This article considers the influence of social capital on secondary enrollments in American cities in 1950. Data from the U.S. census are utilized to analyze enrollment rates across metropolitan areas with populations greater than 500,000. The effects of adult education levels and poverty rates were linked to social capital; employment patterns and the size of various ethnic groups also affected enrollment levels. Overall, trends were similar to those observed in studies of earlier periods, but this article identifies certain urban milieus where community values may have encouraged high school attendance, representing a departure from earlier patterns. Characteristics of particular communities and forms of social capital related to school attendance are discussed.

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.

We propose a general framework to formalize the pro- blem of capturing the intensity of implication for association rules through statistical metrics. In this framework we present properties that influence the interestingness of a rule, analyze the conditions that lead a measure to perform a perfect prune at a time, and define a final proper order to sort the surviving rules. We will discuss why none of the currently employed measures can capture objective inte- restingness, and just the combination of some of them in a multi-step fashion, can be reliable. In contrast, we propose a new simple mo- dification of the Pearson coefficient that will meet all the necessary requirements. We statistically infer the convenient cut-off threshold for this new metric by empirically describing its distribution function through simulation. Experiments show a promising behaviour of our proposal.

It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The model developed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows that a marriage market equilibrium where women marry earlier in life than men can be achieved without making any assumptions about the wage process or gender roles. The only driving force in this model is the asymmetry in fecundity horizons between men and women. When the model is calibrated with Census Data, the average age at first marriage and the pattern of the sex ratio of single men to single women over different age groups mimics the patterns observed in developed countries during the last decade. Chapter 3 extends the model in order to analyze assortative mating. In this case people belong to one of two groups and prefer to marry someone within the group. In this chapter it is shown that, given constant preferences, the limited horizon for searching for a mate affects the likelihood of intermarriage through ages, and the dynamic is different for men and women.Chapter 4 is an empirical study and uses 1970 and 1980 US Census data to study how the local sex ratios of single men to single women affect several aspects of the marriage market. Unlike earlier literature, this work also investigates other margins over which individuals can substitute in the marriage market-specifically the choice of spouse's characteristics. These new results suggest that a shortage of single men leads women (and also men) to marry earlier. This suggests a more elastic response for women to a tight marriage market than the one for men. This is consistent with a marriage model where the search horizon for women is shorter than the one for men, as the one developed in the previous chapters. The results also suggest than an adverse change in the sex ratio can lead both men and women to marry outside of their own radical or educational group.

Whether measured by social rank, occupational status or educational levels, newlyweds tend to resemble one another. The pattern of like marrying like, which anthropologists label status homogamy, is observed across time and place, and is true among both commoners and the nobility. This paper investigates complexion homogamy (light marries light and dark marries dark) in the African-American community. The evidence reveals a marked pattern of complexion homogamy dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The evidence also reveals that the convention of complexion homogamy had meaningful economic ramifications. Complexion homogamous marriages among light-complected blacks resulted in households with higher literacy rates, higher occupational status, and greater wealth.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to describe the prevalence of self-reported moderate and vigorous physical activity (PA) among 40,261 native Californians in relation to age, gender, education, race/ethnicity, and self-reported disease risk factors. METHODS: Subjects, from the California Twin Program, completed a questionnaire that included three PA questions and were categorized by their level of PA: moderate and vigorous PA sufficient to meet CDC and ACSM guidelines. The relationship between demographic variables, chronic disease risk factors, and meeting the PA guidelines are reported. RESULTS: For moderate and vigorous PA, 22.3% and 37.4% of the total group reported meeting the guidelines respectively. Approximately one-half of all subjects met either duration or frequency criteria, but not both, for moderate and vigorous PA. Only 11.2% and 27.4% reported no moderate or vigorous PA, respectively. Significant age and education gradients existed for both moderate and vigorous PA. An inverse association was noted between both moderate and vigorous PA guidelines and prevalence of chronic disease risk factors. Both frequency and duration of PA were required to adequately characterize the association between PA and health outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: These data demonstrate 1) greater prevalence of sufficient moderate and vigorous PA and lower prevalence of sedentary behavior in this sample compared with adults nationwide, 2) a greater association between vigorous PA and improved health outcomes than was observed for moderate PA, 3) PA guidelines must focus on both frequency and duration of activity, and 4) age and education gradients in moderate and vigorous PA that could have implications for more effective targeting of guidelines to improve the PA prevalence of American adults.

Wage-hedonic techniques are regularly used to determinewillingness-to-pay to avoid environmental disamenities, like thoseassociated with particulate matter and other forms of air pollution. A keyassumption underlying these techniques is that individuals face anunconstrained choice over alternative locations. Evidence suggests thatthis is not the case and that, moreover, certain groups facedisproportionate constraints on mobility. This has the potential to skewhedonic measurements toward finding smaller costs of pollution,especially for the immobile (typically disadvantaged) groups. We proposea model of residential sorting that recovers estimates of mobility costs anduses them to correct this source of bias. The model is applied to data fromthe micro samples of the 1990 and 2000 US Censuses, and the results areused to measure the welfare cost of a marginal increase in PM10. Resultsshow a significant downward bias in WTP calculated with the wagehedonictechnique, particularly for those with less education.

