Secondary schooling experienced incredible growth in the first 40 years of the 20th Century. Was legislation on compulsory attendance and child labor responsible for this growth? Using individual data from the 1960 census, I estimate the effect of several laws on educational attainment for individuals who were 14 years old between 1915 and 1939. The results show that legally requiring a child to attend school for one more year, either by increasing the age required to obtain a work permit or by lowering the entrance age, increased educational attainment by about 5%. The effect was similar for white males and females, but there was no effect for blacks. Continuation school laws, which 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 distribution of education. By increasing the education of the lower tail, the laws contributed to the decrease in educational inequality, perhaps by as much as 15%. States with more wealth and a higher percentage of immigrants were more likely to pass more stringent laws, and states with higher percentage of blacks were less likely to do so. Importantly, the results suggest that the laws were not endogenous during this period.

Past-present comparisons of second-generation progress are often plagued by vague references to the baseline, the past. This essay seeks to contribute some specificity to the understanding of second generations past for the sake of comparison and as a contribution to historical understanding in its own right. First, it defines the older second-generation groups that make for theoretically meaningful comparisons. It next determines when these relevant second-generation members grew up and the magnitude of each ethnic birth cohort. Finally, the essay calls attention to important shifts in the social composition of second-generation cohorts that have not been studied systematically before (when indeed noticed at all). Specifically, over time, the proportion of immigrant parents who arrived as children, arrived after the mass migration, or married a native-born American varies immensely. Such compositional shifts should interest those who study contemporary as well as past immigration, since these shifts will appear in some fashion in any immigration. The study also analyses Stanley Lieberson's work with ethnic cohorts in A Piece of the Pie, and confirms his fundamental conclusion.

We briefly summarize the facts about the U.S. educational lead during most of the twentieth century and suggest why the U.S. led in formal schooling. We then comment on the probable consequences for distribution and economic growth.

We apply an understanding of what computers do the execution of procedural or rules-based logic tostudy how computer technology alters job skill demands. We contend that computer capital (1) substitutes for a limited and well-defined set of human activities, those involving routine (repetitive) cognitive and manual tasks; and (2) complements activities involving non-routine problem solving and interactive tasks. Provided these tasks are imperfect substitutes, our model implies measurable changes in the task content of employment, which we explore using representative data on job task requirements over 1960 1998.Computerization is associated with declining relative industry demand for routine manual and cognitive tasks and increased relative demand for non-routine cognitive tasks. Shifts are evident within detailed industries, within detailed occupations, and within education groups within industries. Translating observed task shifts into educational demands, the sum of within-industry and within-occupation task changes explains thirty to forty percent of the observed relative demand shift favoring college versus non-college labor during 1970 to 1998, with the largest impact felt after 1980. Changes in task content within nominally identical occupations explain more than half of the overall demand shift induced by computerization.

Prior research has demonstrated that people who do not have a living spouse are much more likely to enter a nursing home. An important factor determining whether an elderly person has a living spouse is the difference in ages between the spouses. For two wives of the same age, the wife with the older husband will be less likely to have a living spouse during her old age, when she might become ill and require care. This has important consequences for trends in nursing home care, because the age gap between spouses has declined by almost two years across the birth cohorts of 1900 and 1955. We find that this trend will end up reducing womens annual expenditures on nursing home care by nearly $1.4 billion, but raising men's annual expenditures by about $600 million.

This paper analyzes how the implicit difference in time horizons between refugees and economic immigrants affects subsequent human capital investments and wage assimilation. The analysis uses the 1980/1990 Integrated Public Use Samples of the Census to study labor market outcomes of immigrants who arrived in the US from 1975 to 1980. I find that in 1980, refugee immigrants in this cohort earned 6 percent less and worked 14 percent fewer hours than economic immigrants. Both had about the same level of English skills. The two immigrant groups had made substantial gains by 1990; however, refugees had made greater gains. In fact, the labor market outcomes of refugee immigrants surpassed that of economic immigrants. In 1990, refugees from the 1975-1980 arrival cohort earned 20 percent more, worked 4 percent more hours, and improved their English skills by 11 percent relative to economic immigrants. The higher rates of human capital accumulation for refugee immigrants contribute to these findings.

