A panel of age-specific transition probabilities is developed for the three-decade period 1980 to 2010. Analysis shows that both male and female transition probabilities have evolved over the 30-year span. The transition probabilities are used to calculate both period and cohort worklives. The results differ starkly for men and women. For men, worklives are most affected for those with little education. For women, obtaining a college degree has the most impact on worklives. The results suggest that using historical period worklives may have mis-estimated worklives for these two groups relative to cohort estimates.

This report updates available information about the employment and earnings status of Maryland residents with a reported disability.  Almost 1 in 12 working age Maryland residents has a reported disability. The disability rate among the age group 35-64 is higher than for the age group 18-34.  In Maryland, African Americans do not have a significantly higher disability prevalence rate than white people, both at about 11%. American Indians and Alaskan Natives are more than twice as likely to have a disability, while Asians and Hispanics are about half as likely to report a disability.  Baltimore City has the most individuals with a reported disability, regardless of type. Baltimore County, Prince George’s County, Montgomery County and Anne Arundel County also have more individuals with reported disabilities than do other Maryland counties.  Allegany County, Baltimore City, Washington County, Wicomico County and St. Mary’s County are the 5 jurisdictions that reported higher disability rates above 10% among working- age Marylanders.  Almost a quarter of Marylanders age 25 and over and with a disability do not have a high school diploma, while about 1 in 11 of their peers with no disability is in the same position. On the other hand, about 43% of Marylanders age 25 and over and with a disability obtained post- secondary education, including some college or associate’s degree, while two thirds of Marylanders with no disability were able to do so.  Nearly one third of working-age Marylanders with a disability are employed compared with 77.3% Marylanders with no disability.  Working-age Marylanders with a disability are over three times more likely to exit the labor force than non-disabled peers.  55% of working-age Marylanders with no disability. . .

Sietve vette feleségül anyja választottját” szalagcímmel megjelenő tudósításában a New York Times napilap arról számolt be, hogy 1910. május 12-én Petra Kozkowska, egy „20 éves magyar lány” partra szállt Ellis Islanden, ahol először látta meg leendő férjét, Andrew Mallert, egy coloradoi bányászt. A pár még aznap New York városába utazott házasságkötés céljából. A vőlegény anyja rendezte el a frigyet, mivel „ismerte a Kozkowska családot az óhazában, és hallott a lány szépségéről”. A Times tudósítása még további részleteket is tartalmazott: „Tárgyalások kezdődtek, melyek eredményeképpen a lány beleegyezett a házasságba, átkelt az Atlanti-óceánon, hogy találkozzon azzal a férfival, akivel majd házasságot köt.” Az újság és a szerkesztők mindezt nem tartották figyelemreméltónak, és a híradásban jóval több figyelmet szenteltek a „különös paraszti viseletnek”, amit Petra Kozkowska a partraszálláskor viselt, valamint az ezt követő manhattani bevásárló körútnak, melynek eredményeképpen sikerült beszereznie egy új szoknyát, új ingblúzt, lakkbőr csizmát, valamint egy „pompás, széles karimájú konfekció kalapot sok tollal”.

There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across the United States, and, in particular, the residents of declining cities report less happiness than other Americans. Although this unhappiness is at least as strong among new residents of such places as long-term residents, some people continue to move to these areas. These areas also seem to have been less happy historically during the era in which these now-declining cities prospered. These patterns are compatible with the view that individuals do not aim to maximize self-reported well-being, or happiness, and that subjective well-being is better viewed as only one part of the utility function. In the past the residents of now declining places were compensated financially for their unhappiness, but it is less clear what draws migrants to these unhappy places today.

The TRA survey is a unique research approach based on the nationwide collection of historical individual-level data on the personal, occupational and economic situation of people having married or died between the early nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Coinciding with the release of the first part of the data produced by the survey, this article looks at the survey's founding principles and sources before going on to assess its geographical and temporal representativeness. Taking as an example the trend in the proportion of individuals leaving no wealth behind when they die, as established using the database, a tool such as this provides an interesting basis for writing an economic history that is both micro- and macro-social. Our analysis then shows how the approach adopted for the TRA survey can be extended to any new individual-level data. This is the very principle and purpose of the TRA survey, which, far from being closed, is a matrix for studying the transformations that have affected French society and many other societies over the last two centuries.

Due to its important applications in data mining, many techniques have been developed for clustering. For today's real-world databases which typically have millions of items with many thousands of fields, resulting in datasets that range in size into terabytes, many traditional clustering techniques have more and more restricted capabilities and novel approaches that are computationally efficient have become more and more popular. In this paper, a new efficient approach to graph-theoretical clustering using a minimum spanning tree representation of a dataset is proposed which consists of two-phases. In the first phase, we modify the standard Prim's algorithm in such a way that an efficient construction of such a tree can be realized based on k-nearest neighbor search mechanisms, during which a new edge weight is defined to maximize the intra-cluster similarity and minimize the inter-cluster similarity of the data set. In the second phase, based on the intuition that the data points are closer in the same cluster than in different clusters, the longest edges in the minimum spanning tree obtained from the first phase are removed to form clusters as the standard minimum spanning tree-based clustering algorithms do. Experiments on synthetic as well as real data sets have been conducted to show that our proposed approach works well with respect to the state-of-the-art methods.

Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth, and financial stability. Yet our understanding of the determinants of financial decision making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both standard and two-sample instrumental variable strategies, we show that education increases financial market participation, measured by investment income and equities ownership, while dramatically reducing the probability that an individual declares bankruptcy, experiences a foreclosure, or is delinquent on a loan. Further results and a simple calibration suggest that the result is driven by changes in savings or investment behavior, rather than simply increased labor earnings.

This brief updates Perspectives on Low-Income Working Families brief 9, Children of Immigrants: National and State Characteristics (Fortuny et al. 2009) and Perspectives on Low-Income Working Families brief 17, Children of Immigrants: 2008 State Trends Update (Fortuny 2010). This brief presents data highlights from the 2010 and 2011 American Community Surveys. The statistics presented in this brief and others can be accessed through the Children of Immigrants Data Tool web site.1 Also, interactive maps showing these statistics over time and across states can be found at the Children of Immigrants Interactive Map website.

This dissertation explores three topics on agriculture and development using different applied econometric techniques. In the first chapter, Non-linear regression models were used to estimate the effect of own and other taxa previous population levels, nitrogen application, and crop rotation on population dynamics of plant parasitic and non-parasitic nematodes using data from the Cullars rotation. Because field experimental data was used, a spatial component was included as populations in one plot were proved to be related to the population level of their neighbors. Own previous levels were found to be very important for all groups of nematodes and all of the groups had an interaction effect with at least one other group. Lesion and cotton root-knot nematodes were found to be competitive while Mononchidae, Dorylaimidae, microbivorous and lance nematodes were non-competitive. All of the populations showed high seasonality patterns having lower populations during winter, to then remain steady until September-October when there is a significant increase in the population of cotton root-knot, Dorylaimidae, microbivorous, and lesion nematodes. Nitrogen had a positive effect on Mononchidae, microbivorous, spiral, and cotton root-knot nematodes. The use of clover after cotton in the rotation crop program proved to be significantly better in reducing plant parasitic nematodes compared to other treatments. The second chapter analyzed the market structure of Peruvian agricultural exports as Peru has become the largest fresh asparagus exporter, third in processed artichoke, and third in paprika. This may have generated market power but the exertion of it and towards whom has not ii been studied yet. Pricing-To-Market (PTM) models tested for price discrimination in the Peruvian export market for these three goods. The results strongly suggested that Peruvian exporters were engaging in price . . .

Part 2 shows that over half the jobs in Iowa pay less than what is needed by many families to achieve basic self-sufficiency. How many Iowa families earn below the family supporting income levels reported here? How many families, in other words, must rely on work supports to get them closer to the basic needs budget level?

Previous research has neglected to consider whether trends in immigration are related to changes in the nature of homicide. This is important because there is considerable variability in the temporal trends of homicide subtypes disaggregated by circumstance. In the current study, we address this issue by investigating whether within-city changes in immigration are related to temporal variations in rates of overall and circumstance-specific homicide for a sample of large US cities during the period between 1980 and 2010.

While there continues to be much assessment of the enduring, largely negative legacy of urban renewal, there has been very little quantified, nationwide analysis at the neighborhood level. This paper contributes to the literature on urban renewal by investigating one dimension of mid-20th century urban change: housing demolition. During the middle decades of the 20th century, government-backed demolition occurred under a variety of housing and transportation programs. Because during those controversial decades no single agency kept track of what was demolished and where, I use a proxy: net loss of housing units by census tract for each decade between 1940 and 1970. I consider three hypotheses: that substandard housing and percent nonwhite in a census tract predicted its likelihood of urban renewal demolition, that the eventual outcome of urban renewal was an increase in higher-density housing, and that there was an improvement in socioeconomic factors. None of the hypotheses are supported. Quantitative, national level analysis of urban renewal has been rare, and much more is needed.

In light of the growing numbers of women of color in the entrepreneurial sector in the United States, employing public-use microdata from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners, this study finds that new firms owned by black and Hispanic women were more likely to cease operations than those owned by their male counterparts or by non-Hispanic whites, even when controlling for other owner- and firm-level characteristics and labor market conditions. These differences occurred despite the existence of public programs designed to help female and minority entrepreneurs, raising the question of efficiency of the current policy infrastructure in the United States.

