Population Research and Policy Review最新文献

Using data from the American Community Survey for 2014–2018, we provide empirical evidence about the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of South Asian Americans. Our study investigates not only Indians, but also provides the first multivariate analyses for Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Sri Lankans. The focus is on second-generation South Asians, but some descriptive statistics are shown for first-generation immigrants. In comparison to Whites, the educational distributions of first-generation immigrants are bimodal to varying degrees across the South Asian groups. However, with the exception of the Nepalese, all of the native-born South Asian groups obtain higher levels of education than Whites. Poverty among South Asian groups tends to reflect their educational levels so that poverty rates decline between the first-generation and the native-born, but second-generation Bangladeshi and Pakistani have somewhat higher than expected poverty due to family size and composition. Second-generation Indians, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans are more likely to be affluent than Whites, and these differences are partly but not fully explained by educational and other demographic characteristics. Other findings provide no support for the popular claim that the wages of second-generation South Asian groups are disadvantaged in comparison to Whites.

Sparsely populated areas of developed countries are regions of great demographic diversity and dynamism. While they remain strategically and economically important, trends in urbanization and technology have increased their relative sparsity and isolation making centralized government, service delivery and planning a challenge. Populations of their sub-jurisdictions are small and often exhibit significant heterogeneity in key demographic characteristics, not least between their Indigenous first residents and non-Indigenous citizens. Development of projection models for these areas is challenged by significant input data paucity, biases and structural issues related to the data collection and estimation architectures in place to gather input data across diverse and small populations. While this is the case, the demand for and importance of projections is no less for sparsely populated areas than elsewhere. Variants of the cohort component model are important tools for population projections for SPAs, with their grounding in the demographic accounting equation and modest input requirements. Nevertheless, to attain fit-for-purpose input data requires demographers to consider and select from a growing number of methods for smoothing issues with input data for projections for these regions. In this article we analyze the contributions of recent advances in methods for estimating fertility, mortality, and migration rates for small and diverse populations such as those in SPAs, focusing on the very sparsely populated jurisdiction of the Northern Territory of Australia. In addition to the contributions of our method itself, results at the detailed level demonstrate how abnormal and challenging ‘doing’ projections for sparsely populated areas can be.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that employment is an important social context affecting fertility, yet relatively little is known about the extent to which work characteristics affect fertility expectations. Using over 25 years of data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we analyzed the associations between part-time work and characteristics associated with autonomy over working time, specifically self-employment and managerial/professional occupation, and childbearing expectations among women ages 18–45 (N = 4,415). Logistic regression models for longitudinal data reveal that work characteristics are significantly associated with fertility expectations, but that the specific nature of the relationship varies by parity. Among women with one child, those working part-time had predicted probabilities of expecting to have additional children that were 2% higher than those working full-time. In contrast, among women without any children, those working part-time had predicted probabilities that were 2% lower than those working full-time. Similar contrasting relationships by parity were found when comparing self-employed women to employees and managers/professionals to those in other occupations. Findings were consistent across racial and ethnic groups. These results suggest that different mechanisms link work characteristics to fertility plans for mothers and non-mothers, specifically that role incompatibility and work-family conflict are more salient for mothers but that financial strain is so for non-mothers.

This paper estimates the effect of the OxyContin reformulation and the subsequent heroin crisis on grandparent caregiving in the United States—grandparents who are primarily responsible for their grandchildren. The empirical approach is a difference-in-differences and a series of event studies that exploit variation in the timing of the reformulation of OxyContin and geographic variation in pre-reformulation rates of nonmedical use of OxyContin across states. I find that a standard deviation increase in pre-reformulation nonmedical use of OxyContin leads to higher grandparent caregiving. Increases range from 2.5 to 8.5%, on average, relative to the baseline mean. This change is more pronounced among grandparents between 46 and 65 years of age. When I examine changes in heroin-related mortality as a possible mechanism, I find modest increases in grandparent caregiving when no parents are present or when no or only one parent is present of 1.80 and 1.50% of the baseline mean, on average.

In this paper, we investigate the long-term effects of the Vietnam War on physical and mental health outcomes of Vietnamese who were children (age 6 to 9 and 10 to 14), teenagers (age 15 to 19), and young adults (age 20 +) during the war, including differences by gender and military participation, and examine the ways in which these effects are moderated by age. Research has documented that the effects of war on physical and mental health may linger well into late adulthood, suggesting a scarring effect of war among wartime children in particular. However, the degree to which scarring differentially affects younger versus older children, or children versus teenagers and young adults, is not well established. Using detailed individual level health data provided by the Vietnam Health and Aging Study (VHAS), we examine the association between the age of exposure to warfare and long-term physical and mental health outcomes of affected cohorts. Our analysis shows that early childhood exposure has long-lasting detrimental effects on an array of adult health outcomes. Wartime children who were exposed before their teen years are significantly more susceptible to functional and physical limitations, and impaired ability to perform daily activities, as older adults. Our results also indicate that while war exposure associates positively with PTSD across all age cohorts, it is pre-teens that are statistically most likely to suffer in old age compared to their older counterparts, suggesting both physical and mental health could be scarred by early childhood exposure to war. Additionally, we find that male wartime children are more likely to suffer from physical limitations, while female wartime children appear to experience PTSD symptoms over the course of their lives. Moreover, children who remained civilian over the course of war disproportionally suffered adverse long-term health effects of war. Taking these findings together, they indicate the importance of post-conflict policy that prioritizes mitigating efforts aimed at improving both physical and mental health of children, particularly those at risk. These targeted post-war policies are critical for not only the post-war recovery, but also for peacekeeping operations within conflict-torn countries.

