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.

Recent debates on immigration have led to speculation regarding the socioeconomic advancement of immigrants and their children with some prominent scholars arguing that recent immigrants are of “low quality” and will have difficulty matching the accomplishments of immigrants of the early twentieth century. Others have suggested that immigrant progress will be hindered in the Post-Civil Rights Era, but not by immigrants’ own shortcomings. Rather, immigrants’ opportunities will be limited by deindustrialization and racism. This study examines patterns of poverty across three generations of recent immigrants from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean using U.S. Census data from 1980 and 2000. The findings here contradict the expectation that recent immigrants would not experience significant upward mobility. There is a nearly universal intergenerational decline in poverty among immigrants groups from throughout the western hemisphere—regardless of their racial or national origins. However, a significant Black disadvantage emerges in the “new second” that leaves Black immigrants more likely than all others to experience poverty in the U.S. It is a disadvantage that cannot be explained by origins, city of residence, age, education, employment, or marital status. All of this suggests that the success and failure of immigrants in the U.S. may have more to do with their placement in our most crude racial schemas than with their human capital.

This chapter discusses the large literature and numerous issues regarding education-related differences in income in the U.S. Early analyses of skill-related differences compared the earnings of workers across occupations. The general consensus of these investigations was that skill premiums narrowed substantially between 1900 and 1950. The large increase in the supply of high-school graduates relative to the increased demand for skilled workers is the likely explanation. Following the 1940 Decennial Census, which collected information on educational attainment and on earned income and time worked, empirical analyses concentrated directly on education-related differences in earnings. The human capital revolution of the late 1950s/early 1960s greatly expanded the research on education and income and shifted the focus to wages. The human capital approach modeled income as endogenous and sought to understand the variation in earnings by providing a framework for estimating the returns to education and experience. Recent analyses of education and wages have built on this foundation and have been embedded in a large literature that seeks to document and understand the substantial increase in wage inequality over the last 40 years. The consensus is that increases in the demand for skill are the main culprit, though the reasons for such increases are still an open question. We use census data to document the overall increase in education-related income differences over the past 60 years for several income measures. We also document concomitant changes in enrollment and provide a preliminary analysis suggesting that enrollment has responded to the increase in education-wage premiums. We use NLSY data to document the variation in enrollment patterns for those who attend college and to show how these differences are related to pre-schooling characteristics and to post-schooling earnings. We conclude with a brief discussion of the main issues for future research raised throughout the chapter.

Estimates of persons eligible and receiving or not receiving Food Stamp and Medi-Cal services by age groups in Los Angeles County, CA.

The Duke Twins Study of Memory in Aging is anongoing, longitudinal study of cognitive changeand dementia in the population-based NationalAcademy of Sciences-National Research Council(NAS-NRC) Twin Registry of World War II MaleVeterans. The primary goal of this study has beento estimate the overall genetic and environmentalcontributions to dementia with a specific focus onAlzheimers disease. An additional goal has beento examine specific genetic and environmentalantecedents of cognitive decline and dementia.Since 1989, we have completed 4 waves of datacollection. Each wave included a 2-phase telephonecognitive screening protocol, followed byan in-home standardized clinical assessment forthose with suspected dementia. For many participants,we have obtained postmortem neuropathologicalconfirmation of the diagnosis ofdementia. In addition to data on cognition, wehave also collected information on occupationalhistory, medical history, medications and otherlifetime experiences that may influence cognitivefunction in late life. We provide an overview of thestudys methodology and describe the focus ofrecent research.

The relatively high marital fertility of the Irish in the United States in the 19th century has long been interpreted as evidence for the persistence of a distinctive Irish culture in the United States. This claim echoes a similar view of Irish-American marriage patterns. Recent work has shown that the marriage patterns of the Irish in the United States were similar to native-born whites with similar occupational and other characteristics. This paper studies the reasons for the high fertility of Irish-Americans in 1910. Irish-born women in that year had much larger families than the typical native-born woman, and little of the difference can be attributed to other characteristics. Second-generation Irishwomen were less distinctive in this regard, although even they differed from the natives primarily because of a different proclivity to have a large family. Our results signal the complexity of immigrant adjustment to a new environment; the Irish largely abandoned one aspect of Irish demographic behavior while clinging to another.

Paper explores attendance patterns of school age children in counties where coal mining was the major industry - Las Animas and Huerfano Counties of Colorado and Fayette and Westmoreland Counties in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The authors conclude that children in the Colorado counties tended to stay in school longer.

