In this report, NCES extends the analysis of comparable wages to the labor market level using a Comparable Wage Index (CWI). The basic premise of a CWI is that all types of workersincluding teachersdemand higher wages in areas with a higher cost of living (e.g., San Diego) or a lack of amenities (e.g., Detroit, which has a particularly high crime rate) (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003). This report develops a CWI by combining baseline estimates from the 2000 U.S. census with annual data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Combining the Census with the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) makes it possible to have yearly CWI estimates for states and local labor markets for each year after 1997. OES data are available each May and permit the construction of an up-to-date, annual CWI. The CWI methodology offers many advantages over the previous NCES geographic cost adjustment methodologies, including relative simplicity, timeliness, and intrastate variations in labor costs that are undeniably outside of school district control. However, the CWI is not designed to detect cost variations within labor markets. Thus, all the school districts in the Washington, DC metro area would have the same CWI cost index. Furthermore, as with other geographic cost indices, the CWI methodology does not address possible differences in the level of wages between college graduates outside the education sector and education sector employees. Nor does the report explore the use of these geographic cost adjustments as inflation adjustments (deflators.) These could be areas for fruitful new research on cost adjustments by NCES.

The public profile of the Brown v. Board of Education decision tends to overshadow the well-established fact that racial disparities in school resources in the South began narrowing 20 years before the Brown decision and that school desegregation did not begin on a large scale in the Deep South until ten years after the Brown decision. We instead view Brown as a highly visible marker of public policys mid-century reversal on matters of race. When we examine the labor market outcomes of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks who would have finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school by just a few years, relative to northern-born blacks in same age cohorts.

This research has demonstrated that the chain immigration process does exist, and we can measure the multiplier effects by calculating immigration multipliers. With the introduction of the Immigration Multiplier (IM), Immigration Unification Multiplier (IUM) and Immigration Reproduction Multiplier (IRM)), we can clearly differentiate different immigration patterns across different regions. It is also very important to notice that few demographic researches on immigration processes have ever combined the immigration unification process with the immigration reproduction process into one complete immigration model. This research is a first attempt to do so. The new Immigration Multiplier method introduced in this paper has many aspects that other traditional measures do not have. The most important aspects are: measurable (for measuring the chain migration process), complete (for measuring both the immigration unification process as well as the immigrant reproduction process), comparable (for comparing immigration patterns region-by-region, country-by-country, year-by-year), practical (for performing the relatively simple calculations). With this concept and method of the Immigration Multiplier developed in this research, we can now use it to measure the migration chains and its multiplier effects for any immigrant population, and provide the explanations why they are different. Therefore, this method has provided a tool to accomplish the goal of better understanding the chain migration process, and it could be used for further academic research and policy evaluations.

Most states now offer some form of school choice—charter schools in most states, open enrollment in several, vouchers or tax credits for private school tuition in a few. Florida, however, is special. This is partly because some of its choice programs are unique, but it is mainly because Florida simultaneously offers multiple programs. Each program is relatively pure, in the sense of being designed around a particular, classic vision of school choice. As a result, each program provides a certain range of opportunities and operates within its own set of constraints. Nevertheless, the programs overlap so that every student in Florida is eligible for at least two programs and some students are eligible for several. In short, Florida offers a tapestry of school choice programs, and the success of the state’s choice initiatives depends on this tapestry approach to coverage. Florida choice programs are, in order of largest to smallest . . .

During the 1990s, market hours in the United States rose dramatically. The rise in hours occurred as gross domestic product (GDP) per hour was declining relative to its historical trend, an occurrence that makes this boom unique, at least for the postwar U.S. economy. We find that expensed plus sweat investment was large during this period and critical for understanding the movements in hours and productivity. Expensed investments are expenditures that increase future profits but, by national accounting rules, are treated as operating expenses rather than capital expenditures. Sweat investments are uncompensated hours in a business made with the expectation of realizing capital gains when the business goes public or is sold. Incorporating expensed and sweat equity into an otherwise standard business cycle model, we find that there was rapid technological progress during the 1990s, causing a boom in market hours and actual productivity.

The racial gap in educational achievement has been large and mirrored inequality in economic outcomes. While economists such as Robert Margo have done an excellent job in documenting these gaps from 1880 onwards, much of the literature ignores the period immediately following emancipation. The Freedmen's Bureau was a governmental agency set up to assist freed slaves in their transition to their new lives. Perhaps its most important function was in establishing a system of schools in the South. I have obtained data from the US archives on Freedmen Bureau schools. Coupling this information with individual census data, I estimate the effect that these schools had on black literacy and school attendance rates. While previous scholars have minimized the impact of the schools this paper suggests they had a strong effect. Estimates indicate counties with bureau schools had literacy rates nearly 35 percent higher and school attendance rates over 100 percent higher than counties without. These results suggest the Freedmen's Bureau schools had a large impact on the economic and social development of the South.

