Students across the United States experience high levels of contact with the police. To clarify the causal relationships of this contact with educational outcomes and the mechanisms by which such ...relationships arise, we estimate the effects of arrest on student engagement with school using daily attendance data. Recently arrested students missed significantly more school than did students who would be arrested later in the school year. The effects of arrest on attendance can be attributed to suspensions and court appearances; we found little evidence of changes in absences due to health or skipping school. These results suggest that institutional, not student centric, mechanisms drive the relationship between arrest and educational outcomes. Were it not for institutional channels, particularly exclusionary discipline, arrested students would likely remain more engaged in school. Estimates are similar for white and black students, but black students are differentially affected because they are arrested at higher rates.
We provide novel evidence on the broader impacts of school choice systems by quantifying disparities in peer continuity from middle to high school in New York City. We find that Black and Hispanic ...students and those in high-poverty neighborhoods attend high school with a much smaller fraction of their middle school or neighborhood peers than their White, Asian, and low-poverty neighborhood counterparts. Disparities also emerge in peer isolation: 27% and 20% of Black and Hispanic students transitioned with no other student from their middle school, while only 7% to 8% of White and Asian students did. Group differences in choice similarity, which in part reflects systematic variation in the number of local school options, drive this result.
Unplanned or unwanted pregnancies and births are linked to adverse maternal outcomes, but the extent to which such relationships hold for all racial/ethnic groups remains unknown. In this paper, I ...use large-scale data to estimate unadjusted and inverse propensity weighted associations between a five-level measure of pregnancy intention and six indicators of maternal well-being among separate samples of white, Black, and Hispanic mothers. I find substantial racial/ethnic variation. White and Hispanic mothers who reported that their pregnancies were mistimed, unwanted, or that they were unsure how they felt were significantly more likely to experience adverse outcomes than same-race/ethnicity mothers who reported that their pregnancy was intended, but the pattern was much more tenuous for Black mothers. After adjusting for potential confounding variables, relationships between pregnancy intentions and adverse outcomes remain substantial only for white and Hispanic mothers.Unplanned or unwanted pregnancies and births are linked to adverse maternal outcomes, but the extent to which such relationships hold for all racial/ethnic groups remains unknown. In this paper, I use large-scale data to estimate unadjusted and inverse propensity weighted associations between a five-level measure of pregnancy intention and six indicators of maternal well-being among separate samples of white, Black, and Hispanic mothers. I find substantial racial/ethnic variation. White and Hispanic mothers who reported that their pregnancies were mistimed, unwanted, or that they were unsure how they felt were significantly more likely to experience adverse outcomes than same-race/ethnicity mothers who reported that their pregnancy was intended, but the pattern was much more tenuous for Black mothers. After adjusting for potential confounding variables, relationships between pregnancy intentions and adverse outcomes remain substantial only for white and Hispanic mothers.
Women in the United States are much more likely to become mothers as teens than those in other rich countries. Teen births are particularly likely to be reported as unintended, leading to debate over ...whether better information on sex and contraception might lead to reductions in teen births. We contribute to this debate by providing causal evidence at the population level. Our causal identification strategy exploits county-level variation in the timing and receipt of federal funding for more comprehensive sex education and data on age-specific teen birth rates at the county level constructed from birth certificate natality data covering all births in the United States. Our results show that federal funding for more comprehensive sex education reduced county-level teen birth rates by more than 3%. Our findings thus complement the mixed evidence to date from randomized control trials on teen pregnancies and births by providing population-level causal evidence that federal funding for more comprehensive sex education led to reductions in teen births.
