We examine explanations for the secular decline in interstate migration since the 1980s. After showing that demographic and socioeconomic factors can account for little of this decrease, we present evidence suggesting that it is related to a downward trend in labor market transitionsi.e. a decline in the fraction of workers moving from job to job, changing industry, and changing occupation that occurred over the same period. We explore a number of reasons why these flows have diminished over time, including changes in the distribution of job opportunities across space, polarization in the labor market, concerns of dualcareer households, and a strengthening of internal labor markets. We find little empirical support for all but the last of these hypotheses. Specifically, using data from three cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys spanning the 1970s to the 2000s, we find that wage gains associated with employer transitions have fallen, possibly signaling a growing role for internal labor markets in determining wages.

The State Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), established in 1997, is an important source of health care access for children living in near poor families. As with other means tested government programs, some worry that program eligibility rules distort parental labor supply decisions. Using March CPS data, I evaluate the programs effect on the labor supply of single mothers using an instrumental variables estimation strategy that relates child insurance coverage with program eligibility rules. Results suggest that SCHIP led to an increase in public coverage and private insurance crowd-out, with no effects on maternal work behavior.

In Small-Town America, we meet factory workers, shop owners, retirees, teachers, clergy, and mayors--residents who show neighborliness in small ways, but who also worry about everything from school closings and their children's futures to the ups and downs of the local economy. Drawing on more than seven hundred in-depth interviews in hundreds of towns across America and three decades of census data, Robert Wuthnow shows the fragility of community in small towns. He covers a host of topics, including the symbols and rituals of small-town life, the roles of formal and informal leaders, the social role of religious congregations, the perception of moral and economic decline, and the myriad ways residents in small towns make sense of their own lives. Wuthnow also tackles difficult issues such as class and race, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse.

This chapter provides an overview of the intergenerational progress of several major immigrant groups in the United States. Drawing on the most recent issues of the CPS, we provide estimates of poverty rates, educational attainment, and occupational attainment among the native born children of immigrants and compare these outcomes to similar estimates of the foreign born with the 1980 Census, allowing for a comparison across generations. We find improvement from the first to second generation for nearly every origin group. To more directly explore the transmission of socioeconomic status among immigrants, we directly link the parental and child outcomes of immigrants in Los Angeles, estimating the relationship between parents’ and children’s educational and occupational outcomes. We find considerable variation in the relationship between parent and child outcomes by origin group, although all immigrants show higher rates of intergenerational mobility than the children of the native born. Traditional assimilation models, as well as the alternative working class and selectivity hypotheses we pose here, do not fully explain these inter-ethnic differences.

Studies of immigrant adaptation in the United States emphasize the importance of duration of residence, language use, location of schooling and other factors related to the migration process in determining outcomes for immigrants. Research also points to the variability of socioeconomic mobility among immigrants and their descendants across receiving contexts encountered in the United States. This paper extends this model to young children and examines how the linguistic environment of the family and the community interact to produce differential developmental outcomes. The analyses rely on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) and 2000 US Census. Children’s cognitive scores vary considerably by mothers’ nativity and household linguistic isolation; a result that is largely influenced by the greater likelihood of living in poverty for children in linguistically isolated homes. The level of linguistic isolation in the community is also associated with cognitive scores but the greatest variation in scores across communities occurs among children of US born mothers.

Earlier studies found that parental characteristics as well as early-life conditions and mid-life environment play a significant role in survival to advanced ages. However, little is known about simultaneous effects of all these three factors on longevity. This ongoing study attempts to fill this gap by comparing American centenarians born in 1890-1891 with their short-lived peers born in 1890 and died at age 65 years. The records were taken from computerized family histories, which were then linked to 1900 and 1930 U.S. censuses. The study found that parental longevity and some mid-life characteristics proved to be significant predictors of longevity while the role of childhood conditions was less important. More centenarians were born in the second half of the year compared to controls suggesting early origins of longevity. The results of this study suggest that familial background, early-life conditions and mid-life characteristics play an important role in longevity.

The association between labor supply and laws related to marriage and divorce has previously been analyzed both theoretically and empirically. Most of these studies have focused on effects of changes in divorce laws. This paper investigates whether availability of common law marriage (CLM henceforth) in the U.S helps explain variation in the labor force participation and hours of work of men and women over time and across states. To the extent that CLM facilitated specialization and trade in households following traditional gender roles the abolition of CLM could help explain some of the gender convergence in labor supply and time in household production that has been observed in recent decades. In addition we also investigate the association between CLM and hours of household production.

