Customers typically buy products after comparing their features, thus several market analysis tasks(e.g., skyline computation) perform dominance analysis between products. In this paper, we study an interesting problem in this class, which has not received enough attention by past research. An important decision problem by a company is how to design a new product, which dominates all its competitors. Designing the perfect product, however, might not be feasible since in practice the development process is confined by some constraints, e.g., limited funding or low target selling price. We model these constraints by a constraint function which determines the feasible characteristics of a new product. Given such a budget, our task is to decide the best possible features of the new product that maximize its profitability. In general, a product is marketable if it dominates a large set of existing products, while it is not dominated by many. Based on this, we define dominance relationship analysis (DRA) and use it to measure the profitability of the new product. The decision problem is then modeled as a budget constrained optimization query (BOQ). Computing BOQ is challenging due to the exponential increase of the search space with dimensionality. We propose a divide-and-conquer based framework which outperforms a baseline approach in terms of not only execution time but also space complexity. Based on the proposed framework, we further study an approximation solution which provides a good tradeoff between computation cost and quality of result.

An export strategy is an essential component of a state competitiveness agenda in the 21st century and a critical element of job growth in the immediate term. American exports grew 12.7 percent from the third quarter of 2009 to the third quarter of 2010, outperforming the 3.2 percent growth of the economy. Exports are just as critical to state economies, but state export promotion efforts often suffer from several shortcomings, although not across allstates and not to the same degree. States do not have the data to understand their own export strengths, nor the effectiveness of their existing export programs. State export efforts are reactive, fragmented, and inconsistently funded. Finally, state export efforts all too often ignore(and therefore duplicate and fail to leverage) the export-promoting work of other groups or the federal government. To remedy these problems, bolster their economies, and create jobs in the process, states should:1) Get smart about assessing exports and the performance of their export promotion activities2) Create an export strategy as part of the states economic agenda3) Leverage the resources of other organizations involved in export promotion

This study tested competing theories of assimilation by examining the patterns of union formation (i.e. marriage, cohabitation, single, ethnic / racial intermarriage and ethnic / racial inter-cohabitation) among non-Hispanic American whites, non-Hispanic African Americans and Jamaican women aged 18 44 years in the year 2000. The study also examined how union formation patterns differ across groups of Jamaican women (i.e. born and living in Jamaica, 1st generation Jamaican immigrants, 1.5 generation Jamaicans, 2nd generation, and beyond).It is important to study West Indian union formation patterns since the West Indian immigration rate has been increasing. The black West Indian population in the U.S. grew by about 67% between 1990 and 2000. The growth rate of the black West Indian population is greater than that of other established groups such as the Cubans and Koreans (Logan & Deane, 2003). This study focused specifically on Jamaicans since the bulk of the West Indian migrants is from Jamaica (Peach, 1995). Moreover, they represent both the diversity of modes of incorporation in the U.S. and the range of occupational backgrounds and immigrant status among contemporary immigrants (from professionals and entrepreneurs to laborers, refugees and unauthorized migrants).I used the Reproductive Health Survey 2002 for the analysis of the Jamaican women in Jamaica and the Census 2000 (5% PUMS) for the analysis of non-Hispanic white American and non-Hispanic African women. I also used the National Survey of Family Growth 2002 (NSFG 2002) to assess data quality and for purposes of comparison.I found that Jamaican womens union formation patterns followed the segmented assimilation model where marriage rates tended to decline across generation and cohabitation rates tended to increase across generation that resembled more the union formation patterns of non-Hispanic African American women. Also, I found that out partnership increased across generation where Jamaican women had much greater odds of out partnering with a non-Hispanic African American partner compared to partnering with a non-Hispanic white American partner.

Using longitudinal data linked to the 1850 and 1860 U.S. federal census manuscript schedules, this article examines the effect of migration to high-risk malaria counties on real estate wealth accumulation. Although the migrants recognized the risk of malaria, they still migrated to malarial regions. Those who migrated to areas with higher risk of malaria experienced smaller increases in real estate wealth than migrants to less malarial areas. The findings in this study provide historical evidence with which to estimate the potential modern-day economic benefit of malarial eradication.

