Historical GIS is a relatively new interdisciplinary field, which has been developing rapidly over the last 10 years. The main functional capabilities of GIS technologies which contributes to historical research are mapping; spatial analysis; building geodatabases, integrating, storing and managing various spatial and temporal information; visualization, etc. The purpose of the present work is to develop Historical GIS for the capital of Bulgaria - city of Sofia using GIS technologies, remote sensing and ground-based data. As a result of the study a geodatabase for conservation the cultural heritage and Historical GIS of the city for a period of a hundred years will be created. The historical GIS of Sofia is an innovative research for Bulgaria allowing the development of the urban environment to be analyzed. This research will popularize remote sensing and GIS technology as a tool for preservation and conservation of the cultural heritage in highly urbanized areas in Bulgaria.

Le premier recensement nominatif canadien du xixe siècle, celui de 1851-1852 pour le Canada- Est et le Canada-Ouest, représente une occasion unique de comprendre les comportements sociaux observés à cette époque. Cette analyse approfondie, axée sur un échantillon aléatoire de 20 %, relativise les critiques formulées à son encontre : les données provenant des manus- crits témoignent d’un dénombrement principalement (mais pas toujours) systématique. Relati- vement peu de recenseurs ont utilisé les marques « ditto » ou les totaux au lieu des marques unitaires par individu, peu également ont attribué plus d’un statut familial à chaque personne. Les membres des familles nucléaires, les parents du chef de ménage et les domestiques ont été classés, dans la plupart des cas, de façon uniforme d’un recenseur à l’autre. L’absence d’un tiers des manuscrits du recensement de 1852 pose un plus grand défi, mais notre échantillon est néanmoins représentatif de la population à l’échelle de la province en égard au sexe, à l’âge et à l’état matrimonial.

Virtually all research on the racial identification of multiracial individuals has used data from 1990 or later, yet multiracial individuals have existed since long before then. American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, for example, are small indigenous groups who have been forming interracial unions for many generations. These groups are among the people who are least likely to give exactly the same race response when asked their race(s) in different contexts or on different surveys. In this project, I focus on these groups as well as more commonly studied groups(e.g., whites, blacks, and Asians) to summarize how children of interracially married parents are racially labeled on Census forms and how that has changed between 1960 and 2010. To provide the most accurate estimates, I use dense restricted-use census data housed in the Census Research Data Centers. This research provides a rich background for the expansion of knowledge about multiracial identification to more types of people and to more historical contexts.

Efficient processing of top-k queries has drawn increasing attention from both industry and academia due to its varied applications. Lower access cost is a crucial concern for a top-k query processing. Typically, when answering a top-k query, there exist two types of accesses: sorted access and random access. In some scenarios, the latter is not supported by the data source. Fagin et al. proposed the No Random Access (NRA) algorithm (Fagin et al, J Comput Syst Sci 66:614656, 2003) for this situation. In this paper, we motivate our work by a key observation of the NRA algorithm: the number of accesses could be further reduced by selectively (instead of in parallel) performing sorted accesses to different lists of the dataset. Based on this insight, we propose a Selective NRA (SNRA) algorithm aiming to cut down the unnecessary access cost. Later, we optimize the SNRA algorithm in terms of runtime cost and present the SNRA-opt algorithm. Furthermore, we address the problem of instance optimality theoretically and turn SNRA (and SNRA-opt) into instance optimal algorithms, termed as Hybrid-SNRA (HSNRA) and HSNRA-opt. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithms perform significantly fewer sorted accesses than NRA (and its state-of-the-art variations). In terms of runtime cost, the proposed SNRA-opt and HSNRA-opt algorithms are two orders of magnitude faster than the NRA algorithm. In addition, we discuss the parameter selection problem of the SNRA algorithms, both theoretically and experimentally.

