This paper examines the destination choices of black migrants during the Great Migration. As previous research has shown, educated blacks were more likely to relocate to the North in the pre-World War II era. This analysis shows that this tendency can be attributed to better-educate migrants' ability to finance transportation costs, greater responsiveness to intercity wage differentials, and stronger distaste for Southern disamenities. After 1940, the destination choice gap closed, largely because migrant responses to wage differentials and valuation of Southern disamenities changed. These changes are observed both in the population at large and within birth-year cohorts.

Leon Litwick (1961) and Ira Berlin (1974) provide the most comprehensive historical accounts of free blacks in the north and south, respectively. This paper attempts to build upon their successes by presenting a national study that combines the legal, demographic and economic experiences of free blacks, with an extended analysis of antebellum wealth inequality. In doing so, I propose the asymmetry hypothesis, which is an investigation of the link between the social conditions and economic outcomes of free blacks relative to whites. For the empirical portion of the study, I employ cross-sectional variables from the IPUMS samples. This paper finds that economic differences between free blacks and whites were intertwined with asymmetrical social constraints. While the legal and social status of free blacks was significantly better than slaves, their status did not equal that of whites. Yet free blacks did attempt to overcome the social conditions by structuring their households to provide a basic foundation for the pursuit of happiness.

Studies attempting to link locational attributes and individual outcomes often focus on children or young adults, under the presumption that their location was exogenously determined by their parents. This strategy is more difficult to justify if parents migrate selectively and tend to transmit their own characteristics to their children. This paper uses Census microdata to document a strong link between selective migration in one generation and economic outcomes in the next. I show that selective migration is a possible explanation for a puzzle in the existing literature: the changing relationship between segregation levels and individual outcomes within the black population.

The labor-force participation rate (LFPR, hereafter) of older males in the United States has fallen dramatically over the last 120 years.For the discussions of the long-term trend of the labor force participation rate of older males prior to 1940, see Durand, Labor Force; Long, Labor Force; Ransom and Sutch, “Labor” and “Trend”; Moen, Essays and “Labor”; Margo “Labor Force Participation”; Carter and Sutch, “Fixing the Facts”; and Lee, “Long-Term Unemployment.” In 1880 nearly four out of five men 65 and older were gainfully employed. Today, only 15 percent of males at those ages participate in the labor market. Such a sharp decline in the labor market activity of older men has been regarded as one of the most marked changes in the U.S. labor market that the twentieth century witnessed. In addition to the secular rise in retirement, the sharp increase in the share of the aged population has made this retirement behavior a major social issue in the post–World War II era. Many economists have attributed this phenomenon to the implementation and expansion of social insurance programs, especially Social Security.See Boskin, “Social Security”; Parsons, “Decline” and “Male Retirement Behavior”; Hurd and Boskin, “Effect”; and Gruber and Wise, Social Security. See Krueger and Pischke, “Effect”; and Lee “Rise” for some evidence against this argument. However, about half of the fall in the LFPR of older men took place prior to 1940, when the public programs for old-age security were not as yet well developed. Though a number of factors have been suggested, including rising retirement incomes and a changing industrial environment, it is not entirely clear what caused the exit of older workers from the work force during this period.Costa, Evolution.

The first section begins the examination by illustrating the demographic shifts most commonly associated with gentrification, and then offers two competing explanations for them. The competing explanations motivate two very different views of the distributional effects of gentrification. In the first view, revitalization of urban neighborhoods causes changes in well-being among disadvantaged households. In the second view, gentrification is merely a side effect of other broad economic trends that affect the poor. The analysis also makes clear that residential displacementthe primary focus of most existing literature on the consequences of gentrificationis neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for declines in the living standards of poor households.The following section considers the general equilibrium effects of gentrification beyond the housing market. Increases in the local tax base might improve the quality of local public goods and services. Employment opportunities in certain industries might improve with the arrival of a more affluent clientele; that is to say, gentrification might partially solve the urban "spatial mismatch" problem. 7 Finally, gentrification might decrease the urban concentration of poverty, ameliorating the ills associated with it. 8 The subsequent section reviews the literature on the distributional impact of gentrification, and concludes that previous studies are too narrowly focused to fully address the question of whether gentrification harms the poor.

