This dissertation examines abolition in New Jersey between 1770 and 1857. It argues that the American Revolution did not lead white New Jerseyans to abolish slavery. Instead, the Revolutionary War and the years following it reinforced the institution of slavery in the Garden State. This dissertation first focuses on the factors that led New Jersey to pass the Gradual Abolition Act of 1804, specifically the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism and the influence of Quaker abolition activists and then examines the elongated abolition period which followed the enactment of gradual abolition, beginning with the role of the children born under the law, those who I call slaves for a term. The role these children played in early national America challenges our understandings of slavery and freedom. Instead of a quick abolition process, slaves and slaves for a term in New Jersey continued to serve their masters in significant numbers until the 1840s and then in smaller proportions until the eve of the Civil War. The existence of slavery in a free state challenges our understanding of the rise of capitalism in the early republic as well as the role the North played in debates over nationwide slavery issues beginning in the 1820s. This long-standing relationship to slavery helped prevent the formation of a strong abolitionist base in . . .

We examine ruralurban differences in reliance on secondary caregivers for African American female primary caregivers (250 rural, 242 urban) and their care recipients. Logistic regression was used to identify caregiver and care recipient characteristics significantly associated with the likelihood of having a secondary caregiver within rural and urban samples. Post hoc Wald chi-square tests were used to identify significant between-sample differences in regression coefficients. Secondary caregivers were more common in urban than rural contexts. Having a secondary caregiver was more strongly related to primary caregivers poorer physical health and nonresidence with care recipients in rural than urban contexts. Findings suggest that policy initiatives, such as the National Family Caregivers Support Act and the cash and counseling model, may benefit rural and urban residents, particularly rural residents as the majority of them lacked secondary caregiver assistance.

This study examines how young immigrants are faring in New Destinations using individual level data from the 2000 IPUMS to assess the relative roles of race/ethnicity, nativity, country of origin, and place on the likelihood of not being enrolled in high school for youth aged 15-17. I find that a place plays a nuanced role in the risk of non-enrollment that varies by nativity as well as other household characteristics. While children in general have higher risks of dropping out in New Destination communities relative to those in Established Immigrant communities, the risks to immigrant children are even greater. I find that Mexican and Guatemalan origin immigrants are particularly vulnerable, especially in places with the largest increases in the percent foreign born. The implications of these findings for both immigrants and their communities are discusses in the conclusion.

This paper analyzes the e¤ect of federal and state maternity leave policies on female employment. We analyze if the enactment of the federal Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) di¤eren-tially a¤ected states that previously implemented maternity leave laws than those states which did not. Additionally, we study whether FMLA caused an increase in the female employment and labor force participation in those states that expanded its bene…ts and relaxed the eligibility criteria. Finally, we analyze the Paid Family Leave program in California, comparing how the change in female employment and labor force participation di¤ers from those states which have FMLA alone and those which have complemented the bene…ts of FMLA. Using March CPS data available from the Integrated Public Use Micro data Series (IPUMS), our results suggest, …rst, a positive and signi…cant e¤ect of FMLA on female employment and, second, a positive and signi…cant e¤ect on the change in female employment for some of the states that expanded the bene…ts and eligibility criteria of FMLA

In 2007, Barney Frank, a member of the House of Representatives, visited community leaders in Minneapolis to hear their stories of the subprime mortgage crisis. As chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, he came away with two beliefs: 1) the absence over the past twelve years of any significant federal aid for the construction of affordable rental units left individuals with disabilities in a vulnerable situation and 2) a federal policy that has allowed some affordable units to become market-rate has exacerbated the problem. This story was related in Priced Out in 2008, a bi-annual report that tracks the affordability of housing for people . . .

The evolution of the skill premium (i.e., the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers) has interest from at least two perspectives: it is a rough measure of inequality among workers of different qualifications and provides information on the characteristics of the development process of the economy. In this paper, I investigate empirically the evolution of the skill premium in Chile over the last 40 years. After some fluctuations in the 1960s and 1970s, the skill premium increased in the 1980s and has remained roughly constant since then. The data suggest that this evolution is an outcome of a significant increase in relative demand for skilled workers in the 1980s and 1990s and a sizeable increase in the relative supply in the 1990s. Sectoral evidence shows that, after controlling for sector and time effects, (i) the relative demand increased faster in the same industries in Chile than in the US and (ii) the correlation is stronger for tradable industries and non-tradable industries that are intensive in imported capital, as expected. This result is consistent with a number of theories that link skill up- grading in developed and developing countries. To try to disentangle among these theories, I present time series evidence suggesting that, after controlling for other determinants of skill premium, not only there is a positive correlation between skill premium in Chile and in the US but also the size of the correlation is consistent with the Acemoglu (2003a) model of endogenous technological choice in which new technologies are produced in developed countries (like the US) and adopted in developing economies (like Chile).

