Young children, birth through eight, are more diverse than other age groups in the United States. They are more likely to be first- or second-generation immigrants and, as a consequence, more likely to belong to racial-ethnic groups originating outside European nations. Many also live with parents whose heritage language is not English. For these reasons, children in immigrant families merit special attention by policy-makers, program administrators, and others who have responsibility for assuring that the young children of today become competent students, workers, citizens, and parents in the years ahead. The development of effective policies and programs for all children and families depends on having information about their life circumstances, including their family composition, education, work, income, and housing, and for immigrants, also their country of origin, citizenship, and language skills. This article presents new results from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2005, 2006, and 2007, reflecting important life circumstances of young children in immigrant families, compared to those in native-born families. We present new population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, which highlight the increasingly important role that children of immigrants will play in the economy and civil society during the coming decades. We then discuss implications for the design and implementation of effective policies and programs.

This paper proposes a model of long term economic development and assesses it on the United States 1840-2000. Because of a low cost of education, parents invest into children education and simultaneously diminish the number of their offspring. This trade-off generates a virtuous circle inwhich individual productivity, labor market participation and the share of the labor force in total population are rising, ultimately transforming a physical capital-based economy into a human capital-based economy. Overall, the model accounts for major traits of American economic development at the micro-economic level over the period, which are: the rapidspread of education, the continuous decrease in fertility and the associated rise in women participation to the labor market, the reduction in differential fertility across income groups, the growth in life expectancy, the Great Compression of income inequality in the course of the twentieth century,and intergenerational correlation of income. Macro-economic trends suchas capital deepening in the nineteenth century, the ageing structure of the population, the rise in labor productivity and fast technological change, are also well captured. Counterfactuals show that the expansion of education has a comparable effect on the growth rates of labor and physicalcapital, and that inequality has a detrimental impact on output growth because it slows down the accumulation of human capital across generations.

Despite evidence that skilled labor is increasingly concentrated in cities, whether regional wage inequality is predominantly due to differences in skill levels or returns is unknown. We compare Appalachia, with its wide mix of urban and rural areas, to other parts of the U.S., and find that gaps in both skill levels and returns account for the lack of high wage male workers. For women, skill shortages are important across the distribution. Because rural wage gaps are insignificant, our results suggest that widening wage inequality between Appalachia and the rest of the U.S. owes to a shortage of skilled cities.

Much of the inequality literature has focused on national inequality, butlocal inequality is also important. Crime rates are higher in more unequal cities; peoplein unequal cities are more likely to say that they are unhappy. There is a negativeassociation between local inequality and the growth of city-level income and population,once we control for the initial distribution of skills. High levels of mobility across citiesmean that city-level inequality should not be studied with the same analytical toolsused to understand national inequality, and policy approaches need to reflect the urbancontext. Urban inequality reflects the choices of more and less skilled people to livetogether in particular areas. City-level skill inequality can explain about one-third ofthe variation in city-level income inequality, while skill inequality is itself explained byhistorical schooling patterns and immigration. Local income also reflects the substantialdifferences in the returns to skill across, which are related to local industrial patterns.

This article reports on findings to date of Puerto Rican migration to and experiences in Central Florida from the 1940s into the 1980s. To set the course for a study of the making of Puertorriqueidad in Central Florida, the article maps out the historic trajectories that have brought Puerto Ricans to Central Florida and it historicizes the development of Puerto Rican spaces in Central Florida. Puerto Ricans in Central Florida have moved from these different trajectories into a geographic space marked by historic emphases on self reliance and free enterprise, an area where "development" and "neoliberalism" mean the same thing. Pulling together these diverse threads, both geographic and historical, this article proposes further research to be done to address the question of how Puerto Rican experience is redrawing Central Florida, and how Central Florida is redrawing Puerto Rican experience.

For the almost 2,500 years since Plato wrote that “any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich,” urban scholars have been struck by the remarkable amount of income inequality within dense cities. America is an unequal nation, and while there is certainly plenty of rural inequality, there is a 44 percent correlation between inequality and density across those U.S. counties with more than one person per every two acres. Moreover, just as inequality within the United States as a whole has been rising since the 1970s, inequality in almost every metropolitan area has risen since 1980. In many cases, the increase in inequality has been considerable. This policy brief reviews the economic determinants of inequality at a local level. Pre-tax income inequality is generally understood as refl ecting the distribution of skills in the population as well . . .

