Das vorherrschende Familienverständnis in den USA des 21. Jahrhunderts ist zugleich von einem Beharren auf traditionellen Formen (Kernfamilie, Bi-Generationaliät) und einer Pluralisierung von Normen (Geschlechterrollen, gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensgemeinschaften) gekennzeichnet. Der Beitrag nähert sich diesem vermeintlichen Widerspruch in historischer Perspektive und untersucht, wie Familie während des gesamten 20. Jahrhunderts als „Basis der Gesellschaft“ konzipiert wurde. Zunächst wird gefragt, welche Definitionen von „Familie“ die amerikanischen Soziologen im Zeitraum zwischen 1900 und 2000 diskutierten. Ein zweiter Abschnitt beschreibt die sozialhistorische Entwicklung der US-amerikanischen Familie im selben Zeitraum. Ein drittes Kapitel diskutiert die Veränderung von Familienwerten und Gendernormen seit der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, indem es insbesondere nach der Bedeutung der Kategorien „Race“, „Class“, „Gender“, Sexualität und Religion für die amerikanische Familie fragt. In der Zusammenschau zeigt sich, dass sich in den USA des 20. Jahrhunderts Phasen der Dynamisierung und Pluralisierung von Familienwerten und Gendernormen mit der Forderung nach Rückkehr zur Kernfamilie und zu traditionellen Genderrollen abwechselten – abhängig vom jeweiligen politisch-moralischen Klima und der Geschwindigkeit sozialen Wandels. Dabei erscheint gerade die Kombination von Wellen des Normwandels mit Phasen der rückwärtsgewandten Selbstvergewisserung als typisch für die Anpassung einer Gesellschaft und ihrer Werte an die Herausforderungen der industriellen Moderne.

How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between a task’s engineering complexity and its training requirements. When two tasks are equally complex, firms will automate the task that requires more training and in which labor is hence more expensive. Under quite general conditions this leads to job polarization, a decline in middle wage jobs relative to both high and low wage jobs. Our theory explains recent and historical instances of job polarization as caused by labor-replacing technologies, such as computers, the electric motor, and the steam engine, respectively. The model makes novel predictions regarding occupational training requirements, which we find to be consistent with US data.

This dissertation consists of three papers on the effect of homeownership on labor market outcomes. In the first paper, I developed a one-sector two-region endogenous job search model and show that when jobs arrive from both local labor market and non-local labor market, homeowners: are less likely to be unemployed than renters; and have higher overall search intensity and exit rate than renters. I then estimate the effect of homeownership on unemployment using a panel data set aggregated from the American Community Survey data from 2003 to 2011 and use relative cost of owning a home as instrument for homeownership. I also estimate models at the individual level. Regression results show that homeownership is negatively and significantly related to unemployment confirming the theoretical predictions. These results are robust to different estimation . . .

In the first chapter, the hypothesis that workers are fully compensated in wages for differences in cost of living is tested for four groups of workers with different levels of educational attainment for the years of 2000, 2006, and 2011. Unlike previous studies, based on the 2SLS method, I find that the wage-price elasticity generally increases with educational attainment in the more recent years. The empirical results support the full compensation hypothesis for workers with educational attainment equal to or higher than some college in the more recent years, while workers whose educational attainment is lower than high-school are found to be incompletely compensated in all years. In the second chapter, the Panel Analysis of Nonstationarity in Idiosyncratic and Common components (PANIC) approach with recursive mean adjustment method (RMA) is applied to investigate regional economic convergence in China. Unlike previous research which finds evidence in favor of intra-region economic convergence, based on a panel set of real per capita GDP for 28 provincial unit in China from 1978-2012, after bias reduction, common factors are found to be nonstationary for China and its three sub- regions. Most of the idiosyncratic components are also found to have a unit root. My results show then that regional economic clubs do not exist in China; thus, reflecting the problem of provincial growth divergence in China. In the third chapter, a new G2SLS approach proposed by Lee (2007) and developed by Bramoullé et al. (2009) is first applied to investigate spillover effects of counties’ employment growth, initial fiscal policy variables and initial employment density for the U.S. Unlike the conventional Spatial-Durbin IV model, according to the results of the G2SLS approach, no evidence of spillover effects of employment growth is found; positive spillover effects on employment growth is found for initial safety expenditures in 2000-2007 and 2000-2010, and for initial high-tech employment share in 2000-2010. Initial log of county employment density is found to lower its own employment growth rate. The Monte Carlo simulation results imply that, based on the group interaction structure in the sample, the G2SLS approach provides credible identification of the model parameters.

