This research examines the significant effects of immigration on transit use. Drawing ondata from the U.S. Census, we examine how the enormous influx of immigrants to Californiahas altered the demographics of transit commuting in the state and contributedimportantly to a growth in transit ridership. California immigrants commute by publictransit at twice the rate of native-born commuters, comprise nearly 50 percent of alltransit commuters in the state, and are responsible for much of the growth in transitcommuting in the state. But over time, immigrants reliance on transit declines. Transitmanagers would be well advised to plan for these inevitable demographic changes byenhancing transit services in neighborhoods that serve as ports to entry for new immigrants,those most likely to rely on public transportation.

Using General Social Survey data from 1989 to 2008, I estimate earnings differentials between heterosexual and queer workers. When following the model specified in earlier studies, I find that queer men earn between 11.6% less than their heterosexual counterparts and that queer women earned approximately 11.6% more than their heterosexual counterparts. When respecifying the model to account for the gender composition of individuals occupations, I find that queer mens earnings are not statistically different from straight mens earnings, and the earnings advantage enjoyed by queer women drops marginally, to 10.5%. This addition significantly improves upon the explanatory power of the existing model. These findings undermine earlier results, indicating that earnings differentials are not as drastic as has been posited. Much of the differential found in earlier studies can be attributed to occupational characteristics rather than labor market discrimination.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, women in the United States decided to move increasingly into the labor market. This paper investigates the growth of the service sector as an explanation for the increase in women's employment. It develops an economic model that can account for the increase in women's employment and the growth of the service sector at the same time. A growth model with two sectors and a home production technology is constructed in order to quantitatively assess the contribution of sectoral productivity differences to the change in women's employment decision. The sectoral productivities are taken from the data. This model demonstrates that a higher rate of productivity growth in market services compared to home services can account for a large fraction of the observed increase in women's labor supply from 1950 to 2005.

This study responds to three recent phenomena in immigration policy and the United States labor market: the growing ambiguity of localities’ roles in immigration enforcement, the influx of lower-skilled immigrants, and the expansion of employmentpreferences in immigrant admissions. Building on pre-existing labor market literature, this paper examines the impact of sanctuary statutes and citizenship on natives’ average wages and unemployment rates in U.S. cities. “Sanctuary statutes” are city-level ordinances that ban municipal employees from gathering information about a resident’s legal status and prohibit the use of city funds for federal immigration enforcement. These policies have given rise to a debate about the type of immigrants drawn to sanctuary cities and their subsequent impacts. Using Census data from 1980-2000, this study segments the foreign-born population into naturalized citizens and noncitizen immigrants. The findings indicate whether or not an immigrant has attained U.S. citizenship bears a greater impact upon native’s labor market outcomes than the presence of sanctuary . . .

I discuss in this chapter the relative importance of two different social policy interventions to improve educational attainment. Specifically, interventions could focus on raising high school or college graduation rates. The issue of which intervention to call for was brought home to me in a seminar about my recent book, Italians then, Mexicans now (Perlmann 2005). To some extent, my arguments are particular to the Mexican second generation today, because their high school dropout rates are distinctly high. But to the extent that other groups’ rates approximate those of the Mexican second generation, the point will be true for these other groups as well. In any case, whatever is true for the Mexicans is critical to know because they are by far the largest single immigrant group, and Mexicans are an even larger proportion of low-skill immigrants.

Data from the New Immigrant Survey are used to study the impact of preimmigration status and visa categories on the assets portfolio choices of U.S. legal permanent residents. The present study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it is one of a few studies able to explore wealth among immigrants in the United States. Second, we are able to study the effect of adjustment status and different immigration visa categories on immigrants’ assets holdings, which has been given little attention in immigration studies. Third, we are able to examine both the nature and magnitude of the impact differences in visa categories have on their assets portfolio, which helps to better understand their economic situation and provides information for further studies. The results demonstrate adjustee immigrants have significant more advantages in assets owning, compared with new arrivals. And among different immigration visa categories, employment principal group is more likely to report owning assets and owning higher-valued assets. Diversity immigrants, children and parents of U.S. citizens are in a . . .

