This paper addresses the intergenerational mobility question by examining the role of family structure in the transmission of educational attainment within a family using the one percent Integrated Public Use Microsample Series (IPUMS) of the decennial Census for the decades 1970 and 1990. We first introduce mobility indices and tests which examine the proximity of the transition matrix to that which would pertain in the perfectly mobile state. Unlike existing transition matrix based mobility indices, these indices and tests can be employed when the transition matrix is not square, and when the transition matrix is between states that are defined multivariately or more generally when the quantiles of the marginal states are unmatched. Using educational attainment as a proxy for permanent income for children and both educational attainment and income as proxies for parents, the tests indicate that mobility significantly increased, both in the population as a whole and within intact parent and single parent sub-populations, over the period. Within the single parent group there was much less evidence for significant mobility change for children from exogenous single parent families than for children from endogenously single parent families, which accords with theoretical predictions. There is also some evidence of convergence between intact and single parent groups, suggesting that there is a trend towards equal opportunity for children of intact and endogenously single parent families.

This paper shows that an important requirement of the MIRAB model, economic success in the host country, is a characteristic of Pacific Islander migrants to the USA and their offspring. Pacific Islanders improved their economic lot in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. Part of this improvement was due to increases in their human capital: Pacific Islanders acquired more education, work experience and better English language skills. This upgrading allowed more workers to acquire white-collar jobs and to increase their earnings.

Spatial equilibrium models rely on migration to arbitrage away differences in utility across locations net of moving costs, where remaining differences in wages and rents reflect the compensating differentials related to site-specific amenities. Recent refinements to the spatial equilibrium model focus upon the prospect of disequilibrium in amenity markets. Amenity market disequilibrium implies over- or under-compensation (incomplete compensation) across some locations, which suggests a role for these factors in subsequent migration. This paper fol- lows the theoretical and empirical approach of Clark, Herrin, Knapp, and White (2003). An intercity wage regression is estimated where fixed effects capture the impact of site characteris- tics on wages. We then regress the fixed effects on a comprehensive vector of site attributes, where the residuals capture incomplete compensation in wages. The derived measures of in- complete compensation are included in a binary logit model of migration. The results provide further evidence that incomplete compensation for site characteristics is a significant factor in migration decisions, and the findings are consistent with tendencies toward spatial equilib- rium.

The 1930s saw the birth of mass survey research in America. Large public polling companies, such as Gallup and Roper, began surveying the public about a variety of important issues on a monthly basis. These polls contain information on public opinion questions of central importance to political scientists, historians, and policymakers, yet these data have been largely overlooked by modern researchers due to problems arising from the data collection methods. In this article I provide a strategy to properly analyze the public opinion data of the 1930s and 1940s. I first describe the quota-control methods of survey research prevalent during this time. I then detail the problems introduced through the use of quota-control techniques. Next, I describe specific strategies that researchers can employ to ameliorate these problems in data analysis at both the aggregate and individual levels. Finally, I use examples from several pubic opinion studies in the early 1940s to show how the methods of analysis laid out in this article enable us to utilize historical public opinion data.

This paper analyzes the effects of oral contraception on the probability that an individual woman will marry given her age group, geographic region and other controls. The analysis is based on a model that uses a 1 percent sample of the 1970 and 1980 Census of the Population, and it extends the literature on the age of first marriage of women. The study is based on the diffusion of easily accessible oral contraceptives in the 1970’s having a full impact on behavior by 1980. Evidence indicates that for almost all age groups (except women 40-45 years old), the percentage of women married in the 1970’s is larger than the percentage in the 1980’s. The percentage difference between women married in each year starts out small in the young age categories, swells for women in their mid twenties, and then converges again for the older age categories. This convergence in the later age groups shows that for this data set, some women put off being married, but the number of women ever married at least once is the same.

There are similarities and differences in the concept of respect as it develops in American children and adolescents whose families came from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and the Philippines. In addition, respect has different effects on adjustment, relationships, and achievement at home and at school, depending on whether cultural groups were primarily refugees or immigrants.

