Using a newly created data set containing real output per worker, real physical capital perworker and human capital per worker for US states from 1840 to 2000, Turner et. al (2007b)analyzed the growth rates of aggregate inputs and total factor producvity (TFP). Given thatinstiutional differences across states are likely to be smaller than those observed across countries,the result that variation in TFP still accounts for the lions share of variation in output growthis somewhat surprising. We continue this line of work by documenting the importance of TFP inexplaining cross sectional variation in the levels of log income. We also consider the possibilitythat one major institutional difference across states, slavery, might explain TFP differencesacross states. To this end, we create and present a new state level measure of years of schoolingby race from 1840 - 2000. Again, surprisingly, exploiting this series has very little impact on theupper bound of the fraction of income variation that can be explained by inputs. Thus as inLucas (1988) and Prescott (1998), the mystery of TFP remains. We do, however, find supportfor external effects of physical and human capital, as suggested by Romer (1986,1990), Lucas(1988), and Tamura (2002,2006).

Occupations with a greater share of females pay less than those with a lower share, controlling for education and skill. This association is explained by two dominant views: devaluation and queuing. The former views the pay offered in art occupation to affect its female proportion, due to employers' preference for men-a gendered labor queue. The latter argues that the proportion of females in an occupation affects pay, owing to devaluation of work done by women. Only a few past studies used longitudinal data, which is needed to test the theories. We use fixed-effects models, thus controlling for stable characteristics Of Occupations, and U.S. Census data from 1950 through 2000. We find substantial evidence for the devaluation view, but only scant evidence for the queuing view.

We study potential economic benefits of immigration stemming from two factors: first, that immigrants bring not only their labor supply with them, but also their consumption demands; and second, that immigrants may have a comparative advantage in the production of ethnic goods. Using data on the universe of business establishments located in California between 1992 and 2002 matched with Census of Population data, we find some evidence that immigrant inflows boost employment in the retail sector, which is non-traded and a non-intensive user of immigrant labor. We find that immigration is associated with fewer stand-alone retail stores, and a greater number of large and in particular big-box retailers evidence that likely contradicts a diversityenhancing effect of immigration. On the other hand, focusing more sharply on the restaurant sector, for which we can better identify the types of products consumed by customers, the evidence indicates that immigration is associated with increased ethnic diversity of restaurants.

This paper examines whether management changes caused by the entry of the baby boom into the workforce explain the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and resurgence in the 1990s. Lucas(1978) suggests that the quality of managers plays a significant role in determining output. If thereis heterogeneity across workers and management skill improves with experience, an influx of young workers will lower the overall quality of management and lower total factor productivity. Census data shows that the entry of the baby boom resulted in more managers being hired from the smaller, pre baby boom cohorts. These marginal managers were necessarily of lower quality. As the boomers aged and gained experience, this effect was reversed, increasing managerial quality and raising total factor productivity. Using the Lucas model as a framework, a calibrated model of managers, workers, and firms suggests that the management effects of the baby boom may explain roughly 20 percentof the observed productivity slowdown and resurgence.

Payday lenders have become the banker of choice for many residents of poor and working class neighborhoods in recent years. The substantial costs that customers of these fringe bankers incur have long been documented. Yet there is reason to believe there are broader community costs that all residents pay in those neighborhoods where payday lenders are concentrated. One such cost may be an increase in crime. In a case study of Seattle, Washington, a city that has seen a typical increase in the number of payday lenders, we find that a concentration of payday lending leads to higher violent crime rates, controlling on a range of factors traditionally associated with neighborhood crime. Social disorganization theory provides a theoretical framework that accounts for this relationship. The findings suggest important policy recommendations and directions for future research that could ameliorate these costs.

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states which comprised barely less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the region. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge and rising revenue productivity by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove rising farm and land values.

Objectives. We examined rates of uninsurance among workers in the US health care workforce by health care industry subtype and workforce category. Methods. We used 2004 to 2006 National Health Interview Survey data to assess health insurance coverage rates. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to estimate the odds of uninsurance among health care workers by industry subtype. Results. Overall, 11% of the US health care workforce is uninsured. Ambulatory care workers were 3.1 times as likely as hospital workers (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.3, 4.3) to be uninsured, and residential care workers were 4.3 times as likely to be uninsured (95% CI = 10,6.11). Health service workers had 50% greater odds of being uninsured relative to workers in health diagnosing and treating occupations (odds ratio [OR] = 1.5; 95% Cl = 1.0, 2.4). Conclusions. Because uninsurance leads to delays in seeking care, fewer prevention visits, and poorer health status, the fact that nearly 1 in 8 health care workers lacks insurance coverage is cause for concern. (Am J Public Health. 2009;99:2282-2288. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2008.152413)

This paper examines the effect of various factors on the commuting behaviour of one- and two-worker households. The households' choices in the land and labour markets are modeled in the context of Becker's common preference framework. The empirical investigation using data from the 2007 American Community Survey also tests the Household Responsibility Hypothesis. I find that women have shorter work trips than men, but are willing to commute much longer if they earned more. There is no evidence that the presence of children decreases commuting for married women. Nonwhite workers commute considerably longer than white workers, with nonwhite women being the most disadvantaged.

Research on child custody primarily focuses on the well-being of children following divorce. We extend this literature by examining how the prospect of joint child custody affects marriage-specific investment in childrens private-school education. Variation in the timing of joint-custody reforms across states proxies for the prospect of joint child custody and provides a natural experiment framework with which to examine marriage-specific investment in children. The probability of childrens private school attendance declines by 13 percent in states that adopt joint-custody laws. The effects of joint-custody reform are larger in states that have property-division laws that consistently favor one parent over the other. The results are largely robust for subsamples partitioned by socioeconomic status.

