Epidemiologists and public health researchers are moving very slowly in the data sharing revolution, and agencies that maintain global health databases are reluctant to share data too. Once investments in infrastructure have been made, recycling and combining data provide access to maximum knowledge for minimal additional cost. By refusing to share data, researchers are slowing progress towards reducing illness and death and are denying a public good to taxpayers who support most of the research.Funders of public health research are beginning to call for change and developing data sharing policies. However they are not yet adequately addressing the obstacles that underpin the failure to share data. These include professional structures that reward publication of analysis but not of data, and funding streams and career paths that continue to undervalue critical data management work. Practical issues need to be sorted out too: how and where should data be stored for the long term, who will control access, and who will pay for those services? Existing metadata standards need to be extended to cope with health data.These obstacles have been known for some time; most can be overcome in the field of public health just as they have been overcome in other fields. However no institution has taken the lead in defining a work plan and carving up the tasks and the bill. In this round table paper, we suggest goals for data sharing and a work plan for reaching them, and challenge respondents to move beyond well intentioned but largely aspirational data sharing plans.

Many Hispanic adults have not graduated from high school yet relatively few Hispanic high school dropouts have finished high school by obtaining a GED or alternative high school credential. Only about 4% of Hispanic adults (representing 9% of adult Hispanic school dropouts) have a GED as their highest educational degree completed, matching the prevalence of the GED among white adults (4%). GEDs are not prevalent among Hispanics in part because of the large presence of immigrants among Hispanic school dropouts. Few Hispanic immigrants complete GEDs and the crosssectional evidence suggests that immigrants only seize the opportunity to finish high school as their time in the United States increases. Lack of English language fluency may also impede Hispanic dropouts from obtaining GEDs. The evidence is mixed on how valuable a GED is in the labor market. Among native-born Hispanic workers, dropouts with a GED are paid substantially less than Hispanics who graduated high school with a regular high school diploma, consistent with the research demonstrating the “non-equivalence” of the GED. But Hispanic foreign-born school dropouts who have obtained a GED are paid more than those who graduated high school, consistent with the hypothesis that U.S. employers may have difficulty sizing up the merits of workers with degrees earned abroad.

The southern pine beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis, SPB) is the major insect pest of pine species in the southeastern United States. It attains outbreak population levels sufficient to mass attack host pines across the landscape at scales ranging from a single forest stand to interstate epidemics. This county level analysis selected and examined the best climatic and landscape variables for predicting infestations at regional scales. The analysis showed that, for a given county, the most important factor in predicting outbreaks was that the county was classified as in outbreak status in the previous year. Other important factors included minimum winter temperature and the greatest difference between the average of daily minimums and a subsequent low temperature point, precipitation history either seasonally in the previous year or difference from average over the previous 2 years, the synchronizing effect of seasonal temperatures on beetle populations and the relative percentage of total forest area composed of host species. The statistical models showed that climatic variables are stronger indicators of outbreak likelihood than landscape structure and cover variables. Average climatic conditions were more likely to lead to outbreaks than extreme conditions, supporting the notion of coupling between a native insect and its native host. Still, some extreme events (i.e., periods of very low temperature or very high precipitation) did precede beetle infestation. This analysis suggested that there are predisposing and inciting factors at the large scale but the driving factors leading to individual infestations operate at smaller scales.

In the context of certain dynamic models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. Using this property, we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in Missouri. We leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in prenegotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary. These estimates imply a labor supply elasticity of about 3.7, suggesting that school districts possess significant market power. The presence of monopsony power in this teacher labor market may be partially explained by its institutional features.

This article describes the residence patterns of native born families in the US North in 1850, paying special attention to whether elderly men were living with their adult sons. Co residence of family members can be overestimated if only cases where both members of a dyad were found on the census are used so the analysis includes cases where only one of the dyad had been located in 1850 as well. Also, descriptive statistics will usually give the appearance of ultimogeniture because these patterns are affected by the departure of sons as they grew older. Therefore a multivariate model which controls for age was used. 71% of fathers 60 or older had a son 15 or older in his town; 49% in his household. Patterns of coresidence varied according to the size of the family: only sons were far more likely to remain at home than were sons in larger families. In families with two sons, the youngest stayed at home while in those with five or more sons, it was the eldest. The smaller families illustrate the desire to have at least one child living near the elderly parent if at all possible. Even in this rapidly growing population, demography was a significant obstacle in these smaller families: most of the man who did not have a son close by were living in the areas that had been settled early where a fertility decline had already begun. In virtually all the larger families, at least one adult son was near his elderly parents and usually more than one. These patterns reflect the different economic contexts of the families as they moved out of the region that had been settled earliest and in 1850 was changing to a non farm economy compared with regions that had been settled later whose economies were still based upon farming.

