More than at any time in the past, Hispanics have consolidated their national presence owing to their unprecedented geographic dispersal buttressed by growing numbers (Ziga and Hernndez-Len, 2005). Historically concentrated both regionally and in a few large metropolitan areas, Hispanics have scattered to nontraditional places since 1980, but with intensified force during the 1990s, redrawing ethno-racial landscapes along the way (see Chapter 3; Fischer et al., 2004; Logan, Stowell, and Oakley, 2002). Fueled by high levels of immigration from Mexico, Central America, and South America, the Hispanic geographic scattering presents the paradox of rising levels of regional and national integration combined with resegregation of old gateway cities and diverse settlement patterns in the new destinations (Alba and Nee, 1999; Logan, Stowell, and Oakley, 2002).

We study the effect of fertility on maternal labour supply in Argentina and Mexico exploiting a source of exogenous variability in family size first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States. We find that the estimates for the US can be generalized both qualitatively and quantitatively to the populations of two developing countries where, compared to the US, fertility is known to be higher, female education levels are much lower and there are fewer formal facilities for childcare.

With accelerated world market integration, cities compete with each other cities as sites of production and consumption, targeting firms and households as semi-autonomous location decision-makers. Distinction may be sought in productive structure, consumption and identity. In this paper, contradictory trends towards homogenisation and distinctiveness are theorised. Studying the occupational structure of 50 large US metropolitan areas, it is found that distinctiveness has been increasing in economic base occupations though some heavily blue-collar cities' edge is eroding. Employment in consumption activities has been growing faster than in the economic base and cities are becoming more alike in consumption structure. It is concluded that the search for niches in exporting sectors and related occupational mix is key to urban resurgence.

The gradual "whitening" of Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century is often noted in scholarly, journalistic, and popular descriptions of the island's population. In 1899, a year after Puerto Rico came under U.S. dominion, the census reported that 62 percent of the population was white; by the year 2000, according to official census results, the white proportion of the Puerto Rican population reached 80 percent. Observers of Puerto Rican society have speculated about the sources of this trend, which is typically cited as evidence of the hold of "whitening ideology" on the island. To date, however, none of the hypothesized mechanisms of whitening have been subjected to empirical test. Using newly available public use samples of the 1910 and 1920 censuses of Puerto Rico, this paper explores three possible explanations for the growth in the white population according to official statistics: (1) demographic processes, (2) institutional bias of the Census Office, and (3) socio-cultural shifts in societal conceptions of race. We find little support for the first two hypotheses. The proportion of whites in the Puerto Rican population in 1920 is at least ten percent higher than would be expected due to natural rates of population growth. And it appears, somewhat surprisingly, that any institutional bias of the Puerto Rican Census Office worked to mitigate the magnitude of whitening in this period rather than contributing to it. We find that the statistical whitening of Puerto Rico between 1910 and 1920 is primarily due to changes in the social definition of whiteness. The children of interracial unions, in particular, were much more likely to be classified as white in 1920 than in 1910. 2

It is widely believed that children in America may be on separate tracks into adulthood. On one track are economically advantaged children, many of whom reside with two highly educated parents. The other track typically includes poor children residing with a single mother or with two parents struggling to make ends meet in a changing global economy. In many ways, these tracks represent distinct fortunes along lines of racial and ethnic background. White children are proportionally over-represented among the more advantaged segments of the child population, while children of historically disadvantaged racial minorities and Americas "new" immigrants make up disproportionately large shares of the economically deprived.How true is this perception? In the study whose findings we summarize here, our goal is to document racial differentials in child poverty, while also evaluating the potentially divergent economic paths among Americas racial and ethnic minority children. The key question here is not whether the children of racial and ethnic minorities are poor, but whetherand to what extentthey are joining the American economic mainstream. Our findings demonstrate that analyses of poverty, without attention to racial/ethnic diversity and inequality, misrepresent the changing circumstances of Americas disadvantaged children.

