A model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain the declining labor-force participation rates of elderly males. Using the Health and Retirement Study, the model is calibrated to cross-sectional data on the labor-force participation rates of elderly US males by age and their average drop in market consumption in the year 2000. Running the calibrated model for the period 1850 to 2000, a prediction of the evolution of the cross-section is obtained and compared with data. The model is able to predict both the increase in retirement since 1850 and the observed drop in market consumption at the moment of retirement. The increase in retirement is driven by rising real wages and a falling price of leisure goods over time.

Safety in logging operations in the Southeastern United States has long been an issue of concern. Recently, a growing number of Spanish-speaking workers have become employed in logging operations in the Southeastern U.S. There is a growing concern that injury and fatality rates could increase due to inexperience, possible lack of proper safety training, and language barrier problems attributed to the new Spanish-speaking workers. The study area is the Southeastern U.S., comprising twelve states ranging from Texas to Virginia. The goal of this study is to determine the current percentage of Spanish-speaking workers in the study area, assess the previous and present safety training received by Spanish-speaking workers, and provide recommendations addressing the short and long-term logging safety training needs of Spanish-speaking workers. Data was collected through a combination of field surveys and questionnaires. The surveys collected data from 1890 logging operations in the study area, and was used to determine the population of Spanish-speaking workers in the logging industry. The questionnaires were completed during the summer of 2005 by 41 selected sample loggers who employ Spanish-speaking workers, in which they addressed the previous and present safety training received by Spanish-speaking workers, in addition to other information pertaining to safety. The percentage of Spanish-speaking workers in the logging industry in the Southeastern . . .

Embracing Sisterhood describes the contemporary state of the black woman collective and explores the legacy of black sisterhood in these times. Through an examination of how these ideas are articulated and experienced in the population, McDonald determines the relative degree of black sisterhood and black step-sisterhood that exists among African-American women today.

The skyline operator is important for multicriteria decision-making applications. Although many recent studies developed efficient methods to compute skyline objects in a given space, none of them considers skylines in multiple subspaces simultaneously. More importantly, the fundamental problem on the semantics of skylines remains open: Why and in which subspaces is (or is not) an object in the skyline? Practically, users may also be interested in the skylines in any subspaces. Then, what is the relationship between the skylines in the subspaces and those in the super-spaces? How can we effectively analyze the subspace skylines? Can we efficiently compute skylines in various subspaces and answer various analytical queries?In this article, we tackle the problem of multidimensional subspace skyline computation and analysis. We explore skylines in subspaces. First, we propose the concept of Skycube, which consists of skylines of all possible nonempty subspaces of a given full space. Once a Skycube is materialized, any subspace skyline queries can be answered online. However, Skycube cannot fully address the semantic concerns and may contain redundant information. To tackle the problem, we introduce a novel notion of skyline group which essentially is a group of objects that coincide in the skylines of some subspaces. We identify the decisive subspaces that qualify skyline groups in the subspace skylines. The new notions concisely capture the semantics and the structures of skylines in various subspaces. Multidimensional roll-up and drill-down analysis is introduced. We also develop efficient algorithms to compute Skycube, skyline groups and their decisive subspaces. A systematic performance study using both real data sets and synthetic data sets is reported to evaluate our approach.

This paper investigates the effect of occupational licensing regulation on the representation of minority workers in a range of skilled and semi-skilled occupations representing 12 percent of the civilian labor force. We take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by the introduction of state-level licensing regulation during the late nineteenth and to mid twentieth centuries to identify the effects of licensing on minority representation. We find that licensing laws seldom harmed minority workers. In fact, licensing sometimes helped minorities, particularly in occupations where information about worker quality was difficult to ascertain.

Using county-level data on federal New Deal expenditures on public works and relief and Agricultural Adjustment Administration payments to farmers, this paper empirically examines the New Deals impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Censuss reported population change from 1930 to 1940 and the natural increase in population (births minus infant deaths minus non-infant deaths) over the same period. Our empirical approach accounts for both the simultaneity between New Deal allocations and migration and the geographic spillovers that likely resulted when economic activity in one county may have affected the migration decisions of people in neighboring counties. We find that greater spending on relief and public works was associated with significant migration into counties where such money was allocated. The introduction of our modern farm programs under the aegis of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration appears to have contributed to a net out-migration that sped the transition of people out of farming.

Using a hundred years worth of census and opinion poll data, Century of Difference shows how the social, cultural, and economic fault lines in American life shifted in the last century. It demonstrates how distinctions that once loomed large later dissipated, only to be replaced by new ones. Fischer and Hout find that differences among groups by education, age, and income expanded, while those by gender, region, national origin, and, even in some ways, race narrowed. As the twentieth century opened, a persons national origin was of paramount importance, with hostilities running high against Africans, Chinese, and southern and eastern Europeans. Today, diverse ancestries are celebrated with parades. More important than ancestry for todays Americans is their level of schooling. Americans with advanced degrees are increasingly putting distance between themselves and the rest of societyin both a literal and a figurative sense. Differences in educational attainment are tied to expanding inequalities in earnings, job quality, and neighborhoods. Still, there is much that ties all Americans together. Century of Difference knocks down myths about a growing culture war. Using seventy years of survey data, Fischer and Hout show that Americans did not become more fragmented over values in the late-twentieth century, but rather were united over shared ideals of self-reliance, family, and even religion.

Discussions about the role of paid employment in high school students lives usually involve untested assumptions about historical trends in the frequency, intensity, and selective nature of students employment behaviors. Using several nationally representative data sources, we find few changes in rates of employment or hours worked per week among adolescents since 1940 or among students since 1980. We observe important changes in recent decades in racial/ethnic and gender differences in employment and intensive employment. Finally, we observe that the relationship between students intensive employment and high school completion has been stable and persistently significant since the late 1960s.

