The Great Migration of African Americans from the South at the beginning of the twentieth century had an enormous impact on cities in the Midwest and North including Hartford, Connecticut. This study examines the movement of African Americans to Hartford at the neighborhood and street level. The new arrivals, many from Georgia recruited to work in the Connecticut River valley tobacco farms, joined long-established African American residents of Hartford. A geographic information system (GIS) analysis at the street level illustrates residential differences within the African American community based on place of birth, socioeconomic status, and voting. In the north end of Hartford migrants from Georgia and Eastern European immigrants, for a moment in historical time, shared residential space at the street level. However the Eastern European immigrants had higher occupation status and moved out of the North End neighborhoods, which became increasingly racially segregated as the Great Migration continued.

The level of partisan polarization in the U.S. Congress is higher now than at any time since the Civil War. Although some view polarization as a normal outcome of the political struggle between left and right, it can also have undesirable effects; for example, the fiscal cliff and government shutdown scenarios. For this and many other reasons, political polarization has important consequences for the policymaking process. This report explores the issue of whether the increase in polarization can be attributed, at least in part, to growing geographic separation of liberal and conservative voters. It addresses two questions: first, whether the spatial distribution of the American electorate has become more geographically clustered over the past 40 years with respect to party voting and socioeconomic attributes; and second, whether this clustering process has contributed to rising polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives. We find support for both hypotheses and estimate that long-term geographical clustering of voters is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the increase in polarization in the House between the 93rd and 112th Congresses. An important ancillary finding is that socioeconomic variablesincluding those measuring race, education, income, and urbanicityare dwarfed by the within-district percentage of married adults as a predictor of local partisanship, as measured by both the party affiliation of the House representative and by the presidential vote share.

Government policy mistakes significantly raise the prices of consumer goods. The 12 costly policy mistakes discussed in this paper add $4,440 a year to the annual expenses of the average American family. Most policy mistakes raise costs by limiting supply. Policymakers can lower the cost of living by removing unnecessary regulations and licensure requirements, streamlining bureaucracy, and ending protections that have been granted to favored industries. Citizens and local legislators need not wait for Washington to ease the cost of living: The most costly policy mistakes can be fixed at the state and local levels.

Federal funding agencies are asking principal investigators (PIs) to specify their plans for describing, storing, securing, sharing, and preserving their research data in Data Management Plans (DMPs) included with their grant proposal. This change in sponsored research is best exemplified by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which in 2010 announced that all grants submitted after January 18th, 2011 must include a one- to two-page DMP with all new proposals. In order to review the plans for how University of Minnesota researchers plan to manage, store, describe, protect, and share and preserve their data, a review instrument was created and implemented by the University Libraries in the summer of 2014. Our local study of DMPs in successful NSF grant applications from January 2011 - June 2014 was opt-in by U of M PIs and the libraries collected 182 data management plans for our study, accounting for 41% of the total number of plans solicited. The deidentified data used in our analysis and our survey instrument are presented here.

This paper uses the details of an historical setting in which the introduction of "right to work" laws was arguably exogenous-the period following the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947-to produce credibly identified estimates of the effects of these laws on wages. The average effect of right to work laws on wages across all sectors of the economy is likely small and slightly negative. Some evidence indicates wage effects are more negative within the highly unionized sector. * I would like to thank Abigail Wozniak for her advice on this paper and Daniel Hungerman, James Sullivan, and seminar participants at the University of Notre Dame for helpful comments. All remaining errors are my own.

