We examine the influence of neighborhood peer effects on the decision of women to work using panel data that follows clusters of adjacent homes between 1985-1993. Modeling assumptions imply rank order restrictions that enable us to classify individuals into peer groups while identifying peer effects and underlying mechanisms. For women, peer effects influence labor supply in part because women appear to emulate the work behavior of nearby women with similar age children. For men, peer effects are mostly absent, consistent with inelastic work decisions. Geographically concentrated panel data are crucial for these estimates and could be exploited in other settings.

Cette thèse se veut une contribution à l’avancée de la connaissance des minorités culturelles ayant pris part à la construction du Canada au tournant du 20e siècle. L’histoire du peuplement canadien est riche, il suffit de regarder le nombre de publications réalisées à ce sujet pour s’en convaincre. Cependant, ce sont les origines ethniques les plus fréquentes qui ont souvent attiré les chercheurs. Or, plusieurs groupes ethniques, peu nombreux, ont également contribué à la société canadienne. Depuis quelques années, la réalisation de projets numériques ambitieux reprenant un échantillon, voire même l’entièreté, des recensements nominatifs a étendu les possibilités de recherche sociodémographique sur les minorités ethniques. C’est ici que notre travail a commencé, en utilisant ces nouvelles microdonnées et en les couplant aux recensements agrégés pour étudier une population minoritaire belge installée au Canada entre 1881 et 1911. Nos objectifs étaient dès lors : de réaliser un portrait des caractéristiques sociodémographiques et socioéconomiques de cette population; de découvrir les groupes ethniques installés à proximité; et d’observer son intégration spatiale, économique, sociale et culturelle dans son nouveau pays d’accueil. Dans cette thèse, nous avons ainsi utilisé les données agrégées disponibles pour dresser une première cartographie de la population d’origine belge au Canada. Cela nous a permis de la quantifier et de suivre son évolution dans le temps et l’espace, dont son déplacement vers les provinces de l’Ouest et sa répartition provinciale. Les Belges ont d’ailleurs suivi les tendances générales observées à cette époque dans les flux migratoires canadiens et ont également représenté à plusieurs occasions une part importante de la population locale observée. L’utilisation des microdonnées nous a aidés à détailler les observations faites à partir des données agrégées. Nous avons ainsi observé et suivi l’évolution des caractéristiques sociodémographiques et socioéconomiques des Belges. Des changements ont ainsi été constatés dans la répartition par âge et par sexe, ainsi que dans l’état matrimonial des individus entre 1881 et 1911. À ceci, s’ajoutent des variations dans les professions exercées, passant de religieux à agriculteur et d’agriculteur à ouvrier non qualifié (essentiellement journalier). De plus, il existe une certaine spécificité professionnelle autour du métier de mineur, dont un bon nombre a une origine belge. Enfin, on a constaté que, quelle que soit la province, les Belges s’installent régulièrement à côté des Canadiens français. Cette proximité se traduit également dans les mariages où l’on observe une grande part de mariages mixtes avec des Canadiens français. À l’instar des changements observés dans d’autres groupes ethniques, les Belges célibataires deviennent plus nombreux et louent régulièrement des chambres dans une maison de chambres plutôt que de loger chez un compatriote. Finalement, cette thèse a apporté de nouveaux éléments à la connaissance des minorités ethniques du Canada, tout en montrant comment la population d’origine belge s’est fait une place dans sa nouvelle patrie. Malheureusement, la distinction linguistique, bien que très intéressante, s’est avérée peu réalisable, coupant ainsi de nombreuses avenues potentielles.