The focus of this study, and to some degree its motivation, is the experience of blacks and white immigrant groups in the early part of the twentieth century. In this chapter we introduce ethnic group segregation measures derived from Census data beginning in 1910. These indices measure the degree to which foreign-born individuals are isolated within enclaves composed of persons of their nationality. In 1910, as Figure 1 illustrates, some white ethnic groups Russians and Italians were actually more segregated, on average, than blacks in cities across the United States. Similar to blacks, these immigrant groups had socioeconomic outcomes that lagged behind those of native whites. This can be seen in Figure 2, which plots an occupation-based measure of income over time for each group...

School officials and policy makers have grown increasingly concerned about their ability to attract and retain talented teachers. A number of authors have shown that in recent years the brightest studentsat least those with the highest verbal and math scores on standardized testsare less likely to enter teaching. In addition, it is frequently claimed that the ability of schools to attract these top students has been steadily declining for years. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence measuring the extent to which this popular proposition is true. We have good reason to suspect that the quality of those entering teaching has fallen over time. Teaching has remained a predominately female profession for years; at the same time, the employment opportunities for talented women outside of teaching have soared. In this paper, we combine data from four longitudinal surveys of high school graduates spanning the years 1957-1992 to examine how the propensity for talented women to enter teaching has changed over time. We find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically from 1964 to 1992by our estimation, from almost 20% to under 4%.

Between 1970 and 1990 the share of elderly women living alone grew noticeably in the U.S. (from 48% to 60.2%). At the same time, the share of elderly widows living with children decreased in a similar magnitude, with other types of living arrangements remained stationary. This fact is simultaneous to the big business in the relative income between widows and widows' children. The goal of the paper is to measure the contribution that the change in the relative had in accounting for the new patterns in widows' living arrangements. First, we explain how widows and widows' children are deciding their living arrangements for 1970. Then, we introduce the incomes of the nineties and measure the change in this demographic fact. We are constructing a simple model with a form of mutual concern between moms and children where their relative incomes affect outcomes. The elderly women and their children are deciding whether to live alone or to live together. We estimate the model using properties of the cross-sectional distribution of living arrangements in the seventies and use the model to assess how recent changes in economic fundamentals have shaped the in living arrangement.

Do racial minorities in the United States assimilate to American values and institutions, or do they retain ethnic ties and cultures? In exploring the Japanese American experience, Lon Kurashige recasts this tangled debate by examining what assimilation and ethnic retention have meant to a particular community over a long period of time. This is an inner history, in which the group identity of one of America's most noteworthy racial minorities takes shape. From the 1930s, when Japanese immigrants controlled sizable ethnic enclaves, to the tragic wartime internment and postwar decades punctuated by dramatic class mobility, racial protest, and the influx of economic investment from Japan, the story is fraught with conflict.The narrative centers on Nisei Week in Los Angeles, the largest annual Japanese celebration in the United States. The celebration is a critical site of political conflict, and the ways it has changed over the years reflect the ongoing competition over what it has meant to be Japanese American. Kurashige reveals, subtly and with attention to gender issues, the tensions that emerged at different moments, not only between those who emphasized Japanese ethnicity and those who stressed American orientation, but also between generations and classes in this complex community.

Late nineteenthcentury Canada attracted a large number of immigrants from the UK, despite far lower average income per head there than in the US. While urban labour markets in the northern US were much larger than those in Canada, differences in outcomes between UK immigrants in Canadian and in northern US cities were small. Average annual real earnings by occupation group were only 10 to 15 per cent lower in Canadian cities. Individuallevel census data indicate that the occupational distribution of UK immigrants in Canada was quite similar to that of their peers in the US.

In the past two decades gender pay differences have narrowed considerably and a declining significance of gender has pervaded the labor market in numerous ways. This paper contends that in thefirst several decades of the twentieth century there was a rising significance of gender. The emergence of gender distinctions accompanied several important changes in the economy including the rise ofwhite-collar work for women and increases in women's educational attainment. Firms adopted policies not to hire women in particular occupations and to exclude men from other occupations. A model ofdiscrimination is developed in which men oppose the hiring of women into certain positions. The assumptions of the model break down when women acquire known and verifiable credentials. The shift from the rising to the declining significance of gender may have involved such a change.