This article assembles new data and methods for studying wealth inequality trends in industrializing America. Inequality grew sharply between 1820 and 1850, leveled off, and increased steadily between 1870 and 1900. Inequality grew due to compositional changes in the population, but also grew within occupations, age groups, and the native-born population. Proposed labor-market explanations are inconsistent with the fact that wealth inequality between occupational groups was declining. Wealth accumulation patterns are also inconsistent with the hypothesis of child default on responsibilities for old-age care. We propose research on a new explanation based on luck, rents, and entrepreneurship.

This thesis is a collection of three essays analyzing the economic effects of human capital investments. The first chapter evaluates the effects of a major educational reform in India called Operation Blackboard. The teacher component of Operation Blackboard increased the number of primary school teachers by ten percent. I find that despite substantial misallocation of teachers appointed under the program, on balance the program reduced the prevalence of single-teacher schools and increased the number of teachers per school. Moreover, the program significantly raised primary school completion and literacy for girls but had no effect on boys. Finally, two-stage least squares estimates obtained using the exogenous variation in school quality provided by the program suggest a higher returns to school quality than their ordinary least squares counterparts. The second chapter, co-authored with Hoyt Bleakley, examines the returns to language skills. We take advantage of the fact that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to generate exogenous variation in language skills. We find a significant positive effect of English-language skills on wages among individuals from the 1990 Census who immigrated to the U.S. as children. We control for non-language effects of age at arrival with immigrants from English-speaking countries. Our estimated effect of English-language skills on wages is larger than the effect suggested by estimates that do not correct for endogeneity. Much of this effect appears to be mediated by years of schooling and occupational choice.(cont.) The third chapter investigates the long-run economic consequences of a labor market withdrawal induced by the Japanese-American internment during World War II. Internees spent an average of three years in internment camps. I use the Hawaiian Japanese, who were not subject to mass internment like the West Coast Japanese, as a control group. I find that the labor market withdrawal lowered the earnings of Japanese-American men twenty-five years afterwards. Additionally, it raised the probability of self-employment, and reduced the probability of holding higher-status occupations. These findings are consistent with the predictions of economic models involving a loss of civilian labor market experience or a loss of advantageous job matches.

We present a joint study of the U.S, structural transformation (the decline of agriculture as the dominating sector) and regional convergence (of southern to northern average wages), We find empirically that most of the regional convergence is attributable to the structural transformation: the nationwide convergence of agricultural wages to nonagricultural wages and the faster rate of transition of the southern labor force from agricultural to nonagricultural jobs. Similar results describe the Midwest's catch-up to the Northeast (but not the relative experience of the West). To explain these observations, we construct a model in which the South (Midwest) has a comparative advantage in producing unskilled labor-intensive agricultural goods. Thus it starts with a disproportionate share of the unskilled labor force and lower per capita incomes. Over time, declining education/training costs induce an increasing proportion of the labor force to move out of the (unskilled) agricultural sector and into the (skilled) nonagricultural sector. The decline in the agricultural labor force leads to an increase in relative agricultural wages. Both effects benefit the South (Midwest) disproportionately since it has more agricultural workers. With the addition of a less than unit income elasticity of demand for farm goods and faster technological progress in farming than outside of farming, this model successfully matches the quantitative features of the U.S, structural transformation and regional convergence, as well as several other stylized facts on U.S, economic growth in the last century. The model does not rely on frictions on interregional labor and capital mobility, since in our empirical work we find this channel to be less important than the compositional effects the model emphasizes.

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy.

This paper extends the method of stochastic forecasting to small area populations where migration becomes a stochastic component in the forecast. This method is applied to Minnesota in order to project trauma volume for a large primary care hospital in Minneapolis. Fertility and mortality data come from the Minnesota Department of Health. Migration data come from the census IPUMS 5% sample and the Internal Revenue Service. Fertility, mortality, and trauma are modeled using a random walk with drift model based upon the Lee Carter method. Migration is modeled as a random draw from the observed yearly values. The results provide a measure of future trauma volume that can incorporate statistical confidence intervals. Trauma is expected to increase by 38% with a upper value of 55% and a lower value of 22% on a 95% confidence interval. The method used is promising, but both more highly developed models of age-specific migration and data on migration are needed.

This paper investigates whether going to college in a state impacts the decision to locate in the state after college. Estimating the effect of college location on migration is difficult because location preferences are involved in both the choice of where to go to college and the choice of where to live after college. For a sample of U.S. undergraduate students from the newly collected College and Beyond data set, I control for students' location preferences before they enter college using information on the set of colleges they applied to. I find that college location has modest effects on location decisions of college graduates. Attending college outside one's home state increases the probability of living outside the state and, in particular, increases the probability of living in the state of the college.

