In the United States, rapid suburbanization has recently coincided with large-scale immigration, which leads many to link the two. This paper examines location choices of immigrants, first considering suburbanization as a cross-sectional pattern. Results indicate that race/ethnicity and immigrant status are among the most salient determinants, trumping other factors, e.g., life-cycle stages and socioeconomic status. Immigrants become more dispersed over time; but the propensity is far shy of that of natives and whites. Suburbanization is also treated a process aided by mobility, homeownership, and acculturation. Immigrants are reluctant to own homes in dispersed areas, and do not suburbanize in a pace substantially faster than natives. Evidence does not support the claim that immigration leads to dispersed patterns of land usethe main characteristic of sprawl.

This paper argues that long-run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods (the Tiebout hypothesis). We develop an extension of the Tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and of public good provision must (weakly) increase. Given the secular decline in mobility costs, these predictions can be evaluated using historical data. We find decreasing heterogeneity in policies and proxies for preferences across (i) a sample of U.S. municipalities (18701990); (ii) all Boston-area municipalities(18701990); and (iii) all U.S. counties (18501990).

This paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality, and examines several alternative explanations. A causal link is established by controlling for city fixed effects and city-specific time trends, and by using inequality in the woman's state-of-birth as a proxy for local male inequality. Increasing inequality explains about 25% of the marriage rate decline over the last few decades, and this is not due to the endogenous moving or labor force decisions of women, nor to the marital decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages.

Universal suffrage is a cornerstone of democratic governance. As levels of criminal punishment have risen in the United States, however an ever-larger number of citizens have lost the right to vote. The authors ask whether felon disenfranchisement constitutes a meaningful reversal of the extension of voting rights by considering its political impact. Data from legal sources, election studies, and inmate surveys are examined to consider two counterfactual conditions: (1) whether removing disenfranchisement restrictions alters the outcomes of past U.S. Senate and presidential elections, and (2) whether applying contemporary rates of disenfranchisement to prior elections affects their outcomes. Because felons are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of racial minorities and the poor disenfranchisement laws tend to take more votes from Democratic than from Republican candidates. Analysis shows that felon disenfranchisement played a decisive role in U.S. Senate elections in recent years. Moreover at least one Republican presidential victory would have been reversed if former felons had been allowed to vote, and at least one Democratic presidential victory would have been jeopardized had contemporary rates of disenfranchisement prevailed during that time.

Criminal offenders in the United States typically forfeit voting rights as a collateral consequence of their felony convictions. This article analyzes the origins and development of these state felon disenfranchisement provisions. Because these laws tend to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities, we build on theories of group threat to test whether racial threat influenced their passage. Many felon voting bans were passed in the late 1860s and 1870s, when implementation of the Fifteenth Amendment and its extension of voting rights to African-Americans were ardently contested. We find that large nonwhite prison populations increase the odds of passing restrictive laws, and, further, that prison and state racial composition may be linked to the adoption of reenfranchisement reforms. These findings are important for understanding restrictions on the civil rights of citizens convicted of crime and, more generally, the role of racial conflict in American political development.

Report on the economic benefits of maintaining Florida's status as the number one destination for ammenity--seeking retirees. Analysis of retirement migration trends and detailed report on the need to sustain a high level migratory flow to keep Florida's economy growing with stability and with minimal environmental impacts.

In this article, I rely on new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to construct new estimates of white fertility in the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike previous estimates that showed a long-term decline in overall fertility beginning at or before the turn of the nineteenth century, the new estimates suggest that U.S. fertility did not begin its secular decline until circa 1840. Moreover, new estimates of white marital fertility, based on own-children methods, suggest that marital fertility decline did not begin in the nation as a whole until after the Civil War (1861-1865).

This dissertation studies the long-term decline in state preferences for education spending in the United States. It constructs an expansive state-level panel data set spanning the fiscal years 1976-77 through 2000-2001 to examine how three budget share measures have changed within states over time and across states at a point in time. The share of state discretionary expenditures allocated to public education has fallen by four percentage points since 1977, while the share of public education expenditures allocated to public higher education has fallen by six points. In addition, the share of public higher education dollars appropriated to institutions (as opposed to directly to students) has fallen by four percentage points. Together the declines translate into real institutional appropriation losses of $2,800 per student in an average state significantly more than the $1,700 increase in real average public four-year instate tuition rates since 1977.

