New evidence from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census of Housing indicates that expenditure shares on housing are constant over time and across US metropolitanstatistical areas (MSA). Consistent with this observation, we consider a model in which identical households with CobbDouglas preferences for housing and non-housing consumption choose a location and locations differ with respect to income earned by their residents. The model predicts that the relative price of housing of any two MSAsdisproportionately reflects differences in incomes of those MSAs and is independent of housing supply in each MSA. According to the predictions of our calibrated model, thedispersion of rental prices across low- and high-wage MSAs should be larger than we observe: High-wage MSAs like San Francisco are puzzlingly inexpensive relative to lowwageMSAs like Pittsburgh.

Emancipation in the United States was vast, distended, and chaotic. Shifting boundaries surrounded the struggle, unfolding unevenly over years and an expanse the size of Continental Europe. Some enslaved people were able to escape to Union lines within months of the beginning of the war, yet millions remained firmly bound by slavery in 1865. The president, legislatures, judges, and generals played crucial roles in ending slavery, as did enslaved people, who seized freedom at every opportunity. Military and political struggle were inextricably interwoven with the struggles of individuals held in slavery; thus Abraham Lincoln kept a map of the distribution of slaverythe first map of its kind in the United Statesclose at hand.Trying to make sense of this complexity, historians of emancipation have tended to focus on agency, on the ways actors in different spheres and places strove for freedom. In its simplest form, that inquiry has turned around the question of who freed the slaves. Thanks to innovative work since the 1980s, we now see that freedom came as a result of many strugglesin cataclysmic battles and in protracted debates, on farms and in bureaucracies, in political parties and on lonely roads. Freedom demanded action on many fronts because slavery was entrenched throughout American society. A full understanding of emancipation requires that we put the pieces together. To do thatto comprehend the patterns, proportions, and timing of emancipation, to see multiple forms of power in interaction in space and timewe need an analytical framework that is inclusive, self-aware, and disciplined...

This study estimates 2007 national poverty rates using an approach largely conceptualized by a 1995 National Academy of Sciences panel and similar to the supplemental poverty measure that will soon be produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study uses poverty thresholds based on expenditures for shelter, food, clothing, and utilities, as well as a measure of family income that includes earnings, cash transfers, near-cash benefits, tax credits, and tax payments. The measure also accounts for child care, work, and out-of-pocket medical expenses; variation in regional cost of living; and mortgage-free homeownership. Under this method, the rate of poverty is estimated to be higher than the rate calculated in the traditional manner, rising from 12.4 percent in the official measure to 16 percent in the new measure; the rate of child poverty is more than 3 percentage points higher, and elderly poverty is nearly 7 points higher.

The paper presents a review of selected definitional issues, theoretical concepts and most recent empirical evidence related to the phenomenon of immigrant self-employment. Based on the appraisal of gathered material it also points to possible areas of development of future research in the field.

This paper documents the key stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in the last forty years in three countries:United-States, United-Kingdom and France. We develop a statistical decomposition that provides bounds on changes at the extensive and intensive margins. This decompositionis also shown to be coherent with the analysis of labour supply elasticities at these margins. We use detailed representative micro-datasets to examine the relativeimportance of the extensive and intensive margins in explaining the overall changes in total hours worked. We also present some initial estimates of the broad distribution of implied elasticities and their implication for the overall aggregate hours elasticity.

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States since at least 1980. This paper quantifies the role that the tax policies of the federal and state governments have played in mitigating this income inequality. The analysis, which isolates the contribution of federal taxesand state taxes separately, employs two approaches. First, cross-sectional estimates compare before-tax and after-tax inequality across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Second, inequality estimates across time are calculated to assess the evolution of the effects of taxpolicies. The results from the first approach indicate that the tax code reduces income inequality substantially in all states, with most of the compression of the income distribution attributable to federal taxes. Nevertheless, there is substantial cross-state variation in the extentto which state tax policies compress the income distribution attributable to federal taxes. Cross-statedifferences in gasoline taxes have a surprisingly large impact on income compression, as do sales tax exemptions for food and clothing. The results of the second approach indicate that there has been little change since the early 1980s in the impact of tax policy on income inequality across almost all states.

The foundation for economic security in retirement is laid during ones working life; yet, many Latino workers are falling considerably behind their non-Latino counterparts. Marked distinctions also exist within the Latino population, with non-citizen Latinos showing wealth and income far below Latinos who were born citizens or have naturalized. This presentation uses Census data to reveal trends in immigrant naturalization among various generational cohorts. In 1990, 26% of Latino baby boomer immigrants had naturalized; in 2009, when Generation X was of a comparable age, 37% of Latino GenX immigrants had naturalized. Using data from the Census and the Health and Retirement Study, we highlight income and wealth disparities of these cohorts based on citizenship status and identify the direct effect of naturalization on the change in income over the worklife. Our findings emphasize the importance of naturalization in bolstering economic security in adulthood and helping provide a financially secure retirement.

