Although women participate in every human migration, more actively in some than in others, they have been ignored by migration research for a long time. However, migrating women or women in migration processes, whether as stayers or movers, are no longer invisible. Analysing a sample of passenger list from Bremen to New York and the Census of the United States of America in the year 1910 will give new inside in female migration over long distances, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the United States of America, at the first decade of the 20th century. While women accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total immigration in the second half of the 19th century, since 1930, by contrast, women have dominated migration to the United States. Particularly in the first decade of the 20th century, Austria-Hungary became a major source of migrants to the United States of America. The proportion of women, who took part in this great overseas migration process, varied by ethnic background and type of migration. The unmarried, young, and independent migrant was female, since more single women than men from the provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy decided for a transatlantic move. Although migrant women wage earners in the United States, like in Europe, clustered in very few female-dominated occupations, their possibilities to earn ones living changed after they went overseas. While domestic service was the most important and most exclusively female occupation in Europe, the demand for factory 'girls' increased in the USA and more and more Polish, Czech, Jewish, and German women were occupied in so called 'sweat shops' and factories in garment and textile production. In addition, women migrants of every background were less likely to return to their homelands than were men.

Latino (Hispanic) workers, the fastest growing segment of the labor force, have one of the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and occupational segregation in the country. This study focuses on occupation, one of the most important socioeconomic indicators of the status of workers. The purpose of this report is to examine the occupational allocation of Hispanic workers and assess the factors that affect the pace of their occupational status and mobility.

Imagine the possibility of an online interactive map as an interface, with symbols indicating the location of events in each person’s life, such as the place of birth, marriage, offspring, migration routes, death, and burial site. Add to that links to family photographs, audiovisual material, biographies, and information on the world events that shaped their lives. This is a realistic goal, as evidenced by historians utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for similar pursuits in picturing the past. Other initiatives demonstrate alternate methods of implementing interactive mapping of chronological events, some incorporating multimedia (Southall & White, 1998; Zerneke, 2003). The purpose of this paper is to understand the information needs and the process undertaken by family historians, or genealogists, in their quest to build a GIS database for visualizing ancestral haunts. Do online sources provide the geographic information necessary, or are traditional institutions, such as archives and government records offices, the sole keepers of material needed for validating the physical context of past events? What environmental barriers, such as time and cost, exist in locating suitable information? What accessibility and credibility factors are encountered when using online or traditional information sources? It is expected that this research will demonstrate the limitations of both online and traditional research material, indicating an opportunity to build bridges aimed at reducing unnecessary detours in the search for family history. The first part of this paper provides an overview of the information necessary for building a digital map of past places and related events. It discusses traditional access to relevant material versus that offered by online databases and individual contributors. The search for location evidence is not limited to genealogists; in fact, historians and geographers have similar needs as cited in the literature. A model is presented illustrating the common information needs of these groups and is related to previously published models of information theory and behavior. The remaining half of this paper describes a preliminary case study completed to identify and evaluate the relevance of information found to map location history, using both traditional and online sources. The study objective was to trace one individual’s lineage back to a known relative living in the American colony of Virginia around the 1700s. Relevance ratings were assigned to each source and are presented along with the findings and unresolved information gaps. Although this study was limited to a small sample, it points to future research opportunities.

Gender is fundamental to understanding ethnic marriage patterns, particularly in the case of the United States of America, where immigrant streams have long been sexselective. While for much of a century (1880-1970) male immigrants typically outnumbered females 110:100, for Greeks and Italians the adult sex ratio averaged 150, and Norwegians, Mexicans, Austrians, and others were not far behind at 125. In caste societies, polyandry, celibacy or same-sex unions might be the means for attaining equilibrium in socially-constructed marriage markets. In the United States, outmarriage is the escape valve, as far back in the past as census microdata permit us to peer. Nevertheless, breaking the gender squeeze is a two-step, or better two-generation, process with immigrants, favoring spouses of their own ethnicity even though born in . . .

