This dissertation concerns the role of specialization and asymmetric information in contributing to the rise of the American regulatory state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' It consists of three essays that attempt to demonstrate how the forces of specialization created asymmetric information problems in markets formany goods and services, and how this in turn generated a potentially productive role for government regulation.

Income inequality has worsened over the 90's in Sonoma County. One approach to addressing this trend is to raise wages for low-skilled workers. This paper looks at the possibilities for doing so in the hotel and restaurant industries.

Statistical analysis of a large and unique longitudinal data-set demonstrates that childbearing after age 35 or 40 is associated with survival and healthy survival among very old Chinese women and men. The association is stronger for women than for men. The estimates are adjusted for a variety of confounding factors: demographic characteristics, family support, social connections, health practices, and health conditions. Further analysis based on an extension of the Fixed-Attributes Dynamics method shows that late childbearing is positively associated with long-term survival and healthy survival from ages 80-85 to 90-95 and 100-105. This association exists among oldest-old women and men, but, again, the effects are substantially stronger for women than for men. We discuss four possible factors that may explain why late childbearing affects healthy longevity at advanced ages: (1) social factors; (2) biological changes caused by late pregnancy and delivery; (3) genetic and other biological characteristics; and (4) selection.

Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as in considerable property damage concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. There have been few studies of an econometric nature that examine the impact of the riots on the economic status of African Americans, or on the cities in which the riots took. We present two complementary empirical analyses. The first uses aggregate, city-level data on income, employment, unemployment, and the area's racial composition from the published volumes of the federal censuses. We estimate the riot effect' by both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares. The second uses individual-level census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. The findings suggest that the riots had negative effects on blacks' income and employment that were economically significant and that may have been larger in the long run (1960-1980) than in the short run (1960-1970). We view these findings as suggestive rather than definitive for two reasons. First, the data are not detailed enough to identify the precise mechanisms at work. Second, the wave of riots may have had negative spillover effects to cities that did not experience severe riots; if so, we would tend to underestimate the riots' overall effect.

When adequate data on migration are unavailable, demographers infer such data indirectly, usually by turning to residual methods of estimating net migration. This paper sets out and illustrates an inferential method that uses population totals in the first age group of birthplace-specific counts of residents in each region of a multiregional system to indirectly infer the entire age schedule of directional age-specific migration flows. Specifically, it uses an estimate of infant migration that is afforded by a count of infants enumerated in a region other than their region of birth to infer all other age-specific migration flows. Since infants migrate with their parents, the migration propensities of both are correlated, and the general stability of the age profiles of migration schedules then allows the association to be extended to all other age groups.

In the 1960s numerous cities in the United States experienced violent, race-related civil disturbances. Although social scientists have long studied the causes of the riots, the consequences have received much less attention. This paper examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the riots' impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property. Both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimates indicate that the riots depressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound in the 1970s. Analysis of household-level data suggests that the racial gap in the value of property widened in riot-afflicted cities during the 1970s.

Since the publication of the Coleman report in the US many decades ago, it has been widely accepted that the evidence that schools are marginal in the grand scheme of academic achievement is conclusive. Despite this, educational policy across the world remains focused almost exclusively on schools.This volume focuses its searchlight on family background and its impact on educational success. That schools have an important role in education is beyond question, but this book demonstrates some of the crucial ways that non-school factors matter covering such themes as: the impact of fathers on educational success, socio-economic background and young children's education, and school-community relationships.With contributions from such figures as Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Doris Entwistle and Richard Arum, this book is an important contribution to a debate that has implications across the board in social sciences and policy-making. It will be required reading for students and academics within sociology, economics and education and should also find a place on the bookshelves of education policy-makers.

Opposition to Japanese immigration led to Alien Land Laws that barred Japanese immigrants from buying or leasing farmland. Although there is general agreement that the 1913 California Alien Land Law had little impact, historians and social scientists have differed over the effectiveness of the 1920 initiative, which closed loopholes in the earlier law. Census data show a decline in Japanese American agriculture over the short and long run, which cannot be fully explained by the agricultural downturn of the 1920s. This evidence indicates that the 1920 California Alien Land Law had negative consequences for Japanese immigrant farmers.

