I investigate whether there is an underlying tendency for divorced and never married persons to marry within their own marital history group in the United States. A theory of assortative mating suggests that if the never married and the divorced were to intermarry, their differences in distributional ties would create inefficiencies in the marriage; partly in order to avoid the inefficiencies, they tend to be homogamous. I apply log-linear models to marriages from the Vital Statistics Marriage Files, 1970-1988, to investigate the presence of the homogamous tendency. Consistent with the theory, the never married and divorced are more likely to marry within theiry group than to intermarry, even when removing the influences of relative group size and controlling for spousal education and age. Additional findings indicate that: a) in general, the tendency toward homogamy weakened between 1970 and 1988; and b) no evidence is available that the divorced and the never married engage in status exchange in order to intermarry and hence are groups ordered on a social hierarchy. Implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper explores whether racial stigma can explain the adverse treatment of blacks by whites. We utilize data on lynchings over a period of time that provide a natural experiment for determining how whites treated blacks who were former slaves. Latent variable specifications of individual lynchings are estimated where former slave status and economic factors are hypothesized to determine lynching probabilities. Parameter estimates show that conditional on being a lynching victim between 1882 - 1920, the probability of being lynched during 1882 - 1905 was conditioned by the racial stigma associated with being a former slave. However racial discrimination, captured by a measure of labor market competition between blacks and whites for jobs in the cotton-based agricultural sector, matters even more.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of black and white southerners left farms and rural towns to try their fate in the region's cities. This transition brought about significant economic, social, and cultural changes in both urban centers and the countryside. Focusing on Nashville and its Middle Tennessee hinterland, Louis Kyriakoudes explores the impetus for this migration and illuminates its effects on regional development.Kyriakoudes argues that increased rural-to-urban migration in the late nineteenth century grew out of older seasonal and circular migration patterns long employed by southern farm families. These mobility patterns grew more urban-oriented and more permanent as rural blacks and whites turned increasingly to urban migration in order to cope with rapid economic and social change.The urban economy was particularly welcoming to women, offering freedom from the male authority that dominated rural life. African Americans did not find the same freedoms, however, as whites found ways to harness the forces of modernization to deny them access to economic and social opportunity. By linking urbanization, economic and social change, and popular cultural institutions, Kyriakoudes lends insight into the development of an urban, white, working-class identity that reinforced racial divisions and laid the demographic and social foundations for today's modern, urban South.

This chapter, which examines internal migration in the United States in the nineteenth century, studies the characteristics of intercounty migrants and estimates the hazard rate of changing county of residence within a year. It investigates whether return migration was common and the characteristics of return migrants, and finally, examines the costs of migration, in terms of mortality. The study uses a large longitudinal data set of residential histories for Union Army veterans, allowing the investigation of not just the migration decision through a richer specification than previous researchers have been able to use, but also the return migration decision, which may be workers' optimal reaction to temporary economic shocks. Longitudinal microdata is also used to study the relationship between migration and life expectancy. Because migration, particularly to urban areas, may have decreased the life expectancy of workers, a mortality wage premium may partly account for wage differentials between cities and rural areas.

Beginning in the early 1970s social science research was transformed by new subfields in sociology, anthropology, developmental psychology, social history, and demography that emphasized the scientific study of personal lives. This refocus revolutionized demographic studies by enabling researchers to go beyond the description of populations and aggregate population groups to the behavioral modeling of the individual decisions and actions that constitute population dynamics

This paper examines relationship between interethnic marriages and economic assimilation among immigrants in the United States. Two alternative hypotheses are considered: productivity hypothesis and selection hypothesis. According to the productivity hypothesis, immigrants married to native-born spouses may assimilate faster than immigrants married to foreign-born spouses because spouses play an integral role in the human capital accumulation of their partners. Alternatively, the relation between interethnic marriages and assimilation may be spurious because intermarried immigrants may be a selected subsample from the population of all married immigrants. These alternative hypotheses are analyzed within a model in which earnings of immigrants and their interethnic marital status are jointly determined. The main empirical finding is that selection hypothesis is important, but there remains a sizeable and positive effect of interethnic marriages on economic assimilation of immigrants.

This analysis uses data from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses to explore individual and contextual factors that influence U.S.-born Hispanic adults to maintain Spanish alongside English. Cuban of Puerto Rican ancestry, living with a Spanish-dominant person, having children in ones household, and working in a service- or health-related job all increase the odds of bilingualism. Contextual incentives growth in a states Hispanic population, bilinguals status, and Hispanics political influence also positively influence the odds of bilingualism. By showing a positive relationship between upward mobility, political participation, and bilingualism, my findings suggest that it is possible for Hispanics in the U.S. to maintain selected characteristics of their origin culture while becoming American.

Family structure has long been considered an important determinant of the life opportunities of children. In particular, children growing up in single-mother families have been viewed as particularly disadvantaged. However, the relationship between family structure and young adults' occupational attainment has never been examined in historical perspective, despite the substantial share of children living in single-parent households in the first few decades of the 20th century. The current study will contribute to the knowledge of this understudied area by examining the occupational outcomes of two groups of young, never-married women in 1920: those residing in households headed by their fathers and those residing in households headed by their single mothers. The results reveal that daughters in female-headed households did not experience disadvantage in occupational attainment relative to their counterparts in male-headed households. There are two potential explanations for this finding. First, mothers' personal resources apparently served to alleviate some of the disadvantage experienced by daughters in female-headed households. In addition, prevailing gender norms restricting the range of jobs available to all women, regardless of marital status or family type. Family size and ethnicity are strongly associated with the occupational attainment of daughters as well, although the association varies by household structure.

Although there has been much research on the effects of national origin, English speaking ability and educational attainment on the assimilation of immigrants, there has been little work on the effect of age of immigration on assimilation. This paper uses 1990 Census (IPUMS) data to assess the effects of age immigration on the relative earnings performance of 30-year-old immigrant men. Earnings regressions are run for three cohorts of immigrants defined by their age of arrival and a decomposition analysis is conducted to explain earnings gaps between each of the three immigrant cohorts and a sample of nonimmigrant men. We find that immigrants that arrive in the US before their tenth birthday have higher earnings and higher rates of return to education compared to immigrants who arrive at older age. Late arrivals, on the other hand, have a substantial earnings disadvantage relative to natives and seem to be more adversely effected by low levels of ethnic capital. We also found that a substantial income gap remained between older immigrants and natives even after estimating what their earnings would have been had they possessed the native human capital characteristics Age of arrival clearly matters and should be a consideration in designing immigration policy.

Following migration to the West, intergenerational increases in the prevalence of diabetes among Japanese have been reported.1,2 Diabetes prevalence among second- and third-generation Japanese American adults was considerably higher compared with the rates in Japan.3,4 This phenomenon has generated the "Westernization hypothesis," whereby gradual adaptation of a Western lifestyle, including a high-fat diet and physical inactivity, contributes to an increase in diabetes.5The extent to which the prevalence of diabetes is high among all Japanese populations in the United States and its regional variation are unknown. East Coast Japanese, who tend to be less acculturated newcomers,6 are likely to have a different profile of diabetes prevalence and associated risk compared with West Coast Japanese. Information specific to geographically defined ethnic groups is needed to tailor interventions and preventive services. We report the results of a 1999 mail survey of the largest Japanese residential community in New York State.

The authors describe a public use microdata sample of the 1860 slave population of the United States created at the Minnesota Population Center. They discuss the key substantive issues that quantitative historians are likely to address with the data set, such as the demography of slavery, patterns in slaveholding, and miscegenation. They outline the sample design, data-entry procedures, variable availability, and documenation of the final data set.