In this paper I estimate the relationship between school quality and mortality. Although many studies have linked the quantity of education to health outcomes, the effect of school quality on health has yet to be examined. I construct synthetic birth cohorts and relate the quality of education they attained to their mortality rates. I find that there is a statistically significant relationship between the mortalityschooling gradients, which depict the return to a year of schooling, and the length of school term and relative teacher wage. For instance, increasing the relative teacher wage by one standard deviation results in about 1.9 less deaths per 1000 people per extra year of education. My results suggest that one way to improve the health of the population is to improve school quality.

This section deals with databases constructed and used for producing the particular Norwegian genre of local history; the farm- and genealogical history. This is a sub-category of the main genre «bygdebok» or community history which is complemented with ordinary local history overviews. There exist a number of such databases in Norway. They contain in principle basic, time-stamped information about all existing or deserted dwellings (farms, cottar’s places, modern houses and even apartment buildings) and all people that have lived in the geographic area covered and relations between people grouped into families or ancestries and between these people and their dwellings. However, the database designs and models vary quite a bit.

This paper examines the economic consequences of the US oil boom from 1880 to 1910. I combine information on oil discoveries with US census data and investigate the effects on various indicators of development. Evidence from OLS and IV-estimates indicate that oil discoveries (a) increased urbanization, (b) drew more (male) workers into mining and manufacturing, away from agriculture, (c) improved the economic situation of men and women and (d) improved the education of men and women. Effects are generally weaker for women, which supports the idea that changes in employment opportunities were the main driver of these changes.

Rates of Hispanic intermarriage with whites declined for the first time during the 1990s. One hypothesis, which we test here, is that the recent influx of new immigrants has provided an expanding marriage market for Hispanics, reinforced cultural and ethnic identity, and slowed the process of marital assimilation. In this article, we use data from the March Current Population Survey (19952008) to identify generational differences in Hispanic-white intermarriage. The results indicate that second-generation Hispanics were more likely to marry first- rather than third-generation Hispanics or whites, a pattern that was reinforced over the study period. The results suggest declining rates of intermarriage among second-generation Hispanicsa pattern that diverges sharply from thoseobserved among third-plus-generation Hispanics, where in-marriage with other Hispanics declined over time. If couched in the language of straight line assimilation theory, third-plus-generation Hispanic are assimilating by increasingly marrying other third-generation co-ethnics and whites. On the other hand, assimilation among the second-generation is slowing down as its members increasinglyreconnect to their native culture by marrying immigrants.

This paper presents a new perspective on results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility program. Building on recent developments in the program evaluation literature, this paper defines several treatment effect parameters and then estimates and interprets these parameters using data from MTO. The evaluation framework is used to make a clear distinction between the interpretation of Intent to Treat (ITT) and Treatment on the Treated (TOT) parameters as program effects and Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) parameters as neighborhood effects. This distinction helps to clarify that results from MTO are only informative about a small subset of neighborhood effects of interest. Tests for instrument strength show that MTO induced large changes in neighborhood poverty rates. However, it is also shown that MTO induced remarkably little variation in many of the other neighborhood and school characteristics believed to influence outcomes and that much of this variation was confined to the tails of these characteristics' national distributions. Consistent with prevailing theories of neighborhood effects, labor market and health outcomes improved when households moved to neighborhoods with characteristics at or above the national median. The evidence suggests housing mobility programs designed to induce moves to neighborhoods with characteristics in addition to or in lieu of low poverty might induce larger effects than MTO, and results point to the investigation of heterogeneity in program effects from MTO as a fruitful direction for future research.

This chapter provides an introduction to the assumptions befhind comparative-historical methodology and will outline several key approaches to comparative-historical research, including historiography, large-N comparative scholarship, negative case methods, and formal methods. It will then review critiques of comparative-historical approaches that come from both positivist and interpretivist researchers before turning to the new direction in which comparative-historical methods can be employed, such as exploring the recent past and incorporating new technology into comparative-historical research. Comparative-historical research is not a tool only suited to the dreary questions of yesterday's scholars, but rather a tool that can provide new windows into our social organizations, our culture, and indeed our future.