This study examines how young immigrants are faring in New Destinations using individual level datafrom the 2000 IPUMS to assess the relative roles of race/ethnicity, nativity, country of origin, and placeon the likelihood of not being enrolled in high school for youth aged 15-17. I find that place plays anuanced role in the risk of non-enrollment that varies by nativity as well as other householdcharacteristics. While children in general have higher risks of dropping out in New Destinationcommunities relative to those in Established Immigrant communities, the risks to immigrant children areeven greater. I find that Mexican and Guatemalan origin immigrants are particularly vulnerable,especially in places with the largest increases in the percent foreign born. The implications of thesefindings for both immigrants and their communities are discussed in the conclusion.

The geography of Mexican immigration to the United States dramatically shifted in the1990s with greater settlement occurring in new destination regions with little history ofimmigration. This research assesses gender differences in destination choices ofMexican immigrants that arrived in the United States in the late 1990s. We hypothesizethat female immigrants choose destinations with more diverse or mature Mexican-bornpopulations relative to male immigrants due to greater availability of and access tomigration resources. We use 1990 and 2000 Census data and conditional multinomiallogistic regression models to predict the probability of destination choice among recentMexican immigrants. As expected, we find that both prior settlement and Mexican-bornmaturity are more important for female immigrants than for male immigrants. We alsofind, however, empirical distinctions between the effects of population maturity and theamount of previous immigration, which are closely tied in the social causation literature.

Milwaukee was different from other northern industrial communities in that its African American population grew after World War II, much later than other northern industrial communities, who saw their African American populations rise during the first and second Great Migrations, during World War I and its immediate aftermath and World War II, respectively. Milwaukee's African American population did not reach more than 10% of the total population until 1970 and did not become a majority/minority city until 2000. Despite this late growth in the African American population, racial segregation was uncommonly high in metropolitan Milwaukee, both in the city proper and its suburbs. The passage of the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 (FFHA) occurred practically concurrent with the sharpest rise in black population in Milwaukee, but the availability of this potentially potent legal remedy did not seem to have had any impact on African Americans' access to housing in the metropolitan area. Why, then, did Milwaukee's belatedly burgeoning black population confront seemingly insuperable . . .

Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals-e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration-are not evenly distributed, but rather tend to be concentrated within the same group. This phenomenon, called imbreeding homophily, has been related to either (social) preference for links with own-type individuals (choice-based homophily) or to the prevalence of individuals of her same type in the choice set of an individual (opportunity-based homophily). Choices determine the network of relations we observe whereas opportunities pertain to the composition of the (unobservable) social network individuals are embedded in and out of which their network of relations is drawn. In this view, we propose a method that, in the presence of multiple data, allows one to distinguish between opportunity and choice based homophily. The main intuition is that, with unbiased opportunities, the effect of choice-based homophily gets weaker and weaker as the size of the minority shrinks, because individuals of the minority rarely meet and have the chance to establish links together. The occurrence of homophily in the limit of very small minorities is therefore an indicator of opportunity bias.

Skilled immigrants to the United States, defined as those with a college degree, outperform college-educated natives in terms of wages, patenting, commercialising or licensing patents, and publishing. This success is due to immigrants who originally entered the United States on a student/trainee visa or a temporary work visa, and is explained by their different fields of study and higher level of education. Skilled immigrants are also more likely to start successful companies than their native counterparts, apparently owing to higher unmeasured entrepreneurial ability. The effect of skilled immigration on per-capita patenting, publishing and starting companies could be larger than implied by immigrants’ individual success, if immigrants have positive spill-overs on natives, or could be smaller, if immigration discourages native endeavours. For patenting, there is evidence that immigrants have positive spill-overs. Skilled immigration has the potential to increase a country’s capacity for innovation, thereby boosting productivity growth and ultimately economic growth. To the extent that innovation has a public good component, skilled immigrants might increase the receiving country’s per capita welfare simply by . . .

I show that a CES production-function-based approach with skill differentiation and integrated national labor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The model predicts that if I look at the employment (rather than wage) response by skill to immigration in a state, I can estimate the substitutability-complementarity between natives and immigrants. This allows me to infer, other things constant, how immigrants stimulate or depress the demand for native labor. I also use a novel instrument based on demographic characteristics of total Central American migrants or of the Mexican Population to predict immigration by skill level within California. Looking at immigration to California between 1960 and 2005 my estimates support the assumption of a nationally integrated labor market by skill and they support the hypothesis that natives and immigrants in the same education-experience group are not perfectly substitutable. This, in turn, explains the counter-intuitive fact that there is a zero correlation between immigration and wage and employment outcomes of natives.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of foreign homeownership in Spain between 2001 and 2006, seen as an indicator of integration of migrants in host countries.Other goals, derived from the former, are to determine the influence of nationality in the homeownership and to quantify the likelihood of foreigners to live under this form of tenure. Having modelled the socio-demographic variables between the years 2001 and 2006, the results show alower propensity of foreign born people to live through ownership than nationals and, what is most important, that the Spanish residential system demands more efforts for foreigners so as to live in property than the Californian system.

