Problem, research strategy, and findings: Metropolitan planning organizations attempt to shape urban form at the regional and metropolitan scale, including the pattern of suburban centers. How do these efforts change behavior? Our study informs that question by way of a new family of urban form metrics summarizing the polycentric structure of U.S. metropolitan areas. Using a spatial statistical approach, these measures are sensitive to the size, amount, and location of suburban centers. The article then tests the influence of these structures on commute timesnationally from 1970 to 2000. Takeaway for practice: The influence of development densities on travel in sprawling regions is more complicated than previously understood or measured. While the level of both neighborhooddensity and regional density explain average commuting times, density also works relatively. The spatial variation ofdensity, the density of suburban centers relative to the region, and the spatial distribution of high-density nodes each appear to play distinct roles in influencing travel.

The repeal of Ohio Senate Bill (SB) 5 appeared on the November 8, 2011, general election ballot as a veto referendum, where it was defeated by a margin of 2,145,042 (61.3 percent) to 1,352,366 (38.7 percent).' SB 5 would have greatly limited the collective bargaining rights of Ohio's 525,000 state and local public employees. The bill limited public employee collective bargaining on economic issues including wages and prohibited them from bargaining for health insurance and pensions. It further limited the scope of bargaining on employment and administrative issues while greatly expanding management rights. All forms of binding interest dispute resolution were eliminated by the bill, including interest arbitration and the right to strike. The bill also mandated performance pay, reduced sick days, and capped vacation leave. It outlawed agency shop provisions and mandated only open shop agreements. At impasse in negotiations the governing body of a city, school, or township could implement . . .h

Hispanic poverty rates are high compared with other major demographic groups and have improved little in the past four decades. In 2010, 26.4 percent of Texas Hispanics fell below the poverty line versus 9.2 percent of non-Hispanic whites (Chart 1A); nationally, 24.6 percent of Hispanics and 10.5 percent of non-Hispanic whites were poor (Chart 1B).1 Hispanic performance has also been disappointing when compared with other minorities nationally. Hispanic poverty rates have fallen 12 percentage points in Texas but less than 1 percentage point in the U.S. over the past 40 years. Black poverty declined 12 percentage points in Texas and 9 percentage points in the U.S. during the same period. Although Hispanics have logged much greater improvement in Texas than in the U.S. since 1970, their poverty . . .

Analyses reveal that, on average, both school attendance zones and school districts are gerrymandered to zone out more racially/ethnically dissimilar students in favor of more racially/ethnically similar students. As a result, schools and districts are significantly more racially and ethnically homogeneous than they would be in the absence of gerrymandering. While gerrymandering serves to segregate students of all races and ethnicities, it particularly serves to exclude blacks and Hispanics from predominantly white schools and districts, reinforcing the historical divisions between these groups. Indeed, estimates suggest that, on average, school attendance zones and school districts are 15% and 14% less black-white diverse, respectively, than would be expected if their boundaries were not gerrymandered. Findings suggest that the gerrymandering of boundaries adds another pernicious layer of segregation to public education institutions, which are already highly segregated by residency.

The employment to population rate of high school-aged youth has fallen by about 20 percentage points since the late 1980s. One potential explanation is increased competition from substitutable labor, such as immigrants. I demonstrate that the increase in the population of less educated immigrants has had a considerably more negative effect on employment outcomes for native youth than for native adults. At least two factors are at work: there is greater overlap between the jobs that youth and less educated adult immigrants traditionally do, and youth labor supply appears more responsive to immigration-induced wage changes.

One method of evaluating the success of management decisions regarding acquisitions is to examine equity price movements as the news of the merger is made public. The price movement of the acquiring firm’s equity around the announcement of the acquisition indicates if shareholders believe management has acted in their interest. In the banking industry, researchers have found that, on average, equity values of the acquiring bank do not display abnormal positive returns upon announcement, and often display statistically significant negative returns. Another line of research has documented that CEOs are better compensated for managing larger organizations, particularly when involved in merger activity. This study investigated the possibility of a linkage between weak firm-level corporate governance structures at banks and their propensity to make acquisitions that produce negative reactions from equity holders. A commercially sold governance index from Institutional Shareholder Services, now part of MSCI Barra, was used to measure governance strength. Acquisition events were from the comprehensive Thomson Reuters SDC merger database and equity values from CRSP. Results indicated that weaker corporate governance is associated with inferior stock market reactions upon announcement of an acquisition, which should be of interest to regulators as they monitor corporate actions for covert motives, and to investors in their investment selection process.

The number of Hispanic women in the United States more than doubled during the last thirty years. As economists and demographers study the assimilation patterns of these new immigrants and of the US born second-generation immigrants, it is worth asking in what ways changes during the last 30 years in the rates of intermarriage are similar or different to those of other groups in the population. Fryer (2007) explores intermarriage rates among White, Black and Asian women. His results show that these rates increased during the second half of the twentieth century for White and Black women, but not so for Asian women. Yet, whether this is true also for Hispanics remains until now unexplored. Understanding the dynamics of intermarriage of Hispanic women is important, as Furtado and Theodoropoulos (2010) view intermarriage as a useful metric of immigrant assimilation. Furthermore, researchers are increasingly interested in the dynamics behind the association of social integration with socioeconomic outcomes of immigrants (for example Furtado and Trejo, 2012) In this article we use the 1980, 1990, 2000 Census and the pooled 2008, 2009 and 2010 American Community Survey1 to document intermarriage trends among Hispanic women, paying attention to differences across different cohorts across these four decades. Within the sample, we are especially interested in the outcomes of Hispanic women. In their survey of Hispanic families, Landale and Oropesa (2007) emphasize the need to analyze change in family structure across time.

