In this study an attempt is made to examine the influence of kinship on a series of individual transitions and behaviours that mark the life course (marriage, leaving home, out-migration and mortality). Moving beyond a 'traditional' view, in which kinship is restricted to the cohabitation group, the study tests both the effects of the household and of the family beyond the household in order to observe their independent, opposite, or complementary actions. All these issues must be considered within the more general context of the 'nuclear hardship hypothesis': should family links beyond the unit of cohabitation be taken into account? How far can family support isolated people?

Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health. This paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive U.S. censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates. I use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education. The results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality, and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature.

Were compulsory attendance and child labor laws responsible for the incredible growth in secondary schooling from 1915 to 1939? Using 1960 census data, I find that legally requiring children to attend school for 1 more year, by increasing the age required for a work permit or lowering the entrance age, increased educational attainment by about 5 percent. The effect was similar for white males and females, but there was no effect for blacks. Continuation school laws that required working children to attend school on a part-time basis were effective for white males only. These laws increased the education only of those in the lower percentiles of the education distribution, thereby decreasing education inequality, perhaps by as much as 15 percent. States with higher levels of wealth, higher percentage of immigrants, or lower percentage of blacks were more likely to pass stringent laws. The results also suggest that these laws were not endogenous.

Racial differences in homeownership have long been a topic of sociological study. Previous studies, however, neglected to consider differences in levels of homeownership between nonmarried black and white women in the context of place. Accordingly this paper focuses on the interaction between place, race, and gender and its impact on homeownership for nonmarried persons. The study employs the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and logistic regression analysis to address the following questions: Has the racial differential in homeownership for nonmarried women changed from 1970 to 1990? How do place, race, and gender interact to determine the levels of homeownership for nonmarried women? The findings reveal that, although black women were less likely than white women to own homes, the racial differential declined dramatically in rural areas over the two-decade period. The overall trend of decline was opposite to that for urban areas.

Between 1984 and 2000, the share of non-elderly adults receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs rose from 3.1 to 5.3 percent. We trace this growth to reduced screening stringency and, due to the interaction between growing wage inequality and a progressive benefits formula, a rising earnings replacement rate. We explore the implications of these changes for the level of labor force participation among the less skilled and their employment responses to adverse employment shocks. Following program liberalization in 1984, DI application and recipiency rates became two to three times as responsive to plausibly exogenous labor demand shocks. Contemporaneously, male and female high school dropouts became increasingly likely to exit the labor force rather than enter unemployment in the event of an adverse shock. The liberalization of the disability program appears to explain both facts. Accounting for the role of disability in inducing labor force exit among the low-skilled unemployed, we calculate that the U.S. unemployment rate would be two-thirds of a percentage point higher at present were it not for the liberalized disability system.

A Star Tribune analysis of Census figures, adjusted for inflation, shows a sharp rise in the share of people crossing the threshold from middle class to upper income from 1990 to 2000 - in the 13-county Twin Cities area and across the state. For instance, the proportion of families in the Twin Cities area making the equivalent of $50,000 to $74,999 fell from 47 percent to 41 percent over the decade, while the share of families making $75,000 to $99,999 leaped from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of families with incomes of less than $35,000 fell from 23 percent to 19 percent.

A study of the changes in the authority of the household head over dependents, the reasons for those changes, and the impact of those changes on governmental institutions in the United States. Use is made of IPUMS to study household composition and group quarter living.

Does America face an affordable housing crisis and, if so, why? This paper argues that in much of America the price of housing is quite close to the marginal, physical costs of new construction. The price of housing is significantly higher than construction costs only in a limited number of areas, such as California and some eastern cities. In those areas, we argue that high prices have little to do with conventional models with a free market for land. Instead, our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls, play the dominant role in making housing expensive.

Concern is often voiced about the quality of American schoolteachers. This paper shows that, while the relative quality of teachers is declining, this decline is a result of skill-biased technological change, which improves the knowledge of skilled workers outside teaching, but not the general knowledge of schoolteachers. This raises the price of skilled teachers, but not their productivity. Schools respond by lowering the relative quality of teachers and raising teacher quantity. Growth in the price of teachers also raises the cost of primary education. These three predictions appear consistent with the data. Class sizes have dropped by more than half over the last 50 years in many developed countries. In stark contrast, analysis of U.S. Census microdata reveals that, from the 1900 birth cohort to the 1955 birth cohort, the log earnings of male teachers - adjusted for experience and hours worked - have declined by twenty-three percentage points relative to college-educated workers, and by fifty percentage points for female teachers. Finally, over the past thirty years alone, the real per student cost of primary school education in the U.S. has more than doubled, in spite of stagnant student achievement.

