The first essay studies the long term trend of internal migration in the United States. Over the last forty years, there has only been a modest change in the overall interstate migration rate in the United States. However, different demographic groups have seen very different patterns of changes. The migration rate for families with two college graduate spouses dropped from 5.66% in 1965-1970 to 2.82% in 2000-2005. As for the families with college-graduate husband, it dropped from 4.05% to 2.15% during the same time frame. Interstate migration rates for other types of families or singles have seen little change. This paper extends Mincer’s family migration model into a search framework and directly estimates the effects of female labor force participation, spousal earning ratio, correlation of earnings from job offers, and home ownership on the migration propensity by using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data in the period of 1982-2005. Endogeniety issues of these variables are appropriately addressed. According to the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis, we find that the increasing female labor force participation rate and earning ratio of wife to husband are the primary determinants for the decline in the interstate migration rate of families with two college-graduate spouses and families with a college-graduate husband in the 1980s-1990s. The rising home ownership accounts for a large portion of the decrease in the migration rate of highly educated families, in the 1990s-2000s. The second essay studies the impact of changing youth cohort size on the unemployment rate. Although an increase in youth cohort size is often found to exert an upward pressure on the aggregate unemployment rate, it has been provided some ii empirical evidences and a theoretical model to the contrary. We find that the estimated elasticity of unemployment rate is quite sensitive in a fixed effect model, with the inclusion of year dummies, when there is a strong temporal correlation between the youth cohort size and the unemployment rate. Both the sign and magnitude of the estimates vary significantly when using data from different time periods. We propose an alternative way to control for the fixed effects and obtain consistent estimates across the time periods in the United States. Our results support the conventional wisdom of positive correlation between youth cohort size and aggregate unemployment rate. This positive effect of the youth cohort size is strongest for the youngest workers and gradually diminishes for older workers, which implies that the young and the prime age workers are not perfect substitutes to the employers.

The dissertation includes three essays on development and regional economics. Son preference prevails among Indian couples. I test the hypothesis that women who bear sons experience an elevated status within the household, which translates into their increased role in decision-making. The first essay empirically examines the issue. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey, I find that women who have given birth to at least one son show greater participation in the household’s financial decisions as well as other decisions in a household. Presence of a senior member in the household, however, reduces the women’s relative household bargaining strength. The second essay examines the wage differentials of natives, naturalized citizens, and immigrants on the basis of gender, and for the latter two categories, on the basis of region of origin. This paper argues that the assimilation effect for naturalized citizens should be stronger than that for immigrants since a naturalized citizen, on an average, spends more than 15 years in the country, much higher than immigrants. I find that immigrants experience higher increase in wages than naturalized citizens with longer stay in the United States. The essay concludes that this trend in wages cannot be explained by the assimilation argument alone. We also report that naturalized citizens command higher returns to higher education than immigrants. The third essay explores issues in regional economics. Kansas has the third largest public highway miles and one of the highest miles per person in the country. Due to declining rural population, counties lack the required tax base and fiscal health to support their large ailing rural road infrastructure. The average farm size is increasing and so is the size of vehicles using the rural roads. This paper suggests removing some rural low volume roads from the county road network as one option. I study three Kansas counties to analyze the cost-benefit of reducing low volume road miles. I find that rural counties will be able to save money by closing some low volume roads.

This dissertation presents an integrated framework that was developed to examine trajectories of neighborhood change, mechanisms of suburban diversity, and the relationships between neighborhood change and employment accessibility. First, this dissertation extends the study of neighborhood change to a greater time and spatial span, systematically examining the trajectories of neighborhood change at the census tract level. The results show that neighborhood change is complicated and exhibits various trajectories. The dominant patterns do not always conform to classical models of neighborhood change, providing counterpoints to some long-established assumptions. This dissertation also provides evidence of the mechanisms through which metropolitan and suburban characteristics influence suburban diversity. Most importantly, it highlights a remarkable increase in suburban diversity with respect to neighborhood composition. Finally, this dissertation investigates the relationships between neighborhood change, spatial transformation, and employment accessibility in the North Carolina Piedmont region during the last three decades. Spatial patterns of the neighborhood distributions suggest that job accessibility varies by neighborhood typology. A detailed analysis of the trajectories of neighborhood change shows interesting patterns in both central city and suburban ecological succession and transformation. These geographical shifts of neighborhoods were shown to be associated with changes in job accessibility to a certain extent. In sum, by introducing an integrated framework including social, spatial, and employment factors, this dissertation develops a more balanced understanding of neighborhood change in the United States.

