Work-family conflict is much higher in the United States than elsewhere in the developedworld.6 One reason is that Americans work longer hours than workers in most other developedcountries, including Japan, where there is a word, karoshi, for death by overwork.7The typical American middle-income family put in an average of 11 more hours a week in2006 than it did in 1979.8Not only do American families work longer hours; they do so with fewer laws to supportworking families. Only the United States lacks paid maternity-leave laws amongthe 30 industrialized democracies in the Organization for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment.9 The only family leave available to Americans is unpaid, limited to threemonths, and covers only about half the labor force.10 Discrimination against workerswith family responsibilities, illegal throughout Europe,11 is forbidden only indirectly here.Americans also lack paid sick days, limits on mandatory overtime, the right to requestwork-time flexibility without retaliation, and proportional wages for part-time work. Allexist elsewhere in the developed world.12So it should come as no surprise that Americans report sharply higher levels of workfamilyconflict than do citizens of other industrialized countries.13 Fully 90 percent ofAmerican mothers and 95 percent of American fathers report work-family conflict.14 Andyet our public policymakers in Congress continue to sit on their hands when it comes toenacting laws to help Americans reconcile their family responsibilities with those at work.

This paper studies the evolution of interethnic attitudes, the integration or segregation dynamics of ethnic minorities and the conditions for the rising of ethnic-based social hierarchies. By means of a cultural evolution framework, a dynamics of interethnic attitudes is provided and conditions for their convergence derived. Steady states implying a constant role of racism and no role for racism are identified. By deriving sufficient conditions for convergence, we find that the way in which Oblique Socialization Schemes (the way children react to out-offamily stimuli when forming their cultural values) are defined and modelled becomes crucial for the structure of the derived long run equilibria. In particular, we find that Steady States implying an Ethnic-based social ranking or full integration of ethnicities may be reached depending on whether or not agents use Reciprocity and/or Ethnocentrism in their interethnic attitudes formation schemes. We study the conditions under which one group puts more effort in the socialization process, it changes more in values and shows more frustration than others. At last, we provide an endogeneization of socialization process by applying an homophily rule, finding out when breaks in the convergence process happen

The composition of urban areas changed over the 20th century as African Americans migrated en masse from the southern countryside. Nearly all of the quantitative work to date on race and housing has focused on segregation after World War II (see Cutler and Glaeser (1997)). No papers to my knowledge have examined the earlier influence of black migration which has influenced urban migration patterns for nearly a century. I have compiled and digitized a new dataset based on previously classified surveys of neighborhoods by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1938 that show housing values, ethnic composition, occupational structure, and amenities for over 600 neighborhoods in New York City. I then use the data to investigate how the movement of blacks into neighborhoods influenced housing values in both their neighborhoods and the surrounding area. The analysis is based on a spatial two-stage least squares estimator. The instrument combines information on outflows of black migrants from other states to New York with neighborhood-level data on the birth states of African Americans living in New York City. The strength of this instrument comes from the propensity for people to migrate to areas with pre-existing populations of their peers. While housing values declined throughout much of New York City during the Great Depression, the results indicate little evidence that black movement in a neighborhood led to further declines in housing values. The results also highlight the importance of controlling for spatial dependence between neighborhoods in hedonic models of housing values.

In a previous study, Howland and Nguyen showed that cities that attracted Asian immigrants experienced slower declines in computer employment than did cities without immigration. This article continues this exploration of the role that immigrants play in labor supply and regional growth by applying a similar framework to four additional low-wage manufacturing industries. Results show that job retention and creation in three low-skilled industriesfruit and vegetable processing, apparel manufacturing, and leather and leather products manufacturingrespond to the influx of Hispanic immigrants in metropolitan areas. Asian immigration had no impact on these three industries, and neither Hispanic nor Asian immigrants affected metropolitan employment growth in the meat-processing industry.

Transportation analysts frequently recommend pricing as way to combat road congestion. Market prices for curb parking are a particularly attractive way to implement this approach, both because paying to park is a less alien idea than paying to drive and because the travel involved in cruising for parking is almost entirely socially wasteful. However, the literature on performance-priced parking has thus far ignored the possibility that pervasive nonpaymentthrough rent-seeking, opportunism, or fraudwill dilute the efficacy of market prices. In this paper we use an original survey of thousands of parking meters in Los Angeles, California to show that at any given time almost 40 percent of vehicles parked at meters are both not paying and not breaking any laws. We document, in other words, a high incidence of legal nonpayment. We also show that across an entire day, vehicles that are legally nonpaying consume more meter hours than vehicles that pay or that occupy spaces illegally. The implications of this research are twofold. First, legal nonpayment costs local governments significant amounts of revenue each year. Second, and more importantly, the high rate of legal nonpayment threatens to undermine the effectiveness of policies built around market-prices for curb parking. We suggest policy reforms for cities confronted with high levels of legal nonpayment. Chief among these reforms is an end to the practice of granting free, time-unlimited parking to vehicles displaying disabled placards. These laws are present in at least 23 states, and pose a serious threat to the effectiveness of market-priced parking.