The rapid increase of immigrant population in metropolitan areas across the United States brings significant changes to urban labor market. While many immigrants integrate into the formal labor market through participation in wage and salaried work, a substantive proportion of Latino and Asian immigrants are making their way into ethnic entrepreneurship through their own businesses. Using 2000 Census microdata for the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study, this research investigates the effect of intra-metropolitan opportunity structure and local area context, especially spatial structure, urban employment pattern, social environment and ethnic concentration, on Asian and Latino immigrants’ incidence of self-employment. These two groups grew rapidly both in the total labor force and among the self-employed in Atlanta. It is found that living in central city and inner ring suburbs depresses Latino immigrants’ entrepreneurial activities. The growth of trade jobs and concentration of immigrants in a local area both give rise to immigrant entrepreneurship. Results suggest that traditional theories like disadvantage theory needs to be reassessed in the context of new immigrant gateways, while the ethnic enclave hypothesis is still validated. Potential policies to promote immigrant entrepreneurship are also discussed.

We develop a model of alcohol consumption that incorporates the negative biological relationship between body mass and inebriation conditional on total alcohol consumption. Our model predicts that the elasticity of inebriation with respect to weight is equal to the own-price elasticity of alcohol, consistent with body mass increasing the effective price of inebriation. Given that alcohol is generally considered price inelastic, this result implies that as individuals gain weight, they consume more alcohol but become less inebriated. We test this prediction and find that driver blood alcohol content (BAC) is negatively associated with driver weight. In fatal accidents with driver BAC above 0.10, the driver was 7.8 percentage points less likely to be obese than drivers in fatal accidents that did not involve alcohol. This relationship is not explained by driver attributes (age and sex), driver behaviors (speed and seatbelt use), vehicle attributes (weight class, model year, and number of occupants), or accident context (county of accident, time of day, and day of week). Copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, I ask whether children who grow up in subsidized housing return to the program as adults. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (IPTW) to compare children who grew up in subsidized housing to those who did not but lived in households eligible to receive the subsidy. I nd that children who grew up in subsidized housing have small albeit statistically signicant probabilities of returning to subsidized housing as adults.

I identify local, inter-industry spillovers net of congestion and competition in US manufacturing over the twentieth century. I do so along four Marshallian industry connectivities: input supplying, output consuming, labor pooling, and ideas collaborating. For identification, I use two major inventionsautomobiles in 1904 and semiconductors in 1958in newly-digitized, city-industry-year level US Census of Manufactures records, 1880-1990. Because the inventions were large, unanticipated demand shocks to supplier industries, the pre-invention supplier share of a citys manufacturing employment is an exogenous measure of the citys invention shock. Hence, a comparison of pre- and post-invention employment between supplier-connected and -unconnected industries, across cities with large versus small pre-invention supplier shares identi- fies the net connectivity spillovers. In the early twentieth century, net connectivity spillovers were near zero, except for negative net output consuming spillovers. In the late twentieth century, net output consuming spillovers attenuated to zero while net labor pooling spillovers became negative. These results are consistent with falling transportation costs, increased occupational specialization, and reduced worker migration. Together, they point to limited and decreasing local, inter-industry productivity spillovers relative to congestion and competition in twentieth century US manufacturing.

Skyline queries have attracted considerable attention to assist multicriteria analysis of large-scale datasets. In this paper, we focus on multidimensional subspace skyline computation that has been actively studied for two approaches. First, to narrow down a full-space skyline, users may consider multiple subspace skylines reflecting their interest. For this purpose, we tackle the concept of a skycube, which consists of all possible non-empty subspace skylines in a given full space. Second, to understand diverse semantics of subspace skylines, we address skyline groups in which a skyline point (or a set of skyline points) is annotated with decisive subspaces. Our primary contributions are to identify common building blocks of the two approaches and to develop orthogonal optimization principles that benefit both approaches. Our experimental results show the efficiency of proposed algorithms by comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms in both synthetic and real-life datasets.

Today the use of transit-oriented development (TOD) is a common strategy for metropolitan areas endeavoring to advance the sustainable communities strategy. At the same time, urban areas in America are experiencing rising energy prices and new geographies of employment, poverty, and wealth. Furthermore, the Millennial generation, and some Baby boomers are changing their residential preference from the suburbs to the central city. These modifications in the urban economy and residential preferences are likely to intensify competition for housing in the central city. Increased demand for housing generates high rents, which often results in the displacement of low-income, transit-dependent population. Consequently, the effectiveness of transit-oriented development is compromised as new affluent households increase vehicle use for home-based trips. Using 1990 and 2010 census data, this research investigated the unintended consequences of TOD policy on mode choice and equitable accessibility in block groups within one mile radius of rail stations in six metropolitan statistical areas. The research employed geographic information systems (GIS) and multivariate regression to analyze the relationship between socio-economic and demographic change in transit-oriented development and associated effects on mode choice for work commute. The findings reveal that while driving declined between 1990 - 2010, transit use for work commute increased in most metropolitan areas in the study. In addition, transit-oriented developments are associated with a high number of affluent households, college graduates, and White-collar employees, when compared with block groups with no transit-oriented development. However, the percentage of foreign-born residents have increased in transit-oriented development, while the percentage of Black and White population have declined. In addition, block groups within one mile of transit stations show nearly similar levels of transit use and driving when compared block groups within the half mile radius. These findings have significant implications on the long term effectiveness of TOD policy.