This paper analyzes changes in gender employment rate (GER) differentials for whites and blacks in the United States from 1950 to 2008. We document the evolution of the GER gap, which narrows considerably within both racial groups and turns slightly negative for blacks. We document the changing employment levels that drive these patterns as well as compositional shifts in each gender-race population. Among whites, nearly all of the narrowing is attributable to increasing employment rates among women. For blacks, a large component of the narrowing is explained by declining employment rates among men. Black employment rates decline precipitously for the least educated and post-1980 are reduced further by increased institutionalization and declining marriage rates. In an analysis of state-level interdecade changes in female outcomes, we find that a worsening of black male employment prospects is associated with an increase in female education and a decline in marriage and fertility rates.

Microdata protection in statistical databases has recently become a major societal concern and has been intensively studied in recent years. Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) is often applied to statistical databases before they are released for public use. Microaggregation for SDC is a family of methods to protect microdata from individual identification. SDC seeks to protect microdata in such a way that can be published and mined without providing any private information that can be linked to specific individuals. Microaggregation works by partitioning the microdata into groups of at least k records and then replacing the records in each group with the centroid of the group. This paper presents a clustering-based microaggregation method to minimize the information loss. The proposed technique adopts to group similar records together in a systematic way and then anonymized with the centroid of each group individually. The structure of systematic clustering problem is defined and investigated and an algorithm of the proposed problem is developed. Experimental results show that our method attains a reasonable dominance with respect to both information loss and execution time than the most popular heuristic algorithm called Maximum Distance to Average Vector (MDAV).

We consider the relationship between health and time allocation in the American Time Use Survey. Better health is associated with large positive effects on home production and larger positive effects on market production, but less consumption of leisure. Theoretically, if market- and home-produced goods are perfect substitutes, the positive correlation between health and home production implies that health exerts larger effects on home than on market efciency. Notably, these correlations are higher for single people than for married people, perhaps reecting a lack of market substitutes for the time of married people.

Black Virginians have shaped the history of the commonwealth – beginning in Jamestown in 1619 with “twenty and odd” Africans, through six regiments of the U.S. Colored Infantry at General Lee’s Appomattox surrender, and up to and beyond Governor L. Douglas Wilder, the first black governor elected in the nation since Reconstruction. The relationship between the Commonwealth’s past, and the future for black Virginians, is illuminated in geographic and demographic trends, examined in this report.

Studying the United States in 1920 and 1930, Rajan and Ramcharan (2011) show that counties with highly concentrated agricultural land holdings had fewer banks. They argue that wealthy landowners stalled financial development in order to prevent poor farmers and tenants from moving up the agricultural ladder. The lack of data, however, forced the authors to examine a period when agriculture was no longer the dominant industry, most every county had a bank, and the federal government had begun to provide agricultural credit through the Farm Loan Board. To observe landowners at the height of their power and banks during the period when they were being introduced, we make use of a new panel database stretching from 1860 to 1900 to test the connection between land concentration and financial development. The data indicate that landed elites encouraged financial development in agricultural areas before 1900. The effect, especially in the South, tends to be focused around national banks rather than state banks, suggesting that owners might have encouraged certain types of banks. The negative correlation in the 1920s thus seems to have been the result of changes in the agricultural and financial sectors that occurred after 1900. After accounting for Federal lending agreements, climate, and county-level production, the negative correlation becomes statistically insignificant if not positive.

Between 1850 and 1920, most U.S. states enacted laws expanding the rights of married women to own and control their separate property and to own their market earnings. The economic approach to property rights implies that as married women gain economic rights, the incentive to invest in girls human capital will rise. This prediction is tested by examining the impact of these legal changes on girls school attendance rates relative to boys. State-level census data are used to examine the effects of these changes on school attendance among all school-aged children. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data are used to examine their effect on school attendance among children ages 1519, who are just beyond compulsory schooling ages. Consistent with hypothesized effects, the empirical analysis shows that expanding womens economic rights resulted in higher relative rates of school attendance by girls and had the largest effect on the 1519 age group.

