Discussions about the role of paid employment in high school students lives have typically operated under untested assumptions about historical trends in the frequency, intensity, and selective nature of students employment. Using a variety of nationally representative data sources, we find few changes in rates of employment or intensive employment among adolescents since 1940 or among students since 1980. We observe important changes in recent decades in race/ethnic and gender differences in employment and intensive employment. Finally, we observe that the relationship between students intensive employment and high school completion has been stable and persistently large since the late 1960s.

We use data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to document racial convergence in the value of owner-occupied housing from 1940 to 1990. Most of this convergence occurred before 1970, as black & white-owned units became more similar in terms of housing characteristics & as black & white homeowners became more similar in terms of their household characteristics. During the 1970s, convergence in values stalled despite continued convergence in housing & household characteristics; thus, the "unexplained" or residual portion of the racial value gap increased. Because changes within metropolitan areas are central to the post-1970 story, we go on to explore the changing empirical connection between urban residential segregation & the racial value gap. 5 Tables, 1 Figure, 38 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.].

Although the United States has experienced race-related civil disturbances throughout its history, those that occurred in the 1960s were unprecedented in their frequency and scope. 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. Law enforcement authorities took extraordinary measures to end the riots, sometimes including the mobilization of National Guard units. In retrospect, the riots marked a turning point in American racial politics, as the carefully orchestrated demonstrations of the early Civil Rights Movement gave way to violent, chaotic civil disturbances. . .

A vast theoretical and empirical literature considers the labor-market impact of immigration. In contrast, the literature on the labor-market impact of emigration or outflow of workers is almost exclusively theoretical. This paper is the first econometric study of the effect of emigration on national wages. I examine empirically the effect of Mexican migration to the United States on wages in Mexico using data from the Mexican and the US census from 1960-1990. The main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on Mexican wages. A 10% decrease in the supply of natives owing to emigration increases wages in Mexico by 3.3 7.6%. The increase in wages is the highest for the higher wage earners (those with 12-15 years of schooling). Simple welfare measures based on a partial equilibrium framework suggest that emigration loss to Mexico as a whole is less than 0.1% of GDP. However, there is a significant distributional impact. The gain to existing workers and loss to capital owners is in the range of 1.0 2.4 % of GDP.

For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects, and tests for reverse causality. We also find that skilled cities are growing because they are becoming more economically productive (relative to less skilled cities), not because these cities are becoming more attractive places to live. Most surprisingly, we find evidence suggesting that the skills-city growth connection occurs mainly in declining areas and occurs in large part because skilled cities are better at adapting to economic shocks. As in Schultz (1964), skills appear to permit adaptation.

This session will demonstrate the use of PDQ-Explore and PDQ-Expert to access and analyze large microdata files. These include, among others, the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) from the IPUMS project at the University of Minnesota Population Center. The U.S. census microdata encompassed in the IPUMS files can be accessed as a single data set spanning 1850-1990 with the 2000 files to be added when available. PDQ-Expert provides a natural language, case-based reasoning interface to PDQ-Explore. It is designed to allow persons unfamiliar with microdata and basic analytic procedures to extract meaningful information from large and complex data sets. PDQ-Explore and PDQ-Expert are commercial products developed by Public Data Queries, Inc., with small business research support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects and tests for reverse causality. We also find that skilled cities are growing because they are becoming more economically productive (relative to less skilled cities), not because these cities are becoming more attractive places to live. Most surprisingly, we find evidence suggesting that the skills-city growth connection occurs mainly in declining areas and occurs in large part because skilled cities are better at adapting to economic shocks. As in Schultz (1964), skills appear to permit adaptation.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act is the most important legislation in American education since the 1960s. The law requires states to put into place a set of standards together with a comprehensive testing plan designed to ensure these standards are met. Students at schools that fail to meet those standards may leave for other schools, and schools not progressing adequately become subject to reorganization. The significance of the law lies less with federal dollar contributions than with the direction it gives to federal, state, and local school spending. It helps codify the movement toward common standards and school accountability.Yet NCLB will not transform American schools overnight. The first scholarly assessment of the new legislation, No Child Left Behind? breaks new ground in the ongoing debate over accountability. Contributors examine the law's origins, the political and social forces that gave it shape, the potential issues that will surface with its implementation, and finally, the law's likely consequences for American education.

Easing immigration restrictions for the highly skilled in developed countries portend a future of increased human capital outflows from developing countries. The myriad consequences of these developments for developing countries include the direct loss of the fiscal contributions of these highly skilled individuals. This paper analyzes the fiscal impact of this loss of talent for a developing country by examining human capital flows from India to the U.S. The escalation of the emigration of highly skilled professionals from India to the U.S is examined by surveying evidence on the changing nature of the Indian-born in the U.S. during the 1990s. The loss of talent to India during the 1990s was dramatic and highly concentrated amongst the prime-age work force, the highly educated and high earners. In order to estimate the fiscal losses associated with these emigrants, this paper first estimates what these emigrants would have earned in India, and then integrates the resulting counterfactual distributions with details of the Indian fiscal system to estimate fiscal impacts. Two distinct methods to estimate the counterfactual earnings distributions are implemented: a translation of actual U.S. incomes in purchasing power parity terms and an income simulation based on a jointly estimated model of Indian earnings and participation in the workforce. The PPP methods indicate that the foregone income tax revenues associated with the Indian-born residents of the U.S. comprise one-third of current Indian individual income tax receipts. Depending on the method for estimating expenditures saved by the absence of these emigrants, the net fiscal loss associated with the U.S. Indian-born resident population ranges from 0.24% to 0.58% of Indian GDP in 2001.