A number of studies report that U.S. state mortality rates, particularly for the elderly, decline during economic downturns. However, existing microdata evidence of how business cycle changes affect individual health and health behaviors is based largely on working-aged adults. We examine the relationship between unemployment and health in the age 65 and older population using the 1994-2008 Medicare Current Beneficiary Surveys. Overall, we find thatseniors report worse health and use more inpatient care when unemployment rates rise. These findings differ from most studies of the general adult population which often report that recessions improve physical health, reduce unhealthy behaviors, and if anything, reduce medical care use. This pattern either suggests that the elderly respond differently to recessions or that the relationship between unemployment and health has changed over time. Regarding the latter, we find new evidence that elderly mortality is countercyclical during most of the 1994 to 2008 period.

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramaticallynative white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of help to the formality of the domestic servant relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This dissertation considers two distinct issues in macroeconomics. The first and second chapters look at the effects of changes in tax policy on productivity of an economy from an empirical and theoretical stand point. The third chapter concerns the implications of cross-national migration for long-run growth and welfare. In the first chapter, I analyze the effects of tax policy changes on US total factor productivity (TFP). A substantial fraction of the income differences between countries can be explained by differences in TFP. Thus it is important to know the effects of policy changes on TFP. This is the first study that looks at the effect of changes in tax policy on TFP. Data on tax shocks comes from the sources used by Romer and Romer (2009). Empirical estimates show that a 1 percent permanent exogenous rise in total taxes lowers TFP by up to 1.75 percent in the long run. The drop in output associated with the increase in taxes is between 2 and 3 percent. Thus the change in TFP explains most of the movement in output that follows a tax change. Individual income taxes have a strong and significant effect on TFP whereas corporate income taxes do not significantly affect TFP or most other macroeconomic variables. The analysis also shows that the effects of tax changes on output and on observable inputs have become smaller over time while the effects on TFP and on wages have become larger over time. In the second chapter, I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to explain the dynamic macroeconomic effects of tax changes. The model has two key features: learning-by-doing at the worker level and endogenous TFP evolution whereby TFP growth depends on investment and human capital. When I calibrate the learning-by-doing and TFP evolution processes using micro evidence on the effect of human capital accumulation on productivity, the effect of taxes on TFP in the model is substantially less elastic than in the data. When I instead select parameters to match key aggregate moments, the estimated model is successful in accounting for the qualitative and quantitative nature of the empirical results. However, this requires stronger learning-by-doing than seems reasonable given the microeconomic evidence. I argue that the gap between the model and data may arise because some of the tax changes labeled as exogenous by Romer and Romer (2009) are in fact endogenous in which case the empirical results would overstate the true effects of tax changes on TFP. The difference between model and data may also arise because of the model not being rich enough. The model drives its components from both the business cycle and endogenous growth literature, thus the gap between model and data perhaps shows that the literature is not adequate in explaining observed patterns in the data. The third chapter characterizes the effect of the much-discussed "brain drain" - the migration of relatively skilled workers from less to more advanced economies - on long-run development in the workers' home nation. A summary of the model is as follows: I employ a life cycle model with two countries, one poor and one rich, with endogenous migration and return migration decisions from and to the poor country. Workers working in the poor country receive wage offers from the rich country and decide to migrate to the rich country if the wage offer and subsequent wage growth gives them a higher lifetime utility than from staying in the poor country. The workers who migrate to the rich country have higher wage and skill growth rates than the workers in poor. The central question of this chapter is to evaluate the costs and benefits of a policy where the government of the poor country incentivizes the expatriates to return from the rich country to the poor country to take advantage of their superior skills that they accumulate while working in the rich country. The direct benefit from calling back workers from the rich country is the increase in output of the poor country because of the higher skills of return migrants relative to domestic workers. The indirect benefit to the poor country is the increase in skill level of domestic workers because of the positive externalities from the returning workers. However, every worker that is called back to work in the poor country must also be given high enough compensation so that he is indifferent between working in the two countries. This is the cost of bringing a worker back. These costs and benefits determine 1) whether it is beneficial to call expatriates back or not, and 2) which workers benefit the country the most. Results show that the economy can gain the most by calling back workers with skill levels that are 1.28 standard deviations above the mean skill level of domestic workers. In the model, since skill is a combination of education and experience, this skill level in real life can either correspond to highly skilled young professionals or highly experienced professional or a combination of both. Calling back workers of lower skill levels will lower the gain since their experience in the rich country would not be high and hence the superior skill accumulation would be lower. Calling back workers of higher skill levels will lower the gain since the cost of calling them back would be too high.