This document focuses on children in immigrant families to help Californians better understand the lives of almost half of California's children and families, about whom stereotypes often prevail. The report's data--obtained from sources such as the 2000 Census, the 2001 California Health Interview Survey and the 1999 and 2002 National Survey of America's Families--show that: (1) Most immigrant families in California have full-time workers: 84 percent of all children in immigrant families have at least one parent who works full-time; (2) Among California children in low-income families, those in immigrant families are much more likely to have a parent working full-time (74 percent) than those in native families (44 percent); (3) Children in immigrant families are more likely to be poor and live in crowded housing; (4) Poor children in immigrant families are less likely to receive food stamps than poor children in native families; (5) Children in immigrant families are less likely to have health insurance coverage from their parents' employers and, though public programs help, they are more likely to be uninsured than children of nonimmigrants; and (6)Children in immigrant families are less likely than children in native families to attend preschool and less likely to participate in after school enrichment activities once in school.

It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. This explanation, however, involves an implicit assumption about female specialization in home production - anassumption that does not completely hold, especially in modern times.This paper shows that a marriage market equilibrium where women marry earlier in life than men can be achieved without making any assumptions about the wage process or gender roles. The only driving force in this model is the asymmetry in fecundity horizons between men and women. When the model is calibrated with Census Data, the average age at first marriage and the pattern of the sex ratio of single men to single women over different age groups mimics the patterns observed in developed countries during the last decade (e.g. France, the U.S. and Sweden).

The typical presentation of the problem around work in the Black community is that there is an unemployment crisis. An equally important crisis facing the Black community is the crisis of bad jobs: jobs that pay poorly; jobs with few benefits; jobs that offer no protection from employer harassment; jobs whose only future is a dead-end. During the expansion of the 1990s, the U.S. economy generated a large number of these bad jobs. At the same time, persons of color received a disproportionate number of the bad jobs. Hence, the expansion of the 1990s could be characterized as a racially polarized job expansion. By 2000, many of the occupations, where a significant number of African Americans maintained employment, paid wages that made it difficult to sustain a family....

This paper examines how changes in state tax policy affect the number of federal estate tax returns filed in each state, utilizing data on federal estate tax return filings by state and wealth class for 18 years between 1965 and 1998. Controlling for state- and wealth-class specific fixed effects, we find that high state inheritance and estate taxes and sales taxes have statistically significant, but modest, negative impacts on the number of federal estate tax returns filed in a state. High personal income tax and property tax burdens are also found to have negative effects, but these results are somewhat sensitive to alternative specifications. This evidence is consistent with the notion that wealthy elderly people change their real (or reported) state of residence to avoid high state taxes, although it could partly reflect other modes of tax avoidance as well. We discuss the implications for the debate over whether individual states should "decouple" their estate taxes from federal law, which would retain the state tax even as the federal credit for such taxes is eliminated. Our results suggest that migration and other observationally equivalent avoidance activities in response to such a tax would cause revenue losses and deadweight losses, but that these would not be large relative to the revenue raised by the tax.

This report provides an fiscal and economic analysis of the Monterey County General Plan Update. It has been prepared to better understand the fiscal and economic impacts associated with the level, distribution, timing, and mix of development proposed in the January 2004 General Plan Update. This report begins with a review of the fiscal impacts associated with public facilities that are needed to support the proposed development. Part 2 focuses on the Monterey County economy and the impacts that may result from implementation of the General Plan Update. Part 3 provides a review of the housing needs that will be key in assuring that workers are able to locate in the County. FISCAL IMPACTS AND PUBLIC FACILITIES FINANCINGThe current State budget crises and the inability to invest in adequate maintenance of public infrastructure have led to significant facilities deficiencies and operating cost deficits for county governments. With the selection of a land use plan that manages future growth, county governments can to some extent influence the future costs associated with service delivery to new development. By comparing the fiscal impacts associated with the GPU as compared to other alternative growth scenarios, it is revealed that the level, distribution, phasing and mix of development is extremely important in determining future service costs. In addition, the jurisdiction of the development is very important. County government provides a variety of services to the entire county population as well as to residences within the unincorporated county jurisdiction. Criminal justice, health care and public assistance are examples of services the County provides to residents of the cities as well as in the unincorporated area. Within its own jurisdiction, the county also provides police protection through the sheriffs department, road maintenance, parks and recreation and in some cases water and wastewater facilities, among other services.

The authors show that estimated productivities of labor and capital, which rationalize trade flows across countries, are related to total factor productivities, which rationalize output differences across countries. They present evidence that these productivities from trade are related to the institutions and geography across countries. Protection of property rights is the dominant influence on both labor and capital productivity, with geography less important and democracy even less important. The authors also present preliminary evidence that protection of property rights has similar effects on workers with only primary education as on those with more education.