This paper examines the widespread migration to farms in the U.S. during the Great Depression. We show that the option to move to farms serves as informal insurance during times of economic crisis, and that modernization in the agricultural sector reduces the ability of the land to provide this insurance function. The movement to farms also has spillovers on the broader economy, facilitating a decline in market-based expenditure and a shift into home production. At the same time, by absorbing surplus labor, the subsistence farm sector puts upward pressure on nonfarm wages and thus provides a countervailing force against deflation. We also provide evidence that the introduction of formal unemployment compensation reduces the movement to farms later in the decade. Our results bring attention to a less-studied effect by which formal insurance stabilizes the economy during deep crises: it increases market demand by diverting consumption away from home production and towards market-based expenditure.

Objective This study examines the differing roles of parents in producing bilingualism among second‐generation Asian and Latino Americans, the fastest growing immigrant groups in the United States. Methods We employ the probit model to estimate the likelihood of language maintenance for both ethnic groups using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA of 2005–2014. Results The estimation results show that mothers play a more significant role than fathers, especially for Latino Americans, and that heritage‐language retention increases with the parents’ age at arrival. We also find an increase in the rates of language maintenance across generations, presumably resulting from heightened awareness of the need to preserve cultural heritage among younger immigrants in recent decades. Conclusion These findings highlight the cultural and structural differences in gendered parenting between the two immigrant groups and suggest potential areas of gains through intervention programs for immigrant parents to promote parental investment in their children's development, including bilingualism.

Extended Abstract Total fertility in the United States fell from 7.0 in 1835, one of the highest rates in the world, to 2.1 in 1935, one of the lowest (Coale and Zelnik 1963; Hacker 2003). In some respects, the U.S. fertility transition is an ideal case study for testing theories of fertility decline. The population was characterized by remarkable ethnic, racial, and religious diversity and large group differences in fertility. Geographic differences in fertility were also large, reflecting spatial differentials in industrialization, agriculture, urbanization, school attendance, women's labor force participation, population composition, religion, and occupational structure (Hacker 2016). Unfortunately, our understanding of the U.S. fertility transition has been limited by poor data. A national birth registration system was not established until 1933, after the end of the century-long fertility decline. IPUMS samples of the 1850-1940 censuses have helped address the lack of birth registration data, but low sample densities-most census samples are limited to 1% densities-have limited researchers' ability to analyze contextual factors and small population subgroups. A few researchers (e.g., Wanamaker 2012; Lahey 2014) have continued to rely on aggregate state-and county-level data published shortly after each census. Others have relied on retrospective children ever born data published in the 1900, 1910, and 1940 censuses for ever-married women (e.g. David and Danderson 1987; Jones and Tertlit 2008). Although these data can be used to measure trends in cohort fertility from the early nineteenth century, selection issues distort the timing of the decline and the measurement of independent variables for analysis. This paper leverages the analytical power of new IPUMS complete-count microdata databases of 1850, 1880, and the 1900-1940 decennial censuses (a joint ongoing project between the Minnesota Population Center and Ancestry.com) to reexamine the U.S. fertility transition. The dataset includes nearly 600 million individuals spanning the beginning of the decline in the middle of the nineteenth century to its temporary end with the baby boom in the late. A major advantage of these complete-count datasets is our ability to examine individual-level, couple-level and household-level correlates of fertility at or near the time of childbearing simultaneously with contextual variables outside the household, including a measure of patrilineal kin propinquity and county-level measures of shared group size, population diversity, population density, schooling and economic opportunity. The complete-count data allow the evaluation of small population subgroups, including nearly 30 nativities (the fertility transition occurred during the peak years of immigration from Europe) and interstate migrants. We model couples' recent fertility (number of own children under age 5) in each census using a rich and consistent set of independent variables to evaluate the role of changing factors in the fertility transition and to decompose their contribution over time. We include measures often neglected by demographers including kin availability, parental religiosity, detailed nativity, and generation.

We estimate the short and long-run effects of resource booms on people (rather than places) using household data. We find evidence of positive effects during the boom and negative effects during the bust. The cumulative effect on income was arguably negative when restricting the sample to observations from prime working years (<55) and unambiguously positive otherwise. We reconcile the difference by showing that the boom delayed retirement. The evidence suggests the boom was a curse for the average household. It failed to generate clear-cut income gains during prime working years and its volatility caused costly income-smoothing adjustments later in life.

Agricultural subsidies and transfers distort the allocation of workers across sectors, and may keep too many workers in agriculture. What are the benefits of implementing an optimal transfer system? We analyze this question in a general equilibrium model with endogenous sector selection calibrated to the US economy. Eliminating distortions has three main effects: (1) small efficiency gains, (2) small income losses for agricultural workers, (3) a significant rise in the price of agricultural goods, which hurts lower-income agents in all sectors. In addition to the welfare analysis of the optimal policy reform, we also use the model to quantify the impact of the retaliatory tariffs imposed by the Chinese Government on US agricultural exports in 2018. The lump-sum transfers needed to compensate agricultural workers are modest (roughly 2% of aggregate agricultural income), when workers can reallocate between sectors. the seminar participants at the CJP Workshop at the University of Minnesota and the Deparement of Economics seminar at CSUEB for valuable discussions and comments. Any remaining errors are our own. Authors' declarations of interest: none.

Child fostering has been documented over time in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. We know little, however, about how the prevalence of fostering differs across countries and broad regions, nor about how fostering – and its predictors – have changed within countries over time. To explore prevalence, trends, and predictors of child fostering, I leverage Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 132 surveys in 38 countries collected between 1986 and 2017, representing all regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Preliminary results suggest significant variation in the prevalence of fostering, ranging from 2.8% of children in Sudan to 34.3% in Namibia. Fostering trends have changed significantly over time in the majority of countries, with nearly one-third of countries experiencing a significant increase over time. Early results suggest that while the prevalence of fostering has changed over time in many countries, predictors have largely remained the same.

Between 1940 and 1970, during the second Great Migration, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States. In this period, blacks were often excluded from the political process in the South, but were eligible to vote in the North. We study if, by changing the composition and the preferences of the northern electorate, the Great Migration increased demand for racial equality and induced legislators to more actively promote civil rights legislation. We predict black inflows by interacting historical settlements of southern born blacks across northern counties with the differential rate of black emigration from different southern states after 1940. We find that black in-migration increased the Democratic vote share and encouraged grassroots activism. In turn, Congress members representing areas more exposed to black inflows became increasingly supportive of civil rights. They were not only more likely to vote in favor of pro-civil rights bills, but also more willing to take direct actions, such as signing discharge petitions, to promote racial equality. Investigating the mechanisms, we document that both “between” and “within” party changes contributed to the shift in the position of northern legislators on civil rights. Taken together, our findings suggest that the Great Migration played an important role in the development and success of the civil rights movement

The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems, including a source of endogeneity that has proven difficult to overcome. Here we outline a simple, likelihood-based estimation approach for recovering the marginal willingness-to-pay function that avoids this endogeneity problem. Using this framework, we find that marginal willingness-to-pay to avoid violent crime increases by sixteen cents with each additional incident per 100,000 residents. Accounting for the slope of the marginal willingness-to-pay function has significant impacts on welfare analyses.

We explore the impact of rising incomes at the top of the distribution on spatial sorting patterns within large U.S. cities. We develop and quantify a spatial model of a city with heterogeneous agents and non-homothetic preferences for neighborhoods with endogenous amenity quality. As the rich get richer, demand increases for the high quality amenities available in downtown neighborhoods. Rising demand drives up house prices and spurs the development of higher quality neighborhoods downtown. This gentrification of downtowns makes poor incumbents worse off, as they are either displaced to the suburbs or pay higher rents for amenities that they do not value as much. We quantify the corresponding impact on well-being inequality. Through the lens of the quantified model, the change in the income distribution between 1990 and 2014 led to neighborhood change and spatial resorting within urban areas that increased the welfare of richer households relative to that of poorer households, above and beyond rising nominal income inequality.

This paper examines the effects of gender roles on the labor supply of women within a social institution, marriage. Using survey responses on gender roles from her source country as cultural proxies, I study whether the effects are greater when the cultural beliefs are shared between spouses. I find that an immigrant woman’s labor supply is jointly negatively explained by her own and her husband’s gender role attitude. In addition, the effects of endogamy are significantly more negative for traditional women where the endogenous formation of marriage is instrumented by geographically constrained marriage market conditions. I argue that this indicates a greater relevance of culture in endogamous marriage and present evidence that rules out the case where differential patterns of assimilation by marriage type are the sole reason behind the asymmetry.

This study contributes to debates over only children versus children with siblings by comparing companionship patterns and well-being among adolescents with and without siblings in the home. The sibling socialization literature suggests children without sibling interactions may be at a disadvantage, spending more time alone and experiencing worse well-being. Conversely, theories positing a quantity-quality trade-off with increasing family size suggest parents may ensure that only children have higher quality social interactions than adolescents with siblings. Using the American Time Use Survey (N = 6,177), this study shows that only children spend more time alone than children with siblings, but also more one-on-one time with parents. Additionally, only children are less stressed when alone and have less negative feelings when with peers, but have less meaningful interactions with non-household adults than do children with siblings. Only children may be more adapted to spending time alone as well as with peers.

Immigration has been the focus of much contention in the United States in recent years. Indeed, concerns persist with regard to how the foreign-born will adapt and integrate into U.S. society and core institutions, including the economy and labor market. Despite the considerable insights of prior research, however, our understanding of contemporary racial/ethnic stratification remains limited, especially in terms of how race/ethnicity and sex intersect with immigrant status. Using pooled 2012–2016 American Community Survey data, we investigate wage differences and near-poverty status by race/ethnicity, sex, and nativity (among full-time, full-year workers) in five dynamic majority-minority U.S. labor markets and high-volume immigrant destinations (Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City). Findings demonstrate that assimilative and human capital attributes matter. Yet our analyses reveal discernible group-level inequalities suggestive of depressed mobility, blocked opportunity, and race/ethnic- and sex-based hierarchy—patterns that highlight the embedded character of assimilation and economic outcomes within contexts of constraint. We find significant inter- and intragroup variation in these regards—particularly for near-poverty. We discuss our findings in light of their empirical and theoretical implications toward understanding minority group incorporation and economic inequality.

Predominantly white Mainline and Evangelical Protestant denominations are in a state of stagnation or decline in the United States. This is partially because these denominations fail to thrive in the ever-growing racial-ethnic diversity of the U.S. In fact, despite increases in the non-white population, diversity within these Protestant groups remains low. The organizational ecology approach asserts that the mismatch between the potential pool of adherents and the demographic niche occupied by the white Protestant groups encourages decline in areas that are diversifying. Past research supporting this theory, however, have relied on limited samples/timeframes and neglected the spatial autocorrelation of religious adherent rates and its predictors. This study re-examines the linkage between racial-ethnic minority growth and white denominations’ adherent decline using a fixed-effects spatial Durbin model to predict the adherent rates of Mainline and Evangelical Protestants in U.S. counties from 1980 to 2010. Results from the non-spatial fixed effects model fail to identify a significant association for Mainline denominations, but adjusting for spatial dependency reveals a direct effect for Mainline denominations and a spatial spillover effect for Evangelicals. Future studies on religious change and diversity must take their spatial structure into account.

A wealth of research has documented the importance of human capital for economic growth and development. While much of this body of research focuses on estimating the relationship between some economic outcome and, generally, levels of educational attainment, a subsidiary corpus of research has developed that focuses on documenting and explaining the geographic variation in human capital stocks that exists. The popular press, in its turn, has also adopted human capital stocks as a proxy for urban and regional vibrancy. Little attention has been focused on what, in fact, constitutes a talent or human capital magnet and how different measures of a seemingly straightforward concept might not only generate different results but might also be capturing more than simply levels of educational attainment. This chapter uses data on educational attainment—the share of the population with at least a college degree—for US metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2010 to conceptualize what is meant by a human capital or talent magnet and to highlight a few ways in which results might be driven by definition and measure. Of particular interest are the roles of age structure, migration, and relative performance.

We explore the impact of rising incomes at the top of the distribution on spatial sorting patterns within large U.S. cities. We develop and quantify a spatial model of a city with heterogeneous agents and nonhomothetic preferences for locations with different amenities of endogenous quality. As the rich get richer, their increased demand for luxury amenities available downtown drives housing prices up in downtown areas. The poor are made worse off, either being displaced or paying higher rents for amenities that they do not value as much. Endogenous provision of private amenities amplifies the mechanism, while public provision of other amenities in part curbs it. We quantify the corresponding impact on well-being inequality. Through the lens of the quantified model, the change in the income distribution between 1990 and 2014 led to neighborhood change and spatial resorting within urban areas that increased the welfare of richer households relative to that of poorer households by an additional 1.7 percentage points on top of their differential income growth.

