In the mid-nineteenth century, about 70 percent of persons aged 65 or older resided with their adult children; by the end of the twentieth century, only about 16 percent did so. According to the consensus of scholarly opinion, the simplification of the living arrangements of the aged during the twentieth century resulted primarily from an increase in the resources of the aged, which enabled increasing numbers of elderly to afford independent living. My analysis supports a different interpretation: the evidence suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family occurred mainly because of increasing opportunities for the young and declining parental control over their children.

Broadcast media deliver audiences to advertisers by bundling nominally free programming with advertisements. These industries are occasionally affected by technology that changes media consumers' control over their advertising exposure. The effects of such technological change depend on media consumers' and advertisers' demand elasticities. This dissertation introduces a method to predict the equilibrium effects of the diffusion of advertisement-avoidance technology, and uses data from the US television industry to illustrate the method.I use a random-coefficients logit to model television viewers. Viewers' television utilities depend on program characteristics and advertising quantities. Advertiser demand for television audiences depends on audience size, viewer demographics, and program characteristics. Television networks compete in advertising quantities for viewers, and generate revenues through ad sales.The model is estimated using television audience data for fifty geographic television markets, program characteristics (including genre and cast demographics), viewer demographics, and quantities and prices of national advertisements. The demand estimation yields the first finding that television viewers, on average, dislike viewing commercials.I respecify and solve the empirical model to account for the assumed effects of an advertisement-avoidance technology on viewers' behavior and advertisers' demand. The solution of the respecified model indicates that proliferation of the assumed technology has a small, positive effect on advertising quantities.

Workers Compensation programs have played an instrumental role in providing protection for American workers and limiting the liability of employers since their inception at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1948, each of the states had enacted and was administering its own workers compensation program. Since its initial development state legislatures have expanded the scope of workers compensation insurance in several important ways. Ever mindful of the goals of competing interest groups, state legislatures steadily improved the mechanisms to provide for injured workers once it became apparent that such mandates were affordable. Since 1930, states have acknowledged the seriousness of occupational diseases, the importance of wage-replacement, rehabilitation and medical care, as well as the need to provide coverage for nearly all employees including those with previous injuries.

Abstract: Objective: To determine to what extent the substance-use information obtained in surveys is affected by method of data collection. Study Design and Setting: Questions on the use of alcohol and drugs were administered to samples of Minnesota adults assigned to one of two conditions to test the effect of mode of administration (mail and telephone); 816 persons completed the survey, roughly one half by mail and one half by telephone.Results: Those interviewed by telephone revealed more heavy use of alcohol, but the mail sample includes disproportionate numbers of respondents from demographic groups that exhibit less use. Controlling for these differences across modes, as well as the differential use of listed telephone numbers and addresses, reduces the effect of mode on one measure of heavy alcohol use to nonsignificance but yields significant effects of mode on others. Specifically, those in the mail condition reported higher levels of illicit drug use in the last year, alcohol use in the last month, and heavy alcohol use in the last 2 weeks.Conclusions: The greater, and arguably more accurate, reporting of substance use, coupled with potential cost savings, suggests that researchers should consider using mail surveys for investigating substance use. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the mid-nineteenth century, about 70 percent of persons aged 65 or older resided with their adult children; by the end of the twentieth century, only about 16 percent did so. According to the consensus of scholarly opinion, the simplification of the living arrangements of the aged during the twentieth century resulted primarily from an increase in the resources of the aged, which enabled increasing numbers of elderly to afford independent living. My analysis supports a different interpretation: the evidence suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family occurred mainly because of increasing opportunities for the young and declining parental control over their children.

