This book examines the most extreme form of the "one-drop" race rule. It examines the history of the idea that Americans who look completely, utterly European without even a hint of Africa, are still classified as black.

This article illustrates how, in the absence of true panel data, multivariate regression analysis can be usedin conjunction with a pseudo panel data set to identify variables that were related to the increase in theproportion of two-income spouses in the United States between 1940 and 2000. We present theprocedures used to form the pseudo panel data set, construct and estimate the various models used toanalyze the pseudo panel data, and interpret the results produced by those models. Our analysis revealedan inverse relationship between the proportion of two-income spouses and the presence of young childrenas well as an increasing trend across generations in the proportion of two-income spouses.

The following statistics, from the US Census Bureaus Census 2000 PUMS 5% file, show the difference in occupational attainment between Mexican immigrants, other foreign workers, and US natives in concrete terms. Over half of all employed Mexican immigrants worked in just two occupational categories. Of the 4.4 million employed Mexican immigrants, 1.3 million or 29 percent worked in production, transportation, and material moving occupations, while 1.01 million or 25 percent worked in service occupations. Combined, these two occupation groups accounted for 54 percent of all employed Mexican immigrants while 0.3 million or 8% worked in management, professional and related occupations. (Grieco, 2004)

Research on changes in women's parenting has focused primarily on their increased likelihood of combining parenthood with paid employment, exploring the pressures that result from this "second shift" or "double burden." This paper complements this approach by focusing instead on the reduction in the help mothers of small children have received as the declines in co-residence of non-nuclear adults, and in fertility, have reduced the number of other women in the household. Using individual-level census data from the period 1880 to 2000, we show a substantial decline in the presence and availablility of other women in the household, as fewer are coresident, and of those who are, more are working or in school. Although all mothers experience this decline, it is most acute for mothers working for pay in nonagriculutral activities.

Great achievements in knowledge are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Using data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors, I find that the age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by approximately 6 years over the 20th Century. This trend is consistent with a shift in the life-cycle productivity of great minds. It is also consistent with an aging workforce. The paper employs a semi-parametric maximum likelihood model to (1) test between these competing explanations and (2) locate any specific shifts in life-cycle productivity. The productivity explanation receives considerable support. I find that innovators are much less productive at younger ages, beginning to produce major ideas 8 years later at the end of the 20th Century than they did at the beginning. Furthermore, the later start to the career is not compensated for by increasing productivity beyond early middle age. I show that these distinct shifts for knowledge-based careers are consistent with a knowledge-based theory, where the accumulation of knowledge across generations leads innovators to seek more education over time. More generally, the results show that individual innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle, a trend that reduces -- other things equal -- the aggregate output of innovators. This drop in productivity is particularly acute if innovators' raw ability is greatest when young.

The following excerpt is from the report, Immigration and a Changing America, published by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Population Reference Bureau. This report is one of several in the new series, "The American People," which sets the results of Census 2000 in context and collectively provides a portrait of the American people in a new century. Each report is written by an author or team of authors selected for their expertise with the data and their broad understanding of the implications of demographic trends.

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 explained by 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 skill prices 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.

MTC is conducting a TOD Study to address the transit oriented development opportunities in the Bay Area. This report looks at demographic characteristics of transit users to estimate the households and jobs with a preference for living/working near transit in the Bay Area, by 2030. It compares these estimates by county with ABAG Projections 2003 and the Smart Growth Vision.

Utilizing 1990 and 2000 5% PUMS files and recodes of PUMAs that provide consistent geographic coding for both censuses, this paper describes the extent and nature of the dispersal of the foreign born into a range of non-traditional destinations during the 1990s. The geographic recodes are based on the 1990 Labor Market Areas of the PUMS-L with necessary adjustments made to accommodate differences with PUMA coding and changes in PUMA coding between 1990 and 2000. The analysis examines the relative power of three theoretical frameworks to specify the most important forces driving this evolving settlement pattern. Models representing the spatial assimilation, spatial network, and economic perspectives will be estimated and evaluated. The analysis will be multilevel and focus on modeling the destination choices of foreign-born migrants in the 1990s as functions of individual human capital and acculturation status, origin and previous U.S. region of residence and LMR economic conditions.

