In this paper we undertake a comprehensive examination of voter ID legislation in the American states, from 2001 through 2012. We show that there has been a notable evolution in the behavior of partisan lawmakers regarding their handling of this issue. Whereas in the early 2000s voter ID laws were few and primarily motivated by efforts to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was passed in response to the vote counting fiasco in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, more recently there is evidence of extreme partisan polarization regarding voter ID laws across state legislatures. With a dataset that includes over 1,000 proposed and nearly 100 enacted voter ID laws spanning a dozen years, we employ (1) negative binomial and multilevel over-dispersed Poisson count models and (2) pooled time series cross-sectional regression models with binary dependent variables, to determine the likelihood a state legislature in a given year introduces and adopts restrictive voter ID bills. It is clear from our evaluation of legislative activity on voter ID laws that they have evolved from a valence issue into a partisan battle where, with few exceptions, Republicans defend their enactment as a safeguard against fraud while Democrats indict them as the leading tactic for voter suppression. Though the partisan fight over voter ID laws is now common knowledge among political observers, the legislation is not uniform across the states; that is, not all Republican-controlled legislatures have pushed for more restrictive voter ID laws. We argue that a state’s broader electoral and demographic context - including a state’s turnout rate and whether or not it is a presidential battleground state - conditions why some Republican - controlled state legislatures have focused on voter ID laws as a useful political tool to shape the electorate. In an age of highly competitive partisan politics, when neither party can lay claim to a dominant electoral position, voter ID laws constitute an issue that both parties utilize to further their political interests. In short, the voter ID issue is a pawn in the larger partisan game of electoral politics.

The last planning document adopted by Wilmington, OH was the 1978 "Land Use, Thoroughfare and Open Space Plan." The 1978 "master plan" was the first community planning document following the closure of the Clinton County Air Force Base in 1971–an event with devastating economic implications. Rather than creating a plan that reflected the newly gained insights during this transformative period in the community, the plan instead was a technical document that broadly analyzed community conditions and offered planning recommendations and guidelines focused on future growth and development. The 1978 plan, like many of the HUD-funded plans spawned from Section 701 of the Housing Act of 1954, is generic in nature and did not provide Wilmington with needed strategic recommendations aimed at addressing prevalent planning issues at the time, or which would enable the community to better prepare and respond to future challenges and opportunities. As was the case during the 1970s, Wilmington is currently in the middle of a transformative period with the recent loss of its largest employer, DHL in 2008 –an economic shock that cost nearly 10,000 jobs and an economic impact of nearly half a billion dollars. Wilmington is now in the process of developing its first new comprehensive plan in over 35 years. As Wilmington has now faced two major economic crises that have taken place at the same air park, a new plan for Wilmington will need to be more explicit in articulating a desired vision for the community, and direct in addressing the risks and uncertainties that the community wishes to avoid. . Using an overview and analysis of the 1978 plan as a comparison, this paper will begin the discussion of building the framework and vision for a new plan for Wilmington that will be strategic in responding to current conditions and providing a tool capable of responding to future issues. Wilmington is long overdue for a new plan, and it will be essential that the next planning phase and subsequent plan reflect the observed changes and lessons learned over the past 35 years.

Objectives: Develop the concept of differential institutional engagement and test its ability to explain discrepant findings regarding the relationship between the age structure and homicide rates across ecological studies of crime. We hypothesize that differential degrees of institutional engagementyouths with ties to mainstream social institutions such as school, work or the military on one end of the spectrum and youths without such bonds on the other endaccount for the direction of the relationship between homicide rates and age structure (high crime prone ages, such as 1529).Methods: Cross sectional, Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses using robust standard errors are conducted using large samples of cities characterized by varying degrees of youths differential institutional engagement for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The concept is operationalized with the percent of the population enrolled in college and the percent of 1619 year olds who are simultaneously not enrolled in school, not in the labor market (not in the labor force or unemployed), and not in the military.Results: Consistent and invariant results emerged. Positive effects of age structure on homicide rates are found in cities that have high percentages of disengaged youth and negative effects are found among cities characterized with high percentages of youth participating in mainstream social institutions.

OBJECTIVE: The present research aimed to compare historic participation in the US National School Lunch Program (NSLP) during childhood and subsequent prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults at the population level.DESIGN: Regression models examined cross-sectional, state- and age-based panel data constructed from multiple sources, including the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System, US Congressional Record, US Census and the US Department of Agriculture. Models controlled for cohorts' racial/ethnic composition and state poverty rates.SUBJECTS: Adult-age cohorts (18-34, 35-49, 50-64 and 18-64 years) by US state over a 25-year period (1984-2008).SETTING: The cohorts' prevalence of overweight and obesity was compared with the cohorts' estimated NSLP participation during schooling (1925-2007; the NSLP began in 1946).RESULTS: Among adults aged 18-64 years, a one percentage-point increase in estimated NSLP participation during schooling between 1925 and 2007 was significantly associated with a 029 percentage-point increase in the cohort's later prevalence of overweight and obesity. Analysis of narrower age cohorts and different schooling periods produced mixed results.CONCLUSIONS: The NSLP might have influenced population health historically. Longitudinal analysis of individuals from studies now underway will likely facilitate more robust conclusions about the NSLP's long-term health impact based on more recent experiences.

