U.S. fertility rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this boom-bust pattern, linking it to the huge improvements in maternal health that started in the mid 1930s. Our hypothesis is that the improvements in maternal health contributed to the mid-twentieth century baby boom and generated a rise in womens human capital, ultimately leading to a decline in desired fertility for subsequent cohorts. To examine this link empirically, we exploit the large cross-state variation in the magnitude of the decline in pregnancy-related mortality and the differential exposure by cohort. We find that the decline in maternal mortality is associated with a rise in fertility for women born between 1921 and 1940, with a rise in college and high school graduation rates for women born in 1933-1950 relative to previous cohorts, and with a decline in fertility for women born in 1941-1950 relative to those born in 1921-1940. The analysis provides new insights on the determinants of fertility in the U.S. and other countries that experienced similar improvements in maternal health.

The 1940 US Census indicates that immigrants from Canada and Northern Europe were more frequently employed in more prestigious occupations than their counterparts from Asia, South America and Southern and Eastern Europe. While many Canadians and Northern Europeans found employment in white-collar jobs, most other immigrants were employed in blue-collar jobs. Using data from US Census, we study immigrants allocation to occupations across time and space and the resulting ranking of immigrant groups based on Duncan Socioeconomic Index (SEI). We find that, within metropolitan areas, there is little overlap between popular occupations across immigrants from different countries. Moreover, we find a substantial variability in popular occupations across metropolitan areas for most of the groups. Using rank ordered logit model, we find that initial occupational choices still matter for the observed ranking. We also show that, under some conditions, improving the initial SEI score of a group that is ranked last, results in changes in observed ranking.

Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African–American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white households to the suburban ring, which reduced the price of urban housing units conducive to owner-occupancy. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that 26 percent of the national increase in black homeownership over the period is explained by white suburbanization.

An estimated 556,000 Hispanics of Peruvian origin resided in the United States in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Peruvians in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Peruvian origin; this means either they themselves are Peruvian immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Peru. Peruvians are the 11th-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 1.1% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2011. Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 33.5 million, or 64.6%, of the Hispanic population in 2011. 1 This statistical profile compares the demographic, income and economic characteristics of the Peruvian population with the characteristics of all Hispanics and the U.S. population overall. It is based on tabulations from the 2011 American Community Survey . . .

Fine-grained access control for relational data defines user authorizations at the tuple level. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has been proposed for relational data where roles are allowed access to tuples based on the authorized view defined by a selection predicate. During the last few years, extensive research has been conducted in the area of role engineering. The existing approaches for role engineering are top-down (using domain experts), bottom-up (role-mining), or a hybrid of both. However, no research has been conducted for role engineering in relational data. In this paper, we address this problem. The challenge is to extract an RBAC policy with authorized selection predicates for users given an existing tuple-level fine-grained access control policy. We formulate the problem for relational data, propose a role mining algorithm and conduct experimental evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 400% improvement in performance for relational data as compared to existing role mining techniques.

Demographers and sociologists have studied why women remain childless for more than two decades; however, this specific choice of zero fertility has not interested economists. Permanent childlessness, in developed countries, can concern up to 30 % of the women in a cohort. Childlessness rates can be positively related to average fertility for some cohorts of women. This paper provides an explanation for this using an endogenous fertility model where individuals have different preferences for children. The main mechanism considered goes through the intergenerational evolution of preferences: I show that a reduction in the gender wage gap, or an increase in the fixed cost of becoming a parent, has a negative effect on both fertility and childlessness. The reduction of childlessness is due to a composition effect: small families shrink more than larger families, and this reduces childlessness.

Assimilation and split labor market dynamics are core foci in research on immigration, race/ethnicity, and inequality. Little work, however, systematically analyzes how assimilation and group-level power dynamics within labor markets intersect relative to employment trajectories and rewards. In this article, we do so by offering integrated analyses of racial/ethnic inequalities for an important case, New York City from 1910 to 1930. Our multi-method analyses draw from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and content-coded coverage from the New York Times for the period. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate a clear racial/ethnic hierarchy as well as group-level variations in opportunity relative to industrial concentration, segregation, and discrimination. Assimilative attributes and generational status mattered, yet certain inequalities were more firmly entrenched. Most pronounced, as seen in our qualitative analyses, were processes of social closure, discrimination, and related exclusionary constraints—constraints encountered and eventually alleviated, to some degree, for new white ethnics but not for African Americans. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical utility of considering the embedded nature of assimilation within broader contexts of racial/ethnic closure in labor market opportunities and also relative to historical and contemporary eras.

An estimated 645,000 Hispanics of Ecuadorian origin resided in the United States in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Ecuadorians in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Ecuadorian origin; this means either they themselves are Ecuadorian immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Ecuador. Ecuadorians are the 10th-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 1.2% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2011. Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 33.5 million, or 64.6%, of the Hispanic population in 2011. 1 This statistical profile compares the demographic, income and economic characteristics of the Ecuadorian population with the characteristics of all Hispanics and the U.S. population overall. It is based on tabulations from the 2011 American Community Survey . . .

It is widely assumed that the traditional male domination of postsecondary education, highly paid occupations, and elite professions is a virtually immutable fact of the U.S. economic landscape. But in reality, this landscape is undergoing a tectonic shift. Although a significant minority of males continues to reach the highest echelons of achievement in education and labor markets, the median male is moving in the opposite direction. Over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.

The most prominent feature of the female labor force across the past hundred years is its enormous growth. But many believe that the increase was discontinuous. Our purpose is to identify the short- and long-run impacts of WWII on the labor supply of women who were currently married in 1950 and 1960. We use mobilization rates for various groups of men (by age, race, fatherhood) to see whether there was a wartime impact. We find that an aggregate mobilization rate produces the largest and most robust impacts on both weeks worked and the labor force participation of married white (non-farm) women. The impact, moreover, was experienced primarily by women in the top half of the education distribution. Women who were married but without children during WWII were the group most impacted by the mobilization rate in 1950, although by 1960 WWII still influenced the labor supply decisions of them as well as those with children during WWII. We end the paper with a resolution between the watershed and revisionist views of the role of WWII on female labor supply.

