We build an economic model of individual migration decisions, and we fit it to individual histories, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Individual decisions to migrate are modeled as a job search problem in which welfare benefits or other alternative sources of income act as a floor, insuring workers against bad job search outcomes. A worker can draw a wage only by visiting a location, thereby incurring a moving cost. Locations are distinguished by known differences in mean wages, amenity values and alternative income sources. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and chooses an optimal sequence of moves before settling down. There is a two-dimensional ranking of locations, ex ante: some places have high wages, and others have attractive fallback options (both adjusted for amenity values). The decision problem is too complicated to be solved analytically, so we proceed by using a discrete approximation that can be solved numerically. State data on welfare benefits and Census data on wages are used to estimate the parameters describing the menu of choices available to individuals, and preference parameter values are selected so as to maximize the likelihood of the migration decisions seen in the NLSY data.

The racial gap in the value of owner occupied housing has narrowed substantially since 1940, but this narrowing has not been even over time or across space. The 1970s stand out as an unusual decade in which the value gap did not narrow despite continued convergence in the observed characteristics of housing. A decline in the relative value of black-owned homes in central cities appears to have offset gains elsewhere during the 1970s, and this central city decline continued into the 1980s. In further exploration of the 1970s, we find evidence of a rising propensity for higher-income blacks to live in the suburbs. We also find a positive correlation between riots in the 1960s and widening of the value gap during the 1970s in a panel of cities.

This dissertation analyzes and explains the gradual rise in rural marriage age in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this period the average age of marriage in the United States rose to a peak near the turn of the century, and then began a marked decline. The decline has been attributed to the increasing availability of well paying wage labor jobs that made it possible for young adults to marry and start a family earlier. Poor opportunity in agriculture the opposite of a high wage job is examined to see if it can explain why rural marriage age rose before declining. Two key variables denoting agricultural opportunity, the average price of a farm and the average level of farm mechanization in the county of residence, are found to be important causes of increasing rural marriage age between 1850 and the turn of the century. Both factors raised the cost of entry into farming, and the latter variable, mechanization, may have played a role in devaluing the perceived need for a farm wife and children. As a result, more and more would-be farmers spent longer periods of time single at the bottom of the agricultural ladder as farm laborers before acquiring a farm of their own and marrying. By 1920, agricultural opportunity variables prove less able to explain change in rural marriage behavior. This is likely due to the fact that agriculture was declining in relative importance to the nation's economy and wage labor jobs were becoming increasingly available in rural areas. Secondarily, in addition to using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), this dissertation offers for public use a new dataset containing linked population and agricultural data from the 1880 U.S. decennial census. There are 23,806 individuals in the dataset; 10,715 of them are linked to an agricultural manuscript census schedule, either directly or through family connections. Metadata for the linked sample is included in an appendix in the form of an XML-tagged codebook compatible with Version 1.0 of the Data Documentation Initiative's Data Type Definition (DDI DTD).

Het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) en het Nederlands Instituut voor Wetenschappelijke Informatiediensten (NIWI) werken sinds 1997 samen aan het project 'Digitalisering Nederlandse Volkstellingen 1795-1971'. In 1795 werd de eerste landelijke volkstelling in ons land gehouden en in 1971 de laatste. De volkstellingen (VTs) bevatten een schat aan historische, sociaal-economische, demografische en culturele gegevens. In totaal zijn in de laatste twee eeuwen een kleine 200 banden met ruim 42.000 bladzijden aan tabellen (en toelichtingen daarop) gepubliceerd. In de bibliotheek en het archief van het CBS bevinden zich daarnaast nog enkele honderdduizenden bladen met ongepubliceerd materiaal over de laatste drie Volkstellingen (1947, 1960 en 1971). Van de tellingen van 1960 en 1971 zijndigitale bestanden bewaard gebleven. De digitalisering van de Nederlandse volkstellingen is gesubsidieerd door het fonds Innovatie Wetenschappelijke Informatievoorziening (lWI) van SURF en door de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Gebiedsbestuur voor de Maatschappij- en gedragswetenschappen en WetenschappeIijk Statistisch Agentschap).

itagawa and Hausers 1960 study matching death certificates to census records revealed mortality differentials by educational attainment which decreased with age for men. Subsequent studies found increased age stratified mortality differentials by education in the 1980s. Age and period comparisons in these studies, because of their relatively short duration, are potentially confounded by cohort effects. To distinguish, age, period and cohort effects, we followed five decade-long U.S. birth cohorts (b.1890-99 ... b.1930-39) of native-born whites through four IPUMS census samples (1960-1990) to track how each cohorts educational distribution changed as they aged, assumed to reflect differential survival. We assume there is no significant in-migration, out-migration, or change in educational attainment after age 30, and that persons report educational attainment reliably throughout life. For each sex cohort and sequential pair of censuses, we calculate risk ratios of 10-year survival by educational attainment using logit models. Educational attainment varies markedly by sex and cohort. Education effects on survival were found across all age and sex groups for each 10-year period. Period and cohort effects for these education differentials on survival are much stronger than age and sex effects. Within each cohort, educational differentials increase with age. However, this is explained by period effects. Educational differentials also widen in successive birth cohorts; education past grade 12 confers survival advantages beginning with the 1910-19 birth cohort for men and the 1920-29 cohort for women.

