Differences in the residential , employment, and household characteristics of African Americans and European Americans as well as racial differences in the journey to work are well documented. There are many studies about the commuting behavior of non-whites, but the specific impact of the exodus of jobs to suburban locations on African American men and women who live in inner cities is still widely debated. An earlier study of Buffalo, N.Y. which, examined racial differences in commuting focused only on women (Johnston-Anumonwo, 1995); and in a follow-up study, men were included in the analysis (Johnston-Anumonwo , 1997). The purpose of the present study then is to examine the question of racial differences in locational access to j obs in Buffalo, N.Y. by presenting new data for the year 2000. The study retains the critical inquiry on whether suburban employment imposes longer commute times on African Americans than on European Americans. The results strongly complement those for 1990 and also 1980 by highlighting the fact that many African American men and women continue to endure relatively long commutes to get to work in spite of transportation, locational, and socioeconomic hindrances. Following a review of the background literature of the journey to work for African Americans , a brief description of the study area and data is provided, and then the findings are presented followed by the conclusions reached.

Current approaches to the link between family and housing tend not to closely examine cultural change. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework, rooted in symbolic interaction, dramaturgy and critical theory, well suited to the study of cultural change. This critical dramaturgical framework is applied to explore the changing link between housing as a stage prop and the privileged performance of motherhood. It is argued that redefinition of the proper performance of motherhood by the privileged constitutes an important aspect of cultural change, making positive evaluations of motherhood more difficult to achieve without a proper house. This results in an increase in stage fright, or women avoiding motherhood because they feel ill prepared to perform it properly, and an increase in the devaluing of certain categories of mother. US census data collected through the IPUMS project is used to provide evidence of these trends, where available, and further avenues of research are suggested.

Rising college enrollment over the last quarter century has not been met with a proportional increase in college completion. Comparing the high school classes of 1972 and 1992, we show declines in college completion rates have been most pronounced for men who first enroll in less selective public universities and community colleges. We decompose the decline into the components due to changes in preparedness of entering students and due to changes in collegiate characteristics, including type of institution and resources per student. While both factors play some role, the supply-side characteristics are most important in explaining changes in college completion.

How does banking affect development, and does banking affect all sectors equally, or change the structure of the economy? Since banking tends to grow with the rest of the economy, these questions are difficult to answer. This paper examines the growth of the national banking system from 1870-1900 during an important period in the financialand economic development of the United States. I create a new data set on individual banks and place them geographically. Minimum capital requirements limited the expansion of banks, and I use these requirements to identify the effects of additional banking. Banking was very important: the opening of a bank with the minimum capital increased total production by 12% for counties close to the dividing line between getting a bank and not. Both manufacturing and farming benefited, suggesting that the commercial, as opposed to investment, activities of banks were very important. Banks increased the inequality in farm size after a decade, largely through the expansion of larger farms, but had no affect on yields. Although the literature on banking often focuses on investment, commercial banking, either through direct currency creation or bills of exchange to facilitate the movement of goods, appears to be an important part of banking activities during development.

How well can parents insure their children's future? This paper aims at answering this question by studying the link between income shocks and parental investments in children in terms of time and goods. The paper presents three main contributions: (1) it estimates the degree of response to income shocks in families with young children, without imposing an a priori insurance setup; (2) it analyzes empirically the mechanism behind the degree of insurance found, in particular, the role of wealth and public transfers, and heterogeneity in responses to shocks by education and family structure; (3) finally, it proposes a useful way to use common information in the NLSY79 and the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to combine these three data sets and construct a panel of income, expenditures and time use.I use local business cycles as exogenous variation to families' resources. These are an unpredictable component of county unemployment rate, which I obtain after removing year and county eff ects from the time-series of county unemployment rate.I fi nd that (1) families only partially insure against income shocks, but expenditures in education of children respond less to shocks than household consumption, as parents try to shield them against shocks because investments may be complements across children's life-cycle; (2) income elasticity of investmentsin terms of time is larger in families with young children than in families where there are only school-agechildren, because at early ages there is a larger substitutability between diff erent uses of time; and (3)better o families use savings to bu er against shocks whereas poor families resort on public transfers.

