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Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers' life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Geography may influence mental health by inducing changes to social and physical environmental and health-related factors. This understanding is largely based on older studies from Western Europe. We sought to quantify contemporary relationships between urbanicity and self-reported poor mental health days in US counties. We performed regression on US counties (n = 3142) using data from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. Controlling for state, age, income, education, and race/ethnicity, large central metro counties reported 0.24 fewer average poor mental health days than small metro counties (t = - 5.78, df = 423, p < .001). Noncore counties had 0.07 more average poor mental health days than small metro counties (t = 3.06, df = 1690, p = 0.002). Better mental health in large central metro counties was partly mediated by differences in the built environment, such as better food environments. Poorer mental health in noncore counties was not mediated by considered mediators., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Social capital-the strength of an individual's social network and community-has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health 1-8 . However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers 9 , we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (3) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other. We demonstrate the importance of distinguishing these forms of social capital by analysing their associations with economic mobility across areas. The share of high-SES friends among individuals with low SES-which we term economic connectedness-is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date 10,11 . Other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average. Differences in economic connectedness can explain well-known relationships between upward income mobility and racial segregation, poverty rates, and inequality 12-14 . To support further research and policy interventions, we publicly release privacy-protected statistics on social capital by ZIP code at https://www.socialcapital.org ., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Objective: Using Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health data set, this preregistered study set out to investigate the effect of parental care arrangements (eg, genetically related parents, adoptive, step/ foster, genetic nonparental relative, and no parental figure) on adult children's income and wealth in later life., Methods: Consistent with the preregistration plan, multivariate analyses of covariance were first used to examine, separately, the effects of paternal and maternal care arrangements on children's income and wealth in later life. Further post hoc exploratory analyses were carried out to evaluate the robustness of the findings., Results: The results indicate that individual earnings in later life are unrelated to paternal care arrangements, thus questioning a key tenet of kin selection theory. However, children raised by biological fathers and adoptive fathers still enjoy significant economic advantages over nongenetic father figures and homes without fathers in relation to household income and wealth., Conclusions: Prevailing theories suggest that children raised by relatives, nongenetically related parents, and no father or mother suffer from a lack of parental investment that should manifest itself in reduced earnings and assets in adulthood. These theories are only partially correct, with evidence pointing to no deleterious effect of variable parental arrangements on individual earnings., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

This paper introduces a new graphical tool: the mean deviation concentration curve. Using a unified approach, we derive the associated dominance conditions that identify robust rankings of absolute socioeconomic health inequality for all indices obeying Bleichrodt and van Doorslaer's (J Health Econ 25:945-957, 2006) principle of income-related health transfer. We also derive dominance conditions that are compatible with other transfer principles available in the literature. To make the identification of all robust orderings implementable using survey data, we discuss statistical inference for these dominance tests. To illustrate the empirical relevance of the proposed approach, we compare joint distributions of income and health-related behavior in the United States., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

To explain racially differential housing outcomes, previous studies have tended to concentrate on discriminatory processes within the mortgage market while ignoring homeowning families' broad socioeconomic challenges. This study proposes a conceptual framework for understanding Black-White inequality in homeownership sustainability, which emphasizes Black homeowners' socioeconomic challenges that are external to mortgage market evaluations, with a particular focus on the mediating role of liquid assets. Based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the framework is put to an empirical test on the differential exit rates between Black and White homeowners in the United States during the recent housing crisis. The findings indicate that the racial gap in homeownership exit is eliminated after liquid wealth is controlled in the model alongside other covariates and that the inclusion of liquid wealth renders all mortgage-oriented variables nonsignificant with regard to their explanatory power for Black-White inequality in exit rates. Policy implications of the findings are also discussed.

With the arrival of an infant, many households face increased demands on resources, changes in the composition of income, and a potentially heightened risk of income inadequacy. Changing household economic circumstances around a birth have implications for child and family well-being, women's economic security, and public program design, yet have received little research attention in the United States. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this study provides new descriptive evidence of month-to-month changes in household income adequacy and the composition of household income in the year before and after a birth. Results show evidence of significant declines in household income adequacy in the months around a birth, particularly for single mothers who live without other adults. Income from public benefit programs buffers but does not eliminate declines in income adequacy. Results have implications for policies targeted at this period, including public benefit and parental leave programs.

