The civil rights movement brought great change to Mississippi, which, like the rest of the South, had been using white surpremacist "Jim Crow" customs and laws to maintain racial segregation into the 1960s. These segregationist . . .

This document reviews the controversy over the true high school graduation rate in the United States, provides a comprehensive review of the debate, discusses shortcomings of current methods, and proposes new methods that address those shortcomings. The author concludes that current methods that are widely used are flawed: High school graduation rates in the United States are well above 80 percent, with high racial disparity; the graduation rates for white and Asian students are around 85 percent, and the rates for Hispanic and African American students are around 70-80 percent. Moderate dating has a positive impact on college readiness and college enrollment; serious dating and early sex has a significant negative impact on graduation and college enrollment.

Married couples enjoy meaningful economies in time, often choosing to specialize where one spouse focuses on market work and the other on household production and childcare. Using data from the American Time Use Survey 20032008, I estimate significant marriage effects upon time use. Most married women gain 3334 min of leisure each weekday when compared to single women. While marriage does not lead to more leisure for husbands, it allows them to allocate timeaway from home and towards market work. Lower-income couples work more at home and for pay, and spend less time in leisure than their single counterparts. The temporal and financial gains from marriage for most people are inconsistent with its declining prevalence.

For over a century, scholars have been debating the effect of slavery on African-American families after emancipation. In this paper, I introduce a unique sample that links people from the 1880 Cherokee Census to the 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules and the 1900 United States Census. By providing observations about a family's experience during slavery and two subsequent post-emancipation observations, the sample can be used to explore how slavery influenced black family formation. I utilize information about slaveholding, or the number of slaves owned by a single farmer or planter, to proxy for experiences during slavery. For the first generation of black families to rear their children after emancipation, slaveholding size did influence the chances that their children would live in single parent families. This result was robust to the inclusion of controls for human capital, income, and wealth. After two decades of economic progress and income growth, though, there was a decrease in the number of single parent households and little connection existed between family structure and slaveholding. The exception to the finding was single mothers in 1900 who did seem to have been influenced slightly by their own mother's slaveholding.

One of the main factors that act as catalysts for small business creation seems to be the existence of business clusters. This study uses both standard and spatial statistics methodologies and tools to analyze the dynamics of small business clusters and the degree to which it is influenced by Marshall-Arrow-Romer or Jacobs effects. The study contributes to better understanding of the influence that industrial diversity or specialization has on the growth of the number of small businesses and, consequently, on small businesses cluster formation. Maybe the most significant finding of this study is that the evidence suggests that Marshall-Arrow-Romer effects are preponderant. Indeed, the study finds significant MAR dynamic effects for the period under scrutiny, as well as Marshall-Arrow-Romer static effects for 2005.

The United States is home to about 535,000 Haitian immigrants — the largest concentration in any single country of Haitians abroad. As the country descended into chaos following the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship in the late 1980s, Haitians began arriving in the United States in large numbers. Many received humanitarian protection. Between 1980 and 2000, the Haitian-born population residing in the United States more than quadrupled from 92,000 to 419,000. The Haitian immigrant population in the United States has continued to grow since 2000, although . . .

Using unique microeconomic data we document the roles of household demographics, ideology and structure in electricity demand. Homes built after 1983 use less electricity than home built before 1960, coincident with stricter building codes. Homes built in the 1970s and early 1980s use more electricity despite building codes in part because the price of electricity at the time of construction was low. We construct an aggregate residential electricity consumption index. Building codes partially explain California’s slowly rising consumption from 1980 to 2006 while other factors (such as rising incomes and increased new home sizes) go in the opposite direction.

Roots of current differences in economic development, education, health, and political institutions seem to go back decades, even centuries. However, the lack of comprehensive linked data has limited scholars’ ability to test alternate theories empirically. Creating data that are useful for testing long-term theories requires far more than entering information from hundreds of historical sources – it requires developing methods to link these data spatially and temporally, constructing “meaning trees” to link variables accurately between sources, and generating procedures to deal sensitively with the varying quality of data (e.g., missing data, rounded numbers, changing definitions over time). Moreover, we needed to formulate a research approach capable of dealing with many types of sources: i.e., historical documents and archival data, plus . . .

Geographic information systems (GIS) have spurred a renewed interest in the influence of geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. Ideally GIS enables humanities scholars to discover relationships of memory, artifact, and experience that exist in a particular place and across time. Although successfully used by other disciplines, efforts by humanists to apply GIS and the spatial analytic method in their studies have been limited and halting. The Spatial Humanities aims to re-orient -- and perhaps revolutionize -- humanities scholarship by critically engaging the technology and specifically directing it to the subject matter of the humanities. This book explores the potential of spatial methods such as text-based geographical analysis, multimedia GIS, animated maps, deep contingency, deep mapping, and the geo-spatial semantic web to re-orient humanities scholarship.

We estimate the effect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal effect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our empirical strategy exploits both time-series and cross-sectional variation in these two variables. To control for endogeneity, we instrument a married woman's ownership of an appliance by the average ownership rate for that appliance among single women living in the same U.S. state. Single women's labor force participation rates did not increase between 1960 and 1970. We find evidence in support of the hypothesis that the diffusion of household appliances contributed to the increase in married women's labor force participation rates during the 1960's.

