In each of the above-listed books, the authors have made contributions to the field of southern urban history. Harriet E. Amos offers a classic organizational history of antebellum Mobile from a top-down perspective. Michael V. R. Thomason edits a work that surveys the entire history of Mobile from precontact to the present.1 And Michael W. Fitzgerald provides a refreshing investigation of urban politics in Reconstruction-era Mobile. The roles of various racial and ethnic groups appear in all of their works, and they are the focus of this review.During the past twenty-five years, historians have continually noted the need for further study of the urban South. The cities in the South have not, however, received the scholarly attention they deserve. A perusal of the conference program for the Seventieth annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (2004) revealed two panels on southern urban history. The conference program for the Second Biennial Urban History Conference (2004) contained three papers on New Orleans and two papers on Atlanta but no panels on southern urban history. Both conferences devoted considerable attention to race relations

This article examines segmented assimilation among foreign-born and U.S.-born Mexicans. Using the 2000 census, this article investigates how immigrants' length of residence in the United States and nativity affect the earnings and self-employment outcomes of low- and high-skilled Mexican men and women in the Southwest. Findings reveal that the earnings of low-skilled, foreign-born Mexicans decrease as immigrants reside in the United States longer and are generally lower among the U.S. born than the foreign born. In contrast, the earnings of high-skilled, foreign-born Mexicans increase as immigrants reside in the United States longer and are generally higher among U.S.-born Mexicans than foreign-born Mexicans. Moreover, self-employment participation decreases as immigrants reside in the United States longer and is lower among the U.S. born than the foreign born, regardless of skill. Since self-employment results in lower earnings, a decline in self-employment indicates economic progress. Furthermore, men are generally better off than women. Drawing from segmented assimilation theory, findings support the "downward assimilation" hypothesis among low-skilled Mexicans and the "Anglo-conformity" hypothesis among high-skilled Mexicans. Overall, this research provides evidence of intragroup differences in segmented assimilation among foreign-born and U.S.-born Mexicans in the Southwest.

Professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers (except private household set-vice workers) grew from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment between 1910 and 2000; laborers (except mine laborers), private household service workers, and farmers lost the most jobs over the period.

Research on the educational enrollment of immigrants typically asserts that todays immigrant children are educationally disadvantaged, and that earlier waves of immigrants were more readily absorbed into the American educational system. This paper addresses these assumptions, drawing on traditional assimilationist and status competition approaches to race and ethnic stratification. Data from the 1920 Census IPUMS are used to analyze school participation of 15 to 18 year olds living in the parental home. The findings demonstrate that the process of assimilation was not uniform for all groups. Some groups achieved parity with the native-stock by the third generation; others took at least an additional generation, or experienced declines in the proportions enrolled in school. In general, the results suggest strong parallels between the educational experiences of white ethnics in 1920 and those of todays immigrants.

Taiwanese immigrants in Los Angeles stand in contrast to the well-documented homeownership deficit among immigrants. Despite the tremendous growth in Taiwanese immigrants during the 1980s, the Taiwanese homeownership rate was not only among the highest of all ethnic groups in 1990, but also recorded a phenomenal increase of 16 percentage points between 1980 and 1990. This paper examines this trend and assesses the contributing factors. It reveals that (1) education and wealth were contributors to Taiwanese high homeownership; (2) Chinese immigrants in general and Taiwanese immigrants in particular had endowment-adjusted homeownership rates well above that of non-Hispanic whites, while the ways in which ethnic Chinese immigrants achieve high homeownership were reflective of their distinctive paths of immigration; (3) surprisingly, higher English proficiency, an indicator of acculturation, was negatively associated with Taiwanese homeownership; (4) the large rise in Taiwanese homeownership in the 1980s was largely contributed to by young, highly educated, newly arrived Taiwanese with a low level of income and a high level of wealth. Findings refute the hypothesis that immigrants are always plagued by homeownership deficits. Well-off immigrants, such as the Taiwanese, may have followed a path of assimilation not yet documented in the literature; acculturation and social adaptation may no longer be preconditions for their economic integration. The arrival of well-off immigrants has a significant potential to bolster regional demand for owner-occupied housing.