In this dissertation I argue that the physical growth of American universities throughout the twentieth century held significant implications for the larger metropolitan order of their host communities. Indeed, universities were a major and previously unrecognized factor in the process of urbanization around the country. By examining several university-city cases, this work illustrates that institutional growth could catalyze changes in patterns of urban investment, as in Muncie, Indiana; reinforce boundaries of urban segregation, as in Austin, Texas; drain the vitality of near-campus neighborhoods as hotbeds of creative political activity through urban renewal, as in Hyde Park, Chicago; or catalyze political protest, as in Berkeley, California. As universities expanded in size with the aid of federal funding sources and developed increasingly national and global identities at the expense of local affinities, these physical, political, and intellectual changes often brought the institutions into conflict with their communities and created tension between the student body and university administrators. Universities responded by embracing the ideal of objectivity and restricting overtly political considerations and statements by faculty and studentspart of a growing consensus in favor of democratic capitalism in broad opposition to communism. This restriction of political possibilities was likewise reflected in the built environment of universities, expressing ambivalence or denial of responsibility about their roles in urban development and American politics. The notion of the ivory tower was established as a critique of higher education in this period, an architectural metaphor constructed to chastise individuals and institutions reluctant to administer and support the Cold War struggle for American hegemony.

Investment in human capital may take many forms. The time that parents spend with their children during the early childhood years can be thought of as an investment in the development of the children’s cognitive, emotional, and social abilities. Formal education, from the primary grades through college and postgraduate studies, represents a further investment in the development of students’ capacities. After leaving school, individuals may engage in structured training or less formal learning on the job. More broadly, medical care, diet, and exercise may be considered forms of investment in human capital. While few would quarrel with the idea that all of these investments may have significant value, measuring that value poses significant challenges. My goal in the present paper is to describe and critique alternative approaches to the measurement of investment in formal education The first section of the paper introduces the idea of an education satellite account in which both the costs of education and the returns to education would be tallied. The second section discusses measurement of the costs of education, and the third section addresses a variety of issues that may arise in attempting to value investment in education based on the projected returns to additional years of schooling. The construction of real output measures for formal education is considered briefly in the fourth section. Concluding observations are offered in the final section.

This paper studies the effects of perceived racism among African Americans onauthoritarianism. We use multilevel modeling with poststratification to estimate these effects from nationally representative surveys and census data. Our approach representsa methodological advance to the extent that previous approaches lacked the statisticalpower to produce reliable estimates for sparsely sampled subsets of data. We findthat, on the aggregate level, the effect of perceptions of black-targeted racism among African Americans on their levels of authoritarianism is positive, significant, and large.In contrast, the effect for Whites is reversed. On the state level, these findings hold for almost 80 percent of the states that are adequately sampled. Previous scholarshiphas done a good job of explaining why Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic despite their high levels of social conservatism and authoritarianism. The present study, to ourknowledge, provides the first explicit and systematic attempt to explain why Blacks have such high levels of authoritarianism in the first place.

This paper studies the self selection in educational characteristics of Mexicans migrating to the US. This is done to determine educational self–selection, changes in self–selection in the nineties, as well as the change in the self–selection in terms of the wage distribution. The paper applies econometric techniques that control for bias by the use of endogenous samples. There are four key findings: first, self selection in the nineties was intermediate; second, self selection in 2000 was in the extremes of the education distribution: at zero years and at more than 16 years of education; third, the largest changes in migration probability were experienced by those two groups; and fourth, despite the changes in migration probabilities, the change in self selection in terms of the wage distribution is a change towards intermediate selection.

Are U.S. immigrants English proficiency and social outcomes the result of their cultural preferences, or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 Census microdata, we relate immigrants English proficiency, marriage, fertility and residential location variables to their age at arrival in the U.S., and in particular whether that age fell within the critical period of language acquisition. We interpret the differences between younger and older arrivers as effects of English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for English-language skills. Two-stage-least-squares estimates suggest that English proficiency increases the likelihood of divorce and intermarriage. It decreases fertility and, for some, ethnic enclave residence.

The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools; the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. We use longitudinal data tracking a cohort of students at 82 Texas public high schools to assess the precision of three widely used high school graduation rate measures: Texass official graduation rates and two competing estimates based on publicly available enrollment data from the Common Core of Data. Our analyses show that these widely used approaches yield highly imprecise estimates of high school graduation and persistence rates. We propose several guidelines for using existing graduation and persistence rate data and argue that a national effort to track students as they progress through high school is essential to reconcile conflicting estimates.

