The last chapters provide ample evidence that life span and month of birth are related. Two questions arise: first, does this influence also exist for the ages 1 to 49? Second, is the magnitude of the excess mortality of the spring-born similar in all age groups? There are at least two different hypotheses concerning these questions. A first hypothesis is that the excess mortality of the spring-born is age-specific because of the changing distribution of causes of death with age. The analysis of the US death certificates presented in Chapter 5 shows that the month-of-birth effect exists in all major groups of causes of death and that its magnitude differs, however. The excess mortality of the spring-born is largest for heart disease and considerably smaller for the group of malignant neoplasms. Thus, the month-of-birth pattern might be comparatively small at younger ages and increase its magnitude at middle and old ages when heart disease becomes an important cause of death. A second hypothesis is that the differences decrease with age due to mortality selection. Among both the spring- and the autumn-born, the frailer will die first, resulting into an ever more homogeneous and “robust” population at higher ages. In practice, it is most probably the case that both forces work simultaneously.

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.

There is a widespread belief among economists that the employment relationship ameliorates the adverse selection problem in health insurance. A job is a place where people come together for reasons other than health insurance.1 For example, the leading health economics text says ”group purchase by employers addresses the problem of adverse selection,” (Folland, Goodman, & Stano 2004) but this sentiment is repeated in many places (Gruber, 2000; Cutler, 2000; Buchmueller & Valetta, 2001). Understanding the connection between health insurance provision and the labor market is important. The labor market is the principal source for the private provision of health insurance in the United States, presumably because of the large subsidy for it in the tax code.2 A common justification for this system is that employer provision ameliorates the adverse selection problem in health insurance provision. However, to our knowledge no one has explored the conditions . . .

Why would voters resort to a statewide tax limitation to force change in their own local government? This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that property tax limitations succeeded because they allowed voters to lower tax rates in other communities. Statewide limitations effectively extend the voting franchise to individuals who have no standing in local elections. Voters may have preferences for tax and expenditure levels in other jurisdictions because they receive rents from employment in those jurisdictions, because they directly own taxable assets in those jurisdictions, or because changes in other jurisdictions might influence their own residential location choice. Empirical tests of this hypothesis focus on the Massachusetts experience with Proposition 2 1/2, which passed in 1980. Voting patterns, household mobility patterns, and postproposition growth in property values all support the nonresident hypothesis.

Using Census data from 1969-1999 and a panel of college-educated workers from 1989-1999, we examine changes across birth cohorts in womens relative rates of age-related, within-cohort earnings growth. Contrary to what is suggested by a simple general training model in which comparably-qualified women begin their working lives at similar (or higher) earnings than men, then fall behind as they age, we find roughly similar rates of age-related earnings growth for women and men in all cohorts, but large and permanent differences in the gender-earnings gap between successive cohorts of American workers. We speculate on the types of models that might explain such a pattern.

This report studies Californias housing shortage during the 1990s, finding that the production of new housing units lagged that of previous business cycles and did not keep pace with demand. It also finds, however, that the actual housing shortfall was much smaller than previous estimates, especially when key demographic and macroeconomic factors are taken into account. Moreover, almost the entire housing shortfall was confined to the Bay Area, San Diego, and coastal Los Angeles (including Los Angeles and Orange Counties). Because the states regional housing markets vary significantly, the authors suggest that any policies designed to address housing shortages should focus on challenges in specific regions.

Both economic and demographic contexts influence aggregate migration streams at the regional scale. The influence of demographic and economic context on aggregate migration at the nonmetropolitan scale, however, remains unstudied. This paper presents analysis based on 1980 and 1990 PUMS data related to age cohort effects on nonmetropolitan population change. The analysis provides enhanced understanding of how demographic factors like the baby boom might influence population movements into and out of nonmetropolitan regions. Using modified age-cohort decomposition techniques, the analysis demonstrates how the fluctuations in nonmetropolitan population growth between 1975 and 1990 are tied to the differential migration flows of the peak baby boom years (those born between 1955 and 1964). The analysis further demonstrates how fluctuations in nonmetropolitan population growth across regions are tied to migration flows of these baby boomers. Significant variation remains within regions. Keywords: nonmetropolitan migration, baby boom, regional variation.

For decades, economists and other social scientists have been studying racial inequality in the American labor market. While some degree of inequality between blacks and whites can be found in all parts of the country, the widest disparities have historically been found in the South. Extreme southern inequality, fed by institutionalized patterns of discrimination in the job market, among other factors, led millions of southern blacks to migrate to other parts of the country between 1920 and 1965. For African Americans of this era, the North represented a “Promised Land,” a place devoid of oppressive Jim Crow laws and endowed with unprecedented opportunities for economic advancement.

