Although age discrimination laws boost employment of older workers, some are exempt from age-law protection and may be better protected by disability discrimination laws. Disability laws may raise the costs of employing the disabled, however, generating mixed predictions regarding employment effects of protection by both types of laws. This study finds that employment of older disabled workers with the coupled laws is lower than those with age-law protection only; employment of the younger disabled is higher with the coupled laws. For older disabled workers, earnings of those with the coupled laws are lower than their counterparts with only age-law protection. (JEL J78, K31, J00) Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Applied geography has undergone remarkable changes in the last 20 years. Powerful new technologies have emerged that greatly improve the ability to collect, store, manage, view, analyses, and utilize information regarding the critical issues of our time. these technologies include geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), satellite-vase remote sensing, and a great variety of remarkable software that allows for the analysis of the compelling problems. The issues include globalization, global warming, pollution, security, crime, public health, transportation, energy supplier, and population growth. Geographic Information Science (GIScience) has given rise to an essentially multidisciplinary approach to applied problems. No single person is expert in all of these areas. It is necessary to emphasize coordination and collaboration and to find the bridges that reduce the barriers between disciplines. In this chapter we briefly discuss the new technologies and the way in which they are being used to solve critical issues. We then make suggestions for an applied geography future via-a-vis the geographic information sciences.

The transition from high school to college has become increasingly important for economic success and mobility in the United States. Most students form definite plans regarding post-secondary schooling by their senior years. Yet, not all seniors who plan to attend college immediately after graduation are successful in achieving that goal. We use information from a longitudinal study of high school seniors to determine the factors that influence their ability to actuate their college plans. Special attention is devoted to racial and ethnic variation in the realization of college plans, and in the possible explanations for such variation. Multivariate binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal an enrollment advantage for Asian students and an enrollment disadvantage for African American students. In addition, Asian students are more likely than whites or blacks to attend two-year schools, while African American students are less likely than whites or Asians to attend four-year schools. Encouragement for a college attendance from parents, teachers, and friends is responsible for the greater likelihood of enrollment among Asians. Weaker high school academic performance appears to explain the disadvantage for African American students. The possibility of a cultural explanation is acknowledged for the greater encouragement enjoyed by Asian students, while alternative mechanisms are suggested for the role of academic performance in the lowerlikelihood of college actuation for black students.

Labor market differences by skill, race, and ethnicity persist in the U.S. This dissertation investigates possible influences on labor markets of less-skilled workers and racial and ethnic labor market gaps. First, it asks how the 1986 immigration reform affected relative labor markets of less-skilled native workers. Second, it asks how relative labor markets of blacks are related to their relative arrest rates. Finally, it asks how immigrant status affected displaced worker labor market re-entry.

Pattern Recognition Algorithms for Data Mining covers the topic of data mining from a pattern recognition perspective. This unique book presents real life data sets from various domains, such as geographic information systems, remote sensing imagery, and population census, to demonstrate the use of innovative new methodologies. Classical approaches are covered along with granular computation by integrating fuzzy sets, artificial neural networks, and genetic algorithms for efficient knowledge discovery. The authors then compare the granular computing and rough fuzzy approaches with the more classical methods and clearly demonstrate why they are more efficient.

The fraction of persons holding a college degree differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper documents data related to state educational attainment differences and explores possible explanations. It shows that highly educated states employ skill-biased technologies, specialize in skill-intensive industries, but do not pay lower skill premia than do less educated states. Moreover, measures of urbanization and population density are positively related to educational attainment. Theories based on agglomeration economies offer natural explanations for these observations.

Compares immigrants from Germany or Austria who were born between 1918 and 1935 and came to this country between 1935 and 1944 as refugees with their American-born counterparts.

Racial differences in wealth ownership are among the most extreme and persistent forms of stratification in the United States, but the factors that contribute to this inequality are unclear. One potentially important contributing factor is family background. It is a critical determinant of attainment, and both childhood family resources and family structure vary racially. This article reports that family size during childhood contributes significantly to racial differences in adult wealth. I find that siblings strain material and nonmaterial resources during childhood and decrease adult home ownership, stock ownership, and total assets. Having extended family in the home also decreases wealth for those from intact families, but an extended family minimizes the negative effect of divorce and separation and increases wealth in disrupted families. I also find that childhood family size and family structure are related to racial differences in adult wealth accumulation trajectories, allowing whites to begin accumulating high-yield assets earlier in life. The results provide insight into the role of family background in creating and maintaining inequality, particularly racial stratification in wealth ownership.

