This paper assesses the increasing importance of incarceration in determining the average socioeconomic status of black males in the United States. I document national trends in the proportion of black males that are either currently institutionalized or who have served previous prison time. The paper also documents the extent to which serving time interrupts the potential early work careers of young offenders and reviews recent research on employer sentiment regarding ex-offenders and the likely stigma effects of prior incarceration. Finally, I assess whether increasing incarceration rates provide a possible explanation for the drastic declines in employment rates observed among non-institutionalized black males. Using data from the U.S. Census, I test for a correlation between the proportion of non-institutionalized men in a given age-race-education group that are employed and the proportion of all men in this grouping that are institutionalized. The proportion institutionalized has a strong negative effect on the proportion of the non-institutionalized that are employed. The relationship is strong enough to explain one-third to one-half of the relative decline in black male employment rates.

The entry of foreign-born workers into U.S. metropolitan labor markets was associated with a rise in ethnic niches, i.e., occupations dominated by ethnic workers. Our study examines the emergence of ethnic niches in the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area, whose foreign-born population began to increase in the 1980s. Using the 1980 and 1990 PUMS data, we first develop an odds ratio to identify the occupational niches associated with different ethnic groups, and then examine the relative earnings of niche workers. We then compare the determinants of job earnings for niche and nonniche jobs using regression analysis. Our findings reveal a sharp ethnic segmentation of the labor force as early as in 1980. The economic advantages of niche employment vary by ethnic group, with the skill level of the job and the extent of ethnic social capital being important factors. Overall, the economic implications of niche employment for foreign-born and native-born workers were strongly contingent on the particular nature of Atlanta's economic growth in the past few decades.

Scholars are divided over whether welfare substantially affects inter-state migration by the poor. This paper identifies several respects in which previous work has not fully characterized the individual choice problem. It addresses these issues with a fully specified choice model that combines state-level fixed effects with quasi-experimental methodology to identify the effect of welfare benefits on migration. The model also controls for family ties that play a major role in migration of poor single mothers. The results indicate statistically significant and relatively substantial effects.

This dissertation examines the labor force participation, self-employment and occupational structure the Portuguese in the U.S. from 1880 to 1990 using U.S. Census data (IPUMS). It compares the Portuguese to other European-Americans in general, and to Italians in particular, in order to ascertain if their trajectory is characterized by similar or distinctive patterns. The study also investigates how the work patterns of the Portuguese vary across gender and nativity and are influenced by human capital, family characteristics and place of residence. The study draws on various theoretical frameworks, including assimilation and forms of capital theory. The methodology used includes logistic regression analysis as well as descriptive statistics and graphs. The historical work patterns of the Portuguese tended to follow the same general, secular trends exhibited by European-Americans, including Italians, but differ in the following ways: (1) The Portuguese participate in the labor force at higher levels than Italians and other European-Americans with similar background characteristics. This was true across gender and nativity subgroups, but ethnic differences were especially evident for immigrant women who live in the Northeast Region of the U.S. (2) The Portuguese show higher levels of occupational concentration and a much lower rate of change over time. The majority has been and continues to be blue-collar workers, especially factory workers. For those born in the U.S., the concentration in blue-collar occupations is the result of lower stocks of human capital, but in the case of immigrants it cannot be explained by background variables. Living in the Newark/New York area decreases the odds of blue-collar work. Conversely, the Portuguese have much lower percentages than other European-Americans, including Italians, in professional occupations, although significant gains have been made since 1980, especially among U.S.-born women. (3) The Portuguese had slightly higher levels of self-employment than Italians until 1940, but since then have experienced a relative decline. Self-employment varies with place of residence, being lowest in places with relatively large numbers of Portuguese, like Fall River, Mass., and highest in California and Newark, N.J. These patterns appear to be related to social capital associated with places of origin and settlement.

The demography of the Hispanic population of the United States has received considerable attention for recent time periods. But historical perspective is more difficult to obtain. This is partly a function of data limitations, since it was not simple to identify the Hispanic origin population before the census of 1970. Studies that have done this have been local in nature, but it has not been possible to do a comprehensive national study. Now there exists a nationally representative sample of the Hispanic population of the United States based on the manuscripts of the 1910 census. It contains about 71,500 persons of Hispanic origin plus about another 24,000 of their non-Hispanic neighbors. It was sampled from six states (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, and Florida) where most of the Hispanic origin population lived. The criteria of mother tongue, Hispanic surname, place of birth, and place of birth of parents were all used to identify individuals. Previous work for recent years has pointed to relatively high fertility in the Hispanic population, tracing it mostly to Mexican and Puerto Rican origin groups. Analysis of this sample indicates this was historically true, at least for the Mexican origin population, which was the predominant part of the 1910 Hispanic population. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the fertility patterns of the Hispanic population at the turn of the century using own children methods. In addition to standardized age-specific child woman ratios, total fertility rates and total marital fertility rates are estimated, as well as estimates of If and Ig. Multivariate analysis of the fertility of individual women (children ever born and own young children present) is used to assess the controlled effects of such variables as socio-economic status (based on occupation and home/farm ownership), region, rural-urban residence, womans employment, ethnicity, race, and literacy.

