After dramatic declines in poverty from 1950 to the early 1970s in the United States, progress stalled. This article examines the association between trends in poverty and income growth, economic inequality, and changes in family structure using three measures of poverty: an absolute measure, a relative measure, and a quasi-relative one. I found that income growth explains most of the trend in absolute poverty, while inequality generally plays the most significant role in explaining trends in relative poverty. Rising inequality in the 1970s and 1980s was especially important in explaining increases in poverty among Hispanics, whereas changes in family structure played a significant role for children and African Americans through 1990. Notably, changes in family structure no longer had a significant association with trends in poverty for any group in the 1990s.

Poverty may have always been with us, but it hasn't always been the same. In an in-depth look at trends, patterns, and causes of poverty in the United States, John Iceland combines the latest statistical information, historical data, and social scientific theory to provide a comprehensive picture of poverty in America--a picture that shows how poverty is measured and understood and how this has changed over time, as well as how public policies have grappled with poverty as a political issue and an economic reality. Why does poverty remain so pervasive? Is it unavoidable? Are people from particular racial or ethnic backgrounds or family types inevitably more likely to be poor? What can we expect over the next few years? What are the limits of policy? These are just a few of the questions this book addresses. In a remarkably concise, readable, and accessible format, Iceland explores what the statistics and the historical record, along with most of the major works on poverty, tell us. At the same time, he advances arguments about the relative nature and structural causes of poverty--arguments that eloquently contest conventional wisdom about the links between individual failure, family breakdown, and poverty in America. At a time when the personal, political, social, and broader economic consequences of poverty are ever clearer and more pressing, the depth and breadth of understanding offered by this handbook should make it an essential resource and reference for all scholars, politicians, policymakers, and people of conscience in America.

This paper explores the economic status of the elderly in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. It has been widely believed that reduced earnings of aging workers in these periods were fully supplemented by increased earnings of children. The patterns of individual consumptionexpenditures, however, indicate that children's supports were no longer an important means of old age security after the end of the nineteenth century. Older males who were out of the labor force were much poorer than active workers of a similar age. The retired were not as much protected by family support as active workers. This result indicates that the previous studies based mainly on active workers overstate the extent of economic progress of the entire elderly population in theindustrial era. This study tends to support the conventional belief that the rise of the welfare state was a response to the emerging social problems in the era of industrialization such asunemployment, poverty, and dependence of the elderly.

The articles in this special issue of Continuity and Change arose from a workshop held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, between 9 and 11 September 1999, hosted by the Universitat de les Illes Balears. The workshop was called to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of another conference, that held in Cambridge at the Faculty of History and at Trinity College in September 1969. It was this conference in 1969 that resulted in the publication of Household and family in past time: comparative studies in the size and structure of the domestic group over the last three centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial North America, with further material from Western Europe, which itself has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Household and family in past time (hereafter abbreviated to HFPT), in part largely due to the analytic introduction on the history of the family contributed by Peter Laslett, subsequently became a seminal work in the field. It not only mapped out the methodological groundwork for the quantitative study of the historical co-resident domestic group, but perhaps unwittingly helped define a research agenda into comparative familial and social structural history that was followed for many years by Laslett, his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and researchers from around the world. It became in a sense a manifesto, and one with which Peter Laslett personally was inexorably linked. Thus, with the sad death of Peter on 8 November 2001, this special issue of Continuity and Change took on a new double purpose: not only to mark the path-breaking 1969 conference and the subsequent publication of HFPT, but also to pay tribute to the remarkable life and work of Peter Laslett.