This paper addresses a central question in urban economics: how does the spatial distribution of employment opportunities influence residential location? Over the past fifty years, both employment and population left central cities for the suburban ring. Between 1960 and 2000, the share of metropolitan Americans who lived in the suburban ring increased from 48 to 68 percent. Over the same period, the share of metropolitan residents who worked outside the city rose from 41 percent to 58 percent. The decentralization of both employment and population has led economists to ask whether workers followed jobs out to the suburbs or jobs followed workers. Answering this question is complicated by the fundamental simultaneity of the location decisions of workers and firms.

What are the benefits of immigration? A small body of literature has examined a variety of benefits of immigration to the U.S.: how they affect GDP, how they affect the efficiency of the labor market, whether they are a net fiscal gain or drain, and how much they lower price levels. However, very little research has examined how immigrants affect the level and character of entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. This paper pursues a new path in this nascent field by directly focusing on immigration’s effect on natives’ entrepreneurship and propensity to innovate via a labor supply effect. We first posit a theoretical model that predicts that immigrants, particularly those possessing skills that are not immediately transferable to the U.S. labor market, facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. At the heart of our theoretical prediction that immigration facilities entrepreneurship is the observation that human capital not immediately valued in the U.S. labor market may still be useful for learning new skills (an insight from cognitive science theory) and therefore . . .

This paper examines the effects of knowledge about a wide variety of subjects on the wages and salaries of U.S. workers. Knowing a lot about topics such as medicine and dentistry, engineering and technology, and production and processing has a positive effect on individual earnings, whereas high knowledge in the areas of food production and personnel and human resources is not rewarded in the labor market. Spillover effects, where the share of metropolitan area employment in high-knowledge occupations enhances earnings, were uncovered primarily in subjects related to producer services and information technology.

The divorce rate in the United States has increased dramatically since the 1960s. Much research has attempted to explain this epidemic. This paper analyzed the effects of house price changes on divorce rates. The study is based on Gary Beckers theory (1977) that a drastic change in wealth increases the probability of marital dissolution. Data from the Current Population Survey and from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight were used. Based on the MSA level, a fixed effects model was used to estimate the effects over a period of one year, three year, and five year changes in the house price index. The results supported Beckers theory, in which positive and negative changes in house prices significantly affected the divorce rate for homeowners. As house values increased, we observed increased rates of separation. Moreover, if house prices decreased, divorce rates decreased. It is predicted that as house prices decrease, married couples are more financially dependent of each other, and they cannot afford to separate because it is more difficult for them to access equity from their house.

Assimilation and split labor market processes have been core foci in literature on immigration, race/ethnicity, and stratification. Prior research, however, has typically examined these processes separately, seldom devoting attention to how the intersection of individual assimilative behaviors and group-level power dynamics contribute to employment opportunities and returns. In this study, we incorporate and integrate aspects of segmented assimilation and split labor market perspectives. Drawing data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for New York City, 1910-1930 and supplementing quantitative analyses with qualitative archival data, we examine the effects of assimilative attributes on employment outcomes for whites, white ethnics, and blacks as well as the role of split labor market dynamics in shaping rewards. Results suggest individual assimilative attributes contribute to group-level variations in socioeconomic status, but that inequalities and clear racial/ethnic occupational hierarchies remain. Certain groupsnotably new stock immigrants and blacksencountered social closure which prevented full participation within New York City's labor market, regardless of individual efforts to assimilate. The implications of simultaneously examining assimilation and labor market processes for future research are discussed.

In this provocative volume, the authors argue that public education is a central part of American civil religion and, thus, gives us an unquestioning faith in the capacity of education to solve all of our social, economic, and political problems. The book traces the development of America's faith in public education from before the Civil War up to the present, exploring recent educational developments such as the No Child Left Behind legislation. The authors discuss how this faith in education often makes it difficult for Americans to think realistically about the capacities and limitations of public schooling.

