Central cities historically have been viewed as ports of entry welcoming new immigrants to the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, new immigrants began to settle in areas outside traditional ports of entry as economic opportunities moved to the suburbs and new suburban immigrant enclaves emerged. By the end of the 20th century, foreign-born suburbanites outnumbered foreign-born central city residents.This article relies on microdata from the U.S. Current Population Survey to identify the determinants of suburban location choice among foreign-born U.S. residents. The analysis includes a variety of controls for household-level socioeconomic characteristics, metropolitan area characteristics, and country of origin. Graphs displaying trends in suburbanization and location choice among U.S. immigrants, along with logit regression models of suburban destination, suggest that recent waves of foreign-born immigrants choose residential locations in conformance with spatial assimilation theory. The study also finds evidence that native and immigrant groups place a different value on the consumer amenities found in the central city and the transportation access and owner-occupied housing supply found in the suburbs. Trends in immigrant suburbanization follow trends in housing and gas prices. These trends have interacted with metropolitan-specific conditions to affect rates of suburbanization among foreign-born residents.

This paper uses hedonic methods and variation in wages and housing costs to estimatehouseholds valuation of climate amenities. We find that, on the margin, household are willing topay more to reduce extreme heat than to reduce extreme cold. Combining these estimates withclimate forecasts for the United States, we find that an 8.3F increase in the average U.S.temperature will result in welfare losses in most areas south of Chicago. On average, the cost ofhotter summers exceeds the gain from warmer winters by 2 to 3 percent of income per year.These results account for taste heterogeneity and sorting; moreover, they are not substantiallyattenuated by allowing for migration.

Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 and Entrepreneurial Activity

Segregation by race, ethnicity and income is a persistent feature of U.S. cities and communities,and ethnic enclaves have formed ever since immigration became more diverse. For low-skilledimmigrants in particular, settling in an ethnic enclave may offer important opportunities andfacilitate coping with the new environment. However, immigrant enclaves may also fosteroccupational segregation and retard assimilation, with the willingness to invest in languageacquisition playing a key role. This paper expands on earlier work focusing on the linkagebetween spatial segregation and language acquisition. Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census thestudy stratifies immigrants by their location in one of four metropolitan areas by educationalattainment and national origin in order to determine the effect of these individual characteristicson English proficiency. The probability of speaking English was found to vary across the fourlocales and educational attainment. Language acquisition was highest in the metropolitan areawhere the immigrant share is smallest, and is increasing in educational attainment.

This article examines the impact of immigration on the location of the computer and computer peripherals manufacturing (SIC 357) and electronic equipment manufacturing (SIC 367) industries in the United States. The authors hypothesize that to stay competitive and keep production costs low, the computer and computer peripherals manufacturing and electronic equipment manufacturing businesses that remain in the United States are shifting employment to areas receiving large numbers of immigrants. Using industry and immigration data by metropolitan area, the authors examine the impact of immigration on industry employment change during the 1990 decade. Results show that cities that attracted immigrants experienced slower declines in computer employment than they would have in the absence of immigration.Key Words: immigration computer industry Asian immigrants metropolitan employment

This paper focuses on the contextual determinants of bilingualism among Latino adults who were born in the US or are members of the 1.5 generation of Latinos who immigrated to the US when they were 10 or younger. We model the broader contexts reflecting contemporary developments that influence change in both the real and the perceived value of bilingualism. Using US census data for metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, we find that the replenishment of an immigrant population is a strong predictor of higher bilingualism among US-born Latinos. We draw on ethnographic data on later-generation Mexican Americans as well as field-work in dual-language immersion schools to explain our findings. The variables measuring the size and growth of the foreign-born Latino population in the MSA/PMSAs in our models capture the factors that encourage bilingualism that we identify in our ethnographic research: institutional contact with Spanish, labour-market rewards, cosmopolitanism.

