This study assesses the effect of black-white differences in school quality on black-white differences in health in later life resulting from the racial convergence in school quality for cohorts born between 1910 and 1950 in southern states with segregated schools. Using data from the 1984-2007 National Health Interview Surveys linked to race-specific data on school quality, we find that reductions in the black-white gap in school quality led to modest reductions in the black-white gap in disability.

Due to the ever increasing importance of the internet, interoperability of heterogeneous data sources is as well of ever increasing importance. Interoperability can be achieved e.g. through data integration and data exchange. Common to both approaches is the need for the DBMS to be able to store and query incomplete databases. In this report we present PossDB, a DBMS capable of storing and querying incomplete databases. The system is wrapper over PostgreSQL, and the query language is an extension of a subset of standard SQL. Our experimental results show that our system scales well, actually better than comparable systems

We construct longitudinal data from the U.S. Census records of 1930 and 1940 to study migration patterns of those affected by the dust bowl.

Today, visitors to Los Angeles and to other leafy suburban residential neighbourhoods in California are greeted by visual panoramas of pristinely manicured lawns and the constant hum of machinery, as gas-powered blowers, mowers, and trimmers are used to prune, manage, and manicure foliage and dispose of debris around private homes. Not long ago, mowing the front lawn was a weekly chore performed without pay by the man of the house, or by a teenage son who might have received a modest allowance for the task. The family man mowing the lawn was an iconic American image seen in scores of television shows and American front lawns on Saturday afternoons. Today it is rare to see male homeowners or family members mowing or raking their lawns in the middle class neighbourhoods of California. Unpaid male family labour has been replaced by Latino immigrant jardineros, who work six days a week, and often, on Sundays too. Gardening is the masculine counterpart of interior domestic work. Latino immigrant men, most of them from Mexico, now prevail in the occupational niche of suburban maintenance gardening.

A large literature has documented an increase of U.S. wage inequality over the past several decades. This paper asks how far one can go towards accounting for the evolution of several measures of U.S. wage inequality based on a stochastic human capital model. The model features four school levels with distinct labor types and skill prices and Ben-Porath style human capital accumulation on the job. Two exogenous changes generate rising wage inequality in the model economy: the (non-monetary) cost of attending college and relative skill prices change over time.Preliminary results suggest that human capital theory can account for almost the entire increase of various dispersion statistics, such as the standard deviation of log wages, the 90/50 wage ratio, and the age-specific college wage premium. The model also accounts for the changing returns to experience over time.

The United States absorbed nearly 22 million immigrants from Europe between 1880 and 1915. How did these immigrants, largely from undemocratic European states, become integrated into the American political system? This paper uses a newly assembled dataset of urban populations in the United States prior to World War I to investigate the decision of newly arrived immigrants to mobilize politically, focusing on the citizenship choice of foreign-born individuals in city wards. I find that immigrants were more likely to become politically active as their ethnic groups share of the electorate grew, particularly in wards where the Democratic Party likely needed the vote of new immigrants to win elections.

Areal interpolation transforms data for a variable of interest from a set of source zones to estimate the same variable's distribution over a set of target zones. One common practice has been to guide interpolation by using ancillary control zones that are related to the variable of interest's spatial distribution. This guidance typically involves using source zone data to estimate the density of the variable of interest within each control zone. This article introduces a novel approach to density estimation, the geographically weighted expectationmaximization (GWEM), which combines features of two previously used techniques, the expectationmaximization (EM) algorithm and geographically weighted regression. The EM algorithm provides a framework for incorporating proper constraints on data distributions, and using geographical weighting allows estimated control-zone density ratios to vary spatially. We assess the accuracy of GWEM by applying it with land use/land cover (LULC) ancillary data to population counts from a nationwide sample of 1980 U.S. census tract pairs. We find that GWEM generally is more accurate in this setting than several previously studied methods. Because target-density weighting (TDW)using 1970 tract densities to guide interpolationoutperforms GWEM in many cases, we also consider two GWEMTDW hybrid approaches and find them to improve estimates substantially.