The first two chapters of this thesis investigate a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden, forcing them to spend longer periods in education and/or become increasingly specialized. In either case, the productivity of innovators may be reduced, with negative implications for growth. The first chapter develops a formal model to examine the growth implications of this "knowledge burden mechanism" and generate testable predictions for innovators. The model predicts that educational attainment, specialization, and teamwork will rise over time. In cross-section, the model predicts that specialization and teamwork will be greater in deeper areas of knowledge while, surprisingly, educational attainment will not vary across fields. I test these predictions using a micro-data set of individual inventors and find evidence consistent with each of these predictions. The second chapter further investigates the knowledge burden mechanism. Using data on famous inventions, I find that the age at which inventors produced them increased by 5 years over the 20th Century. The chapter employs a maximum likelihood model to test explanations for this trend. A knowledge-based explanation receives considerable support: innovators appear to arrive at the knowledge frontier 6.6 years later at the end of the 20th Century than they did at the beginning. This trend is unlikely to be sustainable and further suggests that educational externalities are a problematic byproduct of technological progress, particularly if innovators do their best work when they are young. The final chapter investigates whether national leaders impact growth in developing coun- tries. Using deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation, we ask whether such randomly-timed leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates.We find robust evidence that leaders have a causal effect on growth. The effect of leaders on growth appears limited to non-democracies, where the death of an autocrat tends to be followed by a substantial, prolonged increase in growth.

New Brunswick and Maine are an adjacent Canadian province and U.S. state with similar populations, climates and natural resource endowments. Before 1972, these jurisdictions had roughly similar unemployment insurance UI systems; after that the Canadian system was much more generous, especially to workers with very short work histories. Using the five decennial censuses over the period 1940-1991, we use the comparison between these two jurisdictions over time to estimate the long-term effects of UI program parameters on labor market outcomes. We find that New Brunswick's shift to a more generous UI system in 1972 significantly increased the frequency of part-year work, especially among women, and not only in seasonal industries. Simple "difference" estimates of this policy change based on data from NB alone understate the effects of the change for women because they do not account for a secular downward trend in part-year work in the face of a stable UI system, as is clearly evident in the data from Maine.

This paper develops new price indexes from a variety of sources to assess the hypothesis that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for rental shelter housing has been biased downward for its entire history since 1914. Rental shelter housing is the most important single category of the CPI, especially for those years when rent data have been used to impute price changes for owner-occupied housing. If valid, the implications of the hypothesis of downward bias would carry over to the deflator for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and, in the opposite direction, to historical measures of real PCE and real gross domestic product (GDP).

Studies of social and economic differentials in mortality typically relate circumstances at one moment in time to contemporary mortality risks. Literally hundreds of studies that date back more than a century show that, with rare exception, socially and economically disadvantaged groups suffer elevated risks of death (Williams 1990; Feinstein 1993). Such results are hardly surprising. Healthiness and longevity are nearly universal goals, and groups with more economic and social resources are better equipped to achieve these goals.

Background. We examined the relationship of the number of adverse childhood experiences (ACE score) to six health problems among four successive birth cohorts dating back to 1900 to assess the strength and consistency of these relationships in face of secular influences the 20th century brought in changing health behaviors and conditions. We hypothesized that the ACE score/health problem relationship would be relatively "immune" to secular influences, in support of recent studies documenting the negative neurobiologic effects of childhood stressors on the developing brain. Methods. A retrospective cohort study of 17,337 adult health maintenance organization (HMO) members who completed a survey about childhood abuse and household dysfunction, as well as their health. We used logistic regression to examine the relationships between ACE score and six health problems (depressed affect, suicide attempts, multiple sexual partners, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, and alcoholism) across four successive birth cohorts: 1900-1931, 1932-1946, 1947-1961, and 1962-1978.Results. The ACE score increased the risk for each health problem in a consistent, strong, and graded manner across four birth cohorts (P < 0.05). For each unit increase in the ACE score (range: 0-8), the adjusted odds ratios (ORs) for depressed affect, STDs, and multiple sexual partners were increased within a narrow range (ORs: 1.2-1.3 per unit increase) for each of the birth cohorts; the increase in risk for suicide attempts was stronger but also in a narrow range (ORs: 1.5-1.7).Conclusions. Growing up with ACEs increased the risk of numerous health behaviors and outcomes for 20th century birth cohorts, suggesting that the effects of ACEs on the risk of various health problems are unaffected by social or secular changes. Research showing detrimental and lasting neurobiologic effects of child abuse on the developing brain provides a plausible explanation for the consistency and dose-response relationships found for each health problem across birth cohorts, despite changing secular influences. (C) 2003 American Health Foundation and Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