Using the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce (1993) wage decomposition technique, we analyze changes in the earnings differential between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white men in the United States between 1980 and 2000. The empirical findings, based on decennial census data, indicate that limited-English-proficient (LEP) Hispanic men gained in their relative earnings position compared to English-fluent Hispanics during the 1990s. Our interpretation is that the relative demand for LEP Hispanic workers has risen in recent years.Recent demographic and socioeconomic shiftsincluding the rapid Hispanic population growth, expanding trade and production opportunities in the Spanish language, and changes in immigration policy and enforcementhave presumably affected the relative earnings of limited-English-proficient (LEP) Hispanic workers in the United States. Employing U.S. decennial census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000, this study investigates changes in the earnings structure of LEP Hispanic men vis--vis those fluent in the English language.The population analyzed includes United States- and foreign-born Hispanic men aged 2564 who reported wage and salary income, and who worked at least 20 hours a week for 32 weeks or more in the year prior to the census. We use the convention of identifying the LEP as those who do not speak the English language well. The base group of comparison contains men often considered the most assimilated in the United StatesU.S.-born non-Hispanic whites who only speak English at home (e.g., McManus, Gould, and Welch 1983). A perusal of the sample summary statistics (details are available) indicates that the earnings gap between non-Hispanic White and Hispanic men has widened since 1980. The averages of the natural logarithm of hourly earnings (defined as annual wage and salary income divided by total hours worked) of non-Hispanic White, LEP Hispanic, and English-fluent Hispanic men in 1980 were 2.04, 1.44, and 1.81; by 2000, these earnings rose to 2.86, 2.19, and 2.55.These figures indicate a similar growth in the Hispanic/non-Hispanic White earnings gap for the LEP and the English-fluent between 1980 and 2000, despite the increasing returns to skill that occurred during this time (e.g., Welch 2000). Perhaps the relatively large increase in the mean education levels of the LEP helped counter some of the higher skill returns. Between 1980 and 2000, the average schooling of LEP Hispanics rose by 1.3 years (from 6.5 to 7.8 years), compared to 0.8 years (from 13.1 to 13.9 years) for non-Hispanic Whites, and 0.6 years (from 11.2 to 11.8) for English-fluent Hispanics.

This dissertation explores a previously unknown Civil War financial conspiracy that backfired and caused a great deal of collateral damage among Missouris pro-southern population. In 1861, a small group of pro-secession politicians, bankers, and wealthy men conspired to divert money illegally from Missouris banks to arm and equip rebel military units then forming throughout the state. The schemes collapse eventually caused a revolution in land ownership and permanently altered the states political economy. Most of these events occurred in Missouris main slaveholding district along both banks of the Missouri River, in an area slightly smaller than West Virginia. The narrative begins in January 1861 and ends in the 1880s.The present study grew out of my discovery, in Missouri circuit court records, of the archival traces of a large check-kiting scheme. Further research in judicial and financial sources showed that Missouris banks paid the equivalent of hundreds of millions of todays dollars in unsecured loans to the states southern sympathizers, in return for sham collateral. After Confederate defeat, litigation arising from these loans resulted in sheriffs sales of over a half million acres of farmland. These land sales effectively ended the plantation system in Missouri and the leading role of Missouris planters. The widespread distress caused by the land sales also intensified the states notorious guerrilla insurgency, the worst such conflict ever fought on American soil. Bushwhackers whose names can be identified and who lived in the indebted counties overwhelmingly came from families stripped of their property in the widespread litigation. The financial history of the Civil War in the West has been hitherto largely unresearched. The dissertation traces the effect of financial decisions and conditions on wartime politics, and explains certain social and economic outcomes that otherwise seem anomalous. Because Missouris banks were instrumental in these events, the dissertation considers at length the development of antebellum state banking, its role in the slave economy, and the banking industrys wartime transformation. The industry discussion rests on an analysis of the banks financial statements for the period 18591865, reconstructed through forensic accounting. The resulting data are the most complete set of financial statistics extant for any states banking industry in the period.

