Two centuries of American maritime history, in which the Atlantic Ocean remained the great frontier Westward expansion has been the great narrative of the first two centuries of American history, but as historian Daniel Vickers demonstrates here, the horizon extended in all directions. For those who lived along the Atlantic coast, it was the Eastand the Atlantic Oceanthat beckoned. While historical and fictional accounts have tended to stress the exceptional circumstances or psychological compulsions that drove men to sea, this book shows how normal a part of life seafaring was for those living near a coast before the midnineteenth century. Drawing on records of several thousand seamen and their voyages from Salem, Massachusetts, Young Men and the Sea offers a social history of seafaring in the colonial and early national period. In what sort of families were sailors raised? When did they go to sea? What were their chances of death? Whom did they marry, and how did their wives operate households in their absence? Answering these and many other questions, this book is destined to become a classic of American social and maritime history.

Access to distant goods, services and even labor has become much easier. Increased access to markets has also brought increased competition, pressuring firms to reduce costs to maintain profitability. In this age of globalization, as Michael Porter notes, the importance of generalized urban economies diminishes, and agglomeration economies become much more important. . .

This paper develops four propositions that show that changes in the global job market for science and engineering (S&E) workers are eroding US dominance in S&E, which diminishes comparative advantage in high tech production and creates problems for American industry and workers: (1) The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering graduates is declining rapidly as European and Asian universities, particularly from China, have increased S&E degrees while US degree production has stagnated. 2) The job market has worsened for young workers in S&E fields relative to many other high-level occupations, which discourages US students from going on in S&E, but which still has sufficient rewards to attract large immigrant flows, particularly from developing countries. 3) Populous low income countries such as China and India can compete with the US in high tech by having many S&E specialists although those workers are a small proportion of their work forces. This threatens to undo the "North-South" pattern of trade in which advanced countries dominate high tech while developing countries specialize in less skilled manufacturing. 4) Diminished comparative advantage in high-tech will create a long period of adjustment for US workers, of which the off-shoring of IT jobs to India, growth of high-tech production in China, and multinational R&D facilities in developing countries, are harbingers. To ease the adjustment to a less dominant position in science and engineering, the US will have to develop new labor market and R&D policies that build on existing strengths and develop new ways of benefitting from scientific and technological advances in other countries.

This paper uses data on real and personal property ownership collected in the 1870 Federal Census to explore factors influencing individual wealth accumulation and the aggregate distribution of wealth in the United States near the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous analyses of these data have relied on relatively small samples, or focused on population subgroups. By using the much larger sample available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) we are able to disaggregate the data much more finely than has previously been possible allowing us to explore differences in inequality across space and between different population groups. The data provide strong support for the hypothesis that American industrialization during the nineteenth century resulted in increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.

In this paper, we explore the effect of local labor market conditions on the labor supply decisions of older workers. We use three different sources of variation: shocks to the US steel industry, shocks to Appalachian coal mining, and shocks to US manufacturing. While each experiment uses different methodology, the three tell a remarkably consistent story: the retirement decisions of Americans over the last thirty-five years have been affected by the performance of local labor markets. First, using variation induced by the decline in the US steel industry, we find that a 10 percent reduction in earnings resulting from the decline of the primary metals industry resulted in a 1.5 percent increase in the participation and expenditures of the Old Age program. Second, using variation in coal prices induced by oil shocks, we find that a 10 percent increase in earnings from the coal industry reduced participation about 0.9 percent and decreases expenditures about 1.2 percent. Finally, looking at variation induced by the concentration of manufacturing employment, we use micro data to examine the age and education levels of those who retired.

This dissertation examines the effect of changes in the stock of human capital on the labor force participation decision of women aged 25-54. Without the option of home-based work, some women choose to leave the labor market and stay at home temporarily for family reasons. Working women realize that time out of the labor force could impose penalties on their work careers. This is because during the break, they do not accumulate any new human capital while the existing job skills continuously depreciate. Nowadays, home-based work becomes possible for many jobs because rapid development in personal computers and advances in information and communications technology have reduced employers' cost of offering home-based work arrangements. Working women can resolve the time conflict between demand for paid work and family responsibility by working from home. In a previous study, the home-based work decision depends on the fixed cost of working and potential home production. Women who are disabled, have small children, or live in rural areas are likely to work from home because they have high fixed costs of working and high potential home production. However, none of the existing studies applies the human capital theory of labor supply to the home-based work decision. Using data on the female labor force from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of housing units from the 2000 U.S. Census, I estimate a nested logit model to examine the effects of expected costs of non-participation, in terms of forgone earnings, forgone human capital accumulation and human capital depreciation, on women's labor force participation decision. I find that, other things being equal, women aged 25 to 44 who have potentially high human capital accumulation and high human capital depreciation are likely to stay in the labor force. In the case that the value of their home time is so high that they choose to stay at home, they prefer to work for pay at home than to be out of the labor force.

