Criminal offenders in the United States typically forfeit voting rights as collateral consequences of their felony convictions. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of the origins and development of these felon disfranchisement provisions across the states. Because such laws tend to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities, we build on theories of group threat to test whether racial threat influenced their passage. Our event history analysis shows that the rate of adoption peaked in the late 1860s and 1870s, the period when extending voting rights to African Americans was most ardently contested. Consistent with one version of the racial threat thesis, we find that large nonwhite prison populations increase the risk of passing restrictive laws, even when the effects of time, region, economic conditions, political partisanship, population, and punitiveness are statistically controlled. These findings are important for understanding restrictions on the civil rights of citizens convicted of crime, and more generally for the role of racial conflict in American political development.

Immigration scholars agree that migrants are not random samples of the populations from which they originated; however, they disagree considerably about how immigrants are selected and how this selection affects inequality in the United States. Examining the effects of selectivity requires comparable data on both the sending and receiving sides of the migration process, which only a few case studies have used. To address this gap in the literature, I compiled a unique dataset from published educational attainment data in 32 immigrant-sending countries and corresponding U.S. Census data on immigrants from those countries. To examine the effects of immigrants' educational selectivity on children of immigrants' educational outcomes, I also analyze 1990 IPUMS Census data, Current Population Survey data from 1997-2001, and Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey data from 1992 and 1996. My findings run contrary to the common assumption that many immigrants are negatively selected: nearly all immigrants (with the critical exception of Puerto Ricans) are more educated than the populations in their home countries, but Asian immigrants are more highly selected than Latin American immigrants. Also, earlier waves of Mexican immigrants are more positively selected than later waves. I find that as immigrants' educational selectivity increases, the educational attainment of their second-generation also increases, at both the group and individual levels of analysis. The more positive selection of Asian immigrants helps explain their second generations' superior high school graduation rates, average years of schooling, and college attendance rates as compared to Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or Latin Americans. I also find that immigrant group structural characteristics (including selection and average socioeconomic status) shape educational outcomes among immigrants' children beyond the influence of their own family members. My findings challenge arguments that certain national-origin groups value education more than others by highlighting how the inherently unequal structure of the immigration process itself produces immigrant groups with varying levels of relative pre-migration educational attainment. Thus, I argue that some national-origin groups excel in school while others lag behind because inequalities in the relative pre-migration educational attainments of immigrants are often reproduced among their children in the United States.

After two decades in the economic doldrums, the U.S. economy revived strongly in the late 1990s, as the rate of productivity growth doubled. Although continued rapid growth during the next several decades is certainly possible, it is not assured-and the staked are enormous. This chapter outlines that is known about the sources of U.S. economic growth and describes steps that policymakers-public and private-can take to realize the potential for growth.

Most studies of the intersection of marriage and ethnic assimilation focus on partner choice rather than marital timing as an indicator of immigrant adaptation. Yet whether or when immigrant groups assumed an American marriage pattern can shed light on the nature of immigrant adaptation, its pace, and completeness. We examine ethnic differences for European Americans in the marriage timing of select birth cohorts from 1850 through 1950, utilizing information from the 1910 and 1980 Census Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Our paper utilizes event history analysis to predict timing of marriage by birth cohort, ethnicity, and nativity. The results indicate much greater ethnic dispersion in marriage timing among the cohorts born between 1851 and 1880 than for those born from 1921 to 1950, among both women and men. The sharp decline in ethnic variation in marriage timing suggests that with increasing duration in the United States a particularly American pattern of marriage evolved. Nonetheless, despite considerable compression among European ethnics in the timing of marriage, as of 1980 ethnicity continued to distinguish age at marriage.

The literature has largely ignored white poverty, perhaps because discrimination, particularly institutionalized discrimination, is not a factor driving the process. White poverty is also more easily ignored because it is rarely concentrated to the same extent as central city black poverty. The major exception to the diffusion of white poverty is Appalachia, a region that for decades has experienced the greatest concentration of white poverty in the U.S. My goal is to evaluate the role played by differences in human capital and economic opportunity on the outcomes of both Appalachian and non-Appalachian poor whites. I argue that a main determinant in the Appalachia's relative economic deprivation is lower levels of overall human capital and economic opportunity than the rest of the U.S. The above analysis will be divided into three essays. In the first essay, I estimate a three-stage wage equation model with two additional endogenous regressors, migration and employment, to determine how much of the Appalachian wage gap can be explained by the effects of human capital and local conditions and to estimate returns to migration using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, 1979. I find differences in human capital and economic opportunity account for all of the differences in employment and most of the difference in wages. Migration offers small absolute returns for Appalachians, but does not raise wages to the level of poor white non-Appalachians. The second essay uses the same data and model but simultaneously estimates the parameters using Maximum Simulated Likelihood (MSL) to achieve higher efficiency than the multi-step method. Human capital differences again explain almost all of the wage and employment gaps. Migration offers no return using MSL in this setting. The final essay decomposes the wage gap between Appalachia and the rest of the country into quantities and prices of human capital and industry and occupation shares, Data are taken from the Integrated Micro Public Use (IPUMS) census data project. The large increases in the wage gap during the 1980s were largely caused by changes in income inequality and skill prices unfavorable to Appalachians.

