Author has used IPUMS as a consultant to businesses and organizations -- most recently as a research consultant to marketing departments of a major manufacturing coporation. Most businesses and marketing departments rely very heavily on census data.

The failure of French Canadians to settle the Canadian west before 1900, when substantial numbers of anglophones and Europeans were migrating, is a long-standing puzzle. Historians have relied mainly on cultural explanations. Using new data, we demonstrate that anglophones and francophones had very different personal characteristics, so that movement to the west was rarely economically attractive for francophones. However, large-scale migration into New England fitted French Canadians demographic and human capital profile. Even if the United States had imposed immigration restrictions by the 1880s, this would not likely have diverted many French Canadians westward.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942) was a New Deal relief program designed to deal with what society then perceived to be the occupational and educational needs of America's young, jobless men. In its nine-year existence, nearly three million enrollees in their teens and early twenties "graduated" from the program. Most were high-school dropouts and the vast majority of them came from the working class. An in-depth study of the CCC's multi-faceted agenda reveals a great deal about inter-war American society's expectations for working-class men and boys, their understandings of youthful masculinity, and their interpretations of work, education, and citizenship, and it is the argument of this dissertation that the CCC can and should be seen as an important crossroads for American working-class male youth in the early-20th century. For instance, coinciding as it did with the growth of public schooling and especially of the public high school in the United States, the CCC stands as one of the most ambitious national attempts of the inter-war period to educationally serve what had been a relatively under-served and under-represented sub-section of American society. The CCC also reflects the growing importance of the state in the average American citizen's life in the first half of the 20th century. The attention that the federal government paid to young working-class men in the Civilian Conservation Corps was unprecedented in American history up to that point, and the all-inclusive nature of the program had obvious, lasting influences on its recruits. Finally, the CCC provided a modern-day "rite of passage" into adult manhood for its Depression-era enrollees. Living with 200 other young men at secluded, backwoods campsites resulted in the development of highly masculinized social spaces where boys learned lessons in communal living and tolerance. Cultural life in the camps was replete with highly stylized rituals, colorful initiation rites, and enrollee-enforced codes of conduct. The worlds created by the boys serving at individual camps, I argue, were of equal historical importance to the programs developed by CCC administrators, and in some cases, were perhaps of even greater importance in the boys' personal experiences overall.

Demographic changes of the last 50 years have re-shaped the American family. Increases in divorce, nonmarital births, and cohabitation have shifted child-rearing from co-residence with both biological parents to a variety of complex family contexts. However, changes in living with children differed by gender. Throughout this period, the majority mothers retained physical custody of their children after relationship dissolution, leaving many men outside of the everyday lives of their biological children. In turn, a large pool of women, living with their children, and men, living apart from their children, were now available to create step-families. As a result, these demographic and social changes have shifted the role of parenthood, especially for men, from a biological to a social one. While most demographic research on step-families centers on the role of cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing on likelihood of step-parenthood, few take into account the impact of age or period effects. No studies known of consider cohort effects, or a combination of age, period, and cohort on the historical likelihood of being a stepparent. Using IPUMS data (1940-2000), we employ an age, period, cohort characteristic model to examine differences in social parenting in the United States. Results show age, period, and cohort to be significant predictors of step-parenthood. While incidence of step-parenthood is similar for men and women across all three dimensions, more men experience step-parenthood than women. Overall, our analysis provides a first step towards better understanding of how step-parenthood varies over the life course, over time, and across cohorts.

This report is the product of a 2-year study by a panel of experts convened by the National Academies and supported by several foundations and U.S. government agencies. This panel was charged with conducting a study of the significant demographic changes taking place among the U.S. Hispanic population and their progress relative to the mainstream in several key areas. The panel could also consider ways to improve related data collection. The main purpose of the report is to help inform future policy debate and provide government, public institutions, and the private sector with the information needed to allocate resources for the enduring benefit of both the Hispanic population and the nation as a whole.In the edited volume Hispanics and the Future of America that serves as the companion to this report, readers will find a more detailed review of Hispanics' history, demography, geography, education, family, employment, economic well-being, health, and political engagement.

This study brings to light the phenomenon of aging in the West Indian migrant community in the United States. It presents the results of a cross-sectional exploratory survey of 107 community-dwelling West Indian women aged 55 years and over living in the Greater Hartford region of Connecticut. The data analysis reveals positive self-reports of health and few limiting or disabling conditions. However, there is substantial income inequality, a negative relationship between age group and income and limited use of services among those women most likely to require them. The findings suggest that some of the qualities which contributed to West Indians becoming the Black success model in the U.S. may be counterproductive for successful aging. A community-based strategy for addressing these issues is outlined. (Copies of this article are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Centre, Haworth Press Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580).

The purpose of the study is to expand our knowledge & appreciation of the dimensions of ethnic minority aging by undertaking an exploratory analysis of selected members of the older West Indian migrant population in the United States. The study uses census (IPUMS) and original field survey data to analyze the socio-economic status and living arrangements of community dwelling women, aged 55 years and over, who were born in the English-speaking Caribbean and are resident in Greater Hartford, Connecticut.

