Three of the most fundamental changes in US corporations since the early 1970s have been (1) the increased importance of organizational capital in production, (2) the increase in managerial income inequality and pay-performance sensitivity, and (3) the secular decrease in labor market reallocation. Our paper develops a simple explanation for these changes: a shift in the composition of productivity growth away from vintage-specific to general growth. This shift has stimulated the accumulation of organizational capital in existing firms and reduced the need for reallocating workers to new firms. We characterize the optimal managerial compensation contract when firms accumulate organizational capital but risk-averse managers cannot commit to staying with the firm. A calibrated version of the model reproduces the increase in managerial compensation inequality and the increased sensitivity of pay to performance in the data over the last three decades. This increased sensitivity of compensation to performance provides large, successful firms with the glue to retain their managers and the organizational capital embedded in them.

Given heterogeneous risk and time preferences of individuals, we investigate the impact of those preferences on sorting into occupations and industries using various measures of job risk. We construct three measures of risk across jobs, cross-categorized by occupation and industry: afatal injury rate, non-fatal injury and illness rate, and a measure of inter-person income variability. Using these measures, we analyze how risk and time preference of an individual affects his occupational choice. We find that there are different domains of risk and that individuals do not think of these in the same way. Using Health and Retirement Study data, we find behavioral inconsistency in health risks versus income risk. Based on our results, werecommend against using health-based risk proxies (e.g., smoking behavior) for financial risk analyses and vice versa.

There are reasons to believe that changes in local labor market conditions in recent decades are associated with rates of imprisonment in the United States. Technological advancements and the decline of manufacturing production in urban areas eliminated many high-paying job opportunities that were previously available to less-educated workers. Furthermore, scholars have long argued that the loss of skilled blue-collar job opportunities has been particularly detrimental for the economic situations of historically disadvantaged racial minorities. During the same time-period, social policies shifted, reflecting a new orientation toward poor populations. Research has yet to consider how specific labor market shifts (e.g., deindustrialization) affected the economic situations of less-skilled and minority workers and may also influence imprisonment rates. Similarly, no research has investigated the effects of these shifts as they coincided with political movements that redefined and fundamentally shifted policies targeting poor populations. This research investigates these issues using a combination of data sources, including National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP), Integrated Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS), citizen and government ideology (Berry et al 2010), general election (ICPSR 1995) and Federal Elections Project data (Lublin and Voss 2001), spanning the years 1990 2000 and across more than 500 local areas, predicting that the labor market, economic and political contexts associated with inequality are positively associated with imprisonment rates as well.

Abortion legalization was one of the most important changes in social policy of the 20th century. Previous studies of this consequential legislation examine its impact on the women with the ability to obtain legal abortions, as well as the outcomes of those born in a regime of legal abortion. This is the first paper to examine the effect of abortion legalization on the adult health of the next generation. I examine the link between women?s abortion access and the mortality rates of their children when those children reach ages 20-30. I find that those individuals born at least eighteen months after legalization of abortion in their birth state have mortality rates that are 3% than lower than would otherwise be predicted. Abortion legalization is associated with a statistically significant negative impact on white and black mortality rates, with the largest effects for black males. I find some evidence that the association between legalization and mortality in the next generation is being driven by selection effects, through a change the composition of mothers giving birth and the wantedness? of those being born. I also find that deaths caused by risky behaviors are the most affected by legalization. Overall, the results suggest abortion policy has the potential to affect the adult health of the next generation.

The gender literature has demonstrated that marriage is an important economic context for and predictor of women's class status; however, with regard to this finding, the literature has paid less attention to racial/ethnic differences among women. This paper raises important questions about the presumption of marriage as a route to the middle class for all women. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 IPUMS and 2008 ACS data for Asians, blacks, Hispanics, Whites we derive a middle class index (MCi) based on education, homeownership, per person income, and occupational prestige factors. By 2008, all groups have increased their share of SALA households, but black female SALA middle-class households comprise the highest percentage of their middle-class than do the other racial/ethnic groups. We also construct synthetic cohorts to determine if these women are simply marrying later and find that more SALA middle-class households are maintaining their status over time, but that again, this trend is most pronounced for black women.

Research in narrative intelligence applies artificial intelligence approaches to study human ability to organize experience into narrative form (Mateas and Sengers 2003). Narratives are traditionally defined as a series of temporally ordered clauses (Labov 1972, p360-361). The time-centric approach leads to a lesser consideration of space in narrative construction and analysis. In contrast, we advocate a geospatial narrative in order to stress the importance of space and time in understanding the ordering and spatial interaction of events.We define a geospatial narrative as a sequence of events in which space and time are equally important. Narratives are stories that constitutes sequential organizations of events (Franzosi 2010). Each event in a narrative relates sequential or consequential occurrence in space and time. The conventional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) center on information about spatial states of reality, and temporal information is handled as add-ons to spatial objects. Alternatively, we conceptualize a narrative GIS that emphasizes representing and ordering events in space and time as well as functional abilities to construct meaningful geospatial narratives. While an event is a complex, fuzzy term, we start with one basic linguistic element of narratives: action, as the primitive data construct to start building a narrative GIS. By relating action events across space and time, a narrative GIS aims to discover spatiotemporal correlates among actions and relate actions across scales.