The human capital of individuals appears to be correlated with ethnic group averages in the previous generation, even after controlling for the direct effect of parental investment in the human capital of children. This observed association is often interpreted as evidence for ethnic peer effects, but it might be confounded by omitted variables and measurement error in parental skills. In order to determine whether, and to what extent, this relationship is caused by ethnic peer effects, I develop the following instrumental variables strategy: (1) the occupational mix of new immigrant arrivals during the Great Migration is used to instrument for ethnic capital, and (2) age at arrival is used to instrument for parental skills. Using 1910 and 1920 US Census data on first- and second generation Americans, I find evidence of a significant ethnic capital effect, confirming that the persistence of skill differentials across individuals is partly attributable to their belonging to particular ethnic groups through a channel independent of their respective parents skills. As expected, the results indicate that OLS estimates significantly understate the role of parental skills and slightly overstate the magnitude of ethnic peer effects, which is consistent with the motivation for using instrumental variables. Finally, a number of specification checks support the notion that geographic concentration and endogamy rates accentuate the effect of ethnic capital by promoting a higher level of interaction among individuals in a given ethnic group.

By the mid-nineteenth century school enrollment rates in the United States exceeded those of any other nation in the world and by the early twentieth century the United States had accomplished mass education at all levels. No country was able to close the gap until the last quarter of the twentieth century. For much of its history U.S. education was spurred by a set of virtues, the most important of which were public provision by small fiscally independent districts, public funding, secular control, gender neutrality, open access, a forgiving system, and an academic curriculum. The outcomes of the virtues were an enormous diffusion of educational institutions and the early spread of mass education. America borrowed its educational institutions from Europe but added to them in ways that served to enhance competition and openness. The virtues of long ago need not be the virtues of today, and they also need not have been virtuous in all places and at all times in the past. In this essay we explore the historical origins of these virtues and find that almost all were in place in the period before the American Civil War.

Little is known about the influence of school choice programs on race & economic segregation in public schools. Studies of housing segregation suggest that small differences in the preferences of particular race or socioeconomic groups have the potential to produce large-scale patterns of segregation. In this study, I raise three questions regarding the link between individual choice & educational segregation: (1) Are the school choices of higher status families driven by a desire to avoid schools populated by students they consider to be of lower race or class status? (2) Can other school features, such as safety, appearance, & educational quality, explain apparent race- or class-based choices? (3) Can families' choices of schools be linked directly with segregation patterns independent of school district policies that may interfere with (or galvanize) the ability of people to exercise their choices? To answer these questions, I analyze magnet school application data from a large city to explore the choices of families for schools that vary in racial & economic composition. Findings show that white families avoid schools with higher percentages of non-white students. The tendency of white families to avoid schools with higher percentages of non-whites cannot be accounted for by other school characteristics such as test scores, safety, or poverty rates. I also find that wealthier families avoid schools with higher poverty rates. The choices of white & wealthier students lead to increased racial & economic segregation in the neighborhood schools that these students leave. Moreover, the link between choice & segregation cannot be explained by school district policies. Findings suggest that laissez faire school choice policies, which allow the unfettered movement of children in & out of schools, may further deteriorate the educational conditions for disadvantaged students left behind in local public schools.

A chorus of voices appears to proclaim unanimously that America is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo asserted the existence of such a crisis in his introduction to a March 2000 report that documents a continuing and growing housing affordability crisis throughout the nation. Indeed, Secretary Cuomo regularly justified aggressive requests for funding by pointing to this crisis. Advocacy groups for the poor such as the Housing Assistance Council pepper their documents with assertions that the federal government should commit to a comprehensive strategy for combating the housing affordability crisis in rural America. Trade associations such as the National Association of Home Builders decree that America is facing a silent housing affordability crisis. The National Association of Realtors agrees: there is a continuing, growing crisis in housing affordability and homeownership that is gripping our nation.