The Demographic Supplement to the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) is used to produce state estimates of health insurance coverage and income. These estimates are used in federal allocation formulas that distribute $10-11 billion annually to states for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The purpose of this article is to examine the CPS for evidence of bias in state estimates due to missing data imputation and estimate the extent of the bias for each of the fifty-one states and Washington DC. Comparing three years of CPS (1998-2000), to the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey and 1990 Decennial Census data benchmarks, we find evidence of bias in state estimates of earned income. We also extend the technique to the CPS state health insurance coverage estimates and find even more evidence of bias. In general, the "better off" states (those with higher insurance coverage rates or more income) tend to be even "better off" (have higher estimates of average income and coverage rates) after correcting for bias (and vice versa). We conclude by considering alternative strategies for the U.S. Census Bureau to alter its current imputation procedures.

This report describes the distribution of young Californians by race/ethnic groups and socio-economic conditions, and compares trends using census data from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. Classification of race/ethnic groups separates Hispanics from any race category (Whites, Asians, African Americans), as defined by the Census. The objective of the analysis is to understand the demographic patterns of the young population, as well as their participation rates in the educational system and the California labor market. This is important information for policy makers interested in designing programs that capture the abilities of the young to be used productively, or social programs that help them to improve their living conditions, including those that train them for jobs. This profile of young Californians may also help programs to set their target populations, by providing information on which areas and groups of young people are not currently integrated with the educational system or the labor market. Two tables are appended. (Contains 21 tables and 28 charts.)

This paper employs a simple inter-temporal model to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value, regardless of the overall supply elasticity. The existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity constraints is not Pareto improving, and may in fact be regressive. Historical evidence, which exploits the fact that a clearly identifiable group, war veterans, enjoyed the most favored access to mortgage credit in the postwar era, supports the model. The results suggest that more recent mortgage market innovations have served primarily to increase prices rather than home ownership rates, and that such innovations have the potential to exacerbate socioeconomic disparities in ownership rates.

Urban sprawl has both costs and benefits. One cost of sprawl is that commute times are increasedsince homes and places of work are more dispersed. A benefit is that sprawl allows consumers topurchase larger homes and lots. This paper uses a new data set on housing transactions in Los AngelesCounty to compare some costs (increased commuting) and benefits (larger homes) of sprawl. We usenew methods in demand estimation to recover how heterogeneous home buyers tradeoff commutingversus larger homes at the margin. Finally, we evaluate the partial equilibrium welfare effects of twoanti-sprawl policies.

This paper seeks to determine how much change in the U.S. self-employment rate from 1950 to 1990 is associated with changes in the composition of the labor force, particularly the employment shares of industries. Other exogenous factors considered are age, sex andrace/ethnicity composition of the labor force, as well as education levels. This question is of interest because the answer may indicate that some growth in self-employment is due to broader influences in the economy than factors that impact the attractiveness of self-employment relative to wage employment within specific industries. A simple decomposition separates changes in self-employment rates into a composition component, reflecting shifts in the composition of the labor force (or in the relative sizes of industries), and a within component, consisting of changes in self-employment rates within labor force groups or industries. Results using census data from 1970 to 2000 show that approximately 46 percent of the 2.23 percentage point growth in self-employment can be explained by faster growth of high self-employment industries than of low self-employment industries. Other exogenous labor force changes appear to have less impact on both the pre-1970 decline of self-employment as well as the post-1970 increase. Nonetheless, when age, sex, race/ethnicity and education are added to industry as labor force controls, these variables as a group explain 69% of the 2.23 percentage point resurgence of self-employment.

The aim of this paper is to find underlying labor market trends and structures in the black/white wage gap in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSA). Contrary to the predictions of the traditional human capital model, this paper hypothesizes that the unexplained racial wage gap can be attributed in part to structural traits of the individual labor market, rather than discrimination per say. This study finds that access to social networks and in particular faith-based associations can improve the black/white wage differential. The effects of racial segregation in the MSAs labor market are two-fold: Generally speaking, racial segregation will increase earnings disparities. Secondly, the existence of a secondary, minority-dominated labor market within an ethnic enclave may act as a buffer, decreasing the racial wage gap through minority-owned businesses paying non-discriminatory wages. The study also found that differences in the quality of education and disparities in racial unemployment seemed to contribute little to the racial wage gap.