Malls are common places in urban areas. They present us with safe and convenient environments to shop and to spend leisure time. Although malls have an important presence in our lives, not much empirical research on malls exists in the field of urban studies, especially on the spatial and locational distribution of malls. This research deals with the locational pattern of malls in Texas. I analyzed locations of malls in the larger context of the built and human environment. Specifically, the locations of eighty-one malls in four major metropolitan areas in Texas were studied in light of how highway networks, land availability, population density and household income affect mall locations, using a time-series methodology from 1970 to 2010. The results of this analysis show that the spatial distributions of the malls were primarily correlated with the existence of highway networks. The land availability was an essential but not a decisive factor for mall location. Moreover, household income was a more important factor than population density regarding mall’s site selection. These results indicate that existing urban settings and conditions influence mall locations, but malls are not equally accessible to everyone, especially to low-income households. This equity problem should be addressed in future research.

Access to high-quality local services constitutes an important amenity in residents' valuation of cities. This study examines consumer preferences for variety in nightlife to understand these preferences and their impact on nightlife industry dynamics. I develop a continuous-time structural dynamic model that parameterizes consumer preferences and describes venue entry and exit in the nightlife more often when the potential consumption utility increase. I estimate the model using a panel of liquor license data from Chicago. I find strong preferences for variety (and the attendant increase in demand as variety increases) is sufficiently strong that on the median the increase in demand largely offsets the impact of additional competition on profit for incumbent venues. In particular, a new entrant without music, dance, or other amusement amenities raises consumer welfare as much as a 13.5% price reduction and lowers profits for other venues of the same type by less than 3%. However, potential entrants face high barriers to entry equivalent to six or seven years' revenue.

In 2011, about 13 percent of the U.S. population, approximately 40 million people, were foreign born in the United States. Many of them participate in transnational caregiving, either as children supporting their parents in their country of origin or parents moving to the U.S. to help their children. This report examines research ontransnational caregiving between immigrant adult children and their parents. Following the caregiving definitionsof Finch(1989), the articles were reviewed and categorized as economic support, accommodation, personal care, practical support and childcare, and emotional and moral support. Changes in family norms and roles, and thecaregiving responsibilities after immigration, are also presented.

Variations in spatio-temporal patterns of Human Monocytic Ehrlichiosis (HME) infection in the state of Kansas, USA were examined and the relationship between HME relative risk and various environmental, climatic and socio-economic variables were evaluated. HME data used in the study was reported to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment between years 20052012, and geospatial variables representing the physical environment [National Land cover/Land use, NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)], climate [NASA MODIS, Prediction of Worldwide Renewable Energy (POWER)], and socio-economic conditions (US Census Bureau) were derived from publicly available sources. Following univariate screening of candidate variables using logistic regressions, two Bayesian hierarchical models were fit; a partial spatio-temporal model with random effects and a spatio-temporal interaction term, and a second model that included additional covariate terms. The best fitting model revealed that spatio-temporal autocorrelation in Kansas increased steadily from 20052012, and identified poverty status, relative humidity, and an interactive factor, diurnal temperature range x mixed forest area as significant county-level risk factors for HME. The identification of significant spatio-temporal pattern and new risk factors are important in the context of HME prevention, for future research in the areas of ecology and evolution of HME, and as well as climate change impacts on tick-borne diseases.

Trevino-Guerra, Maria Luisa, Graduation as a Function of Attendance and Discipline of Students in the Student Success Initiative of Texas in One South Texas Urban School District. Doctor of Education, (Ed. D.), December, 2013, 128 pp., 21 tables, 2 figures, 76 references, 76 titles. This study examined the trends and patterns across time of grade placement committee students on the dependent variable, graduation. Longitudinal data for independent variables, attendance and discipline was collected for 173 students from 2005 to 2013. The independent variables of attendance and discipline were examined to determine whether or not high school completion is dependent on these two measures. The Grade 5 students of 2005-2006 in one south Texas large urban school district who were retained in the fifth grade or advanced to the next higher grade by the grade placement committee in accordance with the Student Success Initiative (SSI) of Texas were the focus of this study. Exploratory and confirmatory data/statistical analysis was used side-by-side in the present study. Confirmatory statistical/data analysis included a multiple linear regression and logistic regression analysis, followed with a trend analysis over the eight data points for both attendance and discipline. The null hypotheses for the present study were tested with multivariate and univariate F - distributions with a working alpha level of .025 and reporting alpha level of .05. The logistic regression analyses revealed that overall independent variables, attendance and discipline are strong predictors of the criterion variable graduation for grades fifth through twelfth. Attendance in the eleventh grade and discipline in the tenth grade were found to be the best predictors, respectively when analyzed alone. However, both eighth grade attendance and eighth grade discipline were the stronger factors in predicting graduation, the outcome variable, when analyzed together. A recommendation for practice is that the findings of the present study provide the local education agencies, especially school administrators data to consider when working with potential fifth grade GPC students, SSI sixth grade students, potential eighth grade GPC students, or SSI ninth grade students. Knowing that both poor attendance, that is, number of days present, and discipline, that is, a high number of discipline referrals, are strong and high-yield predictors of not graduating from high school, may/should prompt local education agencies and school administrators to put into practice early and immediate interventions to reverse negative attendance trends and discipline issues of Hispanic students in Texas Schools