Reduced-rank restrictions can add useful parsimony to coefficient matrices of multivariate models, but their use is limited by the daunting complexity of the methods and their theory. The present work takes the easy road, focusing on unifying themes andsimplified methods. For Gaussian and non-Gaussian (GLM, GAM, etc.) multivariate models, the present work gives a unified, explicit theory for the general asymptotic (normal) distribution of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE). MLE can be complexand computationally difficult, but we show a strong asymptotic equivalence between MLE and a relatively simple minimum (Mahalanobis) distance estimator. The latter method yields particularly simple tests of rank, and we describe its asymptotic behaviorin detail. We also examine the methods performance in simulation and via analytical and empirical examples.

This dissertation contains three essays related to the finance and production of public education in the United States. The first essay is an empirical study of how teachers affect the academic achievement of their students, and what characteristics of teachers predict teaching quality. By using panel data on students and teachers, I am able to overcome several of the empirical obstacles facing earlier research on this subject. In my second essay I examine how property taxation and local public spending on education respond to fiscal incentives generated by a property tax relief program in New York State. I also examine how the response of local taxation and spending depend upon the distribution of fiscal incentives among groups within the local community, e.g., homeowners versus renters, elderly versus non-elderly, etc. My third essay is coauthored with Caroline Hoxby. It focuses on the achievement on students who enroll in charter schools, specifically, students in the largest charter school system in the United States, located in Chicago. These schools use lotteries to select their students, and we use this randomized admissions policy to identify the effect of charter school enrollment on student achievement.

Women now earn about 57 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States, a reversal of the gender gap in college education that existed before the late 1970s. A similar reversal can be observed in a substantial majority of developed (OECD) countries, and in a large number of non-OECD countries as well. This paper documents the trend in the college gender gap over the past half century and explores some potential explanations. Within the United States, rising returns to human capital for women may help explain some of the change, but returns to college are now very high for both men and women, and men's enrollment rates have remained stagnant while women's continue to increase. Examining cross-country data, I show that the trend in the college gender gap persists even after controlling for changes in women's labor-force participation rates, per-capita GDP, and total fertility rates. Within the sample of OECD countries, changes in the divorce rate help explain much of the trend in the OECD, suggesting that changes in family structure or divorce risk may have played an important role, although of course marital status is likely to be endogenous to other social and economic changes that affected schooling decisions as well.

As women have made unprecedented gains in paid labor since the 1960s, the study of changes in occupational sex composition and its impact upon workers has emerged as one of the most interesting phenomena to labor market researchers. However, this literature has suffered from a number of data limitations. One of the most confining issues has been the inability to determine how many men would have entered an occupation had women not supplanted them. In focusing on one rapidly-feminizing occupation, veterinary medicine, the present research overcomes this limitation by analyzing the sex composition of applicants to all twenty-seven American veterinary medical colleges between 1976 and 1995. Applicants to the programs represent some measure of interest in the profession and thus do not reflect biases by admissions committees or employers. Cross-sectional pooled time-series analyses are used to test twelve hypotheses of the impact of structural and economic factors on male and female applicants. Support of feminization theories is mixed. Net of control variables, the structural variable analysis does not support the theoretical expectation that men shy away from feminizing occupations because of the presence of women. However, the presence of women as veterinary faculty may serve to discourage other women from applying. This finding is unexplained. Tests of economic hypotheses are similarly mixed in their support of feminization theory predictions. Starting salaries for veterinary graduates are not predictive of the number of male and female applicants a school subsequently receives. However, veterinary salaries relative to the average workerís earnings serves to positively influence applicants. Further, consistent with discourse in the popular and veterinary literatures, the wages of veterinarians relative to physicians serve to deter male applicants. Contrary to the discourse, however, the relative wage gap also serves as a disincentive to female veterinary applicants. Thus, support is found for the similarity of application processes for applicants of both sexes. The findings may be suggestive of mechanisms in veterinary medicine in other countries as well as feminizing health professions in the United States.

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 womens labor supply. This paper uses quasi-experimental variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of oral contraception on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of womens labor-force participation. With legal data that I compiled and fertility and labor market information from 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. In contrast to a long literature in economics that emphasizes the importance of demand factors, my results suggest that legal access to birth control may have accelerated the growth in younger womens labor-force participation since 1970.

The manufacturing sector is the second largest industry in California (after retail), employing over two million persons (including the self employed) and paying more than $86 billion in wages and salaries.* There is concern, however, that Californias manufacturing sector is on the decline and that companies are moving elsewhere.At the request of Assembly member Bob Pacheco, this report examines the changes occurring in Californias manufacturing sector. In particular, it attempts to provide answers to the following questions: Is the states manufacturing sector on the decline? If so, are certain types of manufacturing more affected? Is the decline affecting some workers more than others? For those workers at risk, could the state provide more training opportunities as a means to increase productivity? Which state training programs target the manufacturing sector?This report has three sections. The first explores the scope and size of declining manufacturing capacity in the state; the second presents data on the workers receiving formal training; and the third examines state training programs that offer formal training to workers in the manufacturing sector.