This chapter examines the evolution of English and foreign language competencies, preferences, and use among young adult children of immigrants in the United States, including the extent to which bilingualism is sustained or not over time and generation in the U.S. The issues of language loyalty and change are first considered in a broader historical context, and a national profile is sketched of foreign and English language patterns over the past three censuses. It then focuses on results from the last wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed a large sample of 1.5- and second-generation youth (immigrant children who arrived in the U.S. before adolescence, and U.S.-born children of immigrants) for more than a decade from mid-adolescence to their mid-twenties. The baseline sample of more than 5,000 was representative of 77 nationalities, including all of the principal immigrant groups in the U.S. today. The CILS data set permits both comparative and longitudinal analyses of language fluencies across the largest immigrant groups in the U.S., from widely different cultural and class origins, in distinct generational cohorts, and in different areas of settlement. The analysis is supplemented with other available survey and census data.

In recreation demand studies much of the data is collected via on-site samples. Thus, no data is collected for those not visiting the recreation site. The fact that no information is available for those not visiting the recreation area complicates statistical analyses because the result is an endogenously stratified sample. A supplemental sample contains information on the exogenous variables but no information on the response variable. A supplemental sample can be used, along with an on-site sample, to estimate a probability model for site visitation. In this article, we develop and apply the logit formulation of the model of Lancaster and Imbens (1996). We use an on-site sample from the Sipsey wilderness area in northwest Alabama. For our supplemental sample, we use the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for corresponding counties in Alabama. Together, these samples are used to estimate factors influencing the probability of visiting the site.

This case study of public-academic library collaboration examines how both types of institutions can combine their strengths to provide focused research instruction more effectively than each can accomplish alone. The authors partnered to create a public presentation that details the many house, neighborhood, and land history resources available at local repositories and that describes the often complex process of accessing and interpreting these data. This article evaluates how this type of collaboration compares to earlier cross-library partnerships as described in the literature and explains the many benefits that have resulted from their own collaborative endeavor.

The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth centurythe U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards postal work as other employment opportunities leave the city circa 1960. The response is particularly strong in segregated areas, where black neighborhoods are clustered near the central business district. Furthermore, this pattern only holds for non-mail carriers, many of whom work in central processing facilities. More recently, the relationship between black postal employment and segregation has declined, suggesting that spatial mismatch has become less important over time.

While much research incorporates measures of residential segregation in macro-level research, surprisingly little work has examined the relationship between dimensions of segregation to changes in arrest rates within metropolitan areas. Using data from the U.S. Census and FBI Arrest reports, this paper analyzes how Massey and Dentons (1988, 1994) five dimensions of residential segregation influence total, violent, and property arrest rates within a panel of metropolitan areas (MAs). Additionally, by extending this analysis to explain race-specific arrest rates over time, this study expands existing research using theories of racial threat and concentrated deprivation that link African American residential segregation and arrest rates. Results suggest that significant dimensions of segregation include evenness in distribution across census tracts, exposure to non-African Americans, and concentration within adjoining census tracts. Analysis of arrest rates also suggests that concentrated disadvantage explains arrest patterns over time within MAs.

This dissertation consists of two essays concerning the determination of wages across areas. The first essay investigates the equilibrium relationship between wages and prices across labor markets. Of central interest is the extent to which workers receive higher wages to compensate for differences in the cost of living. According to the spatial equilibrium hypothesis, the utility of homogenous workers should be equal across labor markets. This implies that controlling for amenity differences across areas, the elasticity between wages and the general price level across areas should equal one, at least under certain conditions. We test this hypothesis and find that the predicted relationship holds when housing prices are measured by rents and the general price level is instrumented to account for measurement error. When housing prices are measured by housing values, however, the wage-price elasticity is significantly less than one, even using instrumental variables. Rents reflect the price paid forhousing per unit of time and are arguably the superior measure. Thus, findings in this essay provide support for the full compensation hypothesis. These findings also have important implications for researchers estimating the implicit prices of amenities or ranking the quality of life across areas.The second essay uses a national level dataset and a spatial econometric framework to examine the effects of teacher unions and other school district characteristics on teacher salaries. The results confirm that salaries for both experienced and beginning teachers are positively affected by salaries in nearby districts. Investigations of the determinants of teacher salaries that ignore this spatial relationship are likely to be misspecified. We find that union activity increases salaries for experienced teachers by as much as 16-21 percent but increases salaries for beginning teachers by a considerably smaller amount. This result is consistent with predictions from a median voter model.

The aim of this project is to unify the world of spatial representation (GIS) with the world ofsubstantive information such that the two are interwoven seamlessly. That is, information about atopic (e.g., passenger traffic on a railroad line) is joined with a shape file showing the location of thattopic (e.g., the location of the railroad line), and traced through time. Granted, not all topics lendthemselves to this sort of global representation. Some topics are rightly understood as idiographic(there is no point or little possibility in standardizing the feature). However, the topics of greatestconcern to academics, policymakers, and the lay public are usually generalizable. Thus, we haveevery reason to expect that the issues investigated in this project will include important, and relevant,features of the past -- not flotsam and jetsam.

Despite the importance of understanding home ownership, there exists little consensus atto why many young households rent despite the lower user-cost of owning. In a Bewley modelwith endogenous price volatility, mobility, and home ownership, we assess the contributionof nancial constraints, housing illiquidities and house price risk to home ownership over thelife cycle. We show the existence of a nite dimensional state space, steady state equilibriumwith stochastic prices. The calibrated economy is able to explain most of the rise in homeownership over the life cycle. We nd that, while some young households rent due to borrowingconstraints in the mortgage market, the prole of earnings and desire for mobility are moreimportant determinants of the ownership rate.