Using a data set of public and private relief spending for 295 cities, this article examines the racial and ethnic patterning of social welfare provision in the United States in 1929. On the eve of the Depression, cities with more blacks or Mexicans spent the least on social assistance and relied more heavily on private money to fund their programs. Cities with more European immigrants spent the most on relief and relied more heavily on public funding. Distinct political systems, labor market relations, and racial ideologies about each group's proclivity to use relief best explain relief spending differences across cities.

As the world becomes wealthier over time, inflation-adjusted insured damages fromnatural disasters go up as well. This article analyzes whether there is still a significantupward trend once insured natural disaster loss has been normalized. By scaling uploss from past disasters, normalization adjusts for the fact that a disaster of equalstrength will typically cause more damage nowadays than in past years because ofwealth accumulation over time. A trend analysis of normalized insured damage fromnatural disasters is not only of interest to the insurance industry, but can potentially beuseful for attempts at detecting whether there has been an increase in the frequencyand/or intensity of natural hazards, whether caused by natural climate variability oranthropogenic climate change. We analyze trends at the global level over the period1990 to 2008, over the period 1980 to 2008 for Germany and 1973 to 2008 for theUnited States. We find no significant trends at the global level, but we detectstatistically significant upward trends in normalized insured losses from all nongeophysicaldisasters as well as from certain specific disaster types in the UnitedStates and Germany.

Although the United States has experienced race-related civil disturbances throughout its history, those that occurred in the 1960s were unprecedented in frequency and scope. Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as considerable property damage concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. Law enforcement concentrated . . .

We evaluate the effect of smoking bans and excise taxes on the exposure to tobacco smoke of nonsmokers, and we show their unintended consequences on children. Smoking bans perversely increase nonsmokers' exposure by displacing smokers to private places where they contaminate nonsmokers. We exploit data on bio-samples of cotinine, time use, and smoking cessation, as well as state and time variation in anti-smoking policies across US states. We find that higher taxes are an efficient way to decrease exposure to tobacco smoke.

Many Americans are surprised to learn that some of the most famous and well known professional athletes and celebrities in the world are multiracial Asian American - Tiger Woods, Kimora Lee Simmons, Hines Ward, Keanu Reeves, Johnny Damon, Norah Jones, Ann Curry, and Kristin Kruek, to name just a few.

Much of the existing research on the economic assimilation of post-1965 immigrants relative to the native born has revolved around earnings. The earnings differential is a helpful measure of inequality as it indicates the amount of resources an individual or group has for socio-economic well-being, but it still limits our complete understanding of immigrants' economic incorporation and more specifically, their labor market experiences. Added to this, assimilation is not a uniform process. I evaluate one of the key assertions of segmented assimilation theory by examining national origin patterns of labor market integration, for post-1965 Latin American and Caribbean immigrants' changes in employment status over the period 1980 to 2000. Segmented assimilation theory posits that assimilation can be downward, especially in disadvantaged contexts, conventional as in upward mobility, or partial. Using repeated cross-sections of the 5% IPUMS USA decennial Census samples of 1980, 1990 and 2000, the study assesses changes in the likelihood of being unemployed or out of the labor force as opposed to employed over the course of 1980 to 2000, for pooled cross-sections of working age immigrants relative to US non-Hispanic Whites and native minorities. Emphasis is placed on measuring the effect of national origin and duration of residence on employment status while controlling for the Census year, demographic and human capital factors. Results show that all foreign born have lower risks of nonparticipation than the native majority and native minorities over their course of US residence. Higher labor force participation, however, does not translate into higher likelihoods of full labor market integration. Differentials in labor market integration actually follow a downward assimilation pattern for foreign born Mexicans and Guatemalans/Hondurans/Nicaraguans as their risks of unemployment increase with longer US residence and are similar to native minorities of Hispanic origin. Foreign born Jamaicans' risks of unemployment also mirror those of native Hispanics, thus suggesting a propensity for downward assimilation as well. Foreign born Cubans appear most likely to assimilate conventionally as their risks of unemployment approach parity with the native majority over their duration in the US. Hence, upward and downward assimilation trajectories in labor force attachment depend on nationality.

It is well established that mothers earn less than childless women, even after controlling for differences in human capital. We investigate whether this is partially due to declines in the skill level of new parents' occupations, and whether a decline can be attributed to within-occupation constraints, e.g. hours or stress. We find little change in math skills for new fathers but a sizable decrease for mothers, particularly women with multiple children and highly educated women, much of which is explained by occupational attributes. This translates into lower wages as well, accounting for up to 10% of the motherhood wage gap.

