This paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage. Accounting flexibly for absolute income, the ratio between a man's income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status, but only for low-income men. Relative income affects marriage even among those living with a partner. A 10 percent higher reference group income is associated with a 2 percent reduction in marriage. We propose an identity model to explain the results.

This paper investigates the impact of entering the labor market during the Great Depression employing a regression discontinuity approach with a discontinuity at the age of labor market entry. Using the 1940 and 1950 U.S. Censuses I investigate the medium and long-term effects of a poor labor market on labor market entrant’s earnings. Less educated individuals entering the labor market during the Great Depression experienced a seven to ten percent negative shock to their earnings ten years after the onset of the Great Depression in 1940 in comparison to those entering just prior. This negative effect diminishes, but is still evident ten more years later in 1950. I do not find a negative effect for more educated individuals and instead find a relatively noisy, positive effect.

Macro cross-country data and micro US county data indicate that resource rich regions have small and productive manufacturing sectors and large and unproductive non-manufacturing sectors. We suggest a process of specialization to explain these facts. Windfall revenue induces labor to move from the (traded) manufacturing sector to the (nontraded) non-manufacturing sector. A self selection of workers takes place. Only those most skilled in manufacturing sector work remain in manufacturing. Workers that move to non-manufacturing however, will be less skilled at non-manufacturing sector work than thosewho were already employed there. Resource induced structural transformation thus results in higher productivity in manufacturing and lower productivity in non-manufacturing. We construct and calibrate a two sector, open economy model of self-selection and show that exogenous cross-country variation in natural resource endowments is large enough to explain the direction and magnitude of sectoral employment and productivity differences between resource rich and resource poor regions. The model implies that low aggregate productivity found in some resource rich countries is not caused by a resource induced decline of a relatively productive manufacturing sector. Rather, the higher manufacturing productivity in those countries is a consequence of manufacturing's smaller size.

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the United States has largely focused on how influxes of foreign‐born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly educated native‐born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly educated labor. We use O*NET data on job characteristics to assess whether native‐born workers with graduate degrees respond to an increased presence of highly educated foreign‐born workers by choosing new occupations with different skill content. We find that highly educated native and foreign‐born workers are imperfect substitutes. Immigrants with graduate degrees specialize in occupations demanding quantitative and analytical skills, whereas their native‐born counterparts specialize in occupations requiring interactive and communication skills. When the foreign‐born proportion of highly educated employment within an occupation rises, native employees with graduate degrees choose new occupations with less analytical and more communicative content.

This article examines variation in the labor market success of female and male immigrants in the USA across different countries of origin. Labor market success is measured by the wages of immigrants, and the regression model includes the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), published by the United Nations, to reflect different cultural and institutional conditions that shape gender inequalities in the immigrants' home countries. The GEM reflects women's access to leadership positions and economic wealth, while the GDI indicates the basic living standard of women. According to the regression results, the GEM and the GDI have different effects on women and men. The GEM has a positive effect on the wages of both female and male immigrants, but it has a greater effect on women than men. The GDI has a positive effect on male immigrants but it has a small negative effect on female immigrants. In this sense, this study provides evidence of different effects of various cultural backgrounds on an individual's earning capability and different institutional effects between women and men.

In this paper, we estimate the effect of school quality on the relationship between schooling and health outcomes using the substantial improvements in the quality of schools attended by black students in the segregated southern states during the mid-1900s as a source of identifying variation. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, our results suggest that improvements in school quality, measured as the pupilteacher ratio, average teachers wage, and length of the school year, amplify the beneficial effects of education on several measures of health in later life, including self-rated health, smoking, obesity, and mortality.