This study conducts an exploratory analysis of the travel patterns of troops in the 33rd United States Colored Troop (USCT) during the Civil War using flowlines created via Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. Doing so creates a visual representation of the routes the colored troops of the 33rd regiment took from their birthplaces to where they were enlisted into the Union army. Information on seventy records of individual soldiers were documented into an excel file, which included their age, occupation, birthplace, place of enlistment, term of service, date of enlistment, and any other additional notes on them. By visualizing the birthplaces of these soldiers compared with their enlistment locations, historians are better equipped to examine the historical records and accounts of these troops in a nuanced way. Historians may look at patterns that emerge from the data, and juxtapose them with answers to the questions of how and why these colored soldiers ended up where they did as well as what might they have encountered both during and after the war. This study finds that by in large the USCT 33rd regiment was a southeastern troop, which likely played a major factor in the experiences of these men both during and after the war.

text/html Статья посвящена основным задачам и направлениям модернизации Северо-Кавказского федерального округа. Отмечается, что предложенный в проекте стратегии развития СКФО комплекс мер недостаточен и необходимо искать дополнительные пути модернизации региональной экономики. Обосновывается целесообразность расширения прав собственности местных органов власти с целью получения дополнительных доходов в бюджеты для увеличения темпов социально-экономического развития территорий субъектов округа. The article is devoted to the fundamental problems and directions of modernization of the North Caucasus federal district. It is noted that proposed in the draft strategy of North Caucasus federal district set of measures is inadequate and must seek additional ways to modernize the regional economy. Expanding the property rights of local authorities with a view to generating additional income in the budgets to increase the pace of socio-economic development of subjects of district territories is justified.

This research starts with an empirical analysis on household location choices under changes in climate extremes. It follows with a modeling component that simulates the welfare impacts of climate change on US households by linking a random utility model (RUM) with a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Linking these models enables feedbacks resulting from climate change-induced migration by simultaneously updating regional labor supply in the CGE model while changing labor wages in the empirical RUM model. A residential sorting model is used to estimate household location choices and to reveal household marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) to reduce frequency of extreme weather in the United States. A two-stage random utility model (RUM) is used for estimation. The first-stage discrete choice model employs a multinomial logit specification to recover heterogeneous parameters associated with metropolitan statistical area (MSA) specific variables, migration costs, and the mean indirect utility of each MSA. The second stage of this model decomposes the mean indirect utility obtained from the first stage into its MSA-specific attributes controlling for unobservables using region fixed effects and an instrumental variable (IV). The estimated coefficients obtained from the sorting model are compared to results from a conventional wagehedonic model to evaluate the relative performance of these two models. Additionally, a recursive dynamic inter-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is developed to simulate regional economic impacts. The model is calibrated to the IMPLAN 2010 state-level social accounting matrices (SAMs) for the U.S. and it solves at 1-year steps from 2010 to 2065 across 30 industrial sectors and 5 different regions in the US. An important innovation of this research is the coupling of the RUM with the CGE model to iv endogenize labor wages. Coupling these two models through the labor market influences household location choices in the RUM and allows for changes in the industrial size and sectoral composition of regional economies in the CGE model. This approach allows for both preference heterogeneity and sectoral interactions in the regional economies based on an iterative process. In the empirical component, we find that extreme temperatures and extreme precipitation reduce utility. People’s preferences for temperature extremes are heterogeneous. The climate of one’s place of birth and demographic characteristics such as age, climate of birth region, and educational attainment are significant factors that lead to preference heterogeneity. We also find that the conventional wage-hedonic model underestimates values of amenities. In the modeling component, we find that population share in the Northeast increases due to an moderate increase in frequency of warm weather reflected in the climate change scenario used in the analysis, while population share in the Midwest drops due to significant increases in extreme weather days. After considering the feedback from the labor market, population share in the West increases but shares in the Northeast, Midwest, and South drop relative to the business as usual (BAU) scenario without climate change. While climate amenity and job opportunities are both important factors in households’ location decisions, wage effects tend to dominate climate effects on location choices for the working-age population, and retirees place a higher value on climate amenities compared to workers. In the high-emission A2 scenario, the percentage decrease in gross regional product (GRP) is 1.66% for the Northeast, 3.20% for the Midwest, 2.30% for the South, and 0.68% for California while comparing the climate changeinduced migration scenario to the BAU scenario in 2065. In contrast, GRP in the West increases by 12.93% in the climate change-induced migration scenario relative to the business as usual v (BAU) scenario. Our findings suggest that different mitigating policies should target different regions based on heterogeneous regional impacts. In addition, we find that endogenizing labor wages dampens regional economic impacts from climate change-induced migration. The results suggest that ignoring feedbacks from the equilibrium labor market will overstate the economic impacts of climate-induced migration.