Despite the extensive scholarly literature on both the Great Famine in Ireland and the Famine immigration to the United States, little is known about precisely which Irish men and women emigrated from Ireland in the Famine era. This article makes use of a new dataset comprised of 18,000 Famine-era emigrants (2 per cent of the total) who landed at the port of New York from 1846 to 1854 and whose ship manifests list their Irish county of origin. The data is used to estimate the number of emigrants from each county in Ireland who arrived in New York during the Famine era. Because three-quarters of all Irish immigrants intending to settle in the United States took ships to New York, this dataset provides the best means available for estimating the origins of the United Statess Famine immigrants. The authors find that while the largest number of Irish immigrants came from some of Irelands most populous counties, such as Cork, Galway, and Tipperary, surprisingly large numbers also originated in Counties Cavan, Meath, Dublin, and Queens County, places not usually associated with the highest levels of emigration. The data also indicates that the overall level of emigration in the Famine years was significantly higher than scholars have previously understood.

Construction of both single-family and multifamily homes collapsed with the onset of the housing crisis in 2006. Since then, single-family con - struction has moved up only modestly. Multifamily construction, however, has rebounded strongly, surpassing its pre-crisis level. Business-cycle fac - tors are partly responsiblethe crisis and slow recovery have constrained wages, driving more households to live in apartments, which are typically less expensive than single-family homes. But demographic factors such as marriage rates and improving health have proved equally important. Jordan Rappaport breaks down changes in the number of occupied multifamily units to determine which age groups have contributed most to the rebound in multifamily home construction. He finds that young adults have primarily driven the recent rebound, reversing their swing to - ward single-family homes in the early 2000s. In the long-run, however, baby boomers will likely drive construction as they age into their senior years and downsize from single-family homes.

The title is intended to signal that this paper is a commentary on Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. The editorial insertion in the title calls attention to the point that capital as defined by Piketty is not the reproducible tangible capital that contributes to the production of output, the argument K in the economists production function. Rather Piketty defines capital as marketable (i.e., bequeathable wealth) at current market prices. Pikettys major focus is on the increasing magnitude of the ratio of national marketable wealth to national income over the last 25 to 30 years where the data on wealth is fairly good and his prediction that there will be further increases in this ratio and a growing concentration of wealth at the top as the twenty-first century unfolds. He has much to say about wealth and inheritance in the twentieth century. For the United States he also presents some speculative evidence for the nineteenth century. Pikettys prediction about a worsening wealth distribution depends critically on his assertion that a strong bequest motive dominates the life-cycle motive for wealth accumulation. Inheritance, he suggests, is the major force that is propelling increasing wealth inequality. The contribution of this paper is to explore wealth acquisition, the distribution of marketable wealth, and the magnitude of inherited wealth in the late nineteenth century U.S. For that era I find an abundance of evidence for life-cycle saving (even among industrial workers) and little support for a strong bequest motive (even among the wealthy). This does not mean that wealth inequality was not a serious problem during the Gilded Age nor that it is not a serious problem today, but my findings do challenge Pikettys conclusion that inheritance has always been a driving mechanism producing growing concentrations of wealth and power in capitalist America. As a consequence his fundamental laws regarding the dynamics of capitalism may need to be reexamined. To develop effective policy to counter inequality, we need a better understanding of the forces driving the distribution of wealth over the life cycle of the household and over the population of households in the economy.

Previous research on the Great Migration in the USA has focused on the economic outcomes of black migrants in the North. In comparison, the economic outcomes of black migrants in the West, particularly during the second wave of the Great Migration that occurred between 1940 and 1970, have not been fully explored in the literature. This article analyzes the occupational mobility of southern-born black male migrants in the West in the 1950s relative to various subgroups residing in the West: western-born white and black males and southern-born white males. Regression results from the 1% 1950 and the 1960 census microdata samples indicate that unlike in the North in the 1910s where southern-born blacks were not as upwardly mobile as northern-born blacks during the first wave of the Great Migration, there was no difference between western-born blacks and southern-born blacks in their probability of getting employed in a particular occupational class in the West in the 1950s, during the second wave of the Great Migration. However, compared to white males, although the majority of black males remained employed in lower-blue-collar occupations (as laborers and service workers), southern-born blacks were successful at increasing their representation in upper-blue-collar occupations (into Crafts/Sales).