The prevention of unplanned or unintended pregnancies continues to be a cornerstone of U.S. reproductive health policy, but the evidence that such pregnancies cause adverse maternal and child ...outcomes is limited. In this research note, we examine these relationships using recent large-scale data and inverse propensity weights estimated from generalized boosted models. We find that pregnancy timing is related to maternal experience during pregnancy, but not to infant outcomes at birth—both of which are consistent with prior research. In an addition to the literature, we show that pregnancy timing is relevant for a number of maternal outcomes, such as the onset of depression and intimate partner violence, changes in smoking behavior, and receipt of medical care. These findings suggest that policy intended to improve infant welfare by preventing unintended pregnancies has little empirical support, but that policy focused on increasing reproductive autonomy and maternal well-being has the potential to improve outcomes.
Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetically heterogeneous inherited disorder arising from dysmotility of motile cilia and sperm. This is associated with a variety of ultrastructural defects of ...the cilia and sperm axoneme that affect movement, leading to clinical consequences on respiratory-tract mucociliary clearance and lung function, fertility, and left-right body-axis determination. We performed whole-genome SNP-based linkage analysis in seven consanguineous families with PCD and central-microtubular-pair abnormalities. This identified two loci, in two families with intermittent absence of the central-pair structure (chromosome 6p21.1, Zmax 6.7) and in five families with complete absence of the central pair (chromosome 6q22.1, Zmax 7.0). Mutations were subsequently identified in two positional candidate genes, RSPH9 on chromosome 6p21.1 and RSPH4A on chromosome 6q22.1. Haplotype analysis identified a common ancestral founder effect RSPH4A mutation present in UK-Pakistani pedigrees. Both RSPH9 and RSPH4A encode protein components of the axonemal radial spoke head. In situ hybridization of murine Rsph9 shows gene expression restricted to regions containing motile cilia. Investigation of the effect of knockdown or mutations of RSPH9 orthologs in zebrafish and Chlamydomonas indicate that radial spoke head proteins are important in maintaining normal movement in motile, “9+2”-structure cilia and flagella. This effect is rescued by reintroduction of gene expression for restoration of a normal beat pattern in zebrafish. Disturbance in function of these genes was not associated with defects in left-right axis determination in humans or zebrafish.
In this study, we contrast period and cohort approaches to answering the question: Is US fertility now below replacement? The answer would appear to be an unambiguous “yes” based on period trends in ...the total fertility rate (TFR). Since 2007, TFR has declined from 2.12, just above the replacement level set by demographic tradition at 2.10 births per woman, to 1.67 in 2022, leading many to speculate that the United States has now entered a sustained period of below-replacement fertility. A quite different picture emerges from cohort trends in the cumulative fertility rate (CFR), a cohort measure that is not subject to biases that can distort period TFRs. For older birth cohorts of US women—those born between 1959 and 1987 and who were thus age 33 or older in 2020—observed or projected CFRs at age 45 vary between 2.00 and 2.24 births per woman. For younger cohorts—those born between 1988 and 2010 and who were 10 to 32 as of 2020—we project CFRs at age 45 that are below 2.00, with these declines attributable to falling fertility at younger ages. We thus conclude that from a cohort perspective, the question “Is US fertility now below replacement” should be replaced by the question “Will lifetime fertility fall below replacement for the youngest cohorts of US women?”, with the answer to this latter question depending on the extent to which decreases observed at early ages in these cohorts will or will not be offset by future increases at later ages.
Objectives
Much of reproductive health care policy in the United States focuses on enabling women to have intended pregnancies. Investigating whether the association between pregnancy intention and ...adverse outcomes for mothers and children in the immediate and longer term is due to intention or a mother's demographics provides valuable context for policy makers aiming to improve maternal and child outcomes.
Methods
We investigated relationships between pregnancy intention and pregnancy, infant, early childhood, and maternal outcomes using data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System survey, conducted 2–8 months after the child's birth, and follow‐up surveys from three states (Alaska, Missouri, and Oklahoma), administered at age 2–3 years old. We used logistic regressions with inverse propensity weights to measure associations, accounting for potential confounding factors.
