Data from 160 countries show that during the twentieth century, western countries followed a U-shaped pattern in the age of first marriage of both genders, while other countries did not. I explain the uniqueness of this pattern in terms of the low lab or force participation of married women at the start of the productivity boom. The rise of the "male" industries decreased the age of first marriage as long as the "female" industries remained small. The increase in the age of first marriage is driven by productivity spillovers into the female industries. The data of the U.S. gross state product by industry provides supporting evidence that the rise of the female sectors explains up to 30% of the U-shape's increasing portion for both genders. Additionally, evidence from the 1970s oil boom in Montana demonstrates how, in accordance with the model, the age of marriage followed a U-shape in the oil counties while it rose monotonically in the rest of the state.

The paper assesses the impact of overall inequality, as well as inequality among the poor and among the rich, on the growth rates along various percentiles of the income distribution. The analysis mirco-census data from U.S. states covering the period from 1960 to 2010. The paper finds evidence that high levels of inequality reduce the income growth of the poor and, if anything, help the growth of the rich. When inequality is deconstructed into bottom and top inequality, the analysis finds that it is mostly top inequality that is holding back growth at the bottom.

Der Beitrag zeigt, in welchem Schritt der Analyse von großen Datenmengen die Behandlung von fehlenden Daten stattfindet und warum ein angemessener Umgang mit diesen unerlässlich ist. Vorgestellt werden zudem Methoden zum Umgang mit fehlenden Werten, die sich insbesondere im Kontext von Data-Mining eignen, da hier die Komplexität der Algorithmen eine übergeordnete Rolle spielt. Abgerundet wird der Beitrag mit einer Fallstudie, in der die Verfahren auf einen Beispieldatensatz des US Census Bureau angewandt werden, der in ähnlicher Weise oft in CRM-Systemen der betrieblichen Umwelt anzutreffen ist. Thematisiert werden die Auswirkungen der Methoden sowie in der Praxis zu erwartende Herausforderungen.

The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which GIS analysis can help us understand the spatial structure of US metropolitan areas. Using Detroit as a case study, the research is conducted in four major steps. First, we identify the major factors that have impacted the urban form and spatial structure of Detroit, including the geographic concentration of US automobile industry, the influx of large numbers of European immigrants and black population, racial segregation, and suburbanization. Second, we construct time series of key variables using US decennial censuses, Economic Census, County Business Patterns, National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) and other databases. Third, we utilize several GIS procedures to analyze 1) how the major factors identified in step 1 affect the geographic expansion and internal structure of Detroit and 2) whether and to what extent these major factors are spatially related. Finally, we present our main findings and discuss the potential and limitations of GIS in urban analysis.

Objectives: In the present analysis, we seek to establish a relationship between time spent on food-related activities and food security status as well as between time spent on these activities and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called the Food Stamp Program) participation and benefit level. Design: After matching similar households using Coarsened Exact Matching, we estimate the relationship between food-related time, food insecurity and SNAP participation and benefit level using a comprehensive data set that combines two subsets of the Current Population Survey from years 20042010: the Food Security Supplement and the American Time Use Survey. Setting: City, suburban and rural areas of the USA. Subjects: Non-institutionalized US population over the age of 15 years. Total sample size is 10 247 households. Results: In single households, food insecurity and SNAP participation are associated with 20% more time in meal preparation and 13 % less time eating. Similarly, in married households, SNAP participation and benefit level are associated with 32% less time in meal preparation while food insecurity is associated with 17% less time eating and 14 % less time in grocery shopping. Conclusions: A significant relationship exists between time spent on food-related activities and food insecurity and SNAP. This implies that federal and state government may need to consider the time constraints many low-income households face when reforming food assistance programmes.

