The theoretical premise of this study is twofold. First, that industrial and occupational restructuring within three industries in the U.S.-manufacturing, finance, and high technology-occurred because of technological developments and these, in turn, influenced the settlement patterns of working-age individuals. Second, that quality-of-life factors are increasingly important for the migration decisions of workers as the importance of proximity to ports and raw materials declines. As expected, the results show that high concentrations of high-technology and finance occupations generally have a positive pull for migrants, with younger migrants most attracted to technology jobs. High concentrations of manufacturing jobs have a negative effect. Most surprisingly, the explanatory power of the model declines substantially across the three decades. Both employment variables and proxies for quality-of-life variables lost explanatory power for modeling age-specific in-migration to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Overall, the results support the industrial restructuring hypothesis, but do not find support for the idea that quality-of-life factors have grown in importance.

Cities can use the threat of entry as a mechanism to control private cable firm behavior. Recent state laws prohibiting cities from owning and operating telecom services curtail the efficacy of this mechanism. This paper uses variation in state laws to explore whether the threat of entry mechanism is an effective tool. We find that cities which are prohibited from owning and operating telecom services experience lower expanded tier prices and faster time to broadband availability. These results suggest that private cable operator opportunism is low, and that the state laws act to protect cable firms from appropriation by cities.

This dissertation focuses on how the option of home-based work affected the labor force participation of the disabled during the dawn of the ADA. Was the employment landscape for the disabled more favorable after the passage of the ADA? Did the "reasonable accommodation" mandate of the ADA and technology improvements make home-based work a more viable option for the disabled? In sum, did home-based work facilitate labor force participation of the disabled?This paper is divided into four sections. The introductory section outlines the ADA, how home-based work may fit in its mission, and discusses the literature of labor force participation and disability status. Section II is descriptive and summarizes the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data to compare the disabled and the non-disabled in and out of the workforce and by worksite choice. This section also shows the change in these characteristics between 1990 and 2000 to see if the ADA may have had an effect. Section III outlines the economic theory behind labor force participation and disability status and is modeled after "Home-Based Work and Women's Labor Force Decisions" by Linda Edwards and Elizabeth Field-Hendrey. The presence of a disability alters the fixed cost of working, but in various degrees depending if one is an onsite worker, a home-based worker, self-employed or an employee. Section IV creates an econometric model that fits this labor force participation problem and shows logit estimates of the models and marginal effects for 1990 and 2000. Finally, I summarize my findings.

The theoretical premise of this study is twofold. First, that industrial and occupational restructuring within three industries in the U.S.-manufacturing, finance, and high technology-occurred because of technological developments and these, in turn, influenced the settlement patterns of working-age individuals. Second, that quality-of-life factors are increasingly important for the migration decisions of workers as the importance of proximity to ports and raw materials declines. As expected, the results show that high concentrations of high-technology and finance occupations generally have a positive pull for migrants, with younger migrants most attracted to technology jobs. High concentrations of manufacturing jobs have a negative effect. Most surprisingly, the explanatory power of the model declines substantially across the three decades. Both employment variables and proxies for quality-of-life variables lost explanatory power for modeling age-specific in-migration to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Overall, the results support the industrial restructuring hypothesis, but do not find support for the idea that quality-of-life factors have grown in importance.

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 Deal's impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Census's 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.

Despite robust growth in real GDP per capita in the last three decades, U.S. poverty rates have changed very little. We summarize some basic facts about poverty in the United States, relying on a combination of previously published data from the Census Bureau and our own tabulations based on Current Population Survey data. We then discuss and evaluate four determinants of changes in the poverty rate that have been advanced in the literature: the impact of labor market opportunities; the role of changes in family structure; the role played by government antipoverty programs; and the role of immigration.

Using the birth certificates data from the Vital Statistics of the USA between 1968 and 1999, we construct state level panel data of different measures of fertility and examine the change in divorce laws. Total fertility declined in states that introduced unilateral divorce, which makes dissolution of marriage easier. Most of this effect is due to a decline of out-of-wedlock fertility. We suggest an explanation (and provide supportive evidence for it) based upon the effect of divorce laws on the probability of entering and exiting marriage. Women planning to have children marry more easily with an easier "exit option" from marriage. Thus, more children are born in the first years of marriage, while the total marital fertility does not change, probably as a result of an increase in divorces and marital instability. The effect of changes in divorce laws is greater among whites than African Americans.

According to Samuel Huntington, Latin Americans are eroding our country's core Anglo-Protestant values. The values, says he, made America great, unified the country, and allowed immigrant upward mobility through assimilation and acculturation. Huntington expresses concern that immigrants from Latin America, now our main newcomers, along with their U.S.-born progeny, are creating another America, culturally and socially distinct. The reason for this, he claims, is that they settle in close proximity to one another; they retain use of their mother tongue, Spanish; and they remain, in the main, committed Catholics. These conditions purportedly are bad both for America and for the immigrants. They impede new immigrant ability to live the American Dream and, by implication, America's continued global economic preeminence.

