Much of the research on Mexican Americans and earnings has focused on either national samples or on states such as California and Texas. Even though Mexican Americans have become more visible in the Midwest, we know very little about their earnings in the Midwest. Using an individual level sample consisting of data on 1,807 Mexican Americans from the 2000 Integrated 1% Public Use Microdata Series, we examine the extent to which human capital, family status and industry concentration predict earnings. Multivariate analyses reveal that education and years in the U.S. are positively associated with earnings. However, Mexican American women yield lower returns to their education compared to their male counterparts. Women also experience an earnings penalty for having children while men do not. In addition, workers concentrated in the peripheral sector earn significantly less than workers in the core sector. The findings are interpreted in terms of human capital and labor market theories and directions for future research are discussed.

Throughout recorded history, individual women have reached summits, and their accomplishments have been touted as evidence that women could achieve greatness. But it has taken considerably longer for substantial numbers of women—more than a token few— to reach the peaks. Until recently, the vast majority of women—even college graduates—occupied the valleys, not the summits. They had jobs, not careers. The only reason we can have a meaningful discussion today about “women at the top” is because a quiet revolution took place about 30 years ago. It followed on the heels

Over the past 30 years, the share of adult populations with college degrees increased more in cities with higher initial schooling levels than in initially less educated places. This tendency appears to be driven by shifts in labor demand as there is an increasing wage premium for skilled people working in skilled cities. In this article, we present a model where the clustering of skilled people in metropolitan areas is driven by the tendency of skilled entrepreneurs to innovate in ways that employ other skilled people and by the elasticity of housing supply.

Interracial unions and same-sex unions were rare and secretive in the past because US. society was organized to suppress such unions. The rise of same-sex and interracial unions in the past few decades suggests changes in the basic structure of US. society. Young adults have been marrying later and single young adults are much less likely to live with their parents. The independence of young adults has reduced parental control over their children choice of mate. Using microdata from the US. Census, this article shows that interracial couples and same-sex couples are more geographically mobile and more urban than same-race married couples. The authors view the geographic mobility of young couples as a proxy for their independence from communities of origin. The results show that nontraditional couples are more geographically mobile even after individual and community attributes are taken into account. Same-sex couples are more likely to be interracial than heterosexual couples, indicating that same-sex and interracial couples are part of a common fabric of family diversification. The article discusses related historical examples and trends.

Religion plays an important role in the lives of many Americans, but there is relatively little study by economists of the implications of religiosity for economic outcomes. This likely reflects the enormous difficulty inherent in separating the causal effects of religiosity from other factors that are correlated with outcomes. In this paper, I propose a potential solution to this long standing problem, by noting that a major determinant of religious participation is religious market density, or the share of the population in an area which is of an individual’s religion. I make use of the fact that exogenous predictions of market density can be formed based on area ancestral mix. That is, I relate religious participation and economic outcomes to the correlation of the religious preference of one’s own heritage with the religious preference of other heritages that share one’s area. I use the General Social Survey (GSS) to model the impact of market density on church attendance, and micro-data from the 1990 Census to model the impact on economic outcomes. I find that a higher market density leads to a significantly increased level of religious participation, and as well to better outcomes according to several key economic indicators: higher levels of education and income, lower levels of welfare receipt and disability, higher levels of marriage, and lower levels of divorce.

With an increasing use of data mining tools and techniques, we envision that a Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining System (KDDMS) will have to support and optimize for the following scenarios: 1) Sequence of Queries: A user may analyze one or more datasets by issuing a sequence of related complex mining queries, and 2) Multiple Simultaneous Queries: Several users may be analyzing a set of datasets concurrently, and may issue related complex queries.This paper presents a systematic mechanism to optimize for the above cases, targeting the class of mining queries involving frequent pattern mining on one or multiple datasets. We present a system architecture and propose new algorithms to simultaneously optimize multiple such queries and use a knowledgeable cache to store and utilize the past query results. We have implemented and evaluated our system with both real and synthetic datasets. Our experimental results show that our techniques can achieve a speedup of up to a factor of 9, compared with the systems which do not support caching or optimize for multiple queries.

Because exploratory rule discovery works with data that is only a sample of the phenomena to be investigated, some resulting rules may appear interesting only by chance. Techniques are developed for automatically discarding statistically insignificant exploratory rules that cannot survive a hypothesis with regard to its ancestors. We call such insignificant rules derivative extended rules. In this paper, we argue that there is another type of derivative exploratory rules, which is derivative with regard to their children. We also argue that considerable amount of such derivative partial rules can not be successfully removed using existing rule pruning techniques. We propose a new technique to address this problem. Experiments are done in impact rule discovery to evaluate the effect of this derivative partial rule filter. Results show that the inherent problem of too many resulting rules in exploratory rule discovery is alleviated.

The number of Mexican immigrants that have entered the U.S. has greatly increased over the past decade. The occupational attainment of these immigrants provides insight into how successful they are in the host country and language deficiency has an effect on this occupational attainment. By controlling for language proficiency, human capital characteristics and other variables from the IPUMS database, this project uses probit analysis to predict the probability that an immigrant will be employed in a favorable occupation in the U.S. Results show that language deficiency reduces the probability of attaining a favorable occupation, but having no English language skills decreases the probability by a lesser amount than if the immigrant had any English language skills. This information is important to the analysis of immigration policy and to language training for immigrants in the United States.