Abstract The objective of this thesis is to contribute to a strand of the empirical labor supply literature by advancing our understanding of the labor supply of relatively older workers. This is a topic of particular interest in developed countries, where due to current population trends older individuals comprise an ever growing share of the population. Chapter 1 provides a summary and overview of the thesis. Chapter 2 shows that husbands and wives have an incentive to coordinate their retirements due to the existence of leisure complementarities, which arise when one or both spouses enjoy retirement more if it is shared with their partner. Chapter 3 advances our understanding of older individuals’ incentives to continued work by showing that, after accounting for selection into retirement and composition effects, there is no statistical evidence that wages of individuals who remain in their career job ever decrease with age. In other words, conditional on remaining on the career job, the individual wage profile does not have an inverted-U shape. Any wage decreases associated to the declining physical and cognitive abilities associated to the aging process would materialize only at the point where the individual transits from the career job into parttime work, usually referred to as semi-retirement. For individuals that transit directly from the career job into full retirement, no decrease in wages would be observed. Chapter 4 builds on the results obtained in chapters 2 and 3 to estimate the role of leisure complementarities in determining joint retirements. If finds that they account for 8% of the joint retirements observed in the data (those where husband and wife retire within a year of each other). This result underlines the importance of jointly modeling the behavior of husbands and wives. Confining the analysis to the study of men while taking the behavior of their wives as exogenous -the approach traditionally followed in the literature-, ignores a source of simultaneity in spouses’ decisions. This may lead to inaccurate predictions of the effect of policy changes on men’s retirement behavior.

This paper investigates the impact of legalization on the economic outcomes of the legalized population. It uses a natural experiment caused by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which gave amnesty for undocumented immigrants who could prove continuous residence in the U.S. after January 1, 1982. The arbitrary cutoff date on the eligibility criteria causes a discontinuity in the relationship between the year of immigration and the probability of being legal. This paper uses this discontinuity to identify the causal impacts of legalization on immigrants outcomes. Regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences estimates show that immigrants eligible for the policy have a significantly higher probability of being naturalized citizens than those who were not. Legalization is also found to have a positive and significant effect on wages, a negative effect on the probability of working in a traditionally illegal occupation, and no significant effect on geographical mobility. The analysis for different demographic groups confirms such conclusions and shows that the estimated effects of legalization are larger for low-educated Latin American immigrants, the group that was disproportionably affected by the policy.

Urban and planning historians frequently focus on inherently spatial topics such as migration, segregation, gentrification, and suburbanization and rely on historical maps as primary sources, but they rarely use geographic information systems (GIS) as a research method for analyzing spatial patterns. This article considers the reasons that GIS is not used more, including longstanding ambivalence about quantitative methods and limited training opportunities. It then outlines ways in which GIS can uniquely inform historical researchby emphasizing underlying spatial processes, making spatial patterns visible, and transforming mapping into a processin ways that can refine and challenge existing urban historical narratives. Finally, recommendations for overcoming existing barriers to historical GIS are presented.

As environmental concerns mount alongside increasing auto dependence, research hasbeen devoted to understanding the number of automobiles households own. The 2000US census public use micro sample is used to demonstrate the importance of preferenceformation in auto ownership by studying auto ownership among recent movers. Using amultinomial probit model, the paper demonstrates that residents in the US transit citieswho moved from major metropolitan areas are more likely to own fewer vehicles thancounterparts who moved from smaller metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas. It isconcluded that these results are due to learned preferences for levels of car ownership. Oncethe self-reinforcing cultural knowledge of living without cars is lost, it could be difficultto regain. A focus on children and young adults, familiarising them with alternatives tothe car may be an important approach to developing collective preferences for fewer cars.

Using the University of Washington Beyond High School survey data, I examine determinants of language proficiency and its consequences on a variety of socialpsychological and socioeconomic adaptation outcomes. In particular, I explore whether fluent bilingualism—proficiency in both minority home language and English—provides an adaptation advantage to the children of the post-1960 immigrants in terms of educational aspirations, expectations, college enrollment and graduation, compared to their Englishmonolingual or limited-bilingual peers. The results indicate that high school seniors from homes in which a second language is spoken prefer English over the parental language and that a shift to the dominant use of English by the third generation appears to be occurring. However, a quarter of those seniors maintain some proficiency in the minority home language. Proficiency rates vary by minority language group, but one in four youths from dual-language homes is fluently bilingual. Length of residence in the United States, measured as generational status, largely determines proficiency in minority home language, English and fluent bilingualism. Family social background and family structure are only weakly associated with language proficiency. However, family social background is a strong predictor of educational aspirations and attainment. Korean- and Vietnamese-speaking seniors not only report higher educational ambitions but also enroll in and graduate from a four-year college at higher rates than Spanish, Khmer- and Russian- speaking seniors. Spanish speakers appear to the most disadvantaged in terms of graduating from college Fluently bilingual youths hold higher educational aspirations and expectations than their English monolingual peers when family social background, family structure and generational status are controlled and are also more likely to attend a four-year college. However, fluent bilingualism does not provide an advantage in graduating from a four-year college.

