This paper assesses the extent to which cities promote wage growth after labor force entry and how this extent varies by unobserved learning ability for different sized cities. I incorporate this growth attribute the learning effect into a standard inter-city framework to specify average earnings equations given location choices. Using a wage growth measure constructed from wages and migration histories of two adjacent cohorts in the 2000 census to quantify the learning effect, empirical estimates indicate that college graduates starting work in big cities on average have a 7 percent higher wage growth over the five-year period immediately following labor force entry than their counterparts who begin in small cities. I use a variation in average learning ability within a city-size category across birth states to identify the rate of return to learning ability in this category. The results suggest that big cities promote wage growth, especially for high learning ability young workers. However, such return to learning ability is absent in small cities and rural areas. Estimates imply that positive sorting by learning ability into big cities when first entering the labor force is a salient feature for college graduates born in rural states.

The Karonga Health and Demographic Surveillance System (Karonga HDSS) in northern Malawi currently has a population of more than 35 000 individuals under continuous demographic surveillance since completion of a baseline census (2002–2004). The surveillance system collects data on vital events and migration for individuals and for households. It also provides data on cause-specific mortality obtained by verbal autopsy for all age groups, and estimates rates of disease for specific presentations via linkage to clinical facility data. The Karonga HDSS provides a structure for surveys of socio-economic status, HIV sero-prevalence and incidence, sexual behaviour, fertility intentions and a sampling frame for other studies, as well as evaluating the impact of interventions, such as antiretroviral therapy and vaccination programmes. Uniquely, it relies on a network of village informants to report vital events and household moves, and furthermore is linked to an archive of biological samples and data from population surveys and other studies dating back three decades.

While the relationship between education and general health has been firmly established in the literature, surprisingly little research has analyzed individual components of the global health judgments, such as chronic conditions or pain. We present a systematic account of the health gradient for multiple health outcomes by detailed educational categories among U.S. working-age adults. Using the 19972010 National HealthInterview Surveys (N = 204,764), we analyze individual health outcomes ranging from cardiovascular disease to vision problems with a series of logistic regression models. The results at the presecondary and baccalaureate levels are consistent with the health gradient. An unexpected finding occurs among adults with some college but no degree, and those with technical/vocational associate degrees: these groups report more pain and a higher prevalence of a broad range of conditions than high school graduates who never attended college. We discuss several explanations for the observed patterns. The findings challenge the broadly accepted educational gradient in health; additionally, the lower postsecondary groups comprise a quarter of American adults. Jointly, there is a clear research and policy impetus to understand the source of this glitch in the health gradient.

Public rhetoric often decries a societal retreat from marriage that it is an increasingly obsolete institution (Time Magazine/Pew Research Center 2010). The 1950s have been described as the golden age of marriage in the United States and marriage has declined since the 1960s (Coontz 2000/1992; Cherlin 2009/2004). In this paper, we take a longer view of the history of marriage by sex and race, describing trends among those never married at age 35 and age 45 and older, and historical median ages at first marriage using Decennial Census data. We find that the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly for men and women given the high proportions married at young ages. Race differences are particularly interesting, as black women were moreoften married than white women prior to World War II, yet since the 1980s, have been increasingly less likely to be married.

Early in life, people make education and career decisions that affect their income and wellbeing for the rest of their lives. Understanding how individuals make these human capital investments helps economists evaluate the efficiency and equity of individual sorting into schools and occupations and predict the pace of labor market adjustment following changes in labor demand. The second chapter of this dissertation estimates the relationship between earnings uncertainty and expected earnings across occupations. Rational, risk-averse workers require higher average compensation to enter occupations where they face greater uncertainty about lifetime earnings. Compensation for earnings risk explains 17% of the differences in average earnings across occupations, but only a small share of total earnings inequality. Lifetime earnings risk, which is largely uninsurable, creates inefficiencies in the labor market: products become more expensive to cover this compensation, but workers are no happier than they would be with lower, safer earnings. Moreover, workers sort into occupations partially based on their preferences for risk, rather than their relative skills. The third chapter estimates the responsiveness of college enrollment decisions to changes in the relative average earnings of workers with and without a college degree. Growth in the college earnings premium can explain more than half of the 10 percentage point rise from 1980 to 2002 in four-year college enrollment for men. As the relative supply of workers with a college degree rises, some of the recent rise in their relative earnings should be reversed. The fourth chapter studies the causes of mismatch between student ability and college quality, measuring college quality with peer student ability and resources per student. Additional wealth and information about college lower the probability that a student will attend a college of low quality relative to their ability and raise the probability that she will attend a relatively high quality college. Programs that provide information about college to less informed students may increase the equity of student sorting into colleges. However, if all well-informed students seek to attend the highest quality colleges, only increasing the overall quality of the college stock can improve welfare.