There is a substantial literature arguing that financial development contributes to economic growth. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by examining the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940. Specifically, we make three contributions. First, drawing on the banking history literature, we carefully control for factors that could confound a causal interpretation of the effect of financial development on growth. Second, drawing on available data for this period, we examine the pathways through which financial development can affect growth; in particular, we examine the impact of these laws on a range of farm, manufacturing, and human capital outcomes. Third, we document that not all forms of financial development have a positive effect on economic growth. In particular indiscriminate lending can negatively impact economic growth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was made a Progressive lion upon his pithy dissent to the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark decision to overturn a New York statute restricting (male) bakers working hours. The 14thAmendment, said Holmes famously, does not enact the Social Statics of Mr. Herbert Spencer.1 Twenty-two years later, in another well-known case, Holmes wrote for the majority, which upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law proposing involuntary sterilization of persons believed to be mentally retardedthe feebleminded, in the jargon of the day. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes, Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell (1927). Three generations of imbeciles, Holmes volunteered, is enough.How does an opponent of Spencerian Social Darwinism come to endorse coercive sterilization of the unfit? This essay argues that, as a matter of history, there is no contradiction in the views that underwrite the two opinions. It is not merely that both statutes proposed to subordinate individual rights to a putatively greater social good. Progressive thought, it turns out, did not have to travel far when it moved from labor statutes conceived as protecting society from Social Darwinism to eugenic legislation conceived as protecting society from persons deemed biologically unfit. The heart of the Progressive enterpriseto improve society by uplifting the industrial poorwas not the whole of the Progressive enterprise. In fact, in the Progressive Era especially, eugenic treatment of those deemed biologically inferior was promoted as ameans to the end of uplifting the industrial poor.

Recent studies suggest that health inequalities across socio-economic groups in the US are large and have been growing. We hypothesize that, as in other, non-health contexts, this pattern occurs because more educated people are better able than to take advantage of technological advances in medicine than are the less educated. We test this hypothesis by relating education gradients in mortality with measures medical innovation. We focus on overall mortality and cancer mortality, examining both the incidence of cancer and survival conditional on disease incidence. We find evidence supporting the hypothesis that education gradients are steeper for diseases with more innovation.

The 1880 U.S. population database contains records for the over 50 million individuals enumerated in the census. This unique data set is the result of collaboration between the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). To make census data available to genealogists, LDS volunteers transcribed the characteristics of all U.S. residents in 1880. The MPC verified and corrected this transcription, in exchange for the right to disseminate the resulting database for scholarly and educational purposes. The authors consider editing and coding procedures and a range of problems: missing and incorrect geographic identifiers, data-processing errors, duplicate and missing cases, and inaccurate breaks between households. They also classify variables according to standardized coding systems, making the database compatible with the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS).

Revisionist historians maintain that the aged in nineteenth-century America and north-western Europe usually preferred to reside alone or with only their spouse. According to this interpretation, the aged ordinarily resided with their adult children only out of necessity, especially in eases of poverty or infirmity. This article challenges that position, arguing that in mid-nineteenth-century America coresidence of the aged with their children was almost universal, and that the poor and sick aged were the group most likely to live alone. The article suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family in the twentieth century is connected to the rise of wage labour and the diminishing importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance.

Study by economists Gordon B Dahl and Enrico Moretti of Census Bureau data finds couples with girls have divorced more often than those with boys in every decade since 1940's; study fits in with fast-growing interest among economists in how families operate; suggests age-old favoring of boys is not confined to past or to developing nations; tendency of parents, and especially fathers, to invest more in their families when they include boy gives boys important leg up; divorce data graphs; photos (M)

In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became morestringent and potentially constrained secondary-school aged youths. It might appear from the timing and the specifics of this history that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate the possibility that state compulsory schooling and child labor laws caused the increase in education rates by using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments. We also use micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. We find that the expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 can, at best, account for 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollments and can account for about the same portion of the increase in the eventual educational attainment for the affected cohorts over the period.

In a recent article, we (Ruggles and Brower 2003) described changes in census measures of household and family composition in the United States since 1850. Because the article was prepared before the release of microdata from Census 2000, it was incomplete. This note fills gaps in the article and discusses the implications of procedural changes for the measurement of families and households in 2000.