Contingent workers are a large and increasingly important segment of the US labour force. This paper uses the Contingent Work Supplement of the Current Population Survey to gain some understanding of this workforce and to link that information to larger on-going annual and decennial surveys for sub-national-level estimation and analysis. A typology is developed of the non-standard workforce based on their work arrangement and the industries in which they concentrate; with four types of worker: contingent core, standard workers in contingent industries, non-standard workers in traditional industries, and traditional workers. The state of Georgia is used as an example of a regional economy that has experienced much economic growth in recent years and possibly a surge in contingent workforce as well. Characterising these workers by demographic and economic characteristics demonstrates much diversity across these four groups. Possible policy implications on employment quality and economic development are also...

Our study provides a national portrait of the Baby Boom generation, paying particular attention to the heterogeneity among unmarried Boomers and whether it operates similarly among women versus men.

Evidence points to a significant and persistent wage gap between whites and blacks in the U.S. This gap could be attributed to discrimination, but it can also be driven by systematic differences in human capital that are correlated with race. An important determinant of human capital is family background. This paper disentangles discrimination from family background by comparing siblings who were coded by census enumerators asmore or less black. We locate brothers in households that in 1910 had some sons coded as Black while others as Mulatto and we link them to the 1930 census. We then assess the extent to which brothers differ on educational outcomes in childhood and economic outcomes in adulthood. We find that outcome differences between brothers are much smaller than those between Mulattoes and Blacks selected randomly from the population. Still, darker-skinned brothers are less likely to attend school in early childhood and are also less likely to be literate. Overall, our findings suggest that systematic differences in family background account for most of the educational and economic gaps observed in the population.

I propose that the distribution of housing prices within cities may result from the persistence of initial advantage from the time of settlement. I identify locations endowed with poor natural drainage, a disamenity before the installation of sewer pipes, and evaluate their influence on the rental price of housing in New York City near the time of settlement and again in 1940. I find that early aversion to historical marshes not only persists, but grows over time despite the introduction of water and sewer pipes that should have eliminated the initial disadvantage of marsh locations. This suggests that that initial conditions can set the long-run path of housing prices. I find that entrenchment mechanisms including the durability of structures, entrenchment of manufacturers, and segregation cannot fully account for the persistence. Similar initial conditions may help explain the distribution of housing prices in other cities.

Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Furthermore, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen dramatically. We develop a simple theory of household size where living with others is beneficial solely because the costs of household public goods can be shared. In other words, we abstract from intrafamily relations and focus on households as collections of roommates. The model's mechanism is that rising income leads to a falling expenditure share on household public goods, which endogenously makes household formation less beneficial and privacy more attractive. To assess the magnitude of this mechanism, we first calibrate the model to match the relationship between household size, consumption patterns, and income in the cross section at the end of the 20th century. We then project the model back to 1850 by changing income. We find that our proposed mechanism can account for 37 percent of the decline in the number of adults in a household between 1850 and 2000, and for 16 percent of the decline in the number of children.

Predicting the future can be risky business, but demographics tell us there is one irrefutable element in Arizona’s future – the disproportionate growth in young Latino citizens. Latinos constitute Arizona’s most rapidly growing ethnicity and could represent more than 50 percent of Arizona’s population by mid-century. The ramifications will be profound, with major impacts to be felt in the healthcare industries, at all levels of education, the workforce population and in state budgeting – just to cite a few. But perhaps the most important and far-reaching shift will be a change in statewide voting patterns and elections. Presently, Arizona politics and government are dominated by a Republican majority that is supported and elected, primarily, by Arizona’s aging white population. Research shows Latinos are unlikely to vote Republican and much more likely to support Democratic and Independent candidates. As a result, as their numbers grow much larger in proportion to other ethnic groups, Latinos’ impact on electing officials more to their political favor also will grow. That means that, over time, Arizona is likely to see more and more Democratic and Independent candidates elected to office, as well as perhaps more moderate Republicans. The demographics are undeniable: Unless there is an unforeseeable sea change in Latino voting patterns, Arizona is destined to become a much less Republican-dominated state, perhaps even changing from red to blue in the coming decades. The change will be slow – the full impact won’t be felt for another 20 or 30 years – but incremental and noticeable, as our state’s political face is changed irrevocably by Arizona’s emerging Latino vote.