While divorce rates peaked in the 1980s, an estimated 33% of first marriages now end in divorce orseparation within the first 10 years of marriage and debates over the effects of divorce laws are still verymuch alive. While there is a plethora of research documenting the effect of divorce on children, there hasbeen relatively little empirical work seeking to assess the effect of the divorce legislation on children andlater life outcomes. This paper seeks to narrow this gap in the literature by revisiting earlier results and byproviding updated evidence on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on child outcomes. It builds onJonathon Grubers 2004 paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics, which, in addition toaddressing the effect of unilateral divorce on divorce rates, looks at the effect of unilateral divorce exposureboth as a child and as an adult on a variety of outcomes including education, income, marriage and suicide.In order to test the robustness of Grubers estimates and to assess whether these trends persist with theinclusion of more recent data, I first replicate his results as precisely as possible. Then, I extend Grubersanalysis by including 2000 census data which was not available at the time of his publication. While myreplication of Gruber is not perfect, for the most part, I am reasonably successful in replicating his majorfindings using data from the 1960-1990 time period. In my extension, I find many of the updated resultsfound using the 1960-2000 timeframe to be smaller in magnitude and, in many instances, much less precisethan those estimated with the original sample. Updated results still provide evidence of a positive, albeitsmaller, effect of current unilateral divorce exposure on divorce probabilities. However, contrary toGrubers findings, I find little evidence of strong negative effects of youth exposure to unilateral divorce on later life outcomes once the 2000 data are included.

This article examines competing theoretical claims regarding how an individual's education will affect his or her likelihood of interracial marriage. I demonstrate that prior models of interracial marriage have failed to adequately distinguish the joint and marginal effects of education on interracial marriage and present a model capable of distinguishing these effects. I test this model on black-white interracial marriages using 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. census data. The results reveal partial support for status exchange theory within black malewhite female unions and strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market. Structural assimilation theory is not supported because the educational attainment of whites is not related in any consistent fashion to the likelihood of interracial marriage. The strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market has gone unnoticed in prior research because of the failure of prior methods to distinguish joint and marginal effects.

This paper focuses on bilingualism among Latino adults who were born in the US or are members of the 1.5 generation: immigrants who arrived as children age ten or younger. We ask: Under what contextual circumstances does bilingualism thrive among US-born and 1.5 generation Hispanics? While we acknowledge that Spanish retention across generations is in part a factor of individual- and household-level circumstances (Alba et al. 2002, Bean and Stevens 2003, Linton 2004, Stevens 1985), our interest is in broader contexts because these reflect contemporary developments that could influence change in both the real and perceived value of bilingualism. Our analysis encompasses US metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, emphasizing dynamics of socio-cultural, demographic, economic, and political change. We explore the contextual circumstances under which bilingualism could become a stable and compatible aspect of being American.

Minority-owned banks have a mission to promote economic well-being in their communities. In particular, specialization in lending based on a central mechanism of shared-minority identity can yield an advantage in serving community needs through times of financial and economic crises. To test this proposition, we analyze individual banks in their local market context from 2006 to 2020. Results suggest minority-owned banks improve economic resilience in their communities during the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis through increased small business and household lending, but fewer benefits are found during other phases of the business cycle. Our results are robust and stand up to treatments of identification concerns, including propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variables (IV). Our results imply that if all U.S. banks behaved in a manner consistent with minority-owned banks through the GFC, at least 1.9 million more minority jobs would have been maintained and at least $50 billion more in credit would have been available to small businesses on an annual basis. These findings are consistent with predictions of the economic resilience literature but not those of the finance-growth nexus literature.

The first edition of this ground-breaking book was the pioneer text on outcomes research. It's a resource no quality-minded health care professional should be without. Both practical and applied, this book makes sense of the new science of studying health care outcomes - a vital process in health care quality assurance. Understanding Health Care Outcomes Research, Second Edition, gives readers a wealth of expert advice on the basic framework needed to conduct any type of outcomes research, formulating the model, choosing the study design, developing meaningful measures, gathering data, and assessing and presenting results. The second edition includes new chapters on confounders, research design, and working within clinical settings. All chapters have been updated. Understanding Health Care Outcomes Research, Second Edition includes more attention to larger interventions that include population level changes.

