This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.

This article explores historical evidence of spatial inequality in a particular metropolitan setting, focusing on adult education. Variation in collegiate education is interpreted in light of Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital. Using census tract data, OLS regression suggests that education levels were moderately independent of other social characteristics in both 1960 and 1980. Historically, distinct "education zones" or districts took shape before conflict over desegregation erupted. We also examine differences in student attainment with individual-level data, and consider the question of peer influences on educational success. Altogether, we suggest that education became an important dimension of geospatial inequality in metropolitan life, rather independently of controversies over race and "white flight." Cet article examine l'évolution des inégalités spatiales en matière de formation, en mettant l'accent sur l'éducation des adultes, dans le cadre spécifique de la métropole de Kansas City. Les variations du niveau d'éducation sont interprétées selon le concept bourdieusien de capital culturel. L'analyse statistique, par la méthode de régression des moindres carrés ordinaires (MCO), des données du recensement suggère que les niveaux d'éducation étaient modérément indépendants des autres caractéristiques sociales en 1960 et en 1980. Historiquement, les « zones d'éducation » ont été mises en place avant que le conflit sur la déségrégation n'ait éclaté. Les différences de niveau des élèves sont aussi examinées à partir des données individuelles, ainsi que l'influence des pairs sur la réussite scolaire. En définitive, l'article montre que l'éducation est devenue une dimension importante de l'inégalité spatiale dans la vie métropolitaine, indépendemment des controverses sur la race et la « fuite des blancs

Was economic mobility high during the rst half of the twentieth century in the United States? I combine two historical data sources to estimate intergenerational income mobility between 1915 and 1940. I match fathers from the Iowa State Census of 1915 to their sons in the 1940 Federal Census, the first state and federal censuses with data on income and years of education. In my sample of fathers and sons, I estimate a lower intergenerational elasticity of income than is found in modern studies of the United States, suggesting higher levels of income mobility. Income mobility measured with relative income ranks also show higher mobility historically. Intergenerational mobility of education is higher in my sample than in modern measures as well. I fi nd sons in rural counties in 1915 to have more mobility of both income and education than urban sons. Lacking data on income, past studies of historical intergenerational mobility have relied on occupation transition data for fathers and sons to measure mobility. When I compute standard measures of occupational mobility for my sample, I find levels of mobility between 1915 and 1940 to be smaller than modern estimates, which contrasts with the higher mobility I find in income measures. This suggests that the standard estimates of historical occupational mobility may not be accurate substitutes for measures of income mobility.

Can forced assimilation policies successfully integrate immigrant groups? As cross-border migration surges, more countries must grapple with this question. A rich theoretical literature argues that forced integration can either succeed or create a powerful backlash, heightening the sense of cultural identity among the minority. This paper examines how a specific integration policy namely language restrictions in elementary school affects integration and identification with the host country later in life. I focus on the case of Germans in the United States during and after World War I. In the period 19171923, several US states barred foreign languages from their schools, often targeting German explicitly. Yet rather than facilitating the assimilation of immigrant children, that policy instigated a backlash. In particular, individuals who had two German parents and were affected by these language laws were less likely to volunteer in WWII; they were also more likely to marry within their ethnic group and to choose decidedly German names for their offspring. These observed effects were greater in locations where the initial sense of German identity, as proxied by Lutheran church influence, was stronger. These findings are compatible with a model of cultural transmission of identity, in which parental investment overcompensates for the direct effects of assimilation policies.