Results
After inverse propensity weighting, pregnancy intention was associated with adverse maternal pregnancy behaviors but not most infant outcomes. Mothers who reported an unwanted pregnancy were associated with increased odds of the child receiving a developmental delay diagnosis. Among those who did not report depression prior to pregnancy, mothers with unwanted pregnancies were more likely to experience persistent depression, and mothers with pregnancies mistimed by two or more years had a higher likelihood of experiencing depression postpartum or in the follow up period.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that pregnancy intention is less consequential for maternal and child well‐being than socio‐economic disadvantage, suggesting that re‐orienting policy toward social conditions and reproductive autonomy will serve better individual and population health.
This paper uses birth certificate data to provide novel estimates of the age-specific risk of a low birth weight birth (LBW, an infant born weighting <2500 g) for U.S.-born non-Hispanic Black and ...White mothers, and finds that patterns vary markedly over space and time. Notably, risk of an LBW birth for Black mothers increased much more steeply with age in 1991–94 than in 2014–17. This decline in LBW risks among older Black mothers led to a decline in the Black-White LBW gap of more than half a percentage point. Both patterns and changes were regional; while age gradients on the Black-White LBW gap were lowest in the South in 1991–94, by 2014–17 they had increased in the South and declined in the rest of the country. These descriptive data allow a new examination of hypotheses regarding the causes of age-specific racial LBW gaps. Research has found that racial disparities in a number of health outcomes, including LBW, increase with age, leading some to speculate that this increase is due to the cumulative effects of exposure to disadvantage. The large degree of variability in Black-White LBW disparities suggests that age-specific causes may also play a role. A series of counterfactual trend analyses explore the roles of two specific mechanisms, smoking and hypertension, and compares these to a more fundamental indicator of socioeconomic status: education.
•This paper examines changes in Black-White birth weight disparities over space and time using US birth certificate data.•Disparities in low birth weight declined from 1991-94 to 2014-17, with gaps narrowing by more than 20% at some ages.•Almost all of this decline occurred at older ages (25-39).•These changes were much less prevalent in the South, where disparities had been smallest in 1991-94.•Changes in both cumulative and age-specific factors likely contributed to these declines.
Aim
Exposure to road traffic and air pollution may be a trigger of acute myocardial infarction, but the individual pollutants responsible for this effect have not been established. We assess the role ...of combustion-derived-nanoparticles in mediating the adverse cardiovascular effects of air pollution.
Methods and results
To determine the in vivo effects of inhalation of diesel exhaust components, 16 healthy volunteers were exposed to (i) dilute diesel exhaust, (ii) pure carbon nanoparticulate, (iii) filtered diesel exhaust, or (iv) filtered air, in a randomized double blind cross-over study. Following each exposure, forearm blood flow was measured during intra-brachial bradykinin, acetylcholine, sodium nitroprusside, and verapamil infusions. Compared with filtered air, inhalation of diesel exhaust increased systolic blood pressure (145 ± 4 vs. 133 ± 3 mmHg, P< 0.05) and attenuated vasodilatation to bradykinin (P= 0.005), acetylcholine (P= 0.008), and sodium nitroprusside (P< 0.001). Exposure to pure carbon nanoparticulate or filtered exhaust had no effect on endothelium-dependent or -independent vasodilatation. To determine the direct vascular effects of nanoparticulate, isolated rat aortic rings (n= 6-9 per group) were assessed in vitro by wire myography and exposed to diesel exhaust particulate, pure carbon nanoparticulate and vehicle. Compared with vehicle, diesel exhaust particulate (but not pure carbon nanoparticulate) attenuated both acetylcholine (P< 0.001) and sodium-nitroprusside (P= 0.019)-induced vasorelaxation. These effects were partially attributable to both soluble and insoluble components of the particulate.
Conclusion
Combustion-derived nanoparticulate appears to predominately mediate the adverse vascular effects of diesel exhaust inhalation. This provides a rationale for testing environmental health interventions targeted at reducing traffic-derived particulate emissions.
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