Background: One of the fundamental building blocks for determining the burden of disease in populations is to reliably measure the level and pattern of mortality by age and sex. Where well-functioning registration systems exist, this task is relatively straightforward. Results from many civil registration systems, however, remain uncertain because of a lack of confidence in the completeness of death registration. Incomplete registration systems mean not all deaths are counted, and resulting estimates of death rates for the population are then underestimated. Death distribution methods (DDMs) are a suite of demographic methods that attempt to estimate the fraction of deaths that are registered and counted by the civil registration system. Although widely applied and used, the methods have at least three types of limitations. First, a wide range of variants of these methods has been applied in practice with little scientific literature to guide their selection. Second, the methods have not been extensively validated in real population conditions where violations of the assumptions of the methods most certainly occur. Third, DDMs do not generate uncertainty intervals.Methods and Findings: In this paper, we systematically evaluate the performance of 234 variants of DDM methods in three different validation environments where we know or have strong beliefs about the true level of completeness of death registration. Using these datasets, we identify three variants of the DDMs that generally perform the best. We also find that even these improved methods yield uncertainty intervals of roughly 6 one-quarter of the estimate. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the optimal variants in eight countries.Conclusions: There continues to be a role for partial vital registration data in measuring adult mortality levels and trends, but such results should only be interpreted alongside all other data sources on adult mortality and the uncertainty of the resulting levels, trends, and age-patterns of adult death considered.

This paper explores how changes in marital status affected men's wealth accumulation in mid-nineteenth-century America, using a longitudinal sample of Union Army veterans linked to the 1860 and 1870 census manuscript schedules. Controlling for the endogeneity of wealth and marital selection, this paper provides strong evidence that marriage had positive effects on men's wealth accumulation, whereas ending a marriage had negative effects. The estimated wealth premium on married men is about 60 percent per marital year. This substantial wealth premium is closely related to wives' specializing in household production, and farmers and craftsmen economically benefited from the unpaid labor of their wives.

The 2010-2011 California budget proposal released in January by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office proposes deep cuts in community-based services available to low-income seniors and low-income Californians of all ages with disabilities.1 The cuts will make it much more difficult for many older adults to continue to live safely in their own homes, create hardships for their families, lead to a loss of jobs and health insurance by direct service providers, and close many adult day care centers. Increased use of emergency rooms, hospital in-patient care and nursing facilities by affected older adults are likely to erode the financial savings of the reductions.2 This policy note analyzes the likely consequences of the January 2010 proposals for seniors, their families and service providers.3 We find that the proposed reductions would reduce support for home care in the state to levels not seen for almost 30 years.

This dissertation examines issues regarding the educational attainment of the U.S. workforce. Specifically, I investigate the impact of various factors on the growth of postsecondary educational attainment. This includes issues pertaining to improving the skill-level of the workforce at the regional or state level, as well as for the domestic workforce as a whole. One of the main goals of the dissertation is to investigate how public policy may be utilized to help improve the education level of the workforce. In the first chapter, I examine the effectiveness of state merit-based aid scholarships in improving the skill-level of the state workforce. Given the mobility of workers, particularly those with a high level of education, it need not be the case that a state retains those whose postsecondary education is being subsidized. I examine the impact of Florida’s Bright Futures Scholarship Program, which provides subsidies to a large fraction of Florida high school students that choose to pursue higher education within the state, on the location . . .

Economists have puzzled over why eligible individuals fail to enroll in social safety net programs. Chilling effects arising from an icy policy climate are a popular explanation for low program take-up rates among immigrants, but such effects are inherently hard to measure. This paper investigates a concrete determinant of chilling, Federal immigration enforcement, and finds robust evidence thatheightened enforcement reduces Medicaid participation among children of non-citizens. This is the case even when children are themselves citizens and face no eligibility barriers to Medicaid enrollment. Immigrants from countries with more undocumented U.S. residents, those living in cities with a high fraction of other immigrants, and those with healthy children are most sensitive to enforcement efforts.Up to seventy-five percent of the relative decline in non-citizen Medicaid participation around the time of welfare reform, which has been attributed to the chilling effects of the reform itself, is explained by a contemporaneous spike in immigration enforcement activity. The results imply that safety net participation is influenced not only by program design, but also by a broader set of seemingly unrelatedpolicy choices.