This dissertation explores human interactions with Torontos Don River Valley from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the period of intense urbanization and industrialization between 1880 and 1940. Its concentration on the urban fringe generates new perspectives on the social and environmental consequences of urban development. From its position on the margins, the Don performed vital functions for the urban economy as a provider of raw materials and a sink for wastes. Insights derived from the intersections between social and environmental history are at the heart of this project. The dissertation begins by documenting the industrial history of the river and its transformation from a central provider in the lives of early Toronto residents to a polluted periphery in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the valleys related function as a repository for human undesirables reveals connections between the processes that identified certain individuals as deficient others and similar imperatives at work in classifying difficult or unpredictable environments as waste spaces. Efforts to reclaim and improve the river are the subject of the remaining chapters. A series of initiatives between 1870 and 1930 aimed at reconfiguring the lower Don as an efficient corridor for transportation and industrial development reveal in their shortcomings and unintended consequences a failure to accommodate dynamic and often unpredictable ecological processes. Reclamations of a different kind are explored in the conservation movement of the twentieth century, through which the valley emerges as a valuable public amenity. The dissertation concludes by investigating how the valleys history informs current plans to renaturalize the river mouth. Throughout, the Don functions as an autonomous and causal force in the citys history. On this small river on the urban fringe, nature and society worked in mutually constitutive ways to shape and reshape the metropolis.

En las ltimas dcadas, los latinos han representado una porcin creciente de la poblacin estadounidense. Los estados de la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y Mxico estn en la vanguardia de esta transformacin y sus respuestas en trminos de polticas han generado un intenso debate sobre el problema de la inmigracin y la seguridad fronteriza. La firma del proyecto de ley SB1070 de Arizona en abril de 2010 es la ms reciente tarea tendiente a intentar atrapar a los inmigrantes indocumentados y a poner freno a su ingreso1.Cules son algunos de los factores demogrficos, polticos y econmicos clave que contribuyen al crecimiento demogrfico de inmigrantes y al cambio en la composicin racial/tnica de Arizona?

We show that incorporation consumption commitmentsgoods like housing for which adjustment is costlychange the relationship between risk and consumption. Commitment provides a motive to reduce consumption when possible future losses are too small to warrant adjustment but not when losses are large enough that adjustment would be worthwhile. This implies conditions under which mean-preserving increases in risk can increase housing consumption. Our empirical evidence exploits the interaction of these conditions with a novel proxy for unemployment risk: couples sharing an occupation. Consistent with our model, same-occupation couples consume more housing only when adjustment costs are high and potential losses are sufficiently large.

Standard theory predicts a positive relationship between risk and return, yet recent house price data show thathousing returns vary positively with risk in some metropolitan areas but negatively in others. This paper rationalizescross-market di erences in the risk-return relationship for housing, and in so doing, explains the puzzling negativerelationship. The paper's explanation emphasizes the interaction of three local market factors: households' hedgingincentives, housing supply constraints, and urban market growth. Using a simple conceptual framework, I show thathouseholds are willing to accept a lower return to compensate for price risk when the current house provides a hedgeagainst future housing consumption risk. This hedging e ect is mitigated, however, by increased construction whenhousing supply is elastic and urban growth is su$ciently high. Consistent with these predictions, I nd evidence thatin markets where hedging incentives are su$ciently strong, there tends to be a negative risk-return relationship.Furthermore, the impact of hedging on the risk-return relationship is stronger in markets where housing supplyis more constrained. Finally, these hedging and supply-constraint e ects appear only in growing markets wherepopulation growth is su$ciently high.Keywords: Risk-return relationship; Housing; Geographical Variation; Hedging; Supply constraints; Urbangrowth

Once educational attainment and other observable characteristics have been controlled for, studies show that the gender wage gap among adult full-time workers is about half the size it was in 1980. Using U.S. Census and Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1959 through 1999, the authors investigate the extent to which the decline in this gap was associated with changes across cohorts in the relative rate of wage growth after labor market entry (slopes), versus changes in relative earnings levels at labor market entry (levels). They find that slope changes associated with post-schooling investments, including work experience, account. For no more than one-third of the narrowing of the gender wage gap over the past 40 years, The majority of the narrowing can be attributed to factors present at the time that successive cohorts entered the labor market., such as a growing demand for women's unobserved skills or declining discrimination.

This paper reviews theories of immigrant political incorporation and compares the social and political adaptation of two very different ethnic groups in American history and contemporary politics. Immigrants and their descendants from Ireland are now considered a symbol of success in social integration and political incorporation by becoming "white" in US racial politics. Taiwanese Americans, on the other hand, are considered part of the migrant population from Asia who has been paradoxically characterized as a yellow peril, a model minority, and the perpetual foreigner throughout US history. What explains the paradoxical gaps in social and political incorporation among Taiwanese Americans? What accounts for the differences in political incorporation between Irish and Taiwanese Americans? And how can the Irish American experience help explain the prospect of political incorporation for Taiwanese (and other Asian) immigrants as well as the role of ethnic homeland politics in the process? We take stock of historical, institutional, and behavioral evidences related to the evolution of the two ethnic groups to challenge the validity of the conventional pluralist framework and liberalisms assumptions of immigrant incorporation for an emergent, nonwhite, and majority-immigrant community.

Profiles residents still uninsured after the individual mandate was implemented: young, single, urban, male racial/ethnic minorities and non-citizens with limited English proficiency. Outlines lessons on outreach to those eligible for public coverage.