In James Fenimore Coopers famous novel *Last of the Mohicans*, the heroes are members of a vanishing race. Coopers portrayal, while inspiring more than one popular film, is far from the truth. The Mohican people, also known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Indians, did not disappear from history but instead, despite obstacles, have retained their tribal identity to this day. In this first history of the modern-day Mohicans, James W. Oberly narrates their story from the time of their relocation to Wisconsin through the post-World War II era.An Algonquian-speaking tribe, the Mohicans lived in the Hudson River Valley during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1730s they moved eastward to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, taking up a host of English values and ways, including literacy and Christianity. In the 1820s, a confederacy of Stockbridge Indians and Munsees moved again to Wisconsin, where they reside today on a 46,000-acre reservation. Because Mohican leaders have long been fluent in English, an unusual wealth of documentary evidence, including personal memoirs, has survived. Oberly draws on these sources and on a range of government and legal documents to provide an in-depth political and cultural portrait of the tribe. The volume also includes three appendices containing key legal documents in the Mohicans political history.

This article discusses second-generation Indo-Caribbean (West Indian of Indian descent) teenagers' ethnic identities, through a look at their taste preferences and self assertions of identity. Both Indo-Caribbean young men and women draw from multiple influences on their identities. In terms of tastes in clothing and movies, however, girls are more interested in things Indian, and in "Indian culture". Boys, on the other hand, choose to distance themselves from an Indian identity. Three factors explain these gender differences in choices about ethnic identity: (1) different media images for South Asian men and women; (2) a school context lending different levels of peer symbolic status to perceived Indian boys and girls; and (3) a gendered process of migration by which women maintain stronger cultural roots in the new country. The findings in this article point to the need to pay attention to gender differences when considering ethnic incorporation.

This paper explores the linkages between migration and labor market outcomes. It begins by developing a formal model that characterizes an individuals residential location decision (US state) as a function of tastes, migration costs, and potential earnings. We first clarify what can be learned about these decisions from data on migration patterns and earnings available in large-scale datasets (e.g., the US Census). This analysis extends existing identification results in the literature to a setting in which migration decisions are a function of not only earnings but also tastes and initial conditions (i.e., birth region). Second, we characterize a set of models that are identified under alternative restrictions on the general model of labor market sorting proposed herein. As a starting point, we focus on a baseline specification that is just-identified; this assures that it makes the maximum possible use of the information in the data without imposing additional restrictions. This baseline specification is considerably more flexible than the models that have been used in the existing literature to study inter-regional migration and labor market outcomes. The final part of this paper estimates this model using 1990 US Census micro data. Estimates demonstrate the ability of the framework to parse the observed US income distribution and migration patterns in ways that are informative about the relative roles of migration costs, amenities, and earnings in sorting behavior. Special attention is paid to the implications of the results for measuring returns to education.

There is a nationwide movement and debate over the claim by African Americans for compensation for the enslavement of their ancestors. This chapter presents a brief introduction to the economics of reparations to African Americans for slavery and decades of Jim Crow practices. We first explore the black-white wealth differential as a basis for the reparations movement. We then propose two criterions to determine eligibility for reparations. Finally, we discuss the size of a reparations payment and how the way in which it is financed and distributed effects the incomes of blacks as well as nonblacks.

This paper explores the linkages between migration and labor market outcomeswith the goal of non-parametrically recovering the role of amenities in residentialsorting decisions. It begins by developing a formal model that characterizes anindividuals residential location decision (US state) as a function of tastes, migrationcosts, and potential earnings, clarifying what can be learned about these decisions fromdata on migration patterns and earnings available in large-scale datasets (e.g., the USCensus). To this end, we adapt existing identification results (Heckman (1990),Heckman and Honore (1990) to a setting in which migration decisions are a function ofboth earnings and non-earnings factors, as well as initial conditions. The final part ofthe paper estimates a just-identified version of this model using 1990 US Census microdata. Estimates demonstrate the ability of the framework to parse the observed USincome distribution and migration patterns in ways that are informative about therelative roles of migration costs, amenities, and earnings in sorting behavior. Specialattention is paid to the implications for measuring returns to education.1

In this paper we show that the two major developments experienced by the US labor market - rising inequality and narrowing of the male-female wage gap - can be explainedby a common source: the increase in price of cognitive skills and the decrease in price of motor skills. We obtain the price of a multidimensional vector of skills by combining a hedonic price framework with data on the skill requirements of jobs from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and workers wages from the CPS. We find that in the 1968-1990 period the returns to cognitive skills increased 4-fold and the returns to motor skills declined by 30%. Given that the top of the wage distribution of college and high school graduates is relatively well endowed with cognitive skills, these changes in skillprices explain up to 40% of the rise in inequality among college graduates and about 20% among high school graduates. In a similar way, because women were in occupations intensive in cognitive skills while men were in motor-intensive occupations, these skill price changes explain over 80% of the observed narrowing of the male-female wage gap.