This article outlines a research strategy for studying difficult-to-reach migrant populations that combines community collaboration, targeted random sampling, and parallel sampling in sending and receiving areas. The authors describe how this methodology was applied to the study of gender, migration, and HIV risks among Hispanic migrants in Durham, North Carolina. They illustrate the usefulness of community collaboration for informing survey design and providing a contextual understanding of research findings. They likewise demonstrate the importance of parallel sampling and assess the bias that would have resulted from conducting their study with convenience samples as opposed to a targeted random sampling technique. While the authors describe its application to HIV risks among Hispanic migrants, the methodology can easily be extended to other migrant groups as well as to other sensitive topics pertaining to migration and social adaptation.

Marriage market estimates by sex and age are made for the US and England and Wales in 1990-91, using explicit data on age preferences. Availability is strongly differentiated by age and sex ; it decreases with age for women, while the opposite is true for men. Decomposition shows that young women are advantaged largely by age preferences while older men are advantaged by population age-sex and marital status structure. Most men marry at ages when partners are in short supply, a finding that is examined in detail. Implications for gender power relations through the life course are considered.

This paper addresses the measurement of income sorting across jurisdictions and the attribution of sorting to governmental differences. Measurement error and differences between transitory and permanent income bias variance decompositions' sorting estimates downward by approximately 50 percent. Adjusted US Census data show an average across Metropolitan Areas (MSAs) of approximately eight percent of income variation explained by differences across jurisdictions; approximately 28 percent in the Boston MSA. There, the role of politics in the sorting process seems small because boundaries between adjacent jurisdictions explain only approximately two percent of income variation.

There has been a resurgence of large-scale immigration in the United States and in many other countries in recent decades. Not surprisingly, the impact of immigration on economic conditions in the receiving country is often a topic of contentious policy debate. In the U.S. context, this concern has motivated a great deal of research that attempts to document how the U.S. labor market has adjusted to the large-scale immigration in the past few decades. Much of this research has focused on analyzing the determinants of the skill composition of the foreign-born workforce (see the survey in Borjas [1994]). This analytical focus can be easily justified by the fact that the skill composition of the immigrant population is perhaps the key determinant of the social and economic consequences of immigration.

This paper addresses the measurement of income sorting across jurisdictions and the attribution of sorting to governmental differences. Measurement error and differences between transitory and permanent income bias variance decompositions sorting estimates downward by approximately 50 percent. Adjusted US Census data show an average across Metropolitan Areas (MSAs) of approximately eight percent of income variation explained by differences across jurisdictions; approximately 28 percent in the Boston MSA. There, politics' role in the sorting process seems small because boundaries between adjacent jurisdictions explain only approximately two percent of income variation.

In this study we analyzed six U.S. metropolitan areas (Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Houston, Phoenix and Minneapolis-St. Paul) in terms of the spatial distribution of workers whose occupations were closely linked to the significant advances in information technology in the decade of the 1990s. The selected metropolitan regions experienced roughly similar rates of growth during the 1990's. Using the U.S. Census Bureau's Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) for 1990 and 2000, we used centrographic analysis and spatial autocorrelation analysis for both residential and workplace locations for workers in all six metropolitan areas for 1990 and 2000. These methods yield calculations and maps of concentration of information workers relative to non-information workers as distributed in the entire metropolitan area as well as their relationship to the central business district of the region. We also developed a three-way typology of information workers and performed similar analyses to learn their unique spatial distributions. The presentation concludes discussing the overall implications of results for metropolitan land use and transportation planning and a discussion of further research concerning the impact of information technology on urban spatial structure.

The release of Enovid in 1960, the first birth control pill, afforded U.S. women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers, yet little is known about the impact of the pill on women's labor-force participation. This paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of oral contraception on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women's market work. Using compiled legal data and the Current Population Surveys, my results suggest that early legal access to the pill significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22. Among women in their twenties, early access increased the number of women in the paid market as well as the number of annual hours and weeks worked. The results suggest that birth control may have accelerated the growth in younger women's labor-force participation in the U.S. after 1970.

Teachers are more likely to be found in rural communities and low-wage metropolitan areas than are college-educated workers in other occupations. This analysis explores the extent to which the geographic distribution of teachers explains the relatively low average wage found in other studies. The analysis suggests that excluding geographic indicators from the analysis downwardly biases estimates of relative teacher wages. One important implication of these findings is that researchers should pay attention to geographic wage variations when making earnings comparisons between teaching and other occupations.

Ethnic minorities have specialized in shopkeeping, moneylending and other middleman activities throughout history. Small groups such as the Jews and the overseas Chinese have frequently prospered. While it is well-known that market discrimination hurts minorities more than the majority, this paper shows how social discrimination can result in the opposite. The complementary role of social interaction in production gives minorities an absolute advantage in some occupations. In addition to historical accounts this theory is applied to Census data on ethnic groups in the United States. It is explained why specialization is more common for the self-employed than for wage-earners.

The United States takes deserved pride in the vitality of its economy, which forms the foundation of our high quality of life, our national security, and our hope that our children and grandchildren will inherit ever greater opportunities. That vitality is derived in large part from the productivity of well-trained people and the steady stream of scientific and technical innovations they produce. Without high-quality, knowledge-intensive jobs and the innovative enterprises that lead to discovery and new technology, our economy will suffer and our people will face a lower standard of living. Economic studies conducted even before the information-technology revolution have shown that as much as 85% of measured growth in US income per capita was due to technological change.Today, Americans are feeling the gradual and subtle effects of globalization that challenge the economic and strategic leadership that the United States has enjoyed since World War II. A substantial portion of our workforce finds itself in direct competition for jobs with lower-wage workers around the globe, and leading-edge scientific and engineering work is being accomplished in many parts of the world. Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communications and other advances, workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in Ireland, Finland, China, India, or dozens of other nations whose economies are growing. This has been aptly referred to as the Death of Distance.

This paper uses a novel data set obtained from a major online dating service to draw inferences on mate preferences and the match outcomes of the site users. The data set contains detailed information on user attributes such as income, education, physique, and attractiveness, as well as information on the users' religion, political inclination, etc. The data set also contains a detailed record of all online activities of the users. In particular, we know whether a site member approaches a potential mate and receives a reply, and we have some limited information on the content of the exchanged e-mails. A drawback of the data set is that we do not observe any "online" activities. We first compare the reported demographic characteristics of the site users to the characteristics of the population-at-large. We then discuss the conditions under which the user's observed behavior reveals their mate preferences. We estimate these preferences and relate them to own and partner attributes. Finally, we predict the equilibrium structure of matches based on the preference estimates and a simple matching protocol, and compare the resulting sorting along attributes such as income and education to observed online matches and actual marriages in the U.S.