Relations among occupation, birthplace, and race constitute the core information for historical studies of assimilation, inequality, and group mobility. And they have drawn the attention of historians and other social scientists for a long time. For the most part, these studies rest on cross sectional analysis comparative data drawn from slices across censuses. They compare, for example, the occupational distribution of Irish immigrants at two points in time with the distribution of native-born Americans, sometimes increasing precision by controlling for age. Valuable as these studies are, they suffer from two inadequacies. First, they assume that the age distribution of occupation within an ethnic group may be translated into life course experience. That is, for instance, for example, that over the course of 30 years workers 25 year old in 1900 would replicate the occupational distribution of 55 year olds in the same year. But much could intervene to put current young workers on an altered trajectory. Thus, without empirical evidence it is not possible to simply accept that age distributions at points in time may be reconstructed to represent the life course. The other problem is that changes in occupational distribution could reflect either growth in overall population numbers, a general shift in occupational distribution among the whole population, or the movement of an ethnic group into or out of an industry or rank. The first difficulty the transformation of census data into life course experience may be partially solved by cohort analysis. It is the subject of this paper

Analysis of long-run changes in the living arrangements and economic well-being of the aged is limited by the consistent data sources across time and space. Some fragmentary evidence on the living arrangements of the aged in several European and North American countries before the mid-twentieth century is summarized in Table 1. The numbers should be interpreted cautiously. The earliest estimates are especially suspect, since we generally lack information about the enumeration procedures or completeness of the surviving pre-nineteenth century listings of inhabitants. Even in the nineteenth century, there was significant variation in census concepts and definitions among countries and across time (Ruggles and Brower, forthcoming). Moreover, the processing of the existing historical data has not followed standardized procedures from study to study, and we have little information of the representativeness of the local studies. Therefore it would be premature to make too much of the apparent trends and differences shown in Table 1. Despite all of these qualifications, however, we can be confident that prior to the twentieth century most elderly persons in Europe and North America resided with their children and that residing alone was extremely rare.

Newly available data provide the opportunity to extend the temporal scope of past labor-force statistics and to standardize their measurement. This article presents new statistics on the U.S. labor force since 1850, derived from large census samples composing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)(Ruggles and Sobek 1997). The IPUMS enables the application of consistent labor definitions over the longest time spans that the census allows. Changing academic interests have also created a demand for measures not envisioned by past government statisticians. New series present previously unavailable statistics broken down by race, sex, and age. The tables included here are designed to supplement or supersede labor data presented in the Historical Statistics of the United Stares (US. Bureau of the Census 1975).

Using a recently-uncovered data set that describes over 30 federal New Deal spending, loan, and mortgage insurance programs across all U.S. counties from 1933 to 1939, this paper empirically examines the New Deal's impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net migration measure for each county as the difference between the Census's reported population change from 1930 to 1940 and the natural increase in population (births minus infant deaths minus non-infant deaths) over the same period. Our empirical approach accounts for both the simultaneity between New Deal allocations and migration and the geographic spillovers that likely resulted when spending in one county may have affected the migration decisions of people in neighboring counties. We find that greater spending on relief and public works and a larger value of loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration were all associated with migration into counties where such money was allocated. The FHA's stimulus to the housing industry and large-scale public works projects explain most of the regional variation in migration rates across the country. New Deal loans and agricultural spending to take land out of production had negligible effects on migration patterns.

The racial identity of South Asians has long been a subject of controversy in the United States. Their inchoate racial status translates into a variety of racial descriptors being chosen by and for South Asians. This paper uses 1990 census data to examine the socio-economic and demographic correlates of the racial self-identification choices made by household heads of Asian Indian origin, both foreign- and US-born. The results of multinomial logit analysis show that respondents who are more acculturated to the United States are more likely to describe themselves as Black or White than are those with less familiarity with American society. However, higher socio-economic levels are associated with a greater likelihood of self-identification as South Asian on the census race question. Finally, comparison with a sample of Asian Indian children reveals the latters greater tendency to be identified with a race other than South Asian, due both to their more extensive mixed ancestry and their larger share of US-born respondents.

In twentieth-century America the history of poverty begins with most working people living on the edge of destitution, periodically short of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. It ends with poverty greatly reduced, its components reshuffled. It is a story of both malleability and resilience of poverty reworked by great economic, cultural, and political forces, and of poverty stubbornly resistant to rising affluence and productivity. It spans the time when the experience of scarcity tainted beliefs in the possibility of universal comfort and prosperity with the tinge of utopian fantasy and an era when the continued existence of material deprivation amid unparalleled abundance seemed unnecessary, indeed, a national disgrace....