Citizenship status among the foreign born is a crucial indicator of social and political incorporation, yet there are good reasons to suspect that citizenship status is inaccurately reported on U.S. surveys.

This research argues that immigrants political, social, and economic incorporation experiences, which are embedded in individual life course trajectories and heavily influenced by governmental policies, play an important role in producing diverse health outcomes among older U.S. foreign-born persons. Using data from the 20082010 American Community Survey and 19982010 Integrated Health Interview Series, we demonstrate how naturalization, a key indicator of social and political inclusion, is related to functional health in midlife and older age. Consistent with the theoretical framework, we find that among those foreign-born who immigrated as children and young adults, naturalized citizens show better health at older ages compared with noncitizens, although this relationship is partly mediated by education. But among those older foreign-born who immigrated at middle and older ages, naturalized citizens report worse health compared with noncitizens. Moreover, this negative health selection into naturalization becomes stronger for those naturalizing after the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fair housing movement made up of white-collar professionalsand housewives rapidly emerged in the Route 128 suburbs outside of Boston. The Bostonnetwork, which eventually included thirty-five hundred members and thirty-seven chapters,became the largest and most active example of a national phenomenon. Tracing the evolutionof the fair housing movement complicates standard narratives of suburban politics, modernliberalism, and the civil rights movement. The movements combination of localized and legaltactics played a crucial role in creating the grassroots support and legal means to fight racialdiscrimination and came to shape state and federal housing policy. Yet its suburban-based andindividualist political outlook imposed serious constraints on the efforts to eradicate the rootcauses of residential inequality and solidified larger patterns of spatial inequality in Massachusettsand the nation.

Recommendations for practice are routinely included in articles that report educational research. Robinson et al. suggest that reports of primary research should not routinely do so. They argue that single primary research studies seldom have sufficient external validity to support claims about practice policy. In this article, I draw on recent statistical research that has formalized subjective notions about generalizability from experiments. I show that even rather large experiments often do not support generalizations to policy-relevant inference populations. This suggests that single primary studies are unlikely to be sufficiently generalizable to support recommendations for practice.

The Great Recession had significant economic effects both in the U.S. and around the world. There is evidence that homeownership rates declined during this period, though some immigrants were less severely affected compared to natives. In this paper we investigate the role of several factors in reducing the vulnerability of immigrants in the face of the economic crisis and increasing the probability of their homeownership. Specifically we examine to what extent birthplace networks, savings, length of stay in the U.S., and citizenship status affect the probability of homeownership before the recession and to what extent these impacts have changed since the recession. Using data from Current Population Survey for the years 2000 - 2012 our results suggest that birthplace networks have a significant effect on homeownership and this effect further increases after the onset of recession. Moreover the impact of birthplace network on homeownership is stronger for citizens and those who are not recent immigrants. We also find a decline in the impact of saving and length of stay on the probability of homeownership during 2007-2012 compared to earlier years. In contrast we find an increase in the impact of being a citizen on immigrant homeownership during this period

A large literature documents a strong and consistent educational gradient in health: more-educated persons enjoy lower rates of morbidity and mortality. This literature has generally focused on the amount of schooling one completes but has yet to comprehensively examine other facets of education, such as educational quality or school segregation. More importantly, the literature has generally conceptualized education at the level of individual persons and has yet to fully study the structural dimensions of education and the production of educational inequities. The goal of this article is to identify several areas of educational inequity beyond personal educational attainment. These include (a) population differences in the strength of the educational gradient in health, (b) educational quality, (c) school segregation, and (d) the role of place of education among immigrants. We also discuss some emerging issues, such as student debt and pathways to education. Accordingly, there is much work to be done to further our knowledge regarding the relationship between education and health.

