Since the 1960s both crime rates and the share of immigrants among the American population have more than doubled. Almost three quarters of Americans believe immigration increases crime, yet existing academic research has shown no such effect. Using panel data on US counties from 1980 to 2000, this paper presents empirical evidence on a systematic and economically meaningful impact of immigration on crime. Consistent with the economic model of crime this effect is strongest for crimes motivated by financial gain, such as motor vehicle theft and robbery. Moreover, the effect is only present for those immigrants most likely to have poor labor market outcomes. Failure to account for the cost of increased crime would overstate the immigration surplus substantially, but would most likely not reverse its sign.

Beginning in the 1990s, Puerto Ricans began to massively migrate to the state of Florida, specifically the Orlando metropolitan area. Such has been the flow of Puerto Ricans to Florida that, according to U.S. Census 2000, the largest Puerto Rican population outside of New York is now found in Florida. More specifically, Puerto Ricans in Florida are mainly concentrated in the Orlando-Kissimmee metropolitan area, where 29.0 percent of Puerto Ricans reside. This mass migration is powered by a series of social and economic factors that include but are not limited to: the economic restructuring of cities such as New York, the economic boom in Florida during the 1990’s, lower cost of living, better quality of life, and the geographical proximity to Puerto Rico (Acosta-Belén and Santiago 2006; Duany 2006). This massive flow has garnered the attention of scholars who now seek to understand the reasons for such a migration to Florida in addition to how Puerto Ricans are being incorporated into their new environment. One area of crucial importance is that related to housing, specifically homeownership, an indicator of a households’ socioeconomic mobility (Duany and Matos-Rodríguez 2006).

Different conceptualizations of what constitutes a stay-at-home father household lead to differentcharacteristics and different proportion of stay-at-home father households among all marriedcouples households. In this paper we show the results of different definitions of stay-at-homefather households. A strict estimate of such households defines a stay-at-home father householdas a household with children in which the wife provides all the income and the husband providesno income and performs a majority of the household chores and child care. Less strict definitionsrange by the proportion of household income the wife earns (as long as it is above 50%) and byreason the husband is not working. Analysis is based on CPS data from 1968 to 2009 andexamines the differences in the proportion and characteristics of stay-at-home father householdswhen using different definitions and over time. We find that stay-at-home father households havefewer children, older children, and fewer children under age 5. We also find that mothers in stayat-home father households are much more educated than their husbands. We also find thatmothers in stay-at-home father households experienced the sharpest increase in educationcompared to all males and females in all types of households. Both mothers and fathers in stayat-home father households are older than mothers and fathers in stay-at-home mother and dualearnerhouseholds. Finally, there is a very substantial increase in the amount of fathers whochoose to stay at home to take care of home and family rather than being forced to stay-at-homebecause of inability to find work, illness, or disability.

This study aims to examine racial effects for Asian Americans and understand how, if at all, the racial effects of "being an Asian" shape Asian Americans' labor market achievements. For this purpose, I will examine the occupational distributions of Chinese Americans and Japanese American and non-Hispanic Whites in a comparative perspective and the racial effects on earnings returns at specific occupational levels. The findings of this analysis will help us understand what kinds of fields give better returns to Asian Americans, and thereby, how race affects Asian Americans in the U.S. labor market.

Studies Association conference held in San Juan in October 2008 took the geography of puertorriqueñidadas its theme, reframing the tensions between island and diasporic cultural production with a look to the blurred borders that underwrite attempts to locate authenticity. In the conference logo, Florida had prominent visual representation. In Florida, it is the area that surrounds Orlando and Kissimmee—reaching from Disney World to the west to the Space Coast to the east—that has come to be referenced as the new destination of the guagua aérea(Padilla 1999). Puerto Ricans in 2000 comprised over 50 percent of people in Central Florida who self-identify as “Hispanic” (U.S. Census 2000).1Data from the 2008 American Community Survey place the percentage of Puerto Ricans in regard to total population in the Orlando-Kissimmee area at 10.8 percent, greater than New York City at 9.4 percent. In Kissimmee alone, Puerto Ricans account for 22 percent of the total population (U.S. Census 2009) . .

Throughout American history water resources have played integral roles in shaping patterns of human settlement and networks of biological and economic exchange. In turn, humans have altered hydrologic systems to meet their needs. A paucity of climate and water discharge data for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, has left Americas preindustrial hydrology largely unstudied. As a result, there have been few detailed, quantifiable, regional assessments of hydrologic change between the time of first European settlement and the dawn of industrial expansion...

In this article, the authors examine the growth of secondary school attainment in the United States between 1940 and 1980, exploring several different conceptual frames of reference. Using state-level data, the authors identify a diffusion model of educational expansion using a fixed-effects panel regression approach. This method is used to analyze change over time, with particular attention to evaluating nonlinear processes of growth. The authors consider the effect of a number of correlates on changing patterns of enrollment in the postwar era. Regional differences in attainment diminished during each decade, and a limited number of social and economic developments appear to have influenced rising enrollment, although most attainment growth appears to have been linked to a self-generating process of diffusion.