An important issue for future improvement and extensions of highways will be the ability of projects to sustain challenges to Environmental Impact Statements based upon forecasts of regional growth. A legal precedent for such challenges was established in 1997 when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the EIS for a proposed Illinois toll road was deficient because the growth projections were the same in the build and no-build scenarios. This paper incorporates popular regional growth forecasting models into a quasi-experimental research design that directly relates new highway investments in three California counties to changes in population and employment location, while controlling for no-build historical counterfactuals. The authors model simultaneous employment and population growth from 1980 to 2000 in Merced, Orange, and Santa Clara counties, three California counties that received substantive highway improvements during the mid-1990s. The strategy permits a comparison of the before-and-after tests for effects of investments on economic growth and land use in three regions that contrast how increased highway access affects development patterns: (1) for an urban center in Santa Clara County, (2) for an exurban region in Orange County, and (3) for a small town in Merced County.We find that traditional forecast approaches, which lack explicit control selection, can lead to erroneous conclusions about an impact. Our integrated form of the lagged adjustment model confirms results from a conventional form of the model that includes all cross-sectional units as observations; in both forms of the model we estimate a statistically significant increase in employment development in the exurban region in Orange County where new toll roads were constructed. In the case of Santa Clara County, neither our quasi-experimental integrated approach nor the conventional lagged adjustment approach estimates a significant effect on population or employment growth that can be attributed to the new highways constructed in the urban center. For the small town environment in Merced County, the conventional simultaneous growth regressions produce a materially different estimate than the approach we develop and examine in this paper. Isolating effects to local spatial units where the intervention occurred and their no-build counterfactual produces estimates of a statistically significant decrease in employment growth in the small town near the newly constructed highway bypass.

Proposed amici curiae New Jersey State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP NJ") and Latino Action Network ("LAN"), on behalf of their members, submit this brief in support of the parties challenging N.J.A.C. 5:96 and 5:97. Amici NAACP NJ and LAN respectfully urge this Court to reject the regulations of Council on Affordable Housing ("COAH"), and specifically their use of a "growth share" methodology, as insufficient to ensure that the Mount Laurel doctrine and the New Jersey Fair Housing Act of 1985, N.J.S.A. 52:27D-301 to -329, will in fact open communities of opportunity in New Jersey to those, such as African Americans and Latinos, who are currently excluded from them.

According to culinary scholars, American cuisine retained a strongly British character through most of its history. Despite the waves of immigrants from many parts of the world, ethnic cuisine did not gain a place at the American table until the food revolution of the 1970s. This paper challenges that view by developing and analyzing systematic, quantitative measures of Americas foodways. I demonstrate that beginning about 1900, Americans began to embrace Chinese food. It was the start of a love affair that continues to this day.I attribute Americas chop suey craze to the entrepreneurial efforts of the Chinese who arrived in America during the Exclusion Era, the period between 1882 and 1943 when a series of legislative initiatives severely circumscribed their options. Their entry into the United States was made difficult. They couldnt naturalize. Restrictions were placed on their ability to marry, conduct businesses, and educate their children. Racism limited their employment and housing options. The Chinese responded to these constraints by organizing, moving into self-employment, and dispersing into small cities and towns throughout the country, often living as the only person of their race in their home community. When Americans began to express an interest in inexpensive, healthful, and exotic restaurant fare, the Chinese were poised to respond. A fad was born.

Do richer friends and neighbors improve your health through positive material effects, or do they makeyou feel worse through the negative effect of social comparison and relative deprivation? Using thenewly available National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) data set that reports individualsincome positions within their self-defined social networks, this paper examines whether there is anassociation between relative position and health in the US. Because this study uses measures of individualspositions within their self-defined social groups rather than researcher-imputed measures ofrelative position, I am able to more precisely examine linkages between individual relative position andhealth. I find a relationship between relative position and health status, and find indirect support for thebiological mechanism underlying the relative deprivation model: lower relative position tends to beassociated with those health conditions thought to be linked to physiological stress. I also find, however,that only extremes of relative position matter: very low relative position is associated with worse selfratedphysical health and mobility, increased overall disease burden, and increased reporting ofcardiovascular morbidity; very high relative position is associated with lower probabilities of reportingdiabetes, ulcers, and hypertension. I observe few associations between health and either moderately highor moderately low positions. This analysis suggests that the mechanism underlying the relativedeprivation model may only have significant effects for those at the very bottom or the very top.

European voluntary assimilation has been studied in great detail, but the success of the compulsory assimilation (a term I construct and define as forced assimilation through the social institution of federal law) of the Five Civilized Tribes (FCT) has not been studied in terms of their current socioeconomic position. The prevalent argument within social science is that as American Indians1 assimilate to the mainstream culture their socioeconomic position should improve (Snipp 1989). According to this logic, I argue that a number of factors should situate the FCT in socioeconomic parity with the general population of Oklahoma. This research examines the effects of compulsory assimilation through the current socioeconomic position of the FCT in Oklahoma, as measured by models of OLS regression and sequential logit data analysis. The findings indicate that the FCT still lag behind on basic socioeconomic indicators. I propose this is due to negative racial positioning rather than a failure to assimilate.

