This map analyzes geographic variation in residential segregation by age in the contiguous United States at Census 2010. We evaluate segregation at the micro-scale between blocks within counties and then examine spatial patterns of segregation by county across the United States using local indicators of spatial autocorrelation. This approach emphasizes local levels of segregation analyzing the extent to which older adults and younger adults reside in the same immediate neighborhood, and it assesses more regional levels of segregation by evaluating spatial clustering. Findings show that the extent of age segregation varies significantly across the contiguous United States. Counties in the Great Plains, in other areas of the Rural West and the Upper Midwest, and in Florida tend to exhibit high segregation, while Appalachia and other areas of the Rural South are generally more integrated.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine information systems-enabled interorganizational collaborations called public safety networks--their proliferation, information systems architecture, and technology evolution. These networks face immense pressures from member organizations, external stakeholders, and environmental contingencies. This dissertation investigates the role of three effects on these networks--the effect of peers in network proliferation, the effect of environmental and organizational complexity on their information systems, and the effect of legacy systems on capability scale and scope. Better understanding the conditions associated with network proliferation will assist decision-makers in assessing appropriate partnering opportunities. Better understanding the nature of the information systems supporting these networks will assist designers to build capabilities that more closely align with network requirements. Better understanding the limitations introduced by aging information systems and the means of overcoming those limitations will assist network leadership in providing network members with information system capabilities that remains responsive to organizational changes in scale and scope. This dissertation includes findings from three separate studies of public safety networks. Study one involves regression analysis of various state-level factors and finds peer-effects help predict network proliferation. The findings extend public administration knowledge on peer-influenced institutional practices by providing evidence for the role of inter-state mobility in predicting public safety-related outcomes. Study two involves decision tree analysis of survey data on information technology architecture components and finds that employing a complexity lens provides a useful perspective for examining the types of architectures that currently existing in the public safety domain. The findings extend information infrastructure knowledge by illustrating the value of taking a complexity perspective and by specifying a taxonomy of information systems architecture configurations in the public safety domain. Study three involves a case study analysis of legacy system effects that tests the effectiveness of bootstrapping and adaptiveness design principles in overcoming these effects. Conceptual observations and empirical findings extend information infrastructure knowledge by specifying the legacy effect, by demonstrating how and why bootstrapping and adaptiveness overcome legacy effects, and by highlighting the significant role that positive network effects and flexible standards play in balancing the tensions faced by networked organizations. Keywords: information infrastructures, socio-technical, homophily, complexity, legacy systems, public safety networks, survey, case study.

This dissertation analyzes how immigrants’ individual and home country characteristics affect and determine their labor market participation, returns to education and wages in both their country of origin (before migration occurs) and in the United States. The dissertation also estimates the extent to which immigrant skills are transferable to the American labor market. The research is carried out using data from the New Immigrant Survey, released in 2003, supplemented with the Mexican Household Income and Expenditure National Survey and other data sources. The New Immigrant Survey has two specific sets of questions that other surveys do not have. First, it has a detailed set of questions about the socioeconomic experience of the migrants before they left their home country. Secondly, the survey asked participants about their immigrant visa categories, allowing a separation of immigrants into economic migrants (those who came through employment preferences or other categories directly linked to economic objectives) and non-economic migrants (refugees, migrants entering through family preferences, etc.., whose direct migration motive was political, family-related, and not directly economic in nature). The dissertation reveals that there exist significant differences between economic and non-economic migrants in the determinants of labor market participation, wages, migration selectivity and transferability of skills. Substantial differences are observed between men and women. Immigrants have low labor participation rates in their country of origin although they are highly educated compared to non-migrants at home. Those from English-speaking and high GDP countries are less likely to work but earn higher wages. Non-economic migrant men are more likely to be employed (than economic migrant men), but their wages do not differ. Among women, both economic and non-economic migrants are just as likely to be employed but non- economic migrant women earn less. Using Mexico as a case study to examine the selectivity of legal immigrants, it was found that documented migrants were less likely to have been employed before migration to the US, but their level of education and wages were significantly higher than those of non-migrants. The individual characteristics of these two groups affect their employment and wage determinants differently. Some of the literature has emphasized how immigrants may be positively selected because of greater motivation, willingness to undertake risks, etc. But, on this basis, most of the existing analysis of the determinants of immigrant wages in the U.S. suffers from omitted variable bias because there are no data for these unobserved characteristics or skills (motivation, persistence, etc.) and they are ignored in the statistical analysis. In an examination of immigrant wages in the U.S., this dissertation used wages earned abroad as a measure of the unobserved skills of the migrants and their level of transferability. An analysis of the determinants of immigrant wages was then carried out, examining rates of return to education, experience, differences in wages between economic and non- economic migrants, etc. The level of transferability of skills was found to be higher for economic migrants than for non-economic migrants.

