We provide a theory that is able to account for the observed co-movement between the shift in intergenerational living arrangements from coresidence to non-coresidence and economic development. Our theory is consistent with the diminution in the status of the elderly documented by some sociologists. The results from our analysis show that, when technical progress is fast enough, the economy experiences a shift from stagnation to growth, there is a transition from coresi-dence to non-coresidence, and the social status of the elderly tends to deteriorate.

The Great Depression offers a unique laboratory to investigate the causal impact of migration on local labor markets. We use variation in the generosity of New Deal programs and extreme weather events to instrument for migrant flows to and from U. S. cities. In-migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, in-migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work or access to relief jobs. For every 10 arrivals, we estimate that 1.9 residents moved out, 2.1 were prevented from finding a relief job, and 1.9 shifted from full-time to part-time work.

To what extent do various organizational forms depend on the characteristics of the local communities in which organizations are embedded? Are changes in form rooted in local communities and their constituent networks and associational systems? We address these questions and integrate organizational theory with research on community, social capital and collective efficacy through an event history analysis of mutual conversions to corporations in the American savings and loan industry. This was a traditionally community-based banking subsector that was increasingly subject to the resurgence of the market during the 1970s and 1980s. We find substantial effects of community structure on change in organizational form. As mutuals become less embedded in their local communities, and as those communities become disorganized and less rich in certain kinds of associations, their members become more receptive to the markets call, and are more inclined to abandon mutual enterprise for for-profit corporate forms. Yet our results also caution us against overly simplified social disorganization or declining social capital arguments. Some forms of associationalism promoted conversions and served as social infrastructure for marketization. Such findings suggest that community takes qualitatively different forms and that revisions of claims about community disorganization or declining social capital in the latter 20th century are warranted.

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choicesof multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal governments new check all thatapply method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowlydefined the population of multiracial individuals as the biracial children of single-race parents.In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples ofthe U.S. Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in itsunderstanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity inthe patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestryindividuals respectively, while we find that multiple race identification is the modal category forthose of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classificationregime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work onmultiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracialancestry groups.

I show that a CES production-function-based approach with skill differentiation and integrated nationallabor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The model predictsthat if I look at the employment (rather than wage) response by skill to immigration in a state, I canestimate 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 novelinstrument based on demographic characteristics of total Central American migrants or of the MexicanPopulation to predict immigration by skill level within California. Looking at immigration to Californiabetween 1960 and 2005 my estimates support the assumption of a nationally integrated labor market by skilland they support the hypothesis that natives and immigrants in the same education-experience group arenot perfectly substitutable. This, in turn, explains the counter-intuitive fact that there is a zero correlationbetween immigration and wage and employment outcomes of natives.

Exchange theories of mate selection argue that persons who have a lower status than their partner in one respect tend to have a higher status than their partner in another. A relative disadvantage in one domain is “exchanged” for a relative advantage in another domain. The hypothesis has been applied to several different pairs of vertically ordered characteristics, such as education and physical attractiveness, occupation and education, and parental occupational status and own occupational status. When applied to socioeconomic status and race, the hypothesis has been controversial, largely because race is not a vertically ordered status characteristic. The hypothesis is nevertheless important because if status exchange does occur in racially mixed couples, it can be regarded as evidence that in the marriage market—and presumable also in society at large—race is treated as a hierarchical variable. For that reason, status exchange may tell us something about the degree of racial prejudice in society. Moreover, an increase in mixed‐race couples cannot simply be regarded as a sign that the color line is fading if such marriages remain characterized by exchange. The hypothesis was originally presented by classic sociologists like Kingsley Davis (1941) and Robert Merton (1941) but it has never been popular. There have been many theoretical critiques of exchange and several attempts have been made to empirically refute the hypothesis. “A Critique of Exchange Theory in Mate Selection” by . . .

In this article, we provide a theory that is able to account for the observed co-movement between the shift in intergenerational living arrangements from coresidence to non-coresidence and economic growth. Our theory is consistent with the diminution in the status of the elderly documented by some sociologists. A significant implication of our theory is that while explanations of the shift in the living arrangements that are based on pure economic factors are compatible with the evidence, those relying on cultural factors are not.

