Using the 5% Public Use Micro Data Sample (PUMS) from the 2000 U.S. census, we examine differences in disability among eight black subgroups distinguished by place of birth and Hispanic ethnicity. We found that all foreign-born subgroups reported lower levels of physical activity limitations and personal care limitations than native-born blacks. Immigrants from Africa reported lowest levels of disability, followed by non-Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean.Socio-demographic characteristics and timing of immigration explained the differences between these two groups. The foreign-born health advantage was most evident among the least-educated except among immigrants from Europe/Canada,who also reported the highest levels of disability among the foreign-born. Hispanic identification was associated with poorer health among both native-born and foreign-bornblacks.

This project investigates family-friendly workdays using time diary data. Specifically, we (1) identify occupations that allow parents to spend more time on childcare and (2) investigate whether this time use benefit comes at the cost of lower wages. We use data a pooled cross section from the American Time Use Survey (2003-2009) and Tobit regression analysis to control for observable differences between workers; omitted variable bias is addressed. We find that jobs in education are significantly more “family-friendly” than other jobs but that service jobs, such as those in retail and food services, are less conducive to spending time on childcare. Interestingly, preliminary work does not show that workers with children must trade off wages for the ability to spend more time with their children. In fact, workers in occupations that are “family-friendly” appear to have slightly higher wages than observationally similar peers.

In every society for which we have data, people's educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents' education or with other indicators of their parents' socio-economic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified during recent decades, not least thanks to better data having become accessible to researchers. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and evaluate recent empirical research on education and family background. Broadly speaking, we focus on two related but distinct motivations for this topic. The first is equality of opportunity. Here, the major research issues are: How important a determinant of educational attainment is family background, and is family background—in the broad sense that incorporates factors not chosen by the individual—a major, or only a minor, determinant of educational attainment? What are the mechanisms that make family background important? Have specific policy reforms been successful in reducing the impact of family background on educational achievement? The second common starting point for recent research has been the child development perspective. Here, the focus is on how human-capital accumulation is affected by early childhood resources. Studies with this focus address the questions: What types of parental resources or inputs are important for children's development, why are they important, and when are they important? In addition, this literature focuses on exploring which types of economic policy, and what timing of the policy in relation to children's social and cognitive development, are conducive to children's performance and adult outcomes. The policy interest in this research is whether policies that change parents' resources and restrictions have causal effects on their children.

This chapter describes the data and methods used to analyze rates of poverty at the individual and contextual levels for Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern United States. The individual-level data were extracted from the American Community Survey , 2006 using the IPUMS system provided by the Minnesota Population Center. The focus is on four dependent variables, namely, extreme poverty , 100% poverty, low income, and relative poverty status. These outcomes are examined relative to several principal independent variables including ethnicity, citizenship status, undocumented status (for Mexican immigrants) and type of occupation, among others. As the results are considered on the basis of a binary dependent variable (i.e. likelihood of reporting to any of the four outcomes of poverty), logistic regression is the proper method of analysis and is described in full detail. This is followed by descriptive tables containing the selected variables and their definitions.

Suburbanization has long been associated with upward social mobility. Suburbs generally have lower crime rates and offer more public services of better quality than their urban counterparts, thus providing more benefits and advantages to their residents. In contrast, cities are experiencing urban decay due to out-migration to the suburbs, the decline of industrial activity, and increases in crime. According to urban economic theory, household sorting occurs: households tend to sort themselves into neighborhoods of persons with similar income, education, and race. Household sorting results in poorer, less educated, and ethnic minority individuals living in urban areas such that these residents' characteristics lead to the concentrated problems of cities. At the same time, urban decay reinforces these city residents' lower socio-economic status with more exposure to crime, fewer opportunities for job networking, and scarce public services. Since there is a significant imbalance between suburban and urban neighborhoods, it is important to study movement from cities to suburban and urban neighborhoods, it is important to study movement from cities to suburbs and vice versa.

Homophily is the tendency to establish relationships among people who share similar characteristics or attributes. This study presents evidence of homophilic behaviour for an adolescent friendship network of 6,961 links in the West of England. We control for unobserved characteristics by estimating school and individual fixed effects and present evidence on the role of length and closeness of friendships on the degree of homophily. We also exploit the dynamics of the friendship by comparing similarities among existing and future friends. Results indicate that academic achievement, personality, educational aspirations, bad behaviour and mother’s education are essential in the friendship formation process. However, income and parents’ occupational class proved to be insignificant. We also show that the degree of homophily among friends selected from a random process is much lower than that of the observed friendships.