The rise in the divorce rate over the past 40 years is one of the fundamental changes in American society. A substantial number of women and children now spend some fraction of their life in single female-headed households, leading many to be concerned about their economic circumstances. Estimating the cause-to-effect relationship between marital dissolution and female economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase marital instability also may affect the economic status and labor market outcomes of women. We propose an instrumental variables solution to this problem based on the sex of the first born child. This strategy exploits the fact that the sex of the first born child is random and the fact that marriages are less likely to continue following the birth of girls as opposed to boys. Our IV results cast doubt on the widely held view that divorce causes large declines in economic status for women. Once the negative selection into divorce is accounted for our results show that, on average, ever-divorced women live in households with more income per person than never-divorced women.

In California, Green Party and Democratic Party communities vote in favor of ballotinitiatives that are pro-environment while Republican Party communities are less likely tovote in favor of such initiatives. Given that these ideology measures have predictivepower in political markets, do these same measures have predictive power in explainingprivate consumption differences? This paper uses several consumption data sets todocument that households who live in communities where Green Party voters are overrepresentedconsume fewer resources than observationally identical non-Greens.While Democrats vote green, their private consumption patterns are the same asRepublicans.

This paper uses decennial Census data to examine trends in immigrant segregation in the United States between 1910 and 2000. Immigrant segregation declined in the first half of the century, but has been rising over the past few decades. Analysis of restricted access 1990 Census microdata suggests that this rise would be even more striking if the native-born children of immigrants could be consistently excluded from the analysis. We analyze longitudinal variation in immigrant segregation, as well as housing price patterns across metropolitan areas, to test four hypotheses of immigrant segregation. Immigration itself has surged in recent decades, but the tendency for newly arrived immigrants to be younger and of lower socioeconomic status explains very little of the recent rise in immigrant segregation. We also find little evidence of increased nativism in the housing market. Evidence instead points to changes in urban form, manifested in particular as native-driven suburbanization and the decline of public transit as a transportation mode, as a central explanation for the new immigrant segregation.

An older Mexican man sits across from me at King Taco in East Los Angeles, arguably the best taco stand in Los Angelos, and explains why he went into business for himself. "Why do I want to work for someone else, when I can work for myself and make more money? I know where to find cheap [Mexican immigrant] workers and I can tell them what to do, you see." Juan Mendes owns his own . . .

Cross-sectional data, such as Census statistics, enable the re-enactment of household lifecourse through the construction of the household composition matrix, a tabulation of persons in households by their age and by the age of their corresponding household-heads. Household lifecourse is represented in the household composition matrix somewhat analogously to survivorship in a life-table in demography. A measure of household lifecourse is the average household size, specific to age of household-head. Associated with the age-specific household size is the age-interval 0-4, which yields average number of children present in households, also by age of head. Trajectories of re-enacted household lifecourses for Phoenix and for the State of Arizona are depicted here to track the gamma probability density function. Through this relationship also the association between household size, children per household, and fertility emerges. To the extent that housing conditions or tenure impact average household size, or other aspects of household composition, fertility in particular is discerned as a housing-related demographic attribute of households. Household size and headship ratio, both specific to age of head, are here shown to be analytically related to the household composition matrix, their product yielding the age-specific headship coefficient. As a measure incorporating parameters of households and dwellers, thus also characterizing occupied dwelling units, the headship coefficient emerges as a demographic indicator of housing in a community.

The paper combines IPUMS historical occupational data with research into the causes of shifts in occupational employment over the 1910-2000 period.

There are four different hypotheses analyzed in the literature that explain deunionization, namely: the decrease in the demand for union representation by the workers the impact of globalization over unionization rates technical change and changes in the legal and political systems against unions. This paper aims to test all of them. We estimate a logistic regression using panel data procedure with 35 industries from 1973 to 1999 and conclude that the four hypotheses can not be rejected by the data. We also use a variance analysis decomposition to study the impact of these variables over the drop in unionization rates. In the model with no demographic variables the results show that these economic(tested) variables can account from 10% to 12% of the drop in unionization. However, when we include demographic variables these tested variables can account from 10% to 35% in the total variation of unionization rates. In this case the four hypotheses tested can explain up to 50% of the total drop in unionization rates explained by the model.

Cross-sectional data, such as Census statistics, enable the re-enactment of household lifecourse through the construction of the household composition matrix, a tabulation of persons in households by their age and by the age of their corresponding household-heads. Household lifecourse is represented in the household composition matrix somewhat analogously to survivorship in a life-table in demography. A measure of household lifecourse is the average household size, specific to age of household-head. Associated with the age-specific household size is the age-interval 0-4, which yields average number of children present in households, also by age of head. Trajectories of re-enacted household lifecourses for Phoenix and for the State of Arizona are depicted here to track the gamma probability density function. Through this relationship also the association between household size, children per household, and fertility emerges. To the extent that housing conditions or tenure impact average household size, or other aspects of household composition, fertility in particular is discerned as a housing-related demographic attribute of households. Household size and headship ratio, both specific to age of head, are here shown to be analytically related to the household composition matrix, their product yielding the age-specific headship coefficient. As a measure incorporating parameters of households and dwellers, thus also characterizing occupied dwelling units, the headship coefficient emerges as a demographic indicator of housing in a community.