I show that among women likely to use welfare, movers move to higher-benefit states. I also find that the probability likely welfare users will move at all is lower in higher-benefit states. This effect is concentrated early in the life cycle, as theory predicts. I construct a theoretical framework to measure the impact of welfare migration on optimal state benefits. Simulation results suggest little impact in higher-benefit states, but possibly a more substantial impact in other states. Finally, evidence suggests little reason for concern (due to welfare migration) in using cross-state variation in welfare generosity to identify incentive effects of the welfare system on other outcome variables.

Condensed representations of pattern collections have been recognized to be important building blocks of inductive databases, a promising theoretical framework for data mining, and recently they have been studied actively. However, there has not been much research on how condensed representations should actually be represented. In this paper we propose a general approach to build condensed representations of pattern collections. The approach is based on separating the structure of the pattern collection from the interestingness values of the patterns. We study also the concrete case of representing the frequent sets and their (approximate) frequencies following this approach: we discuss the trade-offs in representing the frequent sets by the maximal frequent sets, the minimal infrequent sets and their combinations, and investigate the problem approximating the frequencies from samples by giving new upper bounds on sample complexity based on frequent closed sets and describing how convex optimization can be used to improve and score the obtained samples.

FindingsA study of income and poverty data for Upstate New York finds that:Personal income in Upstate grew at just half the national rate in the 1990s, and by 2000 lagged the country by 11 percent. Over half of Upstates meager income growth was accounted for by increases in government transfer payments from such sources as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit. - Hour for hour, Upstate workers receive lower wages than people of similar age, race, sex, and educational backgrounds nationwide. Upstates workers also work fewer hours, and a smaller share of Upstate adults participate in the workforce, contributing to Upstates comparatively low wages per capita. - Upstates highest-income households earn substantially lower incomes than the national average. Upstates 80th-percentile householdwhose income is higher than 80 percent but lower than 20 percent of all households earned about $74,300 in Upstate in 1999, compared with over $81,100 nationwide. - Upstates lowest income households experienced little income growth in the 1990s. These households saw slow relative earnings growth and a substantial decrease in welfare income over the decade so that by 1999, their income had fallen from about 8 percent above the national average to about 1 percent below it. - Upstate poverty rates grew for families, individuals, and children during the 1990s, while they decreased for all three of these groupings nationwide. Traditionally a low-poverty region, by 2000 Upstates poverty rate was 11 percent, closing in on the national average of 12.4 percent. - Concentrated poverty is on the rise in Upstate even as it declines acrossthe nation. The share of concentrated poverty neighborhoods in the United States, and the share of poor households living in such neighborhoods, dropped in the 1990s. The opposite was true for Upstate.Upstate has two income problems requiring two sets of responses. Policies are needed to create better income opportunities for well-educated workers, who otherwise leave the region. Also, policies are needed that will directly improve the income of low-income households and low-wage workers and reduce their residential concentration in Upstate cities.

Employing U.S. Census data, this study analyzes how English-language fluency affected the earnings of self-employed immigrant men in the 1980s. Our results suggest that English proficiency became a more important determinant of earnings for foreign-born entrepreneurs in 1990 compared with 1980, even while controlling for factors affecting selection into self-employment.

This paper investigates the key determinants of entry into the teaching profession, and the subsequent sorting of new teachers across urban, suburban, and rural schools. Of particular interest is the relative importance of teacher salaries, alternative labor market opportunities, and non-pecuniary job attributes or working conditions on this decision process. Results from a nested logit model applied to the Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) Longitudinal Study suggest that work conditions play a relatively more important role in determining where new teachers end up choosing to teach, rather than differences in teacher salaries. This is especially true for women. Meanwhile wages play a relatively more important role at the occupational entry decision. In addition, there is significant variation in teacher quality indicators across these school locations.

Utilizing data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. census, this study investigates whether the passage of official-English legislation at the state level during the 1980s affected the housing acquisition of foreign-born Hispanics. The results suggest that both limited-English-proficient (LEP) and English-fluent Hispanic immigrants who resided in states that passed English-only legislation were less likely to acquire a home during the 1980s compared to their counterparts in other areas. Consistent with economic theory, however, the group that seemed to be most affected included older LEP residents. One explanation for these findings is that the official-English legislation mirrored growing xenophobia against foreign-born Hispanics, resulting in additional social stratification on the basis of ethnicity in housing markets.

Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. In "Social Inequality, a group of the nations leading social scientists assess whether the recent tun-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation. While today's widening inequality may be a temporary episode that will resolve itself as the country adapts to the recent shocks of globalization and computerization, the danger is that the current economic divisions may harden into permanent social divisions, setting in motion a self-permeating cycle of social disadvantages. The most comprehensive review of this quandary to date. "Social Inequality maps out a new agenda for research on inequality in America with important for public policy.

In the early 1900s, white ethnic Americans exhibited disparate marriage patterns that greatly concerned social commentators. This paper examined whether white ethnics assumed the nuptiality tempo of the native-stock population, focusing on generational and period effects. We use data from the 1960 Census IPUMS to obtain information on cohorts born between 1901 and 1930. Event history analysis enables us to explore ethnic and generational patterns of entrance into first marriage. We next assess period effects on marriage timing. Results indicate that among white ethnics marriage timing shifted across generations to more closely approximate the union formation patterns of nativestock whites; nonetheless, significant ethnic differences remained. Results are discussed in light of their meaning for assimilation and theories of union formation.