This study investigated the effects of housing assistance received by children between the ages of 10 and 16 at some point during the period 1968-1982 on four outcomes experienced in adulthood: (1) welfare receipt between ages 20-27; (2) earnings above poverty between ages 25-27; (3) total earnings between 25-27; and (4) educational attainment at age 27. The impacts of public housing and privately owned assisted housing built or rehabilitated using federal government subsidies were studied using information from the Panel Study of Assisted Housing Database. The most significant finding is that public housing does not have detrimental effects on the long-term self-sufficiency outcomes of youth. The worse outcomes experienced by children who spend some time in public housing when compared to those who did not have assisted housing experience were a result of differences in family background, not housing assistance. There was some evidence that public housing may have positive effects on a child's long-term self-sufficiency, and there was also some evidence that public housing has a stronger positive effect on the most disadvantaged children. Housing assistance appears to have no effect on high school graduation, but it is associated with a 12 percentage point increase in the probability of a youth having some postsecondary education. Six appendixes discuss methodologies and some aspects of public housing impact.

I examine how the historical planter elite affected economic development between 1840 and 1960 using county-level variation within the US South. To capture the planter elites potential to exercise de facto power, I construct a new data-set on the personal wealth of the richest Southern planters before the American Civil War. I find that counties with a relatively wealthier planter elite before the Civil War performed significantly worse in the post-war decades and even after World War II. I argue that this is the likely consequence of the planter elites lack of support for mass schooling. My results suggest that when during Reconstruction the US government abolished slavery and enfranchised the freedmen, the planter elite used their de facto power to maintain their influence over the political system and preserve a planter-friendly regime. In fact I find that the planter elite was better able to sustain land prices and the production of plantation crops during Reconstruction in counties where they had more de facto power.

An estimated 4.9 million Hispanics of Puerto Rican origin resided in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia in 2011, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That is a slightly greater number than the population of Puerto Rico itself in 2011, which was 3.7 million. Puerto Ricans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Puerto Rican origin; this means either they themselves were born in Puerto Rico or they trace their family ancestry to Puerto Rico. This statistical profile focuses on the characteristics of Puerto Ricans residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, henceforth the United States.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was associated with a population shift in the United States in the 1930s. Evaluating the relationship between the AAA and the incidence of malaria can therefore offer important lessons regarding the broader consequences of demographic changes. Using a quasi-first difference model and a robust set of controls, we find a negative association between AAA expenditures and malaria death rates at the county level. Further, we find that the AAA was associated with increased out-migration of low-income groups from counties with high-risk malaria ecologies. These results suggest that the AAA-induced migration played an important role in the reduction of malaria.

The boom and bust in housing during the 2000s has led to renewed interest in the boom and bust inhousing between 1920 and 1940. The most commonly used housing value series for this period isreported by Robert Shiller in Irrational Exuberance. We investigate the changes in housing valuesin cities between 1920 and 1940 using a variety of alternative sources with many more cities availablefor comparison than in the Shiller series. We find that all nominal housing value series show a strongdecline between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. However, all of the series except the Shiller seriesimply that housing values in 1920 were well below the 1930 value and thus imply much stronger growthrates in housing values during the 1920s housing boom. Only the Shiller series predicts a strong recoveryin housing values to within 5 percent of the 1930 level. All of the others suggest that nominal housingvalues in 1940 remained at least 18 percent below the 1930 values and several series suggest that valueslurched downward between 1933 and 1940. The results suggest that a significant reconsiderationof the operation of housing markets in the 1920s and 1930s is required.

This paper presents an empirical examination of economic and institutional development. Utilizing a novel data set on American Indian tribal nations, we investigate how constitutional design affects economic development, while holding the broader legal and political environment fixed. Instrumental variables regressions, using the party of the US President at the time of the initial adoption of tribal constitutions as an instrument for constitutional design,indicate that parliamentary systems (versus presidential) have a strong positive effect on economic development, while ordinary least squares regressions of current economicoutcomes on parliamentary systems of government show no effects. Robustness checks suggest that the results are not explained by differences in other institutions or geographiccharacteristics. Additional results provide some suggestive evidence that the effects may operate through channels that are typically associated with parliamentary systems, such aslarger public employment, and more equitable income distribution.