Utilizing data on U.S.-born and Caribbean-born black women from the 19802000 U.S. Censuses and the 20002007 waves of the American Community Survey, I document the impact of cohort of arrival, tenure of U.S. residence, and country/region of birth on the earnings and earnings assimilation of black women born in the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. I also test whether selective migration accounts for earnings differences between U.S.-born and Caribbean-born black women in the United States. I show that almost all arrival cohorts of Caribbean women earn less than U.S.-born black women when they first arrive in the United States. However, over time the earnings of early arrival cohorts from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean are projected to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born black women. Indeed, this crossover is most pronounced for women from the English-speakingCaribbean. In models that account for selective migration by comparing the earnings of Caribbean women to U.S.-born black women who have moved across states since birth, I show that more time is required for early arrival cohorts from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean to surpass the earnings of U.S.-born black internal migrants. Women from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean do not seem to experience earnings growth as their tenure of U.S. residence increases. In summary, the findings suggestthat selective migration is an important determinant of earnings differences between U.S.-born black women and black women from the Caribbean.

A number of studies report that U.S. state mortality rates, particularly for the elderly, decline during economic downturns. Further, several prior studies use microdata to show that as state unemployment rates rise, physical health improves, unhealthy behaviors decrease, and medical care use declines. We use data on elderly mortality rates and data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey from a time period that encompasses the start of the Great Recession. We find that elderly mortality is countercyclical during most of the 19942008 period. Further, as unemployment rates rise, seniors report worse mental health and are no more likely to engage in healthier behaviors. We find suggestive evidence that inpatient utilization increases perhaps because of an increased physician willingness to accept Medicare patients. Our findings suggest that either elderly individuals respond differently to recessions than do working age adults, or that the relationship between unemployment and health has changed.

In The long-term maintenance of electronic health records within their original context of information is an ethical requirement that conflicts with the constant need to migrate the information into new systems as they are developed and improved. The specifics of every particular healthcare setting preclude the feasibility of a monolithic health record, and the achievement of interoperability between systems is the primary challenge faced by health informatics researchers. Different multilevel modeling approaches have been studied to deal with this complexity. Nevertheless, the original multilevel modeling specifications are targeted to the development of hospital-based electronic medical records, which adds complexity to the development of simpler purpose- specific applications for extra-hospital healthcare situations. This paper presents the knowledge engineering of a minimalist multilevel model that can be implemented by developers across the broader spectrum of healthcare applications. By using industry standard technologies, this approach enables the wider adoption of interoperable technology for healthcare.

El objetivo primordial es estudiar la confluencia de normas de varios orígenes y su consideración para definir la norma hispana de los EUA. Se arranca de una exposición de trabajos previos del autor que justifican su intervención. Sigue la referencia a la periodización histórica para indicar que se retoma a partir de las dificultades indicadas para la última etapa definida y las posibles posteriores. La construcción de una tabla cronológica en la que se vayan colocando los distintos momentos de hispanización por los diversos grupos inmigrantes dirige hacia la descripción de los fenómenos lingüísticos convergentes y divergentes para su caracterización geográfica y social y termina con la valoración de convergencias y divergencias para el establecimiento de la norma. This paper proposes the foundations for the establishment of a norm of the Spanish linguistic variety of the United States. The author justifies his participation with an analysis of his previous studies. A historical reference to periodization follows. Difficulties for the characterization of a contemporary periodization are also presented. A chronological table of the immigrant waves and their distribution drives towards the description of linguistic phenomena. Those phenomena are divided according either to their convergence into the mainstream of Spanish or the presence of discrepancies originated in areal varieties.