A description of the major demographic shifts over the past half-century, including a wide range of statistics reflecting cultural, family, social, economic, and housing circumstances of the nation's children across various racial/ethnic and country-of-orgin groups.

The recent release of public-use data from the 2000 Census allows researchers to better document the patterns of immigrant settlement that occurred during the 1990s. This paper focuses on issues relating to the so-called new settlement states, or states that faced rapid foreign-born growth rates during the 1990s, but previously lacked a tradition of accepting newcomers. Using 1990 and 2000 Census data, this paper maps the growth in the new settlement states. It goes beyond the mapping to discuss three important questions relating to new immigrants. First, where did the immigrants in the new settlement states come from? Second, are immigrants the driving the growth of the new minority groups? Aggregated data show that Latinos and Asians are the new minorities, but are immigrants or more established native-born migrants responsible for this change? Lastly, this paper focuses on the socio-economic status of the immigrant populations in new settlement areas

This article uses the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to examine how shifts in marital status have influenced the likelihood of parental/adult-child coresidence from 1960 to 1990. Results indicate that the propensity to live with parents would have decreased between 1960 and 1990 if there had not been a change in the marital status of these young adults. While it is true that more people aged nineteen to thirty were living with their parents in 1990 compared to 1960, this was because more were formerly married or never married, and these groups are much more likely to live with their parents than married individuals. The results indicate that among the formerly married and never married, the propensity to live with parents actually declined.

This paper uses decennial census and other data to measure the scale and timing of the waves of immigration, births, and domestic out-migration that affected the six-county Los Angeles region between 1970 and 2000. It examines the relationships between these demographic waves and describes their cumulative impacts on the size and composition of the regions population through 2000. The peak years for immigration were 1988 to 1990 and for births, 1991 and 1992. Between 1990 and 2000 the region lost 2.05 million migrants, or 13 percent of its population, net, to the rest of the U.S., substantially more than earlier estimates that were based on less complete data. As a result, the demography of the region has been transformed. It can no longer be understood as a microcosm of the nation, as it could as recently as 1980. In the Los Angeles region, the baby boom generation is no longer the largest, as it had recently been in Los Angeles and still is in the rest of the U.S.; two later cohorts now outnumber baby boomers, immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1980 and 2000 and children born in the region in just the 15 years from 1986 to 2000. As a result, models of a typical metropolitan area no longer apply, because they do not represent the distinctive behaviors and impacts of large cohorts of foreign-born adults and their mostly native-born children. Since demography shapes much of human activity, the transformation poses a challenge both to demographic analysis and a wide spectrum of economic and planning models whose embedded assumptions about population may no longer be valid.

This thesis examines the well-being of families under changing labor market conditions, changes in the legal environment and changes in public policy. The first chapter asks how women's fertility decisions are affected by changing labor market conditions. Chapter two examines whether divorce shocks persist into old age, and the final chapter studies how the elderly alter their living arrangements in response to changes in Social Security benefit payments. Chapter one exploits exogenous variation in labor demand for women to measure how total fertility responds to changes in female earnings. The principal finding is that women who are likely to face lower wage offers - those who have completed high school or are high school dropouts - reduce their total fertility when labor market conditions are better. In contrast, women who are likely to face higher wage offers - those who have completed at least some college - increase their total fertility when labor market conditions improve. Chapter two exploits variation in property division laws to examine whether there is a persistent effect of such laws on the well-being of ever-divorced women in retirement. The results suggest that a woman who divorces in a state and year where all pension assets are recognized as marital property has higher per capita household income in retirement than a woman who divorced in a state where pensions were not considered marital property.The results are consistent with some persistence in the effect of property division laws at divorce, but the effects do not appear to be pervasive enough to have a significant impact on other measures of well-being in retirement, including whether a woman lives independently, whether she or a member of her household owns her home, whether she receives government assistance, and whether she receives pension income. Chapter three examines how elderly individuals change their living arrangements when their social security benefits change. Findings suggest that living arrangements are substantially more elastically demanded by non-married elderly than previous studies, and that reductions in Social Security benefits would significantly alter the living arrangements of the elderly. Most of these effects appear to be concentrated among the less educated elderly.

