Despite long-standing interest in the effects of financial development, it has been difficult to determine how banks affect growth since they typically grow with the economy and engagein multiple activities. I consider a time when banks were limited to commercial loans to understand how banks mattered for growth. I construct a novel dataset tracking the size and location of every national bank in the United States from 1870-1900. A large minimum capital requirement meant that otherwise similar counties had very different amounts of banking and I use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of banking on economic development. Even though national banks could not take land as collateral, proximity to a national bank increased agricultural production per capita and tilted the composition of production away from manufacturing. Agricultural gains came from increasing the land under cultivation, not by increasing yields per acre. Additional banking in 1900 still increased incomes 70 years later, suggesting that these results are highly persistent. Although the literature on financial development often focuses on investment as the conduit from finance to growth, this paper points to an alternative: relieving the short-term liquidity needs of commerce.

We provide theory for calculating bounds on both the value of an individuals human capital and the return on an individuals human capital, given knowledge of the process governing earnings and financial asset returns. We calculate bounds using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns. The large idiosyncratic component of earnings risk implies that bounds on values and returns are quite loose. However, when aggregate shocks are the only source of earnings risk, both bounds are tight.

This research examines trends in the relationship between obesity based on self-report height and weight and self-perceived health over a 30-year period. Importantly, this period included the articulation of comprehensive public health campaigns on excess weight and thus provides opportunities for assessment of the efficacy of the campaign, as well as the broader psycho-social impact of excess weight. Using novel data from the Integrated Health Interview Series, odds ratios for the association between obesity and self-perceived health were estimated for repeated cross-sectional samples that are nationally representative of noninstitutionalized American adults aged 18-85 and older spanning 1976-2006. Our findings show that (i) there are weak associations between obesity and self-perceived poor health; (ii) these associations are particularly small among men, often to the point of being nonexistent; and (iii) weak relationships for both men and women have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. Several reasons why the public health campaign around excess weight has had limited traction are discussed including the collective problem of excess weight in America and how this undermines current approaches in public health efforts addressing excess weight.

Political districts come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can be short and fat, long and skinny, jagged, round, or oblique. They can appear unnaturally misshapen, or they can be neat and compact. These misshapen districts often evoke a visceral response. Their appearance suggests that they are purposefully created to bias or cheat the electoral process. Politicians, political insiders, political scientists, political geographers and voters alike have long since hypothesized that the redistricting process has perpetuated both decreasing electoral competition and representation. This thesis analyzes both electoral competition and political representation through the lens of political redistricting.

Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent lifestyle in the United States. The share of 30- to 44-year-olds living as unmarried couples has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Adults with lower levels of educationwithout college degreesare twice as likely to cohabit as those withcollege degrees.A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data suggests that less-educated adults are less likely to realize the economic benefits associated with cohabitation. The typical college-educated cohabiter is at least as well off as a comparably educated married adult and better off than an adult without an opposite-sex partner. By contrast, a cohabiter without a college degree typically is worse off than a comparably educated married adult and no better offeconomically than an adult without an opposite-sex partner. (Most adults without opposite-sex partners live with other adults or children.)

With the significant development of mobile commerce, privacy becomes a major concern for both customers and enterprises. Although data generalization can provide significant protection of an individuals privacy, over-generalized datamay render data of little value or useless. In this paper, we devise generalization boundary techniques to maximize data usability while, minimizing disclosure of privacy. Inspired by the fact that the permissible generalization level results in a much finer level access control, we propose a privacy-aware access control model in webservice environments.We also analyze how to manage a valid access process through a trust-based decision and ongoing access control policies. The extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic data sets show that the proposed privacy aware access control model is practical and effective.

Thus far, our focus has been on achieving confidentiality protection through SDL procedures, which as we know mask the data that are to be disseminated. This is the restricted data approach.1 As we noted in Chapters 1 and 2, a different but complementary approach is for the DSO to instead control the process of accessing and analyzing the data.2 Restricted access has the potential advantage for users who can subscribe to the DSO’s stipulations that they will often be able to obtain data that are richer than SDL masked data, typically with more geographical and temporal detail.