Последние достижения в области медицины и новейшие технологии не смогут оказать положительное воздействие на здоровье населения при отсутствии надлежащих систем здравоохранения для применения их на практике. Однако на протяжении многих лет системам здравоохранения по всему миру не уделялось должного внимания. Это отсутствие внимания наиболее явно выражается в критической нехватке хорошо подготовленных работников здравоохранения. Первым шагом станет определение существующих пробелов. Однако во многих странах в настоящий момент отсутствует технический потенциал для тщательного мониторинга их собственных кадров здравоохранения: данные часто являются ненадежными и устаревшими, отсутствуют общие определения и доказавшие свою эффективность аналитические инструменты, не хватает навыков и опыта по проведению оценки важнейших вопросов политики. Это Руководство предназначено для расширения такого технического потенциала. Оно представляет собой всеобъемлющие, стандартизированные и удобные в использовании рекомендации по проведению мониторинга и оценки кадровых ресурсов здравоохранения. В нем собраны аналитические схемы и варианты стратегий для улучшения информации и базы фактических данных в отношении кадров здравоохранения, а также предлагается опыт стран для ознакомления с эффективными подходами и методами.

The following provides an assessment of the performance of both individual safety net programs and the cumulative impact of all safety net benefits and tax credits on household incomes in the early years during and following the 2007-09 recession. Specifically, I examine the extent to which various benefits and tax credits have moderated the impact of earnings losses for households in different positions in the income distribution, with special attention to the experiences of low-income households. In addition, I examine whether these moderating impacts differ for households of various racial/ethnic compositions, female-headed households, and residents of states with more and less accessible safety net programs. Overall, safety net programs have very significantly mitigated what would otherwise have been substantial, and in the case of lower income households, severe losses in income. This has been especially true for many working poor and lower middle class households who have benefited from their eligibility for a range of benefits and credits that are conditional on employment or earnings. However, heavy reliance on employment conditional benefits has reduced access to this income support for households with barriers to labor force participation, such as very poor female-headed households. In addition, across the income distribution non-white households have experienced both disproportionately large earnings losses and less receipt of compensating benefits and credits. Finally, the availability, accessibility, and generosity of benefits and credits varies so substantially across states that very poor households have experienced both the largest and the smallest declines in total household income depending on state of residence. In closing, I stress that many of the programs that have done the most to mitigate earnings losses were either temporary (tax credits) or exhaustible (Unemployment Insurance, TANF) and are not structured to accommodate a prolonged employment crisis such as that we are currently experiencing. Given the dramatic erosion of labor force participation among low-income households and the exhaustibility of the programs that have expanded the most since 2007, I expect the capacity of current safety net programs to mitigate income losses to falter substantially and potentially disastrously in coming years.

We examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank failures exploiting the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period. Focusing on this historical event allows us to: (1) rule out the confounding effects of state implicit guarantees; (2) identify the causal relation using contiguous counties on the border of states with different regulation. Our main finding is that counties in free banking states experienced significantly more bank failures. We also provide evidence that the individual probability of failure of both incumbent and entering banks was significantly higher in free banking states. We argue that the destabilizing effect of free banking is consistent with the view that bank competition leads to more risk taking. Our results suggest that the introduction of free banking led to more bank entry and caused a significant drop in the market share of incumbent banks.

The economics literature has not reached consensus about how much (or even whether) immigration reduces wages among native-born workers. Area-based studies tend to find small if any effects. On the other hand, direct estimates of the elasticity of substitution between immigrant and native-born workers tend to be large, which implies large wage effects. In this paper, I show that elasticity of substitution estimates are upward-biased if native-born workers augment their human capital in the face of rising immigration. I then use the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) and U.S. Census data to show that low-skilled immigration induces natives to attain more years of schooling, improve their performance in school, and take jobs that involve communication-intensive tasks for which they (native English speakers) have a comparative advantage. My empirical findings imply that previous estimates of the elasticity of substitution are probably too high, which helps reconcile competing perspectives about immigrations effects on native-born workers wages.

When I first read Charles Murrays new book about white America coming apart at the seams, I was immediately reminded of two other recent volumes on that growing shelf of books about the breakdown of America society and the dire consequences of a nation rent with polarizing differences. The first was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.s, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991), a book about what its author saw as the increasing balkanization of a polity that seemed to be inexorably moving from its glory days of E Pluribus Unum to E Pluribus Plures. Schlesinger had highlighted the catalytic role of the rise of black power and the powerful influence of certain Afro-centrists, abetted by nave liberal allies, in instigating the whole process. The second was Samuel Huntingtons Who Are We?: The Challenge to Americas National Identity (2004)...