Older, industrial cities have suffered with the shift from manufacturing to services,but the increased importance of innovation as an economic driver mayhelp industrial cities, which are often rich in the institutions that generate innovation.This paper studies how innovation is related to wages for different typesof workers (e.g., more-educated versus less, and younger versus older) and toreal estate prices for cities. We also study industrial and occupational employmentshares. Our estimates indicate that innovation and aggregate education areassociated with greater productivity in cities. They indicate that innovation andaggregate education impact wages less in industrial cities, but that they impactreal estate prices more. We also fi nd greater effects of innovation and aggregateeducation for more-educated and prime-aged workers. We pay particular attentionto controlling for causality and adjustments of factor inputs.

Most historical accounts date the American knowledge economy from aroundthe turn of the twentieth century, with the rise of science-based technologies, researchuniversities, and corporate laboratories. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, forexample, write that something fundamental changed around the turn of the twentiethcentury, when technological shocks in scientific disciplines generated economicallyimportant findings that swept the knowledge industry. The founding of the AmericanAssociation of Universities marked the emergence of research universities as a selfconsciousgroup, with particularly rapid expansion in applied sciences and engineering.1In this paper, we argue that many features of this configuration began muchearlier in the minerals sector, including synergies between higher education and industry,federal support for scientific research and infrastructure, deployment and diffusion ofcodified forms of useful knowledge, and economic progress based on extension of theknowledge frontier. In many major universities, the mining school was an early center ofmarket-oriented science that helped to chart the path of institutional evolution for thedistinctive U.S. innovation system.

The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the 19602000 US censuses, we find that a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3 percentage points.

This paper assesses the effects of school desegregation on its intended beneficiaries: black students. In Louisiana, substantial reductions in segregation between 1965 and 1970 were accompanied by large increases in per-pupil funding, which allowed funding in integrated schools to be “leveled up” to the level previously experienced only in white schools. Desegregation also brought increased exposure of blacks to whites. Analysis of new data on levels of segregation, resources and educational attainment from 1960–75 suggests that the increase in funding associated with desegregation improved educational attainment for blacks. A 42 percent increase in funding led to a 15 percent increase in high school graduation rates, and the estimated present value of the additional education exceeded the additional cost.

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

Teachers, and public sector employees more generally, tend to receive relatively large portions of their employment compensation in pensions and other non-salary benefits. For example, teachers in the Illinois Teacher Retirement System received $3.5 billion in pension benefits payments in 2009. At 40 percent of the year's payroll for member teachers, these benefits represent large costs to taxpayers in the form of deferred compensation. The introduction of an option for public school employees in Illinois to purchase additional retirement benefits provides an opportunity to examine how teachers value such benefits through the measurement of their demand and cost schedules. The price of the annuity was based on the teacher's salary and accumulated experience as of 1998. Because a teacher's salary is likely correlated with her annuity demand and subsequent collection for reasons other than just the salary's determination of the price she pays, I use a simulated instrumental variables framework to estimate employee demand for the extra retirement benefits relative to the costs of providing them. On average, the willingness to pay for the upgrade is almost $110,000 less per employee than the cost of the increased benefits it provides, thus ruling out a worker-preference theory as the main justification for large pensions. Relative to other forms of compensation such as current wages, other benefits and working conditions, pensions are an extremely costly and unwieldy tool for attracting high quality teachers. What is more, currently there is great concern about the inability of state and local governments to pay their promised pension benefits (Leiber 2010) and to balance their budgets more generally (Powell 2010). The finding that pension benefits at the margin are worth much less to public employees than they cost to provide suggests reducing benefits may be a more efficient policy than increasing taxes for balancing pension budgets.

Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the Northern schools had lower direct costs relative to income. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions. Extra local voice raised tax support without crowding out private support for education

Background: Sepsis is a major public health problem. Social factors may affect health behaviors, economic resources, and immune response, leading to hospitalization for infection. This study examines the association between marital status and sepsis incidence and outcomes in a population-based cohort.Methods: We analyzed 1,113,581 hospitalizations in New Jersey in 2006. We estimated risk-adjusted incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for sepsis among divorced, widowed, legally separated, single, and married subjects using population data from the American Community Survey. We used multivariable logistic regression to estimate marital status-specific hospital mortality.Results: We identified 37,524 hospitalizations for sepsis, of which 40% were among married (14,924), 7% were among divorced (2,548), 26% were among widowed (9,934), 2% (763) were among legally separated, and 26% (9355) were among single subjects. The incidence of hospitalization for sepsis was 5.8 per 1,000 population. The age, sex, and race-adjusted IRR for hospitalization with sepsis was greatest for single (IRR = 3.47; 95% CI, 3.1, 3.9), widowed (IRR = 1.38; 95% CI, 1.2, 1.6), and legally separated (IRR = 1.46; 95% CI, 1.2, 1.8) subjects compared with married (referent). We observed that single men and women and divorced men had greater odds of in-hospital mortality compared with married men; widowed and legally separated men and all ever-married women had no excess mortality during hospitalization for sepsis.Conclusions: Hospitalization for sepsis is more common among single, widowed, and legally separated individuals, independent of other demographic factors. Among patients hospitalized for sepsis, single and divorced men and single women experience greater hospital mortality, highlighting the need to characterize the potentially modifiable mechanisms linking marital status to its greater burden of critical illness.

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

With the passage of national health care reform legislation, there is a growing need for in-depth information on health insurance coverage across key population subgroups and across state and local areas. The American Community Survey (ACS), which added a question about health insurance coverage in 2008, has the potential to serve as a major information resource to support the implementation and evaluation of health care reform at the federal, state, and local levels. This paper describes the ACS health . . .