Despite the abundance of sociological research on the gender wage gap, questions remain. In particular, the role of cohorts is under investigated. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we use age-period-cohort analysis to uniquely estimate age, period, and cohort effects on the gender wage gap. The narrowing of the gender wage gap that occurred between 1975 and 2009 is largely due to cohort effects. Since the mid-1990s, the gender wage gap has continued to close absent of period effects. While gains in female wages contributed to declines in the gender wage gap for cohorts born before 1950, for later cohorts the narrowing of the gender wage gap is primarily a result of declines in male wages.

Although African Americans had been leaving the South since the days of slavery, it was not until the 20th century that they migrated on a massive scale to begin new lives in the industrial cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast. As millions of African Americans left the region of their birth between 1900 and 1970, they contributed to the dramatic redistribution of the nation's black population and eventually shifted the center of African American social, economic, political, and cultural life from the rural South to the urban North and West. From Harlem to Watts, black migrants built new communities that anchored the growth of black business and capital, created new trends in black art, literature, and culture, and mobilized new forms of politics that proved critical to the grassroots assault on Jim Crow later in the 20th century.

Objectives of the 1996 overhaul of the US welfare system included reducing dependency, raising employment and de-incentivizing out-of-wedlock fertility. Using public use state-level panel data from 1990 to 2005, I analyse how state implementation of welfare reform simultaneously affects the caseload, employment and out-of-wedlock births (henceforth, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) objectives). Because endogeneity and simultaneity could not be rejected, I use Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) method. Results indicated that most of the steep decline in the caseload is attributed to welfare reform, while the economy's overall effect paled in comparison. However, lagged and contemporaneous unemployment individually ranked second and third behind the Hispanic share of state population. The conservative tilt over the period studied ranked forth, followed in declining order by full family sanctions, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) payments, time limits (lagged by length), access to abortion clinics...

Utilizing a comparative and historical perspective, we interrogate claims of progress focusing on low-wage Black and White women workers from 1970 to 2000. We begin by offering a historical perspective on occupational segregation by race and gender, which informs the evaluation of low-wage Black womens occupational progress. We then situate Black womens occupational attainment since 1970 within the larger context of labor market restructuring, which fundamentally changed the occupational landscape. We find no evidence that industrial and occupational upgrading among low-wage Black women, particularly in the South, from 1970 to 2000 narrowed the racial wage gap among low-wage women. The wage gap between low-wage Black and White women declined because of larger changes in the American economy, which reduced the quality of those jobs, eroding the wage advantage that White women in the white-collar service sector once enjoyed.

U.S. healthcare costs consistently outpace inflation, causing growing problems of affordability. This trend cannot be sustained indefinitely. The purpose of this study is to use supply-chain tools for macro-level examination of the U.S. healthcare as a business system and identify options and best use practices. We compare the important and successful U.S. food industry to the essential but problematic U.S. healthcare industry. Supply chain strategies leading to food business operations success are examined and healthcare applications suggested. We emphasize "total cost of ownership" which includes all costs incurred by all stakeholders of U.S. healthcare, including maintenance and cleanup, not just the initial purchase price...

Existing frameworks in social movement research fall shortwhen examining movements that require a simultaneous exercise of multiple identities. In this study, the author investigates Asian American social movement organizations in metropolitan San Francisco and the relationship between single-ethnic and panethnic identities through in-depth interviews with social movement leaders in order to better understand how multiple identities are negotiated. Leaders of panethnic organizations actively and consciously work toward a panethnic movement identity that necessitates the maintenance of single-ethnic identification. Panethnicity and single-ethnicity are conceptualized as interlocking identity structures. The author argues that this new conceptualization of panethnic identity is made necessary as leaders acknowledge and attempt to address the ethnic and class hierarchies that exist within a diverse Asian American population. The findings of interlocking identities point toward a need to broaden current understandings of identity work whereby multiple movement identities are simultaneous and mutually affecting.

