Public transfer programs in industrial nations have massive long term fiscal imbalances, and apparently permit the elderly to benefit through pension and health care programs at the cost of the young and future generations. However, the intergenerational picture is turned upside down when public education is included in generational accounts along with pensions and health care. We calculate the net present value (NPV) of benefits received minus taxes paid for US generations born 1850 to 2090, and find that all generations born from 1950 to 2050 are net gainers, while many of today's old people are net losers. Windfall gains for early generations when Social Security and Medicare started up partially offset windfall losses when public education was started, roughly consistent with the Becker-Murphy theory.

We exploit the military mobilization for World War II to investigate the effects of female labor supply on the wage structure. The mobilization drew many women into the workforce permanently. But the impact was not uniform across states. In states with greater mobilization of men, women worked more after the war and in 1950, though not in 1940. These induced shifts in female labor supply lowered female and male wages and increased earnings inequality between high school- and college-educated men. It appears that at midcentury, women were closer substitutes for high school men than for those with lower skills.

This paper addresses the bias inherent in the use of potential, as opposed toactual, work experience measures in human capital models. We create predictedwork experience measures from the NLSY79 and the PSID and extend our ?nd-ings to the IPUMS. We consider both additive and multiplicative measurementerror constructs and ?nd that the classical errors-in-variables framework doesnot apply. Our results indicate that potential work experience biases the eectsof schooling and the rates of return to labor market experience, particularly forthe female subset. Using such a measure in human capital models explainsless of the male-female wage gap as well.

Detailed description of the socio-economic characteristics of elder Floridians and their caregivers. Development of a targeting index based on widely available census data.

Supply factors affecting the costs of obtaining schooling are quantitatively important in explaining the U-shaped trend in the skill premium in the U. S. across the twentieth century. Specifically, the direct costs fell dramatically in the early part of the century as a result of increased public funding and falling fertility rates. The foregone earning costs of schooling were also low for mid-century workers because of high youth unemployment during the Great Depression. Incorporating these factors, the baseline calibrated model is able to explain about 40 percent of the mid-century decline and alternative calibrations explain up to 71 percent without any mid-century decline in the demand for skill.

A standard model of precautionary saving predicts that increasing risk leads to increased saving and decreased consumption. This paper will argue that the impact of risk can be complicated by the commitment feature of some forms of consumption, the fact that adjusting the quantityof consumption can be costly.In particular, we present cleanly identified variation in a major risk -unemployment -for which commitment inverts the standard precautionary saving result. Couples who share an occupation face increased risk as their unemployment shocks are more highly correlated. These couples spend more on housing than other couples. We exploit variation in moving costs and unemployment insurance generosity to show thatthese results are consistent with a theory of consumption commitments and do not reflect unobservable differences between couples.

This study has explored how demand-side factors, represented by variousindustrial characteristics, affected the probability of long-term unemployment of oldermale manufacturing workers in the early twentieth century United States, based on theIPUMS of the 1910 census linked to the industry-level statistics from the 1909manufacturing census. These results largely support the pessimistic view of the impactof industrialization on the labor-market status of older men, suggesting that the shiftsin the industrial environment such as the rise in the speed of production and diminishedflexibility would have produced a great pressure toward leaving the labor force amongolder workers. On the other hand, the rise of large corporations and the rapidproductivity growth per se were presumably not responsible for the decline in theemployment of older workers. The formalization of work-organization and the declineof craft control could have secured the labor-market position of elderly workers.

This study critiques the China Historical Geographic Information System in terms of its failure to distinguish between regions of Chinese civilisation that were directly incorporated into an imperial field administration and Inner Asian regions under indigenous polities. Although the focus of this study is on eastern Tibet, specifically China’s southwestern Tibetan Frontier in Sichuan, the general methodological approach employed is relevant to the entire Inner Asian cultural region. Despite China’s long history, only some eastern Tibetan communities located along the transition zone between the eastern Tibetan Plateau and agrarian China were integrated into the traditional Chinese field administration. Most of this expansion occurred during the last dynasty known as the Qing or Manchu, c. 1644–1911.