The population of the United States is aging. Because of this demographic shift, discussion of social support is leading many scholars to discussion of patterns of intergenerational giving. This paper adds to this discussion by fusing it with discussions of social capital and the production of collective goods. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), logistic regressions elucidate the value of various forms of social capital by how increases in such commodities increase the chance of receiving intergenerational support. Furthermore, the concept of saturationhow much of any social capital commodity exists within a familial groupis used to explain variation in value across families. Intergenerational exchange is found to be a collective good produced by individual family members investments in social capital. This relationship is shown to be one that acceleratesi.e. the more saturated social capital is within a family the more a single unit increase affects the chances of help.

This study examines the changes in the school-to-work transition in the United States over the latter part of the twentieth century and their consequences for the wages of young adults. In particular, we document the various types of work and schooling experiences acquired by youth who came to adulthood in the U.S. during the late 1960s, 1970s, and through the 1980s. We pay particular attention to how the differences across cohorts in these transitions vary by gender and race/ethnicity and how these differences affected their subsequent wage attainment. Evidence is evaluated using data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women, Young Men, and Youth 1979. In general, we find that indicators of educational attainment, working while in school and non-school related work increased across cohorts for almost all racial/ethnic and gender groups. This was especially true for young women. Furthermore, various indicators of personal and family backgrounds changed in ways consistent with an improvement across cohorts in the preparation of young men and women for their attainment of schooling and work experience and their success in the labor market. The one exception to this general picture of improvement across cohorts was Hispanic men, who experienced a notable decline in educational attainment, the acquisition of full time work early in their adult lives and in a variety of personal and family background characteristics. With respect to hourly wage rates, we find that wages over the ages 16 through 27 declined across cohorts. However, the rate of growth of wages with age, particularly over adult ages, increased across cohorts for all racial/ethnic and gender groups, except black and Hispanic men. To assess the relative importance that changes in the school, work, military and other experiences had on wages across generations, we employ the decomposition proposed by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1993) to decompose the across-cohort wage changes in observable determinants, in their associated prices and in unobservable determinants, using a standard regression specification for the determinants of life cycle wages. We find that the dominant factor explaining the declines in wages across cohorts is attributable to changes in the prices of observable characteristics and to changes in unobservable determinants. At constant skill prices, changes in the skill composition across youth cohorts would have increased their wages, most especially for Hispanic women, followed by black women, white women, black men, and then white men. In striking contrast, Hispanic males wages would still have declined across cohorts purely accounting for compositional changes. We interpret this result as coming from the changing skill composition of immigrants. Our results also highlight the need for accounting for the endogeneity and selectivity of early skill acquisition.

Gender segregation of jobs plays a central role in current research on gender and labor markets, and understanding the mechanisms driving gender segregation has become a key focus of study. While the literature on gender segregation of jobs often invokes gender sorting mechanisms that operate pre-hire, the data that are used to empirically examine these processes are almost always collected on post-hire populations. This lack of fit between theory and data make it dangerous to conclude anything about the presence or absence of pre-hire gender sorting mechanisms on the basis of post-hire data. In this paper, we examine the workings of pre-hire mechanisms that are alleged to sort men and women into different jobs. Despite the theoretical importance of these mechanisms, very little empirical evidence has ever been offered on the pre-hire stages of the hiring process. We study a research setting that is unusually well suited for identifying and empirically isolating these social processes: we analyze unique data on the recruitment and hiring process starting with the pool of applicants for an entry-level customer service representative (CSR) job at a telephone customer service center of a large bank. We find that all of the factors we examinedpre-application choices, pre-application gender homophily of networks, and screeners choices--played significant and distinct roles in the gender segregation of the CSR job. Furthermore, we demonstrate that making inferences about pre-hire processes on the basis of post-hire data can be misleading. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of our findings.