Untreated syphilis explained one third of the higher prematurity rates of black relative to white babies born at Johns Hopkins in the early twentieth century. Differences in prematurity rates explained 41 percent of the black-white stillbirth gap and one quarter of the black-white birth weight gap. Black babies had lower mortality and higher weight gain than white babies during first ten days of life spent in the hospital because of higher black breast-feeding rates. Historically low birth weights may have a long reach: in 1988 maternal birth weight accounted for 5-8 percent of the gap in black-white birth weights.

About half of all American children can expect to live with both of their biological parents at age fifteen, compared to two-thirds of children born in Sweden, Germany, and France, and nine-tenths of those born in Italy. This form of American exceptionalism reflects both higher rates of divorce and higher rates of breakup among cohabiting couples in the US. The increase in divorce, which began in the early 1960s but leveled off in the early 1980s, affected women at all educational levels. The increase in nonmarital childbearing, which was concentrated between the early 1960s and early 1990s, mainly affected non-white women and white women without college degrees. These changes appear to be a product of changes in sexual mores, which reduced the role of sexual attraction and increased the importance of economic calculations in decisions about whether to marry. The increased importance of economic factors coincided with a decline in non-college mens ability to support a family and perhaps also with an increase in conflict over men and womens roles.

Untreated syphilis explained one-third of the higher prematurity rates of black relative to white babies born at Johns Hopkins in the early twentieth century. Differences in prematurity rates explained 41 percent of the black-white stillbirth gap and one-quarter of the black-white birth weight gap. Black babies had lower mortality and higher weight gain than white babies during the first ten days of life spent in the hospital because of higher black breast-feeding rates. Historically low birth weights may have a long reach: in 1988 maternal birth weight accounted for 58 percent of the gap in black-white birth weights.

This paper uses the records of the Union Army to compare the older age mortality experience of the first black and white cohorts who reached middle and late ages in the twentieth century. Blacks faced a greater risk of death from all causes, especially in large cities, from infectious and parasitic diseases, from genito-urinary disease, and from heart disease, particularly valvular heart disease. Blacks' greater risk of death was the result both of the worse conditions in which they lived at the time of their deaths and of their lifelong poorer nutritional status and higher incidence of infectious disease. Compared to the 1821-40 black cohort, the 1841-50 black cohort was both under greater stress at a young age and had higher older age mortality rates.

In 1978, Californians approved Proposition 13, which fixed property tax rates at 1% of housing prices at the time of purchase. Beyond its fiscal consequences, Proposition 13 created a lock-in effect on housing choice because of the implicit tax break enjoyed by homeowners living in the same house for a long time. In this paper, I provide estimates of this lock-in effect, using a natural experiment created by two subsequent amendments to Proposition 13 - Propositions 60 and 90. These amendments allow households headed by an individual over the age of 55 to transfer the implicit tax benefit to a new home. I show that mobility rates of 55-year old homeowners are approximately 25% higher than those of 54-year olds. The second contribution of this paper is the incorporation of transaction costs, due to Proposition 13, into a household location decision model, providing a new way to estimate marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for housing characteristics. The key insight of this model is that because of the property tax laws, different potential buyers have different user costs for the same house. The exogenous property tax component of this user cost then works as an instrument to solve the main identification problem of revealed preference models - the correlation between price and unobserved quality of the product.

The paper examines the validity of a set of age preference data, provided by a British dating agency, in several respects: (a) for measuring recent levels of partner supply in England and Wales; (b) for measuring partner availability in the USA; and (c) for assessing time trends in partner supply in the two countries. The mean preferences correspond well with observed age differences at marriage in the US in 1990 and in England and Wales in 1991. The assumption of relatively stable age preferences through the twentieth century in both countries is shown to be reasonable. The dating agency preferences perform better than alternative, conventional weighting schemes in predicting observed age differences at marriage in Britain and the US.

The paper reviews and critiques a 2001 paper by Robert Tamura. It takes issue with the econometric specification Tamura uses to test his model of income growth and convergence. Under more robust specification and further data gathered from the U.S. Census (IPUMS), the author concludes that little evidence exists to support the claims made in Tamura's original study and that class size and relative teacher quality do not drive future income growth.

Research suggests that teenage childbearing adversely affects both the outcomes of the mothers as well as those of their children. We know that low-educated women are more likely to have a teenage birth, but does this imply that policies that increase educational attainment reduce early fertility? This paper investigates whether increasing mandatory educational attainment through compulsory schooling legislation encourages women to delay childbearing. We use variation induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws in both the United States and Norway to estimate the effect in two very different institutional environments. We find evidence that increased compulsory schooling does in fact reduce the incidence of teenage childbearing in both the United States and Norway, and these results are quite robust to various specification checks. Somewhat surprisingly, we also find that the magnitude of these effects is quite similar in the two countries. These results suggest that legislation aimed at improving educational outcomes may have spillover effects onto the fertility decisions of teenagers.

A key dynamic implication of the Becker model of discrimination(1957) is that increased product market competition will drive out costly discrimination in the long run. This paper tests that hypothesis by examining the impact of globalization on gender discrimination in manufacturing industries. Because concentrated industries face little competitive pressure, an increase in competition from trade should reduce the residual gender wage gap more in these industries than in competitive industries. The authors compare the change in the gender wage gap between 1976 and 1993 in concentrated versus competitive manufacturing industries, using the latter as a control for changes in the gender wage gap that are unrelated to competitive pressures. They find that while trade increases wage inequality by modestly reducing the relative wages of less-skilled workers, at the same time it appears to benefit women by reducing the ability of firms to discriminate.