This paper empirically assesses the theory of interpersonal income comparison using individual level data on suicide deaths in the United States. We model suicide as a choice variable, conditional on exogenous risk factors, reflecting an individual's assessment of current and expected future utility. Our empirical analysis considers whether suicide risk is systematically related to the income of others, holding own income and other individual factors fixed. We estimate proportional hazards and probit models of the suicide hazard using two separate and independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the Detailed Mortality Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with reference group income. This result holds for reference groups defined broadly, such as by county, and more narrowly by county and one demographic marker (e.g., age, sex, race). These findings are robust to alternative specifications and cannot be explained by geographic variation in cost of living, access to emergency medical care, mismeasurement of deaths by suicide, or by bias due to endogeneity of own income. Our results confirm findings using self-reported happiness data and are consistent with models of utility featuring external habit or Keeping Up with the Joneses preferences.Keywords: Relative income, interpersonal comparisons, interdependent preferences, suicide, happiness, Keeping Up with the JonesesJEL Classifications: I31, D6, H0, J0

This paper inserts Veblen's [Veblen, T., 1898, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The Viking Press, New York] concepts of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption into a very simple model. Individuals have the choice to either invest their time into working, leading to easily observable levels of consumption, or into conspicuous leisure, whose effect on utility depends on how observable leisure is. We let the visibility of leisure depend positively on the amount of time an individual and her neighbors have lived in the same area. Individuals optimize across conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. If population turnover is high, individuals are made worse off, since the visibility of conspicuous leisure then decreases and the status race must be played out primarily via conspicuous consumption. Analyzing interstate mobility in the US, we find strong support for our hypothesis: a 1percentage point rise in population turnover increases the average work week of non-migrants by 7 min. We end with discussing the pros and cons of mobility taxes to offset the negative externality of population turnover on the visibility of conspicuous leisure.

The authors examine the past and present racial dynamics in a Florida public sector union, with special emphasis on a union local led by one of the authors. Past white racial exclusionism and struggle have created a fortress mentality among some of the unions African American leadership and membership that focuses on racial control rather than organizing and growth. This is more pronounced in an older generation that lived through earlier struggles against white discrimination. Using writings by Robin D. G. Kelley, Manning Marable, and Bill Fletcher, the authors draw general conclusions on what types of practice are most likely to counter racial impediments to union effectiveness.Keywords: labor unions; racism; racial relations; labor movement

Using 19952006 Current Population Survey and 19702000 Census data, we find that the fertility, education and labor supply of US-born women with foreign-born parent(s) are significantly positively affected by the immigrant generations levels of these variables, with the effect of the fertility and labor supply of women from the mothers source country larger than that of women from the fathers source country and the effect of the education of men from the fathers source country larger than that of women from the mothers source country. Transmission rates for immigrant fertility between generations are higher than for labor supply or education, with considerable intergenerational assimilation toward native levels of schooling and labor supply, but more persistence for fertility.

Among the key findings of the study are the following:1. Artists are a significant part of the local economy. 2. Artists have a high quality of life in Kansas City. 3. It is hard to be self-employed as an artist in Kansas City. 4. Kansas City is a place where artists can raise families. 5. Within the region, artists are concentrated in Kansas City, MO, south of the river; however, the number of artists living in Johnson County, KS is increasing. 6. Arts occupations are keeping up with the Kansas City economy. 7. Kansas City lags in terms of artists with graduate degrees. 8. Different generations and disciplines of artists have different characteristics and face different challenges.

Immigration is no longer a phenomenon that is simply affecting gateway metropolitan areas in the United States. This analysis demonstrates that large numbers of immigrants are moving to other metropolitan areas and analyses the housing outcomes of households who currently live in the 14 largest emerging gateways. The findings suggest that those households that move from most gateway metropolitan areas have lower homeownership rates than do households that move from within the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that immigrants do worse than native-born households that migrate within the US. The study also demonstrates that immigrants living in crowded conditions or having multiple workers in the household have higher homeownership rates than similar native-born households, and that younger immigrants are relatively more successful in attaining homeownership than are similar native-born residents.

