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.

An IMPLAN-based social accounting matrix (SAM) is used to estimate health care sector impacts on the Morgan County (West Virginia) economy. The SAM is a hybrid of the IMPLAN-SAM, which has an inadequate linkage between industry payments to workers and resulting household spending. An income distribution matrix provides this linkage. This matrix is based on the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata dataset for money payments and on a variety of data sources that account for the distribution of non-money income. Output multipliers and results of a local hospital impact scenario are compared between the original and reformulated models.

Marriage outside one's ethnic or racial group constitutes the ultimate test of assimilation. In this research, we offer a new test of theories of assimilation by examining the choice of marriage partners among Mexican Americans, several European immigrant groups, & natives. Data from the 1880 to 1990 Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) are employed, augmented by additional identification procedures developed for the Hispanic population. Assimilation measured by intermarriage rates varies by ethnic origin with striking affinity in historical patterns for Italians & Mexicans. Density & location of ethnic settlement, sex ratios, & generational mix played a role. Continued immigration marks certain groups, such as Mexicans, as structurally distinct.

This paper establishes the existence of a previously overlooked relationship between agglomeration and hours worked. Among non-professionals, hours worked decrease with the density of workers in the same occupation. Among professionals, a positive relationship is found. This relationship is twice as strong for the young as for the middle-aged. Moreover, young professional hours worked are shown to be especially sensitive to the presence of rivals. We show that these patterns are consistent with the selection of hard workers into cities and the high productivity of agglomerated labor. The behavior of young professionals is also consistent with the presence of keen rivalry in larger markets, a kind of urban rat race. This evidence of a rat race is nearly unique in the literature.

During the 1990s, the nations immigrant population grew by 11.3 million faster than at any other time in our history. Using newly released data from the 2000 Census, this report examines the changing distribution of the nations immigrant population by country of origin at the state level. The findings show that in one sense, todays immigration is more diverse than ever because people now arrive from every corner of the world. In another sense, however, diversity among the foreign born has actually declined significantly. One country Mexico and one region Spanish- speaking Latin America came to dominate U.S. immigration during the decade. The report also found that immigrants from some countries became more spread out in the 1990s, while the dispersion of others changed little.

This dissertation studies the long-term decline in state preferences for education spending in the United States. It constructs an expansive state-level panel data set spanning the fiscal years 1976-77 through 2000-2001 to examine how three budget share measures have changed within states over time and across states at a point in time. The share of state discretionary expenditures allocated to public education has fallen by four percentage points since 1977, while the share of public education expenditures allocated to public higher education has fallen by six points. In addition, the share of public higher education dollars appropriated to institutions (as opposed to directly to students) has fallen by four percentage points. Together the declines translate into real institutional appropriation losses of $2,800 per student in an average state significantly more than the $1,700 increase in real average public four-year instate tuition rates since 1977.Among the main findings are that competing budget items do not appear to crowd out educations budget share. Court mandated K12 funding equalization has resulted in substantial increases in education spending within states, with over a quarter of the increase coming at the expense of public higher education. Attempts by public institutions to increase tuition or raise private funds are seen to trigger a cycle of future budget share cuts, calling into question what institutions can do as they rapidly spiral toward the private high tuition equilibrium. The sensitivity of higher education budget shares to observable state factors has increased over time and dynamic panel estimates indicate that states exercise more discretion over the determination of the higher education K12 split than over other budgetary decisions.Three additional findings are noteworthy. First, cross-cohort ethnic heterogeneity increases have led to funding shifts away from higher education. Second, the surging popularity of targeted, merit student-aid programs appears to have been in an effort to redistribute income to economically well-off families. Third, as more households in a state become eligible to receive federal Pell grants, states move aid away from institutions and toward students sanctioning tuition increases to potentially capture increased student eligibility for federal grant aid.

Despite considerable research, GIS remain two-dimensional(atemporal), limiting historical research. A prototype, quasi-temporalArcView 3.x extension adds temporal functionality for the capture,analysis and display of historical data derived from archival maps.While the composite database model used is inherently inefficient interms of database structure, modern computer hardware is sufficientlypowerful to overcome this limitation, making temporal analysis feasible.A methodology of using archival maps for temporal informationonly (presence/absence or temporal location as opposed to spatiallocation) expedites historical database construction.A case study (Fairhaven, WA) illustrates the possibilities andlimitations of the extension and archival map data.