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S. and finds that few, if any, growth relationships remain constant, including Gibrat's Law. Education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades, but does not seem to predict county growth a century ago. After reviewing this evidence, we present and estimate a simple model of regional change, where education increases the level of entrepreneurship. Human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labor demand. We find that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship, not with growth in quality of life, at least outside of the West. We also find that skills seem to have depressed housing supply growth in the West, but not in other regions, which supports the view that educated residents in that region have fought for tougher land-use controls. We also present evidence that skills have had a disproportionately large impact on unemployment during the current recession.

Investment into the supply of cultural facilities exceeded the demand for them, particularly between 1998 and 2003. Consequently, cultural organizations in cities across the U.S. were faced with dilemmas about how to remain viable after indulging in capital projects. Using data for all MSAs across the U.S., I develop a model that explains the investment determinants of cultural building. I use a two-part model to estimate the effects of capital and labor stock, cultural, demographic, and economic variables on per capita total investment into cultural facilities. I estimate these effects for the period between 1994 and 2008, the period with the greatest level of building the boom period (1998-2003) and then the entire period excluding the boom. My findings suggest that increases in investment were in part due to rising population, education and wealth levels. I present evidence for a positive relationship between the existing level of capital stock in a city and the amount it invests and a negative relationship between per capita investment and labor stock. Finally, I show that in the period between 1998 and 2003 the boom period there was a misalignment of investment and its determinants and suggest that there was overinvestment into cultural facilities during this period.

Over the past century the United States has experienced substantial population-wide gains in educational attainment - increases driven largely by processes of cohort succession Focusing on the adult population age 25-54 we show that there has been (1) a significant attenuation of the historical increases in educational attainment and (2) a shift in the processes underlying educational change that differs by gender Our analysis points to a significant turning point in population-wide educational levels, and from a research perspective has implications for how one interprets findings when using education as a control variable (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved

This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety of OLS and TSLS models, we find that increases in wages and employment: reduce voter turnout in gubernatorial elections by a significant amount; have no effect on Presidential turnout; and raise the share of persons voting in a Presidential election who do not vote on a House of Representative election on the same ballot. We argue that this pattern (which contradicts some previous findings in the literature) can be fully accounted for by an information argument, and is either inconsistent with or not fully explicable by arguments based on citizens’ psychological motivations to vote in good or bad times; changes in logistical voting costs; or transitory migration. Using individual-level panel data methods and multiple years’ data from the American National Election Study (ANES) we confirm that increases in employment lead to less use of the media and reduced political knowledge, and present associational individual evidence that corroborates our main argument.

Previous work suggests that regional variation in pre-migration exposure to racism and discrimination, measured by a region's racial composition, predicts differences in individual-level health among black immigrants to the United States. We exploit data on both region and country of birth for black immigrants in the United States and methodology that allows for the identification of arrival cohorts to test whether there are sending country differences in the health of black adults in the United States that support this proposition. While testing this hypothesis, we also document heterogeneity in health across arrival cohorts and by duration of U.S. residence among black immigrants. Using data on working-age immigrant and U.S.-born blacks taken from the 19962010 waves of the March Current Population Survey, we show that relative to U.S.-born black adults, black immigrants report significantly lower odds of fair/poor health. After controlling for relevant social and demographic characteristics, immigrants cohort of arrival, and immigrants duration in the United States, our models show only modest differences in health between African immigrants and black immigrants who migrate from the other major sending countries or regions. Results also show that African immigrants maintain their health advantage over U.S.-born black adults after more than 20 years in the United States. In contrast, black immigrants from the Caribbean who have been in the United States for more than 20 years appear to experience some downward health assimilation. In conclusion, after accounting for relevant factors, we find that there are only modest differences in black immigrant health across countries of origin. Black immigrants appear to be very highly selected in terms of good health, although there are some indications of negative health assimilation for black immigrants from the Caribbean.

Does sending children to college affect the contemporaneous labor supply of older workers? Drawing on biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Survey from 19922006, the author tracks the labor supply of parents before and after they send their children to college and shows that parents delay retirement while they are financing their childrens college education. Controlling for the total number of children who ever attend college and the total numberof those whose college expenses are paid for by older parents, she finds that mothers and fathers are more likely to be working (by 10.5 percentage points for fathers and by 6.9 percentage points for mothers), less likely to becollecting Social Security benefits, and less likely to report that they are retired if they are currently paying for a childs college education. Of those working, there is little evidence that paying for a childs education has anyimpact on work intensity.