This dissertation explores the establishment of Macedonian diaspora communities in North America, and the concurrent development of Macedonian national identity, between 1870 and 1970. Taking a transnational approach to cultural history, it ultimately finds a reciprocal relationship between Macedonian migration and identity by focusing on key nationalist leaders and organizations, as well as the crucial points of transformation in the evolution of Macedonian national identity. By blurring the boundary between Canada and the United States - as did many migrants from Macedonia who saw the two countries as "Upper" and "Lower" America - this study emphasizes migration rather than settlement in order to unveil nationalism's religious, cultural and political components. The dissertation, therefore, is grounded not in the cement of a single national narrative, but in the cultural products that result from passages - physical, spiritual, and social - among nations. As the nineteenth century ended, a climate of deprivation and violence compelled tens of thousands of men from the Macedonian region to depart their troubled corner of the Balkans and find economic salvation abroad. Like their fellow villagers, most of the migrants considered themselves to be geographically Macedonian but culturally Bulgarian. Almost none identified with a nationality in the modern sense. This study argues, however, that more than simply fulfilling an economic mission abroad, the migrant men, and later their families, capitalized on the freedoms North America offered to forge a broader "salvation" that fundamentally changed their national and ethnic worldview. Put another way, migration catalyzed a process in which the migrants became, simply, "Macedonians." Far from leaving behind the political and cultural battles of their homeland, the migrant communities formed political, cultural, and religious organizations that sought to influence the policies of both their host and home countries. But defining the new Macedonian nation proved a contentious issue. As the migrant communities cleaved into left- and right-leaning factions during the middle and latter years of the twentieth century, the nature of Macedonian identity, which, I argue, was intimately connected to notions of Macedonian cultural history, became a fiercely contested subject, and remains so today.

Sex ratios, the ratio between the number of males per female in a population, can affect decisions regarding marriage, marriage prospects and outcomes. Sex ratios are a good indicator of the availability of mates in a population and this play an important role when individuals are considering marriage. This paper uses the local marriage market sex ratios in the US (metropolitan areas) to study how the availability of individuals from the different sex affects decisions towards marriage and the selection of mates. The empirical results suggests that high sex ratios (more males than females) reduces the number of single females in a population, increases the number of single males and have a negative effect on the age differential between couples. Also, individual outcomes such as schooling and income level are much more related to individual and regional characteristics than to sex ratios. Sex ratios also appear to have little or no effect on the mating process, I observe that individuals tend to marry others with similar educational levels despite of the different availability of mates in a region.

A recent "revisionist " literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic " event of the first-half of the 1980s driven by non-market factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Survey for 1963 to 2005, we find limited support for these claims. The slowing of the growth of overall wage inequality in the 1990s hides a divergence in the paths of upper-tail (90/50) inequality -- which has increased steadily since 1980, even adjusting for changes in labor force composition -- and lower tail (50/10) inequality, which rose sharply in the first-half of the 1980s and plateaued or contracted thereafter. Fluctuations in the real minimum wage are not a plausible explanation for these trends since the bulk of inequality growth occurs above the median of the wage distribution. Models emphasizing rapid secular growth in the relative demand for skills -- attributable to skill-biased technical change -- and a sharp deceleration in the relative supply of college workers in the 1980s do an excellent job of capturing the evolution of the college/high-school wage premium over four decades. But these models also imply a puzzling deceleration in relative demand growth for college workers in the early 1990s, also visible in a recent "polarization" of skill demands in which employment has expanded in high-wage and low-wage work at the expense of middle-wage jobs. These patterns are potentially reconciled by a modified version of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis that emphasizes the role of information technology in complementing abstract (high-education) tasks and substituting for routine (middle-education) tasks.

The transition to adulthood is a critical stage in human development during which young people leave childhood behind, and take on new roles and responsibilities. Recognizing the need to learn more about this crucial period of life, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine convened a panel of experts to examine how the transition to adulthood is changing in developing countries in light of globalization and what the implications of these changes might be for those responsible for designing youth policies and programmes. According to the panel's findings, important transformations in young people's lives are under way. In much of the developing world adolescence is a stage of life that is gaining in significance. Young people now have more time than ever before to acquire the information and skills necessary to become effective participants in decisions about their futures. Nevertheless, the book highlights the persistent disadvantages for young women relative to young men, and the special needs of the poor. Youth living in sub-Saharan Africa are also identified to be of special concern.

Public policy toward low-income families with children in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two decades. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, in existence since 1935, was replaced with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) as part of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). PRWORA eliminated . . .

Do variations in the duration of grandparents caring for grandchildren result in significantly different patterns of poverty and receipt of public assistance for the household and disability for the grandparent caregiver? Using data from the 5% Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) from the Census 2000, this paper explores how grandparent caregivers and their households fare as the length of caregiving extends from the possibly temporary category of under 6 months to a more permanent situation of over five years. The results indicate that households in the higher duration of grandparent caregiving categories have a significantly lower likelihood of living below 150% of the poverty threshold and a higher likelihood of receiving public assistance, after controlling for demographic and human capital covariates[JI1]. Disability of the caregiver varies slightly as the length of caregiving reaches five or more years.

