Purpose: Since the literature on the effect of the unemployment rate as reflection of economic fluctuations on crime shows an empirically ambiguous effect, this study argues that a new way of modelling the dynamics of unemployment and crime by focusing on the transitory and persistent effect of unemployment on crime helps resolve this ambiguity. Design: Panel data for US states from 1965-2006 are examined using the Mundlak (1978) methodology to incorporate the dynamic interactions between crime and unemployment into the estimation. Findings: After decomposing the unemployment effect on crime into a transitory and persistent effect, evidence of a strong positive correlation between unemployment and almost all types of crime-rates is unearthed. This evidence is robust to endogeneity and the controlling for cross-panel correlation and indicators for state imprisonment. Originality: The paper is the first to examine the dynamics of the interaction of crime and economic fluctuations using the temporary and persistent effects framework of Mundlak (1978). In one set of estimates, one can evaluation both the short- and long-run effects of changes of unemployment on crime.

In this paper I estimate the long term individual effect of child labor using a linked census sample from 1900 and 1910 to 1940. The sample consists of over 730,000 males from the US birth cohorts of 1884 to 1904. To solve the fundamental identification problem that starting work later implies higher school achievement under compulsory education laws, I use a difference in difference strategy to exploit both changes in minimum working age laws and compulsory school start ages across 14 states. I find that the effect of starting work a year earlier - controlling for missed school - is an increase of $8 of annual income in 1940. While modest, this effect is roughly the same as the marginal benefit of an extra year of school controlling for age of allowed labor market entry. This implies that families during this time period were likely optimally allocating the time of work eligible children between work and school. To conclude, I discuss the implications of this research for modern policy design aimed at eradicating child labor in developing countries. In particular, modern policy must account for the benefits of work to children if they intend to improve the welfare of those children.

Mass immigration over the past four decades has changed the racial and ethnic composition of United States by ushering in millions of Asians and Latinos whose arrival has not only challenged the traditional black-white color line, but has also changed perceptions about race. Focusing on Asian Americans, I show how contemporary immigration has changed the racial status of this group; once considered unassimilable and undesirable immigrants, Asian Americans now exhibit the highest rates of intermarriage, the lowest rates of residential segregation, and the highest median household incomes of all US racial groups. By highlighting the changing selectivity of Asian immigration after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, I illustrate how their hyper-selectivity has not only affected their patterns of incorporation, but also produced positive stereotypes of contemporary Asian Americans. This, in turn, has resulted in a social psychological process that I refer to as stereotype promisethe promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance and outcomes. By introducing research in social psychology to the fields of immigration and race, I provide a better understanding of the ways in which immigration is changing the meaning of race for Asian Americans in twenty-first century America.

Privacy-preserving data mining has attracted the attention of a large number of researchers. Many data perturbation methods have been proposed to ensure individual privacy. Such methods seem to be successful in providing privacy and accuracy. On one hand, different methods are utilized to preserve privacy. On the other hand, various data reconstruction approaches have been proposed to derive private information from perturbed data. Thus, many researchers have been conducting various studies about data reconstruction methods and the resilience of data perturbation schemes. In this survey, we focus on data reconstruction methods due to their importance in privacy-preserving data mining. We provide a detailed review of the data reconstruction methods and the data perturbation schemes attacked by different data reconstruction techniques. We merge our review with the evaluation metrics and the data sets used in current attack techniques. Finally, we pose some open questions to provide a better understanding of these approaches and to guide future study.

Using data on real per capita income, education levels, and state government tax receipts, I show that there is some evidence of convergence within the U.S. from the time period 1964-2013. I find this evidence for three out of five non-overlapping ten year periods. Defining highly educated people as people with more than five years of college education, I also find that having highly educated people in your state contributes significantly to growth. However, controlling for the levels of income, corporate, property, and sales tax revenue does little to explain growth.