This paper examines the labor market status of older males in the era of industrialization, focusing on the question of how the extent of pressure toward retirement varied across different occupations, and how it changed over time. A comparison of hazard of retirement across occupations shows that men who had better occupations in terms of economic status and work conditions were less likely to retire than were those with poorer jobs. This result tends to reject the recent view that retirement was more voluntary than forced as early as a century ago. The difficulty faced by older workers in the labor market, as measured by the relative incidence of long-term unemployment, was relatively severe among craftsmen, operatives, and salesmen. In constrast, aged farmers, professionals, managers, and proprietors appear to have fared well in the labor market. The pattern of shifts in the occupational structure that occurred between 1880 and 1940 suggests that industrialization had brought a growth of the sectors in which the pressure toward departure from employment at old ages was relatively strong.

This paper demonstrates that economic decline and renewal is the norm among urban neighborhoods in the United States. But change in neighborhood economic status often proceeds so slowly that many urban dwellers may not perceive their own neighborhood to be part of this process. Nevertheless, the decline in economic status of a given neighborhood is central to theoretical models of filtering in which aging housing stocks are passed down to lower income families. Similarly, renewal of low-income neighborhoods is implied by theoretical models of urban redevelopment. Together, these models suggest that neighborhoods rise and fall, and then rise again over extended periods of time. Moreover, the pace of change can be accelerated or moderated by neighborhood externalities and other attributes of the local community that affect migration of people and capital into and out of the neighborhood. These issues are studied using a unique sample based on census tract data for 29 MSAs. The data spanthe 1950 to 1990 period. The long horizon ensures that slow-moving changes in neighborhood economic status can be observed. Data from all of the years are coded to year-2000 tract-specific geographic boundaries. This ensures consistent geographies over time. Findings indicate compelling support for the idea that neighborhoods move up and down the economic ladder: neighborhood income typically changes by roughly 12 percent of the local MSA income with each passing decade. Additional findings overwhelmingly indicate that rates of change are further influenced by the presence of neighborhoodexternalities: neighborhood attributes associated with local investment in human and physical capital enhance the future economic status of the neighborhood. A host of policy implications follow. For example, results suggest that encouraging homeownership will serve to elevate future neighborhood economic status, while construction of place-based public housing has the opposite effect.

This paper explores the political economy of anti-discrimination legislation during the ascendancy of the Civil Rights Movement. It traces the diffusion of state-level fair employment laws and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in promoting such legislation. Activism by Jewish organizations, the NAACP, and unions (particularly the CIO) were key factors in securing the adoption of fair employment legislation. Less unemployment, a larger Catholic population, more competitive political systems, and Democratic governorships appear to have been less important. Predicted times for the adoption of fair employment laws by the southern states underscore the necessity of federal intervention to establish legal protection from job market discrimination. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

By the time Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 98 percent of non-southern blacks (40 percent of all blacks) were already covered by state-level 'fair employment' laws which prohibited labor market discrimination. This paper assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers' income, unemployment, labor force participation, and occupational and industrial distributions relative to whites using a difference-in-difference-in-difference framework. In general, the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s, and the laws had relatively small effects on the labor market outcomes of black men compared to those of black women.

This paper measures the housing market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s using household-level and census-tract data. State-level fair-housing' laws attempted to bar discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin in the sale, rental, and financing of housing, and they were the direct antecedents of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their influence on the housing market outcomes of African Americans has not been assessed in previous work by economists, but policy variation across states during the 1960s provides an opportunity to pursue such estimates. During the 1960s, blacks' housing market outcomes improved relative to whites' and the proportion of exclusively white census tracts declined markedly. But I find little evidence that the fair housing laws contributed to those changes. Rather, the bulk of the evidence indicates that the laws' effects on blacks' housing market outcomes, on residential segregation, and on the value of property in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods were negligible.