In this exploratory case study, I compare and contrast the self-employment experiences and hiring practices of Black, Latino, and White business owners in the Atlanta construction industry. While much of the ethnic entrepreneurship literature has explained the racialized differences between racial and ethnic groups concerning self-employment and their hiring practices, few studies have been able to provide a clear explanation of the mechanisms racial groups use to maintain an economic and social edge without being overtly racist. Furthermore, many scholars have not yet begun to compare the experiences of Whites, Blacks, and Latinos in the South and how their racial ideologies and competition spur on discrimination and racism in a supposedly color-blind environment. To address these gaps, I interviewed 42 White, Black, and Latino sub- and general contractors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. I also collected observational data by visiting the worksites of my respondents and attending organizational meetings. Results suggest that even though many of my respondents indicated that racial dissimilarities were due to individual effort and poor motivation, I find that these color-blind ideologies work well to solidify the racial hierarchy and privilege White contractors. I also find that these ideologies block Blacks and Latinos from obtaining better financing, building a good reputation, or having access to important social connections that introduced most contractors to more lucrative prospects. More importantly, the White good ole boy networks worked as a mechanism to exclude Blacks and Latinos from more lucrative connections, and keep any interactions to a strictly employee-employer relationship. However, these business owners hiring practices are the same: they want the cheapest and hardest-working employees they can get, who are usually Latino laborers. By moving beyond the black/white dichotomy, this study offers new explanations of race relations and racial inequality in a metropolitan area recently affected by immigration. Finally, I show that competition pushes these contractors to be more discriminatory, especially when Latino immigrants threaten their "hard-earned" social positions. My empirical and conceptual analyses provide a good start toward explaining how racism and discrimination is organized and continues to persist in a major U.S. industry.

Over the last fifty years, home production output may have changed significantly due to dramatic increases in women's time allocation to market work. It is important to quantify this change: to the extent that increases in GDP derive from new time allocation patterns, failure to measure reductions in home-production output can create a biased impression of progress. This paper proposes a new method for measuring changes in home production activity. The main idea is to compare the accumulation of retirement wealth for single- and dual-earner couples. Assuming that male time allocation stays relatively stable, a household in which the wife works spends some of its income on goods and services that substitute for home production. Purchases of day care, cleaning services, restaurant meals, and so forth leave the household with less resources available for savings. As a result, we expect dual earner households to systematically consume a larger fraction of their measured income. We estimate the value of foregone home production from the differences in savings rates among single- and dual-earner couples using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study. We can then calculate the net contribution of the increases in female market employment to GDP growth. We formulate a life cycle model where women can allocate their time between home production and market work. Working more hours in the market leads to a loss of home production output. We model this loss as a convex function of market hours. We believe that such a specification has a priori appeal: a woman's hours at home may not all be equally valuable, and, if she seeks market work, she should sacrifice the hours with the lowest opportunity cost first. We solve the model analytically and derive the regression equation that is used for the estimation. Although some of our analytical results rely on functional form assumptions, our framework has several attractive features. In particular, the model allows many dimensions of household heterogeneity, including differences in ability to earn on the market and produce at home and differences in wage and family size profiles. Another advantage is that the model can be generalized to incorporate labor force participation and human capital accumulation decisions without affecting our estimates. Our results indicate that the value of foregone home production is modest. For every dollar that she earns in the market, a woman sacrifices 20-30 cents in lost home production. Thus the net gain of female employment is 70-80 percent of the woman's market earnings. We use our estimates to calculate the impact of dramatic changes in female employment on GDP and aggregate home production. Due to a rise in female labor force participation and the closing of the wage gap, the fraction of labor income earned by women increased from 20% in 1959 to over 35% in 1999. The corresponding fall in home production is substantial: we estimate that 5 percent of 1999 GDP consisted of goods and services that used to be produced at home in 1959

This paper empirically assesses the theory of interpersonal income comparison using a unique data set on suicide deaths in the United States. We treat suicide as a choice variable, conditional on exogenous risk factors, reflecting one's assessment of current and expected future utility. Using this framework we examine whether differences in group-specific suicide rates are systematically related to income dispersion, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and income level. The results strongly support the notion that individuals consider relative income in addition to absolute income when evaluating their own utility. Importantly, the findings suggest that relative income affects utility in a two-sided manner, meaning that individuals care about the incomes of those above them (the Joneses) and those below them (the Smiths). Our results complement and extend those from studies using subjective survey data or data from controlled experiments.

Dynamic mapping permits the layering of county-level statistical data (percentages expressed as alpha values), used as a backdrop to the display of individual incidents of racial violence. Violent incidents expressed as points (flags) show geographic relationships to underlying data that might not be as visible in standard table format especially useful for regional agricultural, economic, and political statistics and to show pertinent legal borders. To illustrate change over time using an interactive interface, each hyperlink click provides deeper levels of information to a user, whether the information is text-only or other media (images, small graphs or charts of linear statistical relationships or regression coefficients would enrich the analysis. Problems in presentation include a tension between narrative and learner-centered exploration. This approach to sharing research data on such a charged subject as lynching might also suggest other exchanges: such as a comment function or guestbook, an opportunity to download portions of the project, or to a chance to explore correlates in a larger landscape. For example, if interactive mapping of one state during a 10-year period is successful, the approach could be extended and expanded to include the entire affected region (the South as a whole) over a longer time period.