People who live at higher densities use public transit more often than people who live at lower densities. Modern investigation into this density-transit relationship stretches back at least 300 years (Zupan and Pushkarev, 1977). While research recognizes this positive relationship, identifying a density level at which transit service becomes feasible has proven to be quite elusive . . .

For over two hundred years, educational attainment in the United States has climbed, with the largest gains occurring recently from 1940 through 1980. Today the adult population is at or near its highest level ever with 88 to 89 percent high school graduates and close to 30 percent college graduates. But there are signs of change. Shortly after 2000, attainment amongst adults has flattened. A closer look at this educational ceiling reveals that the educational gains of the population have not only stopped but are beginning to decline: Census and ACS data show that a reversal is underway. This reversal emerged for the newest members of the adult population around 2000. In addition, college completion rates, although not yet reversed, are slowing dramatically. Looking at the problem spatially, no state had an educational reversal in 1990, but, by 2000, in nearly every western state the percentage of high school graduates was lower among young adults (age 25 to 34) than among prime age adults (age 45 to 64). By 2007, the reversal was deepening in several western states, had spread east through Texas and the Great Lakes region, and also appeared along the south Atlantic seaboard and the East Coast.

In this paper, I investigate self-employment among the immigrant population in the United States. Besides education, language skills or years of settlement, coethnic networking is another important influence on the propensity for self-employment. I use instrumental variables based on a shift-share of national levels of immigration into metropolitan areas. I let this term interact with the self-employment rate of that immigrant group to reflect the different propensities for self-employment among different immigrant groups.I find that immigrants are more likely to become self-employed in the United States than natives, although the difference is not substantial. Among the immigrant population, having a family, owning a home and having a good command of English are positively correlated with being self-employed. Network size alone has a negative and significant effect on the probability of becoming self-employed. However, this relationship is modified by the nationwide group self-employment rate. There is a positive network effect in groups with high self-employment rate, and a negative effect in groups with low self-employment rate. There is also a strong positive interaction effect among immigrants who have a good command of English or a bachelors degree.

Education's role in agricultural production is commonly underestimated when compared to other sectors of the economy, yet the economical implications of formalized schooling on the farm have long been studied. In this thesis it is suggested that educational attainment has, indeed, long been a contributing factor in farming output, earnings, and labor mobility. More specifically, knowledge and skill have been instrumental dynamics of the differentiation amongst output, income, and transferability. The supply of educated farm youth and the demand for their labor have shifted throughout the twentieth century as they have been shaped by institutional support and technological advancement. The last thirty years of the century in America's most prolific farming region, the Heartland, reveals a landscape where formalized education, while universally offered, maintains specific value on and off the farm. However, a notable contradiction may exist between the respective roles of secondary and tertiary schooling, and all relationships involving any level of educational attainment are prone to changes over time.

The goal of this work is to explore the built context of our food system as a manifestation of a set of social and environmental conditions that are antithetical to the long-term health and survival of human life on this planet. The specific focus of this work is the small-scale, integrated farm. The farm is but one piece of the puzzle of how we eat and resides within the larger context of storage, distribution, economy, culture etc. Using precedents, both past and present, and through design explorations this work seeks to develop a positive course forward that will enable humanity to reconnect with its food source. We have the potential and impetus to rebuild and to heal our local resilience, food security, and egalitarian access to fresh, healthy food. Arguably, these goals have coinciding and connected paths within other aspects of our cultural and human needs – housing, manufacturing, healthcare, etc. The essential questions to be answered are: What does a healthy food system look like? How can this be designed to integrate into and support diverse and positive communities? What infrastructure is necessary to support the type of endeavor that creates healthy food, feeds a culture, and heals the damaged soil that is the basis of our sustenance. It is clear that industrial agriculture, the source of nearly all food consumed by Americans, is not this model. Appropriate food systems will vary by culture, climate, economy, settlement patterns, and the like. This work focuses on the condition of the Northeast region of the United States.