Using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations Uniform Crime Report program and differences in the timing of the reforms introduction, we find that unilateral divorce caused an increase in violent crime rates of approximately 9% during the period 196596. When we use age at the time of the reform as an additional source of variation, our findings suggest that young adult cohorts,who were children at the time of the reform, were particularly affected. Finally, we show evidence that a potential channel behind our findings is an increase in poverty and inequality among mothers who were surprised by the reform.

Purpose. Our study documents how the divorce rate among persons aged 50 and older has changed between 1990 and 2010 and identifies the sociodemographic correlates of divorce among todays middle-aged and older adults.Design and Method. We used data from the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to examine the change in the divorce rate over time. ACS data were analyzed to determine the sociodemographic correlates of divorce.Results. The divorce rate among adults aged 50 and older doubled between 1990 and 2010. Roughly 1 in 4 divorces in 2010 occurred to persons aged 50 and older. Demographic characteristics, economic resources, and the marital biography were associated with the risk of divorce in 2010. The rate of divorce was 2.5 times higher for those in remarriages versus first marriages, whereas the divorce rate declined as marital duration rose.Implications. The traditional focus of gerontological research on widowhood must be expanded to include divorce as another form of marital dissolution. Over 600,000 people aged 50 and older got divorced in 2010 but little is known about the predictors and consequences of divorces that occur during middle and later life.

Over 35 years ago, Barbara Bergmann (1971) hypothesized that labor market discrimination against black males is manifest in a "crowding" effect, which results in lower earnings. White employers' refusal to hire blacks in certain occupations forces them to cluster and creates crowding in less desirable jobs, reinforcing a condition of lower earnings. Bergmann provided empirical evidence of this crowding phenomenon by reporting the disproportionate presence of black male workers in several low-skilled occupations relative to what would be expected based on educational attainment and population share. In this chapter we provide an update and extension of black male occupational crowding using a more extensive list of occupations that is not limited to low-skilled work based on the 2000 decennial census. Data are examined to determine whether the crowding phenomenon is still evident in the post-Civil Rights labor market. In addition, a correlation analysis is performed to test for a relationship between occupational crowding and earnings.

A November 2011 Heritage Foundation report-"Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers"-presented data on teacher salaries and benefits in order to inform debates about teacher compensation reform. The report concluded that public-school teacher compensation is far ahead of what comparable private-sector workers enjoy, and that recruiting more effective teachers will be more difficult than simply raising salaries. The debate over the report's findings has generated substantive inquiries as well as some misconceptions. Here, the report' s authors respond to questions and concerns, in the process showing that certain critical accusations-such as undercounting teachers' work hours or overestimating retirement benefits-are simply false. The broader implication of the authors' research is that the current teacher compensation system is not working. The United States needs a more rational system that pays teachers according to their performance. Our recent report, "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers," 1 concluded that, on average , public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries. The report has drawn considerable attention from media outlets, policymakers, and teacher advocates. Several scholars welcomed our report as a valuable

In a previous op-ed on Albany Patch, I referred to Albanys color line running along San Pablo Avenue, and I suggested that perceived disamenities, like cell towers and (the never approved) medical marijuana dispensaries, tend to be located there and not in the more affluent predominantly white neighborhoods to the east...

The impact of economic growth on poverty varies greatly across regions and over time. In this paper, we use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and a to-two-point-in-time decomposition proposed by Datt and Ravallion (1992) and Kraay (2006) to assess the extent of the impacts of income growth and income distribution on poverty in each state in the United States. This study finds that between 1992 and 2011, the growth component was the major source of poverty reduction across U.S. states. This result is not sensitive to the measure of poverty (Headcount, Poverty Gap, or Squared Poverty Gap). Regression analysis shows that U.S. states with a larger share of its population with higher education have experienced larger changes in headcount poverty due to income growth rather than changes in income distribution. Export orientation is also found to positively affect the growth component.