The United States is in the throes of a public-policy debate about public-sector unionism and collective bargaining. The ostensible trigger of this debate is the fiscal crises that state and local governments have been experiencing since 2008. The debate largely centers on the extent to which public employee unions have contributed to this crisis through the pay and benefits they have negotiated for public employees. The role of government as employer is connected in this debate to the role of government as a taxing authority and provider of public services. These roles are often claimed to be in conflict with one another that is, governments as employers are seen as not exercising the same due diligence in setting pay and benefits as private-sector employers. The research evidence indicates, however, that these claims about public employment are based on incomplete and in some cases inaccurate understanding.

The trends in immigration to the United States are astonishing to consider. As of 2009 there were 1,130,818 persons whom received legal permanent residential status in the United States. This number compared to the 448,000 at the turn of the 20th century shows the drastic change that has occurred on the immigration front (DHS, 2010). Over the past century the United States has seen a shift not only in the number of immigrants arriving at the borders, but also a shift in the skill level of the immigrant. In 2009 the largest immigrant group was from Mexico followed by China, the Philippines, and India respectively (DHS, 2010). The three later groups make up an immigrant population that often comes to the United States with a skill set that can be used in a particular occupation. These are high achieving immigrants who often seek professional occupations in the United States labor market. Immigrationstatistics show that Chinese most commonly enter finance,business, or management positions (15.6% of Chinese immigrants in these positions), Filipinos enter healthcaresupport (14.8% of Filipino immigrants in these positions), and Asian Indians enter information technology positions (22.6% of Indian immigrants in these positions) in the U.S. labor market (MPI, 2010).This study aims to examine Chinese, Filipino, and Asian Indian immigrants who were part of the U.S. labor force in 2009. The goal of this research is to identify the variables which most accurately influence the standard of living among these three groups once they are a part of U.S. labor market. I hypothesize that those immigrants who receive work in their ethnic niche occupations will have higher standards of living than those who do not work in the niche occupations. This study will focus narrowly on ethnic groups that come to the United States with relatively high levels of educational attainment. While manyresearchers have focused on immigration collectively, thisresearch will add to existing literature by focusing narrowly on these three unique immigrant groups: Chinese, Filipino, and Asian Indians; and their associated standards of living in relation to occupation. I hypothesize that those immigrants who work in their ethnic niche occupations will have higher standards of living, ceteris paribus, than immigrants who do not.

We study the long run eff ects of one of the most ambitious place based economic development policies in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority. We fi rst conduct an evaluation of the dynamic e ffects of the TVA on local economies in the six decades since its inception. We fi nd that TVA led to short run gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed, while impacts on manufacturing employment continued to intensify well after the program had scaled down. This pattern is potentially consistent with the presence of strong agglomeration economies and multiple steady states in the manufacturing sector. However, it is also consistent with models with a unique steady state and slow adjustment. To diff erentiate between these two possibilities, we estimate a simple dynamic county level model of agglomeration that allows for multiple steady states. We fi nd clear evidence of agglomeration eff ects, but no sign that these e ffects arestrong enough to generate multiple steady states, suggesting that the gains to the TVA region will eventually be reversed. Moreover, we fi nd little evidence of nonlinearity in agglomeration economies, implying the aggregate productivity eff ects of place based development policies are probably limited.

The problem of privately releasing data is to provide a version of a dataset without revealing sensitive informationabout the individuals who contribute to the data. The model of differential privacy allows such private release whileproviding strong guarantees on the output. A basic mechanism achieves differential privacy by adding noise to the frequency counts in the contingency tables (or, a subset of the count data cube) derived from the dataset. However, when the dataset is sparse in its underlying space, as is the case for most multi-attribute relations, then the effect of adding noise is to vastly increase the size of the published data: it implicitly creates a huge number of dummy data points to mask the true data, making it almost impossible to work with.We present techniques to overcome this roadblock and allow efficient private release of sparse data, while maintainingthe guarantees of differential privacy. Our approach is to release a compact summary of the noisy data. Generating the noisy data and then summarizing it would still be very costly, so we show how to shortcut this step, and instead directly generate the summary from the input data, without materializing the vast intermediate noisy data. We instantiate this outline for a variety of sampling and filtering methods, and show how to use the resulting summaryfor approximate, private, query answering. Our experimental study shows that this is an effective, practical solution,with comparable and occasionally improved utility over the costly materialization approach.