The strongest predictor of immigrants' adaptation to the American context is the length of time that they have lived in the United States. Scholars often assume, however, that immediate members of foreign-born families, especially husbands and wives and their foreign-born children, all arrive in the US at the same time and thus have lived there for the same length of time. Using the 2000 US census data, we investigate this assumption and analyse the sequence of migration among young married immigrant husbands and wives. Results show that over a half of married foreign-born men and women had arrived in the US in different years and that the sequence is gendered, with men more often arriving before the women. These patterns differ by country of origin. In general, the earlier arrival is older, and more likely to be employed than the later arrival, whether the earlier arrival is the husband or the wife.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in the UnitedStates face problems of discrimination, the glass ceiling, and very high long-term unemployment rates. As a diverse population, although some Asian Americans are more successful than average, others, like those from Southeast Asia and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs), work in low-paying jobs and suffer from high poverty rates, high unemployment rates, and low earnings. Collecting more detailed and additional data from employers, oversampling AAPIs in current data sets, making administrative data available to researchers, providing more resources for research on AAPIs, and enforcing nondiscrimination laws and affirmative action mandates would assist this population.

The 2008 collapse of the world financial system, while proximately linked to the housing bubble and risk-laden mortgage backed securities, was a consequence of the financialization of the U.S. economy since the 1970s. This article examines the institutional and income dynamics associated with the financialization of the U.S. economy, advancing a sociological explanation of income shifts into the finance sector. Complementary developments include banking deregulation, finance industry concentration, increased size and scope of institutional investors, the shareholder value movement, and dominance of the neoliberal policy model. As a result, we estimate that between 5.8 and 6.6 trillion dollars were transferred to the finance sector since 1980. We conclude that understanding inequality dynamics requires attention to market institutions and politics.

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of the causal effects of in-hospital voluntary paternity establishment (IHVPE) programs on paternity establishment rates and consequent family structure and behavior. Using variation in the timing of IHVPE program initiation across states and years, I first show that IHVPE programs increase paternity establishment rates by 40 percent. Then, using data from the March and April Current Population Survey Supplements, I show that IHVPE programs reduce the likelihood of marriage post-childbirth. The decrease in marriage leads to an increase in the average characteristics of both married and unmarried fathers. Accounting for selection out of marriage, private health insurance provision for children declines, while maternal labor supply increases. The results from my analysis are consistent with a framework where fathers, who are heterogeneous in quality, must make transfers to mothers in exchange for rights to their children. Maternal utility is more sensitive to father quality in marriage than outside marriage, so a decrease in the cost of paternity establishment induces more mothers to choose higher partial transfers outside marriage over full transfers and interaction with lower-than-desired quality fathers in marriage. I provide evidence that the timing of IHVPE program implementation is uncorrelated with numerous state time-varying characteristics and that the results are not driven by pre-existing trends. My results are robust to the inclusion of numerous controls for maternal, child, and state time-varying characteristics, state and year fixed effects, state-specific time trends, and across severalspecifications, methods, and data sets.

Our knowledge about pre-modern Middle Eastern societies has been limited by the lack of data. The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian individual-level census records provide two detailed snapshots of the Egyptian population in its early attempts to make the transition into a modernized society.Carried out during the reigns of Muhammad Ali (1805-1848) and Ismail (1863-1879) respectively, these censuses are perhaps the earliest in the Middle East to include information on all segments of society including females, children, and slaves, and on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. This paper describes the digitization project of a representative sample of the 1848 and 1868 censuses, and introduces an application of the data in the field of Egyptian economic history.

Little empirical attention has been paid to state capital expenditures for higher education. While some anecdotal evidence exists that the process of appropriating capital dollars to higher education institutions is a particularly political process, no study has systematically examined the determinants of higher education state capital spending. This study counters this scholarly oversight by employing a longitudinal analysis of the factors associated with state capital expenditures for higher education. Panel data is used including political, higher education sector, and economic and demographic variables from 1988—2004 on all 50 states. Our fixed effects analysis reveals that the process is indeed political. Numerous political factors were significantly associated with capital expenditures for higher education, including political culture, electoral competition, budgetary powers of the governor, higher education governance structures, interest groups, legislative professionalism, and voter turnout. Although some higher education sector factors, such as private giving and tuition rates, proved to have a significant influence on state capital expenditures for higher education, the results provide substantial evidence that politics matters in the appropriation of these capital dollars. These findings suggest that more research is needed to understand how the determinants of state capital spending differ from other state expenditures on higher education.

