The second half of the twentieth century recorded a rapid growth in health care spending and a significant increase in life expectancy. This paper hypothesizes that the combination of techno-logical progress in medical treatment and rising incomes is the driving force behind these two trends. Using a stochastic, multi-period overlapping-generations model as the analytical vehicle, this paper argues that the rapid growth in medical spending is not driven by factors associated with market structures or insurance opportunities, but instead by factors underlying the production and accumulation of health. According to this model, improvements in medical treatment and rising incomes can explain all of the increase in medical spending and more than 60% of the increase in life expectancy at age 25 during the second half of the twentieth century.

Aims: To analyse the impact of overtime and extended working hours on the risk of occupational injuries and illnesses among a nationally representative sample of working adults from the United States.Methods: Responses from 10 793 Americans participating in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) were used to evaluate workers job histories, work schedules, and occurrence of occupational injury and illness between 1987 and 2000. A total of 110 236 job records were analysed, encompassing 89 729 person-years of accumulated working time. Aggregated incidence rates in each of five exposure categories were calculated for each NLSY survey period. Multivariate analytical techniques were used to estimate the relative risk of long working hours per day, extended hours per week, long commute times, and overtime schedules on reporting a work related injury or illness, after adjusting for age, gender, occupation, industry, and region.Results: After adjusting for those factors, working in jobs with overtime schedules was associated with a 61% higher injury hazard rate compared to jobs without overtime. Working at least 12 hours per day was associated with a 37% increased hazard rate and working at least 60 hours per week was associated with a 23% increased hazard rate. A strong dose-response effect was observed, with the injury rate (per 100 accumulated worker-years in a particular schedule) increasing in correspondence to the number of hours per day (or per week) in the workers customary schedule.Conclusions: Results suggest that job schedules with long working hours are not more risky merely because they are concentrated in inherently hazardous industries or occupations, or because people working long hours spend more total time "at risk" for a work injury. Strategies to prevent work injuries should consider changes in scheduling practices, job redesign, and health protection programmes for people working in jobs involving overtime and extended hours.

This study evaluates, historical changes in the relative importance of key factors influencing white, African American, and Hispanic women's poverty. Empirical results, based on reduced form logistic regressions, indicate that work has become, relative to marriage, a potentially better way to decrease women's poverty. The greater relative importance of work when compared to marriage strongest for blacks and weakest for whites, although for all three groups of women this pattern holds. This trend is consistent with the move fi-om women's main economic support being generated through marriage to instead being generated through work. At the same time, children continue to increase women's chances of being in poverty, though their impact has changed differently among the three groups. The findings suggest that resources directed towards alleviating poverty should ideally be allocated towards efforts to create good job opportunities combined with support to reduce the costs associated with balancing market and family responsibilities.

An important goal of the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Courts decision in Brown vs. Board of Education was to improve the quality of the schools black children attended. This paper uses a new dataset to examine the effects of desegregation on public and private enrollment and the system of school finance for Louisiana. I show that the system of school finance in Louisiana had long favored whites in high black enrollment share districts. Because of this system, whites in districts with high black enrollment shares stood to lose the most from desegregation, as the gap between white student-teacher ratios and black student-teacher ratios in those districts was higher. Given the importance of districts black enrollment share in the system of finance and the potential impact of desegregation, I examine how changes in public and private enrollment, the local property tax base, and per-pupil revenue relate to the initial black enrollment share. The analysis suggests that the Jim-Crow system of school financewhich had prevailed for over 60 yearsunraveled as the schools desegregated. While desegregation did induce some white flight and reduce the local property tax base slightly, the policies had the intended effect of reducing black-white gaps in school resources, as increased funding allowed districts to level up average spending in integrated schools to that previously experienced only in the white schools.

This paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market. The model generates a non-parametric marriage matching function with spillover effects. It rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions as well as pointing out its limitations. The model was used to estimate US marital behavior in 1971/72 and 1981/82. The marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade. Unlike con-tridictory marriage rate regression results, the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young males and females.