We examine the official scope and actual coverage of immigrant civil society in seven California cities using a widely employed 501(c)3 database. First, we code immigrant organizations in official data and compare their number and proportion with population statistics; we find substantially fewer immigrant organizations than we would expect. Second, we measure the organizational undercount of immigrant civil society by calculating the number of publicly present immigrant organizations not captured in official data. We do this for four immigrant-origin communities (Indian, Mexican, Portuguese, and Vietnamese) using 160 key informant interviews and extensive examination of directories and media (ethnic and mainstream). We find a notable undercount, which varies by city and immigrant group. Considering both underrepresentation and undercounts, Mexican-origin organizations seem at a particular disadvantage. Our findings carry important implications for resource inequalities and advocacy capacity in minority communities, underscoring the need for further research on the vitality of immigrant civil society.

Canadians moved to the U.S. in large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canadians also moved to settle the Prairies. We merge Canadian and U.S. Census microdata files from 1900 through 1931 to generate a sample of the population of the Canadian-born living in both Canada and the U.S. We quantify the relative odds of Anglo- and Franco-Canadians moving interprovincially and to the U.S., and do this for each Census year. This allows us to directly compare the relative mobility of each group, and to track changes in mobility over time. We note a shift in the characteristics of French Canadians moving to the U.S. during the 1920s and explore whether this is due to changes in labour demand or the effect of the literacy requirement introduced by Congress in 1917.

Objectives. We elucidated how US late-life disability prevalence has changed over the past 3 decades.Methods. We examined activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) disability trends by using ageperiodcohort (APC) models among older adults aged 70 years or older who responded to the National Health Interview Survey between 1982 and 2009. We fitted logistic regressions for ADL and IADL disabilities and for each of the 3 APC trends with 2 models: unadjusted and fully adjusted for age, period, cohort, and sociodemographic variables.Results. The unadjusted and adjusted period trends showed a substantial decline in IADL disability, and ADL disability remained stable across time. Unadjusted cohort trends for both outcomes also showed continual declines across successive cohorts; however, increasing cohort trends were evident in the adjusted models.Conclusions. More recent cohorts of US older adults are becoming more disabled, net of aging and period effects. The net upward cohort trends in ADL and IADL disabilities remain unexplained. Further studies should explore cohort-specific determinants contributing to the increase of cohort-based disability among US older adults.

Driven by increasing migration from Africa and sustained flows from the Caribbean, the number of Black immigrants in the United States has more than doubled over the past 20 years. As a result, the number of children with a Black foreign-born parent has also more than doubled during this period. Today about 813,000 children from birth to age 10 reside with a Black immigrant parent and together thesechildren account for roughly 12 percent of all young Black children in the United States. This trend holds important implications for the US Black child population as well as the overall child population as both are becoming increasingly diverse in their origins, languages, and other characteristics.The majority of children of Black immigrants have parents who come from Africa and the Caribbean, but no single country accounts for more than one-fifth of this population. The diversity of Black immigrant origins makes it difficult to generalize about the well-being of children of Black immigrants, given that well-being indicators vary greatly by parental country of origin. That said, in general the children of Black immigrants fall in the middle of multiple well-being indicators with Asian and white children tending to fare better and Hispanic children and Black children of natives (i.e., African Americans) tending to fare worse. Black children with parents from Africa generally fare about as well as their counterparts withparents from the Caribbean and, in both cases, children of Black immigrants born in English-speaking countries with a long history of immigration to the United States for instance, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago tend to be the most advantaged. Children with parents from countries with shorter immigration histories, where English is not a common language, and with substantial refugee flows are likely to be more disadvantaged. Those with origins in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and wartornAfrican nations such as Sudan and Somali are most at risk on several key indicators.