The economic recession that began in 2007 prompted speculation over its effects on divorce rates in the U.S. Opposing hypotheses suggest either the recession increases divorce through a stress mechanism; or it reduces divorce by increasing its economic costs or strengthening family bonds. The American Community Survey now offers a large-scale, repeated national sample survey with size large enough to test state-level divorce patterns and timing suitable for examining potential effects of changing economic conditions. After establishing an individual-level model predicting womens divorce, I test whether unemployment, home prices and home foreclosuresare associated with the odds of divorce. Results show a robust decline in divorce from 2008 to 2009. However, higher state unemployment is associated with increased odds of divorce. Interactions between state and individual effects suggest fruitful avenues for further research.

Increases in female employment and falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been fairly stable while female wages have continued to grow. Over the same period, we observe that women's hours spent on housework have declined, but men's have increased. I propose a model with a shrinking gender wage gap that can capture these trends. While rising relative wages tend toincrease women's labor supply and, due to higher opportunity cost, lower fertility, they also lead to a partial reallocation of home production from women to men, and a higher use of labor-saving inputs into home production. I find that both these trends are important inunderstanding why fertility did not decline to even lower levels. As the gender wage gap declines, a father's time at home becomes more important for raising children. When thedisutilities from working in the market and at home are imperfect substitutes, fertility can stabilize, after an initial decline, in times of increasing female market labor. That parents can acquire more market inputs into child care is what I find important in matching the timing of fertility. In a mode l extension, I show that the results are robust to intrahousehold bargaining.

In this paper we estimate the housing services dividend in eight major U.S. cities using data from the U.S. Census. We then construct quarterly time series of housing investment total returns using the Case-Shiller house price index and Bureau of Labor Statistics rent index data. Using the resulting total return data we estimate the optimal allocation of household wealth to the housing asset. We find that in each city two equilibrium portfolios obtain, one for renters and one for homeowners. Moreover, we find that the allocation results are critically dependent upon the inclusion of dividends in the analysis. If we optimize using only capital gains on housing investment, optimal investment in the housing asset goes to zero in all but two cities.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att titta på vilken effekt äktenskap och barn har på lönen för en kvinna respektive en man. Jag har använt mig av den amerikanska databasen IPUMS. Lämpliga nationalekonomiska teorimodeller illustrerar de förväntade effekterna av förändringar på arbetsmarknaden. Resultat visar att det finns en skillnad i vilken effekt äktenskap och barn har på lönen mellan man och kvinna. När en man ingår ett äktenskap ökar hans lön. För kvinnan gäller det omvända.

The purpose of this study was to examine Latino/a student preferences for school counselor activities. The primary focus of research was to determine what school counseling activities Latino/a students perceived as important and which school counseling activities Latino/a high school students perceived as satisfying. The researcher pursued this purpose through administration of a survey instrument developed by the researcher. The instrument consisted of 14 demographic items and 42 5-point Likert scale items based on the domains described in the ASCA's national model and current literature on experiences of Latino/a adolescents. The sample was comprised of 210 Latino/a high school students from five high schools in three school districts in the suburbs of a large Southwestern U.S. metroplex. The study population consisted of 94 female and 115 male participants ranging in age from 14 to 20 years old with the median age of 17.54 years. Overall, students preferred school counseling activities focusing on college and career readiness. According to the results of this study, students indicated that although they believed college and career activities to be important, they were not satisfied with how their school counselors provided those activities. Multiple regression analyses were utilized to determine which demographic variables were significant predictors of respondents' perceptions of importance. Results indicated student perceptions of importance did not vary across grades, economic levels, genders, or cultural differences. The results, limitations, and suggestions for school counseling programs were provided within the report.

