The sizable gender gap in college enrolment, especially among African Americans, constitutes a puzzling empirical regularity that may have serious consequences on marriage markets, male labor force participation and the diversity of college campuses. For instance, only 35.7 percent of all African American undergraduate students were men in 2004. Reduced form results show that, while family background covariates cannot account for the observed gap, proxy measures for non-cognitive skills are crucial to explain it. Moreover, a sequential model of educational attainment indicates that males have actually higher preferences for education than females after controlling for latent factors (i.e. cognitive and non-cognitive skills). The model also shows that cognitive skills strongly affect the decision to move from one school level to the next, especially after finishing high school, but cannot account for disparities between genders. On the contrary, the substantial differences in the distribution of non-cognitive skills between males and females make these abilities critical to explain the gender gap in educational attainment across and within races.

A severe global recession has brought heightened attention to poverty in the United States as the poverty rate rose over time, leveling off at 15.0% in 2011. Recent U.S. Census Bureau data demonstrates the persistence of higher poverty rates for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, children, single mothers, people with disabilities, and other groups, for example. An earlier Williams Institute study and other research showed that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people were also more vulnerable to being poor, and this study updates and extends that earlier report.

Homeownership plays an important role in the socioeconomic well-being of Americans. Despite recent major losses in wealth due to the subprime market crash, home equity remains the largest source of wealth for the average American family. A marker of class status, owning one's home provides access to neighborhoods with the best schools, quality public services, and lowest crime. This article demonstrates that minorities have not had the same access to homeownership that Whites have, and this contributes to continuing socioeconomic disparities between Whites and minorities. This article explores the homeownership experience of Blacks including African-Americans, Caribbeans, and Africans Hispanics, and Asians in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites. Minorities rely heavily on homeownership and home equity as the key component of their wealth and remain less likely than Whites to hold alternative forms of investment such as stocks. The role that homeownership plays in perpetuating intergenerational wealth disparities between Whites and minorities is discussed as are challenges to minority homeownership such as the pervasiveness of risky mortgage products. Exploring the racial gap in homeownership is fundamental to understanding racial inequalities and formulating strategies and policies to help close such disparities. This article concludes with suggestions for future research.

While it is evident that the recession has affected a diversity of people in different ways of life, there is a unique connection between industries and ethnic groups. “Many of the demographic groups that exhibit larger cyclical variation such as those with lower education, minorities, and males, are more likely to be employed in the industries with greater exposure to cycles (Hoynes et. al, 2012). Construction and manufacturing have experienced the largest declines in employment rate of the post-WWII era, with a 13.7 percent decline in construction employment and a 10.0 percent decline in manufacturing employment (BLS, February 2012). Despite government programs to level the playing field such as affirmative action laws and other aid that is available to those seeking employment, there is a continuous disparity among different ethnic groups. With regard to “The Great Recession,” there is a disparity among the unemployment rates of Hispanics and other ethnic groups. This paper intends to explain why there is a disparity. Specifically, it addresses reasons that the unemployment rates of Hispanics are more adversely affected by the Great Recession when compared to the unemployment rates of other minority groups. Also, did concentrations of Hispanics in adversely affected industries contribute to higher unemployment levels during the Great Recession?

Do universities deliver long-term regional development? Because universities produce low mobility tacit knowledge and high mobility embodied knowledge the answer is unclear. In this paper, we use the establishment of agricultural experiment stations to examine how university research affects long-term regional development. Our analysis of county-level agricultural census data from 1870 to 2000 reveals station establishment increased local land productivity over the medium term. Peak effects imply land a standard deviation closer to university research became 36% more productive. While average proximity effects disappear 30 to 50 years after station opening, they remain today where stations focused on basic research.

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007, and on the rise in services in particular. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an unusual industry as more than 90% of its output is an intermediate input to other firms, and it is where most of the service outsourcing activity is concentrated. These facts are essential to understanding the structure of the economy: professional and business services have experienced an almost fourfold increase in their forward linkage, the largest change in input-output linkages over the past 60 years. Using a simple gross output accounting framework, I calculate the contribution of the change in the composition of intermediates and their sourcing mode to the reallocation of employment across sectors. I find that the evolution of the input-output structure accounts for up to 33% of the increase in service employment, and professional and business services outsourcing alone contributes almost half of that amount.

