market outcomes such as wages and employment, the authors of this paper examine whether American workers respond to globalization by increasing their investment in human capital. Using both Census data and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) for the period 2000–2007, they measure the extent to which offshoring and immigration affect enrollment at institutions of higher education. Results indicate that both offshoring and immigration increase enrollment at community colleges but not other types of institutions, particularly among older, non-traditional age students. The authors conclude that U.S. workers are indeed responding to globalization by acquiring the skills necessary to compete in a global economy.

Little is known about men who serve as primary caregivers for American families due to a lack of detailed questions on fatherhood and small numbers found in large-scale, nationally representative surveys. This paper moves beyond this limitation using a combination of in-depth interviews with 40 fathers and microdata from the 2005-2007 American Community Survey to critically assess whether the US Census Bureau accurately counts the number of male primary caregivers. Findings suggest that it likely underestimates the number who care full-time, by as many as 1.4 million, by not counting fathers who work part-time, report other reasons for being home and/or have been home less than one year. These results have important implications for how scholars more precisely measure emergent, transitioning forms of fatherhood.

Privacy-preserving data publication has been studied intensely in the past years. To date, all existing approaches transform data values by random perturbation or generalization. In this paper, we introduce a radically different data anonymization methodology. Our proposal aims to maintain a certain amount of {\em patterns}, defined in terms of a set of properties of interest that hold for the original data. Such properties are represented as linear relationships among data points. We present an algorithm that generates a set of anonymized data that strictly preserves these properties, thus maintaining specified {\em patterns} in the data. Extensive experiments with real and synthetic data show that our algorithm is efficient, and produces anonymized data that affords high utility in several data analysis tasks while safeguarding privacy.

Recent demographic trends have contributed to increases in unmarried (single and cohabiting) mothers in the U.S. The share of births that are to unmarried mothers has doubled in the past three decades and is now 40% (Martin et al., 2009). More than one-half of unmarried births are to cohabiting mothers (Martinez et al., 2012). Further, being born to married parents is no guarantee of a stable family life; roughly half of all marriages end in divorce (Kreider & Ellis, 2011; Raley & Bumpass, 2003). This profile examines the demographic characteristics of single, cohabiting, and married mothers in the U.S. aged 18 and older who have children under age 18 living in their household.

Many US antipoverty programs and measures assume mothers have little, intermittent, or no employment and therefore have sufficient time to care for children, perform household tasks, and apply for and maintain eligibility for these programs. Employment-promotion policies directed toward low-income mothers since the late 1980s have successfully increased their time in the labor force. However, low wages and insufficient employer-based benefits often leave employed single mothers with inadequate material resources to support families and less time to care for their children. The lack of consideration given to the value of poor women's time in both the administration and benefit levels of antipoverty government support, as well as the measures used to calculate poverty, place more binds on poor and low-income mothers' time. Ignoring these binds causes researchers and policymakers to overestimate single mothers' well-being and reduces the effectiveness of the policies.

This paper describes efforts to develop a more comprehensive and up-to-date measure of poverty in Wisconsin as a model for other states to follow. The Wisconsin model uses American Community Survey data to measure the level, depth, and trends in poverty and the effects on poverty of such programs as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) and refundable tax credits, as well as out-of-pocket health care costs and work-related expenses including child care. In many ways, the Wisconsin measure, which was unveiled in September 2010, is a preview of the forthcoming federal Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). However, the two measures differ in important respects. After a brief review of methodology underlying the Wisconsin measure, this paper focuses on a comparison of poverty across two vulnerable demographic subgroups, children and the elderly, and analyzes how specific federal and state policies affect low-income children and elderly in Wisconsin. Poverty rates in 2008 under the Wisconsin Poverty Measure are higher than official poverty rates for both children and the elderly, with child poverty rising from 13.3 percent to 13.6 percent and elderly poverty rising much more, from 7.1 percent to 10.4 percent. Our analysis suggests that child poverty would be even higher but for the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP benefits, and that expansions in benefits under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 played a role in mitigating the rise in child poverty during the recession.

This paper demonstrates that shifting unpaid care work to the paid(social) care provisioning domain entails large employment opportunities. Furthermore, when underemploymentis rampant, investing in mobilizing underutilized domesticlabor resources that bridge gaps of community-- based services, yields strong pro-poor income growth patterns. Social care provision also contributes to promoting gender equality, as women-especially from low income households-constitute a major workforce in the care sector. We present ex-ante policy simulation results from two case studies of South Africa and the United States. Both social accounting matrix-based multiplier analysis and propensity ranking-based microsimualtion provide evidence of the pro-poor impacts of the social care expansion.

Where does adaptation to innovation take place? I present evidence on the role of agglomeration economies in the application of new knowledge to production. All else equal, workers are more likely to be observed in new work in locations initially dense in college graduates and industry variety. This pattern is consistent with economies from the geographic concentration of factors and markets related to technological adaptation. A main contribution is a new measure, based on revisions to occupation classifications, that characterizes cross-sectional differences, across cities, in technological adaptation. Worker-level results also provide new evidence on the skill bias of recent innovations.