This study examines the changes in the school-to-work transition in the United States over the latter part of the twentieth century and their consequences for the wages of young adults. In particular, we document the various types of work and schooling experiences acquired by youth who came to adulthood in the U.S. during the late 1960s, 1970s, and through the 1980s. We pay particular attention to how the differences across cohorts in these transitions vary by gender and race/ethnicity and how these differences affected their subsequent wage attainment. Evidence is evaluated using data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women, Young Men, and Youth 1979. In general, we find that indicators of educational attainment, working while in school and non-school related work increased across cohorts for almost all racial/ethnic and gender groups. This was especially true for young women. Furthermore, various indicators of personal and family backgrounds changed in ways consistent with an improvement across cohorts in the preparation of young men and women for their attainment of schooling and work experience and their success in the labor market. The one exception to this general picture of improvement across cohorts was Hispanic men, who experienced a notable decline in educational attainment, the acquisition of full time work early in their adult lives and in a variety of personal and family background characteristics. With respect to hourly wage rates, we find that wages over the ages 16 through 27 declined across cohorts. However, the rate of growth of wages with age, particularly over adult ages, increased across cohorts for all racial/ethnic and gender groups, except black and Hispanic men. To assess the relative importance that changes in the school, work, military and other experiences had on wages across generations, we employ the decomposition proposed by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1993) to decompose the across-cohort wage changes in observable determinants, in their associated prices and in unobservable determinants, using a standard regression specification for the determinants of life cycle wages. We find that the dominant factor explaining the declines in wages across cohorts is attributable to changes in the prices of observable characteristics and to changes in unobservable determinants. At constant skill prices, changes in the skill composition across youth cohorts would have increased their wages, most especially for Hispanic women, followed by black women, white women, black men, and then white men. In striking contrast, Hispanic males wages would still have declined across cohorts purely accounting for compositional changes. We interpret this result as coming from the changing skill composition of immigrants. Our results also highlight the need for accounting for the endogeneity and selectivity of early skill acquisition.

Ethnicity has been a contentious issue in sexually transmitted infection and HIV research, partly because it contributes to the mythology of beliefs that might add to discrimination, and partly because it is an apparently potent marker of risk. A study by Kevin Fenton and colleagues in today's Lancet is a welcome addition to the evidence, and provides more light than heat. These investigators provide a comprehensive view of sexual behaviour across ethnic groups in Britain, including solid information ...

Objective. This study examines how the odds of a black renter becoming a homeowner changed during the 1990s, considering significant policy changes aimed at dismantling discriminatory barriers to nonwhite homeownership during that time period and various housing-market characteristics, including the level of residential segregation. Methods. This study uses geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses to estimate an event history model of transition into homeownership for black Americans. Results. The results of this study suggest that blacks benefited from the changing home-lending environment and were more likely to become homeowners during the 1990s. These improvements appear to be both absolute and relative to whites. This implies that the policy changes had some success. Nevertheless, blacks were significantly less likely to become homeowners during the study periodeven after controlling for a variety of factors known to be associated with homeownershipsuggesting that further reforms may be necessary to eradicate disparities in access to homeownership between whites and blacks. The analysis also shows that blacks residing in metro areas with the highest levels of racial isolation were significantly more likely to become homeowners than blacks residing in metro areas with the lowest levels of isolation. Conclusion. The study results show that the policy reforms of the 1990s likely had a salutary effect on black homeownership. The results also suggest that residential segregation matters to black homeownership in complex ways.

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945-2000) on the US economy. Contrary to recent studies, we estimate that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. Our analysis relies on a computable general equilibrium model combining the major interactions between immigrants and natives (labor market impact, fiscal impact, capital deepening, endogenous education, endogenous inequality). We use a backsolving method to calibrate the model on historical data and then consider two counterfactual variants: a cutoff of all immigration flows since 1950 and a stronger selection policy. According to our simulations, the postwar US immigration is beneficial for all cohorts and all skill groups. These gains are closely related to a long-run fiscal gain and a small labor market impact of immigrants. Finally, we also demonstrate that all generations would have benefited from a stronger selection of immigrants.