Research generally focuses on how immigration affects native workers, while the impact of immigration on domestic firms is often overlooked. This paper addresses this important omission by examining whether firms respond to immigration by expanding their production activities within a city in order to utilize the abundant supply of low-skilled workers. Using data on immigration and the universe of establishments in U.S. cities, the results indicate that firms respond to immigration at the extensive margin by increasing the number of establishments. Not surprisingly, immigration has a more positive impact on the number of establishments that are small in size and in relatively mobile, low-skill intensive industries. Additional evidence indicates that immigration has little impact on employment within existing establishments, the intensive margin, or on the number of establishments in service industries which may expand simply due to immigrant consumption.

Asian (1) students in the United States are often touted as the "model minority" (Lee, 1996; Museus & Kiang, 2009; Takaki, 2008). Pitted against other minority groups and praised as those who should be emulated for academic success, Asian students may as a result find themselves isolated from other groups, unable to make sense of where they belong in the U.S social strata that is defined through race and privilege (Feagin, 2010). Asians are often described through simplified factors that depict high academic expectations and achievement and over-representation in colleges (Suzuki, 2002; Zhao & Qiu, 2009), particularly in the areas of math and science (Chen & Stevenson, 1995; National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, 2008). Their perceived success may result in being associated with privilege while at the same time they are also experiencing racial prejudice and discrimination. This comes as a result of an oversimplification of Asian experiences that, in fact, are anything but homogeneous or simple. Rather, tremendous variability exists within this group that spans different countries, languages, cultures, and economic and political systems (Lee, 1996; Yu, 2006). Although the model minority myth remains active today as the way the mass public perceives and interacts with Asians, research has shown clearly that achievement and over-representation is not independent of these many variables (Museus, in press). Unfortunately, society continues to uphold the model minority myth of Asian students, regardless of their particular ethnicity, socioeconomic, cultural, and developmental differences. These students continue to be judged and treated accordingly, particularly in educational contexts (Brydolf, 2009). Teachers often hold expectations that may be beyond what Asian students can meet and their non-Asian peers may also pre-judge them based on a standard that in fact does not exist (Chang & Demyan, 2007; George & Aronson, 2001; Koo, 2010). Whereas research has shown the downfalls of teachers and other school personnel holding this standard of achievement (Suzuki, 2002), less is known regarding how peers interact with Asians given the various stereotypes they endure. While Asians living and attending schools in predominantly Asian communities may be buffered from the effects of peer prejudice and/or marginalization, Asians who attend schools in which they are a significant minority are likely to experience a different social climate. This social climate may be particularly problematic when they attend schools in which the predominant student population is another minority group, especially so when that other group is seen as almost a direct opposite--generally described as "underperforming" and lacking in high academic expectations (Foxen, 2010). While research shows that Latina/os in U.S. schools achieve academic success at significantly low rates, these achievement patterns often have little to do with the students' level of intellect, motivation, or expectations (Orellana, 2001). Rather, other socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors impact Latina/os in ways that perpetuate a substandard educational experience (Monzo & Rueda, 2009).

The 2010 health reform seeks to expand health coverage to 30 million people and many will enroll in managed care plans. We exploit Medicaid manage care mandates in California to examine the effect of managed care on prenatal care access and birth and pregnancy outcomes. There is no improvement for the extremely disadvantaged, but access and birth outcomes improves for the moderately disadvantages. The results suggest that a managed care option may be key for improving access to prenatal care and birth outcomes as health care is expanded to the near poor under the health care reform.

This dissertation addresses health care providers behavioral responses to incentives built into payment systems. In particular, my dissertation focuses on the home health care industry, and addresses how home health agencies have strategically navigated the Medicare reimbursement system. Examining Medicare home health care allows a unique opportunity to explore health care providers response to payment systems. That is because home health care has undergone drastic changes in its payment system as the government has struggled to develop a payment system that prevents home health care agencies from providing care based on profit motives only.

Using 1990, 2000 censuses and a 2010 survey, I examine the economic performance of ethnically Chinese immigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (CHT) in the U.S. labor market. Since 1990, relative wages of CHT migrants have been escalating in contrast to other immigrants. I show these widening gaps are largely explained by individuals endowments, mostly education. Rising U.S.-earned degrees by CHT migrants can account for this relatively successful economic assimilation. Cohort analysis shows that the economic performance of CHT migrants admitted to the U.S. has been improving, even allowing for the effect of aging.

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity - in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband - impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force participation, the wife's income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife's potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband's, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.