The purpose of this dissertation research is to determine the causal relationship between local roads spending (i.e., state-allocated road spending and locally-raised road spending) and the decentralization of people in the context of the Detroit Metropolitan Area between 1980 and 1990. This research adopts a human ecology methodological framework and develops a conceptual model that broadly integrates local roads spending with proposed explanations of decentralization. The conceptual model is developed within social geographic inquiry and is informed by three perspectives (a) ecological and spatial assimilation, (b) neighborhood preference, and (c) place stratification in understanding the decentralization process. This research integrates each of these three proposed theoretical perspectives into the human ecological framework to conceptualize how local roads spending affected decentralization during that decade.

This thesis studies determinants of economic inequalities between different educationand racial groups in the United States of America.The first essay analyzes the sources of a recent employment and wage growth at thelower tail of the U.S. employment and wage distributions. It shows that these developmentsare substantially accounted for by a growth in low education, in-person serviceoccupations. A model of changing task specialization proposes that automation displacesroutine clerical and production tasks in the middle of the job distribution but not low-skillservice jobs which may instead benefit from from increased demand when consumers shifttheir consumption to outputs whose production experienced little productivity growth.An empirical analysis at the level of local labor markets over the period of 1950 through2005 confirms that markets which were initially specialized in routine-intensive occupationsexperienced a stronger growth of employment and relative wages in low-skill servicejobs after 1980.The second essay studies the reallocation of workers from middle-skill occupationstowards the tails of the occupational skill distribution between 1980 and 2005. It showsthat the average age of workers in contracting occupations is rapidly increasing as youngworkers rarely move into these jobs. While young workers with college education havemoved both to the upper and lower tail of the occupational skill distribution, older workersand those without college education are increasingly found in lower-skill, lower-payingjobs.The third essay studies racial residential segregation that results when white residentsflee a neighborhood once its minority resident share exceeds a critical tipping point. Itproposes a model where neighborhood tipping does not only result from racial preferencesbut also homeowners pecuniary incentive to sell their houses prior to a racial change toavoid a loss in house value. Hence, high rates of homeownership among white residentsmake neighborhoods more likely to tip. An empirical analysis of neighborhood data froma large panel of cities in 1970 to 2000 confirms that homeowners are disproportionatelylikely to exit a neighborhood when tipping occurs. The departure of the relatively wealthyand well-educated homeowners contributes to a drop in human capital levels of tippingneighborhoods.

This paper explores the role of culture in determining divorce decisions by examiningdifferences in divorce rates by country of origin of immigrants in the United States. Becauseimmigrants who arrived in the US at a young age all share a common set of American laws andinstitutions, we interpret cross-ancestry differences in divorce rates as evidence of the effect ofculture. Using this basic epidemiological approach, we find that culture has quantitativelysignificant effects on divorce decisions, more so for women than men. Supplemental analysessuggest the effect of culture is especially strong for immigrants from low divorce countries thatreside amidst a large number of co-ethnics. Given the importance of divorce as a determinant oflater outcomes in life, our findings suggest that cultural effects should be taken into considerationwhen formulating family policies.

Inferences about earnings volatility across groups and time depend on underlying models of earnings dynamics, data sources, earnings concepts, and sampling strategies. In this paper we evaluate a model of earnings dynamics in which the permanence of shocks varies by age and education. This specification is consistent with observed earnings changes in administrative panel data, and also with the variance of earnings levels in multiple cross-section (synthetic panel) data. However, expanding the earnings concept to include self-employment and changing sampling strategy to include observations with minimal labor force attachment has first-order effects, and may help explain why some studies conclude that earnings volatility is rising.

For many years social scientists have debatedthe role of social structure versus culture in explaining thesocial and economic outcomes of African Americans. Theposition that one takes often reflects ideological bias.Conservatives tend to emphasize cultural factors whereasliberals pay more attention to structural conditions, withmost of the attention devoted to racialist structural factorssuch as discrimination and segregation. In this article Idevelop a framework for understanding the formation andmaintenance of racial inequality and racial group outcomesthat integrates cultural factors with two types of structuralforcesthose that directly reflect explicit racial bias andthose that do not. In so doing, I hope to spark greaterinterest and dialogue in the research and policy arenasaround a more holistic approach to poverty alleviation.

This paper introduces the Income Distribution Project, a free-for-use Internet site created to aid financial service professionals in making initial decisions regarding the appropriate approach in generating estimates of future earnings for an individual. Depending on the occupation and the earnings profile of the subject and its relationship to his/her occupational peers, the necessary analytic rigor may vary significantly in generating valid and defensible estimates. However, without first committing to a relatively elaborate analysis, which comes with attendant costs, a professional often cannot know whether a simpler, cheaper analysis would have sufficed. The information included at the Income Distribution Project provides professionals with a means to answer this question prior to a significant commitment of resources.