A recent integrated health care initiative in Belgium supports 12 regional pilot projects scattered across the country and representing 21% of the population. As in shared savings programs, part of the estimated savings in health spending are paid out to the projects to reinvest in new actions. Short-term savings are expected in particular from cost reductions among high-cost patients. We estimate the effect of the projects on spending using a difference-in-difference model. The sensitivity of the results to the right-skewness of spending is commonly addressed by removing or top-coding high-cost cases. However, this leads to an underestimation of realized savings at the top end of the distribution, therefore, lowering incentives for cost reduction. We show that this trade-off can be weakened by an alternative approach in which cost categories that fall out of the scope of the projects' interventions are excluded from the dependent variable. We find that this approach leads to improvements in precision and model fit that are of the same magnitude as excluding high-cost cases altogether. At the same time, it sharpens the incentives for cost reduction because the model better reflects the costs that projects can affect., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Significant limitations and rapid declines in financial capacity are a hallmark of patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). We use linked Health and Retirement Study and Medicare claims data spanning 1992-2014 to examine the effect of early-stage AD, from the start of first symptoms to diagnosis, on household financial outcomes. We estimate household fixed-effects models and examine continuous measures of liquid assets and net wealth, as well as dichotomous indicators for a large change in either outcome. We find robust evidence that early-stage AD places households at significant risk for large adverse changes in liquid assets. Further, we find some, but more limited, evidence that early-stage AD reduces net wealth. Our findings are consequential because financial vulnerability during the disease's early-stage impacts the ability of afflicted individuals and their families to pay for care in the disease's later stage. Additionally, the findings speak to the value that earlier diagnosis may provide by helping avert adverse financial outcomes that occur before the disease is currently diagnosable with available tools. These results also point to a potentially important role for financial institutions in helping reduce exposure of vulnerable elderly to poor outcomes., (© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

In an increasingly mobile world, the integration of immigrants and displaced individuals is an important factor in creating cohesive and inclusive societies. Integration has different dimensions; this scoping review examines the conceptualization and measurement of economic integration among immigrants and refugees in the United States. Quantitative peer-reviewed journal papers measuring or conceptualizing the economic integration of first-generation documented adult immigrants or refugees in the United States, as well as relevant conceptual or theory papers on this topic, were included in the review. The search strategy included an online search of the Web of Science Core Collection, PsycINFO, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA), and EconLit. Additional search strategies included scanning the reference lists of studies identified as relevant in the initial database search. An analysis of 72 studies included in the review using a data extraction table reveals seven key domains of economic integration: income and economic security, employment and occupational categories, assets and use of financial services, neighborhood and housing, health, education, and use of public assistance. Income and economic security emerged as the most common indicators of integration in the reviewed studies. Notably, less than half of the reviewed publications had a multidimensional approach to defining or measuring economic integration, and the majority of studies were focused on immigrants, with a smaller proportion dedicated to refugees. This review emphasizes the need for comprehensive frameworks in assessing economic integration among immigrants and refugees, reflecting the multifaceted nature of their economic integration experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children's academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income-achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries using data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment. First, we calculate and compare the magnitude of "income achievement gaps" across this sample of countries. Second, we investigate the association between the size of a country's income achievement gap, its income inequality, and a variety of other country characteristics. We find considerable variation across countries in income achievement gaps. Moreover, the U.S. income achievement gap is quite large in comparison to this sample of countries. Our multivariate analyses show that the income achievement gap is positively associated with educational differentiation, modestly negatively associated with curricular standardization, and positively associated with national levels of poverty and inequality.