When a table containing individual data is published, disclosure of sensitive information should be prohibitive. Since simply removing identifiers such as name and social security number may reveal the sensitive information by linking attacks which joins the published table with other tables on some attributes, the notion of k-anonymity which makes each record in the table be indistinguishable with k-1 other records by suppression or generalization has been proposed previously. It is shown to be NP-hard to k-anonymize a table minimizing information loss. The approximation algorithms with up to O(k) approximation ratio were proposed when generalization is used for anonymization.In this paper, we propose several approximation algorithms for k-anonymity with generalizing the attribute values by hierarchies that guarantee O(logk) approximation ratio and perform significantly better than the traditional algorithms. Since suppression of attributes is a special case of generalization of attributes with the hierarchies of two-level trees where the root nodes are * character, our approximation result works also for suppression methods. We next provide O(logk) approximate algorithms which gracefully adjust their running time according to the tolerance (1) of the approximation ratios. We also present the approximate algorithms for both k-anonymity and -diversity with generalizing the attribute values by hierarchies. Experimental results confirm that our approximation algorithms perform significantly better than traditional approximation algorithms.

Generally regarded as a rural phenomenon, the spread of religious revivalism in the Second Great Awakening may have also been associated with urbanization and early industrialism. This report of a secondary analysis of data originally collected by John Hammond (The Politics of Benevolence [1979]) provides support for the urban argument. Ordinary least-squares and Poisson regression analyses of the incidence of revivalism indicate that revivalism is associated with population size, township manufacturing, location in agricultural counties, and proximity to other towns experiencing revivals. Among urban places and manufacturing towns, the highest levels of revivalism are found in New York's western region. However, the results also uncover a strand of revivalism in the rural northern part of the state that cannot be reduced to the principal variables. The significance of these findings for the study of the Second Great Awakening and American evangelicalism broadly is highlighted.

This book considers how interdisciplinary conversation, critique, and collaboration enrich and transform humanities and social science education for those teaching and studying traditional Americanist fields.

This paper examines the role of persistent effects of past labor market conditions in explaining trends in the college-high school wage gap in the US. I document increases in the wage gap for older workers since the late 1990s, which are larger than those predicted by standard explanations and are consistent with an important role for persistence in the wage gap. Using a semi-parametric estimation procedure, I show that the increases are caused by changes in age profiles in the wage gap across birth cohorts, rejecting the assumption of constant age profiles in prior work and providing evidence of persistence in the wage gap. I find that higher unemployment at the age of high school graduation leads to higher college-high school wage gaps through age 30 in the birth cohort. I identify the persistent effects of initial unemployment rates controlling flexibly for unobserved transient effects of contemporaneous conditions. The fade out of persistent effects of initial unemployment rates with age can account for over a third of the unexplained increase in the wage gap for older workers. The results imply that an important component of wage inequality is driven by the luck of birth cohorts to enter the labor market when conditions are favorable. To alleviate the effects of persistent wage inequality, policy makers should consider targeted cross-generational transfers over transfers designed to alleviate only the effects of transitory labor market conditions.

Over the past few decades, a handful of states have chosen to provide statefinancing of special education programs through a method referred to as Census-Based fundingan approach which involves allocated block-grant funding onan assumed basis of uniform distribution of children with disabilities acrossschool districts. The approach has been argued to eliminate financial incentivesfor classification of marginallow severity, higher incidencedisabilities. Weexplain herein that despite some evidence linking headcount-based financingschemes to increased classification rates (a) no evidence exists whether theincentivized rates are more or less indicative of true prevalence of disabilities,and (b) where attempts have been made to discern whether certain populationsof children with disabilities are in fact uniformly distributed, researchers havefound that they are not. We use U.S. Census data on families of children withdisabilities to evaluate the geographic and demographic distribution of thosefamilies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, finding high degrees of geographicclustering, relationships between census disability rates, census poverty rates,geographic locations and school district classification rates. In short, we findfamilies of children with disabilities to be non-randomly and non-uniformlydistributed across geographic spaces in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Weconclude by evaluating the equity consequences of assuming falsely that thesechildren are distributed uniformly.

