Native Americans suffer some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment and the lowest rates of human capital attainment among racial minority groups in the United States, but economists understand very little about the impact these conditions have on the migration patterns of Native Americans. In 1994, a seminal article on this topic appeared in this journal (Cebula and Belton 1994). In their article, the authors suggest that the low levels of human capital and poor conditions in Native American reservations should make Native American migration sensitive to interstate differences in AFDC spending levels. Their hypothesis is confirmed for Native American migration over the 1985-1990 period. This paper refines their analysis by using micro-level rather than aggregate data, and by controlling for reservation residence and the impact of informal social safety nets in the source region. It is found that human capital factors and expected wage differences overwhelm interstate differences in public welfare spending and that informal safety nets in the source region dampen off-reservation migration. These findings suggest that state AFDC spending levels cannot explain contemporary Native American migration patterns.

In 1954, the Internal Revenue Service stipulated that employer contributions to the health insurance plans of their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income. Today, the tax subsidy is major feature of the U.S. health care market. This paper examines the initial effects of the tax subsidy on the demand for health insurance using previously unexamined data from 1953 and 1958. Results suggest that the tax subsidy increased the growth of group insurance, particularly among union members and employed persons. This is a critical effect because group insurance is not only less expensive than individual insurance, but it is also easier to obtain, and households with access to group health insurance are far more likely to purchase health insurance coverage than those without similar access. By increasing access to group insurance, the tax subsidy fostered an increase in the purchase of group health insurance by people who may not have purchased individual coverage, and generated institutional change as it cemented an employment-based system of group health insurance in the United States.

Studies of immigrant acculturation generally assume a similar process for women and men. Historically, the spectrum of young adults' activities was broader for women than for men, including domestic work in the home and labor force participation or school attendance. Using cross-sectional data from the 1910 Census Public Use Sample, this article applies a gendered critique of assimilation theory to explore ethnic differences in daughters' activities. The findings highlight gender role transmission within the family and the fluidity of daughters' activities in response to distinctive ethnic preferences. Families engaged in household strategies regarding the allocation of members' activities to negotiate valued cultural goals, whether retaining daughters in the home or enabling daughters to attend school. The results do not support a simple assimilation model, but rather, point to considerable variation across ethnic groups in the activities pursued by coresident daughters.

The Tiebout hypothesis, which states that individuals will costlessly sort themselves across local communities according to their public good preferences, is the workhorse of the local public finance literature. This paper develops a test of the Tiebout hypothesis using historical variation in mobility costs. Our extension of the Tiebout model to incorporate such costs yields the following comparative statics: as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and, under some standard assumptions, of public good provision must (weakly) increase. Given mobility costs have fallen over time, a natural test of the Tiebout hypothesis is to take these predictions to the data here all US counties over the 1850-1990 period. Contrary to the predictions, we find decreasing heterogeneity between counties in policy outcomes (local education spending and total taxes or revenues) and in a wide variety of proxies for public good preferences (age groups, education levels, election outcomes, home ownership, income, race, and religious affiliation). Using the Boston SMSA as a case study, we show that the heterogeneity trends are similar at the municipal and county levels. These results suggest that forces working in opposition to Tiebout sorting have dominated individual location decisions over the past century.

Welfare eligibility has traditionally required presence of a minor child in the household. Welfare migration incentives should thus be stronger among mothers of young children than among mothers of older children. Moreover, once migration has occurred, it is less likely to occur in the future, so that the population distribution is selected on locational preferences after initial locational decisions are made. Both of these factors suggest that welfare migration should be observed primarily among mothers of relatively young children. Using several welfare migration measures, I present evidence of substantial lifecycle welfare migration among women observed in the 1980 Census, with 1990 Census data suggesting positive but relatively less welfare migration. I argue that this pattern of evidence is to be expected based on theoretical models of the joint determination of locational choice and state benet determination; intergenerational correlation in income also leads to the prediction of declining welfare migration. My results suggest that previous literature on welfare migration has understated the extent of welfare migration because of failure to address dynamic incentive and selection eects.

Since 1965, immigration from Asia and Latin America has led to dramatic increases in the relative sizes of these groups within the United States. Attempts to analyze how high levels of immigration affect the assimilation of ethnic groups have been hampered by the failure to properly distinguish between the native-born and foreign born in empirical analyses, as well as by the conflation of the processes of immigrant acculturation and intergenerational assimilation under the more general rubric of ethnic group assimilation. In this paper, I demonstrate the need to measure not only how immigration has changed the size of ethnic groups within the United States, but also how it has led to a shift in the internal composition within these groups favoring the first generation. More importantly, I show the need to better theorize the link between immigration, group size, and assimilation. While many researchers point to the different social context immigrants face today, fewer note the changed status of native born members of these non-white groups within the US, and how this in turn affects larger process of group assimilation.

In the twenty-first century many of the professional and high ranking managerial workers in the United States and in other OECD countries will be women. This change in women's social and economic status represents a dramatic break with the past, but one that can only be understood by looking to the past. The rise of the career woman would not have been possible without the entry of previous generations of women into the labor market. This entry was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics, expectations, and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women. History suggests that change in women's labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women (and also of men)into the labor market.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was first implemented, a 5% reduction in the length of the standard workweek reduced by at least 18% the proportion of men and women working more than 40 hours per week. This analysis, based on monthly time series data from 1935-41 BLS surveys and individual-level data from the 1940 and 1950 censuses, shows that the Act's impact was larger in the South, where the proportion of men and women working over 40 hours fell by 23% and 43%, respectively, than in the North. Because of much lower pre-Act wages in the South than in the North, the minimum wage provisions of the Act were much more binding in the South, and southern employers were less able than northern employers to adjust straight-time wages in response to the Act's overtime provisions.

In the twenty-first century many of the professional and high ranking managerial workers in the United States and in other OECD countries will be women. This change in womens social and economic status represents a dramatic break with the past, but one that can only be understood by looking to the past. The rise of the career woman would not have been possible without the entry of previous generations of women into the labor market. This entry was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics, expectations, and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women. History suggests that change in womens labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women (and also of men)into the labor market.

Although it is well known that the American Civil War resulted in the death of over 620,000 men of military age, little is known about the war's long-term demographic and social consequences. This dissertation uses newly created IPUMS samples of the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 federal censuses to investigate the impact of the American Civil War on white birth rates and the timing and incidence of white marriage. Despite the large number of men killed in the conflict, demographic analysis indicates that the war had no lasting impact on women's marriage prospects. The war did cause a short-term deficit of approximately 1.2 million white births, but birth rates soon returned to the level predicted by their long-term trend. Although the wartime birth deficit was smaller in absolute numbers in the South than in the North, the percentage of the expected number of births was almost two times larger because of the South's smaller population base. The difference probably reflects the higher proportion of southern men who participated and died in the Civil War than northern men, and the greater economic stresses and uncertainties in the Confederate South. The dissertation also examines the long-term decline in nineteenth-century birth rates in more detail than has been heretofore possible. Estimates are made of sex- and age-specific census underenumeration, and the results are used to help construct own-child estimates of total fertility and total marital fertility. The results suggest that white women in the United States not effectively truncating childbearing until after 1850. In 1860, however, white women in the Northeast census divisions were limiting their number of births, and women in other northern regions began controlling fertility soon thereafter. There is no clear evidence that white women in the South, however, were practicing effective stopping behavior as late as 1880. In addition to region, a number of demographic and economic factors were found to be correlated with marital fertility, including age, occupation of spouse, land availability, and proxies of religion and religiosity