With the advent of multicore processors, it has become imperative to write parallel programs if one wishes to exploit the next generation of processors. This paper deals with skyline computation as a case study of parallelizing database operations on multicore architectures. First we parallelize three sequential skyline algorithms, BBS, SFS, and SSkyline, to see if the design principles of sequential skyline computation also extend to parallel skyline computation. Then we develop a new parallel skyline algorithm PSkyline based on the divide-and-conquer strategy. Experimental results show that all the algorithms successfully utilize multiple cores to achieve a reasonable speedup. In particular, PSkyline achieves a speedup approximately proportional to the number of cores when it needs a parallel computation the most.

Housing is the single largest expense for most American families. For one-third of American households, this expense is not a monthly mortgage payment to a lender, but rather a monthly rent payment to a landlord. Rental housing is the typical tenure choice for the young, the elderly, the disabled, people in highly mobile professional sectors, and low-wage working families, it is also likely to be an important alternative—at least in the short term—for many of the millions of families uprooted by the foreclosure crisis.In light of the potential increased role of rental housing as a tenure option, this article attempts to (1) describe key facts and trends in the affordability of rental housing for low-and moderate-income renters from 1990 through the recession of the late 2000s and (2) examine early evidence on the effects of the recession and foreclosure crisis on rental housing affordability. Although Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research (HUD PD& R) have made important empirical contributions to the understanding of rental housing affordability trends during the past two decades, few studies have analyzed both national level and metropolitan level rental housing affordability dynamics.¹ This article is intended to provide a data-rich update on rental housing market dynamics at both the national and metropolitan levels, drawing on a variety of data sources to provide a more nuanced picture of housing trends and needs. The content is organized as follows: the first section, Renter Income Trends, analyzes trends in renter incomes at the national and metropolitan levels since 1990; the second section, Rent Trends, describes rent trends from 1990 through 2009; and the third section, Affordable Rental Housing Stock Trends, examines trends in rental housing affordability, as measured by rent burdens and affordable supply gap.

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratification literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social boundary for status exchanges via couple formation. This paper evaluates the status exchange hypothesis for Australia and the United States, two Anglophone nations with longimmigration traditions whose admission regimes place different emphases on skills. A log-linear analysis reveals evidence of status exchange in the United States among immigrants with lower levels of education and mixed nativity couples with foreign-born husbands. Partly because Australian educational boundaries are less sharply demarcated at the postsecondary level, we find is weaker evidence for the status exchange hypothesis. Australian status exchanges across nativity boundaries usually involve marriages between immigrant spouses with a postsecondary credential below a college degree and native-born high schoolgraduates.

In 1977, Congress passed the Public Works Employment Act with the goals ofproviding a six billion dollar stimulus to the economy and offering more self-employmentopportunities for minority entrepreneurs. This analysis introduces quantitative support forthe claims that affirmative action was warranted prior to the legislation in 1977, and that thepolicy was indeed successful in encouraging entrepreneurship for minorities and causing arise in expected wages for minority entrepreneurs. This paper utilizes 1970 and 1980 censusdata, and employs several difference-in-differences estimators with the intention of capturingthe effects seen in self-employment rates and total personal income for different ethnic andracial minority groups targeted for assistance by the Public Works Employment Act.

Background: The amount of time individuals spend on health-related self-care is not known.Objective: The aim of this study was to describe how much time American adults reported spending on health-related self-care (eg, taking insulin, dressing a wound).Methods: We analyzed data from the first 5 years, 2003 to 2007, of the population-based American Time Use Survey. Of 64,310 respondents 25 years of age and older, 4267 reported 7022 episodes of health-related self-care on their survey day. We used descriptive statistics, weighted to represent US adults, to describe self-reported time and logit regressions to analyze the odds of engaging in self-care as a function of age, sex, race, and other characteristics. Because health status was collected only in 2006 to 2007, analyses were conducted separately for 2003 to 2007 and 2006 to 2007. Results: Of Americans 25 years of age and older, 6.6% engaged in health-related self-care each day. Among those reporting self-care, mean time reported was 90 minutes (median, 15 minutes); 20.6% reported 2 hours or more. Regressions for 2006 to 2007 show that people aged 75 or older were 3.9 times as likely (95% CI, 2.75.8) to report self-care as persons aged 25 to 44. Compared with persons in excellent health, those in fair health were 2.0 times as likely (95% CI, 1.42.8) and those in poor health were 3.7 times as likely (95% CI, 2.55.6) to report engaging in self-care. Nonworking disabled persons reported self-care 4 times (95% CI, 3.15.3) as often as employed persons. Sex, race/ethnicity, presence of children, and body mass index were also significant.Conclusions: Time spent on health-related self-care is disproportionately distributed across the population, with a larger amount of time reported by those in poor health (3.6 hours/week) and the nonworking disabled (3.2 hours/week). To provide patient-centered care and to promote optimal decisions about health-related time management when making recommendations for additional self-care tasks, clinicians need to talk to patients about how much time they are already spending on self-care.