The share of high-skilled workers in U.S. cities is positively correlated with city size, and this correlation strengthened between 1980 and 2010. Furthermore, during the same time period, the U.S. economy experienced a significant structural transformation with regard to industrial composition, most notably in the decline of manufacturing and the rise of high-skilled service industries. To decompose and investigate these trends, this paper develops and estimate a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and workers that allow for both industry-specific and skill-specific technology changes across cities. The estimates imply that both supply and demand of high-skilled labor have increased over time in big cities. In addition, demand for skilled labor in large cities has increased somewhat within all industries. However, this aggregate increase in skill demand in cities is highly concentrated in a few industries. The finance, insurance, and real estate sectors alone account for 35 percent of the net change over time.

This report updates a 1996 report from the Institute for Womens Policy Research (IWPR), The Status of Women in North Carolina, which was one of a series of reports that IWPR produced between 1996 and 2004 on the status of women in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the years that have passed since the publication of the original report, women have made considerable progress in North Carolina. The states women have experienced a narrowing of the gender wage gap, hold a higher proportion of state legislature seats than in the mid-1990s, and have become much more likely to have a bachelors degree or higher and to work in managerial and professional occupations. The teen pregnancy rate in the state has also declined substantially.

Access to and use of mobile wireless technology has become critical to social and economic participation for people with disabilities. As the technology increases in power and sophistication, these customers increasingly rely on mobile devices and software for functions previously available only through dedicated assistive technology. Successfully serving this large and growing population has become a market imperative as well as a legislative mandate for the wireless industry in the US. Competition for this market is especially keen between the Android and Apples iOS operating systems.

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 indicate that between 1996 and 2010 females on average lost some of the promotion momentum they had achieved at the beginning of mid-career, although they outperformed males in this regard. For both genders economic downturn has contributed to reduced promotion probabilities. In the case of women, however, cohort effects rather than the cycle seem to explain the promotion experience during the Great Recession. Promotions translate into higher real wage increases, and typically more so where job responsibilities increase. Crowding effects, if not necessarily a thing of the past, are no longer manifested in reduced female promotion rates or earnings.

Declining marriage rates suggest a growing fraction ofmillennials will remain unmarried through age 40. In this brief, we use data from the American Community Survey to estimate age specific marriage rates and project the percentage of millennials who will marry by age 40 in different scenarios. We find that the percentage of millennials marrying by age 40 will fall lower than for any previous generation of Americans, even in a scenario where marriage rates recover considerably. Moreover, marriage patternswill continue to diverge by education and race, increasing the divides between mostly married haves and increasingly single have-nots.

This paper uses a sample of adoptees to study the genetic mechanisms underlying intergenerational associations in chronic health conditions. I begin by estimating baseline intergenerational models with a sample of over 100,000 parent-child pairs, and find that children with a parent who has a specific chronic health condition are at least 100% more likely to have the same condition themselves. To assess the role of genetic mechanisms in generating these strong correlations, I estimate models using a sample of approximately 2,200 adoptees, and find that genetic transmission accounts for only 20%-30% of the baseline associations. As falsification tests, I repeat this exercise using health measures with externally established levels of genetic determination (height and chicken pox), and the results suggest that comparisons of biological and adopted children are a valid method of isolating genetic effects in my sample. Finally, to corroborate these adoptee-based estimates, I examine health correlationsamong monozygotic twins, which provide an upper bound estimate of genetic influences, and find a similarlymodest role for genetic transmission. I conclude that intergenerational health transmission is an importanthindrance to overall socioeconomic mobility, but that the majority of transmission occurs through environmentalfactors or gene-environment interactions, leaving scope for interventions to effectively mitigate health persistence.

This paper shows that within a regional economy, employment in the nontradable sector benefits from attracting jobs in the tradable sector. I rework Moretti's study of U.S. cities (AER 2010) and find that one new job in a given city;s tradable sector will result into 1.02 new jobs in the nontradable sector in the same city. I show that Moretti overestimated the size of this local multiple by 0.57, because he made five perfunctory assumptions that had a major impact on his results. Subsequently I show that Moretti's assertion that skilled tradable jobs have a larger multipler than unskilled tradable jobs is not supported by the data. The evidence provided by Moretti was only significant due to an endogeneity effect.