Households choose where to live by trading off wages, house prices and local amenities. In this paper, I estimate the effect of crime on household location choice using a two-stage residential sorting model which incorporates the effect of mobility cost. The choice set in this paper is defined at the level of the metropolitan areas. The results from the second stage show that people are willing to pay more to move to a location with lower violent crime occurrences and are willing to pay more to move to a place with higher property crime; however, the effect of violent crime is larger than property crime. When recovering the willingness to pay (WTP) for the two types of crime using elasticities, the results show that people are willing to pay $651 and $977 for a one hundred unit decrease in violent crime and $23 and $27 for a one hundred unit increase in property crime for 2005 and 2010 respectively. The difference in difference results for the sorting model show that people are willing to pay less to move to a location in which the police number increases, and pay more to move to a location where the crime rate decreases while police force increases. The results of the difference in difference analysis, shows that the elasticity of WTP for the increase in police number in the hedonic price model, is slightly lower than that from the sorting model.

This paper studies the impact of culture on the fertility behavior of teenage women in the US. To identify this effect, it took an epidemiological approach, exploiting the variations in teenage women's fertility rates by ancestral home country. Using three different databases (the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and the 2000 US Census), the results show that culture has quantitatively important effects on the fertility behavior of teenage women. This finding is robust to alternative specifications, to the introduction of a range of home country variables to proxy culture, and to the measurement of individual characteristics present when teenage women continue with a pregnancy to have a child.

This paper investigates the occupational characteristics of natives and immigrants in the United States. Occupations are characterized by a vector of task usages (analytical, interactive, and manual) that describe the activities performed on the job. Immigrants on average perform fewer analytical and interactive tasks and more manual tasks than natives, and these differences are larger for women than men. The task usage gaps between natives and immigrants have widened significantly since 1970. These gaps remain (but shrink) when comparing natives and immigrants in the same age and education group. Lower English language proficiency and living in a larger ethnic or language enclave increase the task usage gaps. While immigrants task usages tend to assimilate to natives with time since migration, newer immigrant cohorts have experienced significantly slower occupational assimilation than earlier cohorts. These results have potentially important implications for recent findings of slower economic assimilation of recent cohorts.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the issue. It begins by using nationally representative survey data to trace the evolution in families child care expenditures. I find that the typical family currently spends 14 percent more on child care than it did in 1990. This is less than half the increase documented in previous work. Interestingly, low-income families spend the same amount or less on child care, while their high-income counterparts spend considerably more. Despite this divergence, families at all income levels allocate the same share of income to child care as they did several decades ago. The next section of the paper draws on establishment-and individual-level data to examine trends in the market price of child care. The evidence suggests that after persistent, albeit modest, growth throughout the 1990s, market prices have been essentially flat for at least a decade. In the papers final section, I analyze several features of the child care market that may have implications for prices, including the demand for child care, the skill-level of the child care workforce, and state regulations. A few findings are noteworthy. First, I show that child care demand stagnated around the same time that market prices leveled-off. Second, although the skill-level of the child care workforce increased in absolute terms, highly-educated women increasingly find child care employment less attractive than other occupations. Finally, child care regulations have not systematically increased in stringency, and they appear to have small and inconsistent effects on market prices. Together, these results indicate that the production of child care has not become more costly, which may explain the recent stagnation in market prices.