Young adults are moving back into their family homes and are now living with their parents. Common terms for the adult children include “previously launched adult” and “incompletely launched adult.” I used data from Wave 3 (2001 to 2003) of the National Survey of Families and Households to analyze the relationship between different life course and family development variables and the launching status of young adults. This dissertation specifically uses the dependent variable “launching status” of either previously launched or failure to launch. I undertake two multinomial logistic regression models with the dependent variable “launching status.” I then proceed to a replication of the original analysis with two other multinomial logistic regression models, using the dependent variable “launching status” and the data gathered from Wave 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (1992 to 1994). I conclude with a descriptive analysis of the 2009 American Community Survey to describe current trends of adult child and parent coresidence. The first analysis uses various life course variables as independent variables and then introduces control variables into the models. The second analysis uses various family development and family structure variables and then introduces control variables into the models. After running the two models using the Wave 3 data, I determined that the life course variables had a significant relationship with launching status, and the family development variables did not prove to be very significantly related to launching status. The replication of the Wave 3 analysis with the Wave 2 data showed similar results. Like the original analysis, the life course variables were significantly related to launching status, whereas the family development variables were not significantly related to launching status. The descriptive results using the American Community Survey data show that a majority of young adults who are living at home are between the ages of 18 and 24, are male, are White and non-Hispanic, and have a high school education or less. The major contribution of this research is that it differentiates between those who have never left the family home and those who left and then returned. This is the first study, to my knowledge, to do so.

This article presents detailed estimates of relative and absolute health inequalities among U.S. working-age adults by educational attainment, including six postsecondary schooling levels. We also estimate the impact of several sets of mediating variables on the education-health gradient. Data from the 19972009 National Health Interview Survey (N?=?178,103) show remarkable health differentials. For example, high school graduates have 3.5 times the odds of reporting worse health than do adults with professional or doctoral degrees. The probability of fair or poor health in mid-adulthood is less than 5 percent for adults with the highest levels of education but over 20 percent for adults without a high school diploma. The probability of reporting excellent health in the mid-forties is below 25 percent among high school graduates but over 50 percent for those adults who have professional degrees. These health differences characterize all the demographic subgroups examined in this study. Our results show that economic indicators and health behaviors explain about 40 percent of the education-health relationship. In the United States, adults with the highest educational degrees enjoy a wide array of benefits, including much more favorable self-rated health, compared to their less-educated counterparts.

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decrease in the rate of income convergence across states. This decline coincides with a similarly substantial decrease in population flows to wealthy states. In contrast to the prior literature, we find that labor migration can quantitatively explain the observed convergence patterns.Next, we explore the reasons behind the decline in directional migration. Housing prices have risen substantially in high-income areas which, in the context of our model, generates four testable predictions. The predictions are (1) a divergence in the skill-specific economic returns to living in rich places, (2) a decline in unskilled migration to rich places, (3) continued unskilled migration to places with high income net of housing costs, and (4) continued income convergence among places with unconstrained housing supply. The data support all of these predictions.We develop a new state-level panel measure of housing supply regulations using court records. Using this as an instrument for housing prices, we document the central role of regulations and changes in housing prices in the end of income convergence.

We use the Immigrants Admitted to the United States (micro-data) supplemented with special tabulations from the Department of Homeland Security to examine how family reunification impacts the age composition of new immigrant cohorts since 1980. We develop a family migration multiplier measure for the period 1981 to 2009 that improves on prior studies by including IRCA immigrants and relaxing unrealistic assumptions required by synthetic cohort measures. Results show that every 100 initiating immigrants admitted between 1981-85 sponsored an average of 260 family members; the comparable figure for initiating immigrants for the 1996-2000 cohort is 345 family members. Furthermore, the number of family migrants ages 50 and over rose from 44 to 74 per 100 initiating migrants. The discussion considers the health and welfare implications of late-age migration in a climate of growing fiscal restraint and an aging native population.

