Using the United States Census Public Use Microdata Sample, I quantify the statistically significant determinants of wage inequality among cities, taking into account demographic, labor market conditions and economic structure. For a wide labor market dependent variable such as Ginis concentration ratio, the primary determinants of wage inequality levels are demographic and labor market characteristics. When inequality is mapped, clear spatial patterns emerge. First, high or low inequality is not embedded in individual cities over time, but rather moves among cities in a state. Second, high inequality cities are consistently found in the states of California, Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. However the statistically significant determinants of inequality differ among these cities creating two distinct groups, those cities with high percentages of foreign born and self-employed workers, and those with high percentages of foreign born and low percentages of full time workers. Third, low inequality cities are consistently found in the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. There is no apparent pattern among the statistically significant variables. However the states with low inequality cities appear to cluster in the industrial crescent of the United States.

Analyzing synthetic cohorts in the 1980 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples, we find that Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics acquired English fluency at a faster pace than Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans during the 1980s. Additional results indicate that English-skill investments differently influenced the earnings distributions of these ethnic groups.

This article chronicles more than 30 years of public opinion, politics, and law and policy on privacy and confidentiality that have had far-reaching consequences for access by the social research community to administrative and statistical records produced by government. A hostile political environment, public controversy over the decennial census long form, media coverage, and public fears about the vast accumulations of personal information by the private sector were catalysts for a recent proposal by the U.S. Bureau of the Census that would have significantly altered the contents of the 2000 census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). These events show clearly that science does not operate independently from the political sphere but may be transformed by a political world where powerful interests lead government agencies to assume responsibility for privacy protection that can result in reducing access to statistical data.

This study of race stratification was undertaken in three articles concerning three distinct outcomes: wage differentials, area- and population-specific homicide rate differentials, and physiological distress and cardiovascular disease. The articles, although substantively distinct, fit together to explore stratification by race and some detrimental consequences of racism on these elements of well-being for African Americans. The first paper lays the foundation for the theme by establishing the hierarchy of racial stratification among five race/ethnic groups in the American labor force by examining wage discrimination in two periods. The second chapter explores how residential segregation leads to place stratification, the ranking of neighborhoods according to the race of their predominant residential population. I suggest that place stratification is directly associated with ecological SES and neighborhood violence rates. The last chapter extends the relationship between race stratification and ecology even further by arguing that racial segregation and income inequality lead to physically and psychologically hazardous environments in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Those who are residents of these types of areas are hypothesized to be more susceptible to distress and at higher risk of physiological ailments that are induced or exacerbated by physiological responses to stress. In short, race stratification not only affects group differences in SES, it impinges on neighborhood stability and even psychological and physical health.

Public concern about personal privacy has recently focused on issues of Internet data security and personal information as big business. The scientific discourse about information privacy focuses on the crosspressures of maintaining confidentiality and ensuring access in the context of the production of statistical data for public policy and social research and the associated technical solutions for releasing statistical data. This article reports some of the key findings from a small-scale survey of organizational practices to limit disclosure of confidential information prior to publishing public use microdata files, and illustrates how the rules for preserving confidentiality were applied in practice. Explanation for the apparent deficits and wide variations in the extent of knowledge about statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) methods is located in theories of organizational life and communities of practice. The article concludes with suggestions for improving communication between communities of practice to enhance the knowledge base of those responsible for producing public use microdata files.

Extensive research has shown that housing discrimination prevents African Americans from attaining residence in neighborhoods that are commensurate with their social class and status. This study examines two dimensions of the locational attainment process. First, the effects of individual-level socioeconomic characteristics on residential attainment are examined. Second, net of these effects, the impact of contextual metropolitan characteristics are assessed. After controlling for the socioeconomic and assimilation characteristics, large disparities exist in the locational attainment of blacks and whites. Racial segregation contributes heavily to these disparities, as do some other metropolitan characteristics. Disparities remain after controlling for the metropolitan context, but they are attenuated. In fact, after holding these factors statistically constant, it is shown that blacks approach parity, and in some cases actually surpass whites. These findings illustrate the importance of considering both economic and social-structural models in discussions of residential mobility and neighborhood attainment.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.1 Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.2 During the last decade historians have answered Vinovskis’s call for a social history of the Civil War. We now have several excellent monographs on women’s response to the war, numerous studies of the northern and southern “home fronts,” dozens of community studies that illuminate how race, class, and gender shaped the wartime experiences of ordinary Americans, and a growing number of studies on the wartime and Reconstruction experiences of African Americans. Few studies, however, have looked beyond the immediate stress of the war to examine its long-term consequences, and virtually no research has built upon Vinovskis’s preliminary demographic speculations to examine the war’s impact on postwar population. The lack of long-term study is most regrettable in the South, which lost an estimated . . .

