The migration of Mexicans to the Pacific Northwest region(PNW) of the United States has received little attention in scholarly literature. This is unfortunate, as Mexican migration has significantly affected this region, both economically and culturally. Using data supplied by the Mexican Migration Project, we compare the characteristics of Mexican migrantsto the Pacific Northwest with characteristics of Mexicans who migrate to other parts of the U.S. The data reveal significant differences between the two groups: Mexican migrants to the PNW earn lower U.S. wages, are less likely to migrate illegally, and more commonly work in agriculture. They also are more transitory in nature, making more frequent, shorter trips to the U.S. Most interesting is that PNW migrants send significantly more money back home compared to Mexican migrants in other parts of the U.S., even after controlling for the aforementioned differences in individual characteristics.

In new economic geography models, spatial concentration typically arises either because of worker mobility or because of vertical linkages among firms. We examine a setup that combines those two approaches in conjunction with local congestion costs. We find that, as trade costsare lowered, the spatial concentration of total activity (agglomeration) follows an inverse u-shaped evolution, while the degree of specialization of locations increases. The evolution of spatial configurations accommodated by this model is consistent with changes in sectorial employment patterns within US metropolitan areas over the 1850-1990 period.

At the request of Assembly member Wilma Chan, this report analyzes recent Census data to respond to the following questions: How many children are enrolled in preschool/childcare? Of those enrolled, how many are in public versus private preschools/childcare? Do enrollment rates vary by ethnic groups, and if so, why? How do California enrollment rates compare to those of other states and the rest of the nation?According to the Census 2000, California has 1.17 million children, aged three to five, who are not yet in kindergarten. The ethnic/racial composition of these children is as follows: Latino children are the largest group (46 percent), White children second (34 percent), Asian and Pacific Islander children third (nine percent), African American children fourth (six percent), children of multiple races fifth (four percent), and Native American children sixth (0.5 percent).Close to half of the states children ages three to five are enrolled in preschool/childcare. As expected, children whose families tend to be in lower income groups (such as Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans) primarily attend public preschool/childcare. Children whose families receive higher incomes like Whites and Asians are more likely to attend private preschool/childcare.

Russian-speakers, one of the largest groups of new immigrants in New York, are characterized by high proportions of refugees, and elderly and urban residents. To understand the extent of diabetes and its risks in this population, client data from a large state-wide diabetes prevention program were used. The prevalence of diabetes among Russian-speaking immigrants aged 40 years and older (N=1,008) was 16.9% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 14.6, 19.3). Russian-speaking immigrants also exhibited a high prevalence of obesity, defined by BMI > or = 30 (33.2%, 95% CI: 30.4, 36.2), high blood pressure (53.8%, 95% CI: 50.7, 56.8), and sedentary lifestyle (69.8%, 95% CI: 67.0, 72.6). After adjusting for age, these rates were significantly higher (P<.01) than the rates for non-Hispanic Whites in the state. Women, urban residents, those with less than a high school education, and Medicaid recipients, were more likely to be at risk. The literature on Russian immigrants suggests an association between dietary behavior, economic hardship, cultural and linguistic barriers, and less favorable health outcomes.

This paper analyzes the effect of regulations governing land use and residential construction upon the course of housing prices in California. We explore the linkage between regulation and housing prices using measures of housing prices estimated from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1990 and 2000 Census of Population and Housing, together with a detailed cross-sectional land use regulation and growth controls in California cities. We explore mechanisms by which regulatory stringency may affect housing outcomes for consumers. First, we assess whether housing is more expensive in more regulated cities. Second, we assess whether growth in the city-level housing stock over the period of a decade depends on the degree of land-use regulation at the start of the decade. Finally, we estimate the price elasticity of housing supply for regulated and relatively unregulated cities. Our results suggest that current regulations have powerful effects on housing outcomes.