Extreme heat events are the number one cause of weather-related mortality in North America. Future climate scenarios suggest that heat waves are expected to increase in both frequency and intensity over the course of the next century. The collective impacts of global climate change and the urban heat island (UHI) have drawn major attention to health risks associated with urban heating. The variation of temperatures due to differences of land composition within the urban environment also allows for the possibility of extreme temperatures to greatly impact certain social and demographic groups more than others. Previous climate justice studies have demonstrated that certain demographic groups disproportionately bear the effects of elevated temperatures in urban areas, but very few of these studies have investigated how the spatial pattern of urban heating and affected populations have changed. This study extended climate justice research through a case study on Marion County, Indiana, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, by examining changes in social and spatial inequalities of the distribution of urban heat between 1990 and 2010. To examine these changes, this study employed United States Census Data as well as Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery to determine heat-related vulnerability at an intra-urban level (census block group). The results of this study indicated that income and level of education were most highly associated with land surface temperatures, and that the populations most exposed to elevated urban temperatures change with time.

Creating a new product that dominates all its competitors is one of the main objectives in marketing. Nevertheless, this might not be feasible since in practice the development process is confined by some constraints, e.g., limited funding or low target selling price. We model these constraints by a constraint function, which determines the feasible characteristics of a new product. Given such a budget, our task is to decide the best possible features of the new product that maximize its profitability. In general, a product is marketable if it dominates a large set of existing products, while it is not dominated by many. Based on this, we define dominance relationship analysis and use it to measure the profitability of the new product. The decision problem is then modeled as a budget constrained optimization query (BOQ). Computing BOQ is challenging due to the exponential increase in the search space with dimensionality. We propose a divide-and-conquer based framework, which outperforms a baseline approach in terms of not only execution time but also space complexity. Based on the proposed framework, we further study an approximation solution, which provides a good trade-off between computation cost and quality of result.

A search in Google Scholars for the key words research triangle, Austin, entrepreneur yields 1,420 academic articles. Most of these articles, however, only note in passing the importance of these two high-tech centers along with well-known Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. There have been no comparative studies of the Research Triangle (RT) and Austin regions even as they are frequently identified as hot-technology spots after the more legendary larger Silicon Valley and Boston cases. As Herbing and Golden (1993) note, these two high-tech regions had their beginnings in the early 1950s, grew into national prominence in the 1970s, and are the two most spectacular success stories of the Sunbelt. The Austin and Research Triangle regions are uniquely compelling as comparative cases. At a general level these two regions constitute rare instances of areas that built up strong technology-based agglomerations in smaller urban regions with more traditional manufacturing or service sector economic bases. In each region active government and public-private sector collaborations attracted initial technology based companies and laid the foundations for the rapid subsequent growth of locally-based firms . . .