Widely recognized experts present the first comparative analysis of recent developments among six Eastern and Western nations concerning population aging and its consequences. Chapters focus on demographic trends, sociocultural contexts, and policy implications. Nations selected as case studies include: the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.The editors and contributors call attention to the varied trajectories and effects of population aging in culturally diverse societies that are often at different stages or on different paths of economic development. Such analyses bring into sharper focus those conditions that are unique, or similar, and emphasize the ways in which cultural stereotypes of aging and the elderly complicate our understanding of the effects of world-wide population aging.

Scholars studying Puerto Rican integration into the United States economy have noted the lag of progress in their economic incorporation when compared to other migrant groups (Borgas-Mendez 1993; Morales 1986; Padilla 1986; Padilla 1993; Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1994; Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996; Sanchez Korral 1983; Santiago 1992; Santiago and Galster 1995; Tienda; Torres 1995). The theoretical explanations for this growing gap are extensive and fluctuating. This work is a discussion of how these differences are manifesting for Puerto Ricans women in New Yorks Metropolitan Area, from the 1970s through the 1980s, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) for 1980 and 1990. Specifically, I will comment on the distinctions that exist for Puerto Rican women and men and how they are absorbed into the labor market of New York. It is important to make the distinction between men and women because the labor market is a structurally gendered sphere. A gendered approach is important when looking at the Puerto Rican community where women endured a significant loss in labor force participation during the 1970s (Cooney and Colon 1996; Ortiz 1996). New Yorks drastic loss of manufacturing after World War II, particularly the fall off in the garment industry was very detrimental to Puerto Rican women who seemed to be caught unprepared for the economic transformation that occurred (Ortiz 1996; Torres and Bonilla 1993). During the 1960s Puerto Rican women's labor force participation rate dropped from 60 percent to well below 30 percent when the 1970s United States Census was taken (Ortiz 1996). This was one of the most dramatic drops in labor force participation due to structural factors for any ethnic or gender group since the great depression. In addition, high poverty rates, growing single female head-of-household rates, and lack of inclusion into the greater economy have placed Puerto Ricans at the extreme opposite end of most successful ethnic groups.

Secondary analysis has assumed a central position in social science research as existing survey data and statistical computing programmes have become increasingly available. This volume presents strategies for locating survey data and provides a comprehensive guide to US social science data archives, describing several major data files. The book also reviews research designs for secondary analysis.

After dramatic declines in poverty from 1950 to the early 1970s, progress stalled. Three major processes-- economic growth, income inequality, and changes in family structure-- have been thought to shape trends over this period. I compare the relative effect of these processes using three measures of poverty: the current official measure, a relative poverty measure, and, for part of the analysis, a technically more refined quasi-relative poverty measure. Using data from the Census and Current Population Survey, I find that income growth explains most of the trend in absolute poverty over the half century, while economic inequality plays the most significant role in explaining trends in relative poverty. Rising income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s was especially important in explaining increases in Latino poverty, while changes in family structure played a larger role among African Americans than others through 1990. In a striking reversal, changes in family structure no longer served to increase poverty among any group in the 1990s.

Recent studies have used regression decomposition to analyze recent data and found that over seventy percent of the black-white wealth differences remained unexplained (See, e.g., Gittleman and Wolff 2000; Altonji, Doraszelski and Segal 2000; and Blau and Graham 1990). However, their results are limited to the variation in recent data. This study contributes improved methodology and historical empirical results to the literature on economic discrimination. In this paper, (i) I present structural regression decompositions, which are modifications to methods developed by Becker (1957) and Oaxaca (1973); (ii) I present a basic empirical test when analyzing structural regression decompositions; (iii) I report the estimated sources of black-white differences in wealth directly before and after emancipation; and (iv) I link these findings to recent studies. Empirical estimates confirm that the size and persistence of modern black-white wealth differences have historical roots. Key words: theory of economic discrimination, structural regression decomposition, wealth inequality, free blacks and slavery.

In this chapter we describe what is known about the complex relationships between gender, math, and labor market outcomes. We perform a simulation showing that U.S. women would fare somewhat better if they knew as much math as men. We then describe how occupational structures have changed over the past 30 years, as gender differences in mathematics education have decreased, and as other barriers to the career development of women have fallen. We conclude that continued improvement of gender equity in math education is likely to have modest effects on income but that other policies have a greater potential to improve the economic well-being of U.S. women.

This report provides information about Florida's overall rental housing stock, the assisted rental housing stock, and characteristics of households in need of affordable rental housing. PUMS data was used in developing the demand-side estimates and projections.

This paper examines how the proportion of US saving that represents life-cycle accumulation changed over the last century. As individuals retire earlier and live longer than before, the expected length of male retirement has increased by more than six-fold since 1850. According to life-cycle models of saving, this means that the proportion of lifetime income saved for retirement should rise over time. I estimate that the fraction of lifetime income saved for retirement tripled between 1900 and 1990. In contrast to such an increase in the estimated retirement saving, the actual aggregate household saving rates exhibit a relatively stable long-term tendency during the 20th century. Based on this result, I argue that the relative contribution of the life-cycle saving to US wealth accumulation increased substantially, perhaps two to three times, over the last hundred years.