This paper studies the relationship between homeownership and completed fertility. We hypothesize that homeownership unaffordability decreases completed fertility by delaying the start of childbearing, thus, increasing the mother’s age at first birth. Applying a Cox Proportional Hazard model on the 2000 US Census and the 2015–2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that renters delay childbearing relative to homeowners. Using the same methodology and the 2000 US Census, we find that renters in relatively unaffordable real estate markets delay the start of childbearing more than those in more affordable ones. Lastly, we use the 1990 US Census and an Ordinary Least-Squares regression, to show that women’s age at first birth is negatively associated with completed fertility. These results provide evidence that the lack of affordable (owned) housing delays the start of childbearing which reduces completed fertility. Thus, even temporary housing unaffordability, especially difficulty to transition to homeownership, might have long-lasting effects on the age pyramid.

A wave of restrictive immigration policies implemented over the past several decades dramatically increased immigrant detentions and deportations in the United States (U.S.), with important consequences for a host of immigrant outcomes. Still, questions remain as to how temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement within and across the U.S. shaped racialized legal status inequities in health and well-being, particularly among those employed in precarious occupations. To fill this gap, we interrogated the links between changes in county-level immigration enforcement and racialized legal status inequalities in musculoskeletal pain and social welfare benefits utilization among U.S. agricultural workers over nearly two decades (2002–2018). We merged data from three sources [(1) restricted-access, geocoded data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) (n = 37,619); (2) county-level immigration enforcement data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC); and (3) population data from the Census and American Community Survey (ACS)] and estimated linear probability models with year, month, and state fixed effects. We show that, in counties with high enforcement rates, workers—especially undocumented workers—were at increased risk of musculoskeletal pain, including pain that was severe. Heightened enforcement was also associated with declines in needs-based benefits utilization, especially among documented and U.S.-citizen non-White workers and undocumented White and non-White workers. Together, these findings highlight how changes in sociopolitical and legal contexts can shift and maintain racialized legal status hierarchies, with especially important consequences for the well-being of vulnerable workers.

Determining whether a household is ‘in poverty,’ requires identifying a resource unit, typically consisting of individuals who both co-reside and pool resources. High levels of family complexity and fluidity in living arrangements among contemporary American families, particularly those that include children, have complicated this task. We leverage novel survey data from Wisconsin to examine the implications of a range of alternative criteria for identifying the resource unit used to measure poverty. We further consider the extent to which unit members, under alternative criteria, exchange food-related resources both within and outside of the unit. Our results reveal inconsistencies between alternative measures of the resource unit and those used to define the resource unit for the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) in the United States, and we find that the SPM unit is generally more consistent than the OPM unit with alternative measures of the resource unit. In addition, we find substantial levels of food resource exchanges among adults who are both inside and outside the resource unit. Together, these findings demonstrate the challenge of appropriately defining the resource unit for measuring poverty and suggest that both the OPM and SPM may not fully account for the availability, amount, or composition of resources for many households.

Abstract

Using data from the 2013 through 2021 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Transition into Adulthood Supplement (PSID-TAS), this study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sexual activity among young adults. Particular attention is given to the mechanisms that might explain the decline in sexual activity during the pandemic. We find that fewer young adults report having had recent sexual intercourse during the COVID-19 pandemic relative to what would have been expected in the absence of a pandemic. However, we do not find a significant decline in the frequency of sexual intercourse among young adults who did have sex. A pandemic-induced decline in the likelihood of being in a romantic relationship, a decrease in the frequency of alcohol consumption, and an increase in parental coresidence explain the bulk of the decline in young adult sexual activity during the pandemic. In contrast, changes in young adults’ employment and college attendance, self-rated health, and psychological distress do not explain the reduced sexual activity during the pandemic.

Population projections are used by a number of local agencies to better prepare for the future resource needs of counties, ensuring that educational, health, housing, and economic demands of individuals are met. Meeting the specific needs of a county’s population, such as what resources to provide, where to target resources, and ensure an equitable distribution of those resources, requires population projections which are both demographically detailed, such as by age, race, and ethnicity, and geographically precise, such as at the census tract level. Despite this need, an evaluation of which methods are best suited to produce population projections at this level are lacking. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy of several cohort-based methods for small area population projections by race and ethnicity. We apply these methods to population projections of King County, Washington and assess the validity of projections using past population estimates. We find a clear pattern that demonstrates while simplified methods perform well in near term forecasts, methods which employ smoothing strategies perform better in long-term forecasting scenarios. Furthermore, we demonstrate that model’s incorporating multiple stages of smoothing can provide detailed insights into the projected population size of King county and the places and groups which will most contribute to this growth. Detailed projections, such as those provided by multi-stage smoothing methods, enable city planners and policy makers a detailed view of the future structure of their county’s population and provide for them a resource to better meet the needs of future populations.