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The MPRC Associate Director was invited to share her expertise in the evaluation of public policies with the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute

Are Enrollment Gains From Conditional Cash Transfers Sustained After Program Rollback? Evidence From Mexico

Health Contextualized: Inequalities in Physiological Function at the Intersection of Race, Skin Color, and Place

A rapidly growing literature has documented the adverse social, economic and, recently, health impacts of experiencing incarceration in the United States. Despite the insights that this work has provided in consistently documenting the deleterious effects of incarceration, little is known about the specific timing of criminal justice contact and early health consequences during the transition from adolescence to adulthood-a critical period in the life course, particularly for the development of poor health. Previous literature on the role of incarceration has also been hampered by the difficulties of parsing out the influence that incarceration exerts on health from the social and economic confounding forces that are linked to both criminal justice contact and health. This paper addresses these two gaps in the literature by examining the association between incarceration and health in the United States during the transition to adulthood, and by using an analytic approach that better isolates the association of incarceration with health from the multitude of confounders which could be alternatively driving this association. In this endeavor, we make use of variable-rich data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 10,785) and a non-parametric Bayesian machine learning technique- Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. Our results suggest that the experience of incarceration at this stage of the life course increases the probability of depression, adversely affects the perception of general health status, but has no effect on the probability of developing hypertension in early adulthood. These findings signal that incarceration in emerging adulthood is an important stressor that can have immediate implications for mental and general health in early adulthood, and may help to explain long lasting implications incarceration has for health across the life course.

Student loans have become a social-financial issue in the United States. This study uses a nationally representative dataset to examine the association between financial socialization and student loan borrowing behavior of individuals after controlling a number of different socio-demographic factors. Results show that the financial burdens of college education, such as borrowing and the dollar amounts of a loan, are higher for Blacks, however, their college attendance is significantly lower than Whites. Blacks are more independent and receive less financial support from family and relatives than Whites. The wealth gap that exists between Black and White parents may contribute to the disparity. Additional financial resources for higher education as well as financial education and counseling may be needed to create better academic access for the vulnerable underserved groups including minority students.

Having first reached epidemic proportions in coastal metropolitan areas, COVID-19 has spread 4 around the country. Reported case rates vary across counties from zero to 125 per thousand 5 population (around a state prison in the rural county of Trousdale, Tennessee). Overall, rural 6 counties are underrepresented relative to their share of the population, but a growing proportion 7 of all daily cases and deaths have been reported in rural counties. This analysis uses daily 8 reports for all counties to present the trends and distribution of COVID-19 cases and deaths in 9 rural counties, from late March to May 16, 2020. I describe the relationship between population 10 density and case rates in rural and non-rural counties. Then I focus on noteworthy outbreaks 11 linked to prisons, meat and poultry plants, and nursing homes, many of which are linked to 12 high concentrations of Hispanic, American Indian, and Black populations. The growing 13 epidemic in rural counties is apparently driven by outbreaks concentrated in these institutional 14 settings, which are conducive to transmission. The impact of the epidemic in rural areas may 15 be heightened due to their weaker health infrastructure and more vulnerable populations, 16 especially due to age, socioeconomic status, and health conditions. As a result, the epidemic 17 may contribute to the ongoing decline of health, economic, and social conditions in rural areas.

MPRC Director Michael Rendall is working with Faculty Associate Paul Torrens, Geography, to analyze social, economic, and health outcomes for New Orleanians

The quantitative scholarship on domestic labor has documented the existence of a gender gap in its performance in all countries for which data are available. Only recently have researchers begun to analyze economic disparities  among  women in their time spent doing housework, and their studies have been largely limited to the U.S. We extend this line of inquiry using data from two European countries, the former West Germany and Sweden. We estimate the “economic gap” in women’s housework time, which we define as the difference between the time spent by women at the lowest and highest deciles of their own earnings. We expect this gap to be smaller in Sweden given its celebrated success at reducing both gender and income inequality. Though Swedish women do spend less time on domestic labor, however, and though there is indeed less earnings inequality among them, the economic gap in their housework is only a little smaller than among women in the former West Germany. In both places, a significant negative association between women’s individual earnings and their housework time translates into economic gaps of more than 2.5 hours per week. Moreover, in both countries, women at the highest earnings decile experience a gender gap in housework that is smaller by about 4 hours per week compared to their counterparts at the lowest decile.

Numerous surveys link interview data to administrative records, conditional on respondent consent, in order to explore new and innovative research questions. Optimizing the linkage consent rate is a critical step toward realizing the scientific advantages of record linkage and minimizing the risk of linkage consent bias. Linkage consent rates have been shown to be particularly sensitive to certain design features, such as where the consent question is placed in the questionnaire and how the question is framed. However, the interaction of these design features and their relative contributions to the linkage consent rate have never been jointly studied, raising the practical question of which design feature (or combination of features) should be prioritized from a consent rate perspective. We address this knowledge gap by reporting the results of a placement and framing experiment embedded within separate telephone and Web surveys. We find a significant interaction between placement and framing of the linkage consent question on the consent rate. The effect of placement was larger than the effect of framing in both surveys, and the effect of framing was only evident in the Web survey when the consent question was placed at the end of the questionnaire. Both design features had negligible impact on linkage consent bias for a series of administrative variables available for consenters and non-consenters. We conclude this research note with guidance on the optimal administration of the linkage consent question.

A growing body of sociological research has shown that racial identification is not only fluid, but crucially depends on other individual- and societal-level factors. When such factors are also associated with socioeconomic outcomes such as earnings, estimates of the disadvantage experienced by individuals because of how they identify racially obtained from standard regression models may be biased. We illustrate this potential bias using data from a large-scale survey conducted by the Mexican census bureau. This survey is the first by the government agency since the country’s independence to include a question on black identification. We find evidence of a substantial bias in estimates of racial disadvantage. Results from our initial models treating racial self-identification as an exogenous predictor indicate that black men have higher earnings than non-black men. However, when we use an instrumental variables model that treats racial self-identification as endogenous, that is, as a function of the same unobserved characteristics as individuals’ earnings, we find a significant negative effect of black identification on earnings. While previous studies have acknowledged the endogeneity of race, ours is the first to explicitly model racial self-identification as an endogenous predictor to obtain an unbiased estimate of its effect on individuals’ socioeconomic conditions.