Objectives. We examined 5 health outcomes among Black children born to US-born and foreign-born mothers and whether differences by mothers region of birth could be explained by maternal duration of US residence, childs place of birth, and familial sociodemographic characteristics. Methods. Data were from the 20002011 National Health Interview Surveys. We examined 3 groups of children, based on mothers region of birth: US origin, African origin, and Latin American or Caribbean origin. We estimated multivariate regression models. Results. Children of foreign-born mothers were healthier across all 5 outcomes than were children of US-born mothers. Among children of foreign-born mothers, US-born children performed worse on all health outcomes than children born abroad. African-origin children had the most favorable health profile. Longer duration of US residence among foreign-born mothers was associated with poorer child health. Maternal educational attainment and other sociodemographic characteristics did little to explain these differences. Conclusions. Further studies are needed to understand the role of selective migration and the behavioral, cultural, socioeconomic, and contextual origins of the health advantage of Black children of foreign-born mothers.

This research investigates and finds support for the hypothesis that the demand for human resource managers is largely derived from the relative demand for professional, managerial, and technical employees with high levels of occupationally specific human capital. Strong demand for these employees significantly increases both employment and earnings of human resource managers, reflecting the growing importance of occupational specific capital to firm performance and the practice of human resources. Using data from the Occupational Employment Statistics and the Current Population Survey March Supplement the research analysis finds that the employment of approximately 11% of the labor force is strongly associated with greater employment and higher compensation of human resource managers, and the employment of another 9% of the labor force is more weakly associated with the employment of human resource management (HRM). However, the employment of approximately 40% of the labor force is associated with the relative decrease in employment and compensation of HRM.

While a growing literature has shown that empowering women leads to increased short-term investments in children, little is known about its long-term effects. We investigate the effect of womens political empowerment on the human capital of children by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. state and federal suffrage laws. We estimate that exposure to womens suffrage during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment among children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. The results suggest that the redistribution of resources following suffrage benefited children with a high marginal return to investment.

In many domains such as computational geometry and database management, an object may be described by multiple instances (points). Then the distance (or similarity) between two objects is captured by the pair-wise distances among their instances. In the past, numerous nearest neighbor (NN) functions have been proposed to define the distance between objects with multiple instances and to identify the NN object. Nevertheless, considering that a user may not have a specific NN function in mind, it is desirable to provide her with a set of NN candidates. Ideally, the set of NN candidates must include every object that is NN for at least one of the NN functions and must exclude every nonpromising object. However, no one has studied the problem of NN candidates computation from this perspective. Although some of the existing works aim at returning a set of candidate objects, they do not focus on the NN functions while computing the candidate objects. As a result, they either fail to include an NN object w.r.t. some NN functions or include a large number of unnecessary objects that have no potential to be the NN regardless of the NN functions. Motivated by this, we classify the existing NN functions for objects with multiple instances into three families by characterizing their key features. Then, we advocate three spatial dominance operators to compute NN candidates where each operator is optimal w.r.t. different coverage of NN functions. Efficient algorithms are proposed for the dominance check and corresponding NN candidates computation. Extensive empirical study on real and synthetic datasets shows that our proposed operators can significantly reduce the number of NN candidates. The comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of our computation techniques.

After a long, dormant period, recent attention has turned to a variety of measurement issues surrounding the concept of human capital. The traditional approach of rely entirely on measures of school attainment, while convenient, is almost certainly misleading. The availability of cognitive skills measures greatly improves on these measurements, but there remains also concern about other unmeasured factors, including noncognitive skills. This paper considers alternative approaches to assessing the role of human capital on individual earnings and on economic growth.

Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data this paper shows that more educated workers demand more high-skill-intensive services and, to a lesser extent, more very low-skill-intensive services (such as personal services). Additional evidence at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level shows that this "education elasticity of demand" mechanism can explain part of the correlation between the share of college-educated workers in a city and the employment share of service industries. The parametrization of a simple model suggests that this induced demand shift can explain around 6.5 percent of the relative demand shift in the United States between 1984 and 2002. Similar results are provided for the United Kingdom. (JEL D12, J24, J31, L84)

Natural and sexual selection are commonly misbelieved to be solely positive aspects of evolution, as they favor strong individuals surviving, reproducing, and passing on their traits to their offspring. What many fail to consider are the different ways in which males and females maximize their evolutionary fitness at their partners’ expense. While males and females have similar reproductive goals, they are both willing to exploit their mates in order to benefit themselves and their mutual offspring. Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, is a model species in demonstrating this trend. In a study conducted by Holland and Rice (1999), the idea that sexual selection is always positive is refuted. Without this selection, populations would do better because antagonistic coevolution would not occur.