This dissertation explores the development of systems of public health in the American South. It argues that debilitating diseases, including hookworm, pellagra, and malaria, played an important role in southern economic underdevelopment at the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1930 and 1930, however, a workable system of public health, based on cooperation between the federal government, private philanthropy, emerged in the southern United States. Initially spurred by war, federal intervention was continued as a result of bureaucratic entrepreneurship. In 1935, the system of federal-state-county cooperation developed in the South was nationalized as Title VI of the Social Security Act, providing the framework for our contemporary system of public health. By the end of World Way II, hookworm, pellagra, and malaria had largely been eliminated in the southern United States. This dissertation argues that public health workers, largely unconstrained by accountability to nationallevel governing institutions, created networks of public and private cooperation, which were formalized into institutional arrangements for confronting the region's pressing public health concerns. Public health workers convinced local elites to support public health programs by relying on arguments grounded in local understandings of race, disease, and economic development. Emerging networks of local support and political legitimacy were further underpinned by the genuine threats posed by disease and the demonstrated competence and capacity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Public Health Service. Local support and political legitimacy, generated by entrepreneurial public health workers at the ground level, was translated into nationallevel legitimacy in the aftermath of two focusing events, the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River and the 1930-1931 southern drought. Although the contemporary "Sunbelt" is unimaginable without the elimination of sharecropping and racial segregation and the advent of air-conditioning, it is equally unimaginable without the elimination of hookworm, pellagra, and malaria. Just as outside intervention played a crucial role in the elimination of the South's debilitating diseases, this dissertation argues, the region's paradoxical needs for both outside assistance and local autonomy to preserve white supremacy and segregation played a central role in defining the contours of public health throughout the nation.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.

Pioneering work by Douglas Almond (2006) used the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic to establish that in utero exposure to health insults has a large, negative impact on health and socioeconomic prosperity that reaches well into adulthood. A key assumption underlying this body of research is that in utero exposure to the influenza pandemic can be treated as if it were randomly assigned. The validity of that assumption is investigated using data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Censuses. We find that those who were exposed in utero were born to families of lower socioeconomic status relative to the cohorts who were not exposed. Specifically, fathers of the exposed cohort made significantly less income, had lower socioeconomic status, were older, had higher fertility, were less likely to be white, and were less likely to be WWI veterans than the fathers of those who were not exposed in utero. When including controls for childhood environment, the effect of in utero exposure on adult outcomes becomes small in magnitude and not statistically significant. Conclusions about the deleterious im- pact of in utero exposure to the influenza pandemic on socioeconomic prosperity in adulthood are, at best, premature.

Using satellite imagery, census data and historical maps, we report on density variation among cities the world over. We find significant differences in the average population density in the built-up areas of a global sample of 120 cities: In 2000, average density was 28±5 persons per hectare in cities in land-rich developed countries, 70±8 in cities in other developed countries, and 135±11 in cities in developing countries. We also find that built-up area densities in this sample declined significantly, at an average annual rate of 2.0±0.4 percent, between 1990 and 2000. We report on the five-fold decline in average tract density in 20 U.S. cities between 1910 and 2000, at an average long-term rate of 1.9 percent per annum, on the slowing down of the rate of decline in recent decades, and on the decline in several other density metrics during this period. Using historical maps and historical demographic data for 1800-2000, we also report on the threefold decline in average urbanized area densities in a global sample of 30 cities during the twentieth century, following an increase in average density in the nineteenth century. On average, densities in this historical sample have been in decline since their peak circa 1890±16, at an average long-term annual rate of 1.0-1.5 percent. All or most of the significant factors accounting for density variations and density decline are identified in multiple regression models and the implications of the findings for urban containment and compact city strategies in different regions are examined. At current rates of density decline in the cities of developing countries, for example, when their urban populations double in the next 30 years, as now expected, their built-up areas will likely triple. Minimum preparations for this massive expansion are clearly in order.

Previous literature concerning immigrant financial market participation has typically treated the immigrant population as a homogeneous collective. However, the immigrant population in the United States is incredibly diverse, particularly in regards to country of origin. Using panel data, we test the hypothesis that U.S. immigrant asset market participation rates vary depending on country of origin. We find that significant variations in the rates of holding stock, mutual funds, U.S. Savings Bonds, and other fixed income securities do exist. In fact, immigrants from some countries of origin are more likely to hold certain types of assets than American natives.Keywords: Investment decision making, immigrants

During the past two decades, Puerto Ricans have been moving to central Florida in large numbers in search of better opportunities. While there is some evidence that Puerto Ricans in central Florida enjoy higher levels of education than Puerto Ricans living in traditional settlement hubs, it remains unclear if these population shifts have also translated into health benefits. The first goal of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the literature on the health of Puerto Ricans in the United States. The literature shows that Puerto Ricans continue to experience worse health outcomes than other groups. The second goal is to establish a recent profile of Puerto Rican health in the U.S. and Florida. By using recently released data from the 2007 American Community Survey, we compared disability rates of Puerto Ricans across 72 counties with large Puerto Rican populations. Our results indicate that Puerto Ricans in Florida have a health advantage over many Puerto Ricans living elsewhere in the U.S. We conclude by discussing some of the social scientific implications of this study and by making some recommendations for future research in this highly understudied area of Puerto Rican disability.