Standard measures of residential segregation tend to equate spatial with social proximity. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique among demographers and ethnographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late nineteenth-century United States, standard measures suggest a counterintuitive pattern: southern cities, with their long history of racial inequality, had less residential segregation than urban areas considered to be more racially tolerant. By using census enumeration procedures, we develop a sequence measure that captures a more subtle backyard pattern of segregation, where white families dominated front streets and blacks were relegated to alleys. Our analysis of complete household data from the 1880 Census documents how segregation took various forms across the postbellum United States. Whereas northern cities developed segregation via racialized neighborhoods, substituting residential inequality for the status inequality of slavery, southern cities embraced street-front segregation that reproduced the racial inequality that existed under slavery.

Popular understandings of segregation often emphasize the Jim Crow South before the 1954 Brown decision and, in many instances, explain continued segregation in schooling as the result of segregated housing patterns. The case of Flint, Michigan, complicates these views, at once illustrating the depth of governmental commitment to segregation in a northern community and showing how segregated schools and neighborhoods helped construct one another. The Flint case also reveals new modes of segregationist thought. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Flints city leaders thought of segregation as splitting, and they sought to divide their city along racial lines. But they thought of segregation as joining as well. Drawing on various strands of progressive reform and educational thought, Flints educational, business, and philanthropic leaders believed community bonds would be stronger in segregated neighborhoods anchored by their schools. Flints community schools program worked toward this end, exemplifying the paired embrace of segregation as joining and splitting, and becoming a model for educators in hundreds of cities nationwide.

In light of rising numbers of unaccompanied minors at the Mexico- US border in 2014, this article examines child migration from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. Using data from the Mexican and Latin American Migration Projects that permit us to go beyond simple descriptive analysis about children apprehended at the border, we investigate the extent to which children from these countries: 1) enter without legal authorization to do so; 2) are more likely to cross the border now than in the past; and 3) are tied to their parents’ migration. In theory, if immigration and refugee protections worked well for children and offered them legal pathways to reunify with their families, then we would expect low levels of unauthorized entry and no dramatic shifts over time. However, our examination of child migration shows that it is strongly linked to unauthorized entry, period of entry, and parents’ US experience. The findings show that the migration of children is closely linked to their parents’ migration history. Although the overall likelihood of a Mexican child making a first US trip is quite low, it is practically non-existent for children whose parents have no US experience. Thus, the increase in child migration from Central America, and the continued high levels of child migration from Mexico result from widespread migration networks and the United States’ long-standing reliance on the children’s parents as immigrant workers. The findings suggest that these children need protection in the form of family reunification and permanent legal status.

This study investigates gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among the prime working-age (i.e., 35 to 44) population using Census data from 1990 and 2000, and the 2009-2011 American Community Survey. We define the total financial return to education as the family standard-of-living as measured by family income adjusted for family size. Our results indicate that women experienced significant progress in educational attainment and labor market outcomes over this time period. In 1990, women aged 35 to 44 are less educated than men, but women overtake men in 2010. Personal earnings grew faster for women than men over this period. Ironically, married women’s progress has led to faster improvement in the family standard-of-living for men than for women themselves. The previously observed married women’s advantage in the family standard-of-living almost completely disappeared by 2010. Gender-specific changes in educational mating are mostly responsible for this paradoxical trend. Because the number of women who are highly educated exceeds the number of men in the marriage market, the likelihood of educational marrying-up has substantially increased for men over time while women’s likelihood has decreased. Consequently, women’s return to education through marriage declined while men’s financial gain through marriage increased considerably.

Information is nowadays an extremely valuable asset and takes on certain occasions a central role in many organizations. This information however may find itself legally protected (e.g. medical records) or contain data of real people as individual preferences or transactions whose privacy people do not want to see broken. On the other hand, there are sometimes obvious applications for this information as for example to generate statistics for medical research or for simply as a way to provide a better service. There is thus a conflict of interest between those who hold information and intend to value it somehow and those who do not want to see their privacy compromised. Two promising technologies arise in this context: techniques based on the notion of differen- tial privacy and data anonymization algorithms. The goal of this dissertation is to explore the interaction between these two technologies and the possibility to utilize them together.