During the course of the 20th century labor saving technologies, from runningwater to modern appliances, have transformed home production. This paper assessesthe impact of these transformations on female labor participation rates andoccupational choices by using 1940 and 1950 US Census data on the diffusion ofplumbing facilities and refrigerators. Its findings indicate that the increased adoptionof modern refrigerators during the 40s did not have a significant impact onwomens participation to the labor market, while improvements in house plumbinginfrastructure may have contributed to the increase in clerical ad sales workers, butnot other occupations. However, I cannot reject that in 1940 cross-county differencesin household plumbing infrastructure contribute to explaining cross-county differences in female labor force participation rates.

Few studies have examined the migration and acculturation experiences of Latino youth in a newly emerging Latino community, communities that historically have had low numbers of Latino residents. This study uses in-depth interview data from the Latino Adolescent, Migration, Health, and Adaptation (LAMHA) project, a mixed-methods study, to document the experiences of Latino youth (aged 14-18) growing up in one emerging Latino community in the southeastern region of North Carolina. Using adolescents own words and descriptions, this study shows how migration can turn an adolescents world upside down, and it discovers the adaptive strategies that Latino immigrant youth use to turn their world right-side-up as they adapt to life in the United States.

This paper uses individual and farm-level data from California for 1860-1880 to understand a puzzle related to 160-acre farms. In 1860, 35 percent of farms in the sample were 160 acres. Surprisingly, these farms differed systematically from other similar farms in their share of improved acres. For example, on 160-acre farms, 42 percent of the acreage was improved, whereas on 80-239 (excluding 160) acre farms, 77 percent was improved. These differences were not attributable to the age, occupation, or ownership status of the farmer or to the quality of the land. Further, the differences diminished over time. The most likely reason for the difference is the Preemption Acts of 1841 and 1853, which gave farmers incentives to claim exactly 160 acres but weak property rights prior to actual purchase.

This paper examines the relationship between racial segregation and poverty. Using data primarily from the 2000 Census, I control extensively for metropolitan area characteristics and other factors. In addition, I use metropolitan area physical geography characteristics as instruments for racial segregation as one approach to address the problem of endogeneity bias. I find significant and positive effects of black (Latino)-white segregation on black and Latino poverty, respectively, that remains evident across a variety of model specifications. Evidence from two-stage least squares estimates reveals that the effect on Latino poverty seems more plagued by endogeneity bias than that on black poverty. Simulations show that if black-white levels of segregation were reduced from hyper segregation (actual) levels to low levels of segregation the black-white poverty rate gap would close by fifty percent. The influence of segregation on poverty varies across important metropolitan characteristics such as region, metro size and percent of the population that minority.

More than 85% of the immigrants admitted to the US since the 1980's have come from Asian and Latin American countries. Currently Hispanic and Asian immigrants are the largest and the second largest immigrant groups in the U.S. Female immigration has also become an increasingly prominent feature of immigration in the recent decades and they comprise almost half of the immigrant population in the United States. This dissertation primarily focuses on the labor force participation, earnings, and occupational attainment behavior of married immigrant women of Asian and Hispanic origin and how that compares to the natives over the time period 1980-2000. The key contribution of this research is the extensive comparative analysis of the behavioral shifts or similarities in the labor market performance of Asian and Hispanic married female immigrants. The data for this analysis has been taken from the U.S. Census of Population and Housing 5% Integrated Public Use Micro Data Samples for the years 1980, 1990, and 2000.Heckman's two-step procedure and Probit method are used to analyze the earnings and the labor force participation of married immigrant and native females. Outcomes indicate that education, English ability, and time in U.S. have stronger effects on the earnings of Asian immigrants compared to Hispanic immigrants. The results also show that the participation decision of Asian immigrant women are more influenced by changes in husband's wages compared to Hispanic immigrants and that family factors such as presence of young children and non-working adult relatives are important determinants of the labor force participation decisions of married women.Multinomial logit models of occupational attainment are estimated to examine the factors that affect the occupational choice of married female immigrants and how that compares to the natives, and Duncan's segregation indices are computed to examine the presence of occupational segregation between immigrant and native married women and whether Hispanic immigrant women are more segregated than Asian immigrant women in the U.S. labor market. The outcomes suggest that Hispanic immigrant women are more segregated than Asian immigrant women in all three years when compared to White non-Hispanic native women. Occupational segregation also exists between Asian immigrant and Asian native women and between Hispanic immigrant and their native counterparts in all three years. The segregation indices in both cases (with own-native and white natives) are bigger in case of Hispanic immigrants than Asian immigrants.

Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending outside of safety-net programs. At the beginnings of recessions, states tend to experience unexpected deficits. While all states ultimately pay these deficits down, differences in the stringency of their balanced budget requirements dictate the pace at which they adjust. States with strict rules enact large rescissions to their budgets during the years in which adverse shocks occur; states with weak rules make up the difference during the following years. We use this variation to identify the impact of midyear budget cuts on state income and employment. Our baseline estimates imply i) a state-spending multiplier of 1.7 and ii) that avoiding $25,000 in midyear cuts preserves one job. These cuts are associated with shifts in the timing of government expenditures rather than differences in total spending over the course of the business cycle. Consequently, our results are informative about the potential gains from smoothing the path of state government spending. They imply that states could reduce the amplitude of business-cycle fluctuations by 15% if they completely smoothed their capital spending and service provision outside of safety-net programs.

Objectives: Stroke mortality rates are reported to be lower for Hispanics than non-Hispanic Whites. We investigate the degree to which this lower reported mortality is explained by inaccuracies introduced through omission of nativity, imprecise measurement of cause of death, and under-ascertainment of Hispanic ethnicity on death certificates. We used national vital registration data for the years 19891991 and 19992002, including foreign- and US-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites. Hispanic deaths were adjusted for misclassification of ethnicity on the death certificate. Denominators for the rates were derived from census estimates.Results: Adjustment for nativity and death certificate misclassification removes the stroke mortality advantage for US-born Hispanic men, but not women. After adjustment, US-born Hispanic men and women have higher rates of mortality from subarachnoid hemorrhage than non-Hispanic Whites (RR: 1.23 and 1.23, respectively), but lower rates of mortality from Ischemic (RR: 0.76 and 0.73, respectively) and chronic effects of stroke (RR: 0.87 and 0.73, respectively).Conclusions: When adjusted for misclassification the lower stroke mortality remains for Hispanic men and women at older ages. Part of the previously reported advantage is a combination of imprecise measurement and data quality.

Obtaining health insurance coverage is a tremendous challenge for self-employed Iowans. While 9.5 percent of all Iowans lacked health insurance in 2008, 1 over 12 percent of the self-employed-more than 23,000 Iowans-lacked health insurance. 2 Many workers who might otherwise have started their own businesses remain in jobs for which they are either overqualified or underpaid, simply because of the assurance of health insurance benefits. As New York Times columnist David Leonhardt noted, "[W]orkers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions, and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn . . .

How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively,is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency infirms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector version of the Grossmanand Rossi-Hansberg (2008) model with a continuum of tasks in each sector and we augment it to includeimmigrants with heterogeneous productivity in tasks. We use this model to jointly analyze the impact ofa reduction in the costs of offshoring and of the costs of immigrating to the U.S. The model predicts thatwhile cheaper offshoring reduces the share of natives among less skilled workers, cheaper immigration doesnot, but rather reduces the share of offshored jobs instead. Moreover, since both phenomena have a positive"cost-savings" effect they may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilledworkers. Our model also predicts that offshoring will push natives toward jobs that are more intensive incommunication-interactive skills and away from those that are manual and routine intensive. We test thepredictions of the model on data for 58 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 2000-2007 and findevidence in favor of a positive productivity effect such that immigration has a positive net effect on nativeemployment while offshoring has no effect on it. We also find some evidence that offshoring has pushednatives toward more communication-intensive tasks while it has pushed immigrants away from them.

This volume consists of three chapters. The first chapter presents a model of interdependent preferences in which utility depends on the individual’s rank within peers, the rank of the peer-group itself, and leisure. It offers explanations to two empirical puzzles - (1) The recent increase in the number of hours worked by the more productive US workers relative to the less productive, and (2) The non-monotonic empirical relationship between happiness and absolute income. The strength of the proposed model, which also nests the classical model of absolute consumption, is its ability to explain two interesting empirical puzzles simultaneously. The second chapter applies the model developed earlier to study rural-to-urban migration in developing countries. It offers explanations to several regularities in rural-to-urban migration that cannot be explained solely by wage differentials or risk diversification arguments. It also generates some interesting results including - (1) Rural-to-urban migration even when there is no . . .