Objective: Given the substantial increases in student educational loan debt in recent years, the objective was to assess trends in educational debt-to-income ratios for graduates of pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, optometry, and veterinary medicine programs in the United States in the 2017-2022 period., Methods: A retrospective analysis of 2017-2022 data for educational debt and income for select health professions was conducted. Annual income data were collected from the American Community Survey, and educational debt data were collected from health professions organizations. Educational debt-to-income ratios for each health profession were calculated, as was the mean change per year in debt-to-income ratio., Results: With the exception of medicine, educational debt consistently exceeded income across the selected health professions in the 2017-2022 period. Debt-to-income ratios of pharmacists and the remaining health professionals decreased on average per year between 2017 and 2022. Physicians had the lowest debt-to-income ratios and dentists had the highest debt-to-income ratios in the study period., Conclusion: Debt-to-income ratios fell below the 2017 levels for the health professions of interest, suggesting that average growth in income outpaced that of debt for the study period. Regardless, debt remains high and may influence health care professionals' postgraduate training and career decisions, and in turn affect access to health care. Therefore, a call to action is proposed to address educational debt burden. Several strategies are suggested, including federal policy changes, implementing tuition reductions or minimal increases, facilitating financial aid options, and reducing underlying costs of health professions programs., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Uncontrolled seizures among people with epilepsy increase risk of adverse health and social outcomes including increased risk of death. Previous population-based studies have reported suboptimal seizure control and disparities in seizure control among U.S. adults with active epilepsy (self-reported doctor-diagnosed epilepsy and taking anti-seizure medicine or with ≥ 1 seizures in the past 12 months) by annual family income. This brief is based upon data from the 2021 and 2022 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to provide updated national estimates of the percentages of adults with active epilepsy with and without seizure control (0 seizures in past 12 months) vs. ≥ 1) by anti-seizure medication use and by annual family income. Annual family income was operationalized with NHIS poverty-income ratio (PIR) categories (i.e., total family income divided by the US Census Bureau poverty threshold given the family's size and number of children): PIR < 1.0, 1.0 ≤ PIR < 2.0; PIR ≥ 2.0. Among the 1.1 % of US adults with active epilepsy in 2021/2022 (estimated population about 2.9 million), 49.2 % (∼1.4 million) were taking antiseizure medication and reported no seizures (seizure control), 36.2 % (∼1.1 million) were taking antiseizure medication and reported ≥ 1 seizures (uncontrolled seizures), and 14.7 % (∼400,000) were not taking antiseizure medication and had ≥ 1 seizures (uncontrolled seizures). The prevalence of seizure control among those with active epilepsy varied substantially by annual family income, with a larger percentage of adults with PIR ≥ 2.0 reporting seizure control compared with those with PIR < 1.0. Opportunities for intervention include improving provider awareness of epilepsy treatment guidelines, enhancing access and referral to specialty care, providing epilepsy self-management supports, and addressing unmet social needs of people with epilepsy with uncontrolled seizures, especially those at lowest family income levels., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Background: Mean cardiovascular health has improved over the past several decades in the United States, but it is unclear whether the benefit is shared equitably. This study examined 30-year trends in cardiovascular health using a suite of income equity metrics to provide a comprehensive picture of cardiovascular income equity., Methods: The study evaluated data from the 1988-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Survey groupings were stratified by poverty-to-income ratio (PIR) category, and the mean predicted 10-year risk of a major cardiovascular event or death based on the pooled cohort equations (PCE) was calculated (10-year PCE risk). Equity metrics including the relative and absolute concentration indices and the achievement index-metrics that assess both the prevalence and the distribution of a health measure across different socioeconomic categories-were calculated., Results: A total of 26 633 participants aged 40 to 75 years were included (mean age, 53.0-55.5 years; women, 51.9%-53.0%). From 1988-1994 to 2015-2018, the mean 10-year PCE risk improved from 7.8% to 6.4% ( P <0.05). The improvement was limited to the 2 highest income categories (10-year PCE risk for PIR 5: 7.7%-5.1%, P <0.05; PIR 3-4.99: 7.6%-6.1%, P <0.05). The 10-year PCE risk for the lowest income category (PIR <1) did not significantly change (8.1%-8.7%). In 1988-1994, the 10-year PCE risk for PIR <1 was 6% higher than PIR 5; by 2015-2018, this relative inequity increased to 70% ( P <0.05). When using metrics that account for all income categories, the achievement index improved (8.0%-7.1%, P <0.05); however, the achievement index was consistently higher than the mean 10-year PCE risk, indicating the poor persistently had a greater share of adverse health., Conclusions: In this serial cross-sectional survey of US adults spanning 30 years, the population's mean 10-year PCE risk improved, but the improvement was not felt equally across the income spectrum., Competing Interests: Disclosures All authors have not published, posted, or submitted any related papers from the same study. Dr Richards is an advisor to a fund at the Tides Foundation; he did not receive compensation from the Tides Foundation for this or any other study. The other authors report no conflicts.

