This study examines how levels of female headship, non-marital fertility, and divorce among Mexican origin women aged 18-59 compare to levels among the non-Hispanic white majority. Change in these family patterns are measured over time and across generations to test three theories of assimilation, linear assimilation, segmented assimilation, and familism. Whether Mexican Americans will follow the patterns of assimilation and integration experienced by European immigrants and their descendents is hotly debated. Some researchers argue that not enough time has passed or generational distance occurred in the Hispanic population for assimilation to be widespread (Alba, 1995). Others argue that the unique experience of particular ethnic groups once in the United States will prevent assimilation towards the mainstream population. Rather than experiencing socioeconomic improvement over time,

It is commonly assumed that jobs in the United Sates require ever greater levels of skill and, more strongly, that this trend is accelerating as a result of the diffusion of information technology. This has led to substantial concern over the possibility of a growing mismatch between the skills workers possess and the skills employers demand, reflected in debates over the need for education reform and the causes of the growth in earnings inequality. However, efforts to measure trends have been hampered by the lack of direct measures of job skill requirements. This paper uses previously unexamined measures from the quality of Employment Surveys and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine trends in job education and training requirements and provide a validation tool for skill measures in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, whose quality has long been subject to question. Results indicate that job skill requirements have increased steadily from the 1970s through the 1990s but that there has been no acceleration in recent years that might explain the growth in earnings inequality. There has also been no dramatic change in the number of workers who are undereducated. These results reinforce the conclusions of earlier work that reports of a growing skills mismatch are likely overdrawn.

One of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history, the great white migration left its mark on virtually every family in every southern upland and flatland town. In this extraordinary record of ordinary lives, dozens of white southern migrants describe their experiences in the northern ""wilderness"" and their irradicable attachments to family and community in the South. Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their ""spiritual exile"" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local ""native"" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of ""shuttle migration,"" in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and ""hillbilly"" music--brought north by migrants.Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.

Many economists and other social scientists and policy makers believe that the growth in inequality in the last two decades reflects mostly an imbalance between the demand for and the supply of employee skills driven by technological change, particularly the spread of computers. However, the empirical basis for this belief is not strong. The growth in inequality was concentrated in the recession years of the early 1980s and any imbalance between the supply of and demand for workers with technological skills likely did not occur until later. The growth of the supply of more-educated workers decelerated during the 1980s, but any impact of that likely would not have been felt until the late 1980s and 1990s. However, inequality actually stabilized during this latter period. On the demand side, trends in occupational composition do not suggest that upgrading was particularly rapid in the 1980s and 1990s compared to the 1970s. Computers do not seem to have greatly affected employment in a number of narrow occupations that are likely to be sensitive to technological change (e.g., computer programmers, bank tellers). Computer use itself does seem to be associated with more education, even controlling for occupation, but the causal status of this relationship is uncertain and even the magnitude of the observed association does not seem large enough to have seriously compromised the ability of supply to meet the implied growth in demand. By contrast, the recession of the early 1980s coincides with a dramatic decline of traditionally better paid blue collar workers, particularly in manufacturing. This suggests a need for a closer look at other possible causes of inequality growth, such as macroeconomic forces and the decline of institutional protections for workers.

This paper explores the labor market status of older males in the early twentieth century, focusing on the question of whether their departure from employment was forced or voluntary. A comparison of the hazard of retirement across occupations shows that men who had better occupations in terms of economic status and work conditions were less likely to retire than were those with poorer jobs. This result tends to reject the recent view that retirement in the era of industrialization was more voluntary than forced. The difficulty faced by older workers in the labor market, as measured by the relative incidence of long-term unemployment, was relatively severe among craftsmen, operatives, and salesmen. In contrast, aged farmers, professionals, managers, and proprietors appear to have fared well n the labor market. The pattern of shifts in the occupational structure that occurred between 1880 and 1940 suggests that industrialization had brought a growth of the sectors in which the pressure toward departure from employment at old ages should have been relatively great. This result supports the traditional view that industrialization had deteriorated the economic status of the elderly.

