We estimate the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers (the slope of the demand curve for more relative to less educated workers) at the US state level. Our data come from the (five) 1950-1990 decennial censuses. Our empirical approach allows for state and time fixed effects and relies on time and state dependent child labor and compulsory school attendance laws as instruments for (endogenous) changes in the relative supply of more educated workers. We find the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers to be around 1.5.

Using samples of census data from the university of Minnesota Population Center's "Integrated Public Use Microdata Series" (IPUMS), we describe trends in African-American migration to the South across recent decades, and explore the applicability of the concept of "return migration" to various demographic patterns. Our findings suggest that the return movement contains multiple migration streams involving African-Americans of higher socio-economic status (compared with both origin and destination populations) moving to both urban and rural destinations. These patterns represent clear differences from the earlier 20th century's "Great Migration" of African Americans from South to North. The recent return migration streams suggest that the South may be replacing the North as a "land of promise" for some upwardly mobile African Americans, and may also reflect what Carol Stack (1996) has termed a "call to home" as a motivating factor shaping recent African American migration to the rural South.

The significance of race and gender for socioeconomic attainment is a classic issue in stratification research that has been extensively studied. Yet little is known about the earnings attainment of female African immigrants to the United States. This is because studies on the attainment process of black immigrants have focused almost exclusively on experience of males. In this study, we investigate the earnings attainment of female African immigrants to the United States. We use a sample of 56,008 respondents of the 1990 population census to examine earnings differences among female African immigrants, their Caribbean born counterparts and native born African American females. Preliminary analysis suggests that compared to their male counterparts, all three female groups earn less. Notably, the average earnings difference between African American males and females is $ 5,500; difference between African males and females is $5,000 and difference between Caribbean males and females is $4,000. Furthermore, the analysis shows a sizeable earnings difference between Caribbean female immigrants and African Americans and Africans with Caribbean immigrants earning more than the two groups. In contrast, native-born blacks earn the lowest among the three groups. These findings are discussed in the context of previous research on the earnings attainment of Blacks and immigrants in the United States. We conclude with a discussion of practical implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.

Poverty levels among all children in the United States have tended to fluctuate in the past 30 years. However, among the children of immigrants, child poverty increased steadily and rapidly from about 12% in 1970 to 33% in the late 1990s before declining to about 21% in 2000. Using 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples data, we identified key factors that underlie the fluctuations in immigrant child poverty from 1969 to 1999 and the divergence from children of natives. We found that roughly half the absolute increase in immigrant child poverty can be linked to changing conditions in the U.S. economy that make it more difficult to lift a family out of poverty than 30 years ago. These changes occurred disproportionately among children of parents with lower levels of education, employment, and U.S. experience but not among racial/ethnic minorities. Poverty risks among various racial and ethnic groups converged over time. The relative increase in poverty for immigrant versus native children owes largely to the divergence between immigrant and native families in racial/ethnic composition, parental education, and employment.

Association rule discovery and other exploratory rule discovery techniques explore large search spaces of potential rules to find those that appear interesting by some user-selected criterion of interestingness. Due to the large number of rules considered, they suffer from an extreme risk of type-1 error, that is, of finding rules that appear due to chance alone to satisfy the interestingness criteria on the sample data. This paper proposes a technique to overcome this problem by using holdout data for statistical evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that standard exploratory rule discovery can result in large numbers of rules that are rejected when subjected to statistical evaluation on holdout data. They also reveal that modification of the rule discovery process to anticipate subsequent statistical evaluation can increase the number of rules that satisfy an inter-estingness criterion that are accepted by statistical evaluation on holdout data.

This article uses new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to examine the reasons why white, Mexican American, and other Hispanic parents are approximately 2.5 times more likely than African American parents to marry within the 30 months after a nonmarital birth. Combining Fragile Families microdata with 2000 US. Census data shows that marriage market conditions exert a large influence on marriage decisions, even among couples that already have formed a romantic relationship and had a child together. The findings also show that an undersupply of employed African American men can explain a large portion of the racial and ethnic differences in marriage after a nonmarital birth. The current findings support the theory that marriage markets are influential not only during the search for romantic partners but also in determining whether romantic relationships, once formed, will lead to marriage.