There are many ways that nationally-representative samples drawn for panel surveys can become non-representative over time. For example, selective attrition and non-response, immigration, and shortcomings in the initial sample may lead to a divergence of the panel sample from the corresponding population it seeks to represent. Although initial cross-sectional weights together with attrition weights in later waves may correct for some sources of non-representativeness, they do not correct for all possible sources. Furthermore, a periodic reassessment of sample representativeness is important for understanding the cumulative effects of attrition and immigration and determining whether additional measures are necessary to correct for declining representativeness and coverage.In this paper, we assess the national representativeness of the 2007 sample of children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)a total of approximately 7,100 children aged 017 years of age. We assessed the national coverage for PSID children using microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) and a new statistical technique called generalized boosted regression models. The ACS provides a gold-standard comparison based on its extremely high (98%) response rate, excellent data quality and completeness, and large sample sizes (approximately 700,000 children aged 017 years in 2007). We constructed a reasonably consistent set of covariates across PSID and ACS to describe children on the basis of their age, race/ethnicity, sex, poverty status, geographic region, and having a foreign-born parent. The generalized boosted models provided flexible, non-parametric estimates for assessing the relationship between our dependent variable (an indicator of whether an observation in the pooled ACS-PSID sample came from PSID) on covariates and their interactions. We also used the ACS sample to identify cases that are logically excluded from PSID (e.g., children whose parents are both post-1997 immigrants to the U.S.), and assess the size and composition of this group.Our results reveal that PSID child sample provides good representation of the corresponding population with coverage of approximately 97% of the U.S. population of children in 1997 and reasonable balance for most groups, although with some exceptions.

Coming Apart describes an unprecedented divergence of American classes on basic social and economic indicators during the period 1960-2010.

Since 1965, Head Start has provided high quality early education and comprehensive support services to the nation’s poorest children from ages 3 through school age. In 1994, the federal Early Head Start (EHS) program was created to address the comprehensive needs of poor children under age 3 and pregnant women. In addition to early learning opportunities, Head Start and Early Head Start’s comprehensive early childhood development programs provide children and families with access to a range of services such as health screenings, referrals and follow-up support, parenting resources, and social services. Programs emphasize the importance of parental involvement and staff work to cultivate parents’ abilities as their children’s first teachers.

A number of organizations publish microdata for purposes such as public health and demographic research. Although attributes of microdata that clearly identify individuals, such as name, are generally removed, these databases can sometimes be joined with other public databases on attributes such as Zip code, Gender, and Age to re-identify individuals who were supposed to remain anonymous. These linking attacks are made easier by the availability of other complementary databases over the Internet. K-anonymity is a technique that prevents linking attacks by generalizing or suppressing portions of the released microdata so that no individual can be uniquely distinguished from a group of size k. In this chapter, we investigate a practical full-domain generalization model of k-anonymity and examine the issue of computing minimal k-anonymous solution. We introduce the hash-based technique previously used in mining associate rules and present an efficient and effective privacy hash table structure to derive the minimal solution. The experimental results show the proposed hash-based technique is highly efficient compared with the binary search method.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History brings together in a single authoritative reference work an extraordinary wealth of information about the history of everyday life in America. Sixty years ago, an encyclopedia devoted to U.S. social history would have been unthinkable. The term "social history" was not even in common use. By the 1960s, however, scholars had begun to reject the notion that what was solely important about the past were the actions of political and military leaders and the ideas of elite intellectuals. These historians insisted upon the value of the experiences of ordinary people. Often called "history from the bottom up," social history includes the study of marginalized people whose voices had been largely missing from the history books, and covers a wide span of activities embracing the whole range of ordinary people's life experience. Social structures and the environment that shaped American life, including family, work, leisure, social movements, and patterns of mobility and settlements, are central to the work, as are themes of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Sensitive to transnational developments, the volume draws extensively on new literature on slavery, health and disease, sexuality, women's activism, and technology's impact on everyday life. With over 450 articles by expert scholars, each signed entry features numerous cross references and discussion of social history as well as additional sources for further study in this two-volume A-to-Z compendium. The encyclopedia is a reference work of unparalleled depth and scope and will introduce a new generation of readers to the complexities of this dynamic field of study. It also features key biographies of leaders in social history, a topical outline, and subject index.