Over the past decade narrowly focused studies have evaluated the effectiveness of state-level welfare policies. In general, they evaluate reforms within a particular state, focus on a small number of outcome variables (usually caseload levels) and/or use a very narrowly defined time period. This narrow and partial analysis is perplexing, from an institutional perspective, as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) forces states into a zero-sum funding game, where shares depend on differential relative success in achieving policy objectives metrics. This institutional structure incentivizes states to mimic and improve upon more successful counterparts to recapture a larger share of TANF block grants. Given this dynamic institutional structure, an evolutionary evaluation of state TANF programmes is warranted. This article uses cluster analysis to explore evolutionary changes in state TANF policies (as characterized by a comprehensive set of outcome variables) immediately following the imposition of T...

This article examines how school and municipal planning practices contributed to segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods well after Brown. In Nashville, Tennessee, a consolidated citycounty municipality, federal urban renewal and housing initiatives and federal education guidelines linked with local practices to favor suburban space, neglect urban space, and reinforce segregation in both housing and schooling. School construction policies served the interests of suburban real estate development and helped to concentrate poor black children and families in the central city. The range of policies and market forces at work in linking schools and housing proves the falsity of the de jurede facto framework courts and historians often applied to school segregation. An uneven distribution of educational resources shaped over decades by local and federal policy led to an uneven distribution of the burdens that came with busing, an inequality made to seem normal by spatial ideology that favored the predominantly white suburbs.

During the Jim Crow era, Northern philanthropy played a significant role in Southern Black education, yet little research estimates the impact on Black-White inequality in schooling outcomes. One program, The Anna T. Jeanes Fund, trained and supported Black teachers in over 600 Southern counties between 1909 and 1930. Another, The Julius Rosenwald Fund, built over 5,000 rural schools for Southern Black students between 1914 and 1931. I use quasi-experimental evidence from these two interventions to compare marginal returns on educational investments in human resources (teachers) and physical capital (schools).I exploit variation in the timing and location of each program and estimate difference-indifferences,effectively estimating effects on the Black-White gap in both enrollment and literacy. I show that the effect full of exposure to both programs during schooling years would have closed pre-treatment Black-White gaps of 9 and 13 percentage points for enrollment and literacy respectively, with roughly two-thirds of the contribution coming fromthe Rosenwald Fund in both cases.

This study aims to measure the wage gap between the white and Mexican population residing in the United States. It also looks at male and female first- and second-and-higher generations in both white and Mexican populations. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is used for the years 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. This study finds that first-generation white males are negatively affected by the wage gap, while second-and-higher-generation Mexican females have continuously benefited from the wage gap over the past thirty years.

The following presents three essays on racial disparities in human capital investments and returns to skill over the life-cycle. The first chapter, The Source of Black-White Inequality in Early Language Acquisition: Evidence from Early Head Start, addresses the source and timing of divergence in the accumulation of early childhood skills between black and white children. The second chapter, The Effects of the Jeanes and Rosenwald Funds on Black Education by 1930: Comparing Returns on Investments in Teachers and Schools, estimates the combined and comparative effects of two large philanthropies targeting rural black schools in the segregated South. The third chapter, Blurring the Color Line: Wages and Employment for Black Males of Different Skin Tones, co-authored with Marcos Rangel, tests for wage differentials within race, across skin color, utilizing a measure of skin tone placed in a prominent social survey. Taken together, these essays evaluate the role race plays in inequality above and beyond what can be explained away by racial disparities in wealth, family circumstances, prior education and other comparable measures. Each essay is written from a human capital perspective, drawing on literature in economics, public policy and education, seeking to broaden our understanding of the incongruous relationship between race and inequality in America.

Skill-biased technical change has been a pervasive feature of the twentieth century American economy (Goldin and Katz 2008). At the ground level, technical change is frequently embodied in new capital goods, whose price relative to output or labor becomes cheaper over time. As the relative price of capital declines, more capital per worker is used, and capital deepening occurs. In the twentieth century, physical capital and skill have been shown to be relative complements so that capital deepening has increased the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor (Griliches 1969). Technology-skill complementarity has also been widespread over the past century with new technologies from those associated with the electricity revolution in the early twentieth century to the computer revolution in late twentieth century being relative complements with human capital (Goldin and Katz 1998; Autor, Katz, and Krueger 1998). Goldin and Katz (2008, p. 297, Table 8.1), using educational attainment as a proxy for skill, show that the demand for skilled labor greatly outpaced the demand for unskilled labor in every decade of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of the 1940s.