This dissertation is a collection of three essays that investigate several topics on Hispanic men’s and women’s labor. Chapter 1, entitled “The Effects of Cultural Beliefs on Fertility and Work Decisions of Hispanic Women”, investigates the impact of cultural beliefs on the fertility and labor outcomes of US-born Hispanic women. I use data on over 60,000 U.S.-born Hispanic women from the 2006-10 waves of the American Community Survey, combined with aggregate variables from their country of ancestry to proxy effects of culture on their own fertility and labor decisions. Results show the effects of culture on fertility and work decisions for Hispanic women to be qualitatively and quantitatively different from prior research based on descendants from non-Hispanic samples. The effects of culture on U.S.-born Hispanic women imply that they realize the tradeoffs between family size and work and adjust their family size accordingly and increase the number of weeks they work but not the number of hours per week. Additionally similar proxies for the husband’s cultural beliefs may either reinforce or offset his wife’s beliefs, depending on whether the couple shares the same country of origin. Hence, the cultural differences between Hispanics subethnicities and other groups result in different fertility and work outcomes, and this should give pause to agglomerate ethnic groups into monolithic groups such as “Hispanic”, “Asian”, or “Other” if the data permit. Additionally, it should urge researchers to further explore the link between cultural variation and other economic outcomes. Chapter 2, entitled “The Employment Effects of the 2007-09 Recession on Hispanic Groups” study examines effects of the recession on levels of employment among men and women of different Hispanic subethnicities using data from the Current Population Survey. As employment was rising rapidly for some Hispanic subgroups prior to the recession, the decomposition method of Engemann and Wall (2010) is used to separately identify the recession’s effects from ongoing changes in the employment-population ratios. As may be expected, Hispanic groups that were concentrated disproportionally in jobs and in parts of the country that were hardest hit by the housing-market bust saw their employment-to-population ratios decline sharply relative to the pre-recession trend. Yet the data show a considerable amount of heterogeneity across Hispanic subethnicities that cannot be traced to housing-market factors, suggesting that different Hispanic groups are moving along different employment paths unique to the group’s immigration history and experience settling in the U.S. The results underline that the Hispanic population is not monolithic and that analysts should disaggregate Hispanics into subethnicities whenever sufficient data permit. Chapter 3 entitled “Trends in Hispanic Earnings Volatility” investigates differences in income volatility between Hispanic men and women, versus white and black non-Hispanic men and women, and among Hispanics of different national origins, by examining which groups face the largest risks of experiencing a large drop in economic resources, how relative risks have changed over time, and what the patterns tell us about the sources of differential trends. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979), this essay compares two measures of earnings volatility: a volatility decomposition developed by Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994) and the standard deviation of arc percent change to document changes over time in the cross-sectional distribution of income changes. The NLSY shows that, for all groups, earnings volatility is lower today than in 1979. This finding is counter to previous research using other data sets (the PSID, CPS, SIPP, and LEHD) and likely reflects a life-cycle effect, whereby young people settle into stable jobs over the first 10-20 years of their careers and their earnings volatility falls. However, the data show some differences in levels of earnings volatility across subethnicities that are invariant to the volatility measure used, and hold up when individual characteristics are controlled for, namely that earnings volatility is relatively high for Puerto Ricans and non-Hispanic blacks and relatively low for Cubans; in the middle of the range, earnings volatility is similar for Mexicans, other Hispanic groups, and non-Hispanic whites. Further research would be valuable for explaining the sources of these differences across groups, and the extent to which policies could help attenuate earnings volatility among groups for which it is relatively high.

Son yıllarda tıbbi alanda önemi gittikçe artan biyopsikososyal yaklaşıma bağlı olarak sağlığı anlama ve değerlendirmede sosyal çevrenin etkisi daha fazla irdelenmeye başlanmıştır. Bu sosyal çevreyi ve bağlı etmenleri değerlendirmek için sosyoekonomik seviye (SES) tespitinden faydalanılmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı; Türk Tıp Literatüründe SES belirteçlerinin ne ölçüde kullanıldığı ve çalışma sonuçlarıyla SES belirteçleri arasındaki bağıntının ne ölçüde doğru kurulduğunun saptanmasıdır. Bu araştırma kesitsel tipte tanımlayıcı bir araştırma olup; Ulusal Akademik Ağ ve Bilgi Merkezi (ULAKBİM) bünyesindeki Türk Tıp Veri Tabanı 2004-2014 yılları arasında kayıtlı olan tıbbi yayınlar taranmıştır. Kriter olarak SES değerlendirme sorularının kullanıldığı yayınlar esas alınmıştır. Bu bağlamda “Sosyoekonomik, sosyodemografik, sosyokültürel, demografik” sözcükleri başlık ve metin içeriklerinde öncelikli olarak taranmıştır. Kapsam dahilinde 3484 adet yayın öncelikle dil, derginin türü, anahtar sözcük ve anabilim dallarına göre gruplandırılmıştır. SES tespitinde irdelenen soru sayısı belirlenip, içeriklerine göre sınıflandırılmıştır. Soruların amaca uygunluk yönünden değerlendirilmesi konusunda ilgili araştırmanın irdelediği sağlık sorunu ile SES belirtecinin hangi bağlamda ilişkilendirildiği değerlendirilip, bu ilişkinin nasıl açıklandığı incelenmiştir. Türk Tıp Literatüründe sosyal, ekonomik, kültürel ve demografik gibi sözcüklerle ilgili kavram karmaşası vardır. Hangi durumda hangi terminolojinin doğru olduğu bilinememektedir. En sık sorgulanan SES sorusu %49,7 ile eğitim durumu olarak bulunmuştur. Araştırma neticesinde . . .