This dissertation consists of three essays on issues associated with labor market regulations and the criminal justice system. The first chapter seeks to examine occupational licensing regulations and the native-immigrant wage gap, while the second and third essays examine the effects of an increase in the incidence of adult incarceration on children’s short and long term outcomes in the United States. The first essay, co-authored with Dr. Hugh Cassidy, examines the incidence and impact of occupational licensing on immigrants using two sources of data: the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that immigrants are much less likely to have a license than similar natives, and that this gap is largest for non-naturalized immigrants, men, and for workers with the highest level of educational attainment. While, a lack of English proficiency reduces the probability of an immigrant having a license, the licensing rate increases with years since migration, and shows large variations by immigrant region of origin. The wage premiums to having a license are much larger for women than men, but seem to be the same for natives and immigrants after controlling for English language ability. In the second essay co-authored with Dr. Amanda Gaulke, we utilize quasi-experimental methods to provide causal estimates of the intergenerational impact of mass imprisonment. Which parents are sent to prison is not random, and many of the same factors that predict adult imprisonment also predict children’s outcome. To minimize bias, we use variation in the timing and implementation of ‘Three Strikes and You’re Out’ laws to identify the effect of exposure to adult imprisonment on children’s long term outcomes. Using the American Community Survey and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the long-run effects, we show that Three Strikes laws impact male children but not female children. Specifically, Black males are less likely to be employed, but among Black males who enroll in college there is no significant decrease in employment and there is an increase in annual earnings. We show sentence length matters which complements the literature on whether parents are incarcerated matters. In the third essay, I assess whether the association between paternal incarceration and children’s outcomes varies with age at exposure and gender by comparing children who were 0-18 years when their biological father or father figure entered jail or prison. I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to estimate the association. The results confirm existing research by providing additional evidence that children in the United States are adversely affected by paternal incarceration, but they also show that the adverse outcomes identified are mainly associated with children exposed during early and late childhood. In particular, I find that children exposed during early childhood, primarily before age six, perform poorly in high school relative to those never exposed. Those separated from their father at an early age due to incarceration (mainly boys) earn less income when compared with boys never exposed. Children exposed during late childhood are also negatively affected by paternal incarceration. Notably, females exposed during late childhood are less likely to complete college, and receive lower income relative to females never exposed.

This dissertation is a compilation of three essays related with investigation of the impact of risk preference on occupational choice, health and happiness. The motivation behind my work are two fundamental questions what are human beings aiming at (on an average) in their lives and whether our life outcomes are affected by our preferences or not. Recent surveys/studies find that people are looking for simple things in life like - health, wealth and happiness.1 To answer the second question this dissertation investigates the impact of risk preference on health, wealth and happiness. I adopt a holistic approach towards risk attitude/preference by studying its impact in financial front as well as in health and happiness front. Given heterogeneous risk and time preferences of individuals, this dissertation investigates the impact of those preferences on sorting into occupations on one front and heterogeneity in health state dependence of utility (using happiness as the utility proxy) on the other front. Contingent upon the results of existence of racial-ethnic and gender heterogeneity in health dependence of utility, this dissertation identifies the contribution of observed factors behind the heterogeneity using nonlinear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition.

The fraction of U.S. college graduate women who ever marry has increased relative to less educated women since the mid-1970s. In contrast, college graduate women in developed Asian countries have had decreased rates of marriage, so much so that the term Gold Misses has been coined to describe them. This paper argues that the interaction of rapid economic growth in Asia combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes causes the Gold Miss phenomenon. Economic growth has increased the supply of college graduate women, but mens preference for their wives household services has diminished less rapidly and is slowed by womens role in their mothers generation. Using a dynamic model, I show that a large positive wage shock produces a greater mismatch between educated women and men in the marriage market than would gradual wage growth. I test the implications of the model using three data sets: the Japanese General Social Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. Using the Japanese data, I find a positive relationship between a mothers education (and employment) and her sons gender attitudes. In the U.S., time spent on household chores among Asian women is inversely related to the female labor force participation rate in husbands country of origin. Lastly, college graduate Korean and Japanese women in the U.S. have greater options in the marriage market. They are more likely to marry Americans than Korean and Japanese men do, and this gender gap is larger among the foreign born than the U.S. born.

