This paper 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. I 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 for housing 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.

This detailed phenomenological study of three immigrant childrens individual networksof linguistic contact (INLC) (interpersonal contact, educational support and contactthrough media) challenges the myth that heritage language maintenance is solely theresponsibility of Chinese immigrant families and communities. Through examiningchildrens ethnolinguistic experiences with INLC, this study identified and analysedfactors that contribute to or impede childrens Mandarin maintenance. Furthermore,this study made suggestions as to how a concerted effort from all spheres of thesociety can expand positive and abrogate negative factors.

Daily headlines warn American workers that their retirement years may be far from golden. The main components of the retirement income system—Social Security and employer-provided pensions and health insurance—are in decline while the amount of income needed for a comfortable retirement continues to rise. In Working Longer, Alicia Munnell and Steven Sass suggest a simple solution to this problem: postponing retirement by two to four years. By following their advice, the average worker retiring in 2030 can be as well off as today's retirees. Implementing this solution on a national scale, however, may not be simple. Working Longer investigates the prospects for moving the average retirement age from 63, the current figure, to 66. Munnell and Sass ask whether future generations will be healthy enough to work beyond the current retirement age and whether older men and women want to work. They examine companies' incentives to employ older works and ask what government can do to promote continued participation in the workforce. Finally, they consider the challenge of ensuring a secure retirement for low-wage workers and those who are unable to continue to work. The retirement system faces very real challenges. But together, workers, employers, and the government can keep this vital piece of the American dream alive.

Latino children in immigrant families are less likely than their peers to participate in early schooling programs, which puts them at increased risk for learning problems and school failure. Factors such as family structure and size, parental education, and income are strongly associated with early learning experiences, participation in early schooling programs, and later academic performance. The authors present an overview of family, health, and institutional factors associated with access to and enrollment in early schooling programs, and they discuss barriers to participation among low-income Latino families.

Two vital American social institutions, education and health care, are intimately related. The individual-level relationship between education and health is tenuous, changing over time, throughout the life course, and across generations. Previous research in this area does not separate the mediating effects of age, period, and cohort or assess the unique effects of various levels of educational attainment on health. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation untangles these factors to find that education has become a more important predictor of health now than twenty years ago, education benefits health across the life course, and college education is necessary for good health in recent generations whereas high school education was a more important predictor of health in earlier generations. From a theoretical standpoint, this study illustrates the need for a more prominent theory to explain the changing nature of the education and health relationship. Methodologically, results suggest that longitudinal analysis is a superior technique to cross-sectional analysis, as the effects of education on health are suppressed in cross-sectional analyses. From a policy standpoint, findings indicate that one viable solution to decreasing health disparities is improved access to education, rather than improved access to physicians, which is the dominant solution in today’s society.

Stroke mortality rates are reported to be lower for Hispanics than non-Hispanic Whites. This project investigates factors that contribute to this lower rate in three ways: 1) examine the role of immigrant status in stroke incidence and mortality, 2) investigate the impact of cause of death ambiguity, and 3) examine the role of misreport of ethnicity on death certificates. In examining the effect of immigrant status I used the Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (EPESE) and the East Boston EPESE. This research compares baseline health characteristics of immigrants with native-born respondents. Additionally, I examine differences in stroke mortality, as well as the risk of stroke between waves. In both EPESE samples significant differences in demographics and co-morbidities existed at baseline between immigrants and the US born. However, the odds of stroke mortality or having a stroke during follow-up were not significantly different for immigrants and the US born in either the East Boston or Hispanic data. To examine the impact of cause of death coding and misreport of ethnicity on death certificates, I used national vital registration data for the years 1989-1991 and 1999-2002, including foreign and US born Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites. Hispanic deaths were adjusted for misclassification of ethnicity on the death certificate. These data were linked to census estimates and 5% census samples for the corresponding time periods, allowing for estimates of the foreign born population. Adjustment for nativity and death certificate misclassification removed 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 stroke than Whites (RR 1.27 and 1.27 respectively), but lower rates of mortality from Ischemic (RR 0.85 and 0.79 respectively) and chronic effects of stroke (RR 0.95 and 0.79 respectively). These results suggest that health benefits immigrants receive do not continue in older age with regards to stroke. Additionally, after adjustment for misclassification, the lower stroke mortality advantage for Hispanic men disappears, while an advantage still remains for Hispanic women. Part of the previously reported advantage is a combination of imprecise measurement and data quality.

This paper estimates the relationship between state and county income inequality and low birthweight (LBW) in the U.S. It examines whether more unequal societies are also less healthy because such societies have lower investment in population health. The model includes an extensive list of community and individual controls and community fixed-effects. Results show that unequal states in fact have greater social investments, and absent these investments children born in such states would be more likely to be LBW. Using alternate measures of inequality reveals that income inequality in the upper tail of the income distribution is not related to LBW; but inequality in the lower tail of the income distribution is associated with increased LBW where the supply of healthcare mitigates the effect of income inequality. Consistent with prior findings, county income inequality is not significantly related to LBW.

It has been well documented in the literature that ethnicity matters significantly in the deter-mination of self-employment rates. In particular, African-American self-employment rates lagfar behind those of other racial groups. Similarly, the literature also provides evidence of thelong-lived nature of institutions and the relationship between institutions and decision-making.After controlling for the appropriate factors that can lead to self-employment differentials, wenote that the Black-White self-employment gap persists. We provide an explanation for this gap,focusing on the important role of repeated negative institutional shocks and how such shocks couldhave influenced generational transmission of information across time. We provide evidence insupport of this hypothesis by comparing African-American exposed to shocks to those who werenot. We find that African-Americans who were less likely to be influenced by negative institutionalshocks and the information transmission from these experiences, have similar self-employmentprobabilities to comparably situated White-Americans.