This paper uses the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and the General Social Survey (GSS) to measure the elasticity of family income on mens adult earnings in 1980 and the early 1990s. The study finds a large and statistically significant increase in the importance of family income over time when comparing cohorts in the NLS, a dataset that has not been previously used for this purpose. We also find a large but statistically insignificant increase when using the GSS. The PSID, however, shows a large but statistically insignificant decline in this parameter. The results imply that changes in the effect of family income did not operate through the channel of human capital. Results suggest that the rate of inheritability of income may have increased in recent decades, but this evidence is not yet definitive. Researchers, therefore, should exercise caution when generalizing about trends over time when using small samples from just one dataset such as thePSID.

This dissertation focuses upon the persistence of racial segregation in metropolitan Milwaukee, both in the city proper and its suburbs. He analyzes how Milwaukees belatedly burgeoning black population confronted seemingly insuperable barriers to residential racial integration at the very time the legal landscape seemed most amenable to black homeownership in white residential areas due to the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Like its counterpart a century later, economic globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century integrated trade, finance, and labor markets. The phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism, which was its hallmark, loosened ordinary people from farms, villages, and towns. Attracted by new opportunities and higher wages, helped by cheaper transportation, they moved across oceans and continents. In some cases, they were pulled by the prospect of work; in others, they were pushed out, driven by pressures on land or competition from cheaper labor. Their stories, however, remain for the most part separate narratives in historical writing. A vast literature recounts successive waves of immigration to the United States; a smaller, but still substantial, body of writing focuses on the internal migration of those people already here. This working paper considers them both separately and together. It is concerned with the distribution of immigrants across America, the movement of U.S.-born people across the continent, and the interconnections between the two. The topic, of course, is vast. Thus, this paper makes no pretense of comprehensiveness. Rather, it presents some data that bear suggestively on the issues.The paper begins with some of the dimensions of immigration in the early twentieth-century and compares them to the situation at the centurys end. It then turns to the question of population distribution - the settlement patterns of natives and immigrants. It ends by looking at a still unsettled question: did competition from immigrants force native workers to leave older, industrial cities?

This paper considers the connection between agglomeration and work behavior. A model of an urban rat race is developed, where work hours are longer in larger markets. The key elements of the model are signaling and thick market effects. Using differencing methods and the 1990 IPUMS data on full-time workers, we find evidence consistent with the rat race hypothesis. We also find evidence consistent with selection, with diligent workers choosing large cities.

I rely on the 1850-1880 IPUMS samples to construct national and regional estimates of male and female age at first marriage and the proportion remaining lifelong bachelors and spinsters for synthetic cohorts of the white population. National estimates of nuptiality have been made recently by Catherine Fitch and Steven Ruggles for most census years between 1850 and 1990, but the results are limited to the native-born population (Fitch and Ruggles 1999). National estimates for the foreign-born population and regional estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage are made here for the first time. In addition to describing trends and differentials in nuptiality, I test several theories of marriage timing in rural areas with multivariate logistic regression models. The results suggest that many of the factors typically associated with marital fertility trends and differentials-availability of inexpensive farmland, literacy, nativity, occupation-are correlated with age at first marriage.

One of the most important economic decisions facing the elderly, and their families, is whether to live independently. A number of previous studies suggest that widows are fairly responsive to Social Security benefits in deciding whether to live independently. But these previous studies have either generally relied on differences in benefits across families or cohorts, which are potentially correlated with other determinants of living arrangements, or have used data from the distant past. We propose a new approach that relies on the large exogenous shifts in benefits generosity for cohorts born in the 1910-1921 period, and we study the impact of this change in living arrangements in the 1980s and 1990s. In this period, benefits rose quickly, due to double-indexing of the benefit formula, and then fell dramatically, as this double-indexing was corrected over a five-year period. Using these legislative changes in benefits that the living arrangements of widows are much more sensitive to Social Security income than implied by previous studies. We also find that the living arrangements of divorcees, the fastest growing group of elderly, are even more sensitive to benefit levels. Overall, our findings suggest that living arrangements are elastically demanded by non-married elderly, privacy is a normal good, and that reductions in Social Security benefits would significantly alter the living arrangements of the elderly. Our estimates imply that a 10% cut in Social Security benefits would lead more than 600,000 independent elderly households to move into shared living arrangements.