The dissertations in the Allan Nevins prize competition have often been read as tea leaves to discern the future direction of the profession. Collectively, those submitted covered diverse subjects, as represented in this panel by topics ranging from colonial currency to food safety regulation to World War II antidiscrimination legislation. The time-periods covered in the works were also spread broadly, although none centered in the nineteenth century, which has traditionally dominated the attention of economic historians of North America. The pivotal period for Claire Priest is the 1730s and 1740s, for Marc Law the 1900s and 1910s, and for Ryan Johnson the 1930s and early 1940s. The new works should serve to widen our time-horizons. Another feature unifying these dissertations is that all three study (to one degree or another) the effects of policies and their enforcement on the economy. We learn of the balance between the courts and the regulators and of the gaps between the stated goals of legislation and the results actually achieved.

Using data collected from 29 interviews with the wives of steelworkers who were forced into unemployment, I explore the conditions and factors that shape womens choices in response to their husbands job loss. Access to a unique and under-studied sample of women married to unemployed working-class men necessitates the use of grounded theory research techniques that allow me to give voice to working-class women.Rational economic perspectives, although frequently used in work-family analyses, are inadequate for exploring decision processes and fail to consider the powerful effects of gender on action. Although the work of gender theorists may help illuminate the results of a micro-level analysis, many theoretical gender analyses may notbe helpful in understanding the variety of labor force responses of women married to unemployed, working-class men. Nonetheless, I suggest that combining the work of gender scholars and new institutionalist theorists may be helpful in addressing both macro and micro-level processes that operate to constrain individual agency.The results of the analysis suggest that economic, labor force, and family constraints operate simultaneously to create a complex weave of factors and circumstances that shape womens decisions regarding work. The need for adequate health insurance, expenses associated with employment, low wages, a sluggish local economy, limited access to desirable and adequate jobs, a lack of educational experience and marketable work-related skills, the responsibility of caring for children, and an unequal division of domestic tasks are among the factors cited as influencing womens decisions regarding labor force participation.Womens strategies for maneuvering through spousal job loss and reemployment are based on taken-for-granted assumptions about gender, family, and work. But equally important in womens decision-making process, and often less addressed, are the effects of a gendered economy, labor force, and division of labor each of which create substantial barriers to sustaining employment. In the context of spousal unemployment, these systems of inequality create situations in which working-class women are unable to sufficiently aid in the financial relief of their families.

This paper explores women's decisions to increase their labor force participation following the forced unemployment of their spouse. Data collected from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 29 women married to blue-collar men in Utah County, UT are analyzed. IPUMS, 2000 Census 1% sample, data are used to illustrate the industries husbands and wives in Utah are employed in and the median salary/wages for married individuals within each industry. Our results suggest that the concentration of employed, married women in certain industries (e.g. education and retail), insufficient wages, a lack of access to better work opportunities, and family constraints all factor into women's decisions regarding labor force participation following spousal unemployment.

While the Tiebout hypothesis has come under increasing empirical fire, studies have not convincingly ascertained whether weak Tiebout sorting is truly evidence against the hypothesis or simply evidence that the prevalence of centralized state policies removes the conditions necessary for fiscal sorting. We explore the extent to which state fiscal policy pertaining to the school finance system affects the incentive or ability to sort on local fiscal characteristics. Using panel data on older households from the Health and Retirement Study, we find smaller adjustments of the local fiscal bundle by within-state empty-nest movers in the presence of school finance equalization policies. In addition, we use household data from the 1970-2000 decennial census to analyze differences in within-state and cross-state mobility rates and location choice under different school finance regimes. We find evidence of decreased within-state mobility at critical points in the Tiebout lifecycle when school finance equalization is present. We also find evidence that older households may escape centralization by moving across state lines.

This paper presents some new evidence about the relationshipbetween education and migration. This relationship is non-monotonic being none educated and high school degree holders the ones who migrate the most. Data do not support an explanation based in comparisons between net present value of wages in each country . I present another explanation based in different unobserved ability for different educational groups. I propose one way of treating unobserved heterogeneity by using information in temporary migrants. Matching data with the implications of the model, migrants are positively selected in terms of unobserved ability. This selection is different across educational groups, but this fact alone cannot explain the non-monotonicity. A composition of different migrations (legal and illegal) with different implied costs is proposed to solve the puzzle.