The launch of the War on Poverty and the race-related riots in American cities were both key events in the 1960s and it has been suggested that there may exist a relationship between the two. From their inception in 1964, community action agencies (CAAs) were directed towards alleviating poverty, but by the late 1960s, they had become an explicitly anti-riot program. Some authors and officials, however, have argued that the CAAs, in fact, triggered the riots. I employ an instrumental variables strategy, in a city-level cross-sectional analysis, to determine the causal impact of CAA spending on riot occurrence and severity. I take advantage of the targeting of federal funds to close electoral races in this strategy. I construct indices for 1964 and 1966 for each city based on the share of the city's counties in which the difference in the vote total between Democrats and Republicans in house elections was less then five percent of the total. These indices are used as instruments, as they are found to determine CAA outlays, but not riot occurrence other than through outlay provision. In addition, I present a semi-parametric monthly panel analysis of riot occurrence. Spending on CAAs is found to have decreased both the likelihood and the severity of the riots.

There is widespread concern that the United States faces a problem in maintaining its position as the scientific and technological leader in the world and that loss of leadership threatens future economic well-being and national security. Business, science, and education groups have issued reports that highlight the value to the country of leadership in science and technology. Many call for new policies to increase the supply of scientific and engineering talent in the United States. While the reports differ in emphasis, the basic message is uniform: the United States should spend more on research and development (R&D) and increase the number of young Americans choosing scientific and technological careers. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush announced the American Competitiveness Initiative that concurred with these assessments: "For the U.S. to maintain its global economic leadership, we must ensure a continuous supply of highly trained mathematicians, scientists, engineers, technicians, and scientific support staff." In 1957, faced with the analogous challenge of Sputnik, the United States responded with increased R&D spending and by awarding large numbers of National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research and National Defense Education Act fellowships, which together induced a large number of young Americans to invest in science and engineering careers. In the early 1960s, the country gave about one thousand NSF graduate research fellowships per year. Forty-five years later, despite a more-than-threefold increase in the number of college students graduating in science and engineering and a global challenge from the spread of technology and higher education to the rest of the world, the United States still gives the same number of NSF fellowships. With so many more college students, current U.S. NSF fellowship policy gives less of an incentive for students to enter science and engineering than did policies in the earlier period.

This paper presents an analysis of the differential growth rates of the farming and nonfarming segments of a rural Scottish community during the 19th and early 20th centuries using the variable-r method allowing for net migration.Using this method, I find that the farming population of Orkney, Scotland, showed less variability in their reproduction and growth rates than the non-farming population during a period of net population decline. I conclude by suggesting that the variable-r method can be used in general cases where the relative growth of subpopulations or subpopulation reproduction is of interest.

Driven by the need to understand change within domains there is emerging research on methods which aim at analyzing how patterns and in particular itemsets evolve over time. In practice, however, these methods suffer from the problem that many of the observed changes in itemsets are temporally redundant in the sense that they are the side-effect of changes in other itemsets, hence making the identification of the fundamental changes difficult. As a solution we propose temporally closed itemsets, a novel approach for a condensed representation of itemsets which is based on removing temporal redundancies. We investigate how our approach relates to the well-known concept of closed itemsets if the latter would be directly generalized to account for the temporal dimension. Our experiments support the theoretical results by showing that the set of temporally closed itemsets is significantly smaller than the set of closed itemsets.

Employing data from the US Census and the American Community Survey, this chapter analyzes differences in self-employment outcomes for Mexican immigrants along the lines of English-language fluency for 1990, 2000, and 2005. Our results indicate that limited English proficient (LEP) Mexican immigrant men have lower self-employment rates than their English-fluent counterparts. Nevertheless, LEP Mexican immigrant men have experienced a relatively large growth in their self-employment rates since 1990 . . .

Before the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park, this area was home to numerous communities, each with a sense of identity. To prepare for the creation of the National Park, all residents living within these communities were relocated, and many of these communities were lost to the passage of time. Today, public memory of these lost communities is being fostered by the descendents of the pre-park area.Through the use of a Historical Geographic Information System, 1920 Edmonson County manuscript census data, and statistical analysis, the demographic composition of these lost communities was explored. This project not only brought to light a past that is not well known, but also built interest in sustaining public memory of the Mammoth Cave pre-park area through the use of historical GIS and public participation.

This chapter investigates entrepreneurship among the Mexican-origin population in the Southwest. using the 5 percent sample of the 2000 census, this analysis investigates how differences in skill level, gender, and nativity affect the entrepreneurial outcomes of this diverse group, as measured by participation and earnings. Findings reveal that the odds of being an entrepreneur are higher for high-skilled Mexican men than for low-skilled men. moreover, the entrepreneurial earnings of high-skilled Mexican men are higher than those of low-skilled men and their wage-worker counterparts. in contrast, Mexican women's entrepreneurial activity is higher among high-skilled foreign-born women than among low-skilled foreign-born women or U.S.-born women, the latter regardless of skill level. Additionally, the earnings of women entrepreneurs are lower than those of their wage-worker counterparts (although the earnings of high-skilled entrepreneurs exceed those of their low-skilled counterparts). Findings suggest that the entrepreneurial activity of Mexicans in the Southwest may indicate two divergent trends: a strategy of economic mobility among high-skilled Mexican men and a strategy of economic survival among Mexican women and low-skilled Mexican men. overall, this research suggests that skill-level, gender, and nativity differentially affect the entrepreneurial outcomes of Mexicans in the Southwest.