We examine the issue of how to measure the degree to which a functional dependency (FD) is approximate. The primary motivation lies in the fact that approximate FDs represent potentially interesting patterns existent in a table. Their discovery is a valuable data mining problem. However, before algorithms can be developed, a measure must be defined quantifying their approximation degree.First we develop an approximation measure by axiomatizing the following intuition: the degree to which X --> Y is approximate in a table T is the degree to which T determines a function from Pi(X)(T) to Pi(Y)(T). We prove that a unique unnormalized measure satisfies these axioms up to a multiplicative constant. Next we compare the measure developed with two other measures from the literature. In all but one case, we show that the measures can be made to differ as much as possible within normalization. We examine these measure on several real datasets and observe that many of the theoretically possible extreme differences do not bear themselves out. We offer some conclusions as to particular situations where certain measures are more appropriate than others.

Explores trends and patterns in teen birth rates over the past three decades. Finds substantial variations across demographic groups and across regions and counties throughout the state.

This paper focuses on two key industries, sugar and wool, and seeks to explain the costs and benefits for them in the tariff bills of 1883, 1890, and 1894. I rely on roll call voting, and archival evidence, e.g. congressional debates and newspaper articles, to illustrate the varied influence of these two industries in the respective chambers of Congress, and census data from 1880 and 1890 for the geographic distribution of these industries. By most accounts, formal lobbying by trade associations, as distinguished from outright bribery, did not begin until the 1920s. However, in trade policy, interests organized well before then, and engaged in both legal and illegal methods of influencing members of the House and Senate (Thompson 1985). Moreover, at the behest of industries in their districts and states, members themselves acted as self-appointed advocates. Did industries as early as the 1880s recognize the need to balance their powers in the House and Senate, and if so, what steps did they take to secure favorable policy in both chambers? Can any of the differences between the two chambers be attributed to location of key industries and lobbying efforts on behalf of these industries? How did party leaders in the chamber limit or promote the influence of individual industries?

The icon of the exploited child is as much a product of the industrial age as the steam engine. Both the protest against child labor and the scholarship that studies it have intently fixed upon the miseries of children in factories. Although curiously silent about children on the farm, both reformers and scholars question economies that send the young to work in mills and mines; the villains in the story are often the same—industrial capitalism, employers who abuse child workers, and the poverty or greed that urges some parents to compel sons and daughters to work. Beyond these factors lies another, more nettlesome yet. Did certain ethnic groups’ cultures sanction the exploitation of children?

Corporate restructuring has been widespread and yet there has been little empirical analysis of the relationship between organizational changes and rising aggregate wage inequality. This paper focuses on one piece of this relationship: the impact of establishment size and establishment size changes (i.e., downsizing) on levels and changes in wage inequality in U.S. cities over the 1970 to 2000 period. Organizational structures associated with more formal and equitable employment relationsas measured by larger average establishment size, more (less) employment in large (small) establishments, and a greater share of all establishments that are largeare associated with lower levels of wage inequality, particularly at the top of the distribution and among women. However, these findings hold only for the earlier years (1969 and 1979), suggesting that these organizational forms no longer have the impact they once had (so it would not matter whether downsizing has been as dramatic as many have assumed). Consistent with this interpretation, the 1980s was the only decade of the three in which a decline in establishment size resulted in a significant increase in inequality, net of controls for other factors associated with rising wage inequality. These transformations fit very well with the timing of rising wage inequality and the spread of organizational restructuring in the 1980s.

I construct a set of dynamic macroeconomic models to analyze the effect of unskilled immigration on wage inequality. The immigrants or their descendants do not remain unskilledover time they may approach or exceed the general level of educational attainment. In the baseline model, the economys capital supply is determined endogenously by the savings behavior of infinite-lived dynasties, and I also consider models in which the supply of capital is perfectly elastic, or exogenously determined. I derive a simple formula that determines the time discounted value of the skill premium enjoyed by college-educated workers following a change in the rate of immigration for unskilled workers, or a change in the degree or rate at which unskilled immigrants become skilled. I compare the calculations of the skill premiums to data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to determine the long-run effect of different immigrant groups on wage inequality in the United States.JEL Classification Numbers: J61, O41.Key Words: Immigration, Educational Attainment, Wage Inequality.

