Examines differences in mortality rates and life expectancies across 19 racial/ethnic groups in California. Finds large differences in life expectancies by gender, nativity (U.S.-born versus foreign-born), and racial/ethnic group.

Objectives. The author examined the prevalence and predictors of colorectal cancer screening among the urban Japanese population of the United States. Methods. A sample of Japanese residents of major US metropolitan areas completed a self-administered mailed survey.Results. Physician recommendation, acculturation, and perceived psychological costs were consistent predictors of screening for colorectal cancer. Gender and marital status were related to screening via fecal occult blood testing; age, susceptibility, and health insurance were related to sigmoidoscopy/colonoscopy screening.Conclusions. Colorectal cancer screening among the urban Japanese population could be increased with interventions seeking to promote physician recommendations for screening, alleviate perceived psychological costs among patients, and improve physician-patient communication.

Modern search and matching theories view labor markets as job ladders. Workers search for good matches while unemployed and while employed. Employment with a particular firm ends either when the job is destroyed or when a worker finds a better opportunity. This simple structure yields several strong predictions. On the job wage growth is zero. Incomes increase as workers move from lower paying to higher paying jobs, occasionally interrupted by spells of unemployment as some jobs are destroyed and the worker has to start over again on the lower rungs of the ladder. Of course, this job ladder view of the labor market is necessarily false in some dimensions. Understanding what those dimensions are and how and why the job ladder paradigm fails is the major purpose of this paper.

The American population of today is far different from that of 40 years ago. The fact that society is cognizant of this is evident by the continual creation of population subcategories (race and ethnic) in an effort to develop a more accurate picture of who we are. Although we recognize that we have and continue to change, we continue to expect to obtain accurate predictions of voter turnout based upon profiles of the voting age population (VAP) as it existed 40 years ago. In this project, I explain how changes in the proportion of the subpopulation groups of the VAP are important to the prediction of voter behavior and how the changes affect the observed behavior at the aggregate level. I develop a theory of group-mix that demonstrates that the changes in subpopulation groups are pivotal in understanding and predicting turnout. I test the theory using American National Election Data from the 1960s through the 1990s to demonstrate that assumptions made about the electorate must take into consideration proportional changes in the mix of the VAP, and must consider the attributes of each proportion. The results of the data analyses provide good support for the group-mix theory and show that if a change in any population subgroup is sufficiently large, it can impact the observed behavior at the aggregate level.

We use 1990 Census data to examine how mate selection patterns differ by Latinos' national origin, race, and nativity. We compare their propensity to marry within their own groups, with non-Latino Whites and Blacks and with other Latino Whites and Nonwhites. Latinos' race plays an important role in assimilation to American society. Latino Whites are more likely than Latino Nonwhites to marry non-Latinos; US-born Latino Whites are more likely than their foreign-born counterparts to marry non-Latino Whites; and US-born Mexican Whites, with a long history in the US, are more likely to intermarry than other US-born Latino Whites. Mate selection patterns of Latino Whites closely follow the predictions of classical assimilation theory. Latino Nonwhites, however, exhibit a different pattern: the US-born are less likely to intermarry than the foreign-born. Racial barrier also is strong within each national-origin group. When Latinos marry outside their own national-origin groups, Whites tend to marry non-Latino Whites, but Nonwhites tend to marry other Latino Nonwhites. This may imply two paths of integration in American society: Latino Whites' assimilation into American society and Latino Nonwhites' formation of Latino pan-ethnicity.

Pursuant to Title VII, Chapter 2 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended (Act), the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) administers formula grant programs which deliver independent living services to older individuals who are blind. The attached Annual Report, prepared by the Rehabilitation Research and Training Centeron Blindness and Low Vision at Mississippi State University, providesa compilation of data for fiscal year (FY) 2002. The statistical information contained in the report is derived from data submitted byeach program on RSA Form 7-OB through the RSA management information system. The Annual Report is designed to support program evaluation efforts made pursuant to Section 12 (Evaluation) of the Act, and the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA).

Iron and steel production grew dramatically in the U.S. when mass production technologies for steel were adopted in the 1860s. According to new measures presented in this study, earnings inequality rose within the iron and steel industries in the 1870s. The paper examines technological uncertainty and skill bias hypotheses about how technological change affects earnings inequality in the light of historical evidence about this period. Firms made a variety of technological choices and for the first time undertook research and development. New professional associations and journals appeared for mechanical engineers and chemists. Industrial unions replaced craft unions. As new ore sources and cheap water transportation were introduced, new plants along the Great Lakes outcompeted existing plants elsewhere. New iron and steel plants in the 1870s were larger than any U.S. plants had ever been, and different management approaches such as cost accounting were developed. A national market replaced local markets for iron and steel. Based on the evidence, technological uncertainty explained the rise in inequality better than skill bias.

Spatial analysis assists theoretical understanding and empirical testing in the social sciences, and rapidly expanding applications of geographic information technologies have advanced the spatial data-gathering needed for spatial analysis and model making. This much-needed volume covers outstanding examples of spatial thinking in the social sciences, with each chapter showing some aspect of how certain social processes can be understood by analyzing their spatial context. The audience for this work is as trans-disciplinary as its authorship because it contains approaches and methodologies useful to geography, anthropology, history, political science, economics, criminology, sociology, and statistics.