In this paper, we explore differential changes in house prices across neighborhoods withina city to better understand the nature of house price dynamics across cities. We do so byproposing a previously unexplored mechanism where individual utility is increasing in theincome of one's neighbors. Instead of proximity to jobs, it is proximity to "richer" peoplethat drive differences in land prices within and across cities. In the model, segregation byincome occurs: richer households are concentrated together with poorer households livingin the periphery. In response to a positive increase in housing demand (e.g. a decreasein the interest rate, an increase in city-wide income, an influx of richer households), richerhouseholds expand into adjacent poorer neighborhoods. This is what we term "endogenousgentrifcation". As the richer households expand into poorer neighborhoods, the land valueincreases due to the externality, driving house prices up. The model also predicts that thecity-wide responsiveness of house prices to a given demand shock will depend on the incomedistribution within the city. As a result, richer cities are predicted to respond more to thehousing demand shock, even if housing supply is perfectly elastic, because they experiencea higher degree of gentrifcation. Using a variety of different data sources, we show that thedata are consistent with many predictions of our model. In particular, we find that thoseneighborhoods whose house values increase the most during city wide housing booms are thepoor neighborhoods that are in close proximity to the richer neighborhoods. This patternis robust to controlling for distance to jobs. Additionally, we find that these neighborhoodsthat experience the highest price increases also show strong evidence of gentrifcation (largeincreases in income, large reductions in the poverty rate, and an influx of new residents).We formally assess the mechanism of the model by showing that house prices increase substantiallyin a poorer neighborhood when the surrounding neighborhoods receive a positiveshock to income. Lastly, we assess how much of cross city differences in price appreciationrates during the 1990s and the 2000s can be explained by our mechanism.

This paper analyzes the differences in wage ratios of university graduates to less than universitygraduates, the education premium, in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2000. Bothcountries experienced a similar increase in the fraction of university graduates and a similarincrease in skill biased technological change based on capital-embodied technological progress,but only the United States had a large increase in the education premium. Using a calibratedKrussel et al. (2000) model, the paper finds that the cross country difference is in equal proportiondue to the effective stock of capital equipment, the growth in skilled labor supply relative tounskilled labor and the relative abundance of skilled population in 1980. Growth in the workingage population is unimportant for the difference.

From 1977-2001, several US states mandated health insurance providers to o er coveragefor infertility treatment. Although the majority of past literature has studied impacts on olderwomen who are likely to seek treatment, this paper proposes that the mandates may have had awider impact on the US population. Speci cally, it may have given an option for younger womento delay birth due to the reduction of the opportunity cost of having a child in the future. Resultsestimated by the discrete-time proportional hazard model suggest a signi cant delay in the timeto rst birth among highly educated women.

The ability of family members to engage in intergenerational transfers of hands-on care requires close proximity or coresidence. In this paper we describe and analyze the patterns of proximity and coresidence involving adult children and their mothers using data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and the U.S. Census. Although intergenerational coresidence has been declining in the United States, most Americans live within 25 miles of their mothers. In both the raw data and in regression analyses, the most robust predictor of proximity of adult children to their mothers is education. Individuals are less likely to live near their mothers if they have a college degree. Virtually all previous studies have considered coresidence alone, or else treat coresidence as a limiting case of close proximity. We show that this treatment is misleading. We find substantial differences in the correlates of proximity by gender and marital status, indicating the need to model these categories separately. Other demographic variables such as age, race and ethnicity also affect the probability of coresidence and close proximity, but characteristics indicating a current need for transfers (e.g., disability) are not correlated with close proximity.

This paper examines the micro-foundations of occupational agglomeration in U.S.metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on labor market pooling. Controlling for a widerange of occupational attributes, including proxies for the use of specialized machineryand for the importance of knowledge spillovers, we find that jobs characterized by aunique knowledge base exhibit higher levels of geographic concentration than dooccupations with generic knowledge requirements. Further, by analyzing coagglomerationpatterns, we find that occupations with similar knowledge requirementstend to co-agglomerate. Both results provide new evidence on the importance of labormarket pooling as a determinant of occupational agglomeration.

I analyse how Hispanic newcomers are becoming incorporated into therural southern racial hierarchy during an early stage of immigration. Iexamine patterns in newcomers (1) racial/ethnic identifications and (2)social interactions with whites and blacks, showing how and why theylend preliminary support to a black/nonblack colour line model, in whichthe central distinction separates the positions of people with Africanancestry from all others. Hispanic newcomers, including many who aredark-skinned, poor, and undocumented, have come to perceive the socialdistance separating themselves from whites as more permeable than thatseparating themselves from blacks, and are engaging in distancingstrategies that may reinforce this distinction.