Some loss in memory is considered a part of normal aging; however, there is a considerable heterogeneity in cognitive aging among older adults. Studies show that living arrangements, social interaction, social relationships and size of social network are among the predictors of memory decline for older adults. Moreover, marriage has been associated with physiological health as well as psychological and social well-being. This study has examined the relationship between the marital status and memory performance in older adults. It was hypothesized that (1) being married will be positively related to memory of older adults; (2) participants with larger supportive social network will perform better on memory tests; and (3) that quality of married life will be positively related to memory for married older adults. Results from this study did not support the hypotheses when age was controlled suggesting no relationship between marital status and memory performance.

Much of the research on the economic integration of immigrants centers on educational and occupational mobility from the first through third generation. Although intermarriage is a key component of both old (Gordon 1964) and new (Alba and Nee 2003) perspectives on immigrant assimilation, the role of intermarriage in the economic integration of immigrants remains poorly understood. As the population of immigrants and children of immigrants has increased in the past few decades, the increasing availability of marital partners with the same national origin has led to an increase in endogamous marriages in the second generation. What are the implications of the decline in intermarriage for the economic outcomes of the second generation of post-1960s immigrants? We use pooled cross-sectional data from the IPUMS-CPS 1996-2010 to investigate the relationship between assortative mating by national origins and the economic well-being of adult children of immigrants. We find that (1) children of immigrants who partner with members of the same national-origin group have lower income and living standards relative to those who intermarry; (2) children of immigrants who partner with a native-born spouse or cohabiting partner are not economically advantaged as compared to those who partner exogamously with first and second generation immigrants; and (3) the economic gains from intermarriage depend on the race and ethnicity of both partners, with Asian immigrants the only group to show no effect of assortative mating.

Investigations of socioeconomic assimilation among immigrant and ethnic minority groups are often limited to analyses of labor market outcomes only. This study investigates the relationship between self-employment, as one overlooked indicator of socioeconomic integration, and segmented assimilation. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 census data this research examines how length of residence in the US and nativity affect ethnic minority group differences in: 1) self-employment trends as a percentage of all men and women; 2) changes in these percentages from 1980 to 2000; and, 3) the odds of being self-employed compared with US-born non-Hispanic Whites. Drawing from segmented assimilation theory, findings demonstrate a mainstream assimilation trajectory as measured by self-employment participation for most ethnic minority groups, although there is some evidence that Filipino men may follow a downward assimilation trajectory. The delayed assimilation hypothesis associated with the “ethnic entrepreneurship” paradigm is not supported. Findings also reveal differences in self-employment participation by gender; however, women’s segmented assimilation trajectories are not markedly different from that of men with one exception: foreign-born Filipinas demonstrate mainstream assimilation. Evidence presented in this study encourages the use of self-employment as one aspect of socioeconomic assimilation.

Byggingen av Historisk befolkningsregister (HBR) er nå i full sving, i første omgang for perioden 1801 til 1815. Målsettingen er både å rekonstituere Norges befolkning i dagene rundt 17. mai 1814 og å konstruere en nominativ folketelling for å supplere den statistiske folketellinga fra 30. april 1815. Ved ferdigstillingen til grunnlovsjubileet i 2014 blir dette verdens første allment tilgjengelige og landsdekkende befolkningsregister og dekker perioden 1801– 1815.4 Dette delprosjektet har fått navnet «Det norske folk i 1814» (DNF1814), og initiativet er tatt av Riksarkivaren og realiseres av representanter for Arkivverket, Registreringssentral for historiske data ved Universitetet i Tromsø, Norsk Regnesentral, DIS-Norge og andre frivillige. DNF1814-prosjektet utgjør kun en mindre del av den åpne delen av HBR.5 HBR tar nemlig mål av seg til å dekke hele den norske befolkningen fram til rundt 1930, og i dette større prosjektet vil også flere partnere delta. At Norge kan ligge langt framme på dette feltet, skyldes at vi sammen med de andre nordiske landene har fullstendige kirkebøker som fyller hullene mellom folketellingene.6 Det planlegges også en lukket del som knytter an til Det sentrale folkeregister (DSF) som ble opprettet i 1964.7 HBR skal knytte samme all åpen historisk person- og stedsinformasjon om personer i Norge. Det skal bygges hovedsakelig på kirkebøker og folketellinger, og vil etter hvert også inkludere annen informasjon som emigrantlister, skiftebøker, fengselsprotokoller og gravminner. Det skal knyttes sammen informasjon om samme person som forekommer i flere kilder og opplysninger om bosteder. Dette er en enorm oppgave som aldri vil bli fullendt. Perioden fra 1735 til 1964 inneholder 9,7 millioner personer og 37,5 millioner kildehendelser i folketellinger, kirkebøker og andre kilder.8 HBR kan nettopp oppfattes som et register til alle disse kildene fordi det gir en samlet oversikt over samme person og familie fra flere kilder og ulike bosetninger.

