In this paper, I gauge the impact of veteran status on migration probabilities for black and white men in the late 20th century United States, comparing cohorts that were subject to various military staffing policies. I find that white veterans are more likely than are white non-veterans to live outside the state of their birth and to have recently migrated. These effects persist regardless of whether veterans were subject to the draft or the All Volunteer Force staffing policy, and are durable across the life course. Among blacks, elevated rates of veterans migration are first observed in 1980. These results illuminate a previously unidentified consequence of veteran status, and may point to a policy-linked mechanism throughwhich prior military employment influences social mobility, the American labor force is redistributed, and the racial composition of states and localities is altered.

Since the 1980s, a relatively new phenomenon of Brazilian immigration to North America has emerged. According to the U.S. Census, the number of foreign-born Brazilians in the United States grew from 212,428 in 2000 to 332,632 in 2008. Brazilian government sources place the number of Brazilians in the U.S. as high as 1.1 million. It is widely cited that the initial increase in Brazilian migration revolves around the weakness of the Brazilian economy in the 1980s and 90s. This study assesses the labor market outcomes of black Brazilian immigrants to the United States compared to their white Brazilian immigrant counterparts. It also compares the difference in earnings between these two groups to the differences in earnings between black and white native-born U.S. citizens. Using pooled cross sectional data from the 2000 U.S. Census and the American Community Survey from 2001 to 2008, I examine which race/nativity, demographic, and human capital variables contribute most the economic disparities between blacks and whites born in the U.S. and in Brazil. The results show that Afro-Brazilians do make considerably less on average than their white Brazilian counterparts but the human capital variables account for most of this disparity. It also shows that the difference in earnings between Brazilians of different races is not a wide as that between U.S. American blacks and whites. This is one of the first studies, to my knowledge, which focuses on labor market outcomes for Afro-Brazilians in the U.S. With stronger and more accurate Census data, more conclusions could be made about this growing population.

Numerous privacy-preserving data publishing algorithms were proposed to achieve privacy guarantees such as l-diversity. Many of them, however, were recently found to be vulnerable to algorithm-based disclosurei.e., privacy leakage incurred by an adversary who is aware of the privacy-preserving algorithm being used. This paper describes generic techniques for correcting the design of existing privacy-preserving data publishing algorithms to eliminate algorithm-based disclosure. We first show that algorithm-based disclosure is more prevalent and serious than previously studied. Then, we strictly define Algorithm-SAfe Publishing (ASAP) to capture and eliminate threats from algorithm-based disclosure. To correct the problems of existing data publishing algorithms, we propose two generic tools to be integrated in their design: global look-ahead and local look-ahead. To enhance data utility, we propose another generic tool called stratified pick-up. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools by applying them to several popular l-diversity algorithms: Mondrian, Hilb, and MASK. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools in terms of data utility and efficiency.

Disruptive behavior in adolescence may indicate a broad vulnerability to disinhibition, which begins in childhood and culminates in adult externalizing psychopathology. We utilized prospective birth cohort data to assess childhood predictors of adolescent disinhibition. We also examined the effect of pre-adolescent fluctuation in cognitive ability. Data were drawn from the Child Health and Development Study cohort, born 19611963; we used the subsample who participated in follow-up through adolescence (n = 1752). Six indicators of behavioral disinhibition (BD), reported in adolescence, were analyzed as a count outcome. Predictor variables were drawn from several waves of data collection and included individual- and neighborhood-level measures. Cognitive ability was assessed with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at two time points. Neighborhood characteristics were assessed using census data from 1970. Number of BD indicators was predicted by maternal characteristics at prenatal assessment (maternal age and alcohol consumption) and age-10 assessment (maternal smoking, education, and separation from father). Characteristics of the child that predicted BD included birth order and conduct problems in middle childhood. Neighborhood poverty did not predict BD. Regardless of initial cognitive ability score, movement to a higher quartile by adolescence was associated with lower BD, while movement to a lower quartile was associated with higher BD. Risk for adolescent BD exists prenatally and extends through middle childhood. Change in cognitive ability during pre-adolescence emerged as a potentially important factor that merits further investigation. A greater focus on the life course can aid in comprehensively understanding disruptive behavior emergence in adolescence.