Between 1880 and 2000, the percentage of married men 60 and older living only with their wives in empty nest households rose from 19 percent to 78 percent. Data drawn from the US census show that more than half of this transformation occurred in the 30-year period from 1940 to 1970, bookended by moderate increases between 1880 and 1940 and very modest increases after 1970. Two literatures have presented demographic, cultural, and economic explanations for the decline in elderly co-residence with their children, but none adequately accounts for a sharp change in the mid-twentieth century. Both aggregate comparisons and multivariate analysis of factors influencing the living arrangements of elderly men suggest that economic advances for all age groups in the critical 30-year period, along with trends in fertility and immigration, best explain the three-stage shift that made the empty nest the dominant household form for older men by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Few transformations have been as important in American political history as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party coalition over the course of the 1930s-60s and the embrace of racial conservatism on the part of many Republicans. This paper, which is part of a broader book project, focuses on changes in mass opinion among Democratic and Republican partisans from the late 1930s through the 1960s. It traces, over time, the relationship between New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism, and between economic policy conservatism and racial conservatism. A key initial finding is that by the late 1930s, economically-liberal northern white Democratic voters were especially pro-civil rights, while economically-conservative northern Republican voters were particularly hostile. This suggests that there was a connection between attitudes towards the economic programs of the New Deal and racial liberalism early on. One of the goals of the book will be to understand where that connection came from, along with its implications for subsequent developments.

This paper deals with the issue of using infant and childhood mortality as an indicator of inequality.The case is that of the United States in the 20th century. Using microdata from the 1900 and 1910Integrated Public Use Microsamples (IPUMS), published data from the Birth Registration Area inthe 1920s, results from a number of surveys, and the Linked Birth & Infant Death Files from the NationalCenter for Health Statistics for 1991, infant and child mortality can be related to such other variablesas occupation of father or mother, education of father or mother, family income, race, ethnicity, andresidence. The evidence shows that, although there have been large absolute reductions in the levelinfant and child mortality rates and also a reduction in the absolute levels of differences across socioeconomicgroups, relative inequality has not diminished over the 20th century.

We document geographic concentration by both venture capital firms and venture capital-financed companies in three metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Boston, and New York. We find that venture capital firms locate in regions with high success rates of venture capital-backed investments. Geography is also significantly related to outcomes. Venture capital firms based in locales that are venture capital centers outperform. regardless of the stage of the investment. This outperformance arises from outsized performance outside of the venture capital firms' office locations, including in peripheral locations. If the goal of state and local policy makers is to encourage venture capital investment, outperformance of non-local investments suggests that policy makers might want to mitigate costs associated with established venture capitalists investing in their geographies rather than encouraging the establishment of new venture capital firms. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Over the past 40 to 50 years, most American cities have experienced significant increases in automobile use. Now, to offset increasing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, many are contemplating measures to reduce automobile use. This study examined Hartford, Connecticut, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, which exhibited an increase and a decrease in automobile use, respectively, between 1960 and 2007. It is hoped that these cities provide lessons in how to successfully reduce automobile travel. The study focused on the cumulative effects of historical policy decisions over decades on parking provisions and changes in travel behavior. The results of this analysis suggest that parking policy affects incremental changes in parking provision that may greatly influence gradual changes in automobile use over time.

This paper examines the effect of water-borne lead exposure on infant mortality in American cities over the period 1900-1920. Infants are highly sensitive to lead, and more broadly are a marker for current environmental conditions. The effects of lead on infant mortality are identified by variation across cities in water acidity and the types of service pipes-lead, iron, or concrete-which together determined the extent of lead exposure. Time series estimates and estimates that restrict the sample to cities with lead pipes provide further support for the causal link between water-borne lead and infant mortality. The magnitudes of the effects were large. In 1900, a decline in exposure equivalent to an increase in pH from 6.7 to 7.5 in cities with lead-only pipes would have been associated with a decrease in infant mortality of 12.3 to 14.3 percent or about 22 fewer infant deaths per 1,000 live births. City-level evidence on wages in manufacturing suggests that the adverse health effects of lead may have extended beyond infants.

En Estados Unidos no existe una estructura de clases sociales plenamente reconocida. El llamado “sueño americano” descansa en la idea de un sistema social meritocrático, supuestamente organizado en términos de la competencia en el trabajo, los atributos individuales y las recompensas sociales.1 Estados Unidos, por lo menos durante los tres decenios posteriores a la segunda guerra mundial, fue un país prácticamente de clase media, con estructuras de oportunidades más o menos abiertas y con mecanismos efectivos de participación que aseguraban la movilidad social ascendente. No obstante, con la instauración del modelo neoliberal, a mediados de los años setenta, decayó la calidad de los empleos, se polarizó la distribución de los ingresos y empeoraron las condiciones . . .