This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed African and European descent in the works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century. The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown's melodramatic stereotype of the mulatto as "tragic figure," Cassandra Jackson's close study of nine works of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity. She analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the "mulatto," nation building, and the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt.

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

Although growth in the US. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a now stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

This paper (i) examines how and why immigrant settlement location patterns have evolved in recent decades in the United States and their implications for Canada, (ii) discusses factors related to immigrant settlement in small towns and rural areas in Canada; (iii) describes recent immigrant dispersal, especially out of California, and its implications for Canada. In the analysis of U.S. immigrant settlement, we found that between 1940 to 2000, metropolitan areas can be categorized into the following types: (a) areas that receive relatively few immigrants; (b) areas that consistently receive a substantial volume of immigrants; and (c) areas that received relatively few immigrants, relative to their population size, during 1940 to 1970, but received considerably more immigrants after 1970. Results suggest that recent immigrants settlement illustrates both persistence and change in immigrant destinations, and we discuss factors associated with these settlement patterns.Recent immigrants in Canada have settled in relatively few places. Most immigrants settle initially in large metropolitan areas, especially in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec. Some immigrants, however, settle in small towns and rural areas. The paper documents factors related to immigrant settlement in ten small towns that have recently attracted immigrants.During the 1990s, an important change occurred in the spatial distribution of immigrants in the United States. Fewer immigrants settled in the main destination state California and there was a net out-migration of immigrants from California to other states. The result was a large-scale dispersal of immigrants, particular Mexico-origin immigrants, during the 1990s. The paper describes this dispersal and some implications for Canada.

In this article, the author endeavors to clarify the shifting nature of gender and motherhood for women physicians. She examines trends in the gender gap in in marriage, divorce, childbearing, work hours, and earnings. The author draws on data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. decennial censuses and data spanning 1991 to 1997 from the Survey of the Practice Patterns of Young Physicians. Compared with women in the general population, the trends for women physicians have been favorable. Women physicians are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than are other women. Among employed physicians, gender differences in earnings and work hours are also narrowing slightly. Nevertheless, a gap is growing between female physicians with children and childless women doctors, and a small but growing percentage of young physician mothers are electing to forgo labor force participation entirely Thus, young physician mothers still suffer significant professional sacrifice.

This article tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across the states from 1880 to 1950. Human capital matters to a state's income level and to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation lowered human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites, presents a unique pattern. The South's low human capital levels following the Civil War and its active postbellum resistance to education reduced its speed of conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation.

The overarching question in this article is: What contextual and individual-level factors influence the decision to maintain Spanish, or see to it that one's children learn and maintain it? I first model the configuration of area-specific circumstances that influence the degree to which Spanish-English bilingualism (as opposed to English monolingualism) is viable or desirable in a particular metro area. When contextual incentives for bilingualism are included in individual-level models, context especially bilinguals' status and Hispanics' political Influence - greatly influences the odds of bilingualism among native-born Hispanic adults. In addition to other macrolevel factors, there is evidence for a critical mass effect. People are more likely to maintain bilingualism when lots of others around them are doing the same thing.

This paper tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across states of the United States from 1880 to 1950. Human capital levels matter not only to a states income level but also to its growth rate through technological diffusion. There is a unique pattern in the South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation played a crucial role in lowering human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites. The Souths low overall human capital levels immediately after the Civil War, combined with its active resistance in the Post-Bellum period to educating its population, played an important role in reducing the speed of Southern conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation after the Civil War.

A growing group of public schools in the United States is voluntarily adopting policies that regard the enrollment of children whose native language is not English as an advantage, not a liability or a complication. This study focuses specifically on dual-language programs that group native Spanish-speakers in the same classroom with native English-speakers, with the goals of bilingual proficiency, high academic achievement, and cross-cultural awareness. Under what demographic, socioeconomic, and political circumstances will community members and school administrators value bilingualism to this degree? The models developed and tested here incorporate factors that influence the probability of a school district instituting and maintaining one or more Spanish-English dual-language programs. The findings show that school district and parent demographics play the most important role. It is noteworthy that dual language programs appear to be viable in racially and economically diverse settings.