We use data from the IPUMS sample of the 1870 US Population Census to analyze the distribution of real and personal property wealth. Wealth was relatively more equally distributed near the beginning of U.S. industrialization than it would be 50 years later. Disaggregating the data by demographic groups and spatially we find evidence consistent with Kuznets' conjecture that urbanization and industrialization were associated with rising inequality in the nineteenth century. But we also find that inequality was high in the South, even though it remained in 1870 highly rural and agricultural. Finally we find evidence that increasing literacy may have helped to reduce inequality.

Half of college students drop out before completing a degree. These low rates of college completion among young people should be viewed in the context of slow future growth in the educated labor force, as the well-educated baby boomers retire and new workers are drawn from populations with historically low education levels. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and the share of workers with a college education. I exploit the introduction of two large tuition subsidy programs, finding that they increase the share of the population that completes a college degree by three percentage points. The effects are strongest among women, with white women increasing degree receipt by 3.2 percentage points and the share of nonwhite women attempting or completing any years of college increasing by six and seven percentage points, respectively. A cost-benefit analysis indicates that tuition reduction can be a socially efficient method for increasing college completion. However, even with the offer of free tuition, a large share of students continue to drop out, suggesting that the direct costs of school are not the only impediment to college completion.

The Gini Index is a widely used measure of income inequality. It has also been used as a segregation measure, but only in the case of binary variables, e.g. race or gender. We develop a general version of the Gini Index that can accommodate either continuous or binary variables, and discuss its relationship to existing measures. Using the Public Use Microdata Sample from the 2000 Census, we illustrate the calculation of the Index and show that it is highly correlated with an existing measure of economic segregation.

Public use microdata samples of the 2000 U.S. census are used to examine the income of Korean immigrants and their children with particular attention to poverty levels. Assimilation and human capital perspectives provide the framework for a logistic regression analysis of poverty among Korean American householders. Major findings include the following: First, the rate of poverty among Korean Americans was very high compared to native Whites and other Asian minorities. Second, the assimilation approach is only partially confirmed in that the poverty rate of the second generation is lower than that for the first generation but higher than that for the 1.5 generation. Third, the poverty rate varied by sex in each generation and the poverty rate among men was much lower than that among women. Finally, four explanatory factors operate differently by generation and by sex in each generation in accounting for the poverty status of Korean American householders. In the final section, policy implications are discussed.

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.

The full impact of immigration on American society is obscured in policy and academic analyses that focus on the short-term problems of immigrant adjustment. With a longer-term perspective, which includes the socioeconomic roles of the children of immigrants, immigration appears as one of the defining characteristics of twentieth-century America. Major waves of immigration create population diversity with new languages and cultures, but over time, while immigrants and their descendants become more "American," the character of American society and culture is transformed. In the early decades of the twentieth century, immigrants and their children were the majority of the workforce in many of the largest industrial cities; in recent decades, the arrival of immigrants and their families has slowed the demographic and economic decline of some American cities. The presence of immigrants probably creates as many jobs for native-born workers as are lost through displacement. Immigrants and their children played an important role in twentieth-century American politics and were influential in the development of American popular culture during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Intermarriage between the descendants of immigrants and old-stock Americans fosters a national identity based on civic participation rather than ancestry.

Recently uncovered 1906 Virginia teacher-salary data allow for more precise and consistentestimation of marginal returns to certification and formal education than available in previousstudies. Virginias separate but equal educational system paid black teachers in rural countieslower wages than it paid white teachers and on average paid a lower premium to blacks forcertification and formal education that it paid to whites. In incorporated cities, returns tocertification and normal school education were about the same for black teachers and whiteteachers, although average salaries were lower for black teachers.

The full impact of immigration on American society is obscured in policy and academic analyses that focus on the short-term problems of immigrant adjustment. With a longer-term perspective, which includes the socioeconomic roles of the children of immigrants, immigration appears as one of the defining characteristics of twentieth-century America. Major waves of immigration create population diversity with new languages and cultures, but over time, while immigrants and their descendants become more "American," the character of American society and culture is transformed In the early decades of the twentieth century, immigrants and their children were the majority of the workforce in many of the largest industrial cities; in recent decades, the arrival of immigrants and their families has slowed the demographic and economic decline of some American cities. The presence of immigrants probably creates as many jobs for native-born workers as are lost through displacement. Immigrants and their children played an important role in twentieth-century American politics and were influential in the development of American popular culture during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Intermarriage between the descendants of immigrants and old-stock Americans fosters a national identity based on civic participation rather than ancestry.