The cost of employee health insurance is steadily increasing, due in part to state mandates that require insurance policies to cover additional medical treatments and services. A preva- lent empirical finding is that these mandates have uncertain labor market effects, as most results are statistically insignificant. We determine several reasons for the imprecision in this area of research: small sample bias, heterogeneity in the effects of mandates, and collinearity of mandate legislation. Empirically addressing these factors with population-level data on small business employment, we identify significant employment effects for several mandates and illustrate how pervasively these issues plague identification.

The following section describes the movement and settlement patterns of Hispanics from the 1990s onward. Special emphasis is placed on foreign-born individuals and maps are presented that detail the changing geographic distribution of this group from 1990 to 2006. Information is based on decennial census data for 1990 and 2000, while ACS data is used for 2006. The maps display that a significant change in movement patterns has been observed beginning in the 1990s with a greater concentration of immigrants settling in the South and Midwest .

In this article, we examine how immigrants from eastern Africa to the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area understand and navigate the U.S. color line and its implications for nonwhites. Although these immigrants are subject to constraints based on their racial status as black, they mobilize other intersecting aspects of their identities to manipulate racial classifications in the hopes of attaining upward mobility in the United States, even when doing so creates other social costs for them. Eastern African immigrants draw on their ethnicity and, among Muslim immigrants, their religion to differentiate themselves from African Americans, who occupy the lowest position in the U.S. racial hierarchy. In challenging their categorization as racially black and seeking to move up the racial hierarchy, Eastern African immigrants refine the color line to distinguish between African-American blacks and non-African-American blacks.

Assessing the impact of lead exposure is difficult if individuals select into environments with different exposure levels on the basis of their characteristics.We address this issue with data from when the dangers of lead exposure were still largely unknown, using new evidence on IQ scores for male World War II U.S. Army enlistees who have been linked to the households where they resided in 1930. Higher exposure to water-borne lead (proxied by urban residence and low water pH levels) led to lower IQ scores: going from pH 6 to pH 5.5 lowered IQ by 5.7 points (1/4 standard deviation). A longer time exposed led to a more severe effect. The ubiquity of lead in urban water systems at this time and uncertainty regarding its impact mean these effects are unlikely to have resulted from selection into locations with different levels of exposure.

Research regarding the growing gap between rich and poor has not wholly considered the dissolution of America's middle-skill jobs (occupations that require training/education beyond the high-school level, but less than a four-year degree). I draw on data from the CPS (1990 to 2009) to uncover the extent to which low, middle, and high-skill employment are distributed among white and nonwhite workers in rural, suburban and urban regions, and how this distribution has changed since 1990. Blacks and Hispanics remain overrepresented in low-skill employment and underrepresented in high-skill labor, although blacks made the most significant percentage gains in high-skill employment since 1990, particularly in the suburbs. Hispanics and rural Americans are most likely to report middle-skill employment, while suburbanites are least likely to report employment in these jobs. The Great Recession expedited middle-skill labor's decline. While both low and high-skill labor increased during this time, high-skill employment expanded far more rapidly.

This chapter describes the data and methods used to analyze rates of poverty at the individual and contextual levels for Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern United States. The individual-level data were extracted from the American Community Survey , 2006 using the IPUMS system provided by the Minnesota Population Center. The focus is on four dependent variables, namely, extreme poverty , 100% poverty, low income, and relative poverty status. These outcomes are examined relative to several principal independent variables including ethnicity, citizenship status, undocumented status (for Mexican immigrants) and type of occupation, among others. As the results are considered on the basis of a binary dependent variable (i.e. likelihood of reporting to any of the four outcomes of poverty), logistic regression is the proper method of analysis and is described in full detail. This is followed by descriptive tables containing the selected variables and their definitions.

The expansion of Medicaid coverage to individuals with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) is a key component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Under full implementation of the ACA, Medicaid enrollment is projected to increase by 39 percent overall. However, even with that increase in Medicaid enrollment, an estimated 38 percent of the uninsured under the ACAwould be eligible for Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), but not expected to enroll. Given how many uninsured have incomes below 138 percent of the FPL, success in improving coverage will depend critically on achieving high participation in Medicaid.Current patterns of participation in Medicaid/CHIP among children could provide insights to help guide state and federal action under the ACA. Dating back to the inception of CHIP in 1997 and continuing with the Childrens Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009,there has been considerable policy focus on increasing coverage in Medicaid/CHIP among eligible children.4 This brief updates an earlier analysis that assessed how well Medicaid/CHIP programs were performing at enrolling eligible children by examining patterns in 2009 and monitoring change relative to 2008; in 2008, Medicaid/CHIP participation rates were over 80 percent nationally, butwith notable variation across states.5,6 The analysis uses the American Community Survey (ACS), which includes a public use sample of approximately 700,000 children each year and which began including a question on health insurance coverage in 2008. The following section describes the data source and methods underlying the analysis; subsequent sections present the results and discuss thepolicy implications of the findings.

