The 2001 IPCC report warns that an increase in the heat waves will raise mortality, primarily among the most vulnerable segments of the population, such as children, the elderly, and the poor. This has resulted in the adoption of public programs that help curb the mortality and morbidity effects of extreme weather events by keeping an eye on the most vulnerable segments of the population. We examine whether individuals re-direct attention to potentially sensitive family members during extreme weather episodes. In particular, on extremely hot or cold days is child- and household member care time different? Do poorer households reallocate child and household care time differently from richer households? Is there a differential response in childcare giving by mothers and fathers? Does the presence of elderly persons result in different patterns in time use? Using data from the 2003-2007 American Time Use Surveys merged with weather data, we find that while womens child care time is relatively insensitive to weather, men tend to engage in more child care when it is extremely cold, and less when it is hot. Poorer households seem to be less capable of adapting. Wealthier mothers spend more time on child care on hot days than poor mothers do.

Received wisdom, some sociological theory and a handful of qualitative studies suggest that the “night shift” of caregiving work that interrupts sleep is a burden borne disproportionately by women. However, there is no broadly representative evidence to substantiate claims about who takes the night shift in contemporary American households. Analyses using data from the nationally-representative 2003–2007 American Time Use Surveys show that net of age, paid work commitment, partnership status and the presence and age of dependents, working mothers were significantly and substantially more likely to get up for the night shift than working fathers. These results suggest that the sleeping hours, which make up a third of every day, are an understudied but important site for micro-level processes that reflect and reproduce gender stratification.

We use incidence data from the 1980 Census and 2008 American Community Survey to track recent trends in interracial marriage. Intermarriage with Whites increased rapidly among Blacks but stalled among Asians andAmerican Indians. Black White intermarriage increased threefold over 1980 2008, independent of changing socioeconomic status,suggesting declining social distance between Blacks and Whites. Marriages between the U.S.- and foreign-born populations also grew rapidly. Marriages to immigrants increased fivefold among U.S.-born Asian women and doubled among U.S.-born Latinas since 1980. Out-marriage to Whites also was higher among self-identified biracial than monoracial individuals, but these differences were smallest among Blacks. Interracial couples were overrepresented among cohabiting couples.Finally, log-linear models provide evidence of growing racial exogamy, but only after adjusting for changing demographic opportunities for intermarriage. Marriagesbetween U.S.- and foreign-born coethnics have been driven by new immigration while slowing the upward trajectory of interracial marriage in America.

This article investigates how the growth in income inequality from 1970 to 2000 affected patterns of income segregation along three dimensions: the spatial segregation of poverty and affluence, race-specific patterns of income segregation, and the geographic scale of income segregation. The evidence reveals a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families. In addition, income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large-scale spatial segregation of affluence rather than by affecting the spatial segregation of poverty or by altering small-scale patterns of income segregation.

The How Art Spaces Matter reports address how and why art spaces (artist buildings live/work and studio and art mixed-used projects) can benefit artists, other arts tenants, neighborhoods, and regions. They increase understanding among artists, funders, local governments, andcommunities. We hope our findings resonate with the diverse array of community members whose insights helped shape them and will help Artspace and other artist space proponentsfoster the success of current and future projects. We welcome new opportunities to expand this research and deepen this critical dialogue.

This paper relaxes the assumption of homogeneous rates of return to schooling by employing nonparametric kernel regression. This approach allows us to examine the differences in rates of return to education both across and within groups. Similar to previous studies we find that on average blacks have higher returns to education than whites, natives have higher returns than immigrants and younger workers have higher returns than older workers. Contrary to previous studies we find that the average gap of the rate of return between white and black workers is larger than previously thought and the gap is smaller between immigrants and natives. We also uncover significant heterogeneity, the extent of which differs both across and within groups. Finally, we uncover the characteristics common amongst those with the smallest and largest returns to education. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper explores the history of African Americans in the U.S. economy since emancipation. With the end of the Civil War, some four million former slaves had gained their freedom, but the freed people faced daunting economic challenges, including poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination. Despite these adverse conditions, the economic status of African Americans improved over the ensuing century, if haltingly and unevenly. Progress was driven by three major forces. First, both inside and outside the South, black educational gains narrowed the black-white skill gap. Second, black workers moved to opportunities in burgeoning urban labor markets. Third, especially during the 1960s, racial discrimination in labor and other markets declined under pressure from the civil rights movement, equal opportunity law, and diminishing racial prejudice on the part of whites. The decades since the achievements of the 1960s present a decidedly more mixed picture. Overt racial discrimination plays a less substantial role in limiting the opportunities of African Americans in the U.S. economy than it did half a century ago. On the other hand, progress toward narrowing the economic gaps between blacks and whites has stagnated. Particularly concerning has been the concentration of poverty and social dislocation in inner-city neighborhoods, exploding black male incarceration rates, and the large and persistent racial skill gap.

The purpose of this brief is to assess whether state and local government employees in West Virginia are compensated more than their private sector counterparts. A simple comparison of the average compensation of the two is not enough. An apples to apples comparison requires controlling for factors like education, age, disability, race, sex, and hours worked.

