This paper studies the slow job market recovery in the U.S. after each post-1990 recession from a sectoral perspective. I establish the following six stylized facts using BLS establishment survey and IPUMS-CPS March data. (1) The U.S. job market has taken significantly longer to recover after each recession since 1990. (2) Goods sector employment has been shrinking while service sector employment has been expanding. (3) The relative employment growth in the service sector changed from countercyclical to acyclical after 1990, but it remained procyclical in the goods sector. (4) The recovery of goods sector employment was slow after each post-1990 recession. (5) The educational attainment of service sector workers has surpassed that of goods sector workers since 1990. (6) The skill premium of workers with college-plus education has increased faster in the service sector when compared to the goods sector. To the best of my knowledge, this paper is the first to document facts (3)-(6). These six facts suggest that the skill-biased technical change in the service sector has prevented the unskilled workers who are laid off in the goods sector from relocating to the service sector. Thus, it takes longer for an unemployed worker in the goods sector to find a new job, resulting in a sluggish job market recovery at the aggregate level.

This study documents the changes in the distribution of the white-black homeownership gap over the housing bust period of 2005 through 2011. Our analysis shows that the housing bust did not a ffect the homeownership gap uniformly. In fact, we fi nd that the gap decreased for households that were the least likely to own and remained unchanged for households that were most likely to own, and that medium likely to own black households were especially vulnerable to the crisis. Contrary to the popular press's focus on the role of predatory lending among minority households, we fi nd that the contribution of racial di fferences to the residual gap (which potentially captures any discriminatory practices) was modest. Overall, the changes in the total racial gap over the sample period are substantively explained by changes in wage income, interest dividend and rental income, marital status, and length of residence, with the extent of their respective influences varying over the homeownership distribution. Our empirical approach reveals distributional information on the determinants of the changes in the homeownership gap at the household level. Such insights have valuable policy implications that would otherwise be concealed in analyses that look only at the conditional mean.

"Alan Lomax famously posited: ""the chief function of song is to express the shared feelings and mold the joint activities of some human community. It is to be expected, therefore, that the content of the sung communication should be social rather than individual, normative rather than particular"" (Lomax 1968: 3). The songs to be explored in this dissertation come under the large umbrella of what I am calling ""White Commercial Gospel Music(s),"" a term which, by my definition, encompasses Bluegrass Gospel, Gospel-tinged Country Music, Southern Gospel Quartet Singing, a large portion of Contemporary Christian Music, and a portion of the ""Hillbilly"" music of the early and middle twentieth century. It is the vernacular and popular sacred music that in large part originates from, and in its early history was consumed in, what has been called by sociologists the ""Vernacular South,"" (Harvard Dialect Survey 2003, Cukor-Avila 2001) the region of the United States South from Kentucky and West Virginia, and West to Louisiana. As a group of genres, WCGMs are harmonically accessible, have repetitive natures that invite singing along, and for the most part adhere to Harlan Howard's famous description of what a country song should contain: ""three chords and the truth."" This dissertation presents findings from an extensive repertoire survey of WCGMs, fieldwork trips to the Vernacular South (particularly to the 2011 and 2012 National Quartet Conventions), and discourse analysis of the repertoire surveyed. It seeks to draw connections between archetypes contained within WCGM lyrics and music and identities within the highly politicized section of modem Christian Southern Evangelicalism called ""Christian Nationalism"" (Goldberg 2006). Through the theoretical lenses of Carl Jung (1902, 1912, 1934), Judith Butler (1990 1996), and Marvin Carlson (2003), the dissertation draws connections between the performative elements of this music and modem Christian Nationalist identity."

This study documents the changes in the distribution of the white-black homeownership gap over the housing busy period of 2005 through 2011. Our analysis shows that the housing bust did not affect the homeownership gap uniformly. In fact, we find that the gap decreased for households that were the least likely to own and remain unchanged for households that were most likely to own, and that medium likely to own black households that were especially vulnerable to the crisis. Contrary to the popular press's focus on the role of predatory lending among minority households, we find that the contribution of racial differences to the residual gap (which potentially captures any discriminatory practices) was fairly modest. Overall, the changes in the total racial gap over the sample period are substantively explained by changes in wage income, interest divided or rental income, length of residence, and marital status, although the extent of their respective influences varies over the homeownership distribution. Our empirical approach reveals distributional information on the determinants of the changes in the homeownership gap at the household level. Such insights have valuable policy implications that would otherwise be concealed in analyses that look only at the conditional mean.