The United States is facing dramatic demographic changes due to the aging of the Baby Boom Generation and increasing diversity, including rapid growth of the Latino population. Questions have been raised regarding the economic security of the aging baby boomers generational cohort once they retire, which are of particular relevance to minority and Latino members of the cohort. Latinos tend to have lower levels of financial security than their white, non-Latino counterparts, but there is little research that examines individuals who fall into the intersection of these two groups: the Latino baby boomers. Because Latino boomers are a largely hidden population, their economic status and prospects are difficult to estimate. After laying out the historical and theoretical contexts in an overarching introduction, this dissertation integrates three empirical chapters to advance knowledge in this area, by: 1) laying out selected sociodemographic, economic, and health characteristics of the cohort and drawing implications for national social insurance policies; 2) assessing the degree of economic disparity between racial/ethnic groups that is due to membership in that racial/ethnic group as opposed to disparities in sociodemographic status, and how these dynamics have changed between generational cohorts; and 3) addressing the degree to which these economic disparities are diminished due to the acquisition of citizenship. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 2) looks at the characteristics of the Baby Boomer population living in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, broken down by Latino ethnicity and citizenship status. Drawing from several U.S. Census Bureau data sources, it revealed three key findings: 1) there were 80 million baby boomers in the U.S. in 2000more than previously reportedof which 8.0 million (10%) were Latinos; 2) U.S.-born Latino boomers were more similar to non-Latino boomers in terms of demographic characteristics, whereas foreign-born citizens and noncitizens scored less well on key demographic indicators; and 3) compared to non-Latino baby boomers, U.S.-born Latino baby boomers had somewhat less favorable economic characteristics. The second empirical chapter identifies the magnitude of racial/ethnic structural disadvantage for income and wealth in the years preceding retirement for the Baby Boom Generation, then compares their structural disadvantage with that of members of the Silent Generation cohort when they were the same age. After adjusting for sociodemographic variables (age, gender, citizenship status, education, marital status, and labor force participation), the structural effects of race/ethnicity on incomeusing the American Community Surveyand wealthusing the Health and Retirement Studywere considerably reduced, confirming two of the chapters four hypotheses; however, the expected reduction in structural effects from the Silent Generation to the Baby Boom Generation was seen for wealth but not for income, confirming only one of the remaining two hypotheses. This reduction of structural disparities in wealth from the Silent Generation to the Baby Boom Generation follows the expectation that these disparities would be reduced over time, which signals good news for the younger members of the Baby Boom Generation, Generation X, and future generational cohorts. But large gaps still exist between racial/ethnic groups, even after sociodemographic adjustment; future reduction in those structural inequalities can help decrease those gaps, an especially important consideration for low-income racial/ethnic minority groups. The third empirical chapter takes an initial step toward disaggregating by age the effect of naturalization on income growth. Using linear growth curve modeling on data from the Survey of Income and Program Participations 2004 panel, it attempts to replicate past findings across the entire lifespan, but fails to detect an effect of naturalization on income growth; only non-citizens had a significantly higher level of income growth during the study period than U.S.-born citizens. In subsetting the analysis for older and younger working-age groups, an effect of naturalization was not detected for either group, and the positive effect for non-citizens was seen only for the younger age group. The predictor variables on the whole had minimal relationships with slope in the model, with less than 1% of variance explained in each model. Although a stronger effect of the predictor variables, including an effect of naturalization, may have appeared were more years of data available, it was not detected over the 4-year study period. Two unexpected findings were: 1) individuals in the younger sample who had naturalized before the study had higher intercepts than U.S.-born citizens but no such difference emerged in the older sample; and 2) in a bivariate context, those who naturalized during the study represented a socioeconomic midpoint of sortson racial/ethnic composition, education, and incomebetween non-citizens and those who had naturalized prior to the study. In sum, these chapters shed light on the Baby Boom cohorts characteristics and dynamics in the period leading up to their retirement age. This dissertation provides insights into the characteristics, demographic history, and socioeconomic patterns of the upcoming cohort of retirees. Implications of these findings have the potential to inform and to modify practice and policy for the next cohort: Generation X. The findings underscore the importance of reducing disparities in education and, to a degree, citizenship as a mechanism for countering the persistent effects of structural inequality on income. These insights have implications for both theory and policy and lay a foundation for a wide range of future research, which is discussed in the final chapter.

New York City is facing a youth unemployment crisis, but the city's youth workforce development programs reach only a fraction of those in need of help and are too often misaligned to the developmental needs of young New Yorkers.

Heat-related mortality remains a public health challenge in the United States. The objective of this study was to determine the temporal consistency of high-risk zones for heat-related mortality using historical georeferenced mortality data from seven US cities. A generalized additive model was used to identify city-specific threshold temperatures associated with increased mortality, and then the mortality rate on threshold-exceeding days was calculated for each postal code comprising each study city. This process was iterated by withholding subsets of data from the model and assessing predictability via cross-validation. In all cities, the average mortality rate in postal codes targeted for intervention by the statistical model was higher than that in non-targeted areas. Targeted areas for interventions in the study data accounted for 50 % of excess heat-related deaths despite only accounting for 25 % of total mortality. Focusing intervention measures at certain geographical zones within urban areas could be an effective means of combating heat-related mortality because there is temporal consistency in places where the death rate is most sensitive to heat.