Objective. To describe current patterns and long-term trends (up to 50 years when possible) related to: 1) physical activity, 2) employment and occupation, 3) travel behavior, 4) land use, and 5) related behaviors (e.g., obesity, television watching).Methods. Data sets were assembled to provide relevant current data as well as historical data. Under each of the categories of interest (i.e., physical activity, employment and occupation, travel behavior, land use), a primary data set was identified. Up to 50 years worth of trend data were described. For key variables, rates of annual compound change were calculated.Results. Trends according to major type of physical activity follow these patterns based on the available data: leisure-time physical activity: level or slightly increasing; work-related activity: declining; transportation activity: declining; activity in the home: declining; sedentary activity: increasing; TOTAL physical activity: declining. Large differences were noted in the rates of walking for transportation across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), with more than a two-fold difference between rates in larger MSAs with transit compared with smaller MSAs or non-MSAs. There is a strong linear increase in vehicle miles traveled per person over the past half-century coupled with a strong and consistent trend toward Americans living in suburbs. For youth, there are significant barriers to becoming more active, notably lack of nearby schools and lack of daily physical education in the curriculum.Conclusion. Although it is difficult to precisely quantify due to the lack of long-term data, it is apparent that a combination of changes to the built environment and increases in the proportion of the population engaging in sedentary activities puts the majority of the American population at high risk of physical inactivity.

In classical association rules mining, a minimum support threshold is assumed to be available for mining frequent itemsets. However, setting such a threshold is typically hard. In this paper, we handle a more practical problem; roughly speaking, it is to mine N k-itemsets with the highest supports for k up to a certain k(max) value. We call the results the N-most interesting itemsets. Generally, it is more straightforward for users to determine N and k(max). We propose two new algorithms, LOOPBACK and BOMO. Experiments show that our methods outperform the previously proposed Itemset-Loop algorithm, and the performance of BOMO can be an order of magnitude better than the original FP-tree algorithm, even with the assumption of an optimally chosen support threshold. We also propose the mining of "N-most interesting k-itemsets with item constraints." This allows user to specify different degrees of interestingness for different itemsets. Experiments show that our proposed Double FP-trees algorithm, which is based on BOMO, is highly efficient in solving this problem.

Ethnic labour market concentration has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. But the Asian ethnic group has been treated as a homogeneous group in most studies on ethnic labour market segmentation. Using the 1% Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the metropolitan areas in the United States with the largest Asian populations, this study shows that Asian ethnic groups are quite diverse in their labour market concentrations. Asian Indian, Japanese and Filipino workers are more concentrated in professional and management employment sectors, which generally require higher levels of skill, English proficiency and education. By contrast, Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese groups are more concentrated in the labour-intensive, semi- or low-skilled manufacturing and personal service sectors. Their concentration patterns are closely related to their human capital characteristics. However, human capital cannot entirely explain the process of labour market choice. Analysis indicates that working with co-ethnic populations could provide more job opportunities for disadvantaged workers, as a result of social networking. Location factors also impact niche employment choice.

This article is a summary of a much longer NBER working paper, Historical Perspectives on Racial Differences in Schooling in the United States, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w9770. In this paper we attempt to provide a historical perspective on contemporary racial differences in schooling. Our focus on the past is predicated on the belief that policy debates are enriched by historical perspective. At the most basic level, historical perspective tells us whether the issue under study is transitory or permanent. Factors that are alleged to be important at a point in time may turn out to be less important for change over time (or vice versa).The evidence discussed in the paper draws heavily on recently available public use samples of various historical censuses, as well as other public documents. This evidence is then interpreted in an analytic narrative that is conceptually based on a simple model of optimal human capital investment.

Effective secondary analysis of social science data requires good documentation. Especially because Internet access has become standard, the problems of reading and understanding the contents of data files have become acute. Resolving these problems requires standards for documenting data, as well as standard formats for both data and documentation that can be read and displayed by computers and software anywhere in the world. To define a documentation standard, representatives of North American and European survey research and data archive organizations have created a Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). This article discusses the value and significance of that effort for the social sciences.