In this paper, we evaluate the impact of schooling and Research and Development (R&D) expenditure on the multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth across US states. While the evidence of positive externalities from schooling has been disappointing in the regional literature, the evidence of externalities from R&D is seldom found at the state level in US. The paper argues that a state with higher level of education not only creates better ideas, but also is more favorable to adopt, implement and execute the newly available ideas and hence, to absorb the knowledge spillovers. Further, it is argued that the states with favorable R&D policies attract more efficient firms and hence, experience higher MFP growth. To achieve this, the paper extends the dual growth accounting exercise to construct MFP growth measures for the non-farm, non-mining, private sector for all US states. The key empirical findings of our paper suggest significant positive externalities from schooling and R&D once we control for the catch-up effect where poor states converge towards the rich states. This attributes an important role toschooling and R&D expenditure in closing the gap between the rich and the poor states, hence speeding up technological diffusion.

The health status of Mexican Immigrants has important repercussions on their economic well-being and that of their families and the areas they live. There is extensive scientific literature documenting the health status of Mexican immigrants but not its causes. Acculturation, assimilation to the labor market, and changes in the composition of the household generate new behaviors that might have a direct effect on the immigrants health status. In this study, I analyze the determinants of the health status of this large segment of the US population from a time use perspective. In particular, I examine how their eating and physical activity habits vary with time since arrival in the U.S.

This paper examines the impact of a father’s World War II military service on the educational attainment of his children. The mechanism linking the two has been identified in the literature establishing positive impacts of parents’ education and homeownership on their children’s educational outcomes. In turn, a World War II veteran’s educational attainment and homeownership status were influenced both by the direct impacts of military service and, as shown in previous studies, by loan guaranty and educational benefits provided in the GI Bill. I use two data sources to tie these strands of literature together. First, I draw a sample of World War II eligible men from the 1960 IPUMS 1 percent sample and examine the impact that fathers’ veteran status had on their children’s grade level. Second, I estimate impacts on high school and college completion using a sample of individuals from the original cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey.

This chapter will introduce a prototype of geospatial web portals, which can enable complicated GIS simulation models in a grid-computing environment (TeraGrid). This prototype demonstrates how complicated GIS simulation models can benefit from geospatial cyberinfrastructure and grid-enabled Internet GIServices. Cyberinfrastructure and grid com- puting can provide high-performance computing power to overcome the limitations of tradi- tional GIS web services and the constraints of the three-tier Internet GIServices architecture. Complicated geospatial problems and huge volume of geospatial datasets can be effectively processed and calculated under the grid-enabled web portlets. The user-friendly simulation tools on the geospatial web portal will provide geographers and geospatial scientists with a powerful tool to conduct on-line spatial analysis and GIS simulation models efficiently.

The difference between average hours worked in the US and average hours worked in Continental European countries has been increasing since the early 1970s. To explain this phenomenon, this paper develops an endogenous growth model with two key properties: agents are heterogeneous in their rates of time preference and labor skills, and the model incorporates progressive income taxes. The model is calibrated to US and German data for the periods 1971-1974 and 1986-1989. Our findings suggest that the degree of progressivity is a major factor in explaining the patterns of the US and German labor supply over time. Predictions of the model also match the distributional trends in both countries during this time period. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This thesis uses the search and matching theory to study the labor market. It has three chapters covering the following topics: the cycle behaviour of unem- ployment and vacancy; effects of labor market policy in developing countries; and wage dispersion among workers having similar characteristics. The first chapter contributes to solutions available in recent literature on the unemployment volatility puzzle through developing a very simple monopol- istic competition model. The key element that helps us to get more volatility in labor market variables is procyclical entry of firms that produces countercyclical markups. Following a positive productivity shock, vacancies increase and unem- ployment falls not just because of the entry of new firms, but also because existing firms restrict their output less and hire more since they are now face competition from more firm. Under plausible parameterizations, our model simulations can reach up to 50% of volatility of labor market key variables found in the data. The second studies the effects of Chinese Hukou system of household regis- tration (the law that limits migration the rural to the urban areas and vice-versa) on labor market outcomes. We find that if the Hukou system of household re- gistration is relaxed by either decreasing the law enforcement or allowing more people to live in the city, urban unemployment rate would be reduced. More re- laxed laws would help the urban sector become more attractive to rural residents, so firms hiring both illegal and legal Hukou status would benefit more from illegal worker since the rent firms extract from illegal workers is higher than that from legal workers and this in turn would induce firms to create more vacant positions. The third chapter proves that within a two-side asymmetric information environment, the take-it-or-leave-it offer mechanism can effectively explain why worker having similar characteristics are paid differently. The reason is through possessing private information, both firms and workers will make only modest wage offers to avoid separation, a mechanism that disperses the wage distribution.

The authors investigate how race is socially constructed among Latino immigrants. Drawing upon Omi and Winants theory of racialization, they call for a highly contextualized analysis that takes into account specific Latino groups and geographic locations. They develop theirargument by investigating how Guatemalan and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta must negotiate their unique understandings of race with forces of racial homogenization that erase distinctions and characterize all Latinos as undocumented Mexican laborers. The authors explain how Guatemalans and Dominicans rely on different resources to challenge this racial construction and assert a distinct racial and ethnic identity.