Over the last sixty years, the courts, Congress, and the President—but mostly the courts—first increased integration in schools and neighborhoods, and then changed course, allowing schools to resegregate. The impact of these decisions is illustrated by the comparative legal histories of Detroit and Louisville, two cities which demonstrate the many benefits of metropolitan-level cooperation on issues of racial segregation, and the harms that arise in its absence. Detroit, Michigan, and Louisville, Kentucky, both emerged from the riots of the 1960s equally segregated in their schools and neighborhoods with proportionally sized racial ghettoes. In 1974-75, the Supreme Court overturned a proposed metropolitan school integration plan in Detroit, but allowed a metropolitan remedy for Louisville-Jefferson schools to stand. Since that time, Louisville-Jefferson schools and neighborhoods, like all the regions with metropolitan plans, have become among the most integrated in the nation, while Detroit’s schools have remained rigidly segregated and its racial ghetto has dramatically expanded. Detroit’s experience is very common in the highly fragmented metropolitan areas of the midwestern and northeastern United States. Black students in Louisville- Jefferson outperform black students in Detroit by substantial margins on standardized tests. Metropolitan Louisville has also grown healthier economically, while the City of Detroit went bankrupt and both the city and school district were taken over by state authorities. The Article concludes with a call to modernize American local government law by strengthening the legal concepts of metropolitan jurisdictional interdependence and metropolitan citizenship.

Why do cultures change? The present work examined cultural change in eight cultural-level markers, or correlates, of individualism in the United States, all of which increased over the course of the 20th century: frequency of individualist themes in books, preference for uniqueness in baby naming, frequency of single-child relative to multichild families, frequency of single-generation relative to multigeneration households, percentage of adults and percentage of older adults living alone, small family size, and divorce rates (relative to marriage rates). We tested five key hypotheses regarding cultural change in individualism-collectivism. As predicted by previous theories, changes in socioeconomic structure, pathogen prevalence, and secularism accompanied changes in individualism averaged across all measures. The relationship with changes in individualism was less robust for urbanization. Contrary to previous theories, changes in individualism were positively (as opposed to negatively) related to the frequency of disasters. Time-lagged analyses suggested that only socioeconomic structure had a robust effect on individualism; changes in socioeconomic structure preceded changes in individualism. Implications for anthropology, psychology, and sociology are discussed.

This report is the second part of a housing study being completed by the Urban Institute for the Washington, DC, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED). DMPED requested an affordable housing needs assessment to measure, quantify, and qualify the need for affordable housing within each ward and neighborhood cluster; to quantify the need to preserve and construct housing units appropriate to meet the needs of DC residents now and in the future; and to help guide investment decisions in affordable housing by the city

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1/2, where the wife's income exceeds the husbands income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force participation, the wife's income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife's potential income is likely to exceed the husband's, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Those patterns hold both cross-sectionally and within couple over time.

In considering whether asset-price bubbles should be offset through policy, an important issue is who pays the price when the bubble bursts. A bust that reduces the wealth of well-off house...

