The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly funded secondary school education, and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus of this article is on why the "high school movement" occurred in America generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly in America's heartland-a region we dub the "education belt." Since Iowa was at the center of this belt, we use information from the unique Census of Iowa for 1915 at both the county and individual level to explore the factors that propelled states like Iowa to embrace so expensive a public good as secondary school education...

The following figures and tables compare the geographical distribution ofthe Union Army recruits linked to census in the year 1850, 1860, 1900, and 1910with total population in the United State within the same cohort at the time ofcensus. There are two main comparisons, one for the total recruits, and one for therecruits living in urban area only.

Evaluating the explicit costs of crime to society is a difficult task, as seen in the few number of researchers that have attempted to solve this problem. However two main approaches have emerged in these endeavors. The most tried technique has used hedonic models, dating back to Richard Thaler's "A Note on the Value of Crime Control: Evidence from the Property Market" in the Journal of Urban Economics (1978). Using this type of model, researchers have strived to isolate the value individuals place on specific amenities or disamenities, such as weather, air pollution and crime rates, as seen in the wages they require and the prices they pay for housing.The other technique evaluates these costs by combining the actual out-of-pocket expenses associated with crime with the imputed costs from the pain, suffering and fear endured by crime victims. Mark Cohen computed these values for specific crimes for the first time in "Pain, Suffering, and Jury Awards: A Study of the Cost of Crime to Victims" in Law and Society Review (1 988). Both methods have their limitations. The hedonic approach has allowed researchers to derive a value for an index measure of crime, but not for specific crimes. Cohen's technique allowed him to examine estimates for individual crimes, but not without sacrificing the market-based analysis of the hedonic models which estimates the costs of crime based on individuals' voluntary decisions.I combine these two methods to obtain a market-based estimate for specific crimes. Incorporating a data set I used for my article in Economic Inquiry (1998), I obtain detailed nationwide information on specific crimes committed at the county level.Expanding other researchers' use of the US Census Bureau's Population and Housing Surveys [Blomquist et al. (1988), Clark and Nieves (1994), Cragg and Kahn (1997), Kahn (1995) and Hoehn et al. (1987) just to name a few] with hedonic models, I use multiple decades of information obtained from counties across the United States to create a panel data set. With this data, I isolate the effects that individual crimes have on housing prices and wage rates, as seen by individuals' and households' preferences changing over time. I then place a dollar value on the benefit of specific crime reduction, as perceived by their willingness to pay.I follow this introductory section of the paper with a literature review, an explanation of methodology, a data preparation section, an analysis of the data and a concluding section.

Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors that reduce trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences, even though the passage of time reduces this effect fairly rapidly; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (black in particular) and, to a lesser extent, women; iii) being economically unsuccessful in terms of income and education; iv) living in a racially mixed community and/or in one with a high degree of income disparity. Religious beliefs and ethnic origins do not significantly affect trust. The latter result may be an indication that the American melting pot at least up to a point works, in terms of homogenizing attitudes of different cultures, even though racial cleavages leading to low trust are still quite high.

This paper studies what determines group formation and the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or ethnicity. We are especially interested in whether and how much the degree of heterogeneity in communities influences the amount of participation in different types of groups. Using survey data on group membership and data on U. S. localities, we find that, after controlling for many individual characteristics, participation in social activities is significantly lower in more unequal and in more racially or ethnically fragmented localities. We also find that those individuals who express views against racial mixing are less prone to participate in groups the more racially heterogeneous their community is. These results are consistent with our model of group formation.

Few large institutions have changed as fully and dramatically as the U.S. healthcare system since World War II. Compared to the 1930s, healthcare now incorporates a variety of new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, financing mechanisms, and underlying sets of organizing principles.This book examines the transformations that have occurred in medical care systems in the San Francisco Bay area since 1945. The authors describe these changes in detail and relate them to both the sociodemographic trends in the Bay Area and to shifts in regulatory systems and policy environments at local, state, and national levels. But this is more than a social history; the authors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives--including strategic management, population ecology, and institutional theory--to examine five types of healthcare organizations through quantitative data analysis and illustrative case studies.Providing a thorough account of changes for one of the nation's leading metropolitan areas in health service innovation, this book is a landmark in the theory of organizations and in the history of healthcare systems.

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 in 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.

Previous methods on mining association rules require usersto input a minimum support threshold. However, there can be too manyor too few resulting rules if the threshold is set inappropriately. It isdi$cult for end-users to nd the suitable threshold. In this paper, wepropose a di erent setting in which the user does not provide a supportthreshold, but instead indicates the amount of results that is required.

This thesis analyses the economic effects of three education policies. The first chapter evaluates desegregation of large public school districts from 1961 to 1982. Data suggest that high school dropout rates of blacks fell by one to three percentage points from 1970 to 1980 in districts that desegregated in the interim. Black dropout rates remained unchanged in districts that desegregated both before 1970 and after 1980. In contrast, white dropout rates remained unchanged from 1970 to 1980 in districts that desegregated in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Further analysis suggests that while some of the decline in black dropout rates attributed to desegregation may be due to improvements in the characteristics of schools attended by blacks, at least some of the decline should be attributed to peer effects. The second chapter analyzes the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993. This equalization scheme provides more state education aid to school districts that historically spent less on schools. Regression-discontinuity estimates suggest that 60 to 75 cents of each dollar of state education aid are spent on education. The results also suggest that increased education spending leads to increased 4th-grade test scores. There is no evidence that increased spending leads to increased 8 th -grade test scores. It is noted that 4th-graders spent a larger fraction of their education in well-funded schools. Further investigation suggests that the increased 4th-grade test scores came as a result of increased performance by low-scoring students.

The passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday stranded many workers who once earned good union wages. The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. With better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods. Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities.

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glaeser (1997) index for industry concentration. This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that is potentially available for jobs in a particular area. The measure is based on observed home-work location patterns. It is particularly useful for testing theories where the scale of the market matters. We apply this measure to a standard wage equation and find that it explains almost half of the cross- region-wage-variance.

This paper is about the scales at which demographic data are available, and demographic research is conducted, and their implications for understanding the relationship between population and environment. It describes a multidisciplinary project designed to study the long-term relationship between population, land use, and environment in the U.S. Great Plains. The paper begins with a discussion of the scales at which data are readily available for demographic, agricultural land use, and environmental data for the United States. Some of these data can be obtained at relatively high resolutions, but the lowest common denominator for many of the long term data is the county, a fairly large unit. I then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different scales available. The third section of the paper uses county net migration as an example of research that can be done, and the scale at which it is effective. The example shows that the county is an effective unit for the study of migration, and that the research results are significant. The conclusion suggests that the study of population processes in an environmental and economic context is appropriate at the county level for some questions, but that scaling the results to larger units may be difficult because of the need to be certain about the contexts in which those processes take place. We probably should not study net migration at the national or continental scale, but aggregating county-level or regional studies to a larger scale may be successful.