Because financial transactions are important for wealth accumulation, and rely on trust and confidence in institutions, the financial market behavior of immigrants can provide important insights into the assimilation process. Compared to the native-born, immigrants are less likely to own savings and checking accounts and these differences tend to persist over time. Our results suggest that a large share of the immigrant-native gap in financial market participation is driven by group differences in education, income, and geographic location. For a given immigrant, the likelihood of financial market participation decreases with higher levels of ethnic concentration in the metropolitan area.

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.

This paper measures the housing market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws in the 1960susing household-level and census-tract data. State-level fair-housing laws attempted to bardiscrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin in the sale, rental, and financing ofhousing, and they were the direct antecedents of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their influence on the housing market outcomes of African Americans has not been assessed in previouswork by economists, but policy variation across states during the 1960s provides an opportunity to pursue such estimates. During the 1960s, blacks housing market outcomes improved relative to whites, and the proportion of exclusively white census tracts declined markedly. But I find little evidence that the fairhousing laws contributed to those changes. Rather, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the laws effects on blacks housing market outcomes, on residential segregation, and on the value of property in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods were negligible.

The confluence of the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement propelled the drive for fair-housing legislation which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African-American population already resided in states with a fair-housing law. Despite laying the political and administrative groundwork for the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, the origins and diffusion of these state laws have not received much attention from scholars, let alone been subject to statistical efforts to disentangle multiple influences. This paper uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of fair-housing legislation to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws adoption. Ceteris paribus, outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair-housing laws sooner than others. The estimated effects are not undermined by including controls for a variety of competing factors and are supported by historical accounts of the legislative campaigns.

In the literature on measured wage inequality, only one recent study, by Glaeser and Mare' (2001), has focused on the enormous wage gap between urban and non-urban workers in the United States. In the present paper, I replicate and extend Glaeser and Mare's original empirical work, and I present a new interpretation of the evidence based on my re-estimation. Contrary to Glaeser and Mare's theory that urban employment induces more rapid skill acquisition, I find that wage growth is no greater for urban workers than for non-urban workers. I show that both the original and extended empirical patterns can be fully explained by a simple spatial equilibrium model that incorporatestwo highly plausible phenomena: (1) a compensating wage differential for the higher cost of living in cities and (2) a dynamic tendency for more able workers to gravitate to cities once they discover that they belong in the big leagues.

A substantial body of empirical research evidence supports the existence of a causal link between educational attainment and health but little is known about the relationship between education and cancer. Further, the causal pathways through which education affects health and longevity are incompletely understood. This study described the association between educational attainment and cancer mortality in the United States between 1960 and 2000 and explored explanations for the patterns observed. The empirical analysis used census and national mortality data and multivariable regression techniques to obtain estimates of the effect of education on mortality due to all-cause, lung, colon, breast and prostate cancer. Time trends in those relationships were examined. A conceptual framework that integrates existing theoretical insights based on human capital theory and that views education's influence on health as shaped by a social and historical context guided the analysis. Education effects varied by gender, cancer site, and over time and were often nonlinear. Based on theory and existing research evidence, it was hypothesized that time trends in education effects would be negative and that education effects on cancer mortality in 2000 would be negative and graded. However, time trends in education effects, although generally negative between 1960 and 1970, were characterized by a variety of patterns and changes in direction in subsequent years. Further, there was no evidence of a gradient in education effects on cancer mortality. Trends in the correlation between education and proximate determinants of cancer or cancer outcomes (for example, health behaviors and utilization of early detection services) may explain some of the patterns observed but the mechanisms that produced others remain unclear. These results suggest that education effects on cancer do not parallel those found for all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality and for other measures of health and functioning such as self-rated health. In addition, they demonstrate that education effects on cancer mortality have varied greatly over time and in unexpected ways. Further refinement of theoretical pathways linking societal context, educational attainment, and cancer will be important to further research progress in this area.