The passage of the National Banking Acts stabilized the existing financial system and encouraged the entry of 729 banks between 1863 and 1866. These new banks concentrated in the area that would eventually become the Manufacturing Belt. Using a new bank census, the article shows that these changes to the financial system were a major determinant of the geographic distribution of manufacturing and the nation's sudden capital deepening. The entry not only resulted in more manufacturing capital and output at the county level, but also more steam engines and value added at the establishment level.

Using nineteenth century legal information combined with census information, I examine the effect of state laws that restricted American women's access to abortion on the ratio of children to women. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4% to 12% when abortion is restricted. In the absence of anti-abortion laws, fertility would have been 5% to 12% lower in the early twentieth century.

For most of human history, populations have been relatively isolated from each other, and only recently has there been extensive contact between peoples, flora and fauna from both old and new worlds. The reach, volume and speed of modern travel are unprecedented, with human mobility increasing in high income countries by over 1000-fold since 1800. This growth is putting people at risk from the emergence of new strains of familiar diseases, and from completely new diseases, while ever more cases of the movement of both disease vectors and the diseases they carry are being seen. Pathogens and their vectors can now move further, faster and in greater numbers than ever before. Equally however, we now have access to the most detailed and comprehensive datasets on human mobility and pathogen distributions ever assembled, in order to combat these threats. This short review paper provides an overview of these datasets, with a particular focus on low income regions, and covers briefly approaches used to combine them to help us understand and control some of the negative effects of population and pathogen movements.

Black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force from 1870 until at least 1980 and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. Differences in observables cannot account for most of this racial gap in labor force participation for the 100 years after Emancipation. The unexplained racial gap may be due to racial differences in stigma associated with women's work, which Goldin (1977) suggested could be traced to cultural norms rooted in slavery. In both nineteenth and twentieth century data, we find evidence of inter-generation transmission of labor force participation from mother to daughter, which is consistent with the role of cultural norms.

This paper studies wage inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2010 in a framework that accounts for changes in the employment of physical and cognitive skills and their returns. I find that the secular rise in the employment of cognitive skills is largely accounted for by labour force composition changes in shares of gender-education groups rather than changes that occur within these groups. Average employed skills differ greatly across groups, but over time their average employed cognitive skills have remained approximately constant. Returns to cognitive skills increased very sharply for high skill levels, more gradually around mean levels, and decreased at low levels. Returns to physical skills generally declined. These trends account for approximately 63% of the increase in the college wage premium, with changes in returns to cognitive skills playing a dominant role.

We investigate the role of complementarities in production and skill mobility across cities. We propose a general equilibrium model of location choice by heterogeneously skilled workers, and consider different degrees of complementarities between the skills of workers. The nature of the complementarities determines the equilibrium skill distribution across cities. We prove that with extreme-skill complementarity, the skill distribution has fatter tails in large cities; with top-skill complementarity, there is first-order stochastic dominance. Using the model to back out skills from wage and housing price data, we find robust evidence of fat tails in large cities. Big cities have big inequality. This pattern of spatial sorting is consistent with extreme-skill complementarity: the productivity of high skilled workers and of the providers of low skilled services is mutually enhanced.

Daylight Savings Time (DST) is promoted as a tool to conserve energy. However, ex post reduced form estimates of the effects of DST find no evidence of energy savings and find some evidence of a small increase in energy use. This paper investigates this disconnect using detailed individual time use data to look at the behavioral effects of DST. We study how individuals change their time use in response to the abrupt shift in daylight associated with DST. We leverage two natural experiments to identify the effect of DST on behavior. First, we study periods around the annual shift in daylight induced by moving into and out of DST. Second, we compare activities by time interval before and after the change in DST start dates that occurred in 2007. We find cautious evidence that individuals are shifting potentially energy intensive activities earlier in the day, which is consistent with earlier findings of increased energy usage.