An important component of the debate surrounding climate legislation in the United States is its potential impact on labor markets. Theoretically the connection is ambiguous and depends on the sign of cross-elasticity of labor demand with respect to energy prices, which is a priori unknown. This paper provides some new evidence on this question by estimating the relationship between real electricity prices and indicators of labor market activity using data for 1976-2007. A key contribution of this analysis is that it relies on within-state variation in electricity prices to identify the models and considers all sectors of the U.S. economy rather than focusing only on the manufacturing sector. The main finding is that employment rates are weakly related to electricity prices with implied cross elasticity of full-time equivalent (FTE) employment with respect to electricity prices ranging from -0.16% to -0.10%. I conclude by interpreting these empirical estimates in the context of increases in electricity prices consistent with H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The preferred estimates in this paper suggest that in the short-run, an increase in electricity price of 4% would lead to a reduction in aggregate FTE employment of about 460,000 or 0.6%.

Presently, the idea of Digital Earth that Gore envisioned (1998) has become increasingly available by the supports of advances in GIS technology, Internet and high-resolution satellite imagery. However, these huge data models always place emphasis on describing the natural and scientific elements but ignore the humanity factors that are equally weighted. The paper aims at providing a technical framework on implementing Digital Tang ChangAn City (A.D.618-907) to restoring the most magnificent time in Chinese history. As a result, the study of the framework is mainly represents as a proposed three-layer system architecture. In addition, the paper specifically introduced the related technologies and the methodologies based on GIS in handling culture and history. It can be concluded that under this technical framework, Digital Tang Changan City is not only to set up a scientific digitized model, but also ground on the humanity perspective to make the digitized model full of vigorous.

In this paper, we use American Time Use Survey (ATUS) andheterogeneity in unemployment insurance policies across states to examine the relationship between unemployment insurance policies and home production. The empirical results suggest that moving to a two times more generous state would decrease time spent on home production about 11 hours per week for unemployed. We also show that theory is consistent with this empirical observation under reasonableassumptions.

The U.S. Census Bureau has divided Wisconsin into 31 Wisconsin Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), with boundaries set to follow county boundaries and ensure at least 100,000 residents in each unit. For our imputations and poverty results, we have grouped these 31 PUMAs into 22 areas, consisting of the 10 largest counties in Wisconsin and the remaining 12 PUMAs that group between 2 and 10 counties into one area (see Table A 1).

This thesis examines the various factors that influence how children in Latino/non-Latino white households are racially and ethnically identified. The question of multiracial/ethnic identity has come to prominence following the changes made to the U.S. Census questionnaire beginning with the 2000 survey which allows the option of more than one racial identifier. However, little research has focused a group which must still grapple with the complications of identification, namely Latino/non-Latino families. Latino identity is considered to be an ethnic identification rather than a racial identification, with ethnic identification still allowing only one option on the census survey. Thus, these families still must struggle with the decision as to how to identify their children. In this study, I use the 2005-2007 3-year sample of the American Community Survey to examine how various family dynamics and contextual factors can help to explain what drives the decisions of parents on how to racially and ethnically identify their children. Specifically, I use both multinomial logistic regression and multilevel binomial logistic regression to predict the outcome of the child either being identified as Latino (white or other) or non-Latino (white or other). These models incorporate characteristics of the Latino parent and the non-Latino parent as well as the ethnic composition of the area in which the family lives. The findings of this study indicate that certain characteristics of the Latino parent are most influential in determining how the child is identified. The language that the Latino parent speaks in the home, the nativity status of the Latino parent, and the ethnic origin group of the Latino parent are all important factors which influence the decision behind how to identify the children in the family. If the Latino parent speaks Spanish in the home, is Mexican in comparison to other Latino groups, and is U.S.-born, the child is more likely to be identified as Latino. However, influencing factors behind multiracial/ethnic identity go beyond the household. The percent Latino in the area in which the family lives also leads to a Latino identification for the child.

The 1993 expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit created the first meaningful separation in thebenefit level for families based on the number of children, with families containing two or more childrennow receiving substantially more in benefits. If income is protective of health, we should see improvementsover time in the health for mothers eligible for the EITC with two or more children compared to thosewith only one child. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey, we find indifference-in-difference models that for low-educated mothers of two or more children, the numberof days with poor mental health and the fraction reporting excellent or very good health improvedrelative to the mothers with only one child. Using data from the National Health Examination andNutrition Survey, we find evidence that the probability of having risky levels of biomarkers fell forthese same low-educated women impacted more by the 1993 expansions, especially biomarkers thatindicate inflammation.

Previous studies of rising inequality in the United States have overlooked the potential role of subnational political economic variation as an institution that shapes earnings restructuring. This paper uses hierarchical linear models to examine how state right-to-work laws contribute to growth in inequality in 80 metropolitan labor markets from 1970 to 2000. Contrary to conventional expectations, labor markets in states with right-to-work laws experience relatively mild growth in earnings inequality, and are less unequal by 2000 than non-RTW labor markets. The trend cannot be fully explained by union density, job growth, uneven development or variation in racial inequality. The findings contribute to a distinctly sociological perspective on rising inequality that considers how social, institutional and economic factors interact at the local and state levels to shape earnings.