This paper compares the effects of English proficiency on foreign-born male and female immigrants in the U.S. by using data from the 2001 American Community Survey. The analysis demonstrates the importance of English proficiency on earnings for foreign-born immigrants. The results indicate that male immigrants suffer increasing penalties with decreasing levels of English proficiency. However, female immigrants who speak intermediate English suffer the greatest earnings penalty. Moreover, male immigrants may benefit more from well-spoken English than female immigrants. The Quantile Regression approach is adopted to examine the effects of English proficiency's effects across the entire earnings distribution. The relative importance of English proficiency is greater at the upper tier of the earnings distribution for immigrants as a whole. A similar pattern remains for both gender groups, although slight differences exist for either group. JEL Classifications: J15, J24

A literatura econômica demonstra que, em última instância, a produtividade é o fator determinante para o sucesso econômico dos países. Estudos que decompõem o produto entre as contribuições dos insumos – capital humano e físico – e acerca da eficiência com que estes são combinados – a produtividade total dos fatores (PTF) – mostram que o processo de desenvolvimento depende fundamentalmente da maneira como estes insumos são combinados, a depender das tecnologias adotadas, do ambiente institucional e das falhas de mercado, entre outros. Este estudo apresenta comparações da evolução da produtividade brasileira com a de outros países. Isto permite avaliar em que medida o Brasil aproxima-se da fronteira tecnológica, das melhores práticas institucionais e da eficiência na alocação dos insumos produtivos que permitem aos países obter desenvolvimento econômico. Estas comparações internacionais constituem um primeiro passo para entender os entraves ao avanço da produtividade brasileira. Diversos estudos realizaram comparações similares, consolidando alguns fatos estilizados.1 Entre eles, é oportuno destacar que, diferentemente dos países que conseguiram ascender à condição de países desenvolvidos no século XX, o crescimento econômico no Brasil foi fundado essencialmente na acumulação de fatores de produção e não no crescimento da PTF. Houve significativo aumento de produtividade nas décadas de 1960 e 1970, entretanto este crescimento foi seguido por queda da PTF no período de estagnação econômica de1980 e 1990. Este estudo atualiza essas estimativas de evolução da PTF no Brasil em relação a outros países com base nas recentes informações da Penn World Table (PWT), uma base de dados de produto interno bruto (PIB) e estoques de trabalho, capital físico e humano que permite a construção das séries de PTF. A versão 8.0 da base de dados abrange um período maior – de 1950 a 2011 – e incorpora uma série de melhorias nos procedimentos de construção das variáveis. Dois exercícios são realizados neste artigo. No primeiro, foram identificadas inconsistências na variável de escolaridade média de Barro e Lee (2012) para o Brasil de 1970 a 1990, comumente utilizada na literatura. Os dados de escolaridade foram corrigidos com base nos censos demográficos e pesquisas domiciliares do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística – IBGE (IPUMS, 2011). A partir desta nova série de escolaridade, a PTF brasileira foi estimada novamente. O segundo exercício consistiu de comparações entre as taxas de evolução da PTF entre o Brasil e alguns países, considerando os dados mais recentes disponíveis. A seguir serão apresentados a metodologia para o cálculo da PTF e os dados disponíveis. Na seção 4, são apresentados os resultados destes dois exercícios e, por fim, são tecidas algumas considerações finais.

Hispanic population growth, in both relative and absolute terms, represents one of the striking demographic changes in the U.S. This demographic shift indicates that the economic status of Hispanics has become increasingly important for the welfare of the nation as a whole. As such, this chapter explores the earnings and other socioeconomic outcomes (including education, homeownership rates, the likelihood of earning interest and dividend income, health insurance coverage, and poverty) of Hispanics in the U.S. While lagging behind their non-Hispanic counterparts, the bulk of the Hispanic/non-Hispanic disparities in these outcomes can be explained by differences in education and other observable characteristics between the populations.