Still Slipping: African-American Women in the Economy and in Society

This article focuses on the progress and regress of African-American women since the publication in 1986 of the author’s Slipping through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women. Gaps between African-American women and other groups (including African-American men and white women) are still reported in education, employment, income, health services, and incarceration. Some experts believe that racial equality has been achieved in the U.S., and affirmative action has slowed. However, the evidence demonstrates that disparity still exists, especially for African-American women at the bottom of income distribution. Their economic status lags behind white women’s. For example, according to the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, the average net worth of a single, middle-aged white woman is $42,600; the average net worth of a single, middle-aged Black woman is $5. This disparity affects not just the women but their children and their educational opportunities.     

The Impact of Mass Incarceration on the Lives of African American Women

This paper examines the consequences of mass incarceration on various aspects of the lives of African-American women. In particular, it seeks to determine how the historically high growth rate in the prison population over the past 30?years has affected employment outcomes, family relationships, and the physical and mental health of Black women who have been incarcerated.     

The Subprime Mortgage Calamity and the African American Woman

Many media and scholarly reports have focused on the subprime mortgage crisis and the resultant global financial meltdown. Most of the literature notes unequivocally that discrimination in the mortgage market has been, and remains, race-based and that it has damaged the African-American population disproportionately. This paper discusses the consequences of the subprime mortgage calamity and its negative impact on the Black community, women in general, and African-American women in particular. After controlling for individual, credit and housing characteristics, research shows that disparities in lending have persisted. Studies indicate that 63% of those given subprime mortgages qualified for prime mortgages. African-American females received the most high-cost loans and were over twice as likely to be given a subprime mortgage compared to White females. Moreover, African-American women were five times more likely to have received a subprime loan than similarly situated White males. Upper-income Black women were more often targeted for high-cost loans than lower-income women of color. As a result, the subprime mortgage crisis has precipitated an enormous loss of home equity and wealth among African-Americans that will affect generations to come.     

Occupation equity: A black and white portrait of women in the united states military

This study examines U.S. military occupation equity with a special focus on African-American women. The dependent variable was occupation category. A three-way interaction of race by gender by mental group was found, making untenable the contention that mental group solely predicts personnel assignment to occupation category. Women, and particularly African-American women, are underrepresented in the core, technical occupations and overrepresented in the nontechnical, support occupations examined in this study. The opposite is true for white men. Social and psychological factors are postulated regarding women’s disproportionate employment in traditionally female and lower status occupations.     

Community economic development: Some critical issues

Community development is an issue of continuing interest not only because of the need for more successful economic development within our cities, but because the survival of a significant portion of African-American poor is at stake. Community development planning seeks to improve all aspects of community life, including health, education, crime prevention, employment and training, business development, family stability, and housing. Community economic development must arise from our black churches, historically black colleges and universities, African-American officials, business leaders, teachers, and health and welfare professionals. In the real world, where group welfare functions are interdependent, only two possible long-term outcomes are both just and stable: win-win or lose-lose. Consequently, there is a need for significant Pareto improvements in all social programs. There are roles for both race-specific and race-neutral policies because long-term Pareto improvements can result both from programs such as targeted minority employment and training as well as color-blind policies that encourage legislators to forgo the coffers of the gun lobby and control the sale and use of guns. The paper will focus on the historical logic of public policy as reflected in housing policy, financing mechanisms under community development corporations, and the issue of an urban underclass. By reestablishing its commitment to the inner cities, the government can redress the onerous impact of two and a half decades of social and economic neglect and private investment re-trenchment.     

Co-Morbidity and Other Complexities Affecting Black Women’s Health

This paper presents some of the major health concerns that affect black women, and examines how various individual health problems co-exist and coincide to create complex health concerns for women. It posits the idea that to effectively address a Black woman’s health, her mental, emotional, social, economic and even spiritual health must be considered as well as her physical condition. The paper focuses largely on the information from individual health-related research presentations at “The Invisible Woman” conference held at Bennett College in March 18–19, 2011 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At this event, scholars presented new research on HIV, obesity and mental health—three areas of critical concern for African–American women—examining ways in which these conditions affect Black women. The paper also addresses the role of health care access and policy in addressing these and other health concerns among women and within the black community. The review of the literature highlights the importance of examining health—perhaps especially Black women’s health—from social, cultural, behavioral, environmental and economic perspectives. It also points out the continued need for research that includes women and people of color.     

Finding the fat: The relative impact of budget fluctuations on African-American schools

On average, per pupil expenditures were much lower in schools attended by African-American children than in schools attended by whites during the period of de jure segregation. Little is known, however, about what motivated school boards to maintain this inequality or why they funded African-American schools at all. Using newly collected data on schools in early twentieth-century Georgia and exploiting a funding shock resulting from the rules regarding appropriations from the State School Fund, this paper examines how school boards divvied up the proceeds of exogenous shifts in school budgets by race. In response to a one dollar per pupil budget cut, instructional expenditures in white schools fell by $1.21 per pupil, while they remained almost unchanged in African-American schools. Thus, whites, rather than African Americans, bore the brunt of budget cuts, indicating that there was little fat to trim from the budgets of African-American schools.     

