Background: Understanding how the timing of exposure to the US Stroke Belt (SB) influences stroke risk may illuminate mechanisms underlying the SB phenomenon and factors influencing population stroke rates.Methods: Stroke mortality rates for United Statesborn black and white people aged 3080 years were calculated for 1980, 1990, and 2000 for strata defined by birth state, state of adult residence, race, sex, and birth year. Four SB exposure categories were defined: born in a SB state (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, or Alabama) and lived in the SB at adulthood; non-SB born but SB adult residence; SB-born but adult residence outside the SB; and did not live in the SB at birth or in adulthood (reference group). We estimated age-, sex-, and race-adjusted odds ratios for stroke mortality associated with timing of SB exposure.Results: Elevated stroke mortality was associated with both SB birth and, independently, SB adult residence, with the highest risk among those who lived in the SB at birth and adulthood. Compared to those living outside the SB at birth and adulthood, odds ratios for SB residence at birth and adulthood for black subjects were 1.55 (95% confidence interval 1.28, 1.88) in 1980, 1.47 (1.31, 1.65) in 1990, and 1.34 (1.22, 1.48) in 2000. Comparable odds ratios for white subjects were 1.45 (95% confidence interval 1.33, 1.58), 1.29 (1.21, 1.37), and 1.34 (1.25, 1.44). Patterns were similar for every race, sex, and age subgroup examined.Conclusion: Stroke Belt birth and adult residence appear to make independent contributions to stroke mortality risk.

Most accounts of why cities pass living wage ordinances stress the importance of grassroots coalitions that have successfully mobilized bias out of concerns for justice and fairness. On the basis of data from the Integrated Public Micro-Use Data Series (IPUMS) for the years 19501990, this paper argues that cities that passed ordinances had labor market characteristics that may have predisposed them to do so. These cities were also more likely to pass ordinances because of transformations in their labor markets that were occurring over several decades. It is these transformations that constitute a form of path dependence. Consequently, it is this path dependence that may account for why some cities were more conducive to the development of grassroots organizations and coalitions that were able to capitalize on changes over a 40-year period as a basis for mobilizing bias. Although the story of post-World War II economic transformations is nothing new, this paper seeks to make a systematic attempt to quantify the extent to which they may have made certain cities more likely to pass ordinances.

This dissertation combines longstanding conceptual approachesbehavioral andeconomicwith aspects of complexity theory to analyze and model intraurbanmigration patterns in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA). It utilizes detailedparcel data records gathered for property tax purposes available for the seven-countyTCMA. This parcel dataset has about six million parcel records covering six years from2002 to 2007 describing attributes of land parcels, their owners, and the structuresconstructed on them. Using spatial data mining and modeling techniques, this researchextracts spatially accurate information on individual household relocations, constructsvacancy chains, and examines their patterns and relation to residential structure andurban growth.

O fluxo migratório é uma das componentes das projecções construídas em Demografia. Existem vários tipos de modelos para estudar as migrações, desde os que consideram os factores económicos como principais implusionadores da migração, até aos modelos sociais que privilegiam as ligações pessoais. Nesta dissertação a exploração e análise dos fluxos migratórios é feita através de um sistema multi-agentes, tendo em consideração as redes sociais de cada agente. Na construção do modelo, as relações pessoais são consideradas como o principal factor que impulsiona ou reprime a migração de indivíduos do seu país para os Estados Unidos da América (país de destino em análise), e vice-versa. É feita uma abordagem geral aos temas da Demografia, Migração, Redes sociais e Sistemas multi-agentes no sentido do enquadramento dos procedimentos desenvolvidos neste trabalho. O ênfase das relações pessoais no modelo construído conduziu ao estudo das redes sociais estabelecidas entre os agentes simulados. Apesar de os resultados do modelo não terem sido suficientemente esclarecedores, foi possível estudar a estrutura das redes sociais e relacioná-las com as tendências de migração demonstradas pelos agentes. As redes sociais que foram criadas entre os agentes das quatro nacionalidades estudadas (alemã, chinesa, mexicana e portuguesa) são coesas e, por isso, favorecem a decisão de migração.

Although over 140 years have passed since slaves were emancipated in the United States, African-Americans continue to lag behind the general population in terms of earnings and wealth. Both Reconstruction era policy makers and modern scholars have argued that racial inequality could have been reduced or eliminated if plans to allocate each freed slave family forty acres and a mule had been implemented following the Civil War. In this paper, I develop an empirical strategy that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and the southern United States to identify the impact of free land on the economic outcomes of former slaves. The Cherokee Nation, located in what is now the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, permitted the enslavement of people of African descent. After joining the Confederacy in 1861, the Cherokee Nation was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nations public domain. To examine this unique population of former slaves, I have digitized the entirety of the 1860 Cherokee Nation Slave Schedules and a 60 percent sample of the 1880 Cherokee Census. I find the racial gap in land ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States. The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate into smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South. Additionally, the Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen. These results together suggest that access to free land had a considerable and positive benefit on former slaves.

