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What is the relationship between people's trust in specified outgroups (such as 'French people' or 'immigrants') and their generalised trust? This relationship has never been empirically tested, which is troubling for the large body of research on the link between ethnic diversity and trust which seemingly assumes that outgroup trust does affect generalised trust. In this paper, I use individual-level survey data to examine how outgroup trust affects generalised trust in the United States and Croatia. Although the two types of trust are correlated, I find no evidence that people account for outgroup salience when translating outgroup trust into generalised trust, as previous theories have suggested. This raises the possibility that a different type of mechanism may be responsible instead, or perhaps that the association is non-causal and trust is a fixed personality trait which is not alterable by experience. In either case, it seems that the conventional explanation for how ethnic diversity reduces generalised trust—namely that it reduces outgroup trust which then feeds through into lower generalised trust—may need to be revised. I conclude by discussing limitations and some suggestions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of multidimensional poverty in the United States over the last decade. It provides estimates of multidimensional poverty over more than a decade, from 2008 to 2019, which covers the Great Recession and the recovery following the recession when major policy changes such as the Affordable Care Act were implemented. For the first time, spatial trends in estimates of multidimensional poverty are also provided. We measure annual poverty levels in 4 regions, 50 states and examine the relation between multidimensional poverty and neighborhood characteristics. We find that on average, 13 percent of the United States population was multidimensional poor. Poverty rates were high in the South and the West and among young adults, immigrants and Hispanics. Alternative indices of multidimensional poverty show consistent trends; multidimensional poverty in the United States rose between 2008 and 2010 and then gradually declined. However, more than a quarter of individuals with incomes above the poverty threshold remained multidimensional poor. This underscores the fact that income does not always capture deprivation experienced by individuals. Policies geared towards affordable housing, health insurance and higher education will help reduce multidimensional poverty in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has voter turnout in the United States not increased proportionally with educational attainment over time? Relative education theories have attempted to answer this question by highlighting how the value of individuals' education may be influenced by the educational levels achieved by others. For instance, individuals may attain a higher level of education compared to previous generations, but the relative value of their education may not improve if society as a whole also achieves higher levels of education. Thus, this increased educational attainment may have little influence on voter turnout. Using a new measure of relative education and incorporating more recent post-2000 data, this research finds that while the relative education model explains the education–turnout relationship prior to 2000, since then individuals with a higher absolute level of education have been more likely to vote, regardless of the relative value of their education. The rise in voter turnout over the past two decades could be attributed to this increase in the absolute level of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity remains prevalent in the United States, affecting millions of households. Research has confirmed that low income and limited assets are risk factors for food insecurity, but how income and assets are associated with food insecurity has not been fully explored in light of the fact that food insecurity endures or worsens over time for some people but not others. Using 2015, 2017, and 2019 waves of the panel study of income dynamics, this study (1) investigated the heterogeneity of food insecurity trajectories using Growth Mixture Modeling; (2) performed a multinomial logistic regression to examine how income and assets are associated with the relative risk of facing a more severe food insecurity trajectory; and (3) compared the coefficient of income with the coefficient of assets. Results of this study showed that both higher income and more assets are associated with a lower probability of facing food insecurity that worsens rather than improves with time. This study also observed that the association strength was stronger for income than for assets. These results offer insights for policies aimed at creating efficient financial support strategies (e.g., income assistance, asset building) that reduce recipients' risk of experiencing long-term food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although refugee resettlement remains a controversial issue, no attempt has yet been made to investigate the relationship between refugee inflow and crime rates in the United States, based on bounds testing approach to cointegration analysis with structural breaks. We argue that the first significant crime drop in the United States occurred prior to the 1990s—from 1980 to 1984—a period that witnessed a decline in refugee inflows following the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980. We next investigate the sensitivity of total crime rate, violent crime rate, property crime rate and their sub-categories, namely, murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft to an increase in refugee inflow (% of total population) in the United States, controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors. The results strongly support the hypothesis that refugee inflow (% of total population) increases crime rates in all ten crime categories under study. The results further suggest that government policies aimed at reducing unemployment rate and income inequality, and an increase in federal expenditures on police force for maintaining public order and safety (% of GDP) will most likely reduce crime rates when there is an increase in refugee inflow (% of total population). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant interest in the changing nature of employment as a critical social and economic challenge facing society—especially the decline in the so-called Standard Employment Relationship (SER) and rise in more insecure, precarious forms of employment—scholars have struggled to operationalize the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of contemporary worker-employer relationships within empirical analyses. Here we investigate the character and distribution of employment relationships in the U.S., drawing on a representative sample of wage-earners and self-employed from the General Social Survey (2002–2018). We use the multidimensional construct of employment quality, which includes both contractual (e.g., wages, contract type) and relational (e.g., employee representation and participation) aspects of employment. We further employ a typological measurement approach, using latent class analysis, to explicitly examine how the multiple aspects of employment cluster together in modern labor markets. We present eight distinct employment types in the U.S., including one resembling the historical conception of the SER model (24% of the total workforce), and others representing various constellations of favorable and adverse employment features. These employment types are unevenly distributed across society, in terms of who works these jobs and where they are found in the labor market. Importantly, women, those with lower education, and younger workers are more likely to be in precarious forms of employment. More generally, our typology reveals limitations associated with binary conceptions of standard vs. non-standard employment, or insider–outsider dichotomies envisioned within dual labor market theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]