Despite recent immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, Blacks in America are still viewed as monolith in many previous studies. In this paper, we use newly released 2000 census data to estimate log-linear models that highlight patterns of interracial and intraracial marriage and cohabitation among African Americans, West Indians, Africans and Puerto Rican non-Whites, and their inerracial marriage and cohabitation with Whites. Based on data from several metropolitan areas, our results show that, despite lower socioeconomic status, native-born African Americans are more likely than other Blacks to marry Whites; they are also more likely to marry other Black ethnics. West Indians, Africans, and Puerto Rican non-Whites are more likely to marry African Americans than to marry Whites. Interracial relationships represent a greater share of cohabiting unions than marital unions. The majority of interracial unions, including native and immigrant Blacks, consist of a Black man and White woman. The implications for marital assimilation are discussed.

Traffic congestion plagues urban cities today as more and more people prefer and rely on private motor vehicles. Perhaps, what may be needed are policies that encourage commuters to leave their automobiles at home and use instead the public transport system. This paper explores one such policy, specifically whether an expansion in bus routing will significantly reduce travel time to work for commuters. Using data from 204 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States, the results show that for an increase of 1 bus line per 100 km2, average work commute time decreases by 4.47 minutes for drivers and 0.04 minutes for bus riders. Hence, the empirical evidence supports the hypothesis. The second part of this paper asks whether there is an optimal congestion tax that can be placed on drivers to close the divergence between private and social marginal costs of vehicle trips. It is this inability to reconcile these trip costs which causes congestion. Through computational work, the paper finds that the optimal congestion tax for the United States is equivalent to $1.30 per driver per day.

We find that wealthier and more educated immigrants are more likely to make use of basic banking services and other formal financial services. Holding these (and other) factors constant, we find immigrants from countries with more effective institutions are more likely to have a relationship with a bank and use formal financial markets more extensively. Institutional quality appears to be an important factor in both determining both the breadth and the depth of financial access. It can explain approximately 17 percent of the country-of-origin-level variation in bank account usage among immigrants in the U.S., after other characteristics, including wealth, education and income, are controlled for. Institutional quality is even more important for explaining more extensive participation in financial markets, accounting for 27 percent of the analogous variation. We examine various measures of institutional effectiveness and are careful to control for unobserved individual characteristics, including specifications with country fixed-effects.

We used data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples to document poverty rates among native-born and foreign-born Mexicans living in the southwest and in new regions where many Mexican families have resettled. Our analysis focused on how changing patterns of employment have altered the risk of poverty among Mexican families and children. We demonstrate that the Mexican population dispersed widely throughout the United States during the 1990s and that Mexican workers, especially immigrants, residing outside the southwest had much lower rates of poverty. Yet, a rapid influx of Mexican immigrants is putting strain on communities struggling to meet their needs. We offer suggestions for family practitioners serving Mexican newcomers, whose circumstances differ greatly from those of local populations.

In the United States a century ago, children's labor earnings were considered the property of their parents. Working children turned over most of the contents their pay envelopes to their parents. Accordingly, surveys of household budgets conducted during the period, as well as most subsequent analyses of these surveys by historians, treat children's income as simply part of family income. But did a dollar of income from children have the same impact on household expenditures as did a dollar of income from the father? Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost of Living Survey 1917-1919, this paper shows that earnings from children altered intrahousehold resource allocations.Holding total expenditures per capita constant, increases in the share of household income brought in by children ages 12 to 16 decreased expenditures on the fathers clothing and the clothing of younger children in the household but increased expenditures on food.

This paper considers the relationship between metropolitan area growth and residential segregation by income across neighborhoods. Theory suggests that a number of factors are likely to affect the demand for income segregation. For example, as income inequality in a metropolitan area rises, the richest households are willing to pay more to live near other rich households, holding other factors constant. The degree to which this demand translates into observed segregation depends in part on how easily the housing market can respond to changing preferences. In rapidly growing metropolitan areas, new housing developments are created which reflect the current demand for segregation by income. In stagnating cities, however, the existing housing stock reflects the demand for economic segregation in a previous era. The empirical work supports the predictions of the model: (1) rising inequality (particularly at the top of the distribution) has a bigger effect on income segregation in more rapidly growing cities, and (2) rising income segregation is associated with the rapid creation of new housing stock even in metropolitan areas with stagnant population growth. The results suggest that policies targeted at managing metropolitan area growth are likely to have important long-run consequences for residential segregation by income.

