The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes issues related to the U.S. hired farm workers' utilization of health care services and their specific choices among health care provider and health bill payment method options. Using data from the National Agricultural Workers Surveys for the years 2000 to 2012 and controlling for other demographic factors, this study's results indicate that undocumented hired farmworkers are 10.6% and 8.4% less likely to use U.S. and foreign health care, respectively, compared to documented immigrant hired farmworkers. Moreover, the general preference of hired farmworkers in the U.S. tends to lean towards patronizing private clinics and settling their health care bills using out-of-pocket funds. The second chapter of the dissertation investigates the employment time allocation choices of U.S. workers between farm and non-farm work alternatives using individual level data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). Green card farm workers are found to devote smaller share of working time to the farm sector than citizen and undocumented workers, which raises the concern that the legalization of immigrant status could possibly exacerbate farm labor shortage conditions. Language barrier and length of residence in the country are found to play important roles in the time allocation of farm workers between farm and non-farm employment. Moreover, external economic shocks could more easily induce citizen and green card farm workers to abandon farm employment while undocumented workers tend to remain in their farm jobs during such difficult times. The third chapter of this dissertation analyzes the impact of undocumented immigrants emigration caused by E-verify on the wages of the natives and immigrants in the adopting states. Using data from the Current Population Survey for the 2000-2014 period, we examine the heterogeneous wage effects on non-migrant natives and immigrants by industrial and educational group. Immigrants and natives who work in manual industries are found to experience decreases in their wages, while other industries are more likely to witness wage increase. The wage effects of E-verify on natives are found to be smaller and insignificant.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Farmworkers face significant disease burden. Meanwhile, farmworker healthcare utilization is low. This study examined individual, environmental, and policy level correlates of U.S. farmworker healthcare utilization, guided by the Behavioral Model for Vulnerable Populations and the Ecological Model. The 2006-2008 administrations of the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) (N=4,891) provided the primary data for this cross-sectional study. Geographic Information Systems, the 2005 and 2006 Uniform Data System, and rurality/border proximity indices provided environmental variables. To identify factors associated with healthcare use, logistic regression was performed using Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Probability weights were applied in descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses. The alpha level was set at .05 for all analyses. The majority of farmworkers were Hispanic (80.0%) and male (78.4%), with an average age of 35.6 (SE=.3) years. Annual family income (M=22,668.0; SE=304.9) and educational attainment (M=7.7; SE=.1) were low. Just over half (57.3%) used formal U.S. healthcare in the previous two years. Multiple factors were independently associated with healthcare use in multilevel models (all in the expected direction), including, at the individual level: sex, immigration and migrant status, English proficiency, access to transportation, and need; at the environmental level: total FQHC full-time equivalent medical professionals/staff and U.S.-Mexico border proximity; and, at the policy level: insurance status and payment structure. Findings were consistent with those from previous studies of Hispanic populations, as well as the limited literature documenting healthcare use correlates for farmworkers. Numerous individual and policy level moderators of associations between environmental level variables and healthcare use were identified. Using Stata, rates of healthcare use among farmworkers were compared to those among U.S. and other subpopulations with similar sociodemographic characteristics (from the 2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey). Rates of use were significantly lower for farmworkers than for the U.S. and low-income populations. However, they were significantly higher than rates for U.S. Hispanics and a comparison group (i.e., Hispanic, low income, and no educational degree). The low rate of use is concerning due to farmworkers' disproportionate disease burden. Multilevel recommendations for change, emphasizing change to the FQHC system, are made so that healthcare access can be improved for this vulnerable population.

Farm operations in the United States have been exposed to an increased amount of labor-related risk over the past two decades, both in terms of the labor they demand and the labor they supply. Farms increasingly face the risk of having their demand for immigrant labor go unmet, as increased anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and improving conditions in their home countries have reduced the incentives for immigrants from Mexico and Central America to work in the US. On the other hand, off-farm work by at least one member of the household has become the norm for all but the largest farm operations. This increased integration with the off-farm or non-farm labor market, driven in part by growing female labor force participation, has, on the whole, improved the financial situation of the average farm household, relative to the average non-farm household. Off-farm income has also been found to be an important determinant of a farm's ability to pay off debt. However, these boons are not without risk: farm finances become more directly intertwined with the performance of the economy in general and, crucially, increasingly reliant on job opportunities being available locally. As rural economies around the country continue to decline, there are likely to be impacts on the future viability of farm operations, especially for farms that support their operations with income earned off-farm. Because those farms tend to be medium-sized operations (either in acres operated or net farm income), they are the farms that will be most affected by increased volatility in the labor market. Therefore, understanding the impacts of that volatility on farm financial viability may also give insight into the growing trend of farmland concentration, which may have its own part to play in the economic decline of rural areas. Over the same period characterized by increasing rural decline, increasing off-farm labor market participation, and increasing reliance on an increasingly unreliable immigrant labor force, government programs aimed at stabilizing and bolstering farm incomes have changed dramatically. Rather than cash transfer and direct payment programs, crop insurance has become the centerpiece of farm support policies. Although crop insurance protects farms from production risk, anecdotal and theoretical evidence suggests that this may encourage farmers to take on more financial risk. These increased levels of financial risk might, in turn, have implications for the amount or kind of labor used on the farm, or implications for the the extent of the farm household's participation in the labor market. Changing farm support policies may cause farmers, or the members of their households, to substitute time spent on off-farm employment with an increased presence on-farm, or vice versa. Given this situation, it is important to understand the impacts that these areas of increased risk have on farms' more short-term, day-to-day operating decisions as well as on their financial decisions that affect their longer term prospects. Although farm operations today are more reliant on the off-farm labor market than ever before, academic or policy-oriented research on the nature of this link has not kept pace with advances in empirical estimation techniques from the general labor economics literature. These estimation strategies can be applied to farm-level data, which include detailed records of labor demanded by the farm and the hours supplied by different members of the farm household to the non-farm economy. Together, these causal results yield valuable insights on the farm level impact of changes in the labor market. The three essays in this dissertation each address a different facet of the implications of increased on-farm risk. Chapter I, "Behind Every Farmer: Off-farm labor and farm viability," speaks to how changes in the off-farm work opportunities for the farm operator and his spouse differentially affect the amount and kind of debt taken on by the farm business or farm household. The estimation strategy replies on the spatial dispersion of growing and shrinking job opportunities for men and women, drived by increased by import competition from China over the past two decades. These results are important for understanding the extent to which farms need robust, thriving rural economics; they have implications for both farm and rural policy, which may by more and more interconnected in the future. Next, Chapter II addresses how the increased use of Federal crop insurance (FCI) has increased farms' use of short-term debt. This work is well-positioned to be extended to analyze how that increased short-term debt is being used on farm: for example, whether it encourages a increase in the capital-to-labor ratio or reduces the need for off-farm income. The third and final chapter examines the implications of an increasingly volatile supply of labor to the farm by looking at how local immigration enforcement causing labor supply shocks impacts farms' operating decisions. Counties with programs that allowed for increased enforcement of immigration laws operated fewer acres and had fewer workers. Additionally, the results suggest that the ability to substitute for this class of worker, either with machinery or native workers, is limited. American farm operations require access to a stable immigrant labor force in order to ensure expanded operations in the face of global population and income growth.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.

How Immigrants Contribute to Developing Countries' Economies is the result of a project carried out by the OECD Development Centre and the International Labour Organization, with support from the European Union. The report covers the ten project partner countries.