We review the literature on segmented assimilation and alternative theoretical models on the adaptation of the second generation; summarize the theoretical framework developed in the course of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study [CILS]; and present evidence from its third survey in South Florida bearing on alternative hypotheses. We find that the majority of second-generation youths are moving ahead educationally and occupationally, but that a significant minority is being left behind. The latter group is not distributed randomly across nationalities, but corresponds closely to predictions based on immigrant parents' human capital, family type, and modes of incorporation. While it is clear that members of the second generation, whether successful or unsuccessful will assimilate - in the sense of learning English and American culture - it makes a great deal of difference whether they do so by joining the mainstream middle class or the marginalized, and largely racialized, population at the bottom. Narratives drawn from the ethnographic module accompanying the survey put into perspective quantitative results and highlight the realities of segmented assimilation as it takes place today in U.S. society.

The advantages of using a multi-group mechanism for measuring occupational segregation are highlighted. Scrutiny of existing scholarship on occupational segregation is reviewed, illustrating the insights provided by such research on the gendered nature of certain occupations & full-time work; however, it is stressed that such literature has failed to explore the dynamic relationship between gender & work time. Data from the 1990 US Census Integrated Public Use Microdata series & from the 1991 British 1% Household Samples of Anonymized Records is subsequently analyzed to ascertain the gender & employment status of UK & US workers; it is revealed that UK & US workers possess different motivations for gaining part-time employment. H. Theil's (1972) entropy index of segregation, a multi-group measure, is subsequently used to investigate this multidimensional relationship between gender & employment status in both countries. The findings revealed greater levels of segregation between male & female workers & between full-time & part-time workers in the UK than in the US. Despite the utility of Theil's entropy index as a measure of occupational segregation, it is noted that such multi-group mechanisms possess certain shortcomings; directions for future research are also offered.

This dissertation is a collection of three independent essays in theoretical and applied econometrics,organized in the form of three chapters. In the first two chapters, I investigate the propertiesof parametric and semiparametric fixed effects estimators for nonlinear panel data models. Thefirst chapter focuses on fixed effects maximum likelihood estimators for binary choice models,such as probit, logit, and linear probability model. These models are widely used in economicsto analyze decisions such as labor force participation, union membership, migration, purchaseof durable goods, marital status, or fertility. The second chapter looks at generalized methodof moments estimation in panel data models with individual-specific parameters. An importantexample of these models is a random coefficients linear model with endogenous regressors. Thethird chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Victor Chernozhukov) studies the interpretationof quantile regression estimators when the linear model for the underlying conditionalquantile function is possibly misspecified.

Immigration has long been a force that shapes the housing and labor markets in gateway metropolitan areas. Recently, the impact of immigration is being felt in an increasingly large number of metropolitan areas. This study focuses on the housing outcomes of households who currently live in the fourteen largest emerging gateways, with special focus give to those households that have left the six established gateway metropolitan areas. The findings suggest that those that households that move from most gateway metropolitan areas have lower homeownership rates than do households that move from within the metropolitan area. At the same time, there is little evidence that immigrants do no worse than native-born households that migrate within the United States. The study also demonstrates that immigrant households that live in crowded conditions or have multiple workers in the household have better homeownership rates than similar native born households, and that younger immigrant household are more successful in attaining homeownership than are similar native-born households.

Using a sample of immigrant men in US census data from the early and late 1900s and available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), this study explores: (1) whether immigrant entrepreneurship is positively affected by ethnic group size and linguistic isolation; (2) how sensitive these relationships are to English-language proficiency; and (3) if these relationships have remained stable over time. The empirical results indicate that the size of the local ethnic population does not enhance immigrant self-employment for either English-proficient or limited-English-proficient (LEP) men in the USA. In addition, while linguistic isolation in the local labour pool seems to promote entrepreneurship among English-fluent immigrants in certain cases, it appears to hinder the business formation among the LEP. Finally, comparing the results across time-periods is consistent with the premise that rising xenophobia pushes a disproportionate share of the LEP into self-employment.