This paper uses two-census methods to estimate life tables for the native-born white population of the United States between 1850 and 1860. In particular, I rely on the Preston-Bennett census-based method of mortality estimation and the 1850 and 1860 IPUMS samples to construct abridged life tables by sex for ages 10 and above. I then use Brass's two-parameter logit model and existing life tables from the 1901 Death Registration Area to smooth the life tables values and to estimate infant and childhood mortality. In contrast to other recent studies of nineteenth-century U.S. mortality, the new estimates indicate that white females did not enjoy a significant advantage in life expectancy over white males and that northern-born whites had higher life expectancies than southern-born whites.

Historical demography documents that mother-only families were more common among African Americans than among Euro-Americans early in the twentieth century. We find direct evidence that African American males in both first and higher-order marriages were more likely to have (re)married previously married women and were more likely to have (re)married women with children. This difference in (re)marital partner choice reduced the racial difference in the prevalence of mother-only families such that, in the absence of such remarriage choices, the prevalence of mother-only families in the turn-of-the-century African American population would have been even higher than has been reported. Remarriage in this period countered the various demographic, economic, cultural, and social-institutional forces that disproportionately destabilized African American marriages; it must be taken into account more fully by analysts concerned with racial differences in family structure.

Presentation of a new research project 'Danes in US 1850-2000'. Based on a detailed study of original census manuscripts, statistical overviews from US Census Bureau, and samplings from Minnesota Population Center (IPUMS), the geographic, social and occupational dispersion will be charted and analyzed.

This paper examines the question of why some states impose tolls while others rely more heavily on gas and other taxes. A model to predict the share of street and highway revenue from tolls is estimated as a function of the share of non-resident workers, the policies of neighboring states, historical factors, and population. The more non-resident workers, the greater the likelihood of tolling, after controlling for the miles of toll road planned or constructed before the 1956 Interstate Act. Similarly if a state exports a number of residents to work out-of-state and those neighboring states toll, it will be more likely to retaliate by imposing its own tolls than if those states don't. The policy implications for the future of congestion pricing are clear, if hard to implement. Decentralization of finance and control of the road network from the federal to the state, metropolitan and city and county levels of government will increase the incentives for the highway-managing jurisdiction to impose tolls. And tolls are a necessary prerequisite for an economically efficient strategy of congestion pricing.

Joint publication of the Federation for Community Planning and United Way Services in Cleveland. Seeks to provide information on older persons for program planning and resource allocation, serve as a general reference on the status of neighborhoods and communities, and function as an educational tool to assist in advocacy efforts.

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

Wilson and Gove (1999a; 1999b) argue that due to a (mis)assumption about what a control for education means, prior work by others has misinterpreted findings regarding an education-adjusted intercohort decline in vocabulary ability. The current research extends these findings by investigating the underlying processes of educational attainment over the course of the last half century. Research literature on educational attainment attributes the pattern of increase of educational attainment over time to a process of cohort replacement in which intercohort change is the primary mechanism underlying the replacement process. Under the assumption that cohorts do not significantly increase their educational levels after age 24, education can therefore be "fixed" for all persons after that age. In the current research, enrollment data are presented that demonstrate substantive changes in the demographics of persons enrolled in higher education; specifically that persons who are older than age 24 have returned to school in record numbers. Using General Social Survey (GSS), Census, and Current Population Survey (CPS) data spanning the latter half of this century, I demonstrate that the strength of the replacement effect in terms of educational attainment is decreasing, and that intercohort differences have diminished in comparison to intracohort change as a contributor to increases in educational attainment. I further explore these findings with respect to race and gender. These findings have broad implications for social science researchers in (1)the way education is treated in statistical analyses, and (2)for the interpretation of results that include an educational control variable.