We analyze changes in the determinants of family income between 1961 and 1999, focusing on the effect of parental education, occupational rank, income, marital status, family size, region of residence, race, and ethnicity. Our data, which cover respondents between the ages of thirty and fifty-nine, come from the two Occupational Changes in a Generation surveys, the General Social Survey, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.The multiple correlation between respondents family income and their parents characteristics fell between 1961 to 1999. During the 1960s the overall dispersion of respondents family income also fell, so the income gap between respondents from advantaged and disadvantaged families narrowed dramatically. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s the overall dispersion of respondents family income rose again. But because the correlation between respondents family income and their parents characteristics was still falling, the income gap between respondents from advantaged and disadvantaged families showed no consistent trend.All else equal, the economic cost of being Black, Hispanic, or born in the South fell between 1961 and 1999. The cost of having a parent who worked in an unskilled rather than a skilled occupation fell between 1961 and 1972 but not after that. Indeed, occupational inequality among parents has probably become more important since 1972. Neither the effect of parental education nor the effect of parental income changed significantly during the years for which we have data. Daughters were considerably less mobile than sons in the 1970s, but this difference had diminished in the 1980s and 1990s. Respondents whose parents were in the bottom quarter of the socioeconomic distribution were more likely to remain where they started than respondents whose parents were in the top quarter of the distribution.We conclude by arguing that while both justice and economic efficiency require a significant amount of exchange mobility, neither justice nor efficiency implies that the correlation between family income and parental advantages ought to be zero. The case for programs that seek to reduce intergenerational inheritance depends on whether they reduce poverty and inequality.

Current immigration research has revealed little about how immigrants compare to those who do not migrate. Although most scholars agree that migrants are not random samples of their home countries' populations, the direction and degree of educational selectivity is not fully understood. This study of 32 U.S. immigrant groups found that although nearly all immigrants are more educated than those who remain in their home countries, immigrants vary substantially in their degree of selectivity, depending upon the origin country and the timing of migration. Uncovering patterns of immigrant selectivity reveals the fallacy in attributing immigrants' characteristics to national groups as a whole and may help explain socioeconomic differences among immigrant groups in the United States.

Over the past twenty years, two very different storieshave dominated the popular understandings of crime in NewYork and Los Angeles. To judge from the major metropolitannewspapers and the stated views of political and communityleaders, LA has been plagued by gangs, and when lawenforcement has tried to respond to the problem, the resultshave been worse than simply ineffective. In 1992, therelease of the verdict acquitting LA policemen on charges ofbeating Rodney King set off an episode of urban anarchy; inretrospect, earlier anti-gang law enforcement crackdowns inthe late 1980s and early 1990s were seen as contributingsubstantially to its causes [Christopher, 1991 #3129]. Aseries of subsequent scandals and reports of disorganizationin law enforcement led to the replacement of two chiefs ofpolice and the loss of elected office of two successiveheads of the LA County District Attorneys office (LA DA).As of this writing, in spring 2000, the LA Police Department(LAPD) and the LA DAs office remain mired in revelationsthat anti-gang officers in the Rampart and other divisionsof the LAPD regularly stole and sold drugs, and on occasioneven shot and framed alleged gang members [Parks, 2000#3127] [Chemerinsky, 2000 #3128]. While crime declined inLA in the 1990s, virtually no one has seriously suggestedthat local law enforcement deserves the credit.

Iron and steel production grew dramatically in the U.S. when mass production technologies for steel were adopted in the 1860s. According to new measures presented in this study, earnings inequality rose within the iron and steel industries about 1870, perhaps because technological uncertainty led to gambles and turbulence. Specifically: Firms made a variety of technological choices and began formal research and development. Professional associations and journals for mechanical engineers and chemists appeared. A national market replaced local markets for iron and steel. An industrial union replaced craft unions. As new ore sources and cheap water transportation were introduced, new plants along the Great Lakes outcompeted existing plants elsewhere. Because new iron and steel plants in the 1870s were larger than any U.S. plants had ever been, cost accounting appeared in the industry and grew in importance. Uncertainty explains the rise in inequality better than a skill bias account, according to which differences among individuals generate greater differences in wages. Analogous issues of inequality come up with respect to recent information technology.

OBJECTIVE: This article examines the effects of changing family structure (including cohabitation) and maternal employment during the 1990s on child poverty rates across America's diverse racial and ethnic groups. Unlike most previous studies focused on broad pan-ethnic groups, our analyses examine children distinguished by race/ethnicity, immigration generation, and national origin (e.g. Mexican, Japanese, Middle Eastern, among others). METHODS: The analyses, using methods of demographic standardization, are based on data from the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples of the U.S. Decennial Censuses. RESULTS: Child poverty rates decline broadly across population groups in the 1990s. Increasing maternal employment during the 1990s, rather than changing family structure, accounted for the largest share (nearly 40 percent) of the recent decline in child poverty for most of the 25 groups considered in this article. Differences in family structure accounted for a large part of observed child poverty differences between minority groups. CONCLUSIONS: Rapid increases in maternal employment during the 1990s provided a hedge against rising child poverty and a route to economic self-sufficiency for growing shares of single mothers and their children.

This paper examines the evolution of the Mexican-born workforce in the United States using data drawn from the decennial U.S. Census throughout the entire 20th century. It is well known that there has been a rapid rise in Mexican immigration to the United States in recent years. Interestingly, the share of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. workforce declined steadily beginning in the 1920s before beginning to rise in the 1960s. It was not until 1980 that the relative number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. workforce was at the 1920 level. The paper examines the trends in the relative skills and economic performance of Mexican immigrants, and contrasts this evolution with that experienced by other immigrants arriving in the United States during the period. The paper also examines the costs and benefits of this influx by examining how the Mexican influx has altered economic opportunities in the most affected labor markets and by discussing how the relative prices of goods and services produced by Mexican immigrants may have changed over time.