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 women's 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.

When conducting studies related to Chinese history and culture, researchers are oftentimes challenged by the complexities of historical Chinese geographic names and traditional Chinese calendars. Furthermore, it is difficult to integrate related social research without the input of complete and contiguous background information. To solve these problems, this article proposes a spatial-temporal framework for conducting historical and cultural research on China. First, conversion methods between the various traditional Chinese calendars were illustrated. Next, spatial-temporal data models for historicalgeographic names were designed and described according to the properties of the representative data sources. Based on these models, the spatial-temporal framework was further built using data collection and processing. With the help of this proposed infrastructure, researchers may more readily explore spatial-temporal information as well as conduct further historical and cultural research on China. Finally, a project entitled Sino-FamilyTree-GIS was employed as a case study to demonstrate the value of this framework.

Using the American Community Surveys multi-year (2005-2009) Public Use Microdata Sample, we estimate the prevalence of English monolingualism and statistically analyze the association between English monolingualism and generational status within the U.S. Hmong population. Our findings show that the odds of speaking only English among the second generation is almost three times more compared to the first generation. Data from the 2009 ACS PUMS further indicate that there is a linear and positive relationship between generational status and English speaking ability. We discuss how English monolingualism, when reinforced by Hmongs age structure and immigration pattern, could impact Hmong Americans rate of household linguistic isolation and their maintenance of oral tradition.

Ecuador recently experienced an unprecedented wave of emigration following the severe economic crisis of the late 1990s. Individual-level data for Ecuador and its two main migration destinations, Spain and the United States, are used to examine the size and skill composition of these migration flows and the role of wage differences in accounting for these features. Estimations of earnings regressions for Ecuadorians in all three countries show substantially larger income gains following migration to the United States than to Spain, with the wage differential increasing with migrants' education level. While this finding can account for the pattern of positive sorting in education toward the United States, it fails to explain why most Ecuadorians opted for Spain. The explanation for this preference appears to lie in Spain's visa waiver program for Ecuadorians. When the program was abruptly terminated, monthly inflows of Ecuadorians to Spain declined immediately.

When researchers want to study indigenous populations they are dependent upon the highly variable way in which states or territories enumerate, categorize, and differentiate indigenous people. In this volume, anthropologists, historians, demographers, and sociologists have come together for the first time to examine the historical and contemporary construct of indigenous people in a number of fascinating geographical contexts around the world, including Canada, the United States, Colombia, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans, and the United Kingdom. Using historical and demographical evidence, the contributors explore the creation and validity of categories for enumerating indigenous populations; the use and misuse of ethnic markers, micro-demographic investigations, and demographic databases; and thereby show how the situation varies substantially between countries.

This study explores how the general American public thinks about Asian Americans, who are a multiethnic, immigrant-dominated, fast-growing, and understudied group. Understanding Americans’ views toward Asians is important in light of the changing face of the American electorate, whose recent additions comprise largely of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, and the likelihood that Americans’ beliefs or thoughts about race and ethnicity will be altered beyond the black-white divide in U.S. politics. As an attempt to gain such understanding, the purpose of this study is to provide a systematic study of Americans’ attitudes toward Asians in terms of positive/negative evaluations that they have of Asians (i.e., affect-based perceptions) and their perceptions of factual attributes of Asians, such as perseverance and intelligence (i.e., cognition-based perceptions). Americans’ perceptions of Asian Americans are examined using a conceptual framework based on theories and measures that have been discussed in past studies of intergroup relations largely directed at the relationship between white and black Americans, including the personal contact, context, self-interest, and symbolic politics theoretical perspectives. The major findings of the effects of these key explanatory factors on Americans’ affect- and cognition-based perceptions of Asians indicate some mixed and conflicting results. The findings confirm some aspects of the personal contact, self-interest, and symbolic politics hypotheses, but not the context hypothesis. The major findings of this study have provided some important insights into Americans’ views of Asians, suggesting that a better or fuller understanding of contemporary racial attitudes in U.S. politics requires focusing on all groups salient to politics, including Asian Americans.