The use of GIS technology for the humanities has opened up new avenues for visually exploring and asking questions of our nation’s historical record. The potential to harness new knowledge with tools designed to capture and preserve geographic links to the artifacts of our past is within our grasp. This research explores the common information needs of a community of interest to achieve their goal of reconstructing the spatial circumstance of America's Colonial era and the information barriers they encounter. It envisions a suite of digital tools to help confidently join together the solitary efforts of dissimilar investigators to facilitate sharing, debate and long term preservation of their painstaking research. The study described in this work examined the common information use behaviors of researchers whose goal is to reconstruct the missing geographic picture of British Colonial settlement in America. The scope of the analysis focuses on the work of two investigators who had constructed historic neighborhood maps of North Carolina's early backcountry settlements. Using a domain analytic approach it examines the resources and different tools employed by each investigator in comparison to the cataloged data provided by the North Carolina State Archives' online Manuscript and Archives Reference System (MARS). The results point to numerous barriers to information that could be overcome with the aid of standardized tools and a shared cyberinfrastructure. Envisioned is a suite of applications to enable a collaborative and authoritative reconstruction, over time, of the missing geographic picture of colonial America.

There were 1.8 million immigrant health care workers employed in the United States in 2010, accounting for 16 percent of all civilians working in health care occupations. This article examines the demographic and labor market characteristics of this population, including their countries of origin, occupations, gender, education, and English proficiency.

This paper contributes to the literature on the economic determinants of marital stability. Surprises that reduce expected marital surplus, such as shocks to permanent income, are among the possible causes of divorce (Becker et al. (1977); Weiss and Willis (1997)). Measures of predicted permanent income are constructed for NLSY79 respondents and their spouses for each year of the marriage, and the effects of cumulative deviations from predicted permanent income at the time of marriage on divorce are estimated. I find that unpredicted decreases in predicted permanent income of the husband increase the probability of divorce. The results are robust to a number of methods and sub-samples, however some interesting patterns emerge across ethnic groups and education levels. Unpredicted decreases in predicted permanent income for the wife have no direct effect on divorce, unless they occur from a switch into unemployment. Characteristics of couples who experience large income shocks are examined. The empirical findings are compared to predictions of several types of marriage models.

The existing literature generally finds a negative impact of the 9/11 tragedy on immigrants labor market performance, consistent with increased discriminationin the labor market and stricter immigration policies. In this paper, we examine the impact of this tragic event on a particular measure of immigrants social outcomesmarriage with a native or intermarriage. We find that the tragicevent actually increases Hispanic immigrants probability of being married to a native. We suggest that our results could be explained by that after 9/11, the deteriorated labor market conditions, along with tightened immigration policies, may have led to increased incentives of immigrants to marry natives. This effect is large relative to the potential discrimination effect, if any, that could reduce natives willingness to marry an immigrant. We also find that the magnitude of the effect is much smaller in the years immediately following 9/11 and becomes larger overtime; and that there exists a large, statistically significant gender difference in the effects of 9/11 on intermarriage outcomes. Finally, we conduct indirect tests of proposed explanations; and our results imply existence of economic gains from intermarriage, and that discrimination may indeed exist.

In this paper I look at the relationship between increased access to reliable fertility controls and men’s disappearance from teaching. As the pill has been found to have a substantial effect on women’s family responsibilities, career investments and labor market outcomes, men’s bargaining position in the marriage market is likely to have changed considerably. Teaching stands out among the career choices of male college freshmen in terms of average income and prestige. The effect of the shift in bargaining power on men’s career choices is hence likely to be prominent in the teaching sector. Between 1968 and 1980, the ratio of male college freshmen planning to become a teacher fell from 12.4% to 2.4% and the share of males among those who aspired to teach dropped from 30.6% to 19.7%. Using nationally representative data on the career plans of college freshmen I find that unrestricted access to the birth control pill bears a negative relation to the likelihood that men plan to teach, while changes in the strength of teacher unions and relative wages of teachers have limited effect on their career plans. Men’s aspirations shift away from teaching towards occupations that are associated with higher average income like accounting and computer programming. The results are supported by equivalent findings looking at actual career outcomes in the Census Data.

For white males born in the United States after 1950, there is a stagnation in the fraction of high school graduates that go on to complete a four-year college degree. At the same time, across successive cohorts, those with a four year-college degree achieve increasingly higher lifetime earnings than those with a high school degree. What caused this phenomenon? I formulate a life-cycle model of human capital accumulation a la Ben-Porath, where successive cohorts decide whether or not to acquire a college degree. Individuals can accumulate human capital both in college and on the job. Human capital accumulation in college requires time and goods as inputs, while accumulation on the job requires only time. Cohorts differ by the sequence of price per unit of human capital they face. Price growth influences an individual's college decision in two ways: as it declines, 1) the return to human capital investment decreases and 2) the opportunity cost of human capital accumulation in college increases relative to that on the job because of the lower relative price of time. I calibrate the structural parameters of my model to life-cycle earnings data for the NLSY79 cohorts and the price sequence to earnings data for the period 1940-2008. My model reproduces the observed pattern in college attainment for the 1920 to 1970 birth cohorts. I find that the stagnation in college attainment that occurs for those born after 1950 is due to the decrease in price growth per unit of human capital commencing in 1970. My model also generates 50% of the increase in earnings for college graduates relative to those for high school graduates. Part of this increase is reinforced by a stronger association between schooling and ability.