An instrumental variables strategy is employed to determine whether the observedassociation between individual human capital and average skills in ethnic groups (ethniccapital), even after conditioning on parental skills, is due to ethnic peer effects. Theinstrument for ethnic capital is derived from the occupational mix of US immigrantsarrived in the 1900s and 1910s, while fathers age at arrival instruments for parentalskills. Using US Census data on adult literacy in English and childrens schoolattendance, I find evidence of a persistent ethnic capital effect. High geographicconcentration and high endogamy rates tend to accentuate this effect.

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health. This paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive U.S. censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates. I use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education. The results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality, and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature.

In 1890 a group of Croatan Indians, now called Lumbees, migrated from their home in Robeson County, North Carolina, to Bulloch County, Georgia. These families left voluntarily, walking the railroad lines, following the turpentine industry from North Carolina to southeast Georgia, where this community of approximately one hundred established a new home and built a school and church to solidify their place. In this period Georgia, and the South as a whole, legally encoded racial segregation and threatened to force Bulloch County Croatans into a black or white identity. But rather than assimilate into the larger black or white communities of Bulloch County, Croatans maintained an identity as Indians and eventually returned home to Robeson County in 1920. The story of their sojourn in Georgia raises questions about how Croatans perpetuated a sense of themselves as a distinct “Indian” people.1 That distinctiveness depended on markers we ordinarily do not associate with Indian communities. How did they maintain a distinctive identity, away from their homeland, in a region that countenanced only two racial categories, “white” and “colored”? Rather than claiming that an unbroken connection to a place sustained their Indian identity, Croatans used the segregation of the Jim Crow South to build social institutions—a school and a church—to distinguish themselves from non-Indians and reinforce their community ties.

The paper analyzes trends in the dispersion of earnings within the most detailed occupation categories s for which consistent information is available from the Current Population Survey since 1968 and the decennial U.S. Census since 1960. The paper examines the evidence for rising inequality within certain kinds of jobs. New media technologies make it easier to transmit certain kinds of work, such as athletic performances to wider audiences around the world, enhancing the relative payoffs to the most-favored performers. This is the superstars effect described by Rosen (1981). Another set of occupations required close work with new semiconductor and information technologies, such as electrical engineers and computer programmers. These occupations experienced technological uncertainty and turbulence. Evidence here shows that within occupations in both classes, inequality has risen. The uncertainty and superstars effects occur to some intermediate extent in many occupations. Therefore we examine also occupations in which these effects are likely to be the weakest those that call for personal interaction with other individuals. Inequality within these occupations has not risen.

In the 1990s Appalachia gained relative to the United States as a whole measured by per capita income and poverty (Pollard 2003, p. 18). Since the 2000 Census, however, the United States has experienced more difficult economic times, characterized by slow or negative job growth and a mushrooming trade deficit. One of the core reasons for the higher trade deficit has been rising imports from China, which compete with an increasingly broad cross-section of U.S. manufacturing (Shaiken 2004). In Appalachia, and especially in rural and southern Appalachia with their high dependence on manufacturing, these new conditions pose daunting challenges for both laid-off workers and economic development officials. This report looks at worker displacement in the Appalachian region during the past decade. It uses the Displaced Worker Survey (DWS) conducted every two years by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as a supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS). It relies on the past five DWS surveys, conducted in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. Each DWS asks workers about displacement experience in the previous three years. Therefore, the research in this report covers the experience of workers displaced during the periods 1993-1995, 1995-1997, 1997-1999, 1999-2001, and 2001-2003.

We describe a theory of legislative logic. This logic is based on the observation that each succeeding stage of the legislative process has increasingly stringent rules and becomes more consequential. This logic unevenly distributes the influence of social movements across the legislative process. Social movements should have less influence at later stages where stringent requirements are more likely to exhaust limited resources and where the consequentiality of action will cause legislators to revoke their support. We apply the theory to a study of state-level woman suffrage legislation. We find that legislators responded to suffragists by bringing the issue of woman suffrage to the legislative forum, but once suffrage bills reached the voting stage, differences in social movement tactics and organization did not have as great an impact.

Using individual-level data on males from the 198891 National Health Interview Survey Multiple Cause of Death Files, we examine the impact of relative deprivation within a reference group on health. We define reference groups using combinations of state, race, education, and age. High relative deprivation in the sense of Yitzhaki is associated with a higher probability of death, worse self-reported health, higher self-reported limitations, higher body mass index, and an increased probability of taking health risks.

This paper proposes a detailed, consistent category system for occupations in the Census of Population data from 1960 to 2000. Most of the categories are based on the 1990 Census occupation definitions. We analyze employment levels, average earnings levels, and earnings variance in our occupation categories over time, compare these to similar trends for occupations defined in the occ1950 IPUMS classification, and test both classifications for consistency over time.

This reports analysis is centered on the economic and political reforms of the 1990s. If most of these reforms did not directly address gender equality, they nevertheless received considerable scrutiny from a gender perspective. And whatever their intentions, they had significant and mixed implications for gender relations and womens well-being. As its title alludes, achieving gender equality and gender justice will be very difficult in a world that is increasingly unequal. The report presents strong arguments for why gender equality must be placed at the core of efforts to reorient the development agenda.

Urban decline is not the mirror image of growth, and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different. This paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model: (1) city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline; (2) urban decline is highly persistent; (3) positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices; (4) negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population; (5) if housing prices are below construction costs, then the city declines; and (6) the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities.