This paper examines the economic well-being of households headed by same-sex partners relative to households headed by married and cohabiting heterosexuals. Using data from the 1990 Census of Population and Households, Public Use Micro Data 5% Sample (PUMS), we evaluate inter-group differences in absolute and adjusted household income and, using algebraic and regression-based decomposition techniques, assess the contribution to these differences of household human capital and labor market activity. Descriptive analyses reveal that average annual income and the income-to-needs ratio are higher in same-sex households than in households headed by married or cohabiting heterosexuals. The multivariate decompositions indicate that this economic advantage exists even though lesbian and gay male couples reap lower returns to their combined human capital investments and labor market activity.

This thesis examines the well-being of families under changing labor market conditions, changes in the legal environment and changes in public policy. The first chapter asks how women's fertility decisions are affected by changing labor market conditions. Chapter two examines whether divorce shocks persist into old age, and the final chapter studies how the elderly alter their living arrangements in response to changes in Social Security benefit payments. Chapter one exploits exogenous variation in labor demand for women to measure how total fertility responds to changes in female earnings. The principal finding is that women who are likely to face lower wage offers - those who have completed high school or are high school dropouts - reduce their total fertility when labor market conditions are better. In contrast, women who are likely to face higher wage offers - those who have completed at least some college - increase their total fertility when labor market conditions improve. Chapter two exploits variation in property division laws to examine whether there is a persistent effect of such laws on the well-being of ever-divorced women in retirement. The results suggest that a woman who divorces in a state and year where all pension assets are recognized as marital property has higher per capita household income in retirement than a woman who divorced in a state where pensions were not considered marital property.The results are consistent with some persistence in the effect of property division laws at divorce, but the effects do not appear to be pervasive enough to have a significant impact on other measures of well-being in retirement, including whether a woman lives independently, whether she or a member of her household owns her home, whether she receives government assistance, and whether she receives pension income. Chapter three examines how elderly individuals change their living arrangements when their social security benefits change. Findings suggest that living arrangements are substantially more elastically demanded by non-married elderly than previous studies, and that reductions in Social Security benefits would significantly alter the living arrangements of the elderly. Most of these effects appear to be concentrated among the less educated elderly.

The author examines available evidence on the effects of exposure to joblessness on emotional well-being according to race and sex. The impact of racism on general health outcomes also is considered, particularly racism in the specific form of wage discrimination. Perceptions of racism and measured exposures to racism may be distinct triggers for adverse health outcomes. Whether the effects of racism are best evaluated on the basis of self-classification or social classification of racial identity is unclear. Some research sorts between the effects of race and socioeconomic status on health. The development of a new longitudinal database will facilitate more accurate identification of connections between racism and negative health effects.

This thesis investigates the effect of social benefits on the labor market behavior of immigrants and females. The first part analyses the effect of welfare generosity on the choice of residency of immigrants and natives. The second part investigates the extent to which social benefits affect the relative well-being of females with and without children in the context of four countries. The effect of welfare benefits on migration has long been discussed, but the research has not led to unequivocal conclusions. Similarly, without the support of a consensus in the literature, patterns in the concentration of immigrants across the United States have been suspected of reflecting welfare generosity. The goal of the first study is to reduce uncertainty regarding the extent of welfare induced migratory and clustering behavior of foreign-born individuals. The choice of residence of immigrants in relation to natives is investigated by relating those choices to the interstate dispersion of welfare benefits and other economic variables and their changing magnitudes over time. The reliability of common methodological approaches is also examined. The paper employs difference-in-difference comparison group-based methods with state fixed effects along with mixed multinomial and conditional logits. The empirical analysis indicates that immigrants cluster in high benefit regions, but their migration pattern is positively correlated with changes over time of economic variables other than welfare benefits. These results have been confirmed by more recent data of immigrant migration patterns. The findings of this paper suggest the existence of other factors aside from benefits (for example, wage rates and ethnic networks), which explain the residential choice of immigrants to a greater extent.The second study explores cross-country variation in social benefits and their effect on the size of the family gap the gap in the well-being of women with and without children as measured by income components. The analysis finds a lot of variation in the impact of benefits across countries and within the income distribution. In countries with means-tested benefits the effect of children on disposable income is not alleviated, but reduced, while countries with universal benefits do not exhibit any effect of children at the bottom of the distribution.

Americans have long been loath to describe themselves in terms of class. Compared to the British, for example, Americans are far less likely to say that their society is composed of haves and have nots.2 In many respects, American culture is notably egalitarian; for centuries, foreign visitors have remarked on how little deference common folk give to their social betters here. They also used to note the political equality among citizens in a former era when the United States was exceptionally democratic. But egalitarian style and universal rights coexist with profound differences in economic resources. Americans are and have always been divided economically. Indeed, America in 2000 was the most economically divided nation in the developed world it had the widest spread in wealth. These divisions not only challenge the self-image of Americans as egalitarian, they have further consequences. Research shows that nations and communities with relatively wide disparities in material standards of living tend also to have relatively high rates of social problems, civic alienation, and discontent. In this paper, we examine differences in Americans standards of living in 2000 and how differences evolved over the twentieth century, especially since World War II. We describe how Americans in 2000 were separated by their material circumstances and how those distinctions compare to ones earlier in the twentieth century, taking into account peoples annual incomes, financial assets, consumption, and subjective assessments of their wealth. For each of these dimensions, we first contrast the well-being of better-off to less well-off Americans. Second, we distinguish the living standards of people of different ages, ancestries, educational levels, and locations. Over most of the century, economic divisions among Americans narrowed considerably in both these ways affluent and indigent became less distinct, as did Americans of different regions and races. But that the convergence stalled and then reversed in roughly the last three decades, widening the economic differences among Americans, most notably dividing by levels of education.

The first section begins the examination by illustrating the demographic shifts most commonly associated with gentrification, and then offers two competing explanations for them. The competing explanations motivate two very different views of the distributional effects of gentrification. In the first view, revitalization of urban neighborhoods causes changes in well-being among disadvantaged households. In the second view, gentrification is merely a side effect of other broad economic trends that affect the poor. The analysis also makes clear that residential displacementthe primary focus of most existing literature on the consequences of gentrificationis neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for declines in the living standards of poor households.The following section considers the general equilibrium effects of gentrification beyond the housing market. Increases in the local tax base might improve the quality of local public goods and services. Employment opportunities in certain industries might improve with the arrival of a more affluent clientele; that is to say, gentrification might partially solve the urban "spatial mismatch" problem. 7 Finally, gentrification might decrease the urban concentration of poverty, ameliorating the ills associated with it. 8 The subsequent section reviews the literature on the distributional impact of gentrification, and concludes that previous studies are too narrowly focused to fully address the question of whether gentrification harms the poor.

This thesis explores the reasons behind child labor in Italian immigrant families. It uses the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses to examine ethnic, gender, age, and generational differences among child workers in the United States. The data indicate that the rate of child labor in the Italian group generally resembled child labor rates in other groups: employment rates were higher for boys, for older children, and for first-generation children. The data also show that child labor declined sharply during the early decades of the twentieth century and across successive generations of Italian-Americans. Both primary and secondary sources illustrate that Italians came to the United States with a utilitarian view of children, seeing them as a component in a family economy oriented first toward survival and then toward accumulation. Interviews of Italian child workers suggest that many preferred the rewards of work to the rigors of the classroom. Oral histories taken later in life indicate that, in hindsight, those who had worked as children felt proud that they had contributed to their families' well-being, but many also looked back with regret over missed opportunities.

Analysis of long-run changes in the living arrangements and economic well-being of the aged is limited by the consistent data sources across time and space. Some fragmentary evidence on the living arrangements of the aged in several European and North American countries before the mid-twentieth century is summarized in Table 1. The numbers should be interpreted cautiously. The earliest estimates are especially suspect, since we generally lack information about the enumeration procedures or completeness of the surviving pre-nineteenth century listings of inhabitants. Even in the nineteenth century, there was significant variation in census concepts and definitions among countries and across time (Ruggles and Brower, forthcoming). Moreover, the processing of the existing historical data has not followed standardized procedures from study to study, and we have little information of the representativeness of the local studies. Therefore it would be premature to make too much of the apparent trends and differences shown in Table 1. Despite all of these qualifications, however, we can be confident that prior to the twentieth century most elderly persons in Europe and North America resided with their children and that residing alone was extremely rare.

This study of race stratification was undertaken in three articles concerning three distinct outcomes: wage differentials, area- and population-specific homicide rate differentials, and physiological distress and cardiovascular disease. The articles, although substantively distinct, fit together to explore stratification by race and some detrimental consequences of racism on these elements of well-being for African Americans. The first paper lays the foundation for the theme by establishing the hierarchy of racial stratification among five race/ethnic groups in the American labor force by examining wage discrimination in two periods. The second chapter explores how residential segregation leads to place stratification, the ranking of neighborhoods according to the race of their predominant residential population. I suggest that place stratification is directly associated with ecological SES and neighborhood violence rates. The last chapter extends the relationship between race stratification and ecology even further by arguing that racial segregation and income inequality lead to physically and psychologically hazardous environments in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Those who are residents of these types of areas are hypothesized to be more susceptible to distress and at higher risk of physiological ailments that are induced or exacerbated by physiological responses to stress. In short, race stratification not only affects group differences in SES, it impinges on neighborhood stability and even psychological and physical health.

Children live in a variety of family arrangements, some of which are complex, as a consequence of the marriage, divorce, and remarriage patterns of their parents. In addition, one-third of children today are born out-of-wedlock and may grow-up in single-parent families or spend significant portions of their lives with other relatives or stepparents. This report examines the diversity of childrens living arrangements in American households. The data are from the household relationship module of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), collected in the fall of 1996,and update a 1994 study that presented estimates from the 1991 SIPP panel of the number of children growing up in various family situations.1As in the earlier survey, detailed information was obtained on each persons relationship to every other person in the household, permit-ting the identification of many types of relatives, and parent-child and sibling relation-ships. This report describes family situations beyond the traditional nuclear family of parents and their children and includes discussions of extended family households with relatives and non relatives who may contribute substantially to a childs development and to the households economic well-being.

Chapter one examines voter rationality. Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect competent politicians. Further, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise when assessing the competence of their elected agents. This paper measures the extent to which voters separate signal from noise in deciding whether to re-elect their state governors. I find some evidence of sophistication: voters appear to evaluate their state's economic performance relative to the national economy. Yet I also find evidence of irrationality: voters in oil-producing states tend to re-elect incumbents during oil price rises, and dump then when the oil price drops. Similarly, voters in procyclical states are consistently fooled into re-electing incumbents during national booms. I conclude that voters are best characterized as quasi-rational. Chapters two and three turn to the effects of unilateral divorce laws. Chapter two examines whether these laws caused divorce rates to rise. The Coase Theorem suggests that merely redistributing property rights should not change marriage-market allocation. The existing empirical literature disagrees. I revisit this literature showing that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime. Taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates, I find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade, but find little evidence of a persistent effect. While unilateral divorce laws have only small effects on marriage-market allocation, chapter three find profound effects on distribution. Suicide rates provide a quantifiable measure of well-being, and we find that female suicide rates fell by about a fifth when states liberalized access to divorce. Domestic violence against women declined by about a third, and intimate homicide rates declined by a tenth, suggesting that these laws improved outcomes for women. Legal institutions appear to have profound effects on outcomes within families.

In early 2002, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) will publish a special report on children. The report will present changes from 1990 to 2000 for the nation, 50 states, and the District of Columbia for several risk factors including child ren in poverty, children in working poor families, children living with a householder who is a high school dropout, and children without secure parental employment. The report will show 1990 census data and 2000 data from a special survey, the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey (C2SS).

In this chapter we describe what is known about the complex relationships between gender, math, and labor market outcomes. We perform a simulation showing that U.S. women would fare somewhat better if they knew as much math as men. We then describe how occupational structures have changed over the past 30 years, as gender differences in mathematics education have decreased, and as other barriers to the career development of women have fallen. We conclude that continued improvement of gender equity in math education is likely to have modest effects on income but that other policies have a greater potential to improve the economic well-being of U.S. women.

Analysis of long-run changes in the living arrangements and economic well-being of the aged is limited by the lack of consistent data sources across time and space. Some fragmentary evidence on the living arrangements of the aged in several European and North American countries before the mid-twentieth century is summarized in table 1. The numbers should be interpreted cautiously. The earliest estimates are especially suspect, since we generally lack information about the enumeration procedures or completeness of the surviving pre-nineteenth century listings of inhabitants. Even in the nineteenth century, there was significant variation in census concepts and definitions among countries and across time (Ruggles and Brower, forthcoming). Moreover, the processing of the existing historical data has not followed standardized procedures from study to study, and we have little information of the representativeness of the local studies. Therefore, it would be premature to make too much of the apparent trends and differences shown in table 1. Despite all these qualifications, however, we can be confident that prior to the twentieth century most elderly persons in Europe and North America resided with their children and that residing alone was exceedingly rare. Today, the great majority of the aged populations of North America and Europe reside alone or with only their spouse. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the percentage of the aged who live alone has also begun to rise in many Asian and Latin American countries (Hermalin and Ofstedal, 1996; Uhlenberg, 1996; Martin, 1989; DeVos, 1995). Taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that the shift towards independent residence of the aged is a worldwide phenomenon. According to the consensus of scholarly opinion, the simplification of the living arrangements of the aged during the twentieth century has resulted primarily from an increase in the resources of the aged, which has enabled increasing numbers of elderly to afford independent living. The author's analysis suggests the opposite: he argues that the decline of the multigenerational family occurred mainly because of increasing opportunities for the young and declining parental control over their children.

Seeking to enrich our understanding of inequality movements, economic historians have used new data to illuminate the earlier darkness that Kuznets urged us to explore. To explore earlier worlds without income tax returns or modern household surveys, they have turned to non-income measures of purchasing power and well-being. The articles in this issue give a good sampling from this new wave of the economic history of inequality.

Objective. African American migrants from the South have long been blamed for many social problems that emerged in northern cities during the second half of the twentieth century. While recent research shows that migrants actually compared favorably with non-migrants on such characteristics as labor force participation, employment, income, and family stability, little effort has been expended to assess the more "macro" effects of migrants on the well-being of the indigenous northern black population. In this paper we investigate the possibility that northern-born black males were less likely to be employed and had lower wages in cities with proportionately larger southern-born populations in 1970. Methods. A multilevel analysis is conducted using individual-level data for 1970 from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and data for metropolitan statistical areas from the Summary Statistic File 4C (Fourth Count) for 1970. Results. We find that percentage southern-born in an urban area is negatively related to black male employment, but that the relationship disappears when controls are introduced. Southern-origin concentration in an urban area is not related to annual income from salary and wages for black males. Conclusions. We conclude that the evidence from our analyses raises serious doubt about a negative "collective" impact of southern migrants on the economic well-being of the indigenous northern black population.