This paper examines how (1) Southern region, (2) rural/small-town space, and (3) new immigrant destination area contexts and characteristics are reported to flavor Hispanics experiences and opportunities in the rural and small-town U.S. South. Data come from ethnographic research and 129 individual semi-structured interviews conducted with Latin American immigrants, U.S.-born Hispanics, and white and black key native informants in two rural counties in eastern North Carolina between June 2003 and May 2004. First, although I find that there is some evidence for all three contextual effects, respondents do not readily agree upon how or why they matter subjectively in their lives, producing confusion or even disagreement when viewed more broadly. However, I also find that any intermediate Southern regional context on Hispanics experiences and opportunities may be diminished when viewed alongside, on one hand, a very broad national-level context of reception, or, on the other hand, very close local-level contexts of reception, including rural/small-town space and new immigrant destination area (roughly measured here by the size of the coethnic population). I conclude that current research on immigration in the New South (and the New Midwest) may be overemphasizing the importance of region and underemphasizing the importance of other factors, namely metropolitan status and new immigrant destination area. Both help to explain variation in Hispanics experiences and opportunities within the same region (here, the U.S. South) or state (here, North Carolina) and warrant more serious attention in future research.

Paper builds on previous work of the authors, incorporating additional data from textual and state report sources. Multiple data sources support idea that parents in Las Animas and Huerfano Counties in southern Colorado valued education beyond the elementary grades and supported their sons and daughter's attendance in high school.

The integration of women into formal labor markets was one of the most salient changes of the twentieth century. The “female century,” in the words of The Economist, witnessed an extraordinary transformation of women’s opportunities and outcomes both in and outside the household.1 My dissertation explores both the causes and the consequences of women’s move from home to market in the United States during three episodes of rapid change. It begins by documenting demand-side shifts during the 1940s that increased the earnings and occupational choices of AfricanAmerican women; then demonstrates the impact of contraceptive technology on the extent and intensity of women’s participation in the formal labor market after 1960; and, finally, estimates the consequences of shifts in women’s labor supply for the growth of earnings inequality in the United States during the 1980s.

Some anti-discrimination laws have the perverse effect of harming the very class they were meant to protect. This paper provides evidence that age discrimination laws belong to this perverse class. It exploits an unusual aspect of the policy for enforcement of the federal 1968 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which made filing an age discrimination claim less burdensome in some states than in others. After the enforcement of the federal law, white male workers over age 50 in states where the federal government allowed 300 days to file a discrimination complaint worked between 1 and 1.5 fewer weeks per year than did workers in states without laws. These men were also .3 percentage points more likely to be retired and .2 percentage points less likely to be hired. These findings suggest that in an anti-age discrimination environment, firms seek to avoid litigation through means not intended by the legislation—by not employing older workers in the first place.

Filipino Americans Filipino Americans make up the second largest Asian group in the United States, after Chinese Americans (see chapter 12 ). According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there were 1, 864, 120 Filipino Americans and an estimated 2, 385, 216 people with at least some Filipino ancestry (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003). Most of those who identified themselves as Filipino only were relatively new to this country, as were most other Asian Americans. Immigrants from the Philippines in 2000 numbered 1, 222, 000, or 4.3% of all foreign-born people, making them the nation's third largest immigrant nationality, outnumbered only by Mexicans (27.7% of foreign born) and Chinese (4.9%) (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2003). Located across the China Sea from mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines consists of more than 7, 000 islands stretched over a distance of more than a thousand miles...

Before I provide the substance of my remarks, I would like to thank two people. The first, Farley Grubb, who convened this session at last year's meetings, so thoroughly summarized the career of Allan Nevins, that I can skip doing so by providing just a reference. The second is Roger Ransom for asking me to do this. Though I was certain at this time last year that I would be able to say that only with sarcasm, two things have made my gratitude genuine. The first, a result of historical forces much larger than the Economic History Association, was the early elimination, for all practical purposes, of the Chicago Cubs from serious play-off contention. This freed up a great deal of my time in the late spring and early summer. The second was the sheer quality of the seven submissions. They made the reading more a pleasure than a chore, though they left me with one tough remaining task: choosing the three finalists. I will make a few remarks about all three as a group before offering specific comments on each.

A productivity adjustment, using published Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) non-farm business multifactor productivity (MFP), is one important component of the Medicare Economic Index (MEI). The MEI is a major factor used to update Medicare payments for price inflation per procedure for physicians. The Office of the Actuary in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) wanted to know if, using the best data available specific to the physicians industry, historical MFP for the physician's industry approximated the rate of increase for BLS non-farm business MFP. This study develops historical time series using the best available, though fragmented, data sources for physician office spending and quantities of outputs and inputs to estimate actual MFP for the physician industry. A best estimate is compared and contrasted with the BLS non-farm MFP.