Unemployment Insurance (UI) is the major social insurance program that protects against lost earnings resulting from involuntary unemployment. Existing literature finds that low-earning unemployed workers experience difficulty accessing UI benefits. The most prominent policy reform designed to increase rates of monetary eligibility, and thus UI receipt, among these unemployed workers is the Alternative Base Period (ABP). In 2009 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sought to increase use of the ABP, making ABP adoption a necessary precondition for states to receive their share of the $7 billion targeted at UI programs. By June 2012, 40 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the ABP despite the absence of an evaluation of ABP efficacy using nationally representative data. This paper analyzes Current Population Survey data from 1987-2007 to assess the efficacy of the ABP in increasing UI receipt among low-educated unemployed workers. We use a natural-experiment design and logistic regression models to capture the combined behavioral and mechanical effects of the policy change. We find no association between state-level ABP adoption and individual UI receipt for all unemployed workers. However, among part-time unemployed workers with less than a high-school degree, adoption of the ABP is associated with a 3.4 percentage point increase in the probability of UI receipt.

We use data on US newspapers from the early 20th century to study the economic incentives that shape ideological diversity in the media. We show that households prefer like-minded news, and that newspapers seek both to cater to household tastes and to differentiate from their competitors. We estimate a model of newspaper demand, entry and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We find that economic competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that incorporating the two-sidedness of the news market is critical to evaluating the effect of public policy.

This paper studies the long run spatial development of U.S. counties and metro areas between 1800 and 2000. The well-documented orthogonality between population growth and initial population size - Gibrat's law - emerges only in the late 20th century. Prior to that, there was strong convergence at low population levels, and moderate divergence at high population levels. Convergence arose primarily from the entry of new counties, whereas divergence may have arisen from a decreasing importance of land or an increasing importance of agglomeration economies. Over time, both convergence and divergence greatly attenuate, but even as late as 1980-2000, Gibrat's law can be rejected for the subset of counties and metro areas that entered the system of U.S. locations at a relatively late date. A simple one-sector model successfully approximates these dynamics. Locations differ by their TFP and the date at which they enter the system of locations. Upon entry, a growth friction slows the transition of locations to their steady-state population, thereby inducing convergence. Concurrently, land's factor income share is assumed to decrease over time; equivalently, the elasticity of local TFP with respect population is assumed to increase over time. This lessens the model's only source of congestion thereby inducing divergence. As the system approaches its steady state, population growth becomes increasingly orthogonal to population. Gibrat's law thus emerges as a consequence of attaining a steady state rather than a cause of it.

Areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters. Exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration (i.e., self-protection) or through public infrastructure investment (e.g., building seawalls). Using migration data from the 1920s and 1930s, this paper studies how the population responded to disaster shocks in an era of minimal public investment. We find that, on net, young men move away from areas hit by tornados but are attracted to areas experiencing floods. Early efforts to protect against future flooding, especially during the New Deal era of the late 1930s, may have counteracted an individual migration response.