This paper examines the racial gap in infant mortality rates from 1920 to 1970. Using state-level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita, we can account for a large portion of the racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945, but a smaller portion thereafter. We re-examine the post-war period in light of trends in birth weight, smoking, air pollution, breast-feeding, insurance, and hospital births.

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 largenonwhite 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.

The dissertation is comprised of two loosely related essays in the economics of education. An extensive literature of education production function studies offers mixed evidence on the effects of school inputs on student performance in both developed and developing countries. The first chapter addresses two aspects in this literature. Quantile regressions are applied to Philippine data to estimate the differential impact of inputs on students at various points on the conditional achievement distribution, that is, at points other than the mean. Variation in the students who attend public schools outside their "barangay" (district) of residence, students who do not attend the nearest school, and students who transferred schools are used to identify these differential impacts and control for selection. Results suggest that a policy of reducing student to teacher ratios will have a positive effect on raising students' math achievement, but may also benefit high achievers more than the average or low achievers. In contrast, the impact of class size reductions on English achievement may impact the average or median student more relative to the tails. Given that teachers constitute a major input in education production, the second chapter explores the impact of the expansion in professional opportunities that American women faced on teacher supply and teacher quality. Data for the analyses include one-percent census samples from 1940 to 1990, three National Longitudinal Surveys, and the CIRP Freshman Surveys. Using standardized test scores, undergraduate institution selectivity, and positive assortative mating characteristics as measures of quality, evidence of a marked decline in the quality of young women going into teaching is documented. In contrast, the quality of young women becoming professionals increased. The more teachers are paid relative to professionals, the more likely educated women are to choose to teach. When wage opportunities in teaching become relatively less attractive, the quality of teachers and prospective teachers declines. These results are robust to fixed effects and difference strategies, as well as to the use of instrumental variables. Results suggest that the driving force leading to these changes are demand-side shocks, including industrial shocks that favored skilled individuals and women.

This dissertation investigates the historical construction of urban poverty through an examination of the relationship forged between poor women and four public institutions: the welfare department, the courts, the public housing authority, and the public hospital in post-World War II Philadelphia. While scholars have successfully integrated racial analyses into studies of urban poverty, most work in this field still focuses on the male experience, particularly in employment and housing. This study shifts the focusfrom men to women, and from employment and housing to a range of public institutions where women constituted the majority of clients. By illuminating the process that led black women to turn to state programs more frequently than white women or black men, it illustrates how both gender and race shaped urban poverty and shows how public institutions both alleviated and intensified urban inequalities. State programs provided crucial support for women who had to care for children, faced race and sex discrimination in housing and employment, suffered from chronic health problems and domestic violence, and could not obtain adequate resources from their friends, families, and communities. Yet the assistance institutions provided came at a price. Public programs often encouraged women's disproportionate responsibility for childrearing, invaded their privacy, stigmatized them, prevented them from acquiring additional material goods or developing long-term relationships with men, and fostered hostility and distrust in their neighborhoods. Public institutions not only responded to inequalities but also played a crucial role in constructing and defining the nature of racialized and gendered urban poverty itself. Four chapters in this study each focus on a single institution, uncovering a variety of dynamic yet unequal relationships that developed between poor women and the programs designed to assist them and dispelling images of the state as a monolithic source of social control. The last chapter examines the harsh public discourse condemning black women's use of public institutions that emerged in Philadelphia in the 1950s and comprised a crucial component of Northern resistance to black migration and civil rights.

In this paper, I estimate the effect of changes in teacher earnings relative to professional earnings opportunities on teacher supply and teacher quality. I analyze data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series of 1940-1990, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Men, Young Women, and Youth-79, and the CIRP Freshman Surveys from 1971-1995 of college freshmen from more than 1,700 institutions. I find that teacher performance on standardized exams declines between 1970 and 1990. Prospective education majors are increasingly being drawn from less selective institutions. Ceteris paribus, a 10 percent increase in entry teacher earnings relative to professionals raises the probability that skilled women choose teaching by 32 to 47 percent for blacks and 18 to 40 percent for whites. Raising relative teacher wages also significantly attracts teachers who perform better on standardized tests and prospective education majors from highly selective institutions. Specification checks imply that the results are robust to various identifying assumptions.