Using data from the U.S. Census in conjunction with data from the Current Population Survey (1980-2009), I find little support for the opt-out revolutionhighly educated women, relative to their less educated counterparts, are exiting the labor force to care for their families at higher rates today than in earlier time periodsif one focuses solely on the decision to work a positive number of hours irrespective of marital status or race. If one, however, focuses on both the decision to work a positive number of hours as well as the decision to adjust annual hours of work (conditional on working), I find some evidence of the opt-out revolution, particularly among white college educated married women in male dominated occupations.

This paper analyzes the impact of 1 st and 2 nd generation immigrants from Mexico, the largest immigrant group in the US, on both native schoolchildren and the Mexican-Americans themselves. My contributions to the literature are twofold. First, I use self-reported friendship data to show that Mexican-Americans have strongly assortative networks that span grade levels. A number of studies have used intra-school grade-level variations in peer characteristics to identify peer effects, relying on the assumption that classmates are the relevant peer group. My findings demonstrate that, in the case of Mexican-American adolescents, this assumption is invalid. Second, contrary to what we might expect given previous results on immigration, I find little evidence of between-or within-group negative effects of Mexican-American students. My results suggest that having Mexican-American classmates is not significantly correlated with natives' college attendance, or with variables such as engagement in risky behavior, delinquency, or sexual activity. There is also no statistically significant effect of having Mexican-American friends on Mexican-Americans' own long-term academic outcomes.

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market. In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans, in highly readable essays, from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: Who is multiracial? How does class influence racial identity? How does social class status vary among multiracial populations? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an "honorary white"? What is the relationship between social class, culture, and race? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds? What are multiracial Americans' explanations for racial inequality in the United States? Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of sociology, race and ethnic studies, social stratification, race relations, and cultural studies.

If there was any time to expect a large peace-time multiplier effect from federal spending in the states, it would have been during the period from 1930 through 1940. Interest rates were near the zero bound, and unemployment rates never fell below 10 percent and there was ample idle capacity. We develop an annual panel data set for the 48 states from 1930 through 1940 with evidence on federal government grants, loans, and tax collections and a variety of measures of economic activity. Using panel data methods we estimate a multiplier, defined as the change in per capita state economic activity in response to an additional dollar per capita of federal funds. The state per capita personal income multiplier with respect to per capita federal grants was around 1.1. Some point estimates for multipliers for nontransfer grants and nonfarm grants were higher but not statistically significantly different from one. There is some evidence that AAA farm grants had negative or no effect on personal income. Federal grants had stronger effects on consumption than on personal income, but they had no positive effect on various measures of private employment.

This paper examines the impact of late-career investment returns and job loss on subsequent retiree well-being. Specifically, we explore whether there is a link between the income of retirees aged 70 to 79 and the stock market and labor market conditions that existed around the time of their retirement. We use data from the 2000 Census and the 2001 through 2007 American Community Surveys and consider both total personal income and income by type. We find that a long-term decline in the stock market in the years leading up to retirement leads to a modest reduction in investment income a decade or so later for those in the top third of the income distribution. The consequences of approaching retirement when the labor market is weak are more severe. A higher unemployment rate around the time of retirement reduces Social Security income for those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution; we estimate that an unemployed worker experiences a roughly 20 percent drop in Social Security income, consistent with claiming benefits several years early. Overall, our results indicate the importance of the challenges faced by lower-income workers who face a weak labor market as they approach retirement.

The migration of millions of southerners out of the South between 1910 and 1970 is largely attributed to economic and social push factors in the South, combined with pull factors in other regions of the country. Researchers generally find that participants in this migration were positively selected from their region of origin, in terms of educational attainment and urban status, and that they fared relatively well in their destinations. To fully measure the migrants success, however, a comparison with those who remained in the South is necessary. This article uses data from the U.S. Census to compare migrants who left the South with their southern contemporaries who stayed behind, both those who moved within the South and the sedentary population. The findings indicate that migrants who left the South did not benefit appreciably in terms of employment status, income, or occupational status. In fact, inter-regional migrants often fared worse than did southerners who moved within the South or those who remained sedentary. These results contradict conventional wisdom regarding the benefits of exiting the South and suggest the need for a revisionist interpretation of the experiences of those who left.

Between 1980 and the early 1990s the variability of labor earnings growth rates across the prime-age working population fell significantly. This decline and timing are consistent with other macro and micro observations about growth variability that are collectively referred to as the Great Moderation. The variability of earnings growth is negatively correlated with age at any point in time, and the U.S. working age population got older during this period because the Baby Boom was aging. However, the decrease in variability was roughly uniform across all age groups, so population aging is not the source of the overall decline. The variance of log changes also declined at multi-year frequencies in such a way as to suggest that both permanent and transitory components of earnings shocks became more moderate. A simple identification strategy for separating age and cohort effects shows a very intuitive pattern of permanent and transitory shocks over the life cycle, and confirms that a shift over time in the stochastic process occurred even after controlling for age effects.