Using individual-level data from the 1985-2011 American Housing Survey panel, this paper confirms that housing capital gains encourage transitions into self-employment. Additional findings suggest that this occurs at least in part because homeownership provides an accessible source of potential financing that serves as a form of insurance for aspiring homeownerentrepreneurs. The link between homeownership and self-employment is also stronger for older homeowners who are wealthier and typically have more latitude to take on discretionary mortgage debt to finance an investment. Overall, our results provide support for arguments in previous studies that personal wealth and access to credit are important drivers of selfemployment. Our findings also provide a new justification for longstanding government support for homeownership: homeownership encourages self-employment.

Occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grew tremendously in regional U.S. labor markets from 1980 to 2000. Using U.S. Census data, we examine the extent to which this growth is attributed to network effects by studying the relationship between the occupational choice of recently arrived immigrants with those of established immigrants from the same country, We find strong evidence of network effects. First, new arrivals are choosing the same occupations as their compatriots, a decision that is operating at the regional level. Second, individuals who choose the most common occupation of their compatriots enjoy a large and positive earnings effect.

While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India's landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined who the ban applied to, we show that child wages decrease and child labor increases after the ban. These results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. We also examine the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, we find that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.

Existing research on occupational segregation measures the degree of under- and overrepresentation of a group in an occupation given that group’s expected level of representation; the occupational crowding hypothesis posits that the expected level of representation is based on the share of the group with the educational attainment level possessed by the majority of the occupation’s workers (Bergmann 1971). Black men are overrepresented in low-wage occupations, and underrepresented in high-wage occupations, even after controlling for education (Bergmann 1971; Gibson, Darity, and Myers 1998; Hamilton, Austin and Darity 2011). The occupational crowding hypothesis indicates that the crowding of black workers into low-wage occupations is due to: (1) employers’ desire not to associate with blacks; (2) employers’ perception that black workers are less productive; (3) employers’ fear of reprisal from white customers or employees. 1 Since occupational crowding research typically ignores the effect of business cycles on occupational sorting, this research examines whether the Great Recession exacerbated the occupational crowding of black men in the U.S. It also analyzes whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) mitigated any reduction in black male representation in non-construction occupations impacted by ARRA contract funding; the most frequently cited non-construction jobs that were created/retained because of ARRA contract spending were in the engineering and architecture occupations.2 My results show that the Great Recession adversely impacted the representation of black men not just in high-wage occupations, but mid-wage occupations as well. However, black men were not further crowded into low-wage occupations, which suggests that they were pushed out of the labor market. In addition, ARRA contract spending did not completely mitigate the recession’s negative impact on black male representation in engineering and architecture. My results are not inconsistent with Wicks-Lim’s (2011) findings regarding ARRA’s effect on occupational sorting. Since crowding occurs even after controlling for education, policy remedies should not center around increasing educational attainment, with the exception of the increased risk for incarceration associated with the lack of a high school diploma (Western 2002), and the possible role of black male incarceration rates in statistical discrimination. Policy prescriptions should instead focus on reducing or eliminating actions on the part of employers which lead to discriminatory labor market outcomes.

Immigration is reshaping the US population. The US Census Bureau estimates that immigrants accounted for 32 percent of population growth between 2000 and 2010. In 2011, the most recent available year of the American Community Survey (ACS), 24 percent of children under the age of 18 had at least one immigrant parent. What do these changes mean for the health and well-being of children in the United States? Past research consistently finds differences in health and health risks between the children of immigrants and the children of natives. However, it is difficult to accurately characterize the health of children of immigrants across their extremely diverse background and circumstances. While children in some national-origin groups appear to be adjusting well to the United State and may even enjoy better health outcomes than children of natives, children in other origin groups face poorer socioeconomic circumstances, have more limited access to public benefits and services, and therefor face greater challenges in the course of their health and development.

The most prominent feature of the female labor force across the past hundred years is its enormous growth. But many believe that the increase was discontinuous. Our purpose is to identify the short- and long-run impacts of WWII on the labor supply of women who were currently married in 1950 and 1960. Using WWII mobilization rates by state, we find a wartime impact on weeks worked and the labor force participation of married white (non-farm) women in both 1950 and 1960. The impact, moreover, was experienced almost entirely by women in the top half of the education distribution.

Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages,” where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous researchers typically have used some combination of rental payments and homeowner housing values, but housing values are forward-looking and may not reflect current user costs. This paper examines differences in quality of life estimates for US metropolitan areas using, alternatively, rents and housing values. We find that the two measures of quality of life are highly correlated. Value-based estimates, however, are considerably more dispersed than rent-based estimates, likely because of the recent housing bubble and because housing values often provide an imperfect measure of the present user cost of housing.

We develop a new measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data. We exploit complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the racial similarity of next door neighbors. Our measure overcomes several of the shortcomings of traditional segregation indices and allows for a much richer view of the variation in segregation patterns across time and space. With our new measure, we can distinguish between the effects of increasing the racial homogeneity of a location and of increasing the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition. We provide estimates of how our new measure relates to traditional segregation measures and historical factors. We also show how the segregation measure is related to the health outcomes of African Americans through late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We conclude with a discussion of how this measure can be used in a variety of ways to improve and extend the analysis of segregation and its effects.

In this article, we create, validate, and analyze new dynamic measures of state partisanship, state policy mood, and state political ideology. The measures of partisanship and policy mood begin in ...