This exercise reproduces and assesses the historical time-series on the top shares of the wealth distribution for the United States presented by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Pikettys best-selling book has gained as much attention for its extensive presentation of detailed historical statistics on inequality as for its bold and provocative predictions about the continuing rise in inequality in the twenty-first century. Those predictions were derived and justified by reference to the historical data, so it is helpful to assess the robustness of the historical evidence presented. Here I examine only Pikettys U.S. data for the period 1810 to 2010 for the top ten percent and the top one percent of the wealth distribution. I conclude that Pikettys data for the wealth share of the top ten percent for the period 1870-1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top one percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Pikettys data for the top one percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810-1910) are also unreliable. They are based on a single mid-century observation that provides no guidance about the antebellum trend and only very tenuous information about trends in inequality during the Gilded Age. The values Piketty reported for the twentieth-century (1910-2010) are based on more solid ground, but have the disadvantage of muting the marked rise of inequality during the Roaring Twenties and the decline associated with the Great Depression. The reversal of the decline in inequality during the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent sharp rise in the 1980s is hidden by a fifteen-year straight-line interpolation. This neglect of the shorter-run changes is unfortunate because it makes it difficult to discern the impact of policy changes (income and estate tax rates) and shifts in the structure and performance of the economy (depression, inflation, executive compensation) on changes in wealth inequality.

Based on Berry's (1987) framework on acculturation and ethnic identity interaction, this study examined the link from this interaction among Asian Americans to their political participation. Using the 2008 National Asian American Survey (Study 1) and a self-initiated survey among Chinese students in Fall 2014 (Study 2), this thesis presents a model from which to consider some of the important determinants of Asian Americans political participation, whether and how acculturation level interacts with (pan)ethnic group resource in predicting their participation. Most findings from these two studies supported the hypotheses. First, all the five traditional models of political participation have significant share in predicting Asian Americans political participation. Second, the interaction between acculturation and ethnic identity does increase the model fit of Asian Americans participation, but with varying strengths based on different forms of participation and target populations. Finally, after creating four groups based on acculturation and ethnic identity, I find that the integrated group is generally the most actively engaged in politics, followed by the assimilated group, the separated group and the marginalized group.

It is well known that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansions in the 1980s and 1990s had a positive impact on female employment. In contrast, the original 1975 EITC has commonly been described as a modest program that did not keep up with inflation; furthermore, during this time public assistance was twice as generous as it would be two decades later. For these reasons, there has been a general assumption that the incentives of the 1975 EITC were insufficient to induce much of a female employment response. In this paper I find strong evidence that the original EITC did have a positive and permanent impact on female employment. Using samples from two different populations of women, I use difference in differences to show that EITC-eligible women increased their relative employment by 3 to 5 percentage points (or about 5% to 8%). These findings are robust to triple differences analysis, model choice, state-specific time trends, choice of sample years, reweighting, and potentially endogenous fertility responses to the EITC. Subgroup analysis shows that this employment response varied by education, cost of living, race, age, marital status, and spousal income in a manner consistent with a standard labor supply model. The largest responses came from subgroups of women more likely to be EITC-eligible and women eligible for more EITC benefits. As far as I am aware, this is the first paper to empirically examine the introduction of the EITC and its first decade of existence.

This paper discusses the challenges to a wider access to archival cartographic materials. The aim of the study is to present and evaluate the preparation of historical maps for presentation in geoportals. The authors use the example of two maps from the early twentieth century, without information on the spatial relations, to trace the course of their processing into a form that allows them to be published in spatial data structures. The descriptions of subsequent stages include theoretical and practical aspects of the procedure. Particular attention was paid to the factors affecting the accuracy of spatial fit that affects the ability to use them further.

We use CPS data from 1976 to 2009 to compare the characteristics and proportions of stay-at-home father (SAHF) households with both stay-at-home mother (SAHM) and dual-earner households. We find that mothers in SAHF households have a significantly higher level of education than their husbands and experience the sharpest increase in education over time compared with spouses in other household types. Caregiving SAHF households are, over time, closing the income gap with their SAHM counterparts. We make a distinction between caregiving and unable-to-work SAHFs and demonstrate that these two types of SAHF households are substantially different from one another. Caregiving SAHF households share key traits with SAHM households. Our results show that families living in stay-at-home households are increasingly the result of a deliberate choice made by spouses to have fathers assume a caregiving role while mothers pursue employment outside the home.