This paper investigates the extent to which employer-sponsored health insuranceinfluenced job mobility between 1995 and 2007. This time period is an important oneto consider given the recent increase in the cost of private health insurance and theenactment of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996. Inaddition, changes in the tax treatment of health insurance for the self-employedoccurred throughout the period. Using data from the 1996-2007 March Supplementsof the Current Population Survey, I find that for married women with employersponsoredinsurance, having an alternative source of coverage increases theirlikelihood of becoming self-employed by 75 percent, while the number of childrenthey have reduces their likelihood of switching jobs by 7 percent per child. Overall, Ifind that having an alternative source of insurance increases the likelihood ofswitching jobs by 9 percent. Finally, I do not find evidence to suggest that job-lockaffects married men.

After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations andexpanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized inthe 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading toa distinct U-shaped relationship between skill levels and employment and wage growth. This paperanalyzes the sources of the changing shape of the lower-tail of the U.S. wage and employmentdistributions. A rst contribution is to document a hitherto unknown fact: the twisting of thelower tail is substantially accounted for by a single proximate cause rising employment and wagesin low-education, in-person service occupations. We study the determinants of this rise at thelevel of local labor markets over the period of 1950 through 2005. Our approach is rooted in amodel of changing task specialization in which routineclerical and production tasks are displacedby automation. We nd that in labor markets that were initially specialized in routine-intensiveoccupations, employment and wages polarized after 1980, with growing employment and earningsin both high-skill occupations and low-skill service jobs.

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the private sector.

American colleges and universities have traditionally lumped all of their black students into a unified Black/African/African American" category. However, there is growing evidence that American higher education is witnessing a historic change in the racial and ethnic ancestry of Blacks who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action. Recent studies have pointed out that disproportionately large percentages of Blacks benefiting from affirmative action are foreign-born Black immigrants, their sons and/or daughters, and multiracials. In addition, the number and percentage of blacks approaching college age from these groups will increase substantially in the next five to ten years.In light of this historic change in the racial and ethnic make-up of Blacks admitted to selective higher education programs, this comment seeks urges admissions programs of selective higher education programs to start collecting relevant data about the racial and ethnic ancestry of its Black students. Now is an appropriate time to urge educational officials of selective higher education programs to begin to document the racial and ethnic ancestry of their Black students. The Department of Education (DOE) has issued new guidelines for the reporting of data on race and ethnicity (the Guidance) that all educational institutions must follow, which go into effect for the fall of 2010. The purpose of the Guidance is to obtain more accurate information about the increasing number of students who identify with more than one race. The Guidance will require education institutions to classify self-identified Black Hispanics and self-identified Black Multiracials as either Hispanic/Latino or Two or More Races, respectively, not as Black/African American. While educational institutions must use the categories required by the Guidance in their reporting to the DOE, they may collect additional information regarding sub-categories for their own purposes within these categories.Since complying with the reporting requirements of the Guidance will require all educational institutions, including selective higher education programs, to gather information about the racial make up of its Black students, this comment urges them also to gather information about the ethnic make-up of its Black students. Gathering such information is vital in order to determine the exact racial and ethnic ancestry of its Black students. Such a process could reveal that Black Immigrants, Black Hispanics and Black Multiracials constitute a much larger percentage of their Black students than these educational officials realize. This information may reveal a need for a given selective higher education program to consider additional changes to its admissions process in order to increase the number and percentage of blacks whose predominate ancestry is traceable to the historical oppression of blacks in the United States.

Any work toward racial equity in America willneed to include strengthening the blackLatino coalition.While there are political and social tensions between these groups, much of the underlying issue involves real and perceived perceptions of economic competition, particularly the notion that immigrant Latinos undercut African American wages. We note that there is some evidence that immigrants pull down incomes of US-born unskilled workersboth black and Latino. We argue, however, that highly restrictive immigration policy will have minimal effects and erode collective political power; a superior alternative is working together to reduce high school dropout rates, raise the minimum wage, reintegrate exoffenders, rigorously enforce antidiscrimination law, promotecomprehensive immigration reform, and pursuecommunity development. Such an analysis is gainingground in grassroots efforts to build trust and forge policy coalitions between Latinos and African Americans.

This study tests the impact of household and demographic factors on the economic well-being of the farm and nonfarm self-employed using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. Parametric and nonparametric techniques are used to test for statistical differences in selfemployment and household income levels. Further, household and demographic factors are tested for their effect on self-employment income using a censored tobit regression model. Findings indicate the farm self-employed report significantly higher levels of self-employment income than the nonfarm self-employed. Several household and demographic factors significantly impact self-employment income levels for the farm and nonfarm self-employed.

