This paper examines why smart cities are growing by exploring the relationship between the college share in a city and migration to and from the city. The results suggest that the greater immigration to smart cities is almost entirely due to persons moving to pursue higher education. Smart cities are growing because in-migrants often stay in the city after completing their education. The growth of smart cities is also mostly attributable to population redistribution within the same state and has little effect on population growth at the state level.

How does the fertility of interracial and interethnic couples compare to the fertility of endogamous couples? If exogamous couples have transcended the boundary between them, then exogamy should not affect fertility. Alternatively, opposition to the relationship from the couple's family and friends may reduce fertility. This study uses 2000 - 2005 American Community Survey data on married (n = 272,336) and cohabiting (n = 48,769) couples to compare the fertility of endogamous and exogamous couples. Interracial and interethnic partnering do not affect fertility for cohabiting, Black-White, Mexican-White, and Puerto Rican-White intermarried couples, but it does reduce fertility in Chinese-White and Asian Indian-White intermarriages. These results are largely consistent with the argument that intermarried couples have transcended group boundaries.

The public use files of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)cover vital public health topics for every year from the late 1960s to the present. Yet the chronological scope of these data was rarely exploited, due to complex file structure, changes in survey content and variable names, voluminous documentation for each year, and shifts in survey methods. The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) overcomes these problems by providing free harmonized data with on-line documentation addressing comparability issues and an easy-to-use data extraction system. (poster presented at the April 2008 meetings of the Population Association of America)

Neglected, but significant, the long-run consequence of the minimum wage requirement which was madenational policy in the United States in 1938 is its stimulation of capital deepening. This took two forms.First, the engineered shortage of low-skill, low-paying jobs induced teenagers to invest in additional humancapital primarily by extending their schooling in an attempt to raise their productivity to the levelrequired to gain employment. Second, employers faced with an inability to legally hire low-wage workers,rearranged their production processes to substitute capital for low-skill labor and to innovate newtechnologies . This preliminary report explores the impact of the minimum wage on enrollments between1950 and 2003. I describe an upward ratcheting mechanism which triggers an educational cascade. Mypreliminary estimate is that the average number of years of high school enrollment would have risen to only3.5 years, rather than 3.7 years, for men born in 1951 (17 in 1968). Thereafter, enrollment rates wouldhave trended down to about 3.2 years for the cohort born in 1986, rather than slowly rising to around 3.9years. The cumulative effect of the minimum wage increases beginning in 1950 was to add 0.7 years to theaverage high school experience of men born in 1986.

The marked rise in income inequality in the United States over the past two decades has prompted a renewed interest in the history of both income and wealth distribution. Several recent studies have sought to construct consistent measures of inequality across most of the twentieth century.1 Evidence about either income or wealth distribution before the twentieth century is quite limited, but it is important to be able to place twentieth century trends in a broader context. The federal censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1870 offer a rare glimpse of patterns of property ownership in the United States during the nineteenth century. In 1850 census enumerators gathered information on the value of real property and in 1860 and 1870 they collected data on the value of both real and personal property holdings of every individual. These mid-century data offer a snapshot of wealth holding prior to the late nineteenth-century acceleration of industrialization. In this chapter we make use of data from the 1870 census contained in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to examine the distribution of wealth at a relatively disaggregated level.

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the US has largely focused on how influxes of foreign-born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly-educated native-born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly-educated labor. We use O*NET data on job characteristics to assess whether native-born workers with graduate degrees respond to an increased presence of highly-educated foreign-born workers by choosing new occupations with different skill content. We find that immigrants with graduate degrees specialize in occupations demanding quantitative and analytical skills, whereas their native-born counterparts specialize in occupations requiring interactive and communication skills. When the foreign-born proportion of highly educated employment within an occupation rises, native employees with graduate degrees choose new occupations with less analytical and more communicative content. For completeness, we also assess whether immigration causes highly educated natives to lose their jobs or move across state boundaries. We find no evidence that either occurs.

One of the principal achievements of the cliometric revolution is the approach to quantitative economic history that it spawned (McCloskey 1978). Economic historians have, of course, always relied upon quantitative evidence, but beginning in the 1950s cliometricians began to analyze quantitative data in new ways. Most importantly they explicitly acknowledged the connection between economic theory and quantitative evidence. Theory not only provided guidance about what to measure, but also how to measure it, and in turn, then, suggested entirely new types of evidence that had not previously been subjected to careful analysis. Even now, after more than half a century, the field of quantitative economic history continues to yield new insights about the past.