Using data from the 1960 and 2000 U.S. Census for white male workers, twoeconometric models, and the standard deviation of the natural log of wages as thevariation measure, I find that education has a multi-faceted role in predicting thevariance of annual wages over the work life. Investment in education throughcollege reduces annual wage variation, and this implies that investment in humancapital can increase mean earnings while reducing the variation of those earnings.This result implies that education has a diversification effect. When education isinteracted with age (or potential experience), education increases the variation ofwages as the worker ages. Past research, including the seminal works of Becker(1993) and Mincer (1974), has focused more on the education-age interactionterm while being close to silent on the impact of education when separated fromage. A second result indicates that the impact of education on annual wagevariation (both in isolation and when interacted with age) is smaller for full-timefull-year workers than for all workers in the labor force. In addition to theseresults, this paper contributes to the literature by using portfolio theory to explaineducations complex contribution to wage variation.

This paper characterizes an index that is informationally richer than the commonly used ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) index. Our measure of fractionalization takes as a primitive the individuals, as opposed to ethnic groups, and uses information on the similarities among them. Compared to existing indices, our measure does not require that individuals are pre-assigned to exogenously determined categories or groups. We provide an empirical illustration of how our index can be operationalized and what difference it makes as compared to the standard ELF index. This application pertains to the pattern of fractionalization in the USA.

The last decade has witnessed the diversification of immigrant destinations in the United States. Although the literature on this phenomenon is burgeoning, research on the experiences of smaller immigrant groups in new destinations is underdeveloped. This is especially the case for those from the Dominican Republic, a group that is expanding beyond the traditional gateway cities of the Northeast. Using a survey of Dominican immigrants in Reading, Pennsylvania, this study has two objectives. The first objective is to describe the prevalence of experiences with institutional and interpersonal discrimination. The second objective is to determine the extent to which these experiences are structured around racial markers (i.e., skin tone), forms of capital, forms of incorporation, and exposure to the United States. Our results show that a substantial minority of Dominican immigrants claims to have been treated unfairly, primarily because of their race and ethnicity. In addition, experiences with some types of discrimination are positively associated with skin tone (i.e., darkness) and several factors that are identified in models of assimilation.

A number of prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and commentators (Moravec 1999a; Solomonoff 1985; Vinge 1993) have presented versions of the following argument:1.Continued exponential improvement in computer hardware will deliver inexpensive processing power exceeding that of the human brain within the next several decades.2.If human-level processing power were inexpensive, then the software for AI with broadly human-level (and then superhuman) cognitive capacities would probably be developed within two decades thereafter.Therefore,3.There will probably be human-level AI before 2060

In 2009, the National Science Foundation and numerous allied scientific organizations celebrated the "Year of Science"-a nationwide program to promote "public understanding of science." The explicit purpose of the program was to combat a perceived decline in the cultural authority of science in the public sphere. Copious signs were present in popular media: increased antievolution activities, apparent confusion about stem cell research and climate change, and fears about expert "death panels" and H1N1 vaccinations. This dissertation systematically examines science's "legitimacy crisis" in U.S.: 1) whether it is supported by empirical data, 2) its root causes and consequences, and 3) how dispositions toward science shape and are shaped by socio-political cleavages in the public sphere. This study is also advantaged by the new biennial science and technology module that was added to the General Social Survey in 2006. This module combines questions that have been asked in previous surveys with new questions that probe different aspects of the cultural authority of science as well as a broad range of demographic, political, and cultural factors. Overall, this study finds a growing association between political orientation and public trust and acceptance of science, specifically, political party and ideology. Those identifying as conservative and moderate have strong reservations about science on a broad range of issues, especially, its relation to the state. However, conservatives' disenchantment with science has grown with time and has peaked in the most recent decade. Additionally, the "politicization of science" in the U.S. appears unique among other economically advanced countries. Finally, numerous interpretations of these results are explored along with their implications for the contemporary U.S.

