This dissertation consists of three empirical essays in population and family economics. The first chapter studies ethnic peer effects in the intergenerational transmission of skills. In order to determine whether the correlation between individual measures of human capital and ethnic group averages in the previous generation is not driven by omitted variables and measurement error, I develop an instrumental variables strategy that uses within-group changes in the occupational mix of new immigrants to the US as a quasi-natural experiment, and exploits variation in parental age at arrival to account for the transmission of skills within the family. I find evidence of a significant 'ethnic capital' effect, which contributes notably to the persistence of skill differentials across individuals over time. The results also suggest that geographic concentration and endogamy rates accentuate the effect of ethnic capital by promoting a higher level of interaction among individuals in a given ethnic group. The second chapter examines the negative relationship between fertility and education. Using information on compulsory attendance and child labor laws that affected women's schooling choices in their teenage years, I identify the effect of education on total completed fertility accounting for the endogeneity of schooling, and find that women with 3-4 additional years of schooling have on average one less child than they would have otherwise. Moreover, while there is evidence that education increases childlessness, this fertility-reducing effect of education does not appear to be mediated by a reduction in marriage rates. The results also imply that rising levels of education account for a sizable fraction of the recent fertility declines observed in several Western countries. Finally, the third chapter evaluates the labor market effects of public subsidies to families with children. Using variation in the level of benefits provided by a policy reform in the UK that affected differentially what would otherwise be comparable groups of families, I estimate the effect of family allowances (also known as child benefits) on female labor force participation. The results show evidence of negative, yet insignificant and quantitatively negligible, effects of family allowances on female labor force participation.

A dominant concern regarding the contemporary immigration to the United States involves immigrants who arrive with work-related skills far below those of typical U. S. workers; will such immigrants manage to improve upon their conditions and will they be able to help their children reach still better conditions? The farther behind the immigrant is from the typical U.S. worker at the time of immigration, the harder this process is likely to be. In earlier periods of American history, we know that such immigrant catch-up did occur; is the present like the past? The most relevant historical example concerns the last great wave of immigration, roughly 18901920 during which southern, central, and eastern Europeans from ethnic stocks that had been little known in the United States before that time, immigrated in great numbers to a modern, industrial, society. Yet by about 1980, no appreciable differences remained between the socioeconomic positions of the descendants of that immigration and the descendants of much earlier arrivals to the United States (Lieberson and Waters 1988). Following Stanley Lieberson (1980), I refer to these southern, central, and eastern Europeans as SCE immigrants...

Trace your family roots back many generations with help from this easy-to-use guide. Learn to set up a family tree, locate and evaluate vital records, select the appropriate hardware and software for the search, make the most of the Internet, and much more. Inside, you'll find invaluable research strategies, advice on getting past "brick walls," and information on the latest print and online genealogical resources. Explore your family history-you never know what you might discover.

While American Catholics stand out as some of the few voices of cultural opposition to the eugenics movement in the United States, Catholics and eugenicists actively engaged in conversational exchanges during the late 1920s. In association with the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society, John A. Ryan and John Montgomery Cooper engaged in a process that Sander Gilman and Nancy Leys Stepan call "recontextualization," whereby they challenged the social and scientific basis for eugenics policy initiatives while constantly urging American eugenicists to rid their movement of racial and class prejudice. In the process, they participated in a revealing debate on immigration restriction, charity, racial hierarchies, feminism, birth control, and sterilization that points to both the instances of convergence and divergence of Catholic and eugenic visions for the national community.

Research on the new second generation in the United States has been deeply influenced by the hypothesis of segmented assimilation, which contends that the children of immigrants are at risk of downward mobility into a new rainbow underclass. This paper seeks to assess that assertion, focusing on the experience of Mexicans, the overwhelmingly largest of today's second generation groups, and a population of predominantly working- or lower-class origins. The empirical component of this paper rests on analysis of a combined sample of the 1996-2001 Current Population Survey.

The 1880 US population database contains records for the over 50 million individuals enumerated in the census. This unique data set is the result of collaboration between the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). To make census data available to genealogists. LDS volunteers transcribed the characteristics of all US residents in 1880. The MPC verified and corrected this transcription, in exchange for the right to disseminate the resulting database for scholarly and educational purposes. The authors consider editing and coding procedures and a range of problems: missing and incorrect geographic identifiers, data-processing errors, duplicate and missing cases, and inaccurate breaks between households. They also classify variables according to standardized coding systems, making the database compatible with the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS).

The theory known as the Barker hypothesis, posits that shocks to the mothers health changes a childs in utero development in ways that may be difficult or impossible to alter later in life. This paper subjects the Barker hypothesis to an ordeal. We use the 1918 influenza epidemic as an exogenous health shock and observe mortality rates in the 1980's for the cohorts born before and during the epidemic.We find no evidence in support of a large Barker effect. Because we use an exogenous shock to health to identify the effect, our results cast doubt on those who claim a large effect from observations where the conditions of birth are a function of persistent health patterns. The possibility remains that a larger or more long-lived shock might produce a measurable effect.