Ill-health causes poverty. The effect runs through multiple mechanisms that span lifetimes and cross generations. Health systems can reduce poverty by improving health and weakening links from ill-health to poverty. This paper maps routes through which ill-health can cause poverty and identifies those that are potentially amenable to health policy. The review confirms that ill-health is an important contributor to poverty and it finds that the effect through health-related loss of earnings is often larger than that through medical expenses. Both effects are smaller in countries that are closer to universal health coverage and have higher social safety nets. The paper also reviews evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the United States (US) on the poverty-reduction effectiveness of public health insurance (PubHI) for low-income households. This reveals that PubHI does not always deliver financial protection to its targeted population in LMICs. Countries that have succeeded in achieving this goal often combine extension of coverage with supply-side interventions to build capacity and avoid perverse provider incentives in response to insurance. In the US, PubHI is effective in reducing poverty by shielding low-income households with children from healthcare costs and, consequently, generating long-run improvements in health that increase lifetime earnings. Poverty reduction is a potentially important co-benefit of health systems., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The author has no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Throughout the nineteenth century, federal Indian policy oscillated between two extreme positions: assimilation versus isolation. While scholars have often been interested in the impact of past federal policy on current levels of economic development among American Indian tribes, none have explicitly examined the influence of federal assimilation policy on long-run economic development. In this paper, I take advantage of tribal-level variation in the application of federal policies to estimate the effect of assimilation on long-run economic performance. To quantify the impact of such policies, I introduce a novel measure of cultural assimilation: the prevalence of traditional indigenous names relative to common American first names. To calculate the distribution of name types, I have gathered the names and locations for all American Indians enumerated in the 1900 United States census. After classifying each name, I calculated the reservation-specific share of non-indigenous names. I estimate the relationship between cultural assimilation in 1900 and per capita income from 1970 through 2020. I find that historical levels of assimilation are consistently associated with higher levels of per capita income in all census years. The results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of cultural and institutional controls and regional fixed effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on global international student mobility (ISM) highlights the uneven nature of student flows--from the developing to the developed world--however, studies have yet to address whether this pattern is replicated within expanding regional networks. Utilizing social network analysis, UNESCO ISM data, and World Bank income classifications, this paper examines economic inequality in ISM from 2008-2012 globally and within the Southern African Development Community, the European Higher Education Area, the Union of South American Nations, and University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific. Findings reaffirm previous global analyses which indicate that higher-income countries play a preeminent role as receivers; whereas, lower-income countries function primarily as source nations. This study demonstrates that this pattern is replicated fractally within the four regional networks as well. Globally and regionally, economically developed countries comprise the core of the world-system in tertiary education while less-developed nations are relegated to peripheral status.

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the estimated returns can be causally interpreted. Using the PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills, this paper explores several approaches that aim to address potential threats to causal identification of returns to skills, in terms of both higher wages and better employment chances. We address measurement error by exploiting the fact that PIAAC measures skills in several domains. Furthermore, we estimate instrumental-variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment and parental education to circumvent reverse causation. Results show a strikingly similar pattern across the diverse set of countries in our sample. In fact, the instrumental-variable estimates are consistently larger than those found in standard least-squares estimations. The same is true in two "natural experiments," one of which exploits variation in skills from changes in compulsory-schooling laws across U.S. states. The other one identifies technologically induced variation in broadband Internet availability that gives rise to variation in ICT skills across German municipalities. Together, the results suggest that least-squares estimates may provide a lower bound of the true returns to skills in the labor market.

This paper estimates the monetary return to quality in US graduate education, controlling for cognitive ability and self-selection across award level, program quality, and field-of-study. In most program types, I cannot reject the hypothesis of no returns to either degree completion or program quality. Important exceptions include master's programs in health science, where completion substantially increases earnings, and in MBA and professional degree programs, where program quality has a positive influence on earnings. I explore the job characteristics that predict greater earnings among students with tertiary education, and I estimate the returns to quality in terms of non-monetary job benefits.