We use a public referendum on a new aviation concept in Berlin, Germany, as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects influences the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and leasevoters, i.e., voters who lease their homes. We expect that homevoters would be more likely to support initiatives that positively affect the amenity value of a neighborhood because some of the related benefits of leasevoters are neutralized by adjustments in market rents. Likewise, homevoters would be more likely to oppose initiatives that negatively affect the amenity value of a neighborhood. Our empirical results are consistent with these expectations, implying that public votes on local public goods do not necessarily reflect the spatial distribution of welfare effects in mixed-tenure environments.

The magnitude of earning excesses in the financial sector has been argued to be one of the causes of the 2007 crisis. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data, this study looks at the long-run behaviour of earnings by gender and racial groups across occupations in the US labour force from 1968 to 2011. At the intersection of occupational, gender and racial norms, this study shows that rent-seeking behaviour is a group phenomenon, not only specific to financial and managerial occupations, but it extends to most of the US labour force. There is in effect a pattern of unethical earnings across occupations for the dominant group in each occupation at the expense of other racial and gender groups.

We know a great deal about the clash between federal immigration and labour standards enforcement directives, but less regarding how these two processes are functioning at the local level and the role that demographic factors and civil society play. This article examines the impact of a climate of local immigration enforcement on worker legal mobilisation in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the USA. I focus on national origin discrimination and find that MSAs with a 287(g) agreement within their boundaries have lower claims rates. Conversely, claims rates are higher in MSAs where an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) agency is present. Interactive models suggest a positive dynamic of demographic insulation, whereby the negative effect of local immigration enforcement on claims-making is diminished in more heavily Latino immigrant places, and the negative impact of a larger Latino immigrant workforce is mitigated with the presence of an enforcement agency. Civil society has a positive impact on claims-making, but with no evidence that 287(g) MSAs with varying concentrations of civil society fare any better or worse. While previous research has concluded a positive impact of 501c(3) organisations on legal mobilisation, this more localised perspective reveals the continuing relevance of labour unions.

Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, this study examined four perspectives on new color lines in Americawhitenonwhite, blacknonblack, tri-racial, and blurredamong college-educated white, black, Hispanic, and Asian men. Findings show that the color lines have not been consistently drawn but vary by nativity and migration status. Among the native born, the color line for earnings cuts mainly across white and nonwhite when field of study and Carnegie classification are controlled for in addition to other covariates. On the other hand, among members of the 1.5 generation, who obtained both their high school and highest degrees in the United States, the lines are most salient between black and nonblack. Among first-generation immigrants, who completed all their education in a foreign country, and 1.25-generation immigrants, who obtained their high school diploma in a foreign country but earned their highest degree in the United States, there is a gradation of the color line with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Despite these mixed results, blacks fall consistently at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and whites at the top, regardless of nativity and migration status. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Despite education's capacity to significantly alter students' life trajectories, little is known about how education affects the political part an individual identifies with and votes for later in life. Using a difference-in-differences design to exploit variation in state compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) across cohorts in the U.S., I find that raising the minimum school leaving age by a year causes a 1-3 percentage point increase in support for the Republican party per cohort. Instrumental variable estimates show that each additional grade of late high school increases the probability that a CSL-complier identifies as or votes Republican by around 10 percentage points. Analysis of the mechanisms suggests that high school's conservative effects primarily operate by increasing income, which in turn increases support for conservative economic policies and ultimately the Republican party. These results suggest both that recent Democrat attempts to raise state leaving ages, and Republican opposition to CSLs, may be strategically misguided.