Research on pan-ethnicity usually focuses on pan-ethnicity among immigrant-based groups such as Asian or Hispanic Americans, asking, for example, whether specific Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese or Asian Indian identify with the pan-ethnic term, Asian American. A recent trend towards identifying with a pan-ethnic national ancestry or ethnicity, such as Australian in Australia, Canadian in Canada, and American in the U.S. has received less attention. In this exploratory study, we analyze Australian, Canadian, and U.S. census data to identify andcompare factors associated with pan-ethnic national ancestry or ethnicity. Main findings show that identification with a national ancestry/ethnicity is mostly limited to the native-born European-origin population with long histories of residence in each country. We discuss fourprocesses that may be implicated in pan-ethnic national ancestry or ethnicity identification -simplification, social marginalization, regional or ethnic subculture, and home-grown ethnic formation -- and questions for additional research.

When President Felipe Calderon took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of violence has led Mexicans living close to the northern border to migrate to the United States. Using data from the American Community Survey to estimate murder rates, I present evidence that the United States southern states have seen the largest increase in Mexican migration from 2005 to 2010. I also show that these new migrants are college educated, which is in high contrast with the archetypical Mexican migrant in the United States. My analysis also shows that there is a correlation between business openings and murder rates in Mexico. I conclude that the war on drugs is making wealthy well-educated Mexicans leave the country, thus diminishing the available skilled labor force and investment needed for future economic development.

For a number of years, Appalachia has been a region that has lacked the growth and development that its neighboring counterparts have been privy. Interestingly, in the past thirty years, investment from the North has moved toward the South and managed to sidestep Appalachia. The purpose of this research project is to see if there was a difference in the way Appalachian and non-Appalachian counties grew during the Rust Belt Sun Belt transition. Through the use of descriptive statistics and a two-way ANOVA on capital, labor and technology, results indicate that Appalachian counties generally performed less successfully when compared to non-Appalachian, Rust Belt or Sun Belt counties.

The migration of Latinos to nontraditional settlement areas in the United States is renewing interest in how an established low-skilled work force is affected by the inflow of a minority group whose members tend to have a weak basket of human capital. Some scholars focus on how the incoming group creates head-to-head competition with established workers. An alternative view posits that, depending on the context of the receiving labor market, incoming workers may primarily fill roles that complement preexisting labor market arrangements. I study these issues in the region of the country that has experienced themost pronounced in-migration of Latinos during the past few years. The findings indicate migrating Latinos tend to complement preexisting labor market conditions rather thanspark job competition and undercut the earning power of non-Latinos.

A substantial body of research documents that maternal employment is associated with childhood obesity. This paper explores possible mechanisms for that correlation in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). We find that maternal employment is associated with working mothers spending, per day, 4 fewer minutes grocery shopping, 17 fewer minutes cooking, 10 fewer minutes eating with children, 12 fewer minutes playing with children, 4 fewer minutes supervising children, and 37 fewer minutes caring for children. The differences tend to be greatest for mothers with young children (age 0–5 years). We explore the extent to which these findings differ by day of the week, whether a partner or spouse is present in the household, whether the mother works non-standard hours, and socioeconomic status. Only a small percentage (about 15%) of the fewer minutes spent in these activities by working mothers appears to be offset by increases in time by husbands and partners. These findings suggest plausible mechanisms for the association between maternal employment and childhood obesity.

Margo Wilson and collaborators discovered that cohabiting couples had very much higher spousal homicide rates than those in registered marriages, and cross-national research has shown this difference to be widespread. We now find that homicide rates in the two sorts of unions have converged in the United States, such that the previously large difference had completely vanished by 2005. Distinct age patterns whereby registered marriages are most lethal in youth and cohabitation is most lethal in middle age have nevertheless persisted. While their homicide rates were converging between 1990 and 2005, married and cohabiting couples were not growing more similar in their basic demographic attributes: age distributions and unemployment rates remained distinct, and differences in education and income actually increased. Why homicide rates in the two classes of unions have ceased to differ remains unknown. We suggest some lines of research that may help provide answers.

Using 2000 Census microdata for the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study, this research investigates the effect of intrametropolitan opportunity structure and local area context, especially spatial structure, urban employment pattern, social environment, and ethnic concentration, on Asian and Latino immigrants' incidence of self-employment. These two groups grew rapidly both in the total labor force and among the self-employed in Atlanta. It is found that living in central city and inner-ring suburbs depresses Latino immigrants' entrepreneurial activities. The growth of trade jobs and concentration of immigrants in a local area both give rise to immigrant entrepreneurship. Results suggest that traditional theories such as disadvantage theory need to be reassessed in the context of new immigrant gateways, while the ethnic enclave hypothesis is still validated. Potential policies to promote immigrant entrepreneurship are also discussed.

Minnesota Compass is a social indicators project that measures progress in Minnesota, its seven regions, 87 counties and larger cities. Compass tracks trends in topic areas such as education, economy and workforce, health, housing, public safety, and a host of others.

This research examines the relationship between the economic status of an immigrant's home country and the probability of self-employment in the US. We find that immigrants from developing countries on average have lower self-employment probabilities relative to immigrants from developed countries. Similarly, we find a positive correlation between the current HDI of an immigrant's home country and the probability of self-employment in the US. These result are unexpected given that past research suggests immigrants from countries with high levels of self-employment (developing countries) are more likely to be self-employed in the US. We provide a possible explanation for these results.