Over the past forty years a tremendous number of women have entered the labor market, removing stay-home motherhood as the most dominant female occupation. The linkage between the change in the labor market and change in family structure has drawn a lot of attention from social scientists, and it is on this linkage that this analysis is focused.An essential dimension of this changing behavior is the sharp rise in out-ofwedlockchildbearing. The central issue of non-married motherhood is more related tothe diminishing willingness to marry than a changing attitude toward fertility. In asetting where individuals choose marriage because of the gains from joint production ofchild quality as well as the division of labor, the declining gains from specialization formen influence potential spouse selection. Men and women with fewer labor marketprospects become less desirable, and consequently a marriage market with more positiveassortative mating will be observed.The increase in female labor market participation is larger for highly-educatedwomen but the decrease in marriage rates is more characteristic of less-educated womenover this period. What drives these changes can be explained by using a simple economic theory, the fundamental concept of which is that couples with lower labormarket prospects also face lower gains from marriage because of the increases in femalemalerelative wages in the less-educated and black groups. A narrowing of the gapbetween male and female wages would reduce the gains from division of labor andlower the incentive to marry. In addition, when the marriage market becomes morepositively assorted, low educated men and women are less likely to marry each other.Our empirical results indicate an increase in the homogeneity of wages betweenspouses over this period regardless of whether we control for education. In particular,black couples are more positively assorted than white couples although the trendconverges by the end of the century. We also show that the marriage market is tiltedtowards better-educated men and women over the period. These findings are consistentwith the theory which explains why single motherhood is more concentrated among less educatedwomen.

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the U.S. Analyses of Census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy increased over most of this period, although there is some evidence of stabilization in the 1990s. From 1940 to the early-1970s, these increases were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well educated persons. Beginning in the early-1970s, the odds of intermarriage among the highly educated stabilized while the odds that high school dropouts marry up dropped substantially. These trends are similar for a broad cross-section of married couples and for newlyweds.

This article uses the history of women in twentieth-century United States to explore the paradox of inequality in American history: the coexistence of durable inequality with immense individual and group mobility. Using census data, the article traces inequality along four dimensions: participation, distribution, rewards, and differentiation. Differentiation, the article argues, resolves the paradox of inequality by showing how mobility reinforces rather than challenges existing social structures. The analysis highlights differences in women's experiences by cohort and race and emphasizes the role of education, technological change, and, especially, government's impact on labor markets. The article concludes by evaluating and extending Charles Tilly's theory of durable inequality in light of the trends in women's experience.

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 Prop 13 has affected the average tenure length of owners and renters in California versus in other states. We find that from 1970 to 2000, the average tenure length of owners and renters in California increased by 1.04 years and .79 years, respectively, relative to the comparison states. We also find substantial variation in the response to Prop 13, with African-American households responding more than households of other races and migrants responding more than native-born households. Among owner-occupiers, the response to Prop 13 increases sharply as the size of the subsidy rises. Homeowners living in inland California cities such as Bakersfield receive Prop 13 subsidies averaging only $110/year and their average tenure length increased by only .11 years in 2000, but owners living in coastal California cities receive Prop 13 subsidies averaging in the thousands of dollars and their average tenure length increased by 2 to 3 years.

Previous studies of the effect of Social Security on elderly living arrangements generally have relied on data from the distant past or differences in benefits across families or cohorts that potentially were correlated with other determinants of living arrangements. Using data from the 1980-99 Current Population Surveys, we attempt to isolate the causal effect of Social Security on living arrangements with an instrumental-variable approach that relies on the large shifts in benefits for cohorts born from 1910-21, the so-called Social Security notch. Over all elderly households, the estimated elasticity of living with others with respect to Social Security income is -0.4, with elasticities of -1.3 and -1.4 for the widowed and divorced, respectively; most of the effects on living arrangements appear to be concentrated among the lesser educated as well. Our estimated elasticities are substantially larger than those from previous studies and suggest that reductions in current benefits would alter living arrangements significantly.