This paper studies the quantitative effects of changes in fertility patterns and relative wages, on changes in employment of married women born between 1940 and 1960. We explore three channels linking these factors to employment decisions in a life-cycle model with experience accumulation. First, because child-rearing is intensivein womens time, employment at childbearing ages increases as fertility is reduced. Second, if women have children later, they reach the childbearing age with more experience, thereby increasing their incentive to remain employed when having children. Third, a decrease in the gender wage gap, ceteris paribus, makes working more attractive, which feeds back on employment decisions later in life because of experience accumulation. After calibrating the model to the life-cycle facts characterizing the 1940 cohort, we find that the decrease in fertility levels has a minor effect on employment. However, the change in the timing of births has a large effect on employment very early in life, while relative wage changes affect employment increasingly with age.When taken together, these changes account for almost 90 percent of the increase in employment of married women throughout the life-cycle.

This paper examines the determinants of labor force participation for Asian immigrant women in the United States by comparing the Korean immigrant women with other Asian immigrant women in the United States and also with the nonmigrant women in South Korea. The results from the analysis using the U.S. and South Korean data sets show that migrant and nonmigrant women have different patterns of labor force participation, suggesting that the social, economic, and contextual factors that surround a woman have a significant influence on her decision to work in the labor market. The similarities and differences among Asian immigrant groups highlight the influence of the U.S. institutions and the adaptation of each immigrant group. Finally, the results show that factors unique to the immigrants experiences, such as citizenship, length of stay in the U.S., and ethnic community, explain a great part of the immigrant womens labor force participation.

This dissertation explains central features of United States family leave policy as instituted by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA). The FMLA entitles working Americans under certain conditions to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid employment leave for specified family-related reasons. While notable for establishing a gender-neutral entitlement to employment leave, overall the FMLA is relatively modest in substance and scope and assigns a limited regulatory role to the Federal Government. The central argument is that these features can be partly explained by the continuing role played by the idea of separate work and family spheres for men and women ('separate spheres'). Historical federal policy relating to women and work, the substantive and political forbear to modern family leave policy, was guided by the idea of separate spheres which carried over to family leave policy. This explanation was assessed empirically through a research design comparing United States Congressional hearing testimony from both policy eras. To access the relative presence of separate spheres and the primary competing idea of equal rights, the incidence of gender-specific and gender-neutral statements in discussions of men, women and their relationships to work and family was compared. The results allow for rejection of the null hypothesis that the idea of separate spheres plays no role in family leave policy, as such suggesting modest support for the overall explanation.

Over the past two decades, concern about the environment has brought with it a tremendous increase in recycling in the United States and around the world. For many, it has become not only a civic, but also a moral obligation. Long before our growing levels of waste became an environmental concern, however, recycling was a part of everyday life for many Americans, and for a variety of reasons. From rural peddlers who traded kitchen goods for scrap metal to urban children who gathered rags in exchange for coal, individuals have been finding ways to reuse discarded materials for hundreds of years. In Cash for Your Trash, Carl A. Zimring provides a fascinating history of scrap recycling, from colonial times to the present. Moving beyond the environmental developments that have shaped modern recycling enterprises, Zimring offers a unique cultural and economic portrait of the private businesses that made large-scale recycling possible. Because it was particularly common for immigrants to own or operate a scrap business in the nineteenth century, the history of the industry reveals much about ethnic relationships and inequalities in American cities. Readers are introduced to the scrapworkers, brokers, and entrepreneurs who, like the materials they handled, were often marginalized. Integrating findings from archival, industrial, and demographic records, Cash for Your Trash demonstrates that over the years recycling has served purposes far beyond environmental protection. Its history and evolution reveals notions of Americanism, the immigrant experience, and the development of small business in this country.

