When a partner is disabled and not in the labour force, the need for earnings provided by the non‐disabled partner increases. However, the disabled partner's need for care raises the value of time spent at home by the non‐disabled partner. The direction of the relation between partner disability and hours worked varies with couple type because connecting links are affected by couple type. Relevant issues include foregone earnings, amount of income lost by the disabled partner, accumulated savings and healthcare coverage. In order to determine whether there is a significant relation between hours worked and having a disabled partner, controlling for other characteristics, Tobit regression equations were estimated using the US 2000 Decennial Census 5% sample. Among same‐sex partners, unmarried opposite‐sex partners and married men, individuals with disabled partners worked fewer hours in the labour force than did those without disabled partners. Only among married women did those with a disabled partner wor...

Despite the importance of marriage for the economic and demographic history of the nineteenth-century United States, there are few published estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage and no published studies of its correlates before 1890, when the Census Office first tabulated marital status by age, sex, and nativity. In this article I rely on the 1860 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series census sample to construct national and regional estimates of white nuptiality by nativity and sex and to test theories of marriage timing. I supplement this analysis with two new public use samples of Civil War soldiers. The Gould sample, collected by the U.S. Sanitary Commission between 1863 and 1865, allows me to test whether height and body mass influenced white men's propensity to marry. Additionally, a sample of Union Army recruits linked to the 1860 census, created as part of the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death project, allows me to combine suspected economic, demographic, and anthropometric correlates of marriage into a multivariate model of never-married white men's entrance into first marriage. The results indicate that nuptiality was moderately higher in 1860 than it was in 1890. In contrast to previous studies that emphasize the primary importance of land availability and farm prices, I find that single women's opportunity to participate in the paid labor force was the most important determinant of marriage timing. I also find modest support for the hypothesis that height affected men's propensity to marry, consistent with the theory that body size was a sign to potential marriage partners of future earnings capacity and health.

This report introduces a quantitative index that measures the degree of similarity between native- and foreign-born adults in the United States: the ability to distinguish the latter group from the former is defined as "assimilation." The Index of Immigrant Assimilation relies on Census Bureau data available in some form since 1900 and as current as 2006. The index reveals great diversity in the experiences of individual immigrant groups, which differ from each other almost as much as they differ from the native-born. They vary significantly in the extent to which their earnings have increased, their rate of learning the English language, and progress toward citizenship. Mexican immigrants, the largest group and the focus of most current immigration policy debates, have assimilated slowly, but their experience is not representative of the entire immigrant population. Collective assimilation rates are lower than they were a century ago, although no lower than they have been in recent decades. This is true despite the fact that recent immigrants have arrived less assimilated than their predecessors and in very large numbers. In addition to country of origin, the Index categorizes groups on the basis of date of arrival, age, and place of residence. Some groups have done far better or worse than the Index as a whole; Assimilation also varies considerably across metropolitan areas. The methodology used to compute the assimilation index is outlined in the report and detailed in an appendix. The assimilation index points to marks of success, to encouraging recent trends, and also to areas of concern. Within areas of concern, the index provides some insight into the nature of the problem and the universe of appropriate potential policy responses. However, the report neither proposes nor endorses any policy responses: its purpose is to present information in a manner useful to concerned citizens and policymakers who hope to make informed decisions regarding the proper course of action.

One of the most signifi cant sources of examination of the ethnic groups of the United States is the U.S. Census taken in every decade. The census is essentially the only offi cial document that attempts to exhaustively quantify and classify the composition of the country’s population. The census data is processed in varying degrees regardless of whether they seek to quantify the number of Hungarians or inform on the demographic characteristics or to present a to this day unrivaled sociological analysis, all data has to be equally validated against the unique characteristics of the data source and the attendant analytical problems. The recurrent theme and source of inquiry for the authors is to what degree it is possible to describe the Hungarian ethnic presence in the U.S. population based on the census data. A particular challenge is the identifi cation and evaluation of the different foreign ethnic groups or ethnic origin of populations that in English we call „ancestry”. There is a tendency within the wider population polled to accept the ethnic origin or ancestry category incorporated in the survey responses, including those of Hungarian origin, as truly representative of actual social communities or groups. Based on this premise, it is assumed that the subjective relationship of the questionnaire respondent, that is, the individual who has Hungarian ancestors, is to him or her and to others, from the community or social standpoint, Hungarian. This premise was challenged, fi rst and foremost by Zoltán Fejõs in several studies pointing out that the use of ancestry related data has to be used with great caution, particularly if we want to quantify from that the data the number of ethnic Hungarians within the population. An important fi nding by Fejõs is that “based on the «hard» statistical data we could only determine a picture of the Hungarians by examining the nature and characteristics of the data sources regarding them.” According to him, „the statistical categories of the analyses, the questions and the wording of the questionnaire, as well as unexamined phenomena of past censuses, are determinants of the overall structure of the national ethnic canvas.”