How does the quality of education received by children affect their performance when they enter the labor market? This paper is an attempt to answer this question for new entrants to the labor market over a period from 1970 to the mid 1990s. In so doing we try to pull together some strands in the literature on both education and the labor market. We also hope to shed light on some of the policy concerns lurking in the background of the relevant literature. Most previous studies of the effect of school quality on the labor market, beginning with Card and Krueger (1992), measure quality with inputs (school expenditures, teacher-pupil ratios). We focus instead on an output measure - test scores. Thus our work is also related to the literature on 'education production functions,' which tries to estimate a link between education inputs and outputs. Both the school inputs-labor market and the education production literatures are unsettled.2 But they also stand in uncomfortable juxtaposition. According to Eric Hanushek (1996) the central tendency of hundreds of education production function studies is that there is no reliable connection between school inputs and outputs. According to Card and Krueger (1996) there is usually a positive relation between school inputs and earnings. While one or both of these results may be wrong, 3they raise an obvious question: 2"How is it that principals and teachers can effectively use school resources to produce improvement in labor market outcomes but fail to use extra resources to produce gains in academic achievement?" (Burtless, 1996) Our results do not directly resolve this conundrum. But they provide an important perspective: academic achievement is also valued in the labor market. And, in a sense to be described, this link is the more important empirically. These academic debates mirror larger concerns about the quality of public education and stagnating incomes of high school graduates. In the case of public education, the broad trend since the late 1960s has been first declining and then stagnant test scores in the face of a substantial increase in per pupil expenditures. The worrisome labor market trends begin about a decade later and entail a significant fall in real earnings of those not going beyond high school. The timing raises another obvious question: did the decline in school performance contribute to the decline in returns to completing high school? While the reduction in returns to high school completion is too pervasive for school performance to be a major cause, our results suggest that there is some link between the two. The first contribution of this paper is to describe the relation between changes in school system performance and changes in earnings for those who enter the labor force without going on to college4. By focusing on this group we hope to capture a ‘pure’ effect of school quality that is undistorted by subsequent college education or on the job training and experience. Accordingly, we analyze 3labor market outcomes for these workers only in the first few years after their entry into the labor force. We have a ‘view’ about what forces other than school quality affect the earnings of these new entrants, and our empirical analysis incorporates it. While this aspect of the empirical work is not a major focus of the paper some of the results we obtain seem interesting enough to warrant further scrutiny. The decision to enter the labor force or go on to college can itself be affected by school quality. Accordingly, we examine that possibility empirically. Finally, we analyze some aggregate outcomes: specifically, is the growth in employment related to school quality? More specifically, do employers tend to migrate to areas with improving school systems? Our unit-of-analysis is the state, because this is the political entity constitutionally responsible for public education in the U. S. (and public schools enroll around 90 per cent of all students). Consequently, the questions we try to answer are about state cross-sections: how are changes in the relative performance of a state’s schools related to the relative changes in outcomes for the schools’ graduates? The next section describes the data we use and how we use them. This is followed by our results. In a nutshell, these are that declining school quality is associated with lower wages for new labor market entrants, reduced ‘job quality’ and a lower probability of college entrance. There is weak evidence that on-the-job training or experience dilutes some of the wage effect. We also find that total 4employment – not just the employment of young workers – is reduced when school quality declines.

Background: The fractious public debate over mammography screening recommendations for women aged 40 to 49 years has received extensive attention in medical-journals and in the press. Objective: To learn how women interpret the mammography screening debate. Methods: We mailed a survey to a random sample of American women 18 years and older, older, sampling women of screening age (40-70 years). Sixty-six percent of women completed the survey (n=503). Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome measures were women's reactions to the debate, their suggestion for the starting age for mammography screening, and their understanding of the source of the debate. Results: Almost all women (95%) said that they had paid some attention to the recent discussion about mammography screening. Only 24% said the discussion had improved their understanding of mammography, while 50% reported being upset by the public disagreement among screening experts. Women's beliefs about mammography differed from those articulated by experts in the debate. Eighty-three percent believed that mammography had proven benefit for women aged 40 to 49 years, and 38% believed that benefit was proven for women younger than 40 years. Most women suggested that mammography screening should begin before age 40 years, while only 5% suggested a first mammogram should be performed at 50 years or older. In response to an open ended question about why mammography has been controversial, 15% cited concerns about the potential harms of radiation and another 12% cited questions about efficacy. Nearly half (49%), however, identified costs as the major source of debate (eg, "Health maintenance organizations [HMOs] don't want to pay for mammography"). Conclusions: Most women paid attention to the recent debate about routine mammography screening for women aged 40 to 49 years, but many believed the debate was about money rather than the question of benefit. Policy makers issuing recommendations about implementation of large-scale mammography screening services need to consider how to effectively disseminate their message.

This paper estimates the expected length of retirement for each labor market cohort between 1850 and 1990. Since 1850, the expected length of retirement has increased by more than six-fold and now represents up to 30 percent of male length of life after entry into the labor force. The rise of the duration of retirement during the twentieth century is analyzed according to the effects of mortality decline and of decreased age of retirement. Implications of the result for a number of economic issues, including the relative importance of life-cycle savings and the potential saving effect of Social Security, are discussed.

The labor force participation of older males in the United States started to decline in the late nineteenth century, long before the development of major public welfare programs for the elderly. Some scholars have attributed this phenomenon to the expansion of the Union army pension programs. This note suggests that the veterans' pension is of secondary importance in explaining the trend toward declining labor market activity of older males. This result implies that the labor force participation of older males would have declined over the last century even without the rise of public welfare and social insurance programs.

I use retrospective work histories from a unique dataset to follow workers in six cities through occupational, industrial, and geographic moves, thereby characterizing aspects of black economic mobility during the 1940s that cannot be viewed through the Census data. Relatively few migrants were drawn directly from the southern agricultural sector. Black occupational upgrades were larger than white upgrades on average but black upgrades were smaller than those of observationally similar whites. Black veterans did no better than black nonveterans in terms of upgrading or wages. And black workers in war-related industries earned substantially more than observationally similar blacks.

This paper traces the diffusion of fair employment legislation at the state level and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in the promotion (or at least the acceptance) of the principle of government-enforced anti-discrimination policy. The empirics indicate that non-southern states with higher proportions of union members, Jews, and Catholics tended to adopt fair employment legislation sooner than other states. There is weaker evidence that after controlling for other characteristics, the likelihood of passage was lower in states dominated by the Republican Party and that there were spillover or contagion effects across states. The proportion of the population that was black does not appear to have shortened the time to adoption.

The report contains an extensive analysis of housing demand, supply and need for affordable housing in Palm Beach County, Florida. The report was prepared under a contract with the Palm Beach County Department of Housing and Community Development.