Despite a longstanding belief that education importantly affects the process of immigrant assimilation, little is known about the relative importance of different mechanisms linking these two processes. This paper explores this issue through an examination of the effects of human capital on one dimension of assimilation, immigrant intermarriage. I argue that there are three primary mechanisms through which human capital affects the probability of intermarriage. First, human capital may make immigrants better able to adapt to the customs of the native culture thereby making it easier to share a household with a native. Second, it may raise the likelihood that immigrants leave ethnic enclaves, thereby decreasing the opportunity to meet potential spouses of the same ethnicity. Finally, assortative matching on education in the marriage market suggests that immigrants may be willing to trade similarities in ethnicity for similarities in education when evaluating potential spouses. Using a simple spouse-search model, I first derive an identification strategy to differentiate the cultural adaptability effect from the assortative matching effect, and then obtain empirical estimates of their relative importance while controlling for the enclave effect. Using U.S. Census data, I find that assortative matching on education is the most important avenue through which human capital affects the probability of intermarriage. Further support for the model is provided by deriving and testing its additional implications.

National historical GISs (NHGISs) are expensive and time consuming to build. They have attracted a lot of funding in many countries and there has been a considerable amount of hype about their potential. In spite of this, knowledge about what an NHGIS can actually offer to historical scholarship is surprisingly limited. In many cases people believe that the main output from an NHGIS will be maps. Maps tell us very little and usually lead to more questions than answers and the main strength of GIS is not as a mapping tool, but as a tool for geographical analysis, or put more broadly, a tool that allows us to analyse historical data in ways that explicitly includes the geographical dimensions of the issues under study. GIS is a far from perfect tool for doing this. It is based around precise co-ordinates . . .

US census data from 1940 to 2000 are used in this paper to illustrate the importance of origin dependence on migration streams and to examine the effects of such dependence on patterns of interregional migration. These findings are then used to make possible the indirect estimation of migration flows. A method is introduced that uses historical regularities found in the ratios of secondary to primary migration and two consecutive birthplace-specific counts of multiregional population stocks. The results demonstrate how patterns of primary and secondary migration act to shape population redistribution processes.

Proposition 13, adopted by California voters in 1978, mandates a property tax rate of one percent, requires that properties be assessed at market value at the time of sale, and allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year until the next sale. In this paper, we examine how Proposition 13 affected average tenure length of owners and renters in California versus in other states. We find that from 1970 to 2000, owners average tenure length increased by .66 years, or by 6 percent, in California relative to the comparison states. Tenants tenure length also increased over the period, but the increase was probably due to adoption of rent control in California cities after Proposition 13 went into effect, rather than to Proposition 13 itself. We also find that migrants from other states responded more strongly than native-born households to Proposition 13. Among owner-occupiers, the response to Proposition 13 increases sharply as the size of the subsidy rises. Homeowners living in inland California cities such as Fresno receive the lowest Proposition 13 subsidies and their average tenure length increased by only .25 years, while the average tenure of owners in Los Angeles increased by one year and that of owners in the Bay area who receive the largest subsidies increased by approximately two years.

Despite their importance to women empowerment and migrant adaptation more generally, the social and cultural processes that determine how gender relations and expectations evolve during the process of migration remain poorly understood In this article, data from a survey conducted in Durham, North Carolina and four sending communities in Mexico are used to examine how the structures of labor power and emotional attachments within the family vary by migration and US. residency, women human capital endowments, household characteristics, and social support. Using both quantitative and qualitative information, the main finding of the study is that the association between migration and gender relations is not uniform across different gender dimensions. The reconstruction of gender relations within the family at the place of destination is a dynamic process in which some elements brought from communities of origin are discarded, others are modified, and still others are reinforced. Results challenge the expectation that migrant women easily incorporate the behavior patterns and cultural values of the United States and illustrate the importance of selective assimilation for understanding the diversity of changes in gender relations that accompany migration.

A study of African American men who worked in the southern lumber industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Argues that industrial employment provided a vehicle through which black men survived the violence and economic hardship that accompanied the collapse of southern agriculture after the First World War.

Our study drew on original data collected in Durham, NC, and four sending communities in Mexico to examine differences in womens relationship power that are associated with migration and residence in the United States. We analyzed the personal, relationship, and social resources that condition the association between migration and womens power and the usefulness of the Relationship Control Scale (RCS) for capturing these effects. We found support for perspectives that emphasize that migration may simultaneously mitigate and reinforce gender inequities. Relative to their nonmigrant peers, Mexican women in the United States average higher emotional consonance with their partners, but lower relationship control and sexual negotiation power. Methodologically, we found that the RCS is internally valid and useful for measuring the impact of resources on womens power. However, the scale appears to combine diverse dimensions of relationship power that were differentially related to migration in our study.