In this dissertation I argue that authoritarianism is a natural human response to the perception of threat to one’s group. The construct thus represents a response to a largely non-existent threat among dominant group members (e.g., “reverse racism”) and to a real threat among stigmatized group members (e.g., racism). As a result, the term doesn’t have the same negative or pathological connotations for stigmatized minorities that it has for dominant racial group members. This forces us to fundamentally reconsider what authoritarianism is. My primary hypothesis is that perceived discrimination causes higher authoritarianism among stigmatized minorities. Chapter 1 articulates my theory of racial variation in authoritarianism (RVA) and derives hypotheses from it. RVA has many moving parts, and in this chapter I ground most of them in the extant literature. Chapter 2 establishes the empirical anomaly that is this dissertation’s jumping-off point, which is that black Americans are the most authoritarian racial group in America. In this chapter I show that every known study reports that members of racial minority groups are more authoritarian on average than their dominant group counterparts. This finding holds across more than five decades of studies and three scales of authoritarianism (Fascism, Right Wing Authoritarianism, and Child Rearing Values). Chapter 3 uses summary statistics to evaluate several dimensions of the empirical finding of racial variation in authoritarianism. These include this finding’s temporal stability, the shapes of its distributions for numerous racial groups, the temporal stability of these distributions, and the finding’s relationship to the following variables: church attendance, education, need for cognition, ethnocentrism, perceived discrimination, linked fate, and gay rights. In this chapter I show that elevated levels of authoritarianism among stigmatized minorities exist independently of the most intuitive covariates that one might suspect are able to account for the empirical anomaly at the heart of this project. Chapter 4 reports a series of logistic regressions to show that racial discrimination represents a form of intergroup threat among black Americans. This secures a crucial link in my theory, which is that perceived discrimination among minorities functions as and behaves like normative threats do among the mass public. Chapter 5 employs multilevel modeling with post-stratification to estimate the effects of perceived racism among black Americans on authoritarianism from nationally representative surveys and census data. In this chapter I provide the most direct and explicit empirical test of my dissertation’s primary hypothesis, which receives clear and strong support. Chapter 6 concludes with a discussion of future research that my project entails.

California’s Human Right to Water, passed in 2012, states that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.” (California Water Code §106.3, Chaptered 2012). To date, the policy discussion on meeting California’s Human Right to Water has focused largely on expanding and improving drinking water utility services in the state and improving the quality and reliability of water for rural households using domestic wells. Sanitation and wastewater have received far less attention. There also has been less attention paid to Californians who reside in areas served by functional utilities, yet do not have the plumbing in their homes to access those services, or who cannot access toilets and running water because they are experiencing homelessness.

The intent of this chapter is to provide an overview of late-late families within the context of couple and family psychology. We begin with the latest demo-graphic data on older adults in the United States and a description of their varied family structures. While these demographic characteristics and family forms are often mirrored or emergent across the globe, inclu-sion of international research about late-life families is beyond the scope of this chapter in most instances (for a discussion of aging families in a global context see, for example, Bengtson & Lowenstein, 2003, and Keating & de Jong Gierveld, 2015). Next, we examine older adults’ relationships with their spouse or part-ner, adult children, grandchildren, siblings, extended kin, fictive kin, and chosen kin, highlighting contem-porary issues that challenge these relationships in late life, including divorce and remarriage, filial norms and expectations, and chronic illness and caregiving. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for theoretical and methodological frameworks needed to guide the study of late-life families and priority areas for future research.

The Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage project (DCDL) is an initiative to produce linked restricted microdata files from the decennial censuses of 1960 through 1990. This paper provides background on the decennial census files and the previous work leading to the DCDL project. The proposed work plan is described in detail, as well as the dissemination strategy for the resulting linked data. When combined with existing linkages between the censuses of 1940, 2000, 2010, the soon-to-be public 1950 census, and the future 2020 census, the DCDL project will provide the final component in a longitudinal data infrastructure that covers most of the U.S. population since 1940.