This article examines variation in intergenerational coresidence among older women and men in Egypt using data from the WHO Collaborative Study on the Social and Health Aspects of Aging. Residence with sons and daughters-in-law is preferred, although residence with daughters and sons-in-law occurs because patrilocal endogamy is common. Whereas residence with sons and daughters declines with age among men, it declines then increases with age among women. Residence with sons-in-law is uncommon among older men and becomes more frequent with age among older women. Findings support the idea that women's exchange of kin-keeping tasks for protection from kin gives older women greater access to normative and alternative forms of intergenerational coresidence, even after accounting for differences in need.

The marriage market is a dynamic bilateral matching market with demographic andpreference shocks. This paper proposes a behavioral model of the marriage market that gen-erates a non-parametric dynamic marriage matching function which is easy to estimate. Themodel is estimated with US data for three time intervals from 1970 to 1984 on the bivariatedistributions of spousal ages at marriage. The estimated model is used to test a separablespousal contribution model of marital output where positive assortative matching by spousalages is generated by the accumulation of marriage specic capital. The separable spousalcontribution model ts the data well. The estimated subjective divorce rates underestimateactual divorce rates. Individuals perceived that their personal divorce risk, although small,have risen over time. The observed drop in the marriage rates of young adults is primarilyattributable to the fall in the relative contributions of young adults in marriage and not dueto a fall in the value of marriage specic capital.

The Fishers are definitely in a select group. "Trent Alexander of the University of Minnesota's Population Center estimated there are about 1,000 couples across the United States that have been married 75 years or more."

Centenarians represent one of the fastest growing age groups in the U. S. Yet, factors indicating longevity and its time trends remain to be fully understood. Natalia Gavrilova and Leonid Gavrilov conducted this research, which explores possible predictors of exceptional human longevity such as familial factors, earlylife living conditions, month-of-birth, and birth order. The Committee on Life Insurance Research and the Committee on Knowledge Extension Research are pleased to make available the results of this research project.

This paper investigates as part of the National Historical Geographic Information System project (http://www.nhgis.org/) the creation of a multi-scale database of historical US census units. This database will include, at a minimum, three different scales (1:150,000, 1:400,000 and 1:1,000,000) and boundary data for all documented census since 1790. Besides the commitment to the production need, the main challenge in the generalization of these spatio-temporal data is the maintenance of geometric and topological consistency both within a dataset and between datasets for one target scale. We propose to address this challenge through: (1) a generalization framework based on the constraint based generalization paradigm and the active object approach; and (2) a topological data model linking all datasets, which represent different census years, for one target scale. The framework is implemented in ESRIs ArcGIS environment using ArcGIS 9.0, Oracle, C# and ArcObjects. The implementation of the model generalization process was completed and successfully tested for the three target scales of the final database. Model generalization accomplishes the removal of redundant points and the removal of boundary-change sliver polygons. The implementation of the cartographic generalization process is still on-going and has focused, until recently, on different approaches for the enlargement and elimination of too small census units or detached parts of a census unit as well as on the reduction of the outline granularity of census units boundaries. Results that were automatically generalized with the current version of the prototype exhibit satisfying quality based on a preliminary visual evaluation.

Executive SummaryThis report, Driver Safety and the Role of Minnesotas Drivers License Policy, quantifies the number of unlicensed drivers in two of Minnesotas most populated counties, Hennepin and Ramsey. It places the contentious debate over the undocumented, unlicensed driver in the context of an unlicensed driver problem. By using factual information about traffic violations and incarcerations involving Hispanic/Latino and Non-Hispanic drivers, the report demonstrates to what extent Minnesota drivers license policy has exacerbated the number of unlicensed drivers, presumably by prohibiting undocumented immigrants from getting a license. Analyses suggest important implications of Minnesota drivers license policy on driver safety and on Hispanic/Latino drivers.

Immigrant entrepreneurs in the US stratify by ethnicity. Koreans are e.g.43 times more likely to run dry-cleaners than are other immigrants, and Gu-jarati speakers from India are 71 times more likely to operate hotels. Thephenomenon of ethnic specialization occurs in many immigrant groups, has along history and is present in several countries with ethnic minorities. Thispaper explores the causes of specialization and attempts to separate group in-teraction from correlated skills as the major determinant. Path dependency isdemonstrated by using the variability in group size combined with laws of largenumbers to generate exogenous variation in the occupational distribution.