This paper explores racial differences in maternal risk factors associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes across urban and rural geographies using 2019 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Bivariate chi-square tests and logistic regression were performed which showed statistically significant geographical differences among Non-Hispanic (NH) Black pregnant women across income levels (p =.016) and perceived health status (p =.003). Regression analyses indicated an increased racial gap between NH White pregnant women and other racial/ethnic groups. The findings support that there are statistically significant racial differences in maternal risk factors across urban and rural geographies for NH Black and Hispanic pregnant women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family economic mobility has been a policy concern for decades, with interest heating up further since the 1990s, especially as the inequality of the family income distribution in the United States has grown. Rising intragenerational mobility could offset some of the effects of rising cross-sectional inequality on longer-term or lifetime inequality, while falling intragenerational mobility would exacerbate such effects. The positions families occupy in the income distribution and the degree to which they are stuck or able to move up (or slide down) over time are critical determinants of their current well-being and their children's prospects. Using data that track individual families' incomes during overlapping 10-year periods from 1978 to 1988 through 2004–2014, this paper documents trends in intragenerational family mobility and investigates the relationships of family characteristics to mobility and whether the importance of those factors has changed over time or differs for shorter or longer periods. The paper measures intragenerational mobility using both relative and dollar-denominated indicators. Family characteristics include family structure, educational attainment and work behavior of the family head and spouse (if present), and time-invariant characteristics of the family head, such as race. The analysis also examines within-period changes in the time-varying factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large literature on earnings and income volatility in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. One strand of that literature has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the United States over the last several decades. There are strong disagreements in the empirical literature on this important question, with some studies showing upward trends, some showing downward trends, and some showing no trends. Some studies have suggested that the differences are the result of using flawed survey data instead of more accurate administrative data. This article summarizes the results of a project attempting to reconcile these findings with four different datasets and six different data series—three survey and three administrative data series, including two which match survey respondent data to their administrative data. Using common specifications, measures of volatility, and other treatments of the data, four of the six data series show a lack of any significant long-term trend in male earnings volatility over the last 20-to-30+ years when differences across the datasets are properly accounted for. A fifth data series (the PSID) shows a positive net trend but small in magnitude. A sixth, administrative, dataset, available only since 1998, shows no net trend 1998–2011 and only a small decline thereafter. Many of the remaining differences across data series can be explained by differences in their cross-sectional distribution of earnings, particularly differences in the size of the lower tail. We conclude that the datasets we have analyzed, which include many of the most important available, show little evidence of any significant trend in male earnings volatility since the mid-1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers at the federal and state level have begun to incorporate energy burden into equity goals and program evaluations, aiming to reduce energy burden below a high level of 6% for lower income households in the United States. Pairing an empirical household-level dataset spanning United States geographies together with modeled hourly energy demand curves, we show that rooftop solar reduces energy burden across a majority of adopters during our study period from a median of 3.3% to 2.6%. For low- and moderate-income adopters (at or below 80% and 120% of area median income, respectively), solar reduces median 2021 energy burden from 7.7% to 6.2%, and 4.1% to 3.3%, respectively. Importantly, solar reduces the rate of high or severe energy burden from 67% of all low-income households before adoption to 52% of households following adoption, and correspondingly from 21% to 13% for moderate-income households. Here, we show rooftop solar can support policy goals to reduce energy burden along with strategies such as weatherization and bill assistance. Modeled results show that rooftop solar reduced energy burden for most adopters in 2021 from a median of 3.3% to 2.6% with the average adopter seeing a 0.6 point ($691 annual) reduction in burden, accounting for costs, incentives, and savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and fast-growing number of studies across the social sciences use experiments to better understand the role of race in human interactions, particularly in the American context. Researchers often use names to signal the race of individuals portrayed in these experiments. However, those names might also signal other attributes, such as socioeconomic status (e.g., education and income) and citizenship. If they do, researchers would benefit greatly from pre-tested names with data on perceptions of these attributes; such data would permit researchers to draw correct inferences about the causal effect of race in their experiments. In this paper, we provide the largest dataset of validated name perceptions to date based on three different surveys conducted in the United States. In total, our data include over 44,170 name evaluations from 4,026 respondents for 600 names. In addition to respondent perceptions of race, income, education, and citizenship from names, our data also include respondent characteristics. Our data will be broadly helpful for researchers conducting experiments on the manifold ways in which race shapes American life., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 states banned or restricted abortion access under elective-procedure restrictions. The rationale was preserving hospital capacity and personal protective equipment (PPE); however, abortions commonly take place in clinics and use less PPE than childbirth. This paper investigates the discursive construction of abortions, the people who get them, and the fetuses in this legislation. The authors analyzed 13 antiabortion documents using an iterative process of thematic coding and memo writing. Twenty-three percent of the legislation listed abortion as banned, whereas the remaining laws implied abortion within the terms "elective" or "nonessential." Legislation used common antiabortion tactics, such as the trivialization of abortion, risk discourses, and constructions of motherhood and fetal personhood. Discourses delegitimized abortion providers and used quasi-medical justifications for banning abortion. Finally, legislation constructed abortion clinics as sites of contagion and waste and consequently as risks to public health. The results highlight the vulnerability of abortion and the connection between abortion policy and other conservative policies, and they gesture toward a strategic attempt to ban abortion federally. These findings have several implications for a post-Roe United States and for stakeholders wishing to increase abortion access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heathcote et al. (2010) conducted an empirical analysis of several dimensions of inequality in the United States over the years 1967-2006, using publicly-available survey data. This