According to culinary scholars, American cuisine retained a strongly British character through most of its history. Despite the waves of immigrants from many parts of the world, ethnic cuisine did not gain a place at the American table until the food revolution of the 1970s. This paper challenges that view by developing and analyzing systematic, quantitative measures of Americas foodways. I demonstrate that beginning about 1900, Americans began to embrace Chinese food. It was the start of a love affair that continues to this day.I attribute Americas chop suey craze to the entrepreneurial efforts of the Chinese who arrived in America during the Exclusion Era, the period between 1882 and 1943 when a series of legislative initiatives severely circumscribed their options. Their entry into the United States was made difficult. They couldnt naturalize. Restrictions were placed on their ability to marry, conduct businesses, and educate their children. Racism limited their employment and housing options. The Chinese responded to these constraints by organizing, moving into self-employment, and dispersing into small cities and towns throughout the country, often living as the only person of their race in their home community. When Americans began to express an interest in inexpensive, healthful, and exotic restaurant fare, the Chinese were poised to respond. A fad was born.

In the classic Schelling tipping model, white residents flee a neighborhood when the minorityresident share exceeds a personal tolerance threshold. Thus, a small movement in minorityshare beyond a tipping point can cause an integrated neighborhood to segregate rapidly. A keylimitation of the Schelling model is that it does not consider the role of expectations and pricesin the tipping process. This paper explores an augmented tipping model in which white and minorityrenters and homeowners interact both spatially (sharing a neighborhood) and financiallythrough rents and house prices. I show that the market mechanism can exacerbate the tippingprocess: homeowners face a pecuniary incentive to sell their houses prior to neighborhood tippingto avoid a loss in house value, whereas renters are less exposed to tipping because theybear no such asset risk. Hence, high rates of homeownership among white residents make neighborhoodsmore likely to tip. Building on recent work by Card, Mas, and Rothstein, this studyevaluates this prediction by analyzing the interaction between initial homeownership rates andneighborhood tipping between 1970 and 2000 across a large sample of Metropolitan StatisticalAreas (MSAs). The results show that when neighborhoods tip, those with high ownership ratesexperience substantially larger white population loss and a larger decline in house prices. Inaddition, homeowners are disproportionately likely to exit a neighborhood when tipping occurs,and income and education levels fall, in particular among whites. These findings provide initialevidence that tipping, usually considered a nonmarket interaction, is augmented by marketforces.

More money is redistributed to poor children in the U.S. through school spending than through any other government program such as health care, welfare, subsidized housing, orfood stamps and related programs. If the goal is simply to transfer money from high income to low income people, then economic theory suggests that school spending is a poormechanism for such transfers. The justification for such transfers is more likely the Efficient Redistribution Hypothesis which implies that, in the absence of redistribution, returns to the marginal dollar of school spending on a poor child are likely to exceed the returns to the marginal dollar of school spending on a rich child. Thus, efficiency considerations alone may justify redistribution, with no need to bring in concerns aboutinequality per se. Currently, there is no direct empirical support for the Efficient Redistribution hypothesis. In this paper, I test whether U.S. states that practiced moreredistribution through school spending ended up producing adults whose incomes were higher on average and less unequal. I exploit substantial within-state variation generated by changes in school finance policies. Owing to rather arbitrary implementation of state Supreme Court judgements, the redistributive consequences of these policies are fairly uncorrelated with other factors affecting states' income distributions. I do find thatredistributive school spending reduces income inequality among adults, but the effects are too weak to justify the use of school spending (as opposed to more direct mechanisms such as income transfers) for purely redistributive purposes. I do not find support for theEfficient Redistribution Hypothesis. Even if the Efficient Redistribution Hypothesis is correct is theory, it could fail to work in practice if schools that serve low income children make inefficient of resources.