This article utilizes panel data from El Salvador to investigate the use of transnational migration as an ex post risk management strategy. I show that adverse agricultural conditions in El Salvador increase both migration to the United States and remittances sent back to El Salvador. I show that, in the absence of any agricultural shocks, the probability that a household sent members to the United States would have decreased on average by 24.26%. I also show that the 2001 earthquakes reduced net migration to the United States. A one standard deviation increase in earthquake damage reduced the average probability of northward migration by 37.11%. The evidence suggests that the effects of the earthquakes had more to do with households retaining labor at home to cope with the effects of the disaster than with the earthquakes disrupting migration financing.

Black migration from the South represented a large increase in labor supply above the MasonDixon line during and after World War II. The skill profile of new arrivals overlapped with that of the existing black workforce. Following Borjas (2003), I use variation in migrant supply shocks across skill groups – defined by educational attainment and work experience – over time to identify the impact of southern migration on northern black and white workers. A five percent increase in the labor force due to southern black migration (the mean across skill groups) would have reduced the earnings of black workers relative to whites by 3-5 percent. The differential effect by race is consistent with patterns of racial segregation by occupation and seniority level. If not for the southern influx, the North would have likely experienced faster convergence in black-white earnings.

Black migration from the South represented a large increase in labor supply above the Mason-Dixon line during and after World War II. The skill profile of new arrivals overlapped with that of the existing black workforce. Following Borjas (2003), I use variation in migrant supply shocks across skill groups-defined by educational attainment and work experience-over time to identify the impact of southern migration on northern black and white workers. A five percent increase in the labor force due to southern black migration (the mean across skill groups) would have reduced the earnings of black workers relative to whites by 3-5 percent. The differential effect by race is consistent with patterns of racial segregation by occupation and seniority level. If not for the southern influx, the North would have likely experienced faster convergence in black-white earnings.

Estimating the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply is complicated by the first endogeneity of the fertility decision. That is, factors that trigger the decision to have a first child could also affect baseline labor supply; empirical approaches that do not account for this difficulty will yield biased estimates. This paper addresses this problem by focusing on a sample of women from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) who sought help to get pregnant. After a certain period, only some of these women gave birth to a child. In this instance, fertility appears to be exogenous to labor supply in that women's employment during months prior to seeking help becoming pregnant is uncorrelated with subsequent fertility. Results using this strategy show that having a first child younger than one year old reduces female employment by 26.3 percentage points. Unlike previous studies, which found smaller effects when dealing with the endogeneity problem of fertility, estimates in this paper are close to ordinarily least squares (OLS) estimates obtained using census data and to OLS and fixed-effects estimates from NSFG data.

In this paper, we use data from the US census to document the history of the relationship between fertility choice and key economic indicators at the individual level for women born between 1826 and 1960. We find that this data suggests several new facts that should be useful for researchers trying to model fertility. (1) The reduction in fertility known as the Demographic Transition (or the Fertility Transition) seems to be much sharper based on cohort fertility measures compared to usual measures like Total Fertility Rate; (2) The baby boom was not quite as large as is suggested by some previous work; (3) We find a strong negative relationship between income and fertility for all cohorts and estimate an overall income elasticity of about -0.38 for the period; (4) We also find systematic deviations from a time invariant, isoelastic, relationship between income and fertility. The most interesting of these is an increase in the income elasticity of demand for children for the 1876-1880 to 1906-1910 birth cohorts. This implies an increased spread in fertility by income which was followed by a dramatic compression.

In this paper I critique the notion of `the creative class' and the fuzzy causal logic about its relationship to urban growth. I argue that in the creative class, occupations that exhibit distinctive spatial and political proclivities are bunched together, purely on the basis of educational attainment, and with little demonstrable relationship to creativity. I use a case study of artists, one element of the purported creative class, to probe this phenomenon, demonstrating that the formation, location, urban impact, and politics of this occupation are much more complex and distinctive than has been suggested previously. The spatial distribution of artists is a function of semiautonomous personal migration decisions, local nurturing of artists in dedicated spaces and organizations, and the locus of artist-employing firms. Artists have very high rates of self-employment, boosting regional growth by providing import-substituting consumption activities for residents and through direct export of their work. Their contribution to attracting high-tech activity is ambiguouscausality may work in the opposite direction. Artists play multiple roles in an urban economysome progressive, some problematic. I argue that artists as a group make important, positive contributions to the diversity and vitality of cities, and their agendas cannot be conflated with neoliberal urban political regimes. I show the potential for artists as a political force to lead in social and urban transformation and the implausibility of their common cause with other members of Florida's `creative class', such as scientists, engineers, managers, and lawyers.

This article illustrates the commonly overlooked sample selection problem inherent in using rural classification methods that change over time due to population changes. Since fast growing rural areas grow out of their rural status, using recent rural definitions excludes the most successful places from the analysis. Average economic performance of the areas remaining rural significantly understates true rural performance. We illustrate this problem using one rural classification system, rural-urban continuum codes. Choice of code vintage alters conclusions regarding the relative speed of rural and urban growth and can mislead researchers regarding magnitudes and signs of factors believed to influence growth. Abstract This article illustrates the commonly overlooked sample selection problem inherent in using rural classification methods that change over time due to population changes. Since fast growing rural areas grow out of their rural status, using recent rural definitions excludes the most successful places from the analysis. Average economic performance of the areas remaining rural significantly understates true rural performance. We illustrate this problem using one rural classification system, rural-urban continuum codes. Choice of code vintage alters conclusions regarding the relative speed of rural and urban growth and can mislead researchers regarding magnitudes and signs of factors believed to influence growth.