This paper brings a new perspective to the analysis of the Mariel supply shock, revisiting the question and the data armed with the accumulated insights from the vast literature on the economic impact of immigration. A crucial lesson from this literature is that any credible attempt to measure the wage impact of immigration must carefully match the skills of the immigrants with those of the pre-existing workers. The Marielitos were disproportionately low-skill; at least 60 percent were high school dropouts. A reappraisal of the Mariel evidence, specifically examining the evolution of wages in the low-skill group most likely to be affected, quickly overturns the finding that Mariel did not affect Miamis wage structure. The absolute wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, as did the wage of high school dropouts relative to that of either high school graduates or college graduates. The drop in the relative wage of the least educated Miamians was substantial (10 to 30 percent), implying an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between -0.5 and -1.5. The analysis also documents the sensitivity of the estimated wage impact to the choice of a placebo. The measured impact is much smaller when the placebo consists of cities where pre-Mariel employment growth was weak relative to Miami.

Immigrant-origin populations, once overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of receiving gateways, have dispersed in recent decades to scores of new destinations throughout the United States. This pattern and its implications for immigrant incorporation have received a great deal of attention, but the vast majority of research has focused on Hispanics. This article examines the relationship between settlement patterns and socioeconomic attainment (income, occupational status, and homeownership) among Asians. Drawing on individual- and metro-level information from the 2009 to 2011 American Community Survey, results suggest that Asians in new destinations face an important tradeoff between income and homeownership, and that differences across contexts are largely attributable to metropolitan labor and housing market conditions, rather than the ethnic context per se. However, there are important differences in outcomes among Asians by national origin and sex, and a comparison with whites suggests that inequality differs across new and more established Asian settlement areas.

One of the most striking changes in American society in the last forty years has been the decline and delay in marriage. The fraction of young men and women who have never been married increased significantly between 1970 and 2000. Idiosyncratic labor income volatility also increased over the same period. This paper establishes a quantitatively important link between these two facts. Specifically, if marriage involves consumption commitments, then a rise in income volatility results in a delay in marriage. Marriage, however, also allows for diversification of income risk since earnings fluctuations between spouses need not be perfectly correlated. We assess the hypothesis that rising income volatility contributed to the delay in marriage vis--vis other explanations in the literature, using an estimated equilibrium search model of the marriage market. We find that the increase in volatility accounts for about 20% of the observed delay in marriage. Thus, we find that the effects of consumption commitments due to increased income volatility outweigh the effects of the insurance gains provided by spouses.

Studies have reported that newly-arrived immigrants to the US often have better health outcomes, including lower body mass index (BMI) than established ones. This study tests the hypothesis about variation in initial BMI among immigrants who have come to the US during different time periods. Using 19892011 data from NHIS, we found that recent immigrants in general were larger at their time of arrival than the earlier ones. However, we also observed variations in initial BMI across racial and ethnic origin groups. For example, we found the trends for Hispanic and Asian immigrants to have increased during the study period. The average initial BMI for recent Hispanic immigrant cohorts surpassed the upper limit for normal weight. While earlier cohorts of Asian immigrants had much lower initial BMI than other immigrant groups, the estimated annual increase among Asians was the most rapid. Our findings support the observation about the rising body weight and obesity rates worldwide. The policy implications of our findings were also discussed.

Many Black women living in the United States select service-oriented careers over non-service-oriented jobs. However, few studies have addressed the career development of immigrant Black women, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa. Deriving from the implications from social cognitive career theory and attribution theories, the purpose of this nonexperimental study was to examine (a) the relationship between the length of stay of sub-Saharan African immigrant women in the United States career choice, (b) the relationship between immigrant status and career choice, and (c) the decision-making self-efficacy and career choice differences between U.S.-born Black women and sub-Saharan African immigrant women. The Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale (Short Form) and Assessment of Attributions for Career Decision-Making were administered to 167 Black women, who were selected using a quota sampling approach. Results showed no relationship between the length of stay of sub-Saharan African immigrant women in the United States and career choice. Immigrant status was not related to career choice, and there were no significant differences in career decision self-efficacy and career attribution between U.S.-born Black women and sub-Saharan African immigrant women. This study offered a first step in calling attention to the career development processes of sub-Saharan African women. The implications for positive social change include the potential to help these women explore nontraditional careers such as those in the hard sciences. Black professional women, in particular, could provide much needed mentorship to sub-Saharan African women to encourage them to consider nonservice-oriented careers.