This paper explores the relationship between anti-miscegenation laws, interracialmarriage and black males' destination selections in the U.S. during the Great Mi-gration. I nd that anti-miscegenation laws in individuals' state of birth aected thesorting of inter- and intraracially married black males into destination states dier-entially. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967,which forced the last 16 Southern states to strike down their anti-miscegenation laws,creates a natural experiment to explore the relationships between the destinationselections of married black males, spousal race and the anti-miscegenation laws. Theinter- and intraracially married younger generation of black males who experienceda marriage market free of anti-miscegenation laws had dierent migration patternsthan those of older generation black males.

We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high degree of responsiveness, controlling for interest group pressure and the ideology of voters and elected officials. Policy salience strongly increases the influence of policy-specific opinion (directly and relative to general voter ideology). There is, however, a surprising amount of noncongruencefor some policies, even clear supermajority support seems insufficient for adoption. When noncongruent, policy tends to be more conservative than desired by voters; that is, there is little progay policy bias. We find little to no evidence that state political institutions affect policy responsiveness or congruence.

The 1960s ushered in a new era in U.S. demographic history characterized by significantly lower fertility rates and smaller family sizes. What catalyzed these changes remains a matter of considerable debate. This paper exploits idiosyncratic variation in the language of Comstock statutes, enacted in the late 1800s, to quantify the role of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Almost fifty years after it appeared on the U.S. market, this analysis provides new evidence that oral contraception accelerated the post-1960 decline in marital fertility.

We investigate whether the degree production and research and development (R&D)activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capitalpresent in the metropolitan areas where the institutions are located. We find that degreeproduction has only a small positive relationship with local stocks of human capital,suggesting that migration plays an important role in the geographic distribution of humancapital. Moreover, we show that spillovers from academic R&D activities tilt the structureof local labor markets toward occupations requiring innovation and technical training.These findings demonstrate that colleges and universities raise local human capital levels by increasing both the supply of and demand for skill.

Social scientists have long understood ethnicity to be socially constructed, contextually dependent and temporally fluid, but even in scholarly works, ethnicity is presumed to spring spontaneously from blood descent in particular instances. An especially widespread case is the inference of Chinese ethnicity for all descendants of the global Chinese diaspora. Although immigration scholars have documented differential contexts of emigration and divergent patterns of settlement among immigrants from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, it remains taken for granted that all members of these disparate groups of immigrants are ethnically bound by a shared sense of Chinese identity. In this paper, I use 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census Long Form data obtained from the University of Minnesotas IPUMS-USA website to show that immigrants from Taiwan, like their counterparts in the country of origin, are heterogeneous, and increasingly so, in their self-identification. I also demonstrate that ethnic choice among Taiwan-origin immigrants is shaped by the confluence of historical and current events in Taiwan and contextual conditions in the U.S., and that ethnic choice matters for political outcomes such as U.S. citizenship acquisition. The lessons of these findings are twofold: (1) the uncritical designation of all Taiwan-origin immigrants as Chinese in academic research leads to inaccurate conclusions about the Chinese American population properly understood, as well as to deficient knowledge about a relatively new, but growing, Asian American ethnic population; (2) beyond the particular case of Taiwan-origin immigrants, knowledge about immigrant incorporation more generally may be enhanced by closer examination of the historical

This study examines why a growing percentage of Taiwan-bornimmigrants in the U.S. have identified themselves as Taiwanese rather thanethnic Chinese in the U.S. decennial censuses between 1990 and 2000. Thetrend appears inconsistent with the assimilation theory, which postulatesthat ethnic groups will become more detached from ethnic politics andidentity the longer they stay in the United States. The application of adouble cohort method enables us to separate the period effect from theduration effect, which is critical to analyzing the changes. Results showsharp temporal differentiation and large geographical variation. The oldergeneration of Taiwanese immigrants and recent arrivals to the United States,as well as those who live in Los Angeles, are the most likely to regardthemselves as Taiwanese rather than ethnic Chinese. In contrast, Taiwanbornimmigrants who have greater English proficiency, who have lesseducation, and who have [mainland] Chinese as their neighbors are lesslikely to do so.Moreover, age-at-arrival is a key determinant in identity formation andchange. Those who came to the U.S. when they were young are least likelyto regard themselves as Taiwanese. Over time, Taiwan-born immigrantshave indeed become more acculturated. Young Taiwan-born immigrantswho came to the U.S. before the 1970s are least likely to make a switch toTaiwanese during the period. However, acculturation alone does not preventone from claiming Taiwanese identity on the census form. For Taiwan-bornimmigrants, writing in Taiwanese on the census form appears to be a"rebellious" or "awakening" act and a symbolic expression of solidaritywith their compatriots in Taiwan, empowered by a growing sense ofTaiwanese consciousness. Globalizationmay now have allowed immigrantsto maintain a closer tie with their country of origin than before, especiallyin times of crisis.