This paper develops a new equilibrium model of two-sided search where agents have multiple attributes and general payoff functions. The model can be applied to several substantive issues. Here we use it to provide a novel understanding of the separate e ffects of equal opportunities for women in the labor market and improved contraception on female education, employment, and timing of first births after World War II. We fi nd that the diffusion of the pill might have played an important role in explaining the observed rise in female education and employment since the 1960s. But without equal opportunities, these changes would have not occurred.

Can variation in crime rates be traced to the threat of infectious disease? Pathogens pose an ongoing challenge to survival, leading humans to adapt defenses to manage this threat. In addition to the biological immune system, humans have psychological and behavioral responses designed to protect against disease. Under persistent disease threat, xenophobia increases and people constrict social interactions to known in-group members. Though these responses reduce disease transmission, they can generate favorable crime conditions in two ways. First, xenophobia reduces inhibitions against harming and exploiting out-group members. Second, segregation into in-group factions erodes peoples concern for the welfare of their community and weakens the collective ability to prevent crime. The present study examined the effects of infection incidence on crime rates across the United States. Infection rates predicted violent and property crime more strongly than other crime covariates. Infections also predicted homicides against strangers but not family or acquaintances, supporting the hypothesis that in-groupout-group discrimination was responsible for the infectionscrime link. Overall, the results add to evidence that disease threat shapes interpersonal behavior and structural characteristics of groups.

Between 1933 and 1973 the federal government funded the construction of over 1 million units of low-rent housing. Using county-level data, I find that communities with high densities of public housing had lower median family income, lower median property values, lower population density, and a higher percentage of families with low income in 1970. However, I find no negative effects of public housing in 1950 or 1960, implying that long-run negative effects only became apparent in the 1960s. The effects found in 1970 are partially due to a decline in human capital.

We proposed a new k-anonymity algorithm to publish datasets with privacy protection. We improved clustering techniquesto lower data distort and enhance diversity of sensitive attributes values. Our algorithm includes four phases. Tuples are distributed to several groups in phase one. Tuples in a group own same sensitive value. In phase two, groups smaller than the threshold merge and then they are partitioned into several clusters according to quasi-identifier attributes. Each cluster would become an equivalence class. In phase three, remainder tuples are distributed to clusters evenly to satisfy L-diversity. Finally, quasi-identifier attributes values in each cluster are generalized to satisfy k-anonymity. We used OCC dataset to compare our algorithm with classic method based on clustering. Empirical results showed that our algorithm could be used to publish datasets with high security and limited information loss.

Cette étude établit une base de données d’origine américaine comptant plus de 20000 individus sur la relation de la taille d’entreprise et le salaire réel. Trois différentes tailles ont été considérées afin de mettre en avant et mesurer cette relation qui se veut positive. Elle s’étale sur une période de 5 ans, soit de 2008 à 2012. Deux méthodes complémentaires ont été utilisées pour mesurer l’effet que comporte la taille de l’entreprise sur le salaire; la première consiste à régresser afin d’obtenir un effet global donc en incorporant toutes les variables dont l’impact peut être pris en compte. Le second, quant à elle, consiste plutôt à déterminer cet impact selon les caractéristiques des individus mais aussi selon celles des entreprises. En utilisant le modèle des moindres carrés ordinaires et d’après les résultats, on comprend que les salaires des employés opérant dans les grandes entreprises est toujours supérieur sauf dans le cas où l’industrie est considérée comme caractéristique. Peu importe la spécificité choisie, cette différence peut, à son minimum, prendre la valeur de 2,32 % et peut même progresser jusqu’à 7 %. D’autres particularités individuelles comme l’éducation, le statut marital voire même le lieu de naissance s’avèrent être des variables de choix qu’on ne saurait mettre de côté afin de mieux comprendre ce phénomène donc la compréhension peut définitivement jouer un rôle majeur sur le marché du travail.

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on presidential turnout. We also find that the share of people voting in one election but not in another on the same ballot increases as local labor market conditions improve. We argue that these results are most consistent with information-based models of voting, and use individual level panel data to show that increased employment lowers media usage and political knowledge.

Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.

Using 2001-2010 homeownership data for the United States we analyze changes in racial and ethnic disparities between whites and blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. We employ Integrated Public Use Microdata (IPUMS) combined with local credit scores and house price to income ratios. Controlling for demographic, income, wealth, employment, and housing characteristics, we find no significant differences between whites and Asians, Mexicans, or Cubans. Conversely, blacks and Puerto Ricans remain substantially disadvantaged. We conduct further analysis for the 2001-2003, 2004-2007, and 2008-2010 periods of the housing boom and collapse. Blacks and Puerto Ricans experienced decreased disparities during the peak years of the boom. Puerto Rican parity with whites continued to improve during the crash while gains among blacks eroded. The results suggest the homeownership differences between whites, Asians, Mexicans, and Cubans are apparently explained by socioeconomic status while racial disparities among blacks and Puerto Ricans evolved but continue to persist.

Americans are living healthier and longer lives, but the shifting age distribution is straining existing and projected social welfare protections for older adults (e.g., Social Security, Medicare). One solution is to delay retirement. Another is an alternative to total leisure retirementan encore stage of paid or unpaid engagement coming after career jobs but before infirmities associated with old age. We draw on gendered life course themes together with data from the American Time Use Survey (20032009) to examine the real time American men and women ages 50 to 75 apportion to paid work and unpaid volunteer work on an average day, as well as factors predicting their time allocations. We find that while full-time employment declines after the 50s, manyAmericans allot time to more limited engagementsworking part time, being self-employed, volunteering, helping outthrough and even beyond their 60s. Caring for a child or infirm adult reduces the odds of paid work but not volunteering. While time working for pay declines with age (though more slowly for men than women), time volunteering does not. Older men and women in poor health, without a college degree, with a disability or SSI income are the least likely to be publicly engaged. This social patterning illustrates that while the ideal of an encore of paid or unpaid voluntary, flexible, and meaningful engagement is an emerging reality for some, it appears less attainable for others. This suggests the importance of organizational and public policy innovations offering all Americans a range of encore opportunities.Keywords: time use; older workers; encore; gendered life course; third age; retirement.

By returning to the theoretical sources of the generational question, the importance of two central concepts, specificity and consistency of cohort effects, is emphasized and gives rise to a new APCD model and a hysteresis test designed to identify long-term cohort effects : a scarring effect, or cohortal scar. A Franco-American comparison of living standards is developed by using cohort data from 1985 to 2010 from the Luxembourg income study (Lis) and Statistics on income and living conditions Eurostat (Eu-StLc). In France, net generational inequalities (taking account of demographic and educational contexts, in particular) are of the same magnitude as the inequalities linked to immigrant status; the beneficiaries being cohorts born around the year 1950. This phenomenon is not declining in intensity with time. The dynamic within the USA is its antithesis, which can be explained by differences in French and American welfare regimes. France is thus marked by deep intergenerational inequalities.

The prevalence and characteristics associated with dual earning may differ for Mexican-American couples compared to white couples in the U.S., partly because of the majority immigrant share of Mexican Americans. Cohabiting and Mexican-interracial couples are a substantial share of Mexican-American couples, a share which is more likely to diverge from a husband sole-earning pattern. Using the 2008-2012 Current Population Survey, we examine whether the observed differences between Mexican groups and white couples, both married and cohabiting, are due to racial-ethnic differences or to nativity composition. Married Mexican-American couples are no less likely to be dual earning than white couples after controlling for nativity, whereas cohabiting Mexican-American couples are not significantly different from white couples in their prevalence of dual earning, regardless of nativity. Mexican couples are also less likely to be female sole earning than white couples, though the gap narrows after controlling for nativity. These differences are largely explained by an assimilation pattern by which couples with two U.S.-born spouses are the most likely to be dual earning. Though educational attainment and the presence of young children are important determinants for all couples, these factors are significantly different in their impact on earnings decisions between Mexican-American and white couples.

This article reports on a study that examined whether the presence of a consolidated governing board for higher education conditions the impact various political factors have on state support for higher education. The existence of a consolidated governing board is shown to significantly alter the politics of the state higher education appropriations process.