This study uses a neo-materialist perspective to develop theoretical predictions regarding temporal ties between income inequality and change in population health. The argument focuses on the relationship between income inequality and adoption of longevity-enhancing innovations. It asserts that longevity change should be influenced by preexisting levels of income inequality and that, consequently, income inequality can cause differential longevity improvement across jurisdictions even if inequality levels remain unchanged. State-level U.S. data from 1970 to 2000 are used to jointly model the effects of initial levels and change in income inequality on 10-year life expectancy change. Results confirm that states with higher levels of inequality experienced less subsequent improvement in life expectancy. Contrary to findings from prior research, analyses also reveal a strong negative association between change in inequality and change in longevity once initial levels of inequality and other state characteristics are controlled. Finally, direct tests of the relationship between income inequality and the adoption of innovations in quality of medical care indicate that the two are highly related and that differences in the average quality of care can account for the negative cross-sectional association between income inequality and life expectancy.

The aim of the study is to describe and explain the evolution of education-dependent unemployment risks for young people in 20 European countries for the period from 1992 to 2005. We try to assess whether this period is characterized by a general rise in inequality in the distribution of unemployment risk across education groups. Furthermore, we test to what extent structural changes, i.e. technological change, educational expansion and globalization, are associated with observed changes in inequality. Over the period of observation, we find that polarization of unemployment risks between tertiary and lower secondary educated can be observed in Germany and the Czech Republic. For the other countries, trends are heterogeneous. Apart from the business cycle, tertiary-level educational expansion is associated with higher unemployment rates among tertiary educated, as well as higher unemployment among women with upper as well as lower secondary education. We attribute the latter finding to crowding out processes. Technological change, measured by the spread of personal computers, is associated with higher youth unemployment, especially for less educated, which implies a polarization of unemployment risks. Compared to technological change, globalization does not have a strong effect on youth unemployment.

Choices pertaining to education, marriage and migration generally have profound impacts on individuals' lives. This dissertation focuses on the role of incentives in decisions involving education, interracial marriage and migration. To this end, Chapter 2 initiates a new line of research that investigates the role of self-employed parents on their children's post-graduation plans and college success. Chapter 2 reveals that self-employed parents affect their offspring's college success even after accounting for possible ability bias and controlling for various individual characteristics. While Chapter 2 focuses on the role of parental occupation on students' incentives to succeed in college, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 investigate intricate relationships among education, interracial marriage, the anti-miscegenation laws, and migration in the U.S. Chapter 3 introduces a study that links previous literatures on the migration of blacks in the U.S. during the Great Migration with anti-miscegenation laws and interracial marriage. Chapter 3 concludes that anti-miscegenation laws in individuals' states of birth affected the sorting of inter- and intraracially married black males into destination states differentially. Chapter 4 contributes to the previous literature on the determinants of black-white marriages by focusing on the impact of geographical variation of the distributions of black and white education and individual education on interracial marriage.

政府が所管する各種統計の個票データを公開する方法が議論されて久しい。議論の具体 的な内容や背景については、近年予定されている統計法の改正などに関連した報告書がす でに様々に公開されているので、それらに譲る。本調査では、北米における政府統計の個 票データ公開の現状を概観･報告することで、わが国における政府統計の個票データを利用 する具体的な仕組みづくりの一助としたい。 具体的には、アメリカ合衆国労働統計局（Bureau of Labor Statistics、以下 BLS と略す）お よびセンサス局（United States Bureau of the Census、通称 Census Bureau、以下 BOC と略す）、 カナダ統計局（Statistics Canada、以下 StatsCAN と略す）において設置･運営されている Onsite Research の方法をまとめる。

Three parallel implementations of a divide and conquer search algorithm (called SUDA2) for finding minimal unique itemsets are compared. The identification of minimal unique itemsets is used by national statistics agencies for statistical disclosure assessment. The first parallel implementation adapts SUDA2 to a Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) cluster using the Message Passing Interface (MPI), which we call an MPI cluster; the second optimises the code for the Cray MTA2 (a shared-memory, multi-threaded architecture); and the third uses a heterogeneous group of workstations connected by LAN. Each implementation considers the parallel structure of SUDA2, and how the subsearch computation times and sequence of subsearches affect load balancing. All three approaches scale with the number of processors, enabling SUDA2 to handle larger problems than before. For example, the MPI implementation is able to achieve nearly two orders of magnitude improvement with 132 processors. Performance results are given for a number of datasets.Key words: Performance; Itemset Mining; Divide and Conquer Algorithm; Load Balancing; Parallel Architecture