In 2004, California became the first state to implement statewide minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. This paper examines the effects of this legislation on labor market outcomes for registered nurses(RNs). Using annual financial data from California hospitals, I find that nurse-to-patient ratios increased in California hospitals following the staffing mandate. However, individual-level survey data indicate that the law had no effect on the total number of RNs in California hospitals, or theirhours and wages. My findings suggest that hospitals met staffing requirements by hiring nurses from recently closed hospitals and shifting nurses from management and supervision into direct patient care.

British historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood once suggested that biography should not be considered a branch of history, largely because he considered it preoccupied with matters of gossip-value rather than more important issues in the past. The biographer, he argued, begins from a standpoint of sympathy with a subject, rendering critical judgment difficultif not impossibleto achieve.1 If Collingwood was scornful of biography as a genre, we can scarcely imagine how he would describe autobiography, even an exercise as brief and professionally motivated as this. On this cautionary note I undertake the task of outlining the major steps in my own academic experience. While admittedly well-disposed to its subject, if not necessarily flattering, this account dwells on events and circumstances that have affected my development as a historian.

This paper explores school construction and renovation practices in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1960s and 1970s. During the decade-long debate over school desegregation, local and state officials often wondered whether the city had a history of intentional school segregation, given the racial imbalance in its schools. While Cambridge never formally acknowledged overt efforts to separate black and white children, questions lingered about how the city had drawn attendance boundaries and selected sites for new school buildings. What factors informed decisions about elementary school construction and school attendance zones in the 1960s and 1970s? We are particularly interested in understanding if and how racial, linguistic, and class considerations affected school construction and school districting during this period. We assert that spatial analysis is a particularly useful way to understand and illuminate the historical linkage between educational opportunity and residential inequality in the post-war period. Drawing from School Committee records, newspaper articles, school reports, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of census, housing, and school data, our paper focuses on one of the largest elementary school construction programs in the citys history.

In this chapter, we investigate the reasons behind the low early education enrollment rates for six major immigrant and native groups, using new analyses of Census 2000 data. We begin by estimating early school enrollment rates for these groups and for whites from native families, and we then develop models to assess the relative importance of cultural and socioeconomic/structural influences in accounting for the enrollment gaps from which the minority groups suffer. By estimating the ranges of the potential influence of these two factors, we are better able to evaluate their relative roles.

One of the most pressing challenges for Springfield is increasing the labor force participation and employment rates of its residents. Recent figures from the American Community Survey show that the citys employed population as a share of the working-age population was only 52 percent compared with 64 percent for the state as a whole. The citys labor force participation rate is extremely low even when compared with other older industrial cities in the region. In Springfields Latino neighborhoods less than half of the working-age population is in the labor force. Springfield residents face a number of barriers when looking for jobs, including low educational achievement rates, a lack of connections to job networks, and a lack of access totransportation to work sites outside the city. These challenges are particularly significant among the Latino population, which accounts for more than a third of the citys residents. In previous research, we studied the causes of Springfields low employment rates. We seek to understand the prominence of self-employment within Springfield, especially among Latinos, and identify the major barriers small business owners face. Given the extremely low labor force participation and employment rates in the city, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods, self-employment might be the best alternative to help residents make ends meet. As Fairlie and Woodruff (2007) point out, business ownership is the main alternative to wage and salary employment for making a living, and thus has important implications for earnings and wealth inequality. In addition, successful businesses, even if they are small scale or home based, provide goods and services to the community that would otherwise be lacking. This study focuses on business ownership as a potential strategy for job creation in the city and for income generation in impoverished areas.