Theories of human capital investment, which emphasize encouraging and protecting investments in human capital, have become salient in rationalizing the adoption of firm asset-sharing and employee stakeholder arrangements, such as Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Yet, mechanisms such as bargaining power have also been a key part of the literature on employee and firm bargaining outcomes. Part of the puzzle with bargaining power as an explanation is that not all forms of bargaining power significantly explain the adoption of firm asset sharing and employee stakeholder arrangements. In order to provide an improved explanation for the adoption of these arrangements, we utilize distributive conceptions of property rights and economic institutions to highlight how power is allocated, segmented, and distributed by economic institutions and, thus, impacts firm asset sharing and employee stakeholder arrangements.

This study explored property value as a proxy of socioeconomic status. The effects of poverty on general health, academic achievement, and child development are devastating. The endurance and growth of poverty can be disheartening. Improvement efforts must be targeted and evidence-based. Dependable evidence requires sound measurement. Traditional measures of socioeconomic status like eligibility for a free or reduced price lunch (FRL), parent income, parent education, and parent occupation leave room for improvement. Hierarchical linear modeling and regression analyses were conducted to compare the effects of FRL eligibility and property value on Math achievement. Geographic Information Systems was utilized to map the effects of property value on student achievement at the school level across a geographical area. The inclusion of visual evidence aids in identifying trends and, eventually, targeting improvement efforts.

This paper analyzes the determinants of bilingualism (i.e., speaks a language other than English at home) among children age 5 to 18 years in the American Community Survey, 2005-2011. Two groups of children are considered: those born in the US (native born) and foreign-born children who immigrated prior to age 14 (the 1.5 generation). The analyses are conducted overall, within genders, and within racial and ethnic groups. Bilingualism is more prevalent if the parents are foreign born, less proficient in English, of the same ancestry (linguistic) group, and if the child lives in an ethnic (linguistic) concentration area. Although the effects are relatively smaller, a foreign-born grandparent living in the household increases child bilingualism, while a higher level of parental education tends to decrease it. Children of Asian and especially of Hispanic origin are more likely to be bilingual than their white, non-Hispanic counterparts. Native-born Indigenous children are more likely to be bilingual.

Accessibility is the most important concept in transportation planning because it describes the ease of travel to opportunities vital for everyday needs. Theoretically, people locate closer to transit corridors if accessibility improves. One desired benefit from light rail is denser land use patterns in the form of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) that captures population growth. In October 1994, the City of Denver, CO, joined the list of American cities that have implemented light rail within the last 33 years. Since then, five corridors have opened there, and planners are retooling their zoning codes to allow TOD near light rail. The hope is to mitigate road-centric policies that enabled sprawl during the second half of the 20th Century. This thesis investigates light rail in the Denver region in the context of accessibility. It asks the following research question: What land use and transportation conditions must exist to encourage the general population to locate near light rail? Five linear regression models test a range of accessibility variables. Evidence suggests that accessibility to jobs and housing near station areas is important for facilitating population growth near light rail. Specifically, land use policy needs to allow residential and non-residential mixed uses near station areas for population growth to occur. It is too early to draw any definitive conclusions for the Denver region. Anecdotal evidence indicates that planners are achieving land use goals of growth, even though many of the region's TOD-supportive policies were recently adopted.

We investigate the relationships of bank failures and balance sheet conditions with measures of proximity to different forms of transportation in the United States over the period from 1830-1860. A series of hazard models and bank-level regressions indicate a systematic relationship between proximity to railroads (but not to other means of transportation) and good banking outcomes. Although railroads improved economic conditions along their routes, we offer evidence of another channel. Specifically, railroads facilitated better information flows about banks that led to modifications in bank asset composition consistent with reductions in the incidence of moral hazard.

Motivated by large educational differences in geographic mobility, this paper considers a simple dynamic extension of Roy's (1951) model and analyzes it using new evidence on net versus excess mobility and the individual-level relationship between mobility and wages. According to the model, the dispersion of a labor income shock specific to a worker-location match is greater for more educated workers and accounts for large educational differences in mobility. In the model, labor mobility raises both the average wage and the college wage premium, a prediction consistent with differences between Europe and the U.S.