The Great Migration of southerners away from their region of birth stands as one of the most significant demographic events in U.S. history. The first waves of migrants headed primarily to the Northeast and Midwest. During and after World War II, a larger proportion moved to the West. We use information from the 1970 through 2000 public use samples to compare the economic status of onward migrants from the Northeast and Midwest with that of direct migrants from the South. Our findings show that onward migrants had greater incomes and higher occupational status, but were not more likely to be employed, than direct migrants with the same sociodemographic profiles. The economic advantages enjoyed by onward migrants were shared by blacks and whites, and prevailed across three of the four decades considered in our analysis.

This dissertation argues that the federal government played an essential role in the shaping of the western economy. American expansion necessitated not only that land be opened up, but also that the regional economy be reorganized. Specifically, the federal government did so in three ways. First, the military wrested control of the western economy from the tribes of the Northwest Territory through warfare, both during the Indian wars of the 1790s and later during the War of 1812. Second, the federal government sponsored the construction of roads throughout the region. Finally, colonial agencies of the federal government attempted to transform the Native American economy from one focused on fur trading to one centered on sedentary commercial agriculture.

Objective. This study examines the educational attainment of Latinos who immigrated to the United States by age 12. We compare the educational attainment of Latino immigrants in established and emerging Latino immigrant gateway cities inorder to identify whether there are any significant differences in educational attainmentbetween immigrants in these two gateways types and why such differences might exist. Methods. We employ OLS regression using the 2000 5% IntegratedPublic Use Microdata Sample. Results. Our results suggest that contrary to speculation, educational attainment among Latino immigrants is significantly higher in new Latino destinations than in established Latino metropolitan areas, although much of the difference is mediated by demographic factors. Migration history, English proficiency, ethnicity, and citizenship status account for a substantial portion of the differences in educational attainment between destination types. The migration history of these immigrants suggests a selection effect: only those immigrants who are relative newcomers to their new Latino destination have significantly higher educational attainment than those in established metropolitan areas. Conclusions. We find that educational attainment among Latino immigrantsis higher in new Latino destinations. Our study suggests that more highly educated Latino immigrants are choosing new Latino destinations, while longer-term immigrant residents of new destinations are faring no better (in terms of educational levels) than those in established destinations. English proficiency, ethnicity, andcitizenship status are confirmed as factors strongly associated with educational attainmentamong immigrants.

This paper constructs a measure of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for physicians offices. Using productivity methodology developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for other industries, and data from various sources including the BLS and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Two scenarios for physicians office MFP which yield similar outcomes. The two scenarios, based on independently derived back-casted physicians office Producer Price Indexes, yield positive increases in physicians office MFP over the study period. This result is a composite of positive physician MFP in early periods which exceeded general economy (non-farm business) MFP, negative physician MFP in middle periods that fell far below general economy rates, and positive physician MFP in recent periods that were approximately equal to general economy rates. Ten-year moving average changes in physicians office MFP, which incorporate historical variable rates of change, exceeded general economy MFP in early periods but have lagged behind general economy MFP more recently. Real physician incomes (i.e., inflation adjusted nominal income), which rose rapidly in early periods, declined in the mid 1990s and have not yet recovered their historical levels.

Over the past two decades, urban and regional policy-makers have increasingly looked to the arts and culture as an economic panacea, especially for the older urban core. The arts' regional economic contribution is generally measured by totalling the revenue of larger arts organisations, associated expenditures by patrons and multiplier effects. This approach underestimates the contributions of creative artists to a regional economy, because of high rates of self-employment and direct export activity, because artists' work enhances the design, production and marketing of products and services in other sectors and because artists induce innovation on the part of suppliers. Artists create import-substituting entertainment options for regional consumers and spend large shares of their own incomes on local arts output. The paper takes a labour-centred view of the arts economy, hypothesising that many artists choose a locale in which to work, often without regard to particular employers but in response to a nurturing artistic and patron community, amenities and affordable cost of living. Because evidence on such economic impacts and location calculus is impossible to document directly, the distribution of artists across the largest US metropolitan areas is used as a proxy, using data from the PUMS for 1980, 1990 and 2000. It is found that artists sort themselves out among American cities in irregular fashion, not closely related to either size or growth rates. The paper further explores variations in the definition of artist, the relationship between artistic occupation and industry, and differentials in artists' self-employment rates and earnings across cities. It is concluded that artists comprise a relatively footloose group that can serve as a target of regional and local economic development policy; the components of such a policy are outlined.