The sharpest increase in home ownership in the United States over the last century occurred between 1940 and 1960, driven in large part by a decrease in age at first ownership. At the same time, family formation at younger ages became much more common. The three chapters of this dissertation shed light on the driving forces behind these changes in housing markets and household formation. In Chapter 1, I focus on the decreased age at first ownership between 1940 and 1960. I assess the contribution of several coincident large-scale government interventions in housing finance by studying veterans' home loan benefits provided under the postwar GI Bills. Applying a regression discontinuity design to two breaks in the probability of military service by date of birth, for cohorts coming of age at the end of World War II and the Korean War, I estimate the impact of veteran status on home ownership. I find significant, positive effects of veteran status on home ownership that diminish with age, consistent with the predicted effects of easier loan terms. Complementary analyses suggest veterans' non-housing benefits and military service itself are unlikely to explain the observed differences in home ownership. In Chapter 2, I ask how military service in World War II and the Korean War, and associated veterans' benefits, affected veterans' pattern of family formation, using a regression discontinuity design analogous to that in Chapter 1. The results suggest that service in the Korean War delayed marriage and had an initially dampening effect on having children. However, by 1960, service in the Korean War appears to be associated with a greater likelihood of having had a child, but not with a greater likelihood of having married. I discuss possible mechanisms for the documented facts, and suggest that the iii PREVIEW housing benefits provided to veterans under the GI Bills may have allowed Korean War veterans to more than recover from the disruption of service by relaxing constraints on household formation. Chapter 3 turns to the remarkable fact that the U.S. home ownership rate increased by 10 percentage points between 1940 and 1945. despite the relative paucity of housing construction during World War II. I discuss possible reasons for this increase, and find evidence suggesting that wartime rent control may have contributed to this rise by stimulating the withdrawal of structures from the rental market for sale to owner-occupiers at uncontrolled prices.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economics. Nevertheless, a neglected area in historical stature studies is the relationship between stature and family size, and statures are documented here to be positively related with family size. The relationship between material inequality and heath is the subject of considerable debate, and there was an inverse relationship between material inequality and stature. The paper also supports a bio-spatial relationship between the environment and stature.

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were more than twice as responsive as whites to income transfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independent living arrangements. My findings have implications for understanding racial differences in rates of retirement and independent living at the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise in retirement prior to 1930, and the subsequent convergence in black-white retirement rates and living arrangements.

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 2554, 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.

Almost 30 percent of the more than 68 million young adults aged eighteen to thirty-four in the United States today are either foreign born or of foreign parentage. As these newcomers make their transitions to adulthood, say Ruben Rumbaut and Golnaz Komaie, they differ significantly not only from one another but also from their native-parentage counterparts, including blacks and whites. The authors document the demographic changes in the United States over the past forty years and describe the ways in which generation and national origin shape the experiences of these newcomers as they become adults.Rumbaut and Komaie point out that immigrant groups experience gaps in social, economic, and legal status that are even greater than the gaps between native whites and blacks. By far the most-educated (Indians) and the least-educated (Mexicans) groups in the United States today are first-generation immigrants, as are the groups with the lowest poverty rate (Filipinos) and the highest poverty rate (Dominicans). These social and economic divides reflect three very different ways immigrants enter the country: through regular immigration channels, without legal authorization, or as state-sponsored refugees. For many ethnic groups, significant progress takes place from the first to the second generation. But, say the authors, for millions of young immigrants, a lack of legal permanent residency status blocks their prospects for social mobility. Having an undocumented status has become all the more consequential with the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive federal immigration reforms.In the coming two decades, as the U.S. native-parentage labor force continues to shrink, immigrants and their children are expected to account for most of the growth of the nation's labor force, with the fastest-growing occupations requiring college degrees. Rumbaut and Komaie stress that one key to the nation's future will be how it incorporates young adults of immigrant origin in its economy, polity, and society, especially how it enables these young adults to have access to, and to attain, postsecondary education and its manifold payoffs.

This review considers empirical studies on student learning in mathematics for bilingual Latinas/os and examines how views of mathematics and language have constrained what we know about this population as mathematics learners. The purposes of the review are to describe views of mathematics and language evident in this research, critique these views in light of current research and theories, and propose recommendations for future research.

Sources associated with 19th century stature variation have been widely considered. Using US state prison records and robust statistics, this paper illustrates that 19th century US white statures were positively associated with a broad combination of wealth, equality, and environmental characteristics. Individuals from geographic areas characterized by low wealth and high inequality had shorter statures. After controlling for various factors, direct sunlight the primary source of vitamin D was also positively associated with stature. After controlling for wealth, inequality, and insolation, farmers were taller than workers in other occupations. These wealth, insolation, and socioeconomic relationships are significant across the stature distribution.