Statistical Agencies manage huge amounts of microdata. The main task of these agencies is to provide a variety of users with general information about for instance the population and the economy. However, in some cases users request additional, more specific information. Many agencies have therefore set up facilities that enable selected users to obtain tailor-made statistical information.A remote access system is an example of such a facility where users can submit queries for statistical information from their own computer. These queries are handled by the statistical agency and the generated, possibly confidentialised, output is returned to the user. This way the agency still keeps control over its own data while the user does not need to make frequent visits to the agency.For some years, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and Luxembourg Employment Study (LES) have made use of an advanced remote access system. At Statistics Netherlands and at other statistical institutes recently the need for a similar system has been expressed. In this article, we discuss the characteristics, limitations and desired properties of a remote access system. We illustrate the discussion by the system used at LIS/LES.

Although the decennial census began in 1790, detailed information was first listed for each individual in 1850. One of the great archival projects of the past two decades has been to make huge samples from each of the 1850–2000 censuses machine-readable—including at least 1 percent of the American population enumerated in each year. The product of this immense effort is available free of charge through the magnificent Web site, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series; in Google, seek IPUMS and choose the first entry). Across all years, a given census question (for example, place of birth) is in the same place in the dataset, and each possible response to the question (for example, Germany) has the same numerical code. Special variables have been created on the basis of explicit assumptions, to make the data easier to use. For 1850–1870, each household member's relationship to the head was not ascertained by the census, but an IPUMS-constructed variable . . .

This article asks whether the rising number of women in the paid labor force over the last half-century has been accompanied by a parallel trend of increased recognition of a breadwinning status for women, or if traditional role conceptions have persisted in spite of women's changed economic and social circumstances. I theorize that employer-provided benefits are a unique form of compensation that, by helping parents balance work and family, directly affect parents in their capacities as breadwinners. As such, assessing women's and men's access to these benefits over the period of women's rising labor force participation can be very revealing of the acceptance of women as breadwinners. To acquire a general picture of women's and men's access to employer-provided benefits, I compare access to benefits from 1940 to 1990 in a modal women's occupation (professional nurses) to a modal men's occupation (automobile mechanics and repairmen). Through the studied time span, these occupations are the largest comparably sized women's and men's occupations that are also similar in pay level and extent of unionization. This allows me to control for pay level and unionization, important alternative explanations for women's restricted access to benefits. I hypothesize that nurses have had more restricted access to employer-provided benefits than have auto mechanics. I find a disadvantage for nurses relative to auto mechanics through most of the time period, which nonetheless diminishes and then reverses slightly at the end. Taking into consideration subtleties, as well as patterns masked in the data as presented, these findings suggest at best a rather slow rate of acceptance of a breadwinning status for women, and at worst, a continuation of traditional gender norms.

I use 1990 US census data and 22 semi-structured interviews with Brazilian immigrant youth in Boston to show how Brazilians are becoming racialized into the black-white binary of American society, but how over time they manage to escape the downward mobility of Hispanic/Latino categorization by becoming American and playing off US natives Spanish-centered understanding of Hispanics/Latinos (which does not include them). Successful Americanization for Brazilians means not becoming part of a stigmatized Hispanic/Latino group associated with low socio-economic status, racial discrimination, and on the heels of massive new immigration from Latin America, disempowered immigrant status rather than becoming Hispanic/Latino as part and parcel of becoming American. The Brazilian case exposes some of the assumptions behind dominant US racial/ethnic categories (particularly white and black), and it lays bare the complexities and contradictions in the Hispanic/Latino panethnic category, pinpointing anew its racial basis and embedded immigrant analogy. That Hispanic/Latino classification continues to conflate race and immigrant status as US-bound immigration from Latin America has increased, expanded, and raised the foreign-born share of the US Hispanic/Latino population prompts a re-evaluation of who the group includes (and why or why not), as well as a re-assessment of African American/Latino positions and relations in the US ethno-racial hierarchy.

Often overlooked in the history of Progressive Era labor, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work have nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. The stories of the men who hunted work between city and countryside, men alternately portrayed as either romantic adventurers or degenerate outsiders, have not been easy to find. Nor have these stories found a comfortable home in either rural or labor histories. Indispensable Outcasts weaves together history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race, manly responsibility, community, and citizenship. Combining incisive cultural criticism with the empiricism of a more traditional labor history, Frank Tobias Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures were in fact integral to the communities they briefly inhabited and to the cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality they embodied. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of the World and presents a complex and compelling portrait of hobo life, from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic of "transient mutuality" that enabled survival and resistance on the road. More than a study of hobo life, this interdisciplinary book is also a meditation on the possibilities for writing history from the bottom up, as well as a frank discussion of the ways historians' fascination with personal narrative has colored their construction and presentation of history.

The demand for text messaging relative to telephony, the amount of time spent participating in virtual worlds or digital games relative to television viewing, and the value of camera phone services all depend on how persons make sense in communication. Three models for communication are information transfer, storytelling, and presence. While analysis of communication has tended to employ the first two models, the third model provides a better orientation for recognizing and organizing useful knowledge about sensuous choices in communication. Making sense of presence of another like oneself is a good that drives demand for a wide range of communication services. From study of living organisms, artistic masterpieces, and media history, this work documents knowledge about this good. Providing means for persons to make sense of presence encompasses competition among communication services with different sensory qualities. Competition to support this good offers enduring opportunities to create high industry value.