Relative black economic performance stagnated in the North after World War II, a period of otherwise significant racial convergence. This paper asks to what extent the economic disappointment of the North can be explained by on-going migration of southern blacks. The migration represented a considerable supply shock to the labor markets above the Mason-Dixon line, particularly to low-skilled labor markets in urban areas that employed many already resident black workers. I use variation in migrant flows between cities to evaluate the impact of black arrivals on low-skilled male workers by race, and by industry. To account for migrants endogenous location choices in the North, I develop an instrument for black migrant flows into a northern city, using southern agricultural variables (push factors) weighted by the state-of-birth profile of a citys black migrant stock. While there is no evidence that the migration depressed wages for low-skilled workers in the North, it appears to have had a large effect on their labor force attachment, both in terms of employment rates and weeks worked. The migration of southern blacks can account for a quarter of the black-white employment gap in the North during this period.

Three topics related to the role of family in economic outcomes are examined. In Chapter 1, a twins instrument is used to measure the effect of an additional infant on womens' housework and market work hours and the on time use of others in the family. Having an additional child increases womens' weekly housework by 3.5 hours and reduces womens' weekly leisure hours by 1.2 hours. Spouses have an increase in housework of 1.1 hours but no reduction in leisure. Chapter 2 develops a simple model to explain how one way in which self-employment might be advantageous to immigrants. Immigrants with poor English language skills cannot realize their full productive ability when dealing with English speakers. However, forming a partnership with someone else who speaks both languages could allow specialization of jobs that would give both a higher wage. The presence of both good and poor English skills in the household presents the opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation. The range of English skills of workers in the household is positively associated with higher self-employment probabilities for men, particularly for households with more earners. Individuals have a higher probability of being self-employed if they have someone with different language skills in the household. Chapter 3 examines the effect of additional siblings on childrens' education using twins instruments. Additional siblings have a significant negative impact on the education of younger children. Afterwards, children catch up. Closely spaced siblings have a larger negative effect. There is evidence that a girls education is hurt more than that of a boy by an additional sibling in a family with at least three children.

Although many theories of urban growth have broad implications regarding the dynamics of wage inequality, little empirical work has explored the issue. This paper studies the relationship between the growth of three measures of economic activity-population, employment, and per capita income-and a variety of wage-dispersion measures across a sample of US metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1990. Overall, the results indicate a negative association between the two: cities experiencing more rapid growth also tend to witness smaller increases (or larger decreases) in their inequality. Such findings offer some support to theories stressing growth-mechanisms which equalize productivity across workers. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

At least two important demographic changes will occur in the United States in the future: the growth of the Hispanic population and the growth of the second and third generations among Hispanics. We argue that the expansion of the Hispanic population is unlikely to slow the retreat from marriage, despite the pronuptial cultural orientations of some groups of immigrants and their native-born coethnics. On the contrary, the second- and third-generation descendents of immigrants will join in the retreat from marriage as a result of their exposure to the cultural and economic environment of the United States, as well as changes in the countries from which their immigrant parents originate. Sources of uncertainty about this scenario are noted.

While a sizable body of research has studied the relationship between aggregate productivity and geographic density, little work has considered how density influences the distribution of productivity across workers. This paper offers some descriptive evidence on the relationship between three measures of earnings inequality-unconditional percentile gaps, residual percentile gaps, between education-group gaps-and population density across a sample of US metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1990. On the whole, the findings reveal a significant and strikingly robust negative association between density and each measure.