从生殖健康角度看女性乡—城迁移工人的生活风险

在城市就业、生活的女性乡—城迁移工人普遍存在生殖健康问题,本文从生活风险后果及如何防范的角度对这个问题进行了研究,认为除了提高女性乡—城迁移工人自身生殖健康知识和防治生殖健康疾病的能力之外,政府有必要通过公共部门及企业对女性乡—城迁移工人的生殖健康问题进行干预,更好地维护劳动力市场的稳定性,提高女性乡—城迁移工人在城市地区的生活水平。     

Maternal Depression and the Production of Infant Health

Depression is most prevalent among women of childbearing age and among low-income women, and the medical literature shows it to have adverse effects on infant health. Yet maternal depression has been overlooked in economic studies of infant health production. This research incorporates maternal depressive symptoms into a standard infant health production model and estimates both structural and reduced-form birth weight equations using samples of non-Hispanic white and black women from the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey. A byproduct of this research is an empirical investigation into factors associated with maternal depressive symptoms. All results show that depressive symptoms have a negative effect on birth weight and that they may operate through several channels such as smoking and prenatal care.     

Panel Data Analysis of Regional Differentials in the Registered Voter Turnout Rate and the Expected Benefits of Voting for Minorities

Voter participation rates vary widely across the 50 states. We seek to identify a source of this interstate variation, focusing upon the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 general elections. Of note is that the latter two general elections featured a minority (i.e., African-American) nominee for president from one of the major political parties. Within the context of the rational voter model, we hypothesize that the presence of a minority candidate atop the ticket will boost minorities’ expected net benefits from voting, with the result that minority voter participation will be higher. Based on cross-sectional fixed-effects estimations, we find that states’ voter participation rates were unaffected by the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2000 and 2004 election cycles, while states’ voter participation rates were positively related to the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2008 and 2012 election cycles.     

Employment implications of a changing health-care system

The American health-care system has undergone rapid growth and structural change over the past 20 years. Because of the increase in expenditures flowing into the system, total employment in the industry has increased significantly. Along with total employment, the employment of black women has also grown. Unfortunately, however, black women continue to be concentrated in the lowest paying of the health occupations. Efforts to improve the occupational distribution of blacks in general and black women in particular are going to be more difficult in the future because of the dominance of cost containment as the nations primary health policy goal.     

我国中老年人健康需求影响因素的实证研究——基于CHARLS数据的分析

本文依据中国健康与养老追踪调查(CHARLS)2012年的数据,运用Probit有序选择模型,对影响我国中老年人健康需求的因素进行实证研究。由模型估计结果得出结论:1男性的健康水平高于女性的健康水平,城镇居民的健康水平高于农村居民;2综合来看,年轻时良好的健康水平和稳定的婚姻状况对中老年健康有正向的显著影响。年龄和教育对健康需求的影响比较符合Grossman模型的预测结果,且显著,收入对健康的影响不太符合Grossman模型的预测;3以性别做为分组变量的模型估计结果显示,教育对女性的健康影响更大,婚姻状况和收入对男性的影响更显著;以城乡为分组变量的模型估计结果表明,收入和教育对农村居民的健康水平有更大的影响。     

General health conditions and medical insurance issues concerning black women

In the last 30 years the health status of black women has improved. However, the likelihood of health problems from complications of pregnancy and childbirth or prolonged illness from combined effects of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity remains. The need for continuity of care for these conditions and the low economic status of black women suggest that current policy shifts away from emphasis on increased access to medical care will adversely affect the health status of black women. Policies to contain health-care costs should therefore be designed to assure appropriate access to needed care for black women and other low-income groups.     

Race and cesarean delivery in Florida

At a time when the Clinton Administration has set a goal of eliminating racial disparities in health by the year 2010, medical experts are struggling to understand one of the most glaring, and least talked about, disparities of all: death in childbirth. In a study made public this spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported that black women in the U.S. were nearly four times as likely to die during delivery, or shortly thereafter, as white women. The disparity, which has remained about the same for the last four decades, holds true even for women who … are middle class and have health insurance. The findings … have renewed interest among scientists and legislators in a problem that many peoole think no longer exists … Dr. David Satcher, the United States Surgeon General, (says) “the disparity is important. In this country, we have a certain standard of expectation about the risk of women dying in pregnancy, and black women are off the scale right now.” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Black Mothers' Mortality Rate Under Scrutiny,” Front Page, 8 Aug. 1999 New York Times)     

The effects of female HIV/AIDS status on fertility and child health in Cambodia

Although Cambodia has been on a higher growth track, it still faces a great challenge in public health. Public health is closely related to the standard of living of the people and is indispensable for further economic development. This paper considers a serious public health problem, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Cambodia. Specifically, it presents two testable hypotheses derived from a simple model and then empirically demonstrates these hypotheses, using data of more than 8000 women from the 2005 Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). One hypothesis is the negative effect of female HIV on fertility, and the other is the positive effect of maternal HIV on child health status. Our estimation results are consistent with these hypotheses, implying that women infected with HIV tend to bear fewer children and their children are in better health.     