Little research has been conducted on the choice of dwelling by U.S. homeowners. Few studies have included manufactured housing into the dwelling choices available to homeowners. This study focuses on the effects of demographic and socioeconomic variables on a households choice to own a manufactured home. A multinomial logit model was used to determine what type of households chooses to own a manufactured home when other traditional dwelling choices are available. I found that income and education play a major role in dwelling choice.

Conventional definition of homeownership is based on the share of households, which ignores the variable effects of household formation. We study whether such omission leads to a distorted assessment of trends and differentials inhomeownership. In the 1990s, many groups experienced a decline in household formation, which indirectly elevated the overall homeownership rate by removing renters. Moreover, Asians have very low household formation but highhomeownership rates, which are in contrast to Latinos and African Americans. We find that higher homeownership rates for Asians stems from their suppressed level of renter household formation and their greater share of adults not forming households. The overall conclusion is that, without accounting for household formation, current measures of homeownership are a deficient indicator of housing success.

By analyzing Census 2000 data, this paper describes the characteristics of which people are most likely to marry outside their race and what this suggests about race relations today. Using a standard probit model and looking at white-Hispanic, white-black, and white-Asian marriages, this study finds that military service, higher education, and the scarcity of ones race in a state increase the probability of one entering an interracial marriage no matter to which race one belongs. Altogether, I have determined that exposure to outside groups (races, cultures, etc.) is key to whether one marries interracially or not.

Within the geographically mobile U.S. labor force, highly educated workers are much more likely than others to migrate over long distances. Theoretical explanations for this disparity abound and generally hinge on assumptions about the relative costs and benefits of moving, but empirical tests of the theories are essentially non-existent. I test competing explanations for the disparity by exploiting their conflicting implications for conditions under which workers successfully arbitrage spatial differences in wages. To isolate relatively pure arbitrage opportunities, I confine the analysis to responses to unanticipated changes in local labor demand at the time a worker first entered the labor market and control flexibly for underlying trends in migration and wages.I find that young college graduates are two to five times more likely than less educated workers to reside in a state with high labor demand at the time they entered the market. Among college graduates, cross-state migration equalizes the wage impact of early career labor demand shocks in their home states. This is not true for less educated workers. The lack of wage convergence is most severe for cohorts who entered the labor market during periods of high spatial variation in state conditions and low national employment growth. My results are consistent with a theory of educational differences in internal migration that assumes less educated workers are credit constrained, and cast doubt on several other explanations for the difference. The results imply that modest relocation subsidies could significantly reduce the spatial mismatch between less educated workers and labor demand.

This paper develops a simple model of the decision to write a will prior to death and tests the implications of the model using data from Ireland prior to the advent of state provided old age support. The model assumes that individuals write wills in order to change the distribution of their assets from the distribution that would occur in the absence of a will and that individuals incur will writing costs. The model leads to the predictions that individuals whose desired distribution differs most dramatically from the default and those who face the lowest costs will be the most likely to write wills. A data set that matches individual Irish estate records from 1901 to 1905 to household records from the 1901 Irish Census is used to test these implications. I find that age, wealth, and landholding influence will writing.

A non-incorporated territory of the United States, Puerto Rico operates under U.S. legal, monetary, security and tariff systems. Despite sharing in these and other key U.S. institutions, Puerto Rico has experienced economic stagnation and large scale unemployment since the 1970s. The island's living standards are low by U.S. standards, with a per capita income only half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. While many studies have analyzed the fiscal implications of Puerto Rico's political relationship with the United States, little research has focused broadly on the island's economic experience or assessed its growth prospects.In this innovative new book, economists from U.S. and Puerto Rican institutions address a range of major policy issues affecting the island's economic development. To frame the current situation, the contributors begin by assessing Puerto Rico's past experience with various growth policies. They then analyze several reforms and new initiatives in labor, education, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, migration, trade, and financing development, which they incorporate into a proposed strategy for jumpstarting Puerto Rican economic growth.

The skilled and well-educated workforce of the New York metropolitan area has played a large role in enabling the region to withstand adverse economic shocks and adapt successfully to a services economy. A further expansion of this human capital will enable the metro area to meet the challenges ahead: attracting new firms, maintaining immigration flows, and competing successfully with fast-growing metro areas in other parts of the country.