The health consequences of child labor may take time to manifest themselves. This study examines whether adults who worked as children experience increased incidence of illness or physical disability. The analysis considers the selection process in evaluating the relative value and cost of child time in school versus work using variation across localities in the number of schools and teachers per child, and in low skill wages dated back to the time when the adults were children. When child labor and schooling are treated as given variables, child labor appears to increase the likelihood of poor health outcomes in adulthood across a wide variety of health measures, but these effects are small. However, when we consider the effect of unobserved health and ability endowments on the age of labor market entry and years of schooling completed, the joint effects of child labor and schooling on health become larger. Delaying entry into the workforce while increasing time in school significantly lowers the probability of early onset of physical ailments such as back problems or arthritis. However, we are unable to isolate the impact of child labor from the impact of increased time in school.

Since immigration to the US began to accelerate in the 1970s, economicand social policy issues surrounding immigration frequently raise concern andgenerate debate. These policy debates often aim to mitigate the costs of immigrationand augment the benefits. Key to this is understanding the characteristics ofimmigrants, especially those related to economic success and integration. A commonlyaccepted finding in the economic literature regards the declining economicquality of successive immigrant cohorts as measured by differences in entrywages across cohorts. In this paper, I refine our understanding of immigrant cohortquality. I show that increasing competition in the labor market among immigrantscan explain a significant portion of declining quality. This result suggests thatlabor market interactions are as important to immigrant economic integration astheir inherent quality.

We analyze the impact of the original means-tested old-age assistance (OAA) programs on the health of the elderly prior to the first Social Security pension payments. Before 1935 a number of states had enacted their own OAA laws. After 1935 the federal government began offering matching grants and thus stimulated the adoption of OAA programs by the states. A new panel data set of 75 cities for each year between 1929 and 1938 combines mortality rates for older age groups with three measures of the OAA programs, spending on non-age-specific relief and a rich set of correlates. The data are analyzed using difference-in-difference-in-difference and instrumental variables methods. Our results suggest that old-age assistance in the 1930s had little impact on the death rate of the elderly. Our sense is that the OAA programs in the 1930s transferred the elderly from general relief programs without necessarily increasing the resources available to them.

Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violent crime in cities and have relied on data with serious limitations regarding nativity information. We analyze administrative data from Pennsylvania prisons, with high quality information on nativity and demographic characteristics. The latter allow us to construct incarceration rates for detailed population groups using U.S. Census data. The raw gap in incarceration rates for the foreign and native born is large, in accord with the extremely high concern at the time about immigrantcriminality. But adjusting for age and gender greatly narrows that observed gap. Particularly striking are the urban/rural differences. Immigrants were concentrated in large cities where reported crime rates were higher. However, within rural counties, the foreign born had much higher incarceration rates than the native born. The interaction of nativity with urban residence explains much of the observed aggregate differentials in incarceration rates. Finally, we find that the foreign born, especiallythe Irish, consistently have higher incarceration rates for violent crimes, but from 1850 to 1860 the natives largely closed the gap with the foreign born for property offenses.

This article provides policymakers with context for understanding past and future policy discussions regarding Social Security widow benefits. Using data from surveys, projections from a microsimulation model, and recent research, it examines three types of benefits - those for aged widows, widows caring for children, and disabled widows. The economic well-being of aged widows has shifted from one of widespread hardship to one in which above-poverty, but still modest, income typically prevails. Many aged widows experience a decline in their standard of living upon widowhood, a pattern which is pronounced among those with limited education. Widows caring for children have been a sizeable beneficiary group historically, but policy changes and demographic trends have sharply reduced the size of this group. Family Social Security benefits ensure a modest level of household income for widows caring for children. Disabled widows differ from the other groups because they are at higher risk for poverty.

Little research exists on the historical relationship between BMI variation, wealth, and inequality. This study finds that 19th century US black and white BMIs were distributed symmetrically; neither wasting nor obesity was common. Nineteenth century BMI values were also greater for blacks than whites. There was a positive relationship between 19th century BMIs and average state-level wealth, and an inverse relationship between BMI and wealth inequality. After controlling for wealth and inequality, rural agricultural farmers had greater BMI values than their urban counterparts in other occupations. JEL-Code: I10, N00.

Fertility levels remain high in most of sub-Saharan Africa, despite recent declines, and even in a large capital city such as Accra, Ghana, women are having children at a pace that is well above replacement level and this will contribute to significant levels of future population growth in the city. Our purpose in this paper is to evaluate the way in which neighborhood context may shape reproductive behavior in Accra. In the process, we introduce several important innovations to the understanding of intra-urban fertility levels in a sub-Saharan African city: (1) despite the near explosion of work on neighborhoods as a spatial unit of analysis, very little of this research has been conducted outside of the richer countries; (2) we characterize neighborhoods on the basis of local knowledge of what we call "vernacular neighborhoods;" (3) we then define what we call "organic neighborhoods" using a new clustering tool - the AMOEBA algorithm - to create these neighborhoods; and then (4) we evaluate and explain which of the neighborhood concepts has the largest measurable contextual effect on an individual woman's reproductive behavior. Multi-level regression analysis suggests that vernacular neighborhoods are more influential on a woman's decision to delay marriage, whereas the organic neighborhoods based on socioeconomic status better capture the factors that shape fertility decisions after marriage.