On the Frontier of Adulthood reveals a startling new fact: adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. A lengthy period before adulthood, often spanning the twenties and even extending into the thirties, is now devoted to further education, job exploration, experimentation in romantic relationships, and personal development. Especially dramatic shifts have occurred in the conventional markers of adulthoodleaving home, finishing school, getting a job, getting married, and having childrenand in how these experiences are configured as a set. This volume considers the nature and consequences of changes in early adulthood by drawing upon a wide variety of historical and contemporary data from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Accounts in this study reveal how the process of becoming an adult has changed over the past century, the challenges faced by young people today, and what societies can do to smooth the transition to adulthood.

The experiences of middle-class Peruvian professionals who have recently migrated to the United States challenge our notions of the migration experiences of Latin American professionals. Many arrive without legal status, language skills or employment sponsorship. Without these resources, they experience employment instability, downward mobility and greater emotional stress. This paper seeks to explain how these new immigrants reconcile downward mobility with their professional backgrounds and personal identities by exploring their resultant emotional struggles.

The primary objective of this study is to examine U.S. repeat migration for blacks, Hispanics, and whites. It investi gates the relationships and patterns of these different racial/ethnic groups utilizing the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Repeat migration within and across categories of individual characteristics for blacks, Hispanics, and whites, is compared in order to determine if there are differences in the overall rates of repeat migration for these groups, once other factors are controlled. To do this several statistical procedures are utilized, and the results of selected descriptive and logistic analyses are presented. The descriptive statistics control for race/ethnicity and examine patterns within the groups; these findings display important relationships to onward and return migration. The inferential statistical method employed is logistic regression for the sample as a whole, which examines the effects across the groups, and the direction of migration. Where past research has not investigated the complexities of repeat migration in combination with race/ethnicity, there are several notable results from this study. Specifically, this research finds that in terms of onward migration, whites are significantly more likely to move onward than are blacks or Hispanics even after controlling for key socioeconomic factors. Changes in marital status are significantly related to migration, and to the direction of repeat migration; individuals who change from "single to married" are likely to be onward migrants, whereas those who change from "married to single" are likely to be return migrants. This study finds there are differences in rates of return migration by level of education for racial/ethnic groups. Moreover, the relationship between onward migration and employment status is different for Hispanics than blacks and whites.

Given a transaction database as a global set of transactions and its local database obtained by some conditioning of the global database, we consider pairs of itemsets whose degrees of correlation are higher in the local database than in the global one. A problem of finding paired itemsets with high correlation in one database is already known as Discovery of Correlation, and has been studied as the highly correlated itemsets are characteristic in the database. However, even noncharacteristic paired itemsets are also meaningful provided the degree of correlation increases significantly in the local database compared with the global one. They can be implicit and hidden evidences showing that something particular to the local database occurs, even though they were not previously realized to be characteristic. From this viewpoint, we have proposed measurement of the significance of paired itemsets by the difference of two correlations before and after the conditioning of the global database, and have defined a notion of DC pairs, whose degrees of difference of correlation are high. Since the measurement of DC pairs is nonmonotonic, DC pair mining problem is difficult. For our difficult problem, we have presented some algorithm for mining DC pairs. The algorithm can efficiently find DC pair to some degree, however we have to improve the algorithm in order to tackle more complicated problem. We discuss some method for an improvement of our system.

Does the academic literature on U.S. immigration adequately capture the experiences of immigrants outside their traditional areas of concentration? This article reviews the three major fields of research in immigrant incorporation-economic, sociocultural, and political. It emphasizes the two most prominent conceptual frameworks in each: the human capital frame and the more recent sociological frame, which highlights "modes of incorporation" and "contexts of reception." Although research in immigrants' political incorporation is less developed than its economic and sociological counterpart, I pay close attention to the ways in which structural and contextual factors shape participation. Immigrants' geographic dispersal complement this trend toward contextualism by providing greater variation in their places of destination; that variation can help advance the comparative research agenda.