Understanding the causes of unemployment and job insecurity among young people remains a central concern for social scientists and policy makers. This study focuses on one potential institutional cause of high youth unemployment, employment protection legislation (EPL). While many are skeptical of a link between EPL and high aggregate unemployment rates, a consensus has emerged linking EPL tohigh youth unemployment in particular. The review of theoretical and empirical research conducted here challenges this consensus. Search and matching theoretic explanations have difficulty making unambiguous predictions about the effects of EPL on youth unemployment and empirical research has undertaken little effort to uncover its causal effects. The empirical analysis tests for the existence of aggregate employment effects of EPL across youth labour markets using aggregate data from affluentOECD countries (19852007) and individual data from labour force surveys for 15 Western European countries and the U.S. (19922007). It conducts conventional regression analyses and also implements a Difference-in-Difference design. Neither conventional nor Difference-in-Difference analyses yield any robust evidence whatsoever linking either dimension of EPL to inferior youth labour marketperformance, for any of the education groups or institutional conditions tested. Altogether, this studyrejects the view that strict EPL is or has been the cause of high youth unemployment rates or low youth employment rates, at least for the sample of countries tested here.

The safety net is a broad array of federal and state programs that supports families through cash, food,housing assistance, and tax credits. Some are universal insurance programs that provide benefits regardlessof other income and assets while others, often called means-tested programs, provide benefits to those with low incomes. Some federal programs operate the same across the country, and others allow for significant state administrative variation. The federal and state governments jointly fund other parts of the safety net, and eligibility and benefits vary across the states. States may also fund programs to fill in the gaps or augment federal programs. These variations mean that low-income families can face verydifferent safety nets across the country.This paper examines how safety net policy variation affects poverty among adults under age 65 and children. We measure the effects using a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that captures the effects of cash, noncash, and tax elements of the safety net and show the net effects on adult and child poverty. In 2009, the Office of Management and Budget formed an Interagency Technical Working Group (ITWG) on developing the SPM to provide an improved understanding of the economic well-being of American families and of how Federal policies affect those living in poverty. The SPM would not replace the official poverty measure, which is based only on cash income, but would supplement it. TheSPM provides a useful benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of safety net policies.We highlight the safety nets in three focal states: Georgia, Illinois, and Massachusetts. These states werechosen to illustrate the effects of narrow, medium, and broad safety nets. The results show how universal and means-tested programs affect poverty and how federal and state program rules have very different effects across states with different populations and economies.The paper begins with a summary of the safety net programs included in the assessment. The next section summarizes methods, including the data, the choice of focal states, the SPM metric, and the methods used to implement the SPM in the focal states. Then we describe the variation in demographic and economic characteristics and safety net policies across these states. The results show how the safety net policies affect both the official and SPM measures of poverty in the three states. Results also highlight how individual elements of the safety net affect poverty and net incomes throughout the income distribution.Federal and state safety net programs substantially reduce poverty, especially among children. The focal states safety net policies have substantially different effects on poverty, but federal policies tend to smooth out differences across the three focal states.

This article presents the first evidence based on a newly-compiled database of known lynch victims. Using information from the original census enumerators manuscripts, we identify individual- and household-level characteristics of more than 900 black males lynched in 10 southern states between 1882 and 1929. First, we use the information for successfully linked cases to present a profile of individual- and household-level characteristics of a large sample of lynch victims. Second, we compare these characteristics with a randomly-generated sample of black men living in the counties where lynchings occurred. We use our findings from this comparative analysis to assess the empirical support for alternative theoretical perspectives on the selection of individuals as victims of southern mob violence. Third, we consider whether the individual-level risk factors for being targeted as a lynch victim varied substantially over time or across space. Our results demonstrate that victims were generally less embedded within the social and economic fabric of their communities than were other black men. This suggests that social marginality increased the likelihood of being targeted for lynching. These findings are generally consistent across decades and within different sociodemographic contexts.