This paper draws on the social structure and personality framework and place stratification perspectives to examine if socioeconomic status mediates the effects of segregation on disability among Puerto Ricans. Although evidence on the harmful effects that residential racial segregation has on the health of African Americans continues to mount, there is little work on Latinos at the national level, and only a couple multilevel studies that examine the effects of segregation on the health of Puerto Ricans. More research is needed on Latinos, and particularly Puerto Ricans, as they are one of the largest Latino ethnic groups in the United States. Puerto Ricans also suffer from high rates of economic disadvantage and poor health. Heeding calls for multilevel analyses on the pathways that link segregation to health, four questions are addressed. First, do Puerto Ricans still suffer from poor health, as previous studies have shown? Second, does county-level segregation affect likelihood that Puerto Ricans have a disability? Third, are higher levels of segregation associated with lower socioeconomic status (SES)? Fourth, does SES mediate the relationship between segregation and disability? Longitudinal multi-level analyses were conducted by merging individual-level data from the 2006 American Community Survey to data from the 2000 U.S. Census (Summary Files 1 & 3). Our literature review shows that Puerto Ricans suffer from serious health disparities when compared to other groups, including other Latinos. Empirical results reveal that segregation increases individuals probability of having a disability above and beyond the effects of other county-level and individual-level risk factors of poor health. The findings also show that higher levels of segregation are associated with lower levels of SES. Consistent with the theoretical expectations of the place stratification perspective, segregation harms health directly and indirectly through SES. Overall, these findings indicate that residential segregation continues to structure the life chances of people of color in the U.S., and also informs calls for hierarchical research that examines other pathways through which racism harms health.

This paper exploits the dual accounting technique to estimate multi-factor productivity growth for goods and services across US states from 1980 to 2007. Due to changes in sectoral classifications, the period is divided into two parts, 1980-1997 and 1998-2007. Over both periods, states exhibit a wide range of productivity growth rates with the goods sector showing much larger variations. The variations are larger for the second time period with some states recording productivity growth as high as almost nine percent annually while other states showing declines at more than two percent. Underlying the wide variation in productivity growth are variations in both wage growth and real user cost growth. There is no evidence that even over the medium term the real user cost growth is zero. In fact since 1998, there is rapid decline of almost two per cent annually. Incorporating human capital into the analysis makes wage growth lower across the board; and productivity growth even lower in both sectors and on average negative in the second period for both sectors. Scaling up the analysis to the national level, we find that there are large differences in primal based measures of marginal product of capital and our estimate of real user cost growth. This can only be partially explained by the anomalous behavior of particular industries such as mining and real estate services, and to some degree due to thedeclining relative price of investment goods.

This paper examines the impact of wage subsidies and direct cash grants on the rebuilding choices of New Orleans homeowners following Hurricane Katrina. I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of households residential location, home repair, home sale, and borrowing/savingchoices using a unique panel dataset that combines interview responses from the recently fielded Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey with administrative property assessment records from the Orleans Parish Assessors Office. The model finds strong evidence of borrowing constraints among black households and among low income households. Using simulations of households choices under counterfactual grant policies, I estimate that the Louisiana Road Home programs direct cash grants increased the fraction of homes that had been repaired or rebuilt within four years of Katrina by 14%. The program increased rebuilding rates by 18% among black households and by about 8% among non-black households. Also, I estimate that, on the margin, an increase in the amount of a direct grant has about 4.0 times the impact on rebuilding rates as an equal sized increase in the present value of New Orleans wages, and about 5.1 times the impact among black households. These findings suggest that following a disaster, any wageincreases that might result from wage subsidies targeted to businesses are likely to have small effects on households choices relative to direct rebuilding grants paid to households.

In this paper, we examine whether investments in higher education have contributed to changes in occupationalinequality by focusing on the impact of college completion rates on movement into desirable occupations between 1983 and 2002. Since forces generating inequality vary by gender, race, and ethnicity, we examine trends for white, black, and Hispanic men and women in our study. Utilizing Ordinary Least Squares Regression on data from 20 Current Population Surveys, we find a modest decrease in both gender and racial inequality in access to desirable occupations and an increase in inequality between Hispanics and members of the other groups. College completion accounts for the progress made by white women and for the declines among Hispanic men. It does not explain changes for African Americans, either between men and women or when compared to whites.

The paper presents preliminary results in the area of ontological engineering for historical research. Historical information systems are still in the initial stage of development. Our experience hitherto shows that the decisive stage in the development of such systems is a conceptual model and ontological engineering seems to be the right tool to build it. Our particular aim is to develop a database system for the history of the administrative structure of the Catholic Church in Central-Eastern Europe in the so-called pre-statical period, i.e. roughly from XII to XIX century. We use DOLCE as a foundational ontology, especially its part concerning social objects.We build an axiomatic system that formally defines the basic notions of those structures and may be interpreted as the conceptual scheme of this database.

We exploit the large inflow of immigrants to the US during the 1870-1920 period to examine the effects that changes in the cultural composition of the population of US counties had on output growth. We construct measures of fractionalization and polarization to distinguish between the different effects of cultural diversity. Our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalizationsignificantly increased output, while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output. We address the issue of identifying the causal effect of cultural diversity on output growth using the supply-push component of immigrant inflows as an instrumental variable.

Using data from the U.S. Census in conjunction with data from the Current Population Survey (19802009), I find little support for the opt-out revolution highly educated women, relative to their less-educated counterparts, are exiting the labor force to care for their families at higher rates today than in earlier time periods if one focuses solely on the decision to work a positive number of hours irrespective of marital status or race. If one, however, focuses on both the decision to work a positive number of hours and the decision to adjust annual hours of work (conditional on working), I find some evidence of the opt-out revolution, particularly among white college educated married women in male-dominated occupations.