The aim of this study is to estimate the impact of the changes in the minimum wage on the distribution of individual income from work, by position in the occupation registered workers (CC) unregistered workers (SC), self-employed (CP) and the set of all the occupied (CC + SC + CP) in the period 1995-2007. In order to do that we have used three complementary methodologies and the results confirm the positive distributional effects of the minimum wage especially among registered workers and workers who are not registered and it is more effective among the latter. In a visual and quantitative presentation, through the densities of kernel, the visible peaks in estimated densities illustrate the value of income equal to the minimum wage in almost all positions in the occupation, confirming, in a way, the evidence found in the literature. Furthermore, we note that the largest proportion of minimum wage receivers is among black women who are at home on the condition of wives or daughters and have a low educational level, besides working in the service sector as unregistered employees. Most of them live in the North and Northeast regions of the country. These results suggest that a large proportion of the income of individuals devoid of bargain wage maintains its purchasing power through the existence of the minimum wage. Accordingly, the minimum wage is proving an effective tool to protect workers who need protection in the labor market. Through the second and third methodological approaches, entitled differences in time differences by hundredth and regressions by hundredth, we try to quantify the impact of minimum wage on the income of each hundredth of the distribution. In the second approach, we try to capture changes in hundredth income which are derived from changes in the minimum wage. The results show that for some clippings and some groups of income, the calculation of the flexibility of the income when it comes to the minimum wage also coincides with the average recorded in the literature. For the third approach, regression by hundredth, we noticed that changes in minimum wage exert significant impacts on the occupied inserted into ranges of low incomes particularly among registered and unregistered workers. However, these changes have proved very important for freelance workers. These exercises strengthen the studies that argue that the minimum wage has an important lighthouse-like effect for a large contingent of unregistered employees, but we do not see this effect in the case of self-employed workers. However, it is important to emphasize that, despite the obstacles in the extrapolation of these results for the economy as a whole and for other periods, this seems to be a non-negligible evidence to indicate that the policy of minimum wage can be used as an instrument of economical policy. Indeed, given its importance as an instrument of distributional policy, we believe that increases in the value of the minimum wage can significantly modify the distribution of income of a country.

In the context of certain dynamic models of monopsony, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. Using this property, we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in Missouri. We take advantage of the plausibly exogenous variation in pre-negotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary. Instrumental variables estimates lead to a labor supply elasticity estimate of about 3.65, suggesting the presence of significant market power for school districts, especially over more experienced teachers. This is partially explained by institutional features of the teacher labor market.

In 2000 Census microdata, various outcomes of second-generation immigrants are related to their parents' age at arrival in the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. We interpret this as an effect of the parents' English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for parental English proficiency. Estimates of the effect of parents' English-speaking proficiency using two-stage least squares yield significant, positive results for children's English-speaking proficiency and preschool attendance, and significant, negative results for dropping out of high school and being below age-appropriate grade.

The fact that the United States is more raciallyand ethnically diverse now than in the past has led scholarsto dismiss dichotomousblack/whiteconceptions ofrace as antiquated. However, some others have noted theemergence of a black/non-black divide that is manifest inpatterns of residential segregation and intermarriage. Thisstudy attempts to determine whether such a dichotomousconception is sufficient to capture the effects of race andethnicity on unemployment patterns among entry-levelworkers in the United States. Findings suggest that morethan 80% of the effects of race and ethnicity on unemploymentcan be captured simply by knowing who is blackand who is not. The most elaborate conception tested hereacknowledges 20 different racial and ethnic groups; it addssignificantly but not commensurately to the explanatorypower of the models. Despite the increasingly diverseracial and ethnic composition of entry-level labor marketsin the United States, it is black exclusion that seems todrive the effects of race and ethnicity on unemployment.