By the end of the 20th century, a century-long demographic trend had been reversed: African Americans were staying in &/or returning to the South in record numbers. Indeed, by the year 2000, the net migration patterns of African Americans showed a return migration to the South from all non-South regions of the country. In this study, we explore the effects of selected push & pull factors associated with this phenomenon. Wilson (1997) & Anderson (1990) have discussed factors associated with inner-city deindustrialization & subsequent population changes, including the disproportionate exodus of upwardly mobile, middle-class blacks from the inner city. Building on this imagery, Hunt & Hunt (2001) speculate that a new & larger population dynamic may be occurring, involving the departure of higher status African Americans (especially the younger & more affluent) from non-Southern urban areas, toward expanding opportunities in the economy of the "New South." Frey (2001) makes a similar argument, emphasizing that the South's race relations climate may have changed sufficiently to have become more welcoming for African Americans. Additionally, Falk (2001) has emphasized the "power of place" & the role it may play in the migration process, a pattern akin to Stack's (1993) "call to home" - both views underscoring the role of family & kinship networks as well as local cultural norms & shared social histories. Using census based micro-samples in IPUMS for 1970, 1980, & 1990, as well as General Social Survey data for 1972-2000, we examine the role of sociodemographic, religious, & ideological factors shaping African American's "return migration" to the South. We contend that considering these factors collectively moves us beyond purely demographic considerations, & toward a more complete understanding of the processes underlying African Americans' return to the South.

Sex ratios, i.e., relative numbers of men and women, can affect marriage prospects, labor force participation, and other social and economic variables. But the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality. This paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The How of immigrants affected the second-generation marriage market because second-generation marriages were mostly endogamous, i.e., to members of the same ethnic group. The empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage, and a large negative effect on female labor force participation. Perhaps surprisingly, the marriage rates of second-generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios. Higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children. The empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market.

In recent decades, the Rocky Mountain West (RMW) has experienced demographic change that both coincides and contrasts with national trends. The 1970s saw a "nonmetropolitan rebound," and while the rebound contracted nationwide in the 1980s, rural growth in the RMW continued to outpace urban areas. In the 1990s, the population of the RMW increased three times faster than the rest of nation, and today, the region contains fourteen of the nation's 20 fastest growing counties. These demographic changes have important social implications for western areas, as migrants may shift community sociodemographic composition. This paper reports on analyses using the historical Integrated Public Use Microdata files, a set of twenty-five high-precision samples of the American population. We use 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census data to longitudinally contrast socio-demographic characteristics of migrant and native populations in the RMW, as well as migrants to the RMW as compared to migrants elsewhere.

When adequate data on migration are unavailable, demographers infer such data indirectly, usually by turning to residual methods of estimating net migration. This paper sets out and illustrates an inferential method that uses population totals in the first age group of birthplace-specific counts of residents in each region of a multiregional system to indirectly infer the entire age schedule of directional age-specific migration flows. Specifically, it uses an estimate of infant migration that is afforded by a count of infants enumerated in a region other than their region of birth to infer all other age-specific migration flows. Since infants migrate with their parents, the migration propensities of both are correlated, and the general stability of the age profiles of migration schedules then allows the association to be extended to all other age groups.

Longitudinal studies of white female headship over the past few decades do not find significant welfare effects but do find a positive relationship between state fixed effects and welfare benefit levels. In other words, although white female headship does not respond to the year-to-year changes in welfare benefit levels, states with the most generous welfare benefits tend to be the states with the highest rates of white female headship. This positive relationship does not exist, however, for blacks. The questions are: Why does a positive relationship exist for whites and when did it originate? and Why does this relationship not exist for blacks? This paper examines these questions by considering the relationship between female headship for blacks and whites and state mothers pensions legislation enacted between 1910 and 1920. Mothers pensions programs were the first public cash assistance programs targeted to single mothers and, like their successors, varied greatly across the states. The results indicate that welfare generosity preceded relatively high rates of white female headship. The positive relationship between welfare generosity and white female headship observed today was not embodied in the mothers pensions legislation enacted in the 1910s. But these early welfare programs, like more recent programs, were not responsive to, and may in fact have been reactionary to, the experiences of black women.

Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo have provided an inter estingly detailed if not complete analysis of regional, gendered pat terns of teaching employment "to explain how [these] patterns came about, evolved, and eventually declined" (p. 1). They attend to a "few key interrelated issues" (p. 5) primarily through analysis of census schedules beginning in 1850 (using the Integrated Public Use Micro . . .

The dynamic character of American industrialization produced imbalances between the supply of and demand for labor across cities and regions. This book describes how employers and job-seekers responded to these imbalances to create networks of labor market communication and assistance capable of mobilizing the massive redistribution of population that was essential to maintain the rapid pace of the nation's economic growth between the Civil War and World War I. It combines a detailed description of the emerging labor market institutions with a careful analysis of a variety of quantitative evidence to assess the broader economic implications for geographic wage convergence and for American economic growth. Despite an expansion in the geographic scope of labor markets at this time, the evidence suggests that labor market institutions reinforced regional divisions within the United States and left a lasting impact on the evolution of many other aspects of the employment relationship.

How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865), and their children and grandchildren. The outcome measures include literacy, whether a child attends school, whether a child lives in a female headed household, and two measures of adult occupation. Using a variety of different comparisons, (e.g. within versus across regions) I find that it took roughly two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up' to the descendants of free black men and women. This finding is consistent with modern estimates and interpretations of father-son correlations in income and socioeconomic status. The data used are from the 1880 and 1920 1 percent (IPUMS) samples, a 100 percent sample of the 1880 Census and a smaller data set in which I link families in the 1920 IPUMS back to the father's family in a 100% sample of the 1880 Census. These latter data sets are derived from an electronic version of the 1880 Census recently compiled and released by the Mormon Church with assistance from the Minnesota Population Center.

Women's Work? is a rare example of collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship, with the historian Joel Perlmann and the economist Robert A. Margo teaming up to reexamine when and why teaching, especially in the primary grades, became synonymous with “women's . . .

We investigate whether a three-generation model of linguistic assimilation, known from previous waves of immigration, can be applied to the descendants of contemporary, immigrant groups. Using the 5% Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample 1990 file, we examine the home languages of second- and third-generation children and compare the degree of their language shift against that among the descendants of European immigrants, as evidenced in the 1940 and 1970 censuses. Overall, the rates of speaking only English for a number of contemporay, groups suggest that Anglicization is occurring at roughly, the same pace for Asians as it did for Europeans, but is slower among the descendants of Spanish speakers. Multivariate models for three critical groups-Chinese, Cubans, and Mexicans-indicate that the home languages of third-generation children are Most affected by factors, such as intermarriage, that determine the languages spoken by adults and by, the communal context.

Although many studies have examined the labor force participation of young women at the turn of the century, this research is limited in many respects, including a focus on specific geographic areas or ethnic groups and a lack of quantitative analysis of occupational attainment. Generally, historical studies of social mobility or occupational attainment focus on the outcomes o f men or, more recently, the influence of fathers’ status on the outcomes of their daughters. Such studies overlook the influence of mothers on daughters’ occupational attainment. This is an important omission, given the relatively high prevalence of female-headed households in the early twentieth century. The current study addresses these issues by using the 1920 United States Census to compare the occupational attainment of two groups of working daughters: those residing in households headed by their fathers and those living in female-headed households. The . . .

Although the French language and the traditional rural way of life are disappearing among Louisiana Cajuns, identification with Cajun ethnicity is flourishing. Henry and Bankston draw on historical documents, ethnographic observations and interviews, and statistical sources to investigate and explain this phenomenon. They argue that while Cajun ethnicity developed from and consisted of the French-speaking, rural poor of the region, it has been transformed into a regional class with common interests and outlooks. This comprehensive structural analysis of Cajun ethnicity suggests a new emphasis on structural conditions in understanding ethnic phenomena and introduces the concept of an "economy of ethnicity."

A problem gaining interest in pattern recognition applied to data mining is that of selecting a small representative subset from a very large data set. In this article, a nonparametric data reduction scheme is suggested. It attempts to represent the density underlying the data. The algorithm selects representative points in a multiscale fashion which is novel from existing density-based approaches. The accuracy of representation by the condensed set is measured in terms of the error in density estimates of the original and reduced sets. Experimental studies on several real life data sets show that the multiscale approach is superior to several related condensation methods both in terms of condensation ratio and estimation error. The condensed set obtained was also experimentally shown to be effective for some important data mining tasks like classification, clustering, and rule generation on large data sets. Moreover, it is empirically found that the algorithm is efficient in terms of sample complexity.