The paper presents and discusses the progress in knowledge of African populations and their dynamics over the past 50 years. It takes as a starting point the landmark series of studies published in The Demography of Tropical Africa. Since then major progresses in data collection and data analysis were made, which are reviewed and discussed, with special reference to direct and indirect methods of demographic estimation. A major change occurred about 25 years ago with the development of DHS surveys and the focus on epidemiology and public health issues. Demographic research had to change its paradigms, and major advances were made in our understanding of population dynamics in relation with health issues. In a last part, the paper addresses special topics, unforeseeable events such as the HIV/AIDS epidemics which had major consequences for many demographic processes, and new fields for research around environmental issues.

We conduct an accounting exercise of the changes in aggregate employment, unemployment and out of labor force (OLF) among 25-64 year old men from 1968 to 2010. We decompose the observed changes in these labor market outcomes into changes in the socio-demographic composition of the population and changes in the labor market outcomes of dierent socio-demographic groups. Using the results of the decomposition, we predict that the OLF-to-population ratio for men will increase to 16% in 2015, up from 14.7% in 2010.

Migration rates to the United States from Mexico and Central America's "Northern Triangle" (El Salvador, Guatamala, and Honduras) have accelerated in the last four decades, spurred by strong migration push-pull factors and massive opportunity differentials throughout the region. About 14 million immigrants from these four countries live in the United States today, up from fewer than 1 million in 1970s, and these countries account for 36 percent of all US immigrants. This significant increase has been driven by economic opportunities, and facilitated by social networks of friends and family already in the United States.The history of US immigration policy within the region corresponds with three major migration periods: mostly laissez faire policies prior to the 1930s with limited migration before World War II; a large-scale temporary worker program (the Bracero Program) during and after the war that increased migration flows; and the emergence of a mostly illegal system following the elimination of the Bracero Program and passage of major immigration legislation in 1965. Despite increasingly robust immigration enforcement beginning in the 1980s, illegal flows of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have persisted.Since 1965, and particularly since the 1990s, immigration from the region has changed in significant ways. While migration flows historically were dominated by migrants from central Mexico who performed agricultural jobs in the US Southwest, during the last two decades the regional migration system has diversified to encompass new communities of origin in Mexico and Central America, new destinations throughout the United states, and a broader occupational profile including jobs in construction, maintenance, food service, and manufacturing. Despite these changes, however, immigrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America continue to have less education and lower incomes than natives and other immigrants, and with few legal visas available, most immigrants from the region are unauthorized.These recent dynamics play a critical role in shaping the politics of immigration policy within the United States. Young, low-skilled immigrants perform essential work, but the rapid growth of low-wage, limited English proficient (LEP), unauthorized populations in states with limited migration experience has contributed to increased anti-immigrant sentiment. Forty years into the current wave of regional migration, and after 25 years of increasingly serious enforcement efforts, this history also defines and limits the policy alternatives available, and highlights the challenges of managing regional flows.

In 2005, Lawrence O. Picus and Associates provided the Wyoming Legislature with a roadmap to educational adequacy. Their report used an evidence based approach to identify the personnel, instructional materials, and other real resources each school and district needed in order to provide “the basket” of educational goods and services every child in Wyoming should receive (Picus et al. 2005). Their report also advised the Legislature on the level of educational funding school districts needed to be able to purchase the specific mix of educational resources the consultants recommended. One of the important recommendations of the 2005 report was that an external cost adjustment (ECA) “should be used to reflect the changing costs of resources in the interim years between full-model recalibrations” (Picus et al. 2005, p 164). ECAs are crucial to the long term viability of any cost-based funding recommendation. Without ECAs, inflation will erode the purchasing power of school districts, potentially leaving them unable to provide the necessary educational resources. There are a number of existing price indices that could be used to measure year-to-year changes in the cost of education, but none of them reflect all of the inflationary pressures facing Wyoming school districts. Rather than applying one of the existing cost indices to the recommended funding level as a whole, Wyoming should consider adjusting each major resource component separately using the most appropriate cost index for each component. If Wyoming chooses to adjust each major resource component separately, it will need to identify the most appropriate cost index for each component. Reasonable indices are available for the professional staff, nonprofessional staff, utilities, and educational materials components of the cost-based allocation model. This report identifies those indices and describes their recent patterns of growth. All of the recommended indices indicate that the inflationary pressure on school districts has eased recently. However, they also indicate that inflationary pressures may be greater in Wyoming than in most other states. It is reasonable to anticipate that inflation will continue to impact the necessary funding allocations and plan accordingly. On the other hand, it is important to note that ECAs serve only to maintain the status quo. Their use in the Wyoming funding model presumes that the model is based on accurate baseline measures of resource costs. If the baseline estimates overstate actual costs for one or more funding components, then applying an ECA to those funding components would simply perpetuate that overfunding, and the most appropriate policy response could be to forgo applying an ECA to those funding components until costs and funding converge. Similarly if a baseline estimate understates actual costs for a funding component, then applying an ECA to that baseline estimate would only perpetuate the underfunding, and further action would be needed to ensure that districts are able to provide the necessary resources.