In Chapter One, we examine evidence for a causal connection between income and mortality. There is widespread and longstanding agreement that life expectancy and income are positively correlated. However, it has proven much more difficult to establish a causal relationship since income and health are jointly determined. We use a major change in the Social Security law as exogenous variation in income to examine the impact of income on mortality in an elderly population. We compare mortality rates after age 65 for males born in the second half of 1916 and the first half of 1917. Data from restricted-use versions of the National Mortality Detail File combined with Census data allows us to count all deaths among elderly Americans between 1979 and 1993. We find that the higher income group has a higher mortality rate, contradicting the previous literature. We also found that the younger cohort responded to lower incomes by increasing post-retirement work effort. These results suggest that moderate employment has beneficial health effects for the elderly.In Chapter Two, we examine another potential determinant of mortality among the elderly, pre-natal shocks to the mothers health. D.J.P. Barker has presented epidemiologic evidence that maternal health status affects the later-lifemortality of children. We use the 1918 influenza epidemic as a health shock which is orthogonal to chronic health status. Our findings are that the influenza-exposed cohorts do not experience significantly higher mortality. This allows us to bound any Barker effect of the epidemic as raising mortality less than ten percent.

Technology occasionally changes media consumers control over the amount of advertising to which they are exposed. Advertisers and media firms will benefit from an empirical methodology to forecast the degree to which such technologies will affect their business. This paper introduces such a methodology. I develop a game-theoretic model of advertiser-supported media markets: media platforms (e.g., television networks) compete both for media consumers (viewers) and for advertisers. The profit-maximizing network sets its ad level to trade off marginal advertising revenue with the value of its last ads marginal audience loss. I estimate the models structural parameters, using television advertisement and audience data from four sources. I then re-specify the model to account for the effects of advertisement-avoidance technology, and solve the re-specified model to make predictions about new equilibrium advertisement prices, ad quantities, and audience sizes. Preliminary results indicate that viewers are averse to advertisements, and that cost per thousand viewers decreases with the number of ads sold, and increases with the size of the audience.

Workers' compensation insurance in the United States began in the early twentieth century when states rapidly enacted their own versions to protect workers and limit the liability of employers. Premiums account for two percent of payrolls, and substantially more in dangerous industries, and therefore represent an important portion of the modern employment compensation package.

In dit artikel wordt een uiteenzetting gegeven van de aard en de doelstellingen van de Historische Steekproef Nederlandse bevolking (HSN). Belangrijkste doelstelling van de HSN is het aanleggen van een representatieve database met 19e- en 20ste-eeuwse levensgeschiedenissen. Er wordt ingegaan op de gegevens waaruit de database van de HSN is opgebouwd (bevolkingsregisters en de akten van de burgerlijke stand) en het reeds met deze database verrichte onderzoek. Vervolgens wordt een indruk gegeven van de ontwikkeling van de HSN in de afgelopen tien jaar en wordt het project Life Courses in Context gentroduceerd. In dit project zullen voor ongeveer 40.000 personen geboren in de periode 1863-1922 de volledige levens lopen worden uitgezocht en in de HSN-database ondergebracht. Daarnaast worden in dit samen met het Nederlands Instituut voor Wetenschappelijke Informatie diensten (NIWI) uitgevoerde project de publicaties van de volks- en beroepstellingen 1859-1947 gedigitaliseerd. Uit het bij het project behorende onderzoeksprogramma wordt een samenvatting gegeven van mogelijk onderzoek dat de HSN-database na invoering van de levenslopen biedt. Het overzicht betreft de volgende onderzoeksthemas: sociale ongelijkheid in gezondheid en sterfte, sociale bewegingen en veranderingen, cultuur, godsdienst en onderwijs, huishoudens en veranderingen in arbeidsrelaties, sociale mobiliteit en de levensloop, migratie.

The educational gap between blacks and whites in the United States is wide and widening at the college graduate level. A less known fact is that the size of this gap differs across the various regions of the country. The difference is especially great for the Northeast, an area known for high average educational achievement. This paper explores the reasons for the differential college completion gaps by race across regions, focusing chiefly on adults between the ages of 25 and 34. Two hypotheses are explored. One is that differential incidence by region of factors determining access to a college education is the principal determinant of the variation in the magnitude of the gaps. The other is that regional college completion gaps reflect ongoing differences among the regions in location preferences between blacks and whites.The study concludes that variation across regions in college completion gaps between blacks and whites is a product both of differences in past factors affecting access to college and of ongoing differences in location preferences of black and white adults.

Present a guideline for maintaining a set of best practices for creating large databases on historical populations. Purposes of maintaining such best practices; Recommendations for working with large databases.

Objective. This article conducts a comparative analysis of temporal and generational patterns in Mexican-American female headship compared to patterns for non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks. These patterns are explored within two frameworks of assimilation, the more general assimilation perspective and the "segmented" assimilation perspective. Methods. Logistic regression analysis looking at female headship is conducted using the 1960-1990 IPUMS. Additional analyses use the 1995 CPS to look at intergenerational patterns of female headship, divorce, and nonmarital fertility among Mexican-origin women relative to other groups of women. Results. Analysis using the IPUMS finds that U.S.-born Mexican-origin women have higher levels of female headship in every year compared to white women, and this difference has actually increased over time. Additionally, analysis using the 1995 CPS finds that while levels of female headship for second-generation Mexican-origin women are no higher, levels for third-generation Mexican-origin women far surpass those of white women. The high levels of female headship and the proportion of never married women with children in the household among third-generation Mexican-American women are startling and lend more support to a "segmented" assimilation framework.

In Not Just Black and White, editors Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson bring together a group of social scientists and historians to consider the relationship between immigration and the ways in which concepts of race and ethnicity have evolved in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.