The existence and extent of occupational gender segregation is well known. This is commonly taken as an indication of gender inequality, but this is incorrect. In general the more egalitarian countries, in terms of gender, tend to have higher levels of gender segregation. To understand this we must appreciate that occupational gender segregation is the resultant of two components, a vertical dimension which does measure gender inequality, and a horizontal component that measures difference without inequality. The vertical dimension measures the extent of advantage/disadvantage of men compared to women in the stratification structure. The structural inequalities of social stratification are usually understood by sociologists as being represented in a stratification scale, and the most useful scale for analysing gender segregation (or any structure of occupational inequality) is CAMSIS. This measures the general desirability of occupations and so includes the inequalities traditionally conceived as class and status. However, economists and the general public are more likely to see occupational inequality in terms of income from wages and salaries. Although income is only one aspect of occupational attractiveness it is an important one, and tends to be quite well related to other aspects of occupational attractiveness.The paper considers these two stratification measures of vertical segregation, and their contributions to the resultant (of vertical and horizontal segregation) overall segregation. The main countries considered are the USA and Britain. The analysis shows the expected male advantage on income, though rather less than some might expect. In terms of occupations general attractiveness (CAMSIS) the situation does not display the expected male advantage. The explanation of the observed patterns is then considered.

Between 1970 and 1990 the share of elderly widows living alone grew by 23.2% in the U.S. (from 52.1% to 64.2%), the share living with their children decreased in a similar magnitude, while the other types of living arrangements remained stationary. In the same period there was a moderate increase in national incomes and a big increase in the income of widows. We pose a variety of models of the determination of living arrangements between widows and their children where living together provides consumption gains due to economies of scale, and it may also provide utility directly. We estimate those models using 1970s data and for some of them we obtain an excellent fit despite the fact that the data display a very nonlinear relation between living arrangements and income. We use the models to measure the contribution of income changes on changes in living arrangements. Our findings are very sharp. The simplest version of the model performs very good and it predicts that changes in the incomes of both the widow and her off-spring generates three quarters of the increase in the number of elderly widows that live alone. An extension of the basic model that takes into account the marital status of children provides slightly better estimates and imputes one half of the observed changes in living arrangements to changes in the incomes and in the marital status of the children.

Most studies of the intersection of marriage and ethnic assimilation focus on partner choice rather than marital timing as an indicator of immigrant adaptation. Yet whether or when immigrant groups assumed an "American" marriage pattern can shed light on the nature of immigrant adaptation, its pace, and completeness. The authors examine ethnic differences for European Americans in the marriage timing of select birth cohorts from 1850 through 1950, using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for 1910 and 1980. Event-history analysis is used to predict timing of marriage by birth cohort, ethnicity, and nativity. The results indicate much greater ethnic dispersion in marriage timing among the cohorts born between 1851 and 1880 than for those born between 1921 and 1950, for both women and men. The sharp decline in ethnic variation in marriage timing suggests that with increasing duration in the United States a particularly American pattern of marriage evolved. Nonetheless, despite considerable compression among European ethnics in the timing of marriage, as of 1980 ethnicity continued to distinguish age at marriage.

Social scientists have long observed a strong negative relationship between education andfertility. Since the choice of schooling is not random, however, the question of whetherthis correlation is causal remains open. In this paper, I use 1950-1990 US Census data,along with information on compulsory attendance and child labor laws that affectedwomens schooling choices in their teenage years, to estimate the effect of education ontotal completed fertility accounting for the endogeneity of schooling. Instrumentalvariable estimates using changes in state compulsory schooling laws as a source ofexogenous variation in education indicate that women with 3-4 additional years ofschooling have on average one less child than they would have otherwise. Furtheranalysis suggests that heterogeneity across individuals and, to a lesser extent, nonlinearityin the fertility return to schooling, explain an important part of the differencebetween IV and OLS estimates. Moreover, this fertility-reducing effect of schooling doesnot appear to be mediated by a reduction in marriage rates, while there is evidence thateducation does increase the probability that a woman will reach the end of her fertilelifetime without children. These results are robust to a number of specification checks,and imply that rising levels of education can account for a sizable fraction of the declinein fertility rates for several Western countries in the second half of the 20th century.

The paper shows trends in the dispersion of earnings within 300 separate occupation categories for which consistent information is available from the Current Population Survey and the decennial U.S. Census for various periods since 1960. The paper examines the evidence for two effects. The first is that because improving media technologies and wider audiences around the world, superstars arise to various degrees in various occupations, especially athletes but also others whose performance can be amplified by media technologies photographers, inequality has been rising. This superstars effect (described by Rosen, 1981, and Frank and Cook, 1995) appears to be a long term development which is likely to continue. The second effect is that in occupations which required close work with new semiconductor and information technologies, such as electrical engineers, computer programmers, systems analysts, and data processing equipment repair persons, inequality rose. In other engineering job categories, inequality did not rise. It is argued here that this third effect is a result of technological uncertainty and complexity, which has been described by a diffuse literature including Greenwood and Yorukoglu (1997) and also historical comparisons which are reviewed here in light of this evidence. Uncertainty is a result of novelty and therefore should be temporary. It may already be in decline on the basis of the evidence here. The uncertainty and superstars effects occur to some extent in many occupations. In principle these are continuous variables, not distinguished in a binary way between the categories shown here. Therefore we examine also occupations in which these effects are least likely those which call for a nurturing role, and/or those in which the jobholder must be physically present to do the work. These are jobs in which uncertainty and media-amplification are least likely, and we show here that inequality within such occupations has fallen sharply.

This paper considers the problem of estimating the distribution of payoffs in a discrete dynamic game, focusing on models where the goal is to learn about the distribution of firms' entry and exit costs. The idea is to begin with non-parametric first stage estimates of entry and continuation values obtained by computing sample averages of the realized continuation values of entrants who do enter and incumbents who do continue. Under certain assumptions, these values are linear functions of the parameters of the problem, and hence are not computationally burdensome to use. Attention is given to the small sample of estimation error in the non parametric estimates and this leads to a preference for use of particularly simple estimates of continuation values and moments.