Previous research on migration and gendered career outcomes centers on couples and rarely examines the reason for the move. The implicit assumption is usually that households migrate in response to job opportunities. Based on a two-year panel from the Current Population Survey, this article uses stated reasons for geographic mobility to compare earnings outcomes among job migrants, familymigrants, and quality-of-life migrants by gender and family status. We further assess the impact of migration on couples internal household economy. The effects of job-related moves that we find are reduced substantially in the fixed-effects models, indicating strong selection effects. Married women who moved for family reasons experience significant and substantial earnings declines. Consistent with conventional models of migration, we find that household earnings and income and gender specialization increase following job migration. Married women who are secondary earners have increased odds of reducing their labor supply following migration for job or family reasons. However, we also find that migrating women who contributed as equals to the household economy before the move are no more likely than non-migrant women to exit work or to work part-time. Equal breadwinner status mayprotect women from becoming tied movers.

This study uses data from the 2002 Rwandan census to situate the discourse on migration and orphan well-being within the context of the household. According to its findings, migrant orphans are less likely than non-migrant orphans to live in households with less favorable structural characteristics such as single-parent households. Significant differences are also found in the implied gains to living standards and schooling associated with migration among paternal, maternal, and double-orphans. However, the higher living standards and schooling attainment of orphan migrants relative to their non-migrant counterparts disappear within child-headed household contexts. More generally, the results indicate that the higher living standards of migrant orphans are in part driven by the fact that they mostly live in households with migrant householdheads or migrant spouses. Yet the analysis also suggests that orphans living within these contexts experience higher levels of intra-household discrimination in investments in their schooling, relative to their orphan counterparts who live in non-migrant households.

This document focuses on how best to relate Resource Description Framework (RDF)-described datasets to other related resources and objects (publications, geographies, organizations, people, etc.) in the Semantic Web. This includes a description of what would be needed to make these types of relationships most useful, including which RDF vocabularies should be used, potential link predicates, and possible data sources. RDF provides a good model for describing social science data because it supports formal semantics that provide a dependable basis for reasoning about the meaning of an RDF expression. In particular, it supports defined notions of entailment which provide a basis for defining reliable rules of inference in RDF data1. Our findings are discussed in the context of social science data and more specifically, how to leverage existing metadata models to use alongside linked data. We provide a case for leveraging the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to enable semantic linking of social science data to other data and related resources on the Web. This document is organized into five use cases, which we consider in turn. Use cases include: linking related publications to data, linking data about people and organizations to research data, linking geography, linking to related studies, and linking data to licenses. We briefly discuss emerging or known issues surrounding the potential use of linked data within each of the defined use cases. Following these, we list more topics that could develop into additional use cases. Appendix A lists elements from the DDICodebook and DDI-Lifecycle specifications that are relevant to each use case.

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market.

This paper presents a simple model that examines the impact of offshoring and immigration on wages and tests these predictions using U.S. state-industry-year panel data. According to the model, the productivity effect causes offshoring to have a more positive impact on low-skilled wages than immigration, but this gap decreases with the workers skill level. The empirical results confirm both of these predictions and thus present direct evidence of the productivity effect. Furthermore, the results provide important insight into how specific components of offshoring and immigration affect the wages of particular types of native workers.

Studies have examined how individual risk factors affect unmet health needs, but few have assessed how factors combine to create compounded risk. Using administrative and survey data from 1,897 publicly insured individuals in Minnesota, this study examines how diagnosed depression—a condition with established functional morbidity—moderates the association between seven common access barriers (e.g., transportation problems, lack of child care, clinic hours) and self-reported unmet health needs. Depression and access barriers were independently, positively associated with unmet need. Depression moderated barriers’ effects: Number of barriers reported had a stronger association with unmet need for individuals with depression. Depressed individuals reporting all barriers had a 70 percent chance of unmet need. Subgroup differences for individual barriers suggest that depressed individuals’ utilization patterns and functional limitations may shape their reactions to access barriers. Findings may inform improvements in public benefit designs and target the unique vulnerabilities associated with depression.