Cory Booker will likely step down as mayor of Newark in 2014 or 2018. When he does, the possibility of a strong Latino candidate emerging is quite likely. There are a number of black politicians who would like to succeed Booker as well. This chapter identifies eight potential successors to Booker and assesses their ability to create a multiracial electoral coalition using prior vote performance in citywide elections.Design/methodology/approach – This study regresses district (or precinct) level vote preferences for the aforementioned potential successors in previous elections on the racial and ethnic composition of the district, using voter district demographic data from 2000 and 201011The 2010 data is still incomplete at the time of publication. As such, this data will be used sparingly. compiled by the US Census Bureau and the Minnesota Population Center.Findings − There is a decade’s worth of evidence suggesting racially polarized voting among blacks and Latinos in Newark. The racialized black and Latino candidates examined in this chapter had much stronger support in districts with large coethnic populations. In contrast, the more deracialized candidates often had softer support in districts with high concentrations of coethnic voters, but often performed better in districts with higher concentrations of non-coethnics.Originality/value − While the author cautions against reading too much into the findings, the results do portend a future of racially polarized voting in Newark, especially as the city’s population diversifies and as different factions vie for power.

Economic development agencies seek industries to benefit their local economies. This article investigates how manufacturing composition affects a region's income and educational attainment using data for individuals and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1970 through 2009. The results provide an understanding of the importance of changes in industry composition on the well-being of residents of an MSA. Using fixed-effects regressions, we model individual educational attainment and real income as a function of manufacturing composition, allowing for nonlinearities through squaring manufacturing composition. Across MSAs, high levels of manufacturing are associated with lower educational attainment and higher income; however, higher growth in manufacturing decreases both educational attainment and income.

This paper examines how a reduction in the cost of college for undocumented students affects college enrollment and adolescent risky behaviors. Prior to 2001, undocumented students in the United States faced high out-of-state tuition costs at public colleges. From 2001 to 2013, sixteen states passed in-state tuition policies, reducing the cost of college up to seven-fold for these students. To the extent that teens are forward-looking and aware that lower tuition increases the likelihood of attending college, this price reduction should decrease the incidence of risky behavior during adolescence among the undocumented. Exploiting the variation in timing of instate tuition policies across states and using Mexican foreign-born non-citizenship as a proxy for undocumented status, I find that these policies increase future college enrollment by about 1.5 percentage points (18% of the sample mean), decrease high school dropout incidence by about 3 percentage points (10% of the sample mean), and decrease the teenage birth rate by 15% (on average, 24 births per 1000 teenage women).

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969–2006, and a 10% increase in 2006 income per employee. Decomposing income effects using 2000 Census worker-level data, we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive, while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers to work more hours. We also present evidence that inter-jurisdictional competition leads local governments to raise more in taxes, spend more, and issue more debt (per capita), but does not help them obtain more inter-governmental transfers. However, the additional cost from this increase in expenditures to a median-wage employee is much smaller than the increase in that employee's wages due to greater inter-jurisdictional competition.

Die Lebensverhältnisse von US-amerikanischen Lehrerinnen und Lehrern, 1860-1910«. Most of the historical research on the daily lives of US teachers relies on qualitative sources such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and missionary reports. Using the US census data from 1860 to 1910, this paper attempts to go beyond sketching impressions of their daily lives, focusing instead on the living arrangements of teachers by region, gender, and race. The main result is that about 70 percent of teachers lived in a nuclear family and 15 percent of them lived with non-relatives; this is more or less true regardless of regions, genders, and races. In addition to descriptive analyses, a multinomial logit model is applied to provide a more systematic way of finding the determinants of the living arrangements and measuring the sizes of their effects. This paper demonstrates a possibility of deepening our understanding of the daily lives of teachers in the past by combining nationally representative data with topics of daily lives.

In the 1929-1933 downturn of the Great Depression, house values and homeownership rates fell more, and mortgage foreclosure rates were higher, in cities that had experienced relatively high rates of house construction in the residential real-estate boom of the mid-1920s. Across the 1920s, boom cities had seen the biggest increases in house values and homeownership rates. These patterns suggest that the mid-1920s boom contributed to the depth of the Great Depression through wealth and financial effects of falling house values. Also, they are very similar to cross-sectional . . .

At the end of the 1960s, the US divorce law underwent major changes and the divorce rate almost doubled in all of the states. This paper shows that changes in property division, alimony transfers, and child custody assignments account for a substantial share of the increase in the divorce rate, especially for young, college educated couples with children. I solve and calibrate a model where agents make decisions on their marital status, savings, and labor supply. Under the new financial settlements, divorced men gain from a higher share of property, while women gain from an increase in alimony and child support transfers. The introduction of the unilateral decision to divorce has limited effects.