It is unclear whether educational disparities in internal migration levels reflect important economic differences or simply different consumption choices. I answer this question empirically by testing for educational differentials in the likelihood that young workers undertake and succeed at arbitrage migration. I find that young college graduates are two to five times more likely than less educated workers to reside in a state with high labor demand at the time they entered the market. Among college graduates, cross-state migration by college graduates equalizes the wage impact of early career labor demand shocks in their home states. This is not true for less educated workers. The lack of wage convergence is most severe for cohorts who entered the labor market during periods of high spatial variation in state conditions and low national employment growth. My results are consistent with theories of educational differences in migration that assume less educated workers are credit constrained, and cast doubt on several other explanations for the difference.

Previous research on the US labor market has shown that unemployment rates of blacks have not only been substantially higher than that of whites over the last four decades, but also these differences have been amplified during recessions. However, the extent to which these differences reflect unobserved skill and productivity or other factors such as discrimination remains a matter of some debate. We propose the use of wages earned in the previous year as a measure of a worker's skill and productivity. Using the Current Population Survey March Supplement and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in each year from 1976 to 2003, we compare the employment outcomes of black and white workers who earned the same wage in the previous year. After adjusting for worker skill and productivity in this way, we find that the unexplained gap in unemployment between blacks and white falls slightly, consistent with the view that some of the difference arises from unmeasured skill and productivity difference between the races. Nevertheless, the gap remains large and significant, and the pattern of larger gaps during recessions is unaffected. Consistent with previous work, we find that these differences do not exist for individuals in the highest part of the skill distribution. Our results improve upon the existing literature on the sources of black-white differences in employment outcomes by mitigating the problems related to unobserved individual productivity and skills. Under general assumptions about labor supply changes over the business cycle, supported by behavior of reported reservation wages of black and white youth, these results may indicate discrimination against blacks.

This essay compares family change during two periods of social and historical upheaval in the United States: the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century and the more recent family changes of the late twentieth century. Despite the manifest social and demographic changes brought about by the industrial revolution, some aspects of family life remained unchanged. Almost all new families formed in the United States before and during the industrial revolution were same-race heterosexual marriages. In the past half-century, however, family diversity has become the new rule; interracial marriages and extramarital cohabitation have both risen sharply. A key to understanding the lack of family diversity in the past and the recent rise in diversity is the changing nature of young adulthood.

This article posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with people if they are of the same race. If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbours of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighbourhood social capital connections and the more likely he is to engage in activities which require it. The article tests this idea using an indicator of individual social capital never previously studied: whether the person uses a carpool to get to work. The analysis accounts for fixed differences across neighbourhoods, and a variety of extensions address possible differential racial sorting into neighbourhoods. The evidence strongly supports the article's hypothesis.

Agglomeration of people and activities in space is a common fact of life in the modern world, despite intrinsic inefficiencies that an agglomeration process may generate. For firms, these spatial concentration phenomena are justified by positive externalities that enhance local productivity and compensate for inefficiencies. In the literature such externalities are generated by both urbanization economies (JACOBS, 1969) and localization economies (MARSHALL, 1890). This study intends to find evidence for such externalities in the urban development of cities in So Paulo state, which is polarized by the largest economic agglomeration in Brazil, the Metropolitan Area of the City of So Paulo, using two techniques based on data of the 2000 Brazilian Census. The first one, Explanatory Spatial Data Analysis, is a non-parametric approach focusing on inquiry of spatial spillovers of urban attributes that in the context of agglomeration economies enhances the productivity of contiguous areas. The main result shows a great economic area around So Paulo city with high productive complementarities that reinforce the relevance of strategic localization and transport infrastructure for regional development. The second one, using data on extended urban areas, focuses on urbanization economies embedded in relationship of productivity levels and the density of manufacturing activities through a wage equation approach To measure these external economies, this study uses a model developed by FINGLETON (2003) that, under typical Urban Economics hypothesis and assuming that variations on wage rates between cities expresses variations on productivity, makes possible estimations of urban increasing returns and spatial spillovers of efficiency levels of production. Using the instrumental variables technique in 2SLS estimations, the main results are in accordance to Jacobs theory since they suggest a positive relationship between productivity and the density of industrial activities. Furthermore, it shows the magnitude of spillover effects in neighboring areas and its decay with distance.