For a long time, migration has been subject to intensive economic research. Nevertheless, empirical evidence regarding the determinants of migration still appears to be incomplete. In this paper, we analyze the effects of socio-economic and institutional determinants, especially labor-market institutions, on migrants' choices. Based on a large data set constructed from micro-data for France, Germany, the UK and the US, we study their decisions to migrate to one of the four countries using a Multinomial Choice framework. Our estimates confirm a number of conventional results such as positive effects of wages and immigrant networks and negative effects of unemployment rates. In addition, we find that employment protection, union coverage and unemployment benefits have positive effects on migration. Also good education and health systems tend to attract migrants, while generous pension systems may deter them. Based on separate estimations for high- and low-skilled migrants, there is evidence that the effects of labor-market institutions differ across skill groups.

Health insurance costs are one reason that employers may be reluctant to hire older workers. Higher health insurance costs are often correlated with other factors of employment, such as firm size, which can also be correlated with employment outcomes. This paper uses state health insurance mandates, which are correlated with higher health care costs, as a source of exogenous variation in an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to identify the causal effects of health care costs on employment of older workers. Using this instrument, I find that increasing health care costs significantly lower men's employment. Thus it appears that rising health insurance costs for older workers are partly responsible for decreasing employment of older potential workers. Although people with higher health care costs are less likely to be employed, older workers do not seem to be singled out; employment and labor force rates for older potential workers are in fact less affected by higher health care costs than are employment outcomes for younger.

Using a model of family decision-making with home production and individual heterogeneity,we quantitatively investigate the role of changes in several aspects of the joint earningsdistribution of husbands and wives (gender earnings gap, gender-specific inequality and assortativenessof matching) and the decline in prices of home appliances in accounting for thedramatic rise in labor force participation of married women since 1959. The implicationsof the factors examined are tested against changes in participation for disaggregated groupsof couples and leisure trends of married individuals, documented from the U.S. populationcensus and time-use survey data. The key finding is that changes in the distribution of potentialearnings account for nearly 90% of the observed increase in labor force participationof married females and in a manner consistent with the change in participation for groupsof females differentiated according to the husbands earnings and changes in group-specificleisure trends. Closing of the gender earnings gap is the main aspect of the distribution thatunderlies this result. Also, increasing purchasing power associated with the closing of thegender earnings gap, generates a widespread use of home appliances, thus driving the homeproduction revolution, which is commonly regarded as a result of the fall in prices of homeappliances alone. The decline in prices of home appliances accounts for only 5% of the rise infemale LFP, while implying counterfactually strong increases in gender-specific leisure time.

Recent studies have examined the effect of political conflict and domestic terrorism on economic and political outcomes, e.g., output, investment, and elections. New data on patents obtained by African Americans from 1870 to 1940 provide a natural experiment for determining the impact of political and ethnic violence on economic activity. Hate-related acts, such as mob violence, are found to depress patenting activity among blacks by 50 percent. A similar shock to white inventors would have resulted in a 48-percent decline and significantly more volatility in U.S. patenting activity over the same period. In particular, economically meaningful patents respond negatively to extrajudicial killings and to state and federal laws promoting segregation. The evidence suggests that more important than mob violence and segregation laws is the systematic federal decision not to restore the rule of law. Further, patenting rates respond quickly and positively to declines in race-related violence and to national efforts to end violence. These findings imply that, then and now, ethnic and political conflict and resulting uncertainty in property-rights enforcement may persistently affect the level, direction, and quality of inventive activity and, hence, economic growth. (JEL D74, G11, N70, O17, O31, P16)

The recent trend of immigrants arriving in mid-size metropolitan areas has received growing attention in the literature. This study examines the success of immigrants in the housing markets of a sample 60 metropolitan areas using Census microdata in both 2000 and 2005. The results suggest that immigrants are less successful in achieving homeownership and more likely to live in overcrowded conditions than native-born whites of non-Hispanic origin. The immigrant effect on homeownership differs by geography and by immigrant group. Finally, we find evidence that immigrant networks increase the likelihood of becoming a homeowner.

This dissertation analyzes how Mexican-origin populations' engagements with formal and informal sites of education during the twentieth century shaped their "Mexican American" ethnic identities. Mexican Americans in Chicago came to view schools as important institutions that could serve as nodes of social assimilation and economic integration into an American mainstream while simultaneously reinforcing their ethnicity and culture. My examination suggests these two sets of aspirations were in tension with one another. My analysis of the role education played in the contentious processes of Mexican American identity formation during the twentieth century in a Midwestern region complicates contemporary interpretations of Mexican American educational history, which mainly focuses on the Mexican-origin populations of the American Southwest. Mexican-origin populations found greater freedom in multiethnic and racially diverse environments of industrial urban centers like Chicago than in the Southwest to engage debates about their Mexicanness. Mexican-origin populations invariably chose schools as the realms in which those debates would occur, deciding that schools were the social institutions that could best articulate and reinforce their varying notions of "Mexican-American."

