The traditional focus of disability research has been on the elderly, with good reason. Chronic disability is much more prevalent among the elderly, and it has a more direct impact on the demand for medical care. It is also important to understand trends in disability among the young, however, particularly if these trends diverge from those among the elderly. These trends could have serious implications for future health care spending because more disability at younger ages almost certainly translates into more disability among tomorrow's elderly, and disability is a key predictor of health care spending. Using data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) and the National Health Interview Study (NHIS), we forecast that per-capita Medicare costs will decline for the next fifteen to twenty years, in accordance with recent projections of declining disability among the elderly. By 2020, however, the trend reverses. Per-capita costs begin to rise due to growth in disability among the younger elderly. Total costs may well remain relatively flat until 2010 and then begin to rise because per-capita costs will cease to decline rapidly enough to offset the influx of new elderly people. Overall, cost forecasts for the elderly that incorporate information about disability among today's younger generations yield more pessimistic scenarios than those based solely on elderly data sets, and this information should be incorporated into official Medicare forecasts.

School officials and policy makers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest studentsat least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized testsare less likely to enter teaching. In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has remained a predominately female profession for years; at the same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside of teaching have soared. In this paper, we combine data from five longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the classes of 1957 to 1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. We find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically.

Immigrants tend to cluster in a small number of geographic areas. Many studies use this clustering to estimate the wage impact of immigration by relating wage rates across labor markets to some measure of immigrant penetration. These spatial correlations may not measure the true impact of immigration because the internal migration response of native workers helps to re-equilibrate local labor markets. This paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigrant supply shocks influence the joint determination of wages and internal migration decisions in local labor markets. The data indicate that immigration is associated with lower wages, lower in-migration rates, higher out-migration rates, and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce. The native migration response is sufficiently strong to attenuate the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market from 40 to 60 percent, depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level.

The weekly wage gap between black and white female workers narrowed by 15 percentage points during the 1940s. We employ a semi-parametric technique to decompose changes in the distribution of wages. We find that changes in worker characteristics (such as education, occupation and industry, and region of residence) can account for a significant portion of wage convergence between black and white women, but that changes in the wage structure, including large black-specific gains within regions, occupations, industries, and educational groups, made the largest contributions. The single most important contributing factor to the observed convergence was a sharp increase in the relative wages of service workers (where black workers were heavily concentrated) even as black women moved out of domestic service jobs. Contact: Department of Economics, Box 351819-B, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235. Bailey is a graduate student in economics at Vanderbilt University. Collins is Associate Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt. Bailey gratefully acknowledges support from Vanderbilt University, the Economic History Association, and the University of Illinois Foundations Rovensky Fellowship. Collins recognizes support from the National Science Foundation (grant 0095943) and the Brookings Institution. Yanqin Fan and Robert A. Margo made helpful suggestions. Claudia Goldin kindly provided data from the Palmer Survey. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Science Foundation, Vanderbilt University, or the Brookings Institution.

During the Civil War not all men served honorably and this was known by everyone in their communities. We study how shame and ostracism affect behavior by examining whether men who deserted from the Union Army, and who faced no legal sanctions once the war was over, returned home or whether they moved and re-invented themselves. We build a unique panel data set that provides us with a control group for deserters because we can identify men who deserted but then returned to fight with their companies. We find that, compared to non-deserters and returned deserters, deserters were more likely to move both out of state and further distances. This effect was stronger for deserters from pro-war communities. When deserters moved they were more likely to move to anti-war states than non-deserters. Our study provides a rare test of the empirical implications of emotion. While both shame and ostracism would push deserters out of their home community, we find no evidence that deserters faced economic sanctions.

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.

We present the first nationwide value of life estimates for the United States at more than one point in time. Ourestimates are for every ten years between 1940 and 1980, a period when declines in fatal accident rates werehistorically unprecedented. Our estimated elasticity of value of life with respect to per capita GNP is 1.5 to 1.7.We illustrate the importance of rising value of life for policy evaluation by examining the benefits of improvedlongevity since 1900. Our estimated elasticity implies that the current marginal increase in longevity is morevaluable than the large increase in the first half of the twentieth century.

Because of renewed immigration, fears about the status of English as the linguistic glue holding America together are common today. In a very different vein, multiculturalists have expressed hopes of profound change to American culture brought on by the persistence across generations of the mother tongues of contemporary immigrants. In either case, the underlying claim is that the past pattern of rapid acceptance of English by the children and grandchildren of the immigrants may be breaking down.

Over the last three decades, the concept of family has been fundamentally changed. An essential dimension of the changing behavior is the sharp rise of out-of-wedlock childbearing. If marriage is a good and efficient union for individuals and a better arrangement for children as stipulated by conventional wisdom, why do we see marriage become less popular and more divorce taking place? The major goal of this paper is to chart the trends of marriage and fertility over the last three decades using data from June Current Population Survey (CPS)and Census Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). We argue that the central issue of out-of-wedlock childbearing is more to do with the diminishing willingness to marry than toward a changing attitude to fertility pattern.