Because federal income taxes are based on nominal incomes, workers with the same real incomes pay more taxes in high-cost areas than in low-cost areas, without receiving more in benefits. In the United States, workers in cities offering above-average nominal wages cities with high productivity, low quality-of-life, or inefficient housing sectors can expect to pay 30 percent more in federal taxes, on average, than identical workers with the same real incomes in cities offering below-average nominal wages. Federal taxes induce workers to leave high-wage areas, which according to a calibrated model, lower long-run employment levels in these areas by about 15 percent and land and housing prices by 25 and 4 percent; the opposite occurs in low-wage areas. This leads to an inefficient distribution of employment, costing about 0.28 percent of total income a year, or $34 billion in 2005. Workers will locate more efficiently if taxes are appropriately indexed to local wage levels; indexing taxes to local costs may also improve efficiency although it would induce too many workers to live in expensive, high quality-of-life cities. Deductions in the tax code, for housing and property taxes, index taxes partially to local costs, helping workers locate somewhat more efficiently, but creating larger losses by distorting consumption choices. Changes in relative wages and housing prices across cities over the 1980s and 1990s are roughly consistent with predicted changes from federal tax changes, but are too noisy to calibrate the model directly.

German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and they comprised nearly 10 percent of all Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily lives_both on the battlefield and on the home front_during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions about the immigrant experience at this time.Originally published in Germany in 2002, this collection contains more than three hundred letters written by seventy-eight German immigrants_men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although they are written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.

I investigate whether divorced and never married persons tend to marry within their own marital history group. This analysis is a step toward assessing any distinctions that may exist between the never married and the divorced, which informs the distinctions between first marriages and remarriages, across which inequality among coresident children has been observed. Using log-linear models applied to data of marriages formed in a year from the Vital Statistics Marriage Files, I find evidence of a tendency toward marital history homogamy beyond that accounted for by relative group size, education, and age. Specifically, the never married and the divorced are more likely to marry within their marital history group than to intermarry. Results also indicate that, although the tendency toward marital history homogamy unaccounted for by group size, age, and education persisted throughout the period 1970-1988 (i.e., the years for which educational data are available in the Vital Statistics data), it did diminish somewhat.

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) is a highly prestigious award for science and engineering (S&E) graduate students. This paper uses data from 1952 to 2004 on the population of over 200,000 applicants to the GRF to examine the determinants of the number and characteristics of applicants and the characteristics of awardees. In the early years of the program, GRF awards went largely to physical science and mathematics students and disproportionately to white men, but as the composition of S&E students has changed, larger shares have gone to biological sciences, social sciences, and engineering, and to women and minorities. The absolute number of awards has varied over time, with no trend. Because the number of new S&E college graduates has risen, the result is a sharp decline in the number of awards per S&E bachelor’s graduate. In the 2000s approximately 1/3rd as many NSF Fellowships were granted per S&E baccalaureate than in the 1950s-1970s. The dollar value of the awards relative to the earnings of college graduates has also varied greatly over time. Our analysis of the variation in the number and value of awards and of the characteristics of applicants and awardees finds . . .

The application and integration of historical cartographic data in GIS has received much recent attention. This chapter discusses the current status of the use of such data in the larger GIS environment, and presents three case studies where such data are being used in France, Central Africa, and North Carolina. A new technique for georegistration of historical maps is presented. A brief discussion of the issues involved in incorporating such data is discussed, along with some consideration of future directions.

After examining different public opinion poll data, Lapinski et al. (1997) reported that anti-immigration attitude had experienced resurgence in recent years. Similarly, George J. Snchez (1997) has examined the rise of nativism directed toward Asian and Latino immigrants with a focus on the Los Angles riots and other evidence, and he attributes the rise of anti-immigrant feelings to nativism. Research also indicates that rising nativism may be effected by race and religion. For example, compared to whites, Jeff Diamond (1998) finds that blacks are more likely to be liberal with respect to immigration policy, but they tend to be more restrictionistic when the issue is economic cost. While research on contemporary nativism has rarely examined the role religion plays, religion was one of the foci in important studies of previous anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, which concluded that such anti-immigrant sentiments, including anti-Roman Catholic sentiment, was mainly held by some Evangelical Protestants (e.g. Higham 1955, 1999). Our primary data source is the American Mosiac Project (AMP) survey data. AMP is a multi-year, multi-method study of the bases of solidarity and diversity in America, based out of the University of Minnesotas sociology department. The survey data comes from a random-digit-dial telephone survey (N=2,081) conducted during the summer of 2003. We adopt four dependent variable measures along four dimensions of immigrant incorporation (or resistance to immigrant incorporation) to American society: Ideological, Policy-Orientated, Language, and Economic Costs. We utilize methods of cross tabulations with chi-square tests, ordinal regression and binary logistic regression analyses. We propose that AMP survey data allows us to investigate claims of resurgent nativism in two ways how both race and religion affect peoples attitude toward immigrants and immigration. We propose that the attitudes towards immigrants and immigration may vary across different groups by race and religion. However, we propose that the general trend toward high levels of anti-immigrant sentiment among the general American public will pervade.

Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery used to choose among the excess number of applicants. A unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration to be obtained by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate, but whose names were not drawn in the lottery, after allowing for the effect of noncompliance among some of those whose names were drawn. We also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery. Comparing this non-applicant group to the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non-experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration. We find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills. As a result, non-experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration, by 9 to 82 percent. A good instrumental variable works best, while difference-indifferences and bias-adjusted propensity-score matching also perform comparatively well.

Currently, there is an extensive body of theoretical and empirical research which links personal networks of individuals with labor market outcomes such as job referral (Fernandez and Weinberg 1997; Granovetter 1974), income (Smith 2000), and job tenure (Fernandez, Castilla, and Moore 2000). However, labor market researchers have directed relatively little attention to the role of social capital at the community level. This gap is surprising given that there is growing evidence that social networks of individual are embedded in the community, since actions and outcomes of individual actors can be influenced not just by their dyadic relationships with network contacts but also by the social environment at large (Granovetter 1992). In that context, the previous research that focuses only on the dyadic network ties of individuals runs the risk of neglecting contextual factors that can significantly facilitate or constrain individual social capital. This risk is even greater in racial inequality research, where researchers have empirically documented the cross-race and gender variations in social capital and their impact on wages (Aguilera 2002; Smith 2000). To fill this gap, we study how community level social capital influences racial gaps in wages in 53 communities in the US.

The news that Hispanics have become the nation's largest minority was no demographic surprise. Its fruition had been predicted at least 30 years ago. This news event, though, was important because the appearance of Latinos on the American scene could no longer be deniedneither in the nation's vital economic or educational policies nor in politics. Nowhere. Once considered a sleeping giant, the Latino population has not only grown tremendously but also now constitutes a significant presence throughout most of the United States. Once confined to a small number of states, the Latino population has migrated to new regions, including much of the South, moved into new sectors of the economy, and become an important voting bloc in many states. Its impact is heightened by the fact that it is considerably younger than an aging non-Latino America, making its potential impact on America's future all the greater.This chapter reports on the factors that account for this growth. Overall, it describes how relatively high rates of immigration and fertility have shaped the growth and the creation of an especially youthful age structure among the Latino population. In particular, it examines how changing immigration policies, social networks, and other factors have led to immigration from Latin America and then how a changing labor market as well as immigration policies have affected migration patterns in the United States and prompted the regional dispersion of Latinos. These demographic foundations are fundamental for understanding nearly every aspect of Latino well-being covered in this book, including their spatial distribution and family structure, their position in the educational system and the labor market, and their access to health care and the political system. A notable example of the importance of this population was its role in the recent presidential election: the Hispanic vote may have influenced the outcome (Cobble and Velaquez, 2004). Given the demographic destiny of the Latino population, that influence is likely to grow with its dispersion into new states and as immigrants become citizens and their children reach voting age.

This article illustrates the commonly overlooked sample selection probleminherent in using rural classification methods that change over time due to populationchanges. Since fast growing rural areas grow out of their rural status, using recent ruraldefinitions excludes the most successful places from the analysis. Average economicperformance of the areas remaining rural significantly understates true rural performance.We illustrate this problem using one rural classification system, rural-urban continuumcodes. Choice of code vintage alters conclusions regarding the relative speed of rural andurban growth and can mislead researchers regarding magnitudes and signs of factorsbelieved to influence growth.

This paper studies the impact of the regime shift from maternal preference to joint custody, in custody dispute adjudication during the 1980s using the one percent Integrated Public Use Microsample Series (IPUMS) of the decennial Census for the decades from 1970 to 1990. We focused on children between the ages of 15 to 18, who were living with a single divorced or separated parent and children of intact families. Educational attainment was used to quantify child outcomes. Using cross state and year variation in the timing of adoption of those laws, we found strong evidence that the children of these single parent households, living in states which adopted joint custody, had a higher probability of high school graduation by age 18. On the other hand, we found that children from intact families suffered a decrease in probability of high school graduation by age 18. This suggests that the law has important unintended negative effects that had been thus far neglected. The result on children from intact families was replicated using the IPUMS Current Population Survey Sample, and results concur with the findings from the census dataset. The results were also replicated when we relax the distributional assumption using stochastic dominance techniques.

Racial and ethnic categories in the US census have continually changed. In this paper, we address the question: How do high levels of immigration and a growing multiracial population challenge census racial and ethnic categories? We examined data from the 2000 Census 5 percent IPUMS to compare racial responses of native- and foreign-born Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners, and native-born multiracial Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners, by ancestry. The relationship between race and ancestry can be instructive. If people understand and identify with census racial categories, we expect considerable overlap between their reported race and ancestry. For some groups, including Europeans, Africans, and Middle Easterners (regardless of nativity) and foreign-born Asians, ancestry and race overlapped well. A serious challenge to current census racial categories is the large and growing numbers of people who reported Some Other Race (SOR) alone (primarily non-Cuban Hispanics) or in combination with another race (a diverse population that includes multiracial Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians). One way of addressing this problem is to merge the current race and Hispanic questions, drop the SOR category, and add the ancestry question to the short-form census, changes that may more effectively meet statistical, government, and other needs.