Gender is a constitutive feature of economic and social relations, and in this paper we examine how gender is intimately bound up with the rise of informal sector occupations among new immigrants. We focus on three informal sector jobs that are widely accepted as Latino immigrant jobs in Los Angeles, California: paid domestic work; suburban garden maintenance; and street vending. Gendered analysis is commonly employed instudies of migrant women working in paid domestic work, long regarded as a paradigmatic “natural” job for women. Gender, however, is not only confined to the domestic sphere nor exclusively attached to women, but rather it is a system that affects all people, and different sectors of society. We argue that the next stage of gender and migration research will require extending gendered analysis to new arenas, including men and youths in the public sphere, and we offer an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities of gender in these diverse contexts.

Many analyses have demonstrated that environmental hazards tend to be concentrated in areas with higher numbers of low-income populations and people of color. We used geographic information science (GISc) and statistical analyses to examine issues of air quality and asthma occurrence among urban children in Louisville, Kentucky. The results of our analyses indicate that there is a well-defined spatial cluster of high rates of childhood asthma hospitalizations in western Louisville, an area of the city that is notorious for its poor air quality and the poor economic and physical health of its residents. Analyses also confirmed a strong seasonal pattern to asthma, with a fall peak. The multi-factorial etiology of asthma makes it difficult to pinpoint specific triggers for acute asthma episodes. Analyses of EPA criteria pollutants and volatile organic compounds from local air monitoring sites showed very little correlation with hospital admissions, although acetone, acrylonitrile and chloroform manifested similar seasonal patterns. In order to address the environmental justice concerns of disproportionate siting vs. minority move-in, we used GISc to examine patterns of residential mobility in western Louisville over a 60-year period. The polluting industries in western Louisvilles Rubbertown preceded the local in-migration of African-Americans, the majority of which took place from 1960 to 1970. While the increasing African-American presence in the community has resulted in a community with greater social cohesion over time and successful community-based initiatives to reduce air toxics emissions have been implemented, significant health disparities in western Louisville must continue to be addressed.

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being study and the Current Population Survey, we find that labor market conditions play a large role in explaining the positive relationship between educational attainment and marriage. Our results suggest that if low-educated parents enjoyed the same, stronger labor market conditions as their more-educated counterparts, then differences in marriage by education would narrow considerably. Better labor markets are positively related to marriage for fathers at all educational levels. In contrast, better labor markets are positively related to marriage for less-educated mothers but not their more-educated counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories about women's earning power and marriage, the current economic recession and future studies of differences in family structure across education groups.

This paper argues that a cross-city comparison of price-to-income ratios overestimates the bubble in high QOL (quality of life) cities. The theory is based on Roback(1982). In high QOL cities people are willing to pay high housing rents and get paid lower wages. This would lead to higher price-to-income ratios even if there were no bubble. We test the theory using data. The challenge is that expected price growth rate may be correlated with QOL across cities. We use our model to disentangle these two effects. Our empirical results show that the QOL bias is significant.

Building upon labor market stratification and assimilation frameworks, this article examines how individual and structural forces intersect and shape the labor market experiences of early twentieth century immigrants and minorities. Given limited systematic comparative research in this vein, a case-centered comparative design is offered providing analytic leverage for identifying potential stratifying mechanisms linked to local variability. Utilizing U.S. Census microdata (1910-1930), I consider Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York Cityfour cities with unique racial and ethnic compositions, industrial makeup, and socio-political dynamics. Findings demonstrate assimilative behaviors and human capital benefit most immigrant groups and later generation ethnics relative to employment opportunities and returns. However, discernible group-level inequalities indicative of racial/ethnic-based constraint and closure persist within and across settings. Findings are discussed in light of their broader theoretical implications for understanding labor market inequality, incorporation, and mobility.

This paper uses new data on school district capital stocks, stochastic frontier analysis, and a value-added measure of school quality to provide the first direct evaluation of the relationship between school facilities and school district costs. We find that the cost of education increases as the capital stock increases, suggest- ing either that school districts are grossly overcapitalized or that nicer facilities reflect an important, unmeasured dimension of school quality. We also find that cost function estimates for Texas are largely insensitive to the exclusion of the capital stock measures, suggesting that stochastic frontier cost function estimates without a capital stock measure are unlikely to be biased.