paper expands the analysis, and extends it to 2021. We find that since the early 2000s, the college wage premium has stopped growing, and the race wage gap has stalled. However, the gender wage gap has kept shrinking. Both individual- and household-level income inequality have continued to rise at the top, while the cyclical component of inequality dominates dynamics below the median. Inequality in consumption expenditures has remained remarkably stable over time. Income pooling within the family and redistribution by the government have enormous impacts on the dynamics of household-level inequality, with the role of the family diminishing and that of the government growing over time. In particular, largely due to generous government transfers, the COVID recession has been the first downturn in fifty years in which inequality in disposable income and consumption actually declined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-rated health (SRH) is a salient outcome for cancer survivors. Although depression is a well-studied correlate with SRH, few studies have focused on the role of cancer survivors' age on the association between depression and SRH. This study evaluates demographic and psychosocial factors associated with cancer survivors' SRH. We also assess the moderating role of age to the association between depression and SRH. This paper analyzed 2,470 U.S. cancer survivors from the 2019 National Health Interview Survey. Two ordered logistic regression models with complex survey weights were used for analyses. Missing data was addressed using multiple imputations by chained equations. Being female, higher education and higher income were positively associated with better SRH. While the relationship between higher education and higher income was consistent with previous findings, the positive association between being female and SRH was different from previous studies. Age significantly moderated the association between depression and SRH, evidenced by results of the joint tests of all interaction term coefficients being statistically significant, F(2, 544.6) = 5.13, p < 0.01. The findings of the study highlighted the significance of screening for social determinants of health and health disparity when supporting cancer survivors. Additionally, findings of this study emphasized the significance of adopting an age-specific approach when evaluating and addressing depression across different age groups of cancer survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has tied up significant medical resources, and its management poses a challenge for the public health care decision making. Accurate predictions of the hospitalizations are crucial for the decision makers to make informed decision for the medical resource allocation. This paper proposes a method named County Augmented Transformer (CAT). To generate accurate predictions of four-week-ahead COVID-19 related hospitalizations for every states in the United States. Inspired by the modern deep learning techniques, our method is based on a self-attention model (known as the transformer model) that is actively used in Natural Language Processing. Our transformer based model can capture both short-term and long-term dependencies within the time series while enjoying computational efficiency. Our model is a data based approach that utilizes the publicly available information including the COVID-19 related number of confirmed cases, deaths, hospitalizations data, and the household median income data. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the strength and the usability of our model as a potential tool for assisting the medical resources allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine how internal migration redistributes earned income across U. S. states between 1995 and 2010. We examine interregional income flows by first describing the movement of earned income between U. S. states. Second, we examine the effect of income migration on spatial patterns of income inequality. The question we ask is, 'does migration increase or decrease convergence income across U. S. States?' A primary contribution of this paper is that instead of using only 1 year of income migration data to explore these issues, we use yearly data from the first year the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data started including income (1995/1996) up to the most current data available (2009/2010). Results indicate that income convergence/divergence across states varies by whether or not there is general economic expansion or contraction. Nevertheless, some high-amenity states continually attract high-income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under neoliberal social provision, debt has become a primary tool for US households to pursue economic mobility and manage risk. Borrowing supports financial and non‐financial investments that, in theory, should lead to lifetime income and asset gains from which debt can be repaid. Many scholars argue, however, that reliance on credit as a welfare tool significantly increases inequality, particularly along racial lines. In this paper, I examine this process of debt‐financed asset accumulation by analyzing racial disparities in the relationship between household debt and assets. Using Survey of Consumer Finances data, I examine disparities in assets held at given debt levels across Black and White households. Results indicate that at equal debt levels, Black households' assets are between 30% and 80% lower than those of comparable White households. This suggests that White households benefit considerably more from social policies that center borrowing as a mechanism of social provision. This likely contributes to the persistence of the racial wealth gap. Racial disparities in access to credit, to homeownership, and to non‐market financial transfers like inheritances partly explain White households' higher returns, but racial gaps remain even when accounting for these factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Medical iatrogenesis' was first defined by Illich as injuries 'done to patients by ineffective, unsafe, and erroneous treatments'. Following Lokumage's original usage of the term, this paper explores 'obstetric iatrogenesis' along a spectrum ranging from unintentional harm (UH) to overt disrespect, violence, and abuse (DVA), employing the acronym 'UHDVA' for this spectrum. This paper draws attention to the systemic maltreatment rooted in the technocratic model of birth, which includes UH normalized forms of mistreatment that childbearers and providers may not recognize as abusive. Equally, this paper assesses how obstetric iatrogenesis disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), contributing to worse perinatal outcomes for BIPOC childbearers. Much of the work on 'obstetric violence' that documents the most detrimental end of the UHDVA spectrum has focused on low-to-middle income countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Based on a dataset of 62 interviews and on our personal observations, this paper shows that significant UHDVA also occurs in