PURPOSE: Recent evidence suggests early-life factors correlate with atrial fibrillation (AF). We hypothesized that AF-related mortality, similar to stroke mortality, is elevated for individuals born in the southeastern United States. METHODS: We estimated 3-year (1999-2001) average AF-related mortality rates by using U.S. vital statistics for 55- to 89-year-old white (136,573 AF-related deaths) and black subjects (8,288 AF-related deaths). We estimated age- and sex-adjusted odds of AF-related (contributing cause) mortality associated with birth state, and birth within the U.S. stroke belt (SB), stratified by race. SB results were replicated with the use of 1989-1991 data. RESULTS: Among black subjects, four contiguous birth states were associated with statistically significant odds ratios >= 1.25 compared with the national average AF-related mortality. The four highest-risk birth states for blacks also predicted elevated AF-related mortality among white subjects, but patterns were attenuated. The odds ratio for AF-related mortality associated with SB birth was 1.19 (confidence interval 1.13-1.25) for black and 1.09 (CI 1.07-1.12) for white subjects when we adjusted for SB adult residence. CONCLUSIONS: Place of birth predicted AF-related mortality, after we adjusted for place of adult residence. The association of AF-related mortality and SB birth parallels that of other cardiovascular diseases and may likewise indicate an importance of early life factors in the development of AF. Ann Epidemiol 2011;21:732-738. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this article, the authors describe a new data infrastructure project being developed at the Minnesota Population Center. The Integrated Spatio-Temporal Aggregate Data Series (ISTADS) will make it easier for researchers to use publicly available aggregate data for the United States over a time span that covers virtually the entire life of the nation: 17902012. In addition to facilitating access and ease of use, ISTADS will facilitate the use of thesevarious data sets in mapping and spatial analysis.

The existing literature generally finds a negative impact of the 9/11 tragedy on immigrants' labor market performance, consistent with increased discrimination in the labor market and stricter immigration policies. In this paper, we examine the impact of this tragic event on a particular measure of immigrants' social outcomes - marriage with a native or intermarriage. Interestingly, we find that the tragic event actually increases Hispanic immigrants' probability of being married to a native. We suggest that our results could be explained by that after 9/11, the deteriorated labor market conditions, along with tightened immigration policies, may have led to increased incentives of immigrants to marry natives. This effect is large relative to the potential discrimination effect, if any, that could reduce natives' willingness to marry an immigrant. We also find that the magnitude of the effect is much smaller in the years immediately following 9/11 and becomes larger over time; and that there exists a large, statistically significant gender difference in the effects of 9/11 on intermarriage outcomes. Finally, we conduct indirect tests of proposed explanations; and our results imply existence of economic gains from intermarriage, and that discrimination may indeed exist.

Could racial economic inequality have been reduced if freed slaves were allocated forty acres and a mule following the Civil War? This paper exploits a plausibly exogenousvariation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and southern United States to identify the impact of free land on the outcomes of former slaves. After joining the Confederacy, the Cherokee Nation was forced to allow its former slaves to claim free land. Using 1880 data, I find smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in theSouth. The Cherokee freedmen also had higher absolute levels of wealth and income.

This study investigates the causal effects of education on individuals transitions between employment and unemployment, with particular focus on the extent to which education improves re-employment outcomes among unemployed workers. Given that positive correlations between education and labour force transitions are likely to be confounded by the endogeneity of education, we make use of data on compulsory schooling laws and child labour laws as well as conscription risk in the Vietnam War period to create instrumental variables to identify the causal relationships. Results indicate that education significantly increases re-employment rates of the unemployed. Particularly large impacts are found in the neighborhoods of 12 and 16 years of schooling. Evidence on the impact of formal schooling on unemployment incidence is mixed.