U.S. residents have been moving en masse to places with nice weather. Well known is the migration towards places with warm winters, which is often attributed to the introduction of air conditioning. But people have also been moving to places with cooler, less-humid summers, which is the opposite of what is expected from the introduction of air conditioning. Nor can the movement to nice weather be primarily explained by shifting industrial composition or by elderly migration. Instead, a large portion of weather-related moves appear to be the result of an increased valuation of nice weather as a consumption amenity, probably due to broad-based rising per capita income.

Previous research suggests that Hispanic elders, as a group, have been much more likely to live with others, especially adult children, than have other, especially non-Hispanic White, elders. It has also tracked an increase in solitary and couple-only living among the latter group since the turn of the century. However, it has not tracked changed living arrangements among Hispanic elders. When we do so, we find little aggregate change since 1970, but noteworthy change in different directions among different Hispanic subgroups. Thus aggregate figures for a diverse minority group may be masking very real changes and makes it all the more imperative that we consider different Latino groups separately and try to better understand issues of immigration and acculturation.

IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF FREE BLACKS IN URBAN SOUTH Carolina, Charleston has received nearly all the attention of historians.1 And understandably so. Charleston, a major port on the Atlantic coast, was the South's second largest city in 1860 and the state's only large city. It had a large free black population (3,237) and was home to approximately one third of the state's free black population of 9,914. With a population of just over forty thousand people, Charleston was roughly five times the size of Columbia, the state capital. As urban geographer Allan Pred notes, "only 1.3 per cent of the state's 1860 population outside Charleston was officially recognized as urban by census takers." Indeed, Columbia was the only other city or town in South Carolina to qualify as urban according to the census's definition of that term (a population greater than twenty-five hundred).

Social science research requirements have challenged the limits of computation for over a century. Several major milestones in the early history of computing were sparked by attempts to advance the social sciences. It was the US census of 1890 that inspired Herman Hollerith (q.v.), a social researcher, to design the first automated data processing machinery. Hollerith's punched card (q.v.) system, while not a true computer, provided the foundation for contemporary computer-based data management.

From 1940 to 1990, a 10 percent increase in a metrpolitan area’s concentration of college-educated residents was associated with a .6 percent increase in subsequent employment growth. Using data on growth in wages and house values, I attempt to distinguish between explanations for this correlation based on local productivity growth, and explanations based on growth in local consumption amenities. Calibration of a city growth model suggests that roughly two-thirds of the growth effect of human capital is due to enhanced productivity growth, the rest being caused by growth in the quality of life. This contrasts with the standard argument that human capital generates growth in urban areas solely through local knowledge spillovers.

In the period following World War II, adulthood came early to most Americans. The vast majority of Americans had assumed adult roles by their late teens or early 20s. Today, it takes much longer to make the transition to adulthood: adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. We use opinion data from the General Social Survey, to describe contemporary attitudes about the nature and timing of this changing period of life. We find that although Americans believe that the transition to adulthood will begin in the late teens or early 20s, they have accepted that it often extends through the late 20s. The definition of adulthood that emerges from the GSS includes being financially independent, leaving home, completing school, and working full-time. Nearly half of Americans viewed marriage and parenthood, once defining markers of adulthood, as unimportant for the attainment of adult status.

Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as in considerable property damage that was concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. There have been few studies of a systematic, econometric nature that examine the impact of the riots on the relative economic status of African Americans, or on the cities and neighborhoods in which the riots took. We present two complementary empirical analyses. The first uses aggregate, city-level data on income, employment, unemployment, and the area’s racial composition from the published volumes of the federal censuses. We estimate the “riot effect” by both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares. The second empirical approach uses individual-level census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for 1950, 1970, and 1980. The findings suggest that the riots had negative effects on blacks’ income and employment that were economically significant and that may have been larger in the long run (1960-1980) than in the short run (1960- 1970). We view these findings as suggestive rather than definitive for two reasons. First, the data are not detailed enough to identify the precise mechanisms at work. Second, the wave of riots may have had negative spillover effects to cities that did not experience severe riots; if so, we would tend to underestimate the riots’ overall effect.