This dissertation integrates the civic community perspective and structuralist and individualist perspectives of poverty to assess the relationships between civic community structures and family poverty outcomes. The key contribution of this project to the larger bodies of civic community and poverty research is the use of a multilevel framework that accounts for both community context and family characteristics in shaping family poverty outcomes. This objective is carried out through a series of multilevel analyses wherein religious and economic civic community structures are examined in relation to various conceptualizations of family-level poverty.The first analysis examines the associations between religious-based measures of civic community and family poverty experiences. Results indicate that the ecological context of religion within places is significant in understanding the poverty experiences of families. Specifically, multilevel models demonstrate the negative effect of Mainline Protestant and Catholic adherents on family poverty. Conversely, it is shown that Mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations have a positive effect on family poverty.The second analysis examines the influence of economic-based measures of civic community on family poverty outcomes. Results indicate that the economic climate of places is significant in understanding the poverty experiences of families. Specifically, multilevel regressions demonstrate negative relationships between small business establishments and family poverty outcomes. Conversely, regression results show that self-employed business persons share positive relationships with family poverty outcomes. Supplementary analyses highlight the significant moderating effect of aggregate socioeconomic status on the relationships between economic climate measures and specific family poverty outcomes.viThe third and final analysis combines both religious and economic indicators of civic community in the examination of family poverty outcomes. Results indicate that the presence of civic community structures within places is significantly related to family poverty. Specifically, multilevel regressions demonstrate that Mainline Protestant adherents and small business establishments are associated with less family poverty. However, Mainline Protestant congregations and economically independent business persons are associated with more family poverty. Again, additional analyses highlight significant interaction effects between aggregate socioeconomic status and economic climate measures on specific family poverty outcomes.

This study is the first to explore the relationship between cohabitation and U.S. adult mortality using a nationally representative sample. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey-Longitudinal Mortality Follow-up files 19972004 (N=193,851), the authors found that divorced, widowed, and never-married White men had higher mortality rates than cohabiting White men, and never-married Black men had higher mortality rates than cohabiting Black men. In contrast, the mortality rates of nonmarried White and Black women were not different from those of their cohabiting counterparts.The results also revealed that mortality rates of married White men and women were lower than their cohabiting counterparts and that these mortality differences tended to decrease with age. The authors found no significant mortality differences when they compared married Black men or women to their cohabiting counterparts. The identified mortality differences were partiallybut not fullyexplained by income, psychological, or health behavior differences across groups.

Migration and its e ects on both migrants and non-migrants has been a focus of social, demographic, and economic research in both developed and developing countries. A major problem faced by all researchers studying the effects of migration is the tendency of migrants to differ from non-migrants on many important characteristics. This paper employs an instrumental variables strategy and a unique source of data to estimate the causal impact of long-distance migration on mortality over age 65. To do so, we consider individuals born in the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana over the period 1916-1927. This group migrated out of these three rural states at a very high rate, and the vast majority migrated out of the area before the age of 40. We show that migrants have systematically higher education and earnings than non-migrants, two characteristics shown in the literature to increase longevity. To control for the selection on these characteristics as well as other, unobserved ones, we instrument for migration using distance of an individual's place of birth from a railroad line. Our results show that given that one has reached age 65, migrating out of these three states reduces the probability of living to age 75 by 16% compared to those who remain in their area of origin. This finding directly conflicts with the "healthy migrant" hypothesis proposed in the literature, and has implications for countries currently experiencing high internal migration as well as for research investigating the causal relationship between education and health.