This paper employs a simple intertemporal model and simulation to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value. The existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity constraints is not Pareto improving. Historical evidence from the housing market, which exploits the fact that a clearly identifiable group, war veterans, enjoyed the greatest access to mortgage credit in the postwar era, supports the model. The results suggest that more recent mortgage market innovations have served primarily to increase prices, rather than increase home ownership rates. (JEL D91; E21; G21; R21)

Although homeownership is commonly portrayed as a single household living in a detached residential structure, the landscape of homeownership in the United States offers a diverse array of homeownership opportunities beyond traditional single- family homes with a single or married-couple borrower(s), some of which provide more affordable entry points into homeownership for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. This brief identifies and quantifies these homeownership types for the United States and Western U.S. states in the 12th Federal Reserve District.i These homeownership types include condominiums (condos), housing cooperatives (co-ops), community land trusts (CLTs), tenancies in common (TICs), multiunit buildings with an onsite owner, homes with accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and homeowners sharing a unit with extended family or others. The brief develops a typology organizing these homeownership categories by whether they involve shared ownership, a shared property, or shared occupancy. The brief outlines and contextualizes each homeownership type and provides estimated unit counts for each geographic scale, where possible. It then discusses innovations in the community development field, as well as outstanding barriers to development and lending for new units in different homeownership categories. Finally, the brief outlines additional research and data collection needed to further clarify the accessibility and distribution of these homeownership types.

This paper studies the response of housing marets to immigration shocks. Following Card (1990), I examine the changes in rental prices in Miami and three comparison groups after the Mariel boat lift. This exogenous immigration shock added an extra 9% to Miami's renter population in 1980. I find that rents increased from 8% to 11% more in Miami than in the comparison groups between 1979 and 1981. By 1983 the rent differential was still 7%. Rental units of higher quality were not affected by the immigration shock. Units occupied by low-income Hispanic residents in 1979 experienced an extra 8% differential hike with respect to other low-income units. Relative housing prices moved in the opposite direction from rents in the short run.

In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience. If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I provide evidence for the fact that successive cohorts have greater returns to experience. Next, I construct proxies for multi-tasking using Paul Ostermans 1992 survey of workplace practices in U.S. establishments, and find that (i) later cohorts choose jobs with greater multi-tasking, (ii) the rate of within-job wage growth rises with the degree of multi-tasking, and (iii) the returns to experience are larger in jobs with more multi-tasking. Finally, I find mixed evidence on the effect of unobserved heterogeneity, which implies that part of these larger returns to experience may be because those in jobs with more multi-tasking have higher unobserved ability.

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.

Many automated systems for detecting threats are based on matching a new database record to known attack types. However, this approach can only spot known threats and thus researchers have also begun to use unsupervised approaches based on detecting outliers or anomalous examples. A popular method of finding these outliers is to use the distance to an example's k nearest neighbors as a measure of unusualness. However, existing algorithms for finding distance-based outliers have poor scaling properties, making it difficult to apply them to large datasets typically available in security domains. In this paper, we propose modifications to a simple, but quadratic, algorithm for finding distance-based outliers, and show that it achieves near linear time scaling allowing it to be applied to real data sets with millions of examples and many features.

Following World War II millions of cotton workers, especially African-Americans, left the fields forever, and farmers mechanized the cotton harvest. Prevailing empirical studies argue that high factory wages lured farmhands away. Based on newly reconstructed data, we estimate the causes of the demise of harvest employment in 12 major cotton-producing states from 1949-1964 and find important roles for mechanization, government farm programs, higher nonagricultural wages, and falling cotton prices. On net, our estimates indicate that factors affecting farm labor demand, not labor-supply influences, caused the disappearance of hand-picked cotton-results that reverse the best econometric work to date.

Defining outliers by their distance to neighboring examples is a popular approach to finding unusual examples in a data set. Recently, much work has been conducted with the goal of finding fast algorithms for this task. We show that a simple nested loop algorithm that in the worst case is quadratic can give near linear time performance when the data is in random order and a simple pruning rule is used. We test our algorithm on real high-dimensional data sets with millions of examples and show that the near linear scaling holds over several orders of magnitude. Our average case analysis suggests that much of the efficiency is because the time to process non-outliers, which are the majority of examples, does not depend on the size of the data set.