This paper investigates the role of non-cognitive skills in the occupational segregation ofyoung workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields ofstudy and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individualsbelieve they are intelligent and have male traits while entry into male-dominatedoccupations is also related to the willingness to work hard, impulsivity, and the tendency toavoid problems. The nature of these relationships differs for men and women, however. Noncognitiveskills (intelligence and impulsivity) also influence movement into higher-paidoccupations, but in ways that are similar for men and women. On balance, non-cognitiveskills provide an important, though incomplete, explanation for segregation in the fields thatyoung men and women study as well as in the occupations in which they are employed.

We investigate household specialization in same-sex and different-sex couples by making use of exact covariate matching, thereby reducing selection bias. Using household-level data from the American Community Survey, same-sex couples are compared to different-sex couples to examine whether these couples divide market work in similar ways. Overall, we find that same-sex couples are less likely than their different-sex counterparts to specialize in domestic and market spheres. But these results hide some important patterns in the data. In particular, same-sex and different-sex couples divide market work similarly when children are present. When comparing same-sex couples to married couples and different-sex unmarried couples, we find that same-sex couples behave more similarly to married couples once children are present. These results suggest that both children and institutions matter in important ways. Our results are largely robust when subsamples of gay men and lesbians are examined separately.

I develop an equilibrium, two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous populationgrowth to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and theage at first marriage of men and women. Within a simple two-period overlapping generationmodel I show that, given an increase of the desired number of children, age at marriage isaffected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the agestructure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing earlymarriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number ofchildren is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, withsingle men outnumbering single women in equilibrium. Using an extended version of themodel to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms describedabove may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the U.S baby boom. I show thatdemographic transitional dynamics after the baby boom may account for approximately a23% of the increase in mens age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, albeit the impact onwomens age is small.

The massive migration of Puerto Ricans from traditional settlement hubs in the Northeast to emerging gateways like Central Florida raises a number of questions that are explored in this paper. First, which counties have experienced the largest growth in the Puerto Rican population between 2000 and 2006? Second, are Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida doing better in terms of wages and other social characteristics than Puerto Ricans living in other U.S. counties? Third, do county and individual-level variables explain the effect that living in Central Florida has on wages? Data from the 2000 Census and the 2006 American Community Survey show that Central Florida counties have experienced some of the highest growth in the Puerto Rican population, that Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida are not enjoying the highest wages, and that both county level factors and human capital variables explain the Central Florida wage disadvantage. Puerto Ricans receive higher wages in counties with larger Puerto Rican populations, with relatively low levels of concentrated disadvantage, and in counties with an abundance of good jobs in the financial and business sectors. In addition, Puerto Rican workers benefit economically from living in counties with relatively low levels of residential isolation from whites.

African Americans grappled with Jim Crow segregation until it was legally overturned in the 1960s. In subsequent decades, the country witnessed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America—forever changing the face of American society and making it more racially diverse than ever before. In The Diversity Paradox, authors Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean take these two poles of American collective identity—the legacy of slavery and immigration—and ask if today's immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or if their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors. They also tackle the vexing question of whether America's new racial diversity is helping to erode the tenacious black/white color line. The Diversity Paradox uses population-based analyses and in-depth interviews to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Lee and Bean analyze where the color line—and the economic and social advantage it demarcates—is drawn today and on what side these new arrivals fall. They show that Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories. Racial status often shifts according to situation. Individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by outsiders or institutions. These groups also intermarry at higher rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming "American" and a form of upward social mobility. African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians and Latinos. Further, multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived as being black only—underscoring the stigma attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the "one-drop" rule. Asians and Latinos are successfully disengaging their national origins from the concept of race—like European immigrants before them—and these patterns are most evident in racially diverse parts of the country. For the first time in 2000, the U.S. Census enabled multiracial Americans to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. Eight years later, multiracial Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. For many, these events give credibility to the claim that the death knell has been sounded for institutionalized racial exclusion. The Diversity Paradox is an extensive and eloquent examination of how contemporary immigration and the country's new diversity are redefining the boundaries of race. The book also lays bare the powerful reality that as the old black/white color line fades a new one may well be emerging—with many African Americans still on the other side.

develop an equilibrium, a two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth, to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age of men and women at first marriage. Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model, I show that given an increase of the desired number of children age at marriage is affected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, with single men outnumbering single women in equilibrium. Using an extended version of the model to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the U.S. Baby Boom. Specifically, I find that the demographic transitional dynamics after the Baby Boom may account for approximately 23 percent of the increase in men's age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, although the impact on women's age is small