We assess the extent to which manufacturing decline and housing booms contributed to changes in U.S. non-employment during the 2000s. Using a local labor market design, we estimate that manufacturing decline significantly increased non-employment during 2000-2007, while local housing booms decreased non-employment by roughly the same magnitude. The effects of manufacturing decline persist through 2011, but we find no persistent non-employment effects of local housing booms, most plausibly because housing booms were associated with subsequent busts of similar magnitude. We also find that housing booms significantly reduce the likelihood that displaced manufacturing workers remain non-employed, suggesting that housing booms "mask" non-employment growth that would have otherwise occurred earlier in the absence of the booms. Applying our estimates to the national labor market, we find that housing booms reduced non-employment growth by roughly 30 percent during 2000-2007 and that roughly 40 percent of the aggregate increase in non-employment during 2000-2011 can be attributed to manufacturing decline. Collectively, our results suggest that much of the non-employment growth during the 2000s can be attributed to manufacturing decline and these effects would have appeared in aggregate statistics earlier had it not been for the large, temporary increases in housing demand.

Museums play a role in American intellectual life as places for members of the public to gather, learn, and engage in discourse about human experience and knowledge (Conn, 1998). As cultural and historical research is informed by increasingly complex information, museums can support visitor discourse around such complex data. To this end, we will construct a prototype museum exhibit, CoCensus, at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, using an innovative combination of an ambient data map display and RFID technology to allow visitors to interact with dynamic visualizations of census data on a local map. This innovative design will enable multiple visitors to cooperatively investigate and discuss complex data and the personal dimensions of American identity. This work highlights important issues for designing public educational spaces to support collaborative data visualization, and take steps towards making large digital resources accessible within the social learning milieu of museums.

The share of metropolitan residents living in central cities declined dramatically from 1950 to 2000. We argue that cities would have lost even further ground if not for demographic trends such as renewed immigration, delayed childbearing, and a decline in the share of households headed by veterans. We provide causal estimates of the effect of children on residential location using the birth of twins. The effect of veteran status is identified from a discontinuity in the probability of military service during and after the mass mobilization for World War II. Our results suggest that these changes in demographic composition were strong enough to bolster city population but not to fully counteract socioeconomic factors favoring suburban growth.

The effect of taxes and benefits on the poor is usually measured using standard poverty and inequality indicators, stochastic dominance tests, and measures of progressivity and horizontal inequity. However, these measures can fail to capture an important aspect: that some of the poor are made poorer (or some of the non-poor made poor) by the tax-benefit system. We call this impoverishment and formally establish the relationships between impoverishment, stochastic dominance tests, horizontal inequity, and progressivity measures. The directional mobility literature provides a useful framework to measure impoverishment. We propose using a transition matrix and income loss matrix, and establish a mobility dominance criterion to compare alternate tax-benefit systems. We illustrate with data from Brazil.

Much of the inequality literature has done a great deal of work to study national inequality. However, most people live in cities and their experience of inequality is shaped by their local and metropolitan environment. This fact implies that next to inequality in countries, local inequality is also important. In this context, this paper investigates the relationship that exists between the urban spatial structure (defined by means of CBD and sub-centres) and the causes and the consequences of urban inequality in cities. To do so, this research takes into account the Barcelona Metropolitan Region as study case. Hence, the aim of this work is to determine whether CBD (central business district) and in particularly sub-centres, exert an influence on urban inequality in order to define future polices that enhance social equity. What determines the degree of inequality across the municipalities of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region and, what are the factors behind the inequality growth across these municipalities?. The former question is addressed through using spatial econometric techniques that estimate if per capita income in 2008 is dependent on the past agglomeration economies that have emerged from CBD and sub-centres in 2001 correspondingly. Consequently, the latter point is also studied, through examining whether urbanization and localization economies that have emerged from CBD and sub-centres in the past, matters for the per capita income growth between 2001 and 2008. The results suggest that agglomeration economies that arise from CBD and sub-centres can explain the degree of income inequality and its growth as well. In addition, once is controlled for other conditions, the econometric models reveal that initial income inequality, population density, presence of human capital, land use balance, urban amenities and coast location are positively associated with per capita income as well as they predict its growth until 2008. Inversely, high level of elderly population is negatively significant correlated with per capita income and its growth. Therefore, planning a metropolitan area by taking into account sub- centres entail a remarkably improvement of its social performance.