the high-income U.S., provide concrete examples, and suggest humanistic solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Self-rated physical health (SRPH) and self-rated mental health (SRMH) are both linked to excess morbidity and premature mortality and can vary across rural and urban contexts. This can be particularly problematic for rural residents who have less access to important health care infrastructure. In this paper, we assess the prevalence of and rural-urban disparities at the intersection of SRPH and SRMH, specifically self-rated physical/mental multimorbidity (SRPMM) overall and across rural-urban contexts. Methods: Using a cross-sectional demographically representative national dataset of over 4000 working age adults in the U.S., we expose rural-urban differences in the prevalence of SRPMM and explore individual-level factors that may explain this disparity. Results: Approximately 15 percent of working age adults reported SRPMM, but rural adults were at higher risk than their urban counterparts. However, this disadvantage disappeared for remote rural working-age adults and was attenuated for metro-adjacent rural working-age adults when we controlled for the fact that rural adults had lower household incomes. Conclusion: Findings reveal a higher risk of SRPMM among rural adults, in part because of lower incomes among this group. This work acts as the foundation for facilitating research on and addressing rural-urban disparities in SRPMM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first explores spatial distributions and patterns of COVID-19 case rates (cases/100,000 people) and mortality rates (deaths/100,000 people) and their disparities between urban and rural counties in the contiguous US. A county-level social vulnerability index was created using principal component analysis. Social vulnerability components were regressed against both county case and mortality rates. Results suggest that hotspots of case and mortality rates are clustered in Midwest and Upper-Midwest US. We found substantial disparities in case and mortality rates between urban and rural counties. County social vulnerability was positively correlated with both case and mortality rates suggesting counties with higher social vulnerability had higher case and mortality rates. Relationships between social vulnerability components and case and mortality rates vary across the conterminous US. Additionally, counties with increased racial and ethnic minorities, higher percentages of minors, and lower median household income are associated with higher COVID-19 case and mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dahl and Lochner (2012) provides some of the first causal evidence of the effects of family income on child achievement using changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. Unfortunately, a coding error in the creation of total family income affects the first stage estimates and inflates the instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Importantly, it does not affect the reduced-form estimates or alter statistical significance of the IV estimates. This response shows that correcting this error does not alter the core findings or main message of the paper. (JEL H24, H31, I21, I38, J13) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity hypothesis, entropy maximization and the Fokker-Planck equation. The origins of the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution and the Pareto power law are discussed in relation to additive and multiplicative stochastic processes. The second part of the paper analyses income distribution data in the USA for the time period 1983-2018 using a two-class decomposition. We present overwhelming evidence that the lower class (more than 90% of the population) is described by the exponential distribution, whereas the upper class (about 4% of the population in 2018) by the power law. We show that the significant growth of inequality during this time period is due to the sharp increase in the upper-class income share, whereas relative inequality within the lower class remains constant. We speculate that the expansion of the upper-class population and income shares may be due to increasing digitization and non-locality of the economy in the last 40 years. This article is part of the theme issue 'Kinetic exchange models of societies and economies'.

Objectives: Previous research in the United States suggests contextual income mobility may play a role in explaining the disparities between life expectancy in the United States and peer countries. This article aims to extend previous research by estimating the consequences of average individual exposure to mobility regimes during childhood and adolescence on adult health., Methods: This study draws its data from two longitudinal datasets that track the county of residence of respondents during childhood and adolescence, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We implement marginal structural models to assess the association of the average exposure to county income mobility on five health outcomes and behaviors., Results: The results are only partially consistent with a systematic association between exposure to income mobility and health outcomes. Evidence obtained from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth suggests less income mobility might increase the probability of smoking by age 30., Discussion: The paper provides a precise assessment of the hypothesis that childhood exposure to income mobility regimes may influence health status through behavior later in life and contribute to longevity gaps. Only partial evidence on smoking suggests an association between income mobility and health, so we discuss potential reasons for the disparities in results with previous research., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

In this paper, factors associated with poverty among refugees were explored using a nationally representative sample in the United States. Relying on the social exclusion theory,) a refugee integration framework was selected as a conceptual framework of the study. Poverty was calculated based on households' income (income poverty) and deprivation in three domains of education, health, and housing (multidimensional poverty). Multivariate models of the study identified limited English language proficiency as the strongest predictor of both income and multidimensional poverty among refugees. The findings call for more attention to English language training among refugees in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Nonfamily farms are responsible for a disproportionate amount of US agriculture production. The importance of these operations to the volume of agriculture production in the United States has led researchers and policymakers to understand nonfamily farms as large commercial operations. This paper examines whether the distinction between family and nonfamily helps explain the financial outcomes of farm operations and households. Design/methodology/approach: We test for differences in financial outcomes of the household and