Through procedural detailed explanation of a specific case study of urban colo- nial history in the area of the parish of El Sagrario, corresponding to the historical center of the Chilean capital, we explore the potential of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in performing of historiographical tabs about primary sources. These tools not only allow graph the final products. They are also able to add new value to the information generated during the research process, through the crosslinking of sources and analytical use of the changes suffered by distribution patterns, at the same time which enter new data associated with a given spatial reference.

Customized colorful maps depicting complex social data are much more prevalent today than in the past. Not only in formal published outlets, interactive map sites make it easy to create and publish custom maps in more casual outlets such as social media. This article defines GIS Lite, describes three licensed products currently licensed by institutions, and discusses issues that arise from their varied functionality and license restrictions.

Family unity has long been a foundation of U.S. immigration policy (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2011). The two major immigration categories under which lawful permanent residence to the United States is granted are immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and familysponsored preference. The Immigration and Nationality Act give prominence to family members when allocating visas for entry to the United States. Sixty-five percent of the 1,062,040 people that became legal permanent residents in fiscal year (FY) 2011 were immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or family-sponsored immigrants...

Partnering with the Minne-apolis Parks and Recreation Board, the authors implemented a pilot park-use promotion program in summer 2011 in three low-income, culturally diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis. The program was designed to encourage park use through active information sharing and incentive mechanisms. Along with the program, the authors conducted baseline and follow-up resident surveys in the neighborhoods to examine demographic differences in park-use patterns and effectiveness of the program. They found significantly lower levels of park use, especially in cold weather, among Blacks, foreign-born residents, low-income residents, and working parents in single-parent families. They also found positive evidence that the pilot park-use promotion program effectively changed residents' perceived information barriers of park use and their park-use behavior. The research upon which this article is based was supported by a grant from CURA's Faculty Interactive Research Program.

Hispanics account for more than half the population growth in the United States over the last decade. With this surge has come a dramatic spike in the number of Hispanic-owned businesses. Hispanic Entrepreneurs in the 2000s is a pioneering study of this nascent demographic. Drawing on rich quantitative data, authors Alberto Dávila and Marie T. Mora examine key economic issues facing Hispanic entrepreneurs, such as access to financial capital and the adoption and vitality of digital technology. They analyze the varying effects that these factors have on subsets of the Hispanic community, such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Salvadorans, while considering gender and immigrant status. This account highlights key policies to drive the success of Hispanic entrepreneurs, while drawing out strategies that entrepreneurs can use in order to cultivate their businesses. Far-reaching and nuanced, Hispanic Entrepreneurs in the 2000s is an important study of a population that is quickly becoming a vital component of American job creation.

What are the broader implications of increasing the regulation of abortion or contraception or decreasing funding for these services? What would happen if Roe v. Wade were repealed or Title X funding was cut? We review empirical evidence from the economics literature to shed light on these questions.

We analyze Medicare's influence on private payments for physicians' services. Using a large administrative change in surgical relative to medical reimbursements, we find that private prices follow Medicare's lead. A $1 change in Medicare's relative payments moves private payments by $1.20. Results are similar when Medicare alters overall reimbursement levels. Medicare thus strongly influences both relative valuations and aggregate expenditures. Medicare's price transmission is strongest when physician groups are numerous and competitive. Transaction and bargaining costs may lead the development of payment systems to suffer from a classic coordination problem. Improvements in Medicare's payment models may therefore be public goods.

This research takes an innovative approach to the investigation the foreign-born population in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area (WMA): it distinguishes (1) the immigrant (and nonimmigrant) flows to the area (by examining the annual snapshot data provided by Department of Homeland Security (DHS)) and (2) the immigrant stocks (by examining Census data provided by American Community Survey (ACS) and Census of Bureau). The immigration data from these two main sources complement each other. The analyses of both immigration flows and stocks provide a comprehensive description of the WMAs foreign-born population and labor pool.

Traditional spatial analysis and data mining methods fall short of extracting temporal information from data. This inability makes their use difficult to study changes and the associated mechanisms of many geographic phenomena of interest, for example, land-use. On the other hand, the growing availability of land-change data over multiple time intervals and longer time frames, often based on satelliteimagery, presents to land-change study a great opportunity, given that this information can be effectively utilized. This methodological gap highlights the need to better understand the analytical challenges brought by temporal complexities, and to investigate alternative analytical frameworks that could handle those challenges.This dissertation attempted to achieve three goals: 1) finding metrics to capture temporal trends, 2) dealing with temporally imprecise data due to constraints of frequency, duration, and starting time of data collection, and 3)handling variables with time-changing values. A simulated land-change dataset based on an agent-based model of residential development and an empirical dataset from two case study sites in San Diego and Tijuana were used for this investigation.Results from the simulation dataset indicated that the survival function and the hazard function are important metrics to reveal temporal trends. In general the resultsof land-change analysis are sensitive to time frequency, in particular when time-dependent variables are also present. Longer duration benefits land-change analysis since longer durations contains more information. However, time-dependentvariables with measures over a long period are more difficult for detection, which may pose a challenge. Starting time also affects the analytical results because the level of process uncertainty varies at different starting times. Findings from real world data mostly agree with those from computational data. Time dependent variables present a major challenge in land-change analysis, and survival analysis can better handle time-independent variables and thus better forecast urban growth.

This article focuses on methods for enhancing access to survey data produced by government agencies. In particular, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is developing methods that could be used in an interactive, integrated, real-time online analytic system (OAS) to facilitate analysis by the public of both restricted and public use survey data. Data from NCHS’ National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) are being used to investigate, develop, and evaluate such methods. We assume the existence of public use microdata files, as is the case for the NHIS, so disclosure avoidance methods for such an OAS must account for that critical constraint. Of special interest is the analysis of state-level data because health care is largely administered at the state level in the U.S., and state identifiers are not on the NHIS public use files. This article describes our investigations of various possible choices of methods for statistical disclosure control and the challenges of providing such protection in a real-time OAS that uses restricted data. Full details about the specific disclosure control methods used by a working OAS could never be publicly released for confidentiality reasons. NCHS is still evaluating whether to implement an OAS that uses NHIS restricted data, and this article provides a snapshot of a research and developmental project in progress.

We document the correlations between early childhood health(as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height and education, a small correlation between height and education, and positive but small returns for both height and education. The relationship between height and education was stronger in the twentieth century and stronger in the first part of the twentieth century than later on (when both investments in education and height stalled), but never as strong as in developing countries. The labor market and wealth returns to height and education also were higher in the twentieth compared to the nineteenth century. We relate our findings to the theory of human capital formation and speculate that the greater importance of physical labor in the nineteenth century economy, which raised the opportunity cost of schooling, may have depressed the height-education relationship relative to the twentieth century. Our findings are consistent with an increasing importance of cognitive abilities in early childhood.

Many economists contend that technology is the primary driver of the increase in wage inequality since the late 1970s, as technology-induced job skill requirements have outpaced the growing education levels of the workforce. The influential skill-biased technological change (SBTC) explanation claims that technology raises demand for educated workers, thus allowing them to command higher wageswhich in turn increases wage inequality. A more recent SBTC explanation focuses on computerizations role in increasing employment in both higher-wage and lower-wage occupations, resulting in job polarization. This paper contends that current SBTC modelssuch as the education-focused canonical model and the more recent tasks framework or job polarization approach mentioned abovedo not adequately account for key wage patterns (namely, rising wage inequality) over the last three decades.

Most studies of racial intermarriage aiming to test Merton’s status exchange theory use education to determine the odds of intermarriage, but none have actually used intermarriage to predict the difference in education among intermarried spouses. This study examines the relationship between husband-wife education differences and intermarriage among U.S. blacks as a test of Merton’s status exchange theory. According to evidence from 2008-2010 IPUMS-ACS data, black husbands tend to engage in “status exchange” more than black wives when marrying across racial lines. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze the relationship with husband-wife education difference and intermarriage questioning if Merton’s status exchange theory is still relevant in the 21st century. Findings indicate the theory still may be useful because husband-wife education differences for black husbands are impacted by whether they are intermarried or not. For black wives, the picture is not as clear.