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that specialized in routine tasks differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low-skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.

We present evidence on the 19th-century trend in the height of male US passport applicants. These men represent a much wealthier segment of contemporary society than found in most stature samples previously analyzed. The height trend among the wealthy is much more robust in comparison to the average population that experienced a decline in stature. The resulting increase in the height gapby roughly 1 in. between cohorts born around 1820 and 1860is in congruence with evidence on rising wealth inequality and the notion of dietary change in antebellum America.

Goldin and Katz (2008) document the key role that the educational attainment of native-born workers in the U.S. has played in determining changing returns to skill and income distribution in the twentieth century, emphasizing the need to understand the forces driving the supply of educated workers. This paper examines stagnation in high school graduation rates from about 1970 to 2000, alongside dramatic changes in elementary and secondary educational institutions and income inequality over those years. I review the policy history of major changes in educational institutions, including but not limited to the massive increase in school spending, and related literature. I then present descriptive analysis of the relationships between income inequality and both graduation and school spending from 1963 to 2007. Results suggest that inequality at the top of the income distribution, which was negatively correlated with the establishment of public secondary schooling earlier in the twentieth century, was positively correlated not only with education spending levels but also with aggregate high school graduation rates at the state level in this later period.

Our focus will be on the role of migration to the United States from a set of important European sending countries as a device for improving the human capital of the children and grandchildren of migrants as measured by their education. In this paper, we derive a new and conceptual more appropriate measure of the generational gains in schooling attributable to migration by taking into account the correct counter-factual – the generational education gains that would have taken place if these migrants had remained in their sending countries. We find that the two European countries where the descendants gained the most in terms of human capital are Italy and Poland.

Child labor is now discussed in government agendas around the world. Since the first discussions and debates on the subject began, great advance has been achieved with the ratification of Convention 182, related to the worst forms of child labor. About 87% of the country members have ratified the Convention 182, including Brazil. In 2010, a commitment was firmed in order to prioritize the elimination of the worst forms of child labor by 2016. The overall aim of this research is to identify the determinants of the reduction of child labor in Brazil, specifically between 2000 and 2010, focusing on the work activities included in the category " worst forms of child labor ". Efforts were made to identify the current characteristics of child labor in relation to: the child's own characteristics, i.e., gender, race and age; regional characteristics where the working children live, covering the five major regions of Brazil, and local characteristics such as rural and urban areas and metropolitan and non- metropolitan areas. Among the econometric models available in the literature, the probit model was chosen. The dependent variable was defined as harzadous work. This variable assumes value 1 if the child works in some dangerous activity and 0 if a child works in some other activity. Furthermore, an extensive descriptive analysis of child labor throughout the 2000s was carried out, including an analysis of the worst forms of child labor. The data used in this work was extracted from the Brazilian Population Census for the years 2000 and 2010. Children were divided in two different age groups, one for those aged 10 to 15 and the other for those aged 16-17. The last decade experienced changes in the child labor market. During this period, child labor decreased substantially in all regions, but more intensively so in some regions. The North and Northeast regions showed the largest relative reductions in cases of child labor. The South and Midwest regions registered proportionately more cases of child labor. An important fact occurred during the decade was that child labor became proportionally greater in urban in comparison with rural areas, and within this movement, child labor cases tended to focus more on metropolitan areas. In general, the worst forms of child labor declined over the decade as well. The face of the child or young person who exercises some of the worst forms of child labor is black , female and closer to 16 or 17 years old.