Air pollution levels can vary dramatically from day to day based on predictable weather variables such as sunlight and temperature. Thus, episodic policies aimed at reducing exposure on high pollution days could be cost effective relative to policies aimed at reducing pollution exposure across all days. Such episodic approaches may include efforts to reduce the supply of pollution on those days expected to yield high pollution levels, such as reducing manufacturing or discouraging vehicle use. But, these supply-side approaches can be very costly, and alternatively, reduced exposure can be achieved by increasing averting behavior among individuals. This paper investigates the effectiveness of such demand-side programs using American Time Use Survey data. Specifically, it investigates whether individuals respond to publicly provided information on air quality by reducing their vigorous outdoor activities, and thus minimizing their exposure to dangerous concentrations of pollutants on high-pollution days. While controlling for individual responses to actual air quality index levels, results show that individuals engage in averting behavior on alert days by reducing the time they spend in vigorous outdoor activities by 18 percent or 21 minutes on average.

Peer Data Management System (PDMS) is an attractive solution for managing distributed heterogeneous information. When a peer (client) requests to retrieve data from another peer(server) with a diff erent schema, translations of the query and its answers are done by intermediate peers (translators). There are two privacy issues in this translation process: (i)answer privacy: no unauthorized parties (including the translators) should know the query result; (ii) mapping privacy: the translation can be a paid service, thus the schema and thevalue mappings used by the translators to perform the translation should not be revealed to other peers. PPP [7], based on commutative encryption, is the fi rst protocol proposed to support privacy-preserving querying in PDMS. However, PPP suff ers from several shortcomings. First, PPP cannot satisfy the requirement of answer privacy (an attack is given in this paper). We show that this issue can be solved by adopting another cryptographic technique called oblivious transfer. Second, PPP adopts a weaker notion for mapping privacy, which allows the client peer observe certain mappings done by translators. In this paper, we stick to the strict requirement that no party can observe the mappings of other peers and develop two lightweight protocols: a simple method based on serial translation and a more complex one that supports parallel translation. Furthermore, we consider a stronger adversary model where there may be collusions among peers and propose an efficient protocol that guards against collusions. We conduct an experimental study on the performance of the proposed protocols using both real and synthetic data. The results show that the proposed protocols not only achieve a better privacy guarantee than PPP, but they are also significantly more efficient, because they do not rely on expensive cryptographic operations.

In the last 50 years, the United States has experienced a large influx of immigrants. The current literature suggests that the impact on native wages is small or nonexistent, but the effect of the foreign born on native internal migration is still disputed. Using Public Use Microdata Samples from every decennial census from 1970 t0 2000, this study estimates the response of native and foreign interstate migration flows to the concentration of the foreign-born population. The results indicate that natives avoid higher foreign concentrations, but the foreign-born are strongly attracted to such concentrations. There is also evidence that this major difference between native and foreign response has motivated the end of positive net migration to the West.

This study uses a new source of linked census data (N = 6,734) to test theories proposed to explain the high intergenerational coresidence in 19th-century America. Was it a system of support for dependent elderly, or did it reflect intergenerational interdependence? I focus on transitions from middle age to old age, and I assess key predictors of family transitions, including widowhood, retirement, disability, migration, and wealth. The results show that adverse events precipitated changes in the headship of intergenerational families but did not increase the likelihood of residing in an intergenerational family. The findings suggest that 19th-century intergenerational coresidence was not principally a means of old-age support; more often, probably, there was a reciprocal relationship between generations.

The Occupational Information Network database (O*NET), a publicly available employment and occupation resource, contains considerable relevant data on accountants' and auditors' work and employment. Created and maintained by the U.S. Department of Labor, the O*NET is organized into six categories; annual updates derived from multiple sources including job analysts, surveys of employers and employees, and labor economists' employment projections. The extensive resources supporting its creation and maintenance have resulted in statistically defensible sampling methods but considerable variability in the validity of O*NET conceptual constructs and measures. Users of the O*NET include scholars, state employment agencies, employers, career counselors, and job seekers. Although we are unaware of current applications of the O*NET in professional accounting, we suggest ten applications. A small body of accounting research uses the O*NET; we suggest additional future research applications. The limitations of the O*NET include overly broad categories of accounting work, issues related to biases and construct validity, and poor organization and ease-of-use. But for scholars with patience and tenacity, the O*NET provides an important publicly available, longitudinal, and cross-sectional resource for investigating accountancy employment and work.

Although the U.S. poverty rate was the same in 2000 as it was in 1970, the geographic distribution of the poor has become more concentrated. A higher concentration of poor in poor neighborhoods is a concern because it may mean the poor are exposed to fewer opportunities that affect their outcomes in life, like employment and income. We show where and how poverty has become more concentrated in the United States, and who is most likely to be affected.