: It is unknown if reductions in U.S. adult smoking rates are uniform across occupational groups. The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is a multistage area probability cross-sectional survey of the U.S. civilian population. Data on occupational and smoking status were collected on 141,122 adult participants from the 1987, 1988, and 1990 -1994 NHIS annual surveys. Overall smoking rates ranged from 58% in roofers to 4% in physicians, with higher rates found among blue collar professions. There were reductions in smoking from 1987-1994 within 72% of occupational groups; 19 of these downward trends were significant and occurred exclusively within white collar professions. Blue collar workers continue to smoke in large numbers, whereas white collar workers report lower rates along with corresponding significant downward trends in rates among selected occupational groups. The development of effective smoking prevention strategies targeting blue collar groups is needed.

This article describes changes in the number of average weekly hours of market work per person in the United States since World War II. Overall, this number has been roughly constant; for various groups, however, it has shifted dramatically from males to females, from older people to younger people, and from single- to married-person households. The article provides a detailed look at how the lifetime pattern of work hours has changed since 1950 for different demographic groups. This article also documents several factors that lead to the reallocation of hours worked across groups: increases in relative wages of females to males; technological innovations that shift female labor from the home to the market; increases in Social Security benefits to retired workers; and changes in family structure. The data presented are based on those collected by the U.S. Bureau of the Census during the 19502000 decennial censuses.

As young people extend the transition to adulthood by delaying marriage and childbearing and expanding education, parents also extend their role in the lives of their children. As youth move into adulthood, families continue to greatly infl uence their children’s life chances and outcomes by, for example, providing social and employment connections, paying for college, and providing direct material support in the form of time, money, help, and shared housing. Robert Schoeni and Karen Ross, in their chapter in On the Frontier of Adulthood, examine several issues related to this material support: how much time and money youth receive from their parents between the ages of 18 and 34, the diff erence in support between high and low-income families, and the changing patt erns of support over the last 30 years. In one of the fi rst empirical att empts to estimate the amount of assistance that children receive during young adulthood, the authors fi nd that parents contribute, on average, $2,200 annually over the 17-year period, and that this support has increased substantially in the last decades.

This dissertation examines the social construction of ethnic and racialidentities in the Garifuna immigrant community of Los Angeles by drawing onethnographic and survey data obtained during fieldwork carried out between 1999and 2001.Beginning with the melting pot theories of Robert Park and continuingwith contemporary segmented-assimilation theories, much of the literature onimmigration has argued that immigrants go through a multi-stage process ofacculturation, and eventual assimilation, into the culture of the host society.While many immigrants struggle to maintain their pre-existing cultural practicesand national identities, over time, generational changes exert steady pressure onthe children of immigrants to accept the identities and values of the larger society.xSome immigrant groups tenaciously resist the acculturation processhowever. Immigration research has shown that sub-national, or diasporaidentified, populations such as Jews, Mixtecs and Yaquis in the United States andEast African Sikh's in Great Britain tend to have different acculturationexperiences than their nationally identified co-migrants.The thesis of this dissertation is that Garifuna immigrants from CentralAmerica have a distinctive acculturation pattern that differs from black, nationallyidentified immigrants such as Jamaicans, Haitians and Belizean Creoles. Bydocumenting and analyzing the Garifuna experience with immigration incontemporary Los Angeles, this dissertation argues that differences in Garifunaacculturation patterns can be explained by reference to cultural sovereigntystruggles taking place 'back home', the politics of racial and national identity inthe U.S. and the institutionalization of Garifuna identities and cultural practicesinto intergenerational voluntary associations. A key finding of this researchproject is that, contrary to much of the research on contemporary blackimmigrants, Garifuna voluntary associations are abundant and serve as the keyinstitutional mechanisms by which immigrant identities have been maintained andtransformed since the mid 1960's.