ProblemCommitment to creative placemaking is deepening, thanks to research on how arts and culture are wedded to place and to growing disappointment with export-base-led economic development. Working across public sector bureaus and encouraged by new funding streams, planners and politicians are investing in arts and cultural activities embedded in neighborhoods and joined to revitalization efforts. Yet most offerings and spaces are run by nonprofits, an often baffling ecology to decision makers.Research strategyTo help planners understand cultural potential, we examine spatial variation in participation rates and in size, disciplinary foci and location of arts nonprofits using large data sets on California.FindingsWe find that at the metropolitan scale, arts participation rates are not dictated by demographics, though they are strongly correlated with presence of arts organizations.Smaller regions in the state, along with smaller cities, are home to higher numbers of arts organizations per capita a result indicating that arts organization presence is not limited mainly to the largest central cities. At the city scale, we find that higher per capita arts nonprofits presence is strongly associated with demographics, particularly levels of educational attainment and residents personal wealth. It is also positively associated with job density (reflecting a citys role as an employment center) and levels of private philanthropic funding for arts and culture. However, while job density is an important explanatory factor, it is not associated with traditional center-periphery distinction (in particular, central city designation). Instead, arts organization presence in California appears to conform to the states complex, polycentric development patterns.Takeaway for practicePlanners can take heart that central city status and resident demographics do not dictate arts potential. We discuss how planners might play lead roles in creativeplacemaking and how an understanding of arts and cultural nonprofits can help. Our analysis has implications for planners in other areas, like community development,heavily reliant on non-profits.

Cape Verde is an island group off the African coast with a history of slavery. Its residents having both European and African ancestors, they consider themselves a mixed-racepeople. Residents of the United States, however, observe the one-drop rule: anyone with a perceptible trace of African blood is defined as Black. This difference motivatesus to ask: how do Cape Verdean Americans answer questions about their racial identity? Strict assimilationists predict that, as they adapt to their new home, Cape Verdeanswill identify less as mixed-race than as White or Black. Others suggest that the quality of race relations at the time immigrants arrive affects their identity. We test these ideas using data from the 2000 US Census and the American Community Survey. Our multivariate analysis shows that some, but not all, forms of assimilation increase the odds of identifying as Black. The odds of identifying as White, on the other hand, have little to do with assimilation. The timing of arrival also has a significant effect on racial identity, with Black gaining popularity among recent immigrants.

This paper examines the housing affordability conditions of the low and moderate income rental households in the United States between 1980 and 2010. Using Integrated Public Use Census Microdata Samples (IPUMS) 5% sample data, we create income and rent distribution for households separately for each metropolitan statistical area (MSA), and match the two distributions by using a unique 'matching technique' so that the lowest-household income is matched with the lowest-rent and so on. The distribution clearly shows that severe housing affordability problem exists at the bottom of the income distribution in each MSA. We define low and moderate income renters as households with 60% and 80% of area median income respectively and construct the affordability indexes for these income groups. The findings indicate that at the national and regional levels, severe and growing housing affordability problem exists for both the income groups. However, the severity is much more prominent for the low income renter group. Almost 4 out of 5 renters from the low income group are paying more than 30% of their income on rent. At the MSA level, affordability is found to be lowest in the large metro areas such as California, Florida, and New York. JEL Classification: R11, R23, R40, H31

There are numerous ways in which migration and health influence each other, but only modest attention was devoted to these relationships in published research until the 1980s. It is reasonable to expect linkages between migration and health for several reasons. Migrants tend to be a selected subgroup of people from their area of origin and they often carry with them unique lifestyles and health attributes. The process of migrating from one place to another often has important health consequences for both the migrants and the people to whom they are exposed in the place of destination.

In the Data Warehouse (DW) technology, On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a good applications package that empowers decision makers to explore and navigate into a multidimensional structure of precomputed measures, which is referred to as a Data Cube. Though, OLAP is poorly equipped for forecasting and predicting empty measures of data cubes. Usually, empty measures translate inexistent facts in the DW and in most cases are a source of frustration for enterprise managements, especially when strategic decisions need to be taken. In the recent years, various studies have tried to add prediction capabilities to OLAP applications. For this purpose, generally, Data Mining and Machine Learning methods have been widely used to predict new measures' values in DWs. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach attempting to extend OLAP to a prediction application. Our approach operates in two main stages. The first one is a preprocessing one that makes use of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the data cube and then generates ad hoc training sets. The second stage proposes a novel OLAP oriented architecture of Multilayer Perceptron Networks (MLP) that learns from each training set and comes out with predicted measures of inexistent facts. Carried out experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal and the performance of its predictive capabilities.