The sharpest increase in U.S. home ownership over the last century occurred between 1940 and 1960, associated primarily with a decrease in the age at first ownership. To shed light on the contribution of several coincident large-scale government interventions in housing finance, I examine veterans' home loan benefits provided under the postwar GI Bills. I use two breaks in the probability of military service by date of birth, for cohorts coming of age at the end of World War II and the Korean War, to estimate the impact of veteran status on home ownership. I find significant, positive effects of veteran status on home ownership in 1960. Consistent with a model in which the impact of easier loan terms declines with age, these effects are larger for younger veterans and diminish in 1970 and 1980 as the cohorts age. Complementary evidence suggests veterans' non-housing benefits and military service itself are unlikely to explain the observed differences in home ownership. Veterans' housing benefits appear to have increased aggregate home ownership rates primarily by shifting purchase earlier in life; they can explain approximately 7.4 percent of the increase in aggregate home ownership from 1940 to 1960, and 25 percent of the increase for the affected cohorts.

The impending retirement of the baby boom cohort represents the first time in the history of the United States that such a large and well-educated group of workers will exit the labor force. This could imply skill shortages in the U.S. economy. We develop medium-term labor force projections of the educational demands on the workforce and the supply of workers by education to assess the potential for skill imbalances to emerge. Based on our formal projections, we see little likelihood of skill shortages emerging by the end of this decade. More tentatively, though, skill shortages are more likely as all of the babyboomers retire in later years, and skill shortages are more likely in the medium-term in states with large and growing immigrant populations. We discuss conflicting evidence on skill shortages based on alternative projections as well as criticisms of the definition of skill requirements, concluding that our projections are likely the most reasonable.

Longstanding government measures of poverty are based on income thresholds that are uniform across locations. The newly developed supplemental poverty measure (SPM) departs from that tradition by setting higher income thresholds in metropolitan and rural areas with higher housing costs. This allows for inter-metropolitan differences in housing prices that affect the level of income necessary for a family to purchase a minimum level of food, clothing, shelter, and other essential items necessary to attain a minimum standard of living. Numerous government programs that provide assistance to the poor define eligibility in part based on a family’s designated poverty status. Although the SPM is not being used for such purposes, the possibility exists that it may be used in this fashion at some point in the future. In that regard, the SPM has potential to affect not only perceptions of regional differences in poverty, but also the geographic distribution of benefits from federal and state government programs that provide assistance to the poor. Central to the new SPM measure of poverty is the idea that the level of income that defines a given size family’s poverty status should be higher in metropolitan (and non-metropolitan) areas with high housing costs. For these purposes, housing costs are defined so as to include expenditures on utilities including electricity, heating, etc.. This is presumably motivated by recognition that the need for heating/cooling as well as energy prices differ widely across geographic areas as between Houston versus Detroit, for example. The new poverty measure also measures housing costs differently for renters, owner-occupiers with a mortgage, and owner-occupiers without a mortgage. This feature of the SPM is motivated by observable differences in the annual out-of-pocket costs of housing that vary with each of the three housing tenures just noted. Calculation of the SPM, at least in its current form (e.g. Renwick (2011)), is based on either mean or median housing costs for individual identified locations. My comments below are organized into three subsections. I will first offer some perspectives intended to critique the SPM. This is followed by one suggestion for an alternative feasible method of calculating the SPM (to use hedonic-based measures of quality adjusted housing costs). Suggestions for further research on geographic adjustment of poverty thresholds are provided in the final section, as are recommendations for the SPM going forward.

In this paper, we present the design, implementation and publication of a SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) geoportal, which links the historical demographic database and early 20th century Madrid mapping. This is a research project developed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in collaboration with the “Dirección General de Estadística” (Statistical Bureau) of the Madrid City Hall. The ultimate goal is to perform geospatial studies from historical demographic sources, enabling the cartographical visualization and representation of a large number of demographic variables (fertility, nuptiality, mortality) occurred in the city in the last century as well as the establishment of a multitemporal comparison of changes in the urban and social structure that took take in the Spanish capital during this period of history which are producing intense migration to the city of Madrid. For the implementation, we have used the REST technology in a environment of object-oriented programming that takes advantage of the dynamism of the applications based in Flex language. This, according to the OGC interoperability standards and the INSPIRE Directive.

Theoretical and empirical studies exploring the effects of income inequality upon growth reach a disappointing inconclusive result. This paper postulates that one reasonfor this ambiguity is that income inequality is actually a composite measure of inequality of opportunity and inequality of returns to effort. They affect growth throughopposite channels, so the relationship between inequality and growth depends on which component is larger. Using the PSID database for U.S. in 1970, 1980 and 1990 we find robust support for a negative relationship between inequality of opportunity and growth, and a positive relationship between inequality of returns to effort and growth.

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables.

Historical Geographical Information Systems, or Historical GIS, has become a rapidly growing field within historical research (Knowles 2005a; Gregory & Ell 2007; Gregory & Healey 2007). Historical GIS is an inter-disciplinary field that involves taking GIS technology, devised in quantitative, data-rich disciplines such as computer science and environmental management, and applying it to the study of history. A major impetus behind the growth of Historical GIS has been the significant investments made by a number of countries in National Historical GISs (NHGIS). Originally these databases would typically contain a country’s census reports and other data for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They contained the statistical data linked to cartographic representations of the administrative units they refer to, together with the changing boundaries of those units. Using a conventional database containing only statistical information, a researcher could search for aspatial patterns of variation and change. Using an historical GIS, however, the researcher is now equipped to identify patterns of change that occur simultaneously over time and across geographic space. Additionally, because all of the data are located in space, they can be integrated with any other data that are also located in space. With historical GIS we can get closer to complexity of change and historical reality.

Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger foreighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a states working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the states eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similarstudents, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.