Privacy-preserving data publishing has attracted considerable research interest in recent years. Among the existing solutions, epsilon-differential privacy provides the strongest privacy guarantee. Existing data publishing methods that achieve epsilon-differential privacy, however, offer little data utility. In particular, if the output data set is used to answer count queries, the noise in the query answers can be proportional to the number of tuples in the data, which renders the results useless. In this paper, we develop a data publishing technique that ensures epsilon-differential privacy while providing accurate answers for range-count queries, i.e., count queries where the predicate on each attribute is a range. The core of our solution is a framework that applies wavelet transforms on the data before adding noise to it. We present instantiations of the proposed framework for both ordinal and nominal data, and we provide a theoretical analysis on their privacy and utility guarantees. In an extensive experimental study on both real and synthetic data, we show the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution.

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to address the effects of tech- nological progress on immigrant skill composition. Our results from this positive model suggest that neutral and skill-biased technological change imply essentially different immigration policies. On the one hand, skill-neutral change implies an immigrant skill distribution that is dominated by the native skill distribution; on the other hand, skill-biased change implies an immigrant over-representation at the top and bottom of the skill distribution. This result is interesting because of its un- expected nature. It implies that if technology changes as it has in the last decades and education has an increasing cost, then it is optimal to allow some low-skill im- migration along with high-skill immigration. We show consistency of our model’s predictions with data from the United States and Canada.

We study the local effects of the Housing Act of 1949, which established a federally subsidized program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate deteriorating structures, complete comprehensive city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the programs effects on city-level measures of median income, property values, employment and poverty rates, and population. The estimates are generally positive and economically significant, and they are not driven by differential changes in cities demographic composition. The results are consistent with a model of spatial equilibrium in which local productivity is enhanced.

The intent of this study is to explore the causes of macro-level structural changes and the implications of these changes for the macroeconomic fundamentals. The cause of the recent sectoral composition change in the US is examined from the perspective of intangible capital accumulation. In the Örst theoretical model of the study, as the importance of intangible capital increases in the production functions ñbut at di§erent rates across sectors ñlabor is shifted from direct goods production to creating sector-speciÖc intangible capital. At the mean time, the real output and employment shares of the high intangible sector increase. The implications of the model are consistent with a series of structural-change-related stylized facts in the US economy. Empirically, it is shown that an industryís future growth in output and employment is strongly correlated with its intangible capital intensity. And the industries in which Örmsíintangible investments have a higher impact on Örmsíproduction tend to grow more. The study then looks at the recent structural change in the production volatility patterns of the US, namely, a divergence in macro and micro level production volatilities. It is shown that as Örmsíorganization capital becomes increasingly important in the production process, the impact of Örm-speciÖc risk factor rises, while that of general risk factor declines. The former raises Örm- level volatility; the latter reduces aggregate volatility. Consistent with this theory, it is found that Örm-level volatility increases with organizational investment, but general factorsíimpact on Örm performance and a Örmís production correlation with other Örms decrease with organizational investment. The study also investigates structural change patterns in di§erent countries. With data from 28 industries across 15 countries, it is shown that at least for the overall capital, the shares of capital intensive industries are signiÖcantly bigger with higher initial capital endowment and faster capital accumulation. More importantly, there is a signiÖcantly positive relationship between a countryís aggregate output growth and the degree of structural coherence in all types of capital.

In this paper, I build a model of family labor supply and residential choices that explicitly incorporates the full-time or part-time work decisions of married women. The model can explain why women's participation patterns in full-time and part-time work vary significantly in areas that are geographically close but differ in real estate prices. The model suggests that high commuting costs could be one of the main obstacles for women's full-time employment in places like the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.

College educated workers are known to migrate more between US cities than the low skilled. This may be due to differences in returns to migration, or differences in constraints. The relative contribution of constraints has important implications for welfare. I model migration as a frictional cross-city job matching process. Within this framework, the constraints hypothesis yields testable predictions on the cross-city elasticity of local wages and unemployment with respect to housing costs. I verify these empirically, and provide further descriptive evidence from observed migration data that casts doubt on the importance of returns. Finally, my results reveal important aspects of the interaction between housing and labour markets.