I assess the long-run implications for children of growing up in a unilateral divorce environment, which increases the ease of divorce by not requiring the explicit consent of both partners. Using 40 years of census data to exploit the variation across states and over time in changes in divorce regulation, I confirm that unilateral divorce regulations do significantly increase the incidence of divorce. Adults who were exposed to unilateral divorce regulations as children are less well educated, have lower family incomes, marry earlier but separate more often, and have higher odds of adult suicide.

The Nam-Powers-Boyd Occupational Status Scale for the year 2000 is introduced here. It is the sixth in a decennial series of such scales initiated at the Census Bureau a half century earlier. The historical background of the 2000 scale, the methodology for constructing the scores, some comparisons with other occupational scales, the 2000 scores themselves, and applications of the 2000 scores are presented.

Longitudinal studies have suggested that households are much more fluid than was once believed. Yet our understanding of changes in household composition is based on limited sets of transitions occurring across relatively long intervals. Furthermore, we know relatively little about ethnoracial variation in household dynamics. Using data from a sample of older Floridians, the authors describe race differences in longitudinal patterns of household change that occurred during four 6-month intervals. Approximately one quarter of respondents experienced some change in composition during the 24-month study. Older African Americans lived in larger and more dynamic households and were more likely to form coresident relationships with grandchildren and nonrelatives. Age, gender, marital status, and disability were also associated with the likelihood of acquiring a new household member. Findings from this research provide additional insight into the processes through which race differences in the composition of households emerge and are maintained over time.

This paper explores the relative success of ethnic and immigrant Ukrainians in Canada and in the United States. We found evidence for both a sheepskin and citizenship effects, which partially explains the strong economic performance of Ukrainian immigrants in Canada. Ukrainian immigrants to the U.S. are overachievers relative to all groups, which sheds light on Borjas thesis that self-selection and not immigration policy sorts immigrants between Canada and the U.S.

This article examines the racial gap in infant mortality rates from 1920 to 1970. Using state-level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita, we can account for a large portion of the racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945. The educational gap between white and nonwhite women was especially important in this regard. In the postwar period, socioeconomic characteristics account for a declining portion of the racial infant mortality gap. We discuss the postwar experience in light of trends in birth weight, maternal characteristics, smoking and breast-feeding behavior, air pollution, and insurance coverage.

The technological advances in agricultural production in the last half of the twentieth century and the decline in manufacturing due to globalization have contributed to many of the needs found in East Arkansas today. In many ways, the region exemplifies a people and an economy in a constant state of change due to its efforts to transition to the 21st century. Influences external to the region along with the emergence of non-agricultural sectors of employment at the local level continue to force change in East Arkansas even as those sectors grapple with workforce issues and competition at the national and global levels. The acceptance and maturation of this dynamic has been neither painless nor ubiquitous.The region, with a land area of some 8,000 square miles, is not blessed with a wide variety of natural resources. At one time, it could be argued that the only two resources worth mentioning were the soils and the water. Today, however, the agricultural water supply in much of the region is in crisis due to depletion of the aquifers. That being said, the soils in most of the region are among the most productive in the world, providing a basis for large scale agricultural production that can rarely be matched. Agricultural production has long been the mainstay of the economy and continues to influence the regions culture, economy, and public policy...

With the resurgence of large-scale immigration to the United States in recent decades, it is not surprising that the impact of immigration on the countrys social and economic conditions is a topic of significant policy debate. A great deal of research has attempted to document how the U.S. labor market adjusted to the pressures of renewed immigration, with particular attention on the skill composition of the foreign-born workforce (Borjas 1994). This emphasis is justified by the fact that the skill composition of the immigrant population is the key determinant of the social and economic consequences of immigration. In addition to measuring the relative skill endowment of immigrants, existing literature stresses the economic consequences that arise from immigrants typically clustering in a small number of geographic areas (Friedberg and Hunt, 1995; Card, 2001). Figure 1 shows the extent of this clustering. In 1990, 73 percent of working immigrants lived in the six main immigrant-receiving statesCalifornia, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jerseywith 32.9 percent living in California alone. However, Figure 1 also shows that this geographic clustering softened in the 1990s. By 2000, the fraction of immigrant workers living in California had declined; the fraction of immigrant workers living in the other immigrant states had remained stable; and the fraction of immigrant workers living in the rest of the country had increased, particularly in southern states where immigrants had not settled historically.This article is a summary of a longer paper, which was supported with a grant from the UK Center for Poverty Research and is available on the UKCPR Discussion Paper Series at http://www.ukcpr.org/Publications/Discussion/Papers.html. In addition to documenting recent trends in settlement patterns the paper examines the impact of this relocation on the skill endowment of the workforce in Southern states and the attendant consequences for wages of immigrants relative to native-born workers. The empirical analysis, which is based on data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of the decennial censuses from 1960 to 2000, indicates that the recent change in immigrant settlement patterns led to the rise of a sizable foreign-born low-skill workforce in the South, particularly outside of Florida and Texas. This workforce developed as a result of both increased settlement of many newly arrived low-skill immigrants in those states and increased internal immigration of low-skill immigrants from other states to the South. The net result between 1960 and 2000 has been a 20 percentage point reduction in the relative wages of immigrants in the South overall, and a nearly 40 percentage point decline in the southern states excluding Florida and Texas.