operations of family and nonfamily farms using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. We compare these results to a decomposition of other possible typologies. Findings: We present evidence that nonfamily farms are a heterogeneous group with a majority of small operations that are dominated by a small number of large operations. We discover that differences associated with the family-nonfamily distinction are largely explained by observable farm and operator characteristics that arise mechanically from the definition. However, we find suggestive evidence that family-nonfamily classification captures differences in economic behavior that lead to higher profitability measures to nonfamily farms. We find little evidence of any inherent structural differences between family and nonfamily farms that helps explain financial outcomes related to leverage or household finances. Practical implications: We conclude that including nonfamily farms in official statistics of farm households may provide a more comprehensive overview of the farm sector, as our results suggest that family and nonfamily farms do not have innate differences that help explain many of their financial outcomes. Originality/value: We incorporate previously unused data on nonfamily farm households and test the difference in mean financial outcomes between family and nonfamily farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both interest and noninterest earnings form the two critical components of the income stream of commercial banks. While interest earnings are tied to the lending volume and prevailing interest rates primarily dictated by the monetary policy and central bank interventions, noninterest earnings can come from diversified sources like income from fiduciary activities, trading revenue, service charges on deposit accounts, fee income, etc. Noninterest earnings can be unrelated to lending volume and prevailing interest rates and possibly uncorrelated with the monetary policies. Noninterest earnings may be a more robust source of income, especially during the low-interest rate regimes. Managing the noninterest to interest earnings is a critical component of income smoothing used by the banks. Noninterest earnings have become a significant component of banks' overall earnings in the last four decades, and the ratio of noninterest to interest earnings has also grown significantly, raising questions about the primary role of the banking sector in financial intermediation as defined by the collection and disbursement of loanable funds throughout the economy. The rise in noninterest earnings also raises questions about the potential conflict of interest especially if banks earn significant consulting income from the same entities that borrow heavily from the banks. In this paper, I look at the time series dynamics of the ratio of noninterest-to-interest earnings spanning nearly four decades from 1984:Q1 to 2023:Q3 for the USA's FDICinsured commercial banking sector. Although the ratio has fluctuated over the period and risen from the baseline, it does not exhibit any non-stationarity. The presence of unit root cannot be found during the time period studied. In other words, the ratio of noninterest-to-interest earnings in the US commercial banking sector does not show any explosive and unstainable growth. In a nutshell, the rise in the ratio seems to be an outcome of the broader income diversification strategy used by the banks and not necessarily a dramatic change in the business model of US commercial banking industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerated resolution therapy (ART) is a psychotherapy for the treatment of prolonged grief disorder (PGD) defined as severe, enduring longing for the lost person. Currently, ART lacks examination of intrapersonal processes, like expectancy, as behavioural mechanisms for action. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to present the findings on participants' treatment expectations of ART for PGD and then discuss potential hypotheses for future testing. This study was a primary qualitative descriptive analysis of prospectively collected interview data (collected 2017–2019) accrued as part of a randomised, wait‐list controlled clinical trial in bereaved hospice family caregivers in the United States. The sample included 29 former informal caregivers who were at least 1‐year post death of their care recipient. They were primarily female, older (67.4 ± 7.1 years), and a little over half (n = 18) had been married to their care recipient. Thematic analysis resulted in three distinct themes with six sub‐themes: The role of knowledge in expectations (sub‐themes uncertainty, prior knowledge); The role of personality in expectations (sub‐themes openness, positive affect); and Expecting a process (sub‐themes cognitive processes, affective processes) which described the interaction of person and process in shaping expectations of our intervention. An across theme analysis of the specificity of the participants' expectations uncovered that knowledge and personality inform expectations of ART and that individuals who verbalise a process for recovery tend to be very specific in their expectations. Three hypotheses for testing are put forward and implications for practice, research and policy discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, data-driven approaches have been developed to analyze demographic and economic surveys on a large scale. Despite advances in multivariate techniques and learning methods, in practice the analysis and interpretations are often focused on a small portion of available data and limited to a single perspective. This paper aims to utilize a selected array of multivariate statistical learning methods in the analysis of income and expenditure patterns of households in the United States using the Public-Use Microdata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE). The objective is to propose an effective data pipeline that provides visualizations and comprehensive interpretations for applications in governmental regulations and economic research, using thirty-five original survey variables covering the categories of demographics, income and expenditure. Details on feature extraction not only showcase CE as a unique publicly-shared big data resource with high potential for in-depth analysis, but also assist interested researchers with pre-processing. Challenges from missing values and categorical variables are treated in the exploratory analysis, while statistical learning methods are comprehensively employed to address multiple economic perspectives. Principal component analysis suggests that after-tax income, wage/salary income, and the quarterly expenditure in food, housing and overall as the five most important of the selected variables, while cluster analysis identifies and visualizes the implicit structure between variables. Based on this, canonical correlation analysis reveals high correlation between two selected groups of variables, one of income and the other of expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]