Children of immigrants have received increasing attention in recent years because first and secondgeneration children of immigrant families are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. This paper addresses the relationship between child access to and use of health services, and perceived health, and parental nativity after controlling for enabling, predisposing and need variables discussed in the literature. Even though socioeconomic variability and background cannot entirely explain health differences across children, it is important to know the intergenerational effects of health inequalities among different groups. Using data from from the Integrated Health Interview Series from 2000 to 2009, I analyze the hypothesis that children of immigrants would perpetuate their parents’ health outcomes compared to children of natives by having lower health service utilization and lacking a usual place of care. Therefore, the issue on children of immigrant families health outcomes is not only one of access to care but also of how to actively incorporate these groups of parents into the health system so their kids would have better outcomes. Targeting the question of nativity would allow me to evaluate this matching outcomes almost completely ignored by the health and immigration literature.

Unemployment Insurance (UI) is the major social insurance program that protects against lost earnings resulting from involuntary unemployment. Existing literature finds that low-earning unemployed workers experience difficulty accessing UI benefits. The most prominent policy reform designed to increase rates of monetary eligibility, and thus UI receipt, among these unemployed workers is the Alternative Base Period (ABP). In 2009 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sought to increase use of the ABP, making ABP adoption a necessary precondition for states to receive their share of the $7 billion targeted at UI programs. By June 2012, 40 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the ABP despite the absence of an evaluation of ABP efficacy using nationally representative data. This paper analyzes Current Population Survey data from 1987-2007 to assess the efficacy of the ABP in increasing UI receipt among low-educated unemployed workers. We use a natural-experiment design and logistic regression models to capture the combined behavioral and mechanical effects of the policy change. We find no association between state-level ABP adoption and individual UI receipt for all unemployed workers. However, among part-time unemployed workers with less than a high-school degree, adoption of the ABP is associated with a 3.4 percentage point increase in the probability of UI receipt.

The investigation of labor market discrimination against native born Asian American men is an important case in contemporary racial and ethnic relations. While some scholars have recently argued that this demographic group has achieved approximate labor market parity with white men, our analysis provides detailed empirical evidence that is more directly relevant to prior theoretical discussions of the Model Minority Myth and the Glass Ceiling. Previous research focuses on racial differentials in conditional means, but the more theoretically relevant parameters refer to racial differentials at the tails of the earnings distributions. Using pooled data from the 2000 Census and the American Community Survey, we specify quantile regression models that estimate the net racial effects at both the lower and the higher ends of the distribution of earnings differentials. At the national level, estimates from quantile regressions provide considerable support for the Model Minority Myth and Glass Ceiling hypotheses but lead to the rejection of the alternative explanation about negative educational selectivity. Conclusions about the full labor market parity of Asian American men relative to white men may thus be premature when using national-level data.

This presentation will demonstrate the latest DDI-related technological developments of Cornell Universitys $3 million NSF-Census Research Network (NCRN) award, dedicated to improving the documentation, discoverability, and accessibility of public and restricted data from the federal statistical system in the United States. The current internal name for our DDI-based system is the Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository (CEDAR). CEDAR ingests metadata from heterogeneous sources and supports filtered synchronization between restricted and public metadata holdings. Currently-supported CEDAR connector workflows include mechanisms to ingest IPUMS, zero-observation files from the American Community Survey (DDI 2.1), and SIPP Synthetic Beta (DDI 1.2). These disparate metadata sources are all transformed into a DDI 2.5 compliant form and stored in a single repository. In addition, we will demonstrate an extension to DDI 2.5 that allows for the labeling of elements within the schema to indicate confidentiality. This metadata can then be filtered, allowing the creation of derived public use metadata from an original confidential source. This repository is currently searchable online through a prototype application demonstrating the ability to search across previously heterogeneous metadata sources.

Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations—vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state—reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged and insecure represent two distinct groups, popular support is broader and opinion less polarized. We test these predictions both across nations within a single policy area (unemployment insurance) and across policy domains within a single polity (the United States, using a new survey). Results are consistent with our predictions and are robust to myriad controls and specifications. When disadvantage and insecurity are more correlated, the welfare state is more contested.