Perhaps uniquely, we combine individual-level data from the American Community Survey 20052011 with aggregate data for small areas to examine the resilience of individuals wages to the 2008 economic crisis. A Mincer-type wage equation, incorporating market potential and employment density, is estimated, leading to a measure of resilience based on actual wages in 2011 and on a counter-factual obtained from our wage equation. We find that individuals living in areas with a higher level of market potential are more resilient, controlling for individual-level characteristics such as education and ethnicity, indicating that both individual-specific and place-specific factors are important.

Enforcing dynamic and confidential access control policies is a challenging issue of data outsourcing to external servers due to the lack of trust towards the servers. In this paper, we propose a scalable yet flexible access control enforcement mechanism when the underlying relational data, on which access policies are defined, has been shared through a secret sharing scheme. For sharing values of an attribute in a relation, the attribute is assigned a secret distribution key and its values are split and distributed among data servers according to a Shamir based secret sharing scheme. Given access control policies over attributes of the relation schema, access to distribution keys, used further for reconstructing original values, is managed using the Chinese remainder theorem. Our solution, in addition to preserving the confidentiality of access control policies, is flexible to efficiently adopt grant and revoke of authorizations. Moreover, it prevents the possibility of information leakage caused by query processing through an access control aware retrieval of data shares. That is, our solution not only enforces access control policies for reconstructing shares and obtaining original values, but also for retrieving shares in query processing scenario. We implemented our mechanism and performed extensive experiments, whose results confirm its efficiency and considerable scalability in practice.

Early supporters of the minimum wage couched their arguments in terms of achieving greater productivity and efficiency. Some of the early management theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor talked about how overall efficiency could be improved if management undertook to make second class workers into first class workers. The efficiency wage argument put forth by Sidney Webb held that a minimum wage would actually encourage managers to invest in their workers human capital. This paper seeks to elevate the debate and refocus it on the issues that the minimum wage really speaks to: the type of society that we want to be. On the basis of CPS data, I show that the effective minimum wage population is considerably larger than commonly supposed, and that todays unskilled workers are no different than the unskilled industrial workers during Taylors time. Therefore, Taylors argument about making second class workers into first class workers through efficiency wages still has application to todays growing lowwage labor market.

This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males passed for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later reverse-passed to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.

There is considerable interest in the numbers and population dynamics of mobile African pastoralists alongside a recognition that they are probably undercounted or excluded from many data sources because of the difficulties in enumerating mobile individuals. In the Sustainable Development Goals where it is anticipated that everyone will be counted and their characteristics measured, it is important to develop appropriate strategies for including mobile pastoralists. I document the extent to which mobile African pastoralists have been invisible in the demographic record in the last half century and analyse the diverse pathways by which these invisibilities have been brought about in census and survey data collection exercises in different countries. A careful review of available documentation for censuses and Demographic and Health Surveys for the band of countries from Mauritania across to Kenya reveals heterogeneous patterns of pastoral nomad statistical invisibility with different forms and intensities according to national and socio-political context. Whereas there was substantial statistical invisibility of mobile pastoralists in the 1980s and 1990s in both data sources, deliberate exclusion has been much reduced in recent years, although there remain issues of clarity and definition. Although the availability of demographic and statistical data on mobile pastoralists is improving, it is impossible to document with any accuracy any transformations in the numbers of these populations over the last half century. Considerable work on developing appropriate categories and definitions needs to be undertaken if statistics on the characteristics of mobile pastoralists are to be appropriately represented in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Residential segregation by race first emerged in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities in the early twentieth century. The existing literature emphasizes discriminatory institutions as the driving force behind the particularly rapid rise in segregation over this period. We use newly assembled neighborhood-level data to instead focus on the role of residential sorting by whites. Employing both nonlinear tipping and linear white flight empirical approaches, we show that white departures in response to black arrivals were quantitatively large and accelerated between 1900 and 1930. Our results indicate that sorting by whites can explain between 45 and 60 percent of the observed increase in segregation over this period. Uncoordinated market decisions appear to have been a key mechanism behind the development of racially segregated cities in the United States.