The United States is one of only a handful of nations in which immigrant women outnumber immigrant men. These women corne from increasingly diverse regions, thereby bringing considerably different skills to the U.S. workforce. However, the question of how gender and ethnicity interact with each other to affect the economic performance of female immigrants remains especially understudied. Thus, this paper aims at providing some insight into this formerly neglected dimension of female immigrant performance. It examines the sources of wage differentials between immigrant females, and other groups in the U.S. labor force, paying particular attention to earnings inequalities created by the interaction of gender and ethnicity. OLS regressions are used to carry out the analysis. A random sample of 100,000 immigrants and 50,000 natives is drawn from the 5% 2000 IPUMS data set. Their salary and wage income is regressed on several variables accounting for differences in human capital, gender and nationality, including interactions between gender and ethnicity. The results show that females and immigrants have relatively low wages because of their sex and country of birth. In addition, interactions between gender and ethnicity are found to be significant determinants of wages.

This study utilizes US decennial census data from the year 2000 toanalyze the earnings of self-employed Mexican immigrants whoreside in a metropolitan area along the US-Mexico border. Theempirical results indicate that Mexican entrepreneurs in US bordercities who primarily operate in Mexico tend to experience asignificant earnings premium over their entrepreneurial and salariedcounterparts working on the US side of the border, even aftercontrolling for differences in observable characteristics. This worklocationearnings gap widens when focusing exclusively on Mexicanbusiness owners lacking US citizenship. It follows that policies whichrestrict labor movements across the US-Mexico border mayinadvertently dampen the earnings of self-employed Mexicanimmigrants residing in the US.

Cohabitation is a rapidly changing aspect of family life in the United States and Britain. This article describes the demography of cohabitation, considers the lace of cohabitation in p the kinship system, and speculates on the future of cohabitation. I argue that three processes-cohort replacement, socialization that occurs when children live with cohabiting parents, and social diffusion-will foster continued increases in rates of cohabitation. These processes are also likely to increase variation in the types of cohabiting relationships that couples form. Understanding the meaning of cohabitation in the kinship system requires distinguishing between individuals' attitudes about their own relationships and the composition of cohabiting unions at the population level.

A large body of research has established a positive connection between an industrys productivity and the magnitude of its presence within locally defined geographic areas. This paper examines the extent to which this relationship can be explained by a micro-level underpinning commonly associated with productivity: establishment scale. Looking at data on two-digit manufacturing across a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas, I find two primary results. First, average plant size defined in terms of numbers of workers increases substantially as an industrys employment in a metropolitan area rises. Second, results from a decomposition of localization effects on labor earnings into plant-size and plant-count components reveal that the widely observed, positive association between a workers wage and the total employment in his or her own metropolitan area-industry derives predominantly from the former, not the latter. Localization economies, therefore, appear to be the product of plant-level organization rather than pure population effects.

The United States is one of only a handful of nations in which immigrant womenoutnumber immigrant men. These women corne from increasingly diverse regions,thereby bringing considerably different skills to the U.S. workforce. However, thequestion of how gender and ethnicity interact with each other to affect the economicperformance of female immigrants remains especially understudied. Thus, this paperaims at providing some insight into this formerly neglected dimension of femaleimmigrant performance. It examines the sources of wage differentials betweenimmigrant females, and other groups in the U.S. labor force, paying particular attention toearnings inequalities created by the interaction of gender and ethnicity. OLS regressionsare used to carry out the analysis. A random sample of 100,000 immigrants and 50,000natives is drawn from the 5% 2000 IPUMS data set. Their salary and wage income isregressed on several variables accounting for differences in human capital, gender andnationality, including interactions between gender and ethnicity. The results show thatfemales and immigrants have relatively low wages because of their sex and country ofbirth. In addition, interactions between gender and ethnicity are found to be significantdeterminants of wages.

Education as acquired skills and knowledge, as a set of associations, acquaintances, and friends, or as a form of credentials figures so prominently that it would be rare to find a discussion of most topics of social inquiry-- prestige, employment, fertility, income and poverty, divorce, political participation, or attitudes that did not include mention of education. Most commonly, education is incorporated in such analyses either using a continuous measure, such as years of education, or ordered discrete categories, distinguishing those with a particular set of credentials with those without. These measures explicitly recognize that educational achievement is an ordered hierarchy, but discussions usually ignore that a given level of education can may vary in how high or low it falls in the hierarchy depending on the age or period considered.