The first chapter of this dissertation introduces housing as a hedging asset in a lifecycle portfolio choice model and addresses the empirically documented hump-shaped life-cycle stock investment pattern. I show that the life-cycle pattern of housing investment has a crucial influence on investments in stocks. House tenure choice is endogenized and an investor uses housing investment to hedge against both labor income risk and rent risk when labor income, house price, rent, and stock price covary with each other. The "U-shaped" life-cycle housing investment profile helps to explain the equity allocation puzzle. This paper also demonstrates that optimal portfolio choice varies across local housing markets and industries, so that a one-sizefits-all prescription is unsuitable for life-cycle investments. The second chapter explores the portfolio choice in a multi-asset setting. It considers a more realistic portfolio which contains not only financial assets but also housing investment and human capital. I look at the covariance structure of labor income, house price, rent, and stock price and examine the possibility of households using these multiple assets in hedging. I obtained the data of these four time series and computed the correlations and volatilities over the period 1980 and 2004. In addition, the PSID data with its Geocode data are used to conduct cross-sectional portfolio choice analysis. I find evidence that the PSID households use housing investment to hedge against labor income risk and rent risk, consistent with the findings by Davidoff (2006) and Sinai and Souleles (2005) and in the real estate literature.

Despite the growing number of Japanese speaking immigrants in the U.S. and the pronounced linguistic dissimilarity between Japanese and English, few studies have examined English proficiency levels or Japanese language maintenance. We use 2000 data from the 5% IPUMS file to examine English proficiency and language maintenance among first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese immigrant youth in the United States. Before presenting multivariate results for our dependent variables, descriptive statistics are presented detailing numerous significant differences within and across generations. Furthermore, the second-generation is divided into subgroups based on each parent's birthplace. This study also contrasts the results of Japanese-Americans with those of Korean-Americans, speakers of another language very distinct from English, in an attempt to ground the significance of our findings. Findings provide support for many of the hypotheses advanced. They also reveal that our regression models generally did a much better job explaining English acquisition among Japanese-Americans than Korean-Americans.

A new algorithm, SUDA2, is presented which finds minimally unique itemsets i.e., minimal itemsets of frequency one. These itemsets, referred to as Minimal Sample Uniques (MSUs), are important for statistical agencies who wish to estimate the risk of disclosure of their datasets. SUDA2 is a recursive algorithm which uses new observations about the properties of MSUs to prune and traverse the search space. Experimental comparisons with previous work demonstrate that SUDA2 is several orders of magnitude faster, enabling datasets of significantly more columns to be addressed. The ability of SUDA2 to identify the boundaries of the search space for MSUs is clearly demonstrated.

The gap between the ages of husbands and wives in the United States fell in each decade from 1900 to 2000. We explore whether this trend was present as well in the second half of the nineteenth century using data from the 1850-1880 IPUMS samples. We find that age homogamy (similarity in the ages of spouses), measured in a variety of ways, actually decreased after 1850 before beginning its twentieth-century increase. The post- 1850 decrease in homogamy did not result from the loss of marriage- age males in the Civil War or from the withdrawal of women from paid labor in industries that employed large numbers of women in early industrialization (e.g., textiles). Rather, the rising age gap resulted from the lack of same-age partners and the desire for younger, more physically vigorous wives in newly settled regions and high-mortality locations such as southern counties with large slave populations.

I document trends in black and white retirement rates and in living arrangements among retirees.I show that the retirement rates of both blacks and whites rose between 1900 and 1930 but thatconvergence in black and white rates and in living arrangements only occurred between 1930 and1950. I examine whether rising income explains the rise in black retirement rates prior to 1930and whether rising income and the institution of Social Security in 1935 led to convergence bylooking at the impact of the first pension program available to both blacks and whites, that servingUnion Army veterans. I find that blacks were 2 to 5 times as responsive as whites to incometransfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independentliving arrangements. The results suggest that income effects from the institution of Social Securityexplain up to half of the convergence in black-white retirement rates and in living arrangements.

This article examines the elements of successful outcomes among disadvantaged members of the South Florida immigrant communities and assesses the utility of rational choice theory and the Wisconsin model. The findings are derived from ethnographic interviews and analysis of two of the most underprivileged South Florida districts, Little Haiti and Hialeah. The article builds upon the elements of success as identified in the lead article of this volume, which include items relevant to the family, the individual, and the broader community context. The authors add the following to those success factors: (1) ignorance (or disregard) of the barriers to success and the odds against overcoming them; (2) emotionally motivated responses to the surrounding social conditions or to specific (cathartic) events; and (3) exiting underprivileged neighborhoods of origin to facilitate access to resources, mainly educational.

This paper documents that virtually all of the growth in the skilled wage premium over the 1980s in the United States was confined to metropolitan areas. Explanations for the growing skilled premium will therefore need to take location into account.Keywords: Skilled wage premium; Metropolitan areasJEL classification codes: J31; R23; F16