Earnings inequality in the United States has increased rapidly over the last three decades, but little is known about the role of firms in this trend. For example, how much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attributed to rising dispersion between firms in the average wages they pay, and how much is due to rising wage dispersion among workers within firms? Similarly, how did rising inequality affect the wage earnings of different types of workers working for the same employer- men vs. women, young vs. old, new hires vs. senior employees, and so on? To address questions like these, we begin by constructing a matched employer-employee data set for the United States using administrative records. Covering all U.S. firms between 1978 to 2012, we show that virtually all of the rise in earnings dispersion between workers is accounted for by increasing dispersion in average wages paid by the employers of these individuals. In contrast, pay differences within employers have remained virtually unchanged, a finding that is robust across industries, geographical regions, and firm size groups. Furthermore, the wage gap between the most highly paid employees within these firms (CEOs and high level executives) and the average employee has increased only by a small amount, refuting oft-made claims that such widening gaps account for a large fraction of rising inequality in the population.

Chinese Americans consist of new immigrants, naturalized citizens, and second- and third-generation children of previous immigrants. Although Chinese were one of the earliest Asian groups in the United States (coming in large numbers during the California Gold Rush in 1849), most of the Chinese population today is quite new. Figure 10.1 shows that there were only 63,000 Chinese in 1870 and the number climbed to 107,000 in 1890. After that time, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the number declined and it was not until 1950 that the number again reached above 100,000. After the repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1943 and . . .

This paper details the methodology used to generate estimates of tax savings from statewide property tax exemption and credit programs in the United States. Estimates for each state are available for 2012 on the Lincoln Institute of Land Policys Significant Features of the Property Tax website. For each program, there are estimates of the total amount of tax savings statewide, the share of homeowners that are eligible, the median level of tax relief, and an analysis of how eligibility and tax savings vary across the income distribution. This is the first time that this detailed data is available for most of these programs. The estimates were generated through a simulation exercise that combined information on the key features of each program with microdata from the American Community Survey on household characteristics that determine eligibility and tax savings from exemptions and credits.

The adult attainment project (AAP) consists of a series of traditional adult statuses: labor force participation, residential independence, marriage, parenthood, and homeownership. This study examines these status indicators holistically as part of a long-term project that is assessed later in adulthood (ages 35-45). Close examination of AAP affords us novel insights into the changing state of the American opportunity structure that go beyond what can be achieved through studying temporal patterns of adult status indicators independently. Over the study period rates of completed AAPs declined by double digits, and the difference in the odds of completing the adult attainment project between men in the upper and lower end of the income distribution doubled. There are structural and cultural explanations for the decline of AAP. Divergence hypotheses favor structural explanations involving social stratification processes. Convergence hypotheses favor cultural explanations based on the loosening of social norms regarding traditional adult statuses. This study uses factor analytic models on data from the Current Population Survey in conjunction with formal measurement invariance testing to evaluate these hypotheses. The adaptive differentiation hypothesis, a blended structural-cultural explanation that posits analytically distinct AAP profiles among high and low socioeconomic groups, receives the most empirical support. The results from this analysis affirm a structurally prevailing change in the lives of poor, working, and lower-middle class Americans.

Most quantitative research on segregation and neighborhood change in American cities prior to 1940 has utilized data published by the Census Bureau at the ward level. The transcription of census manuscripts has made it possible to aggregate individual records to a finer level, the enumeration district (ED). Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have facilitated mapping these data, opening new possibilities for historical GIS research. We report here the creation of a mapped public use data set for EDs in ten northern cities for each decade from 1900 to 1930. We illustrate a range of research topics that can now be pursued: recruitment into ethnic neighborhoods, the impacts of comprehensive zoning on neighborhood change, and white flight from black neighbors.