The Incredible Shrinking Black Woman: Implications of Health Policies

Black American women are shrinking in height at a faster rate than other groups, a phenomenon that has consequences for the physical health and economic well-being of black females. Relative to the cohort born from 1955 to 1974, the most recent cohort (1970–1986) of black American women and girls have lost more than half an inch (approximately 0.56) in height. Adult height is a measure of net nutrition acquired during childhood and adolescence and is correlated with a wide variety of economic and health outcomes. Simultaneously, the body mass index (BMI) among blacks has also increased at a faster rate than whites in both the periods of 1988–1994 (1.06 kg/m2) and 1999–2002. Black women and girls, in particular, experienced the greatest increase in BMI since the 1990s. Evidence that black American women are shrinking and BMI is growing highlights the need to examine the nutritional intake of black girls during childhood and adolescence; early nutritional deficiencies have persistent impact over their life course. In this policy brief, we consider several public health policy interventions that affect black girls’ nutritional intake across the life course, particularly during childhood and adolescence.     

The effect of family planning exposure on fertility choices and reproductive health care in rural Pakistan

This paper investigates whether family planning exposure mainly through the Lady Health Worker Program has had any effect on women’s fertility choices and use of reproductive health care service in rural Pakistan, using the 2013 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS). Exploiting variations in the program intensity across regions, we conduct instrumental variables (IV) estimation on the impact of family planning exposure on women’s fertility preferences and reproductive behaviors. Our analysis shows that even in the presence of strong son preferences in Pakistan, increasing family planning exposure reduces women’s incentive to have additional children. Moreover, family planning exposure is associated with more antenatal care visits, more deliveries performed by skilled professionals, and a greater chance of delivery at the health center. Finally, we examine the heterogeneity in the effect on fertility preference by age group and education level, and find that the effect is mainly significant for the educated and young women.     

Things Fall Apart: Health Consequences of Mass Imprisonment for African American Women

In this article, we examine the possible impact of mass imprisonment on the physical health of African American women. Specifically, we focus on a variety of mechanisms through which mass imprisonment may increase the risk of having three major chronic health conditions that are risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD): hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. This approach is distinctive in that it provides a broad theoretical framework through which mass imprisonment might harm the physical health of African American women in ways separate from the pathways linking mass imprisonment to their risk of contracting infectious diseases (especially HIV and other STIs), which has been the emphasis of most research in this area. In order to draw these connections, we begin by briefly discussing what mass imprisonment is and its social consequences. We then discuss our three CVD risk factors, documenting disparities between white and African American women in these risk factors and discussing mechanisms through which mass imprisonment might contribute to these disparities. We close by discussing the data needed to test our hypotheses and suggesting some avenues for future research.     

健康人力资本与性别工资差异

现有对性别工资差异的研究大多是基于教育、经验等人力资本对工资的影响进行分析而忽视了健康人力资本的作用。本文运用中国健康与营养调查数据,将健康人力资本引入工资决定模型,对我国劳动力市场上健康人力资本对工资的影响以及性别工资差异进行了实证分析。研究发现：健康人力资本是影响我国居民工资收入的重要因素;我国劳动力市场上存在明显的性别工资差异,女性工资显著低于男性;利用Oaxaca—Cotton的分解方法发现性别工资差异中大约只有20％可以被个体特征合理解释,余下的部分被认为是对女性的歧视和没能观测到的因素所致。健康人力资本对工资的边际贡献在性别之间的差异是性别工资差异的重要来源。     

The quantity–quality trade-off related to investment in healthy human capital: New evidence from the implementation of the “selective two-child policy” in China

Using data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), and employing the “selective two-child policy” as a quasi-natural experiment, this study provides empirical evidence of Becker’s quantity-quality tradeoff theory. We find that the selective two-child policy reduced households’ investment in health insurance for their first-child. The proportion of participated families and the amount invested in health insurance declined significantly among families in which one spouse was an only child. The reduction in investment in health insurance was more substantial when the first-child was a girl and when the first-child was younger. One likely mechanism was the wage penalty for motherhood. The relaxed birth policy led to a significant reduction in women’s income. As a result, households’ financial resources became more limited, and their budgets became tighter, leading to reductions in investments in the health of first-child.