What is the role of parents, peers and teachers in shaping school experiences and informing the career choice of males and females? Does the school context matter, and to what extent do educational experiences influence young people's self-concept, values and their outlook to the future? Do teenage aspirations influence later outcomes regarding educational attainment and the assumption of work and family related roles? These questions and more are addressed in the chapters of this book, following lives over time and in context. The book is both innovative and timely, moving the discussion of gender inequalities forward, providing a dynamic and contextualized account of the way gendered lives evolve. Chapters address the role of institutional structures and the wider socio-historical context in helping young men and women to realize their ambitions. A unique feature is the longitudinal perspective, examining the role of multiple interlinked influences on individual life planning and attainment.

We hypothesize that changes in weather patterns in the United States over recent decades have combined to produce an important--and heretofore overlooked--phenomenon: daily weather has become more pleasant for a substantial majority of Americans since the climate change issue emerged in the public sphere. We investigate this hypothesis using daily weather data gathered from weather stations across the United States over the past four decades. We examine county-level data on how winter and summer weather conditions along with annual precipitation have changed over this period. We use these data to develop an index of weather pleasantness derived from previous research on how weather conditions affect population growth in the United States. We estimate that 84 percent of Americans currently live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather now than they did three decades ago. Spanning a range that includes much of the Mountain West, the Southwest, the South and the lower Midwest, the counties whose weather has improved the most are growing more rapidly and have younger populations than counties that have experienced poorer weather. Given previous research showing that the public relies on local weather to understand the problem of global warming, we anticipate that improvement in daily weather patterns may represent yet another challenge to raising Americans’ interest in and concern about the consequences of climate change.

We construct a new dataset of linked census records to follow southern menboth black and whiteduring the first decades of the Great Migration from the U.S. South. We find that detailed observable personal characteristics cannot account for black-white differences in migration choices in this period. Rather, black and white men responded differently to variation in the characteristics of potential destinations. Discrete choice models show that black men were relatively strongly drawn to states with high shares of manufacturing and rapid labor demand growth, were less likely to follow in the footsteps of previous migrants, were more likely to choose a northern destination, and were more deterred by distance than southern whites.

This study examines the relationship between inequality in motion and inequality in place. It is argued that the aggregate effects of household migration have an impact on communities that is more substantial than commonly recognized. Of particular interest, here, is the association between income dispersion in place, as manifest in local income inequality and segregated residential patterns, and income dispersion between places, affected by income inequality within the population of domestically migrating households. This first chapter introduces two questions concerning household mobility and migration. First, to what extent are the household and structural conditions that affect migration differentiated on the basis of social class? Migration research, as it is largely concerned with the question of why people move, has tended to approach group difference in terms of the individual or household characteristics that distinguish migrants from nonmigrants. In contrast, the primary question addressed here is less concerned with why people move . . .

Even if not as intensive as a hundred years ago, or during the “ethnic revival” of the seventies, but again growing with the internet, there is a competition in North America between ethnicities for attention, recognition, respect, and sympathy. There are various players, the leadership in clubs and in organizing festivals and parades, musical events, producers of websites, the foreign-language press, the relevant university departments, even, indirectly, foreign governments. And, of course, there is grass-roots prejudice that is meant to be cultivated. Historical legends are, of course, not the only means to boost ethnic ego and prestige. The essay deals with the ethnic legends about the Civil War period that have been present in German-American historiography.

How do changes in the wage costs born by firms affect the employment prospects of individuals over the medium-run? While this question is central to many policy issues, there remains considerable debate regarding the answer. To shed light on the issue, we propose and estimate a novel specification of the labor demand curve that recognizes the role of entrepreneurs in the creation of new firms and allows for search frictions that introduce a feedback between a firms demand and the demand in a whole market. Using city-industry level variation over four decades, we estimate the elasticity of employment with respect to wages to be -1 at the industry-city level and -0.3 at the city level. We show that the difference between these two estimates likely reflects the congestion externalities predicted by the search and matching literature. In addition, we find that holding wages constant, an increase in the local population is associated with a proportional increase in employment. We discuss how these combined results indirectly inform us about the elasticity of job creation to changes in profits.