Understanding links from new highway construction or capacity expansion to regional growth patterns is crucial for transportation planners and policy makers. In this paper, we incorporate a lagged adjustment regional growth model into a quasi-experimental research design to examine the association between new highway investments and land use change in three California counties. Our study areas provide a mix of urban, small town, and exurban highway projects in order to explore the different effects across project types and geographic contexts. The central finding of this research is that while improvements in surface transportation infrastructure can have large impacts on growth patterns, the nature of the effect depends on the context of the highway investment. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study exploits the differential effects of the Vietnam War across birth cohorts to measure the effects of combat exposure on later violence and crime. Combat exposure and violent acts are measured using self-reports front the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study. I find large positive effects on violence for blacks, suggestive evidence of positive effects on violence for whites and on arrests for certain offense types, and negative "incapacitation" effects on arrests during the men's years abroad. The estimates, while imprecise, suggest that the social cost of the violence and crimes caused by Vietnam-era combat exposure was roughly $65 billion.

Abstract: The use of historical GIS (HGIS) in humanities and social sciences research has added dimensions to scholarship in terms of both analysis and visualization. The construction of appropriate HGIS systems for the integration of historical data requires large investments in time, resources, and technical expertise. Fundamental to the success of such systems is the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) that consists of crucial components including licensing, data formats, documentation, and standards of metadata. This paper examines the aspects of an SDI necessary for HGIS, particularly on the level of national endeavours, through use of the example of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The detailed facets of an effective SDI for a national HGIS can serve as a model for researchers in Canada interested in developing a similar resource.

For more than 30 years, the ratio of average black earnings to average white earnings has remained close to 0.6. Additionally, US cities have remained dramatically segregated by race. This paper provides a joint theory of pre-market skills and residential segregation for quantitatively studying these phenomena. It is established that the magnitude of racial and earnings sorting observed in US cities implies 70 percent of observed black-white inequality. While the mechanism posed is intricate, all of its three non-standard components are essential for permanent black-white inequality to arise in a steady state: neighborhood human capital externalities, house price differences across neighborhoods, and preferences over neighborhood racial composition.

I examine the contested finding that men and women engage in gender performance through housework. Prior scholarship has found a curvilinear association between earnings share and housework that has been interpreted as evidence of gender performance. I reexamine these findings by conducting the first such analysis to use high‐quality time diary data for a U.S. sample in the contemporary period. Drawing on data on 11,868 married women and 10,770 married men in the American Time Use Survey (2003–2007), I find no evidence that married men “do gender” through housework. I do, however, find strong evidence of gender performance among women as evidenced by a curvilinear association between earnings share and women's housework time.

The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation of the early-to-mid 1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive cradle-to-grave welfare state marked by strong national unions, national health insurance, and full employment policies. Drawing upon rarely used early public opinion polls, we explore the dynamics of public opinion regarding New Deal liberalism from this pivotal era. We argue that a broadly based reaction against labor unions created a difficult backdrop for liberal programmatic advances. We find that this anti-labor reaction was especially virulent in the South but divided even Northern Democrats, thus creating an effective wedge issue for Republicans and their Southern conservative allies. More generally, we find that the mass public generally favored the specific programs created by the New Deal, but was hardly clamoring for major expansions of the national governments role in the late 1930s and 1940s. These findings illuminate the role played by the South in constraining New Deal liberalism while also highlighting the tenuousness of the liberal majority in the North.

We explore pre- and early industrial inequality of numeracy using the age heaping method and anthropometric strategies. For France, we map differential numeracy between the upper and lower segments of a sample population for 26 regions during the seventeenth century. For the US, inequality of numeracy is estimated for 25 states during the 19th century. Testing the hypothesis of a negative impact of inequality on welfare growth, we find evidence that lower inequality increased industrial development in the US, whereas for France such an effect was only evident in interactions with political variables such as proximity to central government.

This paper investigates the role played by a cultural trait { identity { in determining occu-pational choice and mobility. The analysis links competition between migrant networks in theMidwest when it was rst developing and the community identity that emerged endogenously tosupport these networks in particular local areas (counties) to institutional participation and occu-pational choice today. Individuals born in counties with greater ethnic fractionalization in 1860,where our dynamic theory predicts a larger fraction of the population will be instilled with identityare (i) signi cantly more likely to participate in particular institutions that are associated with theinstilling of this cultural trait, and (ii) signi cantly less likely to select into mobile skilled occu-pations 150 years later. The e ect of 1860 fractionalization on participation in identity-instillinginstitutions actually grows stronger over time, emphasizing the idea that small di erences in initialconditions with respect to the cultural trait under consideration can have large long-term e ectson institutions and economic choices.