Marriage market estimates by sex and age are made for the US and England and Wales in 1990-91, using explicit data on age preferences. Availability is strongly differentiated by age and sex; it decreases with age for women, while the opposite is true for men. Decomposition shows that young women are advantaged largely by age preferences while older men are advantaged by population age-sex and marital status structure. Most men marry at ages when partners are in short supply, a finding that is examined in detail. Implications for gender power relations through the life course are considered.

This study investigates the implications for union stability of different methods for providing access to income in cohabiting and marital unions among mainland Puerto Ricans. Using the Puerto Rican Maternal and Infant Health Study (N = 836), we show that union dissolution is associated with both union type and type of method. The relatively high rate of union dissolution among cohabiters is explained partially by their lower likelihood of organizing access to income under an equality principle through income pooling. Cohabiting unions that follow the equality principle, however, are as stable as marital unions that follow the equality principle. These patterns are interpreted in terms of the role of economic equality in solidifying socioemotional bonds.

This paper examines the effects of divorce risk on the labor force participation responses of married women. The empirical analysis uses a difference-in-difference-in-difference estimator to compare changes in labor force participation associated with the passage of state-level divorce laws, focusing on the responses of married women with children relative to married women without children. The most important new finding is that married mothers have greater labor force participation responses to no-fault divorce laws than do married non-mothers in states with such laws, even after controlling for differences in labor force participation among married women with and without children in states without no-fault divorce laws. The results suggest that the probability of being in the labor force associated with no-fault divorce law is about 5 percent higher for women with children relative to women without children. Previous research has underestimated the effect of divorce laws on female labor force participation because it failed to account for differences between women with and without children.

The book describes the Danish immigrants and their descendants in the US from 1850 to 2000 with special focus on demography, settlement pattern and socioeconomic status. The book includes many maps, statistical graphs and tables. 450 pages. In Danish. English edition will be published in 2006.

This dissertation uses a random-coefficients discrete-choice logit to analyze how different households choose to live in a particular school district based on the public amenities provided in their communities. The dissertation pays particular attention to the role of financial and credit constraints in restricting school district access for minorities. IPUMS are used at the front-end of the dissertation to look at the total distributions of selected household financial characteristics in Southern California.

Knowing the responsiveness of state spending to federal subsidies along different dimensions allows for the optimal design of joint federal-state programs. Welfare is an important case in point: states have the ability to choose both the extent of welfare eligibility and the intensity of benefits provided through the program. This paper estimates the sensitivity of state spending to separate federal subsidies for increasing benefits and for increasing recipients. Because the federal match rate schedule changed several times during the early years that I study, I am able to estimate elasticities in a way that is not biased by the endogenous relationship between income, spending, and federal contributions. I find that state behavior is quite sensitive to these federal subsidies (and much more sensitive than a simple OLS regression would imply). A 10% increase in the cost of benefits causes a 3.8% decrease in benefit amounts, whereas a 10% increase in the cost of recipients causes a 2.8% decrease in the number of recipients. Cross price elasticities are positive, implying a substitutability of extensive for intensive generosity and making an analysis of total spending without such a decomposition misleading. States appear sensitive to their neighbors benefit levels, and may also use non-income recipiency requirements to adjust to changes in prices. These results suggest that the federal government has untapped policy instruments at its disposal to affect the nature of welfare spending.

This paper estimates the degree to which state spending is influenced by the spending of neighboring states. Focusing on mandated increases in welfare spending, I find that each dollar of state spending causes spending in neighboring states to increase by 37 to 88 cents. I use more plausibly exogenous variation than previous studies to abstract from the endogeneity of neighbors' spending, and show that previous estimates may have been biased. I also explore the strength of several different measures of neighborliness. The most predictive measure is the degree of population mobility between states, suggesting that concerns about migration may drive the interdependence of state spending policy.