This article studies three important issues regarding the method used by Woodrow Borah and S.F. Cook for the evaluation of the population size in Mexico and Latin America, namely the nature and composition of the old rural nahua (aztec) family. To that end a documentary source is used here--the Libros de Tributo--which was not used by the said authors due to the fact that they had no command of the nahuatl language, while no complete translation or transcription of this document was available at the time. It is argued here that the Old Mexico nahuas lived in big homes of extended families (calli). This these was supported by Borah and Cook, but was not taken into account within the wide field of the History of the Family, in particular the way it was developed by the Cambridge University's 'Laslett school'.

The plans of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to create a Nordic "master race" are often looked upon as a horrific but fairly isolated effort. Less notice has historically been given to the American eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although their methods were less violent, the methodology and rationale which the American eugenicists employed, as catalogued in Edwin Black's Against the Weak, were chilling nonetheless and, in fact, influential in the mindset of Hitler himself. Funded and supported by several well-known wealthy donors, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie families and Alexander Graham Bell, the eugenicists believed that the physically impaired and "feeble-minded" should be subject to forced sterilization in order to create a stronger species and incur less social spending. These "defective" humans generally ended up being poorer folks who were sometimes categorized as such after shockingly arbitrary or capricious means, such as failing a quiz related to pop culture by not knowing where the Pierce Arrow was manufactured. The list of groups and agencies conducting eugenics research was long, from the U.S. Army and the Departments of Labor and Agriculture to organizations with names like the "American Breeders Association." Black's detailed research into the history of the American eugenics movement is admirably extensive, but it is in the association between the beliefs of some members of the American aristocracy and Hitler that the book becomes most chilling. Black goes on to trace the evolution of eugenic thinking as it evolves into what is now called genetics. And while modern thinkers have thankfully discarded the pseudo-science of eugenics, such controversial modern issues as human cloning make one wonder how our own era will be remembered a hundred years hence.

This article discusses the use of geographic information technologies to assist researchers in the exploration of historical databases. The case study is a pilot project in which we used geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) to study the history of the Public Waterfront Act (the "Chapter 91" program), a policy designed to balance private property rights, public interest, and environmental protection in the Massachusetts tidelands. The issues discussed range from the role of GIS in society and its limitations as a representational tool to the ability of current GIS to deal with historical data and to manage temporal attributes.

Commentary integrated in an article by D. Read and S. LeBlanc on the relationships between demography, carrying capacity and conflict.

The paper furthers the neoclassical theory of earnings inequality. The inequality multiplier is derived as the amount by which inequality in skills must be multiplied to yield earnings inequality. Neutral technological change and the real interest rate affect inequality by changing capital per worker. The effect of capital per worker on the inequality multiplier is related to skill differentials and capital-skill complementarity. The results explain increasing inequality from the mid 1970's into the 1990's.

Fluctuations in the world price of oil, the concern with greenhouse gas emissions and the efforts to revive the 1997 Kyoto Protocol have resulted in renewed interest in the estimation of elasticities of demand for gasoline. In this paper, a complete system of demand equations is estimated, including an equation for the demand for gasoline. Canadian family expenditure (FAMEX) and United States consumer expenditure (CEX) survey data are used. Household-level data permits estimation of elasticities for various household groups. Also, differences in demand responsiveness to own-price and income changes are estimated for different regions in Canada and the United States. Demand is found to be own-price and income inelastic, on the whole, as reported in earlier studies. There is also variation in these elasticities across regions of Canada and the United States. However, larger differences are observed with respect to household size and housing tenure, than to region of residence.

One of the most important changes in the United States labor market in the twentieth century was the increased participation of married women. In 1900 just 5.6% of married women were in the labor market. By 1998 61.8% of all married women were working or looking for work. The change is all the more notable because the labor force participation rates of single women have grown not twelve hold, but just by half in the same century (from 43.5% to 68.1%). Increased participation by married women in the labor market has occurred because the relationship between characteristics of women and their families, and labor force participation at a point in time has changed. For example, in cross-sectional data a negative association between husbands’ income and wives’ work is observed. Yet, over . . .