In the 1990s the US Congress adopted key changes to the US welfare system. As part of the reform all states instituted additional restrictions on eligibility for welfare payments including family caps and work requirements, as well as time limits on benefit payment. In Chapter One I investigate whether the new cross state variations in eligibility requirements and benefit levels affect migration decisions of welfare-prone mothers. Unlike previous studies of welfare-migration, this paper allows for multiple location choices. Using US Census 2000 data in a conditional logit framework, this paper finds only a trivial effect of welfare payment variation on the migration patterns of welfareprone mothers in this stricter regime. Quantitatively, for example, using the data on never married high school dropout mothers (treatment group) and never married high school graduate mothers results indicate that a $100 increase in the monthly welfare benefit in California will increase the number of treatment group mothers in California by 164 from the base of 50,756. To control for the costs of migration I include distance for each potential move, as well as the mother’s birth location. Both of these factors have statistically significant effects on the propensity to migrate. Chapter Two depicts the effects of other welfare policy variables and labor market factors like wage rate on the probability of choosing a location. The results indicate that time limits and family caps have trivial impacts on the propensity to migrate. However, the gain in utility due to higher welfare benefit depends on the length of the time limit and the family cap. Imposition of a family cap lowers the gain in utility due to a higher time limit. Given that the new welfare policy placed greater emphasis on labor market participation, I also look at the impact of labor market factors on the location choice. I find that in response to a one dollar increase in California’s hourly wage the probability of choosing California for never married high school dropout mothers goes up by 0.007 to 0.023 percentage points. However, such an increase in the wage induces the probability of choosing California for different comparison group mothers to go up by 0.009 to 0.036 percentage points. The trend of higher wage effects with higher levels of education is also observed for the probability of choosing New York. The positive wage effects provide policy makers with another alternative to encourage labor market participation apart from the work requirement policies under the welfare program. Chapter Three provides a study of welfare benefit induced location choices observed in the 1980 Census data. McKinnish (2007) uses a simple logit model that does not consider multiple location choices and assumes equal impact of the welfare benefit on migrating out of each state. I overcome these deficiencies by studying the effect of welfare benefit using a conditional logit model that considers multiple location choices and allows the effect of welfare benefit to vary by states. Estimated coefficients show that the gains in indirect utility due to higher welfare benefit payments are bigger when a mother’s children are young. The difference-in-difference effects indicate that on average a $100 increase in the monthly welfare benefit in the old state of residence will increase the probability of choosing that state for never married high school dropout mothers by 0.01 to1.12 percentage points. Thus, using a more realistic and superior empirical methodology, I find relatively smaller magnitude of welfare magnet effect in 1980 compared to that found in McKinnish (2007).

The authors study the pecuniary penalties for family-relatedamenities in the workplace (e.g., job interruptions, short hours, part-time work, and flexibility during the workday), how women have responded to them, and how the penalties have changed over time. The pecuniary penalties to behaviors that are beneficial to family appear to have decreased in many professions. Self-employment has declined in many of the high-end professions (e.g., pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, law, medicine, and veterinary medicine) where it was costly in terms of workplace flexibility. The authors conclude that many professions have experienced an increase in workplace flexibility, driven often by exogenous factors(e.g., increased scale of operations and shifts to corporate ownership of business) but also endogenously because of an increased number of women. Workplace flexibility in some positions, notably in the business and financial sectors, has lagged.