I use data on part-American Indian children in the 1990 Census 5% PUMS data to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. I use the case of American Indians because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by the data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family.

A lively, hands-on introduction for teachers and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, this book-and-CD package will inspire even the faint-hearted to take the technological bull by the horns and make efficient, informed use of computer and Internet resources. New technology is changing the very nature of research and teaching in the social sciences and humanities. From specialized online forums to Web-based teaching and distance learning, computers are being used to expand educational opportunities, promote cooperation and collaboration, stimulate creative thinking, and find answers to previously insoluble research problems. Combining interactive projects in a CD-ROM format with informative printed essays, this volume showcases innovations that are revolutionizing the craft of scholarship. More than that, it examines realistically how applicable the new technology is to learning. Contributors clarify some of the difficulties of using computers and address problems with the philosophy and culture of computers, including concerns about intellectual property protection and the potential for creating a technological underclass of electronically disadvantaged schools and universities. The accompanying CD features multimedia entries such as an interactive project on owls that educates users about forest ecology; RiverWeb, an interactive archive of information on the history, culture, and science of the Mississippi River; and "Global Jukebox," which recreates the context in which the folklorist Alan Lomax made his pioneering field recordings. The CD includes links to many external sites on the World Wide Web. For those with limited Internet access, a collection of relevant sites is integrated into the CD.

This dissertation contains three essays on the relationship between human-capital investments and labor mobility. The first essay estimates the impact of attending college in a state on the decision to locate in the state after college. This issue is relevant for a variety of state higher education policies. Using data on a sample of U.S. undergraduate students from the newly collected College and Beyond data set, I find that attending college in ones home state increases the probability of living in that state after college. Furthermore, I find that attending college in a state that is not ones home state increases the probability of living in the state after college.I apply these results to college admissions in the second essay, which examines the conflict of interest between universities and state governments concerning standards for admitting in-state versus out-of-state students. Using data on public and private universities from the College and Beyond, I find that public universities set lower admissions standards for in-state than out-of-state students, while private universities on average treated both groups equally. I also find that the location decisions of marginal in-state and out-of-state students are equally affected by attending a public university. This suggests that states would have gained financially if their public universities had admitted additional out-of-state students. The third essay explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outcomes. A model of job training predicts that as market size increases, job turnover among trained workers increases and training becomes more general. Using data on blue-collar workers, I test these predictions by exploiting variation in market size (within occupations) across U.S. metropolitan areas and between urban and non-urban areas. The empirical results provide some support for the theoretical predictions.

This study analyzed racial inequality by decomposing historical black-white differences in wealth using regression decomposition. This technique decomposes economic differences into the portion explained by differences in characteristics and the unexplained portion due to different returns to a set of characteristics (See, e.g., Blinder 1973 and Oaxaca 1973). Preliminary results confirm that the size and source of contemporary black-whitewealth differences have historical roots: In 1870, at least 75 percent of white-black wealth differences were not explained by characteristic differences described by the classical model. This is consistent with wealthdecompositions of late-twentieth century data that show three-quarters of white-black differences were unexplained (See, e.g., Blau and Graham 1990). Furthermore, this study found that 77.8 percent of white-black wealthdifferences were not explained in states that abolished slavery well before the Civil War while 87.9 percent of whiteblack wealth differences were unexplained in states that abolished slavery after the Civil War. Key words:economic discrimination, regression decomposition, wealth inequality, and slavery.

This paper is about searching the combina­ torial space of contingency tables during the inner loop of a nonlinear statistical optimiza­ tion. Examples of this operation in various data analytic communities include search­ ing for nonlinear combinations of attributes that contribute significantly to a regression (Statistics), searching for items to include in a decision list (machine learning) and associ­ ation rule hunting (Data Mining). This paper investigates a new, efficient ap­ proach to this class of problems, called RAD­ SEARCH (Real-valued All-Dimensions-tree Search). RADSEARCH finds the global op­ timum, and this gives us the opportunity to empirically evaluate the question: apart from algorithmic elegance what does this attention to optimality buy us? We compare RADSEARCH with other recent successful search algorithms such as CN2, PRIM, APriori, OPUS and DenseMiner. Fi­ nally, we introduce RADREG, a new regres­ sion algorithm for learning real-valued out­ puts based on RADSEARCHing for high­ order interactions.