Purpose This article aims to provide an annotated bibliography of some of the geographic information system (GIS) resources, specifically data sets, available to libraries and researchers. Drawing on the collective authors' experience working with the GIS resources, this article aims to help librarians interested in developing and building their GIS collection.Design/methodology/approach A literature review was performed using library databases, as well as consulting various library subject guides on the topic. Idaho State University is home to the GIS Training and Research Center and the university offers Master's degrees in Geographic Information Science and Historical Resources Management; the authors consulted graduate GIS students on resources used in the program.Findings There is a large body of literature on GIS. This annotated guide, while not comprehensive, is a solid start to a GIS resources collection.Originality/value No other annotated bibliography currently exists for those interested in building a library collection of GIS data sets.

This paper uses Hurricane Katrina as a case study to assess inequalities in disaster-specific, permanent out-migration. Most research on post-disaster migration utilizes data fromdeveloping countries, lacking application to the United States, or data that are either non-representative or incapable of robustly isolating disaster-specific migration relationships. This paper uses the American Community Survey (ACS) to robustly and representatively assess demographic, economic, and asset-based inequalities in post-disaster out-migration. ACS data provide comparison years for determining hurricane-specific relationships in a logistic regression model, essentially comparing disaster-specific migration to normal migration. Difference in-differences estimation with comparison metropolitan areas detects relationships that may be causal and controls for non-disaster migration covariates specific to the disaster year. Demographic, economic, and asset-based inequalities are present, all of which have implications for disaster planning and response policy. Specifically, labor force attachment, being age 65 or older, and vehicle ownership are among the important predictors of disaster-specific migration outcomes.

We relate the historical (18502000) spatial and temporal changes in cropland cover in the conterminous United States to several socio-economic and biophysical determinants using an eco-region based spatial framework. Results show population density as a major determinant during the nineteenth century, and biophysical suitability as the major determinant during the twentieth century. We further examine the role of technological innovations, socio-economic and socio-ecological feedback that have either sustained or altered the cropland trajectories in different eco-regions. The cropland trajectories for each of the 84 level-III eco-regions were analyzed using a nonlinear bi-analytical model. In the Eastern United States, low biophysically suitable eco-regions, e.g., New England, have shown continual decline in the cropland after reaching peak levels. The cropland trajectories in high biophysically suitable regions, e.g., Corn Belt, have stabilized after reaching peak levels. In the Western United States, low-intensity crop cover (<10 %) is sustained with irrigation support. A slower rate of land conversion was found in the industrial period. Significant effect of Conservation Reserve Program on planted crop area is found in last two decades (19902010).

We analyze the disparities between several race and ethnic groups in a fundamental measure of population health: the rate at which infants die. Using micro-level Vital Statistics data from 2000 to 2004, we separate mortality disparities into three temporal components, and we assess the extent to which these components are predictable by observable background characteristics. The temporal patterns vary substantially across racial and ethnic groups: relative to whites, the high infant mortality rates of blacks and Puerto Ricans are primarily driven by disadvantages in fitness at birth, but the high infant mortality rate of Native Americans is driven by excess infant deaths during the post-neonatal period. Differences across races in conditional post-neonatal mortality are largely predictable by background characteristics, so much of the Native American-white mortality gap is predictable. In contrast, fitness at birth is only weakly related to background characteristics, so the black and Puerto Rican gaps are largely unpredictable. Additional analyses suggest that the well-documented advantage of Hispanics can be accounted for based on the background characteristics we study.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of criminal behavior, which extends prior research on crime by taking into account parental decisions about their children's education and about sending them to school when they become adolescents. Additionally, it is also assumed that acquired ability in childhood and school resources interplay to determine the student's probability of leaving school before graduation. Therefore, considering that dropping out of school and criminality are endogenously determined by the quality of early childhood education, school inputs and law enforcement parameters, this paper offers a framework to study the effects of interventions in early education on criminality and human capital accumulation vis--vis enhancing school resources and public spending on enforcement. Numerical simulations show that stimuli to increase investments in the education of children from disadvantaged families are much more cost-effective as a crime-prevention policy than expenditures on school resources and police protection.

This paper uses a semiparametric homeownership model to estimate and to decompose the household-level whiteblack homeownership gap into an endowment component and a residual component across the distribution of homeownership rates. We find that the racial gap differs across homeownership rates and that studies that examine the gap only at the mean may be misleading. We also find that although household characteristics explain the homeownership gap for most households, there is a substantial portion of the gap that remains unexplained for households with a very low propensity to own homes. A comparison of the estimates from the semiparametric model and a probit model suggests that the semiparametric approach is able to capture the heterogeneity structure between the ethnic groups, particularly in the tails of thedistribution. To illustrate the flexibility of our household-level approach, we decompose the homeownershipgap in cities of varying levels of segregation.