Alejandro Portes and Alejandro Rivas examine how young immigrants are adapting to life in the United States. They begin by noting the existence of two distinct pan-ethnic populations: Asian Americans, who tend to be the offspring of high-human-capital migrants, and Hispanics, many of whose parents are manual workers. Vast differences in each, both in human capital origins and in their reception in the United States, mean large disparities in resources available to the families and ethnic communities raising the new generation.

The U.S. census data reveal high concentrations of same-sex unmarried partners in areas along the U.S.Mexico border. In this article, I consider whether the above-average prevalence rates of same-sex unmarried partners along the U.S.Mexico border can be attributed to measurement error, whether they provide evidence of enclave-like areas for Hispanic same-sex partners, or some combination thereof. Drawing on descriptive statistics and logistic regression analyses, I examine data validity issues, as well as possible explanations for the high presence of gay men and lesbians in these particular residential locations. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the role of ethnicity, language, and household size in creating potential measurement error, as well as in generating attractive enclave characteristics. These findings provide insight into both the validity of the U.S. census data on same-sex unmarried partners, as well as the role of the intersection of sexual orientation and Hispanic ethnicity in determining residential choice. Although undoubtedly measurement error is a contributing factor, findings nonetheless support the existence of actual gay and lesbian enclaves and further suggest that immigration could play a role in generating these high concentration areas.Keywords: Migration; Sexual orientation; Demography

The authors describe the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) as a data source for migration studies. The SIPP is a panel dataset that provides information on income, employment outcomes, and participation in government programs. Survey participants are interviewed for up to four years even if they move to a new household or that household migrates within the United States. This unique longitudinal design gives the survey a strong advantage over traditional data sources. The authors illustrate differences in the propensity for interstate migration among different demographic groups over the 12-year period from 1996 to 2008. They also analyze the relationship between migration choices and life-changing events, such as becoming jobless or dissolution of a marriage. Their findings suggest that future research should consider the migration choices of individuals near retirement age.

The systematic examination of court caseloads has declined over the past several decades. This is largely because of the mixed results, and the lack of a coherent theory or the development of testable hypotheses. This paper reports the examination of a twenty-year period of Federal District Court filings, along with a variety of socio-economic, and political variables, in an effort to provide a sound basis for the development of testable hypotheses and a theory of caseload patterns.

This article builds on earlier studies that have examined "the economic cost of homosexuality," by using data from the 2000 U.S. Census and by employing multilevel analyses. Our findings indicate that partnered gay men experience a 12.5 percent earnings penalty compared to married heterosexual men, and a statistically insignificant earnings penalty compared to partnered heterosexual men, when both individual- and state-level characteristics are taken into account. Partnered lesbians experience about a 3.5 percent earnings advantage compared to married heterosexual women, and a 9 percent earnings advantage compared to partnered heterosexual women. Although individual-level characteristics are the primary determinants of their earnings, we find that some contextual characteristics affect the earnings of partnered gay men and lesbians, relative to partnered heterosexuals, and that these effects vary by sex.

Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work is an examination of the evolution of black womens work in the U.S. from the end of slavery into the twenty-first century. In sum, the author offers a convincing argument that black women, regardless of time and place, have been limited to the lowest rungs of occupational ladders. The status is not incidental but rather the outcome of white racism (on the part of women and men) and the intersection of employer racial and gender discrimination. Branch does not deny progress but asserts that steadfast occupational segregation by race and gender has historically defined black womens place and experience at the bottom of the labor queue and this remains unchanged in the contemporary period.

Research on older adults social integration usually focuses on time-indefinite access to social support, community involvement, and network connectedness. Little research has examined the actual amount of social contact older adults have on a typical day. The author uses nationally representative data on 92,698 adultscollected in the 2003-2009 American Time Use Surveysto examine age-related trends in rates of everyday contact. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression analyses reveal nonlinear relationships between age and rates of social contact. Older adults have substantially lower rates of social contact than younger and middle-aged adultsespecially among women. A significant portion, but not all, of the age-related variation in contact patterns is attributable to life-course factors like living arrangements. The author closes by considering several potential explanations for these trends and by urging social gerontologists to pay closer attention to the causes and consequences of microsocial contact patterns among older adults.