Learning a function of many arguments is viewed from the perspective of high-dimensional numerical quadrature. It is shown that many of the popular ensemble learning procedures can be cast in this framework. In particular randomized methods, including bagging and random forests, are seen to correspond to random Monte Carlo integration methods each based on particular importance sampling strategies. Nonrandom boosting methods are seen to correspond to deterministic quasi Monte Carlo integration techniques. This view helps explain some of their properties and suggests modifications to them that can substantially improve their accuracy while dramatically improving computational performance.

The midcentury GI bills were the largest direct scholarship program for higher education in American history. I use a comparison group created by the sharp cutoff date of the Korean War GI bill to evaluate the effects of the Korean War GI bill on postsecondary educational attainment and access to college by the disadvantaged. I then bound the likely effects of the World War II GI bill based on elasticities estimated for the Korean War GI bill and new estimates using older veterans as a comparison group for younger ones. I find that the combination of the Korean War and WWII GI bills probably increased total postsecondary attainment among all men born between 1921 and 1933 by about 15 to 20 percent, with smaller effects for surrounding cohorts. The impacts of both programs on college attainment were apparently concentrated among veterans from families in the upper half of the distribution of socioeconomic status.

The aim of this paper is to compare baby boomer retirees with previous generations on their overall level, distribution, and composition of family income and on the adequacy of this income in maintaining their economic well- being in retirement. To do this analysis we use projections of retirement income from the Social Security Administrations Modeling of Income in the Near Term (MINT) data system. In absolute terms, measured by real per capita income and poverty rates, we find that baby boomers will be better off than current retirees. In relative terms, however, many baby boomers will be worse off than current retirees. First, MINT predicts changes over time in the relative ranking of important subgroups within specific cohorts, with some subgroups experiencing substantial gains in real per capita income and other subgroups experiencing little gain over time. Second, while both pre- and post-retirement incomes are rising, post-retirement incomes do not rise as much as pre-retirement incomes. Consequently, baby boomers are less likely than current retirees to have enough post-retirement income to maintain their pre-retirement living standards. These findings hold up to various definitions of family income and replacement rates.

We present a three-stage estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage, we estimate a non-parametric hedonic home price function. Second, we recover each consumer's taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for utility maximization. Finally, we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics. As an application of our methods, we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize.

Focuses on the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), a project to make aggregate census data accessible within a Geographic Information System framework for historical population research in the U.S. Range of technological innovations attributed to the feasibility of NHGIS; Key to the accessibility of census summary files; Work components of the project.

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. The first essay investigates the effects of generic entry on post-patent price competition in the prescription drug market using NDC Health data on 18 oral solids that lost their patent sometime between February 1998 and 2002. I am able to characterize the impact of endogenous generic entry on branded and generic prices, conditional on payment type (i.e., cash, Medicaid, third party). Based on the findings in this paper, the overall, long-term impacts of the 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act (Waxman-Hatch Act) are yet to be determined. The second essay develops a theoretical model of earnings where human capital is the central explanatory variable. The analysis and estimation strategy stems from the Mincerian simple schooling model. Human capital investments (i.e., schooling) are incorporated into a model based on individual wealth maximization. We utilize the conventional economic models of supply and demand to derive an optimal level of schooling function. Using the NLSY79, we stratify our sample into one-year work experience intervals for 1985-1989 to identify the overtaking cohort (i.e., the years of work experience at which an individual's observed earnings approximately equal what they would have been based on schooling and ability alone). We employ the AFQT score as an ability proxy and consider its possible endogeneity for several estimation strategies. The third essay attempts to address the bias inherent in the use of potential, as opposed to actual, work experience measures in human capital models. While such a proxy is often deemed reasonable for males, problems still exist;specifically, unemployment spells manifesting themselves as active job searches or withdrawal from the labor market. Presumably, such activities have different effects away from employment status, over-time work, moonlighting, and multiple-job holding. We employ actual work experience data from the NLSY79 and the PSID and extend our findings to a data set in which actual measures of work experience are not available;specifically, the IPUMS, with the creation of predicted work experience measures.

Between 1910 and 1970 millions of southern-born Americans moved to the North or West in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families. Given the demographic significance of this event, the Great Migration has been thoroughly investigated by scholars interested in: the push factors that drove the migrants from the South, the pull factors that attracted them to the North and West, and the fate of migrants after their arrival in their destination communities. Yet, virtually no attention has been devoted to the distances traversed during the Great Migration, or to how the distances traveled varied by key sociodemographic characteristics of the migrants, or over time. We use data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for 1920, 1940, and 1970 to study the distances moved by southern migrants at key points during the Great Migration, focusing on the degree to which the distances traveled by migrants differed by race and gender, as well as by other, selected, characteristics of the migrants. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic, quantitative, examination of the distances traveled during the Great Migration. Results suggest that black migrants were more likely to move shorter distances compared to white migrants across the key points. Further, the likelihood of moving shorter distances increased for women over the period. There is also evidence that the influence of education on distance migrated varies by race, such that white migrants experienced disproportionate increases in distance traveled relative to black migrants.