This paper uses census IPUMS data to analyze trends in racial differences in home ownership and housing values and to examine the connection between residential segregation and the housing status of blacks relative to whites. A widening in the ownership gap between 1940 and 1960 is explained largely by the increasing concentration of blacks in central city areas whereas a narrowing in the ownership gap between 1960 and 1980 is explained only partly by changes in the relative characteristics of the black and white populations. Residential segregation did not widen the racial gap in home ownership rates in 1940 or 1980, but did widen the gap in housing values after 1940.

This paper has benefited significantly from the comments and suggestions of Price Fishback. Also appreciated are the comments and suggestions of the participants of the NBER Development of the American Economy Workshop 2001, World Congress of Cliometrics 2000, and the University of Arizona Econometrics Workshops. I. Introduction The difference in income between black and white workers has narrowed substantially over the past 140 years, but a substantial gap still remains. One factor that may have significantly contributed to the income differential is industrial segregation. Research exploring the existence of inter-industry wage differentials has found that the wages of observationally similar workers can differ significantly across industries (Dickens and Katz 1987, Krueger and Summers 1988). If industrial crowding systematically segregated black workers into industries with a relatively low wage structure, the impact on black workers could have been significant.

Workers in cities earn 33 percent more than their non-urban counterparts. A large amount of evidence suggests that this premium is not just the result of higher ability workers living in cities, which means that cities make workers more productive. Evidence on migrants and the cross-effect between urban status and experience implies that a significant fraction of the urban wage premium accrues to workers over time and stays with them when they leave cities. Therefore, a portion of the urban wage premium is a wage growth, not a wage level, effect. This evidence suggests that cities speed the accumulation of human capital.

It has been shown that the social security system and other sorts of government transfers have helped poor elderly people, such as widows, to live alone in the U.S. This paper investigates whether government financial support contributed to the increase in the probability of the vulnerable elderly living alone in Latin American countries as well. Specifically, the countries that in the 1980s experienced government reforms favorable to the vulnerable elderly, Mexico and Uruguay, are examined. It is concluded that the improvement of educational attainment was mainly responsible for helping the elderly poor to live alone in rural areas in Mexico, and not the government system. On the other hand, in Uruguay, for unmarried elderly females, the increase in social security income explains most of the increase in the probability of living alone.

Since One Kind of Freedom was published in 1977 there have been enormous advances in computer technology and statistical software, and an impressive expansion of micro-level historical data sets. In this essay we reconsider' our earlier findings on the consequences of emancipation in terms of what might be accomplished using the new technology, methods, and data. We employ the entire sample of 11,202 farms collected for the Southern Economic History Project not the sub-sample used to prepare 1KF. We revisit the question of declining production of foodstuffs, examining the data this time on a farm-by-farm basis. We conclude that 30 percent of farms in the cotton regions were locked-in' to cotton production and another 16 percent were producing too much food in an effort to avoid the trap of debt peonage. Using probit methods to control for the effects of age, farm size, literacy, family workers, and willingness to assume risk, we find that race accounts for two-thirds of the gap between black and white ownership of farms. Comparing sharecropping and renting, we find that race was much less of a factor in tenure choice. We note that these efforts only scratch the surface of what remains to be done.

Cutler and Glaeser (1997) show that urban residential segregation has a strong adverse effect on labor marketand social outcomes of young African-Americans relative to whites. We show that this effect is a fairly recenthistorical phenomenon. There is little evidence of such an effect from 1940 to 1970; rather, it emerged between1970 and 1980, and it grew stronger during the 1980s.

Opposition to Japanese immigration led to Alien Land Laws that barred Japanese immigrants from buying or leasing farmland. Although there is general agreement that the 1913 California Alien Land Law had little impact, historians and social scientists have differed over the effectiveness of the 1920 initiative, which closed loopholes in the earlier law. Census data show a decline in Japanese American agriculture over the short and long run, which cannot be fully explained by the agricultural downturn of the 1920s. This evidence indicates that the 1920 California Alien Land Law had negative consequences for Japanese immigrant farmers.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that individuals are less willing to marry when there are more potential partners to search amongst, and thus when others are also less prone to marry. To do this, it develops a reduced-form method (a variation on Manski's (1993) model) that allows identification of such spillovers in two-sided matching markets. Estimates from this method are internally consistent, biased, robust to different definitions of the marriage market, and large enough to warrant attention. Additional evidence suggests that the effect works via the proposed search mechanism.

While it has long been recognized that average wages vary strikingly across regions and urban areas, differences in the variance of wages remain relatively unexplored. In this paper we empirically examine differences in the extent and persistence of wage dispersion across urban areas. Using data from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses, we show that metropolitan area wage distributions vary, that the variation is substantial, and that it is not entirely accounted for by differences in the supply of workers with different skills or the size or geographic region of the city. We find that the differences in wage distributions across cities are highly persistent. We investigate whether there is a link between local fiscal policy and the degree of dispersion in the wage structure, and find evidence that such a relationship exists. Cities with higher overall taxes, fewer transfers from state and federal governments, and a greater share of spending on taxes, fewer transfers from state and federal governments, and a greater share of spending on public health and community development appear to have higher levels of overall dispersion. In addition, we find that cities that rely more heavily on property taxes have greater dispersion in the lower half of the wage distribution, and cities with higher expenditures on education have more dispersion in the upper half.

The number of non-English speakers in Minnesota grew rapidly during the 1990s. Poverty rates are correlated to the ability to speak English, evidence of a potential need to provide economic assistance health care to non-English speakers.