This paper tries to outline the main methodological obstacles that have to be addressed and overcome at reconstructing late colonial Spanish American territories and their development by means of a historical Geographic Information System (HGIS). First we try to show how historians with a broad gamut of research interests could profit from such a territorial HGIS infrastructure for that time and space. In a second step we try to show how certain aspects complicate the task. These include: vernacular concepts of territory (definitions of what actually is a province); the quality, focus, and methods of data gathering in contemporary geographic descriptions, cartographies, and other sources; the lack of definition of interior borders; the sometimes contradictory divisions in military, civil, ecclesiastical, and financial districts; as well as the general discrepancy between administrative control and political claims. And as if these aspects were not enough, there are the competing claims on territories of sovereignty in Latin America, which by applying the uti possidetis juris principle are largely based on colonial territories. In the last part, we outline the basic concept of a spatial database which tries to respond to the raised issues and furthermore incorporates a chronological axis. The model is illustrated by giving the example of the Puno-region.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 examines the identification power of assumptions that formalize the notion of complementarity in the context of a nonparametric bounds analysis of treatment response. I extend the literature on partial identification via shape restrictions by exploiting cross--dimensional restrictions on treatment response when treatments are multidimensional; the assumption of supermodularity can strengthen bounds on average treatment effects in studies of policy complementarity. I combine this restriction with a statistical independence assumption to derive improved bounds on treatment effect distributions, aiding in the evaluation of complex randomized controlled trials. I show how complementarities arising from treatment effect heterogeneity among subpopulations can be incorporated through supermodular instrumental variables to strengthen identification of treatment effects in studies with one or multiple treatments. I use these results to examine the long--run effects of zoning on the evolution of land use patterns. Chapter 2 considers the determinants of land use regulation. Zoning has been cited as a discriminatory policy tool by critics, who argue that ordinances are used to deter the entry of minority residents into majority neighborhoods through density restrictions (exclusionary zoning) and locate manufacturing . . .

Avec l’article sur « La masculinisation des naissances », la revue inaugure une nouvelle série de chroniques annuelles sous la responsabilité de Dominique Tabutin, consacrées à l’état des connaissances sur une question de population à l’ordre du jour dans le monde. Ces chroniques visent à offrir à une large audience (scientifiques, étudiants, journalistes…) des synthèses regroupant à la fois des données factuelles et les éléments des débats théoriques et politiques. L’article de synthèse permet de comprendre l’histoire de la problématique pour replacer le sujet dans un contexte plus large. Après une description critique des sources d’information et des outils de mesure, un bilan des recherches les plus récentes décrit les tendances du phénomène ainsi que ses disparités sociales et spatiales. Une discussion conduit ensuite à s’interroger sur les implications politiques ou juridiques éventuelles de la situation actuelle et future, ainsi que sur les défis posés pour la recherche. Des annexes statistiques ou méthodologiques pourront compléter ce panorama. Partant de ce cahier des charges, Christophe Z. Guilmoto inaugure cette nouvelle série en abordant la question du rapport de masculinité à la naissance, dont la constante de l’espèce humaine se situe aux alentours de 105 garçons pour 100 filles. Très tôt les variations de ce rapport, selon les époques, les populations ou les sous-groupes, ont attiré la curiosité des chercheurs. La première estimation précise effectuée par John Graunt date de 1661 (un rapport de 106,8 garçons pour 100 filles parmi les baptêmes à Londres). D’après les estimations des Nations unies, les modifications récentes de ce rapport dans quelques pays du monde très peuplés, comme l’Inde ou la Chine, ont fait passer le nombre de naissances de garçons pour 100 naissances de filles à l’échelle de la planète de 105 en 1975-1979 à 108 en 2005-2009 (World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision). Les hausses récentes de la proportion de garçons à la naissance s’interprètent comme le résultat de comportements discriminatoires en fonction du sexe, dont l’auteur analyse les mécanismes et les causes, avant d’en discuter les conséquences sociales et politiques.