Long-run labor market inequities are frequently attributed to disparities in primary and secondary school quality, and philanthropists often resort to targeted and tightly conditioned gifts to address these quality disparities. We match data on the Rosenwald Schools Program, an early 20th century initiative aimed at the Southern black-white school quality gap, to newly assembled data on local school districts and measure the impact of Rosenwald gifts on African-American public school resources. Although these gifts increased contemporaneous expenditures on African-American schools, results show that they yielded no lasting change in multiple school quality proxies. Further, because Rosenwald funds were diverted or implicitly matched to favor white schools, we find no evidence that the Fund reduced the black-white gap in superficial school quality. We demonstrate, however, that overall black public education expenditures in this era had a steeper marginal effect on black attendance and literacy measures than white public expenditures had on white outcome measures, which helps to explain why the Rosenwald program led to meaningful human capital gains for black, but not white, individuals despite its failure to impact relative school quality.

Earnings volatility—variability over time in a worker’s earnings—is inter- esting for its potential welfare consequences and as a labor market outcome. In the presence of liquidity constraints, households may not be able to smooth consumption when faced with volatile earnings. And rising earnings volatility may indicate that workers are changing jobs more often or that implicit con- tracts governing compensation within jobs are smoothing pay less, to name two possibilities. This dissertation shows that earnings volatility has increased in the U.S., and assesses, for a specific concept and measure of volatility, the reasons for the increase. After an introduction, Chapter 2 introduces my preferred volatility mea- sure, the volatility of residual earnings after estimating life cycle earnings pro- files. Previous literature covers an array of concepts and measures of volatility. I outline differences among these approaches and argue that the primary mo- tivation for studying volatility—potential welfare losses—has implications for the specification of the life cycle profiles and measures of earnings volatility. Chapter 3 describes the data I use, a sample of male heads of household from the PSID. In Chapter 4, I show that earnings volatility has increased in the U.S., and that about 70 percent of the increase is explained by volatility of wages rather than hours worked. I describe how earnings volatility differs across groups, and show that it has increased among almost all groups. Finally, I consider whether these findings depend on some measurement choices. All measures show increasing earnings volatility in the U.S., but the amount of the increase and comparisons of volatility across groups are often sensitive to methodological choices. Chapter 5 addresses why earnings volatility has increased in the U.S. I de- velop a decomposition approach to attribute changes in economy-wide volatil- ity to various factors. I create a demand shock index that measures work- ers’ predicted exposure to labor demand shocks, using national changes in the occupation-industry distribution of hours worked. My major finding is that larger or more frequent labor demand shocks explain about half of the increase in economy-wide earnings volatility between 1975 and 2005.

Digital history is one more historiographical development since World War II that has challenged professional historians’ definition of scholarship. While oral history and quantitative social history questioned the primacy of the written document and an elite focus, they and public history challenged the centrality of the researcher trained in academic history departments, and postmodernism undermined the authority of categories.[1] Of central concern is not whether the online world has infected humanities scholars in the United States with intellectual challenges (and status anxiety) but what new forms these are taking and the new professional and intellectual questions that digital history poses for historians.[2] As younger scholars worry about what “counts” as scholarship in an online universe, fearing that their senior colleagues will not respect anything other than monographs published by university presses, they partly replay previous waves of concern about professional legitimation.

What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates a system of cities, their internal urban structures, and a high-dimensional theory of factor-driven comparative advantage. It predicts that larger cities will be skill abundant and specialize in skill-intensive activities according to the monotone likelihood ratio property. We test the model using data on 270 US metropolitan areas, 3 to 9 educational categories, 22 occupations, and 21 manufacturing industries. The results provide support for our theory's predictions.

Data from the National Suburban Survey from September 2010 permit the first statistical portrait of Americans displaced by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. The average person who has experienced home mortgage foreclosure since September 2007 resembles the average American but is somewhat likely to be younger, Latino, and a parent. The foreclosed are also more likely to report various other measures of financial distress, including recent job loss. The experience of foreclosure is associated with more problems in the neighborhoods where respondents currently reside, including such problems as crime, unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing. Respondents who have not personally lost a home, but who know the foreclosed, are also experiencing more economic distress and more neighborhood problems than those who have not. These descriptive findings suggest the human costs of the foreclosure crisis and the limits of informal social safety nets for addressing those costs.

In the medical field, we are amassing phenomenalamounts of data. This data is imperative in discovering patterns and trends to help improve healthcare. Yet the researchers cannot rejoice as the data cannot be easily shared, because health data custodians have the understandable ethical and legal responsibility to maintain the privacy of individuals. Many techniques of anonymization have been proposed to provide means of publishing data for research purposes without jeopardizing privacy. However, as flaws are discovered in these techniques, other more stringent methods are proposed. The strictness of the techniques with classification to evaluate the utility loss, and propose a framework to enhance the utility of anonymized data.

I use a two-part model and building permit data for all US metropolitan statistical areas between 1994 and 2008 to estimate the effects of capital and labour stock, cultural sector composition, population change, education and median household income levels on total investment in cultural facilities. The results suggest that investment in cultural facilities is associated with the existing stock of facilities, population change, education and median household income levels. Furthermore, I find preliminary evidence that demand from the cultural sector was not adequately assessed in the period investment took place.