During the 1970s, nearly every state in the nation began instituting tests of basic skills for high school students as the leading edge of the so-called first wave of education reforms. These reforms were a response to the widespread impression that test scores and the quality of public schooling were in decline. According to critics, the high school diploma, once a true accomplishment, had been debased in an era of social promotion and low standards to the point where it held no real meaning for postsecondary institutions or potential employers.The pace of reform was greatly accelerated with the release in 1983 of the blue-ribbon report A Nation at Rist. A chief cause of the nations educational decline, the report ventured, was the cafeteria-style curriculum that allowed students to pursue a diffuse and unchallenging course of study. The report recommended that states require students to take a minimum number of courses in core academic subjects in order to graduate from high school. As a result, by 1992 nearly every state had increased its graduation requirements in the core academic areas. However, only three states, Florida, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, had met the standard recommended by the Risk report: four years of English and at least three years each of social studies, science, and math.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that individuals are less willing to marry when there are more potential partners to search amongst. To do this, it develops a reduced-form method (a variation on Manski's (1993) model) that allows identification of such spillovers in two-sided matching markets. Estimates from this method are internally consistent, unbiased, robust to different definitions of the marriage market, and large enough to warrant attention. Additional evidence suggests that the effect works via the proposed search mechanism.

The rural health sector often plays a vital yet overlooked role in the economy of many rural areas. At the same time, the rural health care delivery system is rapidly changing. These changes, which may or may not be for the better, have the potential for affecting the quality and quantity of delivered health care in Morgan County West Virginia and other rural locations. Changes in the health care delivery system include the growth in managed care systems, which may require local patients to bypass local health delivery systems and decreases in Medicare and Medicaid subsidies to local hospitals and other service providers, which could also lead to a reduction in locally provided health services. The growth in provider networks may change the nature and location of local health care services. The growth in the use of telemedicine has the potential for increasing access to consultative and specialty care at the local level. The designation of critical access hospitals for underserved rural areas by the federal government could help rural communities retain local health care service providers...

Se consideran la literatura sobre la asimilación segmentada y los modelos teóricos alternativos referentes a la incorporación social de la segunda generación, resumiendo luego el marco teórico elaborado al desarrollar el Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study y presentando pruebas de su tercera encuesta dedicada en South Florida a hipótesis alternativas. Encontramos que la mayoría de los jóvenes de la segunda generación está avanzando en lo que se refiere a la educación y al trabajo, pero también que una minoría significativa se está quedando atrás. Dentro de las diferentes nacionalidades, este último grupo no está distribuido al azar, sino que corresponde rigurosamente a los pronósticos basados en el capital humano, el tipo de familia y en el modo de integración de los padres de los inmigrantes. Es evidente que los miembros de la segunda generación se asimilarán, sea con éxito o sin él, lo que se refiere al aprendizaje de la cultura americana, pero será de forma muy diferente si lo hacen uniéndose a la clase media mayoritaria o a la población de clase baja, en su mayoría marginados y víctimas del racismo. Los relatos tomados del módulo etnográfico que acompañan al estudio sitúan en perspectiva los resultados cuantitativos e ilustran la realidad de la integración segmentada tal y como ocurre hoy en la sociedad norteamericana.

Research on the effect of language skills on earnings is complicated by the endogeneity of language skills. This study exploits the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an instrumental variable for language proficiency. We find a significant positive effect of English proficiency on wages among adults who immigrated to the U.S. as children. Much of this impact appears to be mediated through education. Differences between non-English-speaking origin countries and English-speaking ones that might make immigrants from the latter a poor control group for non-language age-at-arrival effects do not drive these findings.

The Center for Population Economics has recently implemented a recommender system for computer-assisted coding (CAC) of historical occupation descriptions. The system will be used to code occupation descriptions into standard occupation categories. We describe the task and the system, and discuss certain theoretical and practical issues which have arisen during its implementation, as well as their implications for Automated Text Categorization (ATC).

Application of the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no-fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates. Each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across US states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization. I show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime. Taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock, I find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade, but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade. That said, this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century. Both administrative data on the flow of new divorces, and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion. These results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage, with an eye to their partner's divorce threat.

The United States government’s posture at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), where the transatlantic slave trade was declared a crime against humanity, evaded a warranted claim by African-Americans for compensation for the enslavement of their ancestors. This evasive posture is anomalous in light of U.S. government support for and administration of reparations for other groups subjected to recent or historic grievous wrongs. Indeed, the U.S. government has undertaken numerous reparations payments to native American tribes for atrocities and treaty violations. Two examples include the 1971 grant . . .