Workers change occupation and industry less often in more densely populated areas, a relationship that had not been previously reported. This reduced-form result is robust to standard demographic controls, as well as to including aggregate measures of human capital and sectoral mix. Analysis of displaced worker Surveys shows that this relationship is present in cases of involuntary separation as well. In contrast, we actually find the opposite result (higher rates of occupational and industrial switching) for the subsample of younger workers. These results provide evidence consistent with increasing-returns-to-scale matching in labor markets. Results from a back-of-the-envelope calibration suggest that this mechanism has an important role in raising both wages and returns to experience in denser areas.

The Immigrant Access to Health and Human Services project maps and describes the legal and policy contexts that govern and affect immigrant access to health and human services. Through a synthesis of existing information, supplemented by in-depth visits to purposively selected sites, the study aims to identify and describe federal, state, and local program eligibility provisions related to immigrants, major barriers (such as language and family structure) to immigrants access to health and human services for which they are legally eligible, and innovative or promising practices that can help states manage their programs.

Contemporary race and immigration scholars often rely on historical analogies to help them analyze America’s current and future color lines. If European immigrants became white, they claim, perhaps today’s immigrants can as well. But too often these scholars ignore ongoing debates in the historical literature about America’s past racial boundaries. Meanwhile, the historical literature is itself needlessly muddled. In order to address these problems, the authors borrow concepts from the social science literature on boundaries to systematically compare the experiences of blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern Europeans (SEEs) in the first half of the 20th century. Their findings challenge whiteness historiography; caution against making broad claims about the reinvention, blurring, or shifting of America’s color lines; and suggest that the Mexican story might have more to teach us about these current and future lines than the SEE one.

In this paper, I study long-run population changes across U.S. metropolitan areas. First, I argue that changes over a long period of time in the geographic distribution of population can be informative about the so-called "resilience" of regions. Using the censuses of population from 1790 to 2010, I find that persistent declines, lasting two decades or more, are somewhat rare among metropolitan areas in U.S. history, though more common recently. Incorporating data on historical factors, I find that metropolitan areas that have experienced extended periods of weak population growth tend to be smaller in population, less industrially diverse, and less educated. These historical correlations inform the construction of a regional resilience index.

It may be thought that the comparison is suggested by situation: both Taiwan and Ireland are small islands adjacent to powerful neighbours with whom they have had complex histories. In both locations we can see histories, politics, and cultures marked by contested subjectivities and identities, as well as struggles over democracy and human rights. A focus on the human situation in both places invites the application of discursive categories such as colonialism and postcolonialism; globalization and localization; and nationalism and hybridity. It also allows explorations of the goals, problems, and limits of sovereignty and independence in the context of sub-ethnic and religious divisions, as well as of the complex relations with a nearby metropolitan Other and of diaspora experiences in the era of post-national globalization. At the same time both contexts challenge the straightforward appropriation of such categories and demand their sophisticated reworking. However, Ireland and Taiwan are neither internally homogeneous, nor are they similar to each other. Indeed, they are strikingly distinctive in their political, institutional, and intellectual histories. The romance of comparison sits in tension with the difficulty of finding a secure and satisfactory place from which to make it.

In multivariate categorical data, models based on conditional independence assumptions, such as latent class models, o er efficient estimation of complex dependencies. However, Bayesian versions of latent structure models for categorical data typically do not appropriately handle impossible combinations of variables, also known as structural zeros. Allowing non-zero probability for impossible combinations results in biased estimation of joint and conditional probabilities, even for feasible combinations. We present an approach for estimating posterior distributions in Bayesian latent structuremodels with potentially many structural zeros. The basic idea is to treat the observed data as a truncated sample from an augmented dataset, thereby allowing us to exploit the conditional independence assumptions for computational expediency. As part of the approach, we develop an algorithm for collapsing a large set of structural zero combinations into a much smaller set of disjoint marginal conditions, which greatly speeds computation. We apply the approach to sample from a latent class model with structural zeros in the context of a key issue faced by national statistical agencies seeking to disseminate confidential data to the public: estimating the number of records in a sample that are unique in the population on a set of publicly available categorical variables. The latent class model offers remarkably accurate estimates of population uniqueness, even in the presence of a large number of structural zeros.