It is well known that children raised in poverty demonstrate lower academic achievement than children raised in affluence. This study extends previous studies in three ways. First, it estimates structural instead of reduced-form models of child academic attainment. Such structural models explicitly account for choices made by children themselves, given choices made by parents and governments. Second, it provides an historical insight into the connections between poverty, child choices and educational outcomes. Nearly all extent work considers the late 20th century. This study uses a unique data set from the mid-nineteenth century. And, third, this study documents the choices underlying adolescent labor force participation. Youth in poor households are more likely than affluent youth to be asked to contribute income to the household. The choice to do so is influenced by parental choices and the expected reduction in the child's later-life wealth attributable to choosing work over additional schooling.

We use a data set of federal corruption convictions in the U.S. to investigate the causes and consequences of corruption. More educated states, and to a smaller degree richer states, have less corruption. This relationship holds even when we use historical factors like Congregationalism in 1890 as an instrument for the level of schooling today. The level of corruption is also correlated with the level of income inequality and racial fractionalization, and uncorrelated with the size of government. There is a weak negative relationship between corruption and economic development in a state. These results echo the cross-country findings, and support the view that the correlation between development and good political outcomes occurs because education improves political institutions.

To what extent do differential levels of investment in public health inputs explain observed differences in health outcomes across socioeconomic and racial groups? This study investigates the impact of 3700 projects that were part of a widespread Federal initiative to improve sanitation infrastructure on U.S. Indian reservations starting in 1960. Sanitation investment substantially reduced the cost of clean water for households, leading to sharp reductions in both waterborne gastrointestinal disease and infectious respiratory disease among Native American infants. The sanitation program was quite cost-effective, in part because improvements in the overall disease environment also reduced infectious respiratory disease among nearby White infants. Despite the health externalities, Federal sanitation interventions explain almost forty percent of the convergence in Native American and White infant mortality rates in reservation counties since 1970.

Simple partial-equilibrium models suggest that income increases at the high end of the distribution can raise price paid by those at the low end of the income distribution. This prediction does not universally hold in a general equilibrium model, or in models where the rich and poor consume distinct products. We use Census microdata to evaluate these predictions empirically, using data on housing markets in American metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000. Evidence clearly and unsurprisingly shows that decreases in one's own income lead to less housing consumption and less income left over after paying for housing. The effect of increases in others' income, holding one's own income constant, is more nuanced. In tight housing markets, the poor do worse when the rich get richer. In slack markets, at least some evidence suggests that increases in others' income, holding own income constant, may be beneficial.

The share of skilled workers in urban populations has steadilyincreased since 1970 in US metropolitan areas, but more in some citiesthan in others. A higher concentration of skills is a sought after asset forcities as it affects population growth positively, also when the initial shareis instrumented for by using land-grant colleges. However, skilled citiesmay attract more skilled workers, but not because they are more skilledinitially: increasing returns are rejected when controlling for fixed effectsand bias due to inclusion of a lagged dependent variable. Several amenitiessuch as a low-skilled personal service sector do affect the concentration ofskills positively. Although firms seem to benefit from externalities, there isno convincing case for an effect on the concentration of college graduatesin a city.

This paper demonstrates that the standard search and matching models of equilibrium unemployment, once properly calibrated, can generate only a tiny amount of frictional wage dispersion, i.e., wage differentials among ex-ante similar workers induced purely by search frictions. The analysis is centered around a specific measure of wage dispersion the ratio between the average wage and the lowest (reservation) wage paid. We show that in the textbook search and matching models this statistic (the mean-min ratio) can be obtained in closed form as a function of observable variables, without any parametric assumption on the wage offer distribution. Looking at various independent data sources suggests that, empirically, frictional wage dispersion is larger by a factor of 20. We discuss the extent to which three extensions of the model (risk aversion, volatile wages during employment, and on the job search) can improve its performance.

While there has been some research into the economic importance of English languageskills, little has been done to study differences between immigrant groups. This paperinvestigates the effects of English ability in Mexican, Chinese, and Soviet immigrants.Data from IPUMS is used to measure returns to language skills and education in each ofthe three groups. The results confirm the hypothesis that various immigrant groups benefitdifferently from English language ability. Mexicans generally have much lower languageeffects than the other two groups. Language-skill complementarity, a hypothesis thatclaims language ability and education interact positively, is supported in the Mexican andChinese, but not the Soviet group. The results of this project are important to the analysisof U.S. immigration policy and evaluation of language training programs. It also providesopportunity for further research into the nature of the differences between the variousimmigrant groups.