PURPOSE: To quantify the relationship between coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factor levels and changes over time and population-wide CHD morbidity and mortality. METHODS: We used a paired cohort and community surveillance of hospitalized myocardial infarction and CHD deaths of community members 53 to 64 years of age in four geographic areas to compare observed community CHD to expected CHD rates and trends based on cohort risk factors. RESULTS: Observed CHD rates declined by 1% to 3% per year in all communities except one, whereas CHD death rates declined 3% to 6% per year in all communities. Risk factor trends predicted a 2% to 3% per year decline in both total events and death. In all communities except one, expected rates of total CHD events were lower than the observed rates, whereas expected and observed CHD death rates were similar. Across all communities women had a higher CHD death rate than expected. CONCLUSION: Overall, trends in CHD risk factors provide a useful indicator of changes in community event rates and of CHD death, but caution is warranted in prediction of absolute risk of CH D events. Ann Epidemiol 2010;20:683-690. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The recent economic downturn in the United States has coincided with stories of young men and women choosing to remain at home, or to move back in with their parents since they can't afford to live independently. But do economic declines cause increases in parental coresidence, or are 'boomerang kids' merely a continuation of a long secular trend towards more living with parents among young adults? This paper first describes changes in parental coresidence from 1960 to 2007, and then turns to an analysis of the causal link between economic conditions and living arrangements among young adults using data on more than 12.5 million individuals from 1960 to 2007. Comparing changes in economic conditions across U.S. states to changes in living arrangements, I find that fewer jobs, low wages, and high rental costs all lead to increases in the numbers of men and women living with their parents. The magnitudes of the effects are quite large: for men, I estimate that changes in economic factors alone are large enough to have caused the observed changes in parental coresidence between 1970 and 2007. For women, since economic opportunity was expanding over the time period we would have expected fewer women living with parents when in fact the opposite occurred. I speculate on the reasons for this asymmetry, and results by race and education subgroups are also discussed.

This paper applies a unified methodology to multiple data sets to estimate both the levels and trends in U.S. high school graduation rates. We establish that (a) the true rate is substantially lower than widely used measures, (b) it peaked in the early 1970s, (c) majority-minority differentials are substantial and have not converged for 35 years, (d) lower post-1970 rates are not solely due to increasing immigrant and minority populations, (e) our findings explain part of the slowdown in collegeattendance and rising college wage premiums, and (f) widening graduation differentials by gender help explain increasing male-female college attendance gaps.

This paper studies the dynamic effect of networks on location and occupation decisions of immigrants to the United States between 1900 and 1930. We compare the distributions of immigrants both by intended and actual state of residence to counterfactual distributions constructed by allocating the national-level flows according to the distribution of previous immigrants and to measures of demand for occupations at the state level. Our results are consistent with migrants using ethnic networks as a transitory mechanism while they learn about their new labor markets and not with other hypotheses that do not account for the dynamic patterns we document.

Data and Methods for Estimating Indicators

This paper determined that environmental occupations slightly decreased the number of children ever born. I used the IPUMS 1990 US Census 1% Sample, approximating environmental jobs, based on occupation and industry codes, and regressing against children ever born

This thesis incorporates the self-reported health status information from the National Health Interview Survey in the United States into a cohort life table to estimate and forecasthealthy life expectancy, which is the average of years lived in good health. First, the thesis defines the Health Status Index (HSI) representing the proportion of the population of people who are in bad health. Applying the HSI, the main contribution of this thesis is modeling the dynamic changes of both the mortality and health processes by using the Lee-Carter model and constructing their stochastic projections. Based on goodness-of-fit tests we find that the Lee-Carter model fits the data quite well. Healthy life expectancy (HLE) is estimated and projected using Sullivans method by including the stochastic projection of the HSI into cohort life tables. The results show increasing trends of both life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE), whereas the latter increases faster than the former. Another novelty of this thesis is the inclusion of uncertainty intervals by means of simulation method for expected simulated LE and HLE.We found that HLE have larger uncertainty than LE. Moreover, maless LE and HLE are lower than females but increase faster with larger confidence intervals. The thesis also provides a comparison between models using level and logit HSI formats, and shows that healthy life expectancies derived from the models with logit HSI are slightly lower, and increase slower with narrower confidence intervals than from the level format models, and a logit transformation is superior to the level format by construction.