This thesis is about returns to schooling for Mexican immigrants to the United States. The United States became the home of many immigrants. There is an evidence that large amount of immigrants in USA are from Mexico. They are among both oldest and newest inhabitants of the nation. Mexican immigrants and their descendants now make-up a significant portion of the US population and have become one of the most influential social and cultural groups in the country. But many studies found that immigrants from Mexico show lower levels of educational attainment, which leads to lower earnings. Our aim is to focus on returns to schooling for Mexican immigrants to the United States using the Mincers earnings function. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we analyzed the differences in returns to schooling between native Americans and Mexican immigrants. And also we investigated whether there are Sheepskin effects or not. We found that there are positive Sheepskin effects for both Mexican immigrants and native Americans. But still there is a difference in rate of return to schooling for natives and Mexican immigrants, namely the rate of returns to schooling for Mexican immigrants is lower than for natives.

In this paper we survey the recent developments in two empirical literatures at the crossroads of labor and urban economics: Studies about localized human capital externalities (HCE) and about the urban wage premium (UWP). After surveying the methods and main results of each of these two literatures separately, we highlight several interrelations between them. In particular we ask if HCE can be interpreted as one fundamental cause of the UWP, and we discuss if one literature can conceptually learn from the methods that are used by the other one.

It has been well documented in the literature that ethnicity matters significantly in thedetermination of self-employment rates. In particular, African-American self-employmentrates lag far behind rates for other racial groups. Similarly, the literature also providesevidence of the long lived nature of institutions and the link between institutions and decisionmaking. After controlling for the appropriate factors that can lead to self-employmentdifferentials, we provide an explanation for the self-employment gap that still exists betweenAfrican-Americans and White Americans. We focus on the important role of repeatednegative institutional shocks and how such shocks influence the development of aninformation matrix as well as the transmission of information across time and generations.We show that African-Americans who were less likely to be influenced by negativeinstitutional shocks and the information stock created from these experiences, have similar self-employment rates to comparably situated White Americans.

It is generally expected that immigrants do not fareas well as the native-born in the U.S. labor market.The literature also documents that Blacks experiencelower labor market outcomes than Whites. This paperinnovates by studying the interaction between race andimmigration. The study compares the labor marketoutcomes of four racial groups in the United States(Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics) interacted withtheir foreign born status, using the Integrated Public UseMicro Data Series data for the 2000 Census. Amongwomen and for labor market outcomes such as laborforce participation, employment, and personal income, the foreign born are doing worse than the native bornfrom the same racial background, with the exceptionof Blacks. Among men, for labor force participationand employment, foreign-born Blacks are doing betterthan native Blacks. The paper tests different possibleexplanations for this reversal of the advantage of nativesover immigrants among Blacks. It considers citizenship,ability in English, age at and time since arrival in theUnited States, as well as neighborhood effects, butconcludes that none of these channels explains ormodifies the observed reversal.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in understanding the levels and trends in high school graduation in the U.S. A big and influential literature hasargued that the true high school graduation rate remains at an unsatisfactory level, and that the graduation rates for minorities (Blacks and Hispanics) are alarmingly low. In this paper we take a closer look at the different measures of high school graduation which have recently been proposed and which yield such low estimates of graduation rates. We argue that the nature of the variables in the Common Core of Data, the dataset maintained by the U.S. Department of Education that is the main source for all of the new measures, requires caution in calculating graduation rates, and the adjustments that have been proposed often impart significant downward bias to the estimates.

Like rural residents in other places, people in rural Oregon have expressed concern about the demographic shifts occurring in their communities. Principally they are concerned about youth leaving and not returning. This analysis uses recent Census Bureau data to describe, in detail, the demographic changes occurring in rural Oregon. Particular attention is paid to migrations role in driving these changes. Interviews of community leaders in rural Oregon reveal how rural Oregon is responding to, and thinking about, these demographic changes. Results indicate that there is no comprehensive public policy in place to address the concern about demographic change. Possible policy strategies to address the demographic changes in rural Oregon are identified.

Immigrants have been discussed as a means of alleviating fiscal pressures on Social Security. Their long-term impact on the Social Security system depends critically on their fertility and mortality patterns. In this paper, we examine the fertility and mortality patterns of immigrants to the United States and compare these patterns with those of non-immigrants. We find that both the recent and cumulative fertility of immigrant women is higher than that of native-born women, but that a large share of these differentials can be "explained" by differences in age structures, race and ethnicity, years in the United States, and country of origin. Using a synthetic cohort approach, we examine the role of years in the United States in more detail, and find no evidence of assimilation towards native-born fertility patterns. Consistent with previous research, we find evidence of a disruption effect on fertility - the fertility of immigrant women in the most recent arrival cohorts is low, but increases at a faster rate relative to both the fertility of immigrants from earlier cohorts and relative to the fertility of natives. We find that immigrants experience lower mortality than native-born individuals in the United States, and these differences remain even after controlling for underlying differences in observable characteristics. However we find that they do not exhibit differences in their subjective expectations of their mortality.

In medical research, doctors must evaluate the effectiveness of a new medicine B against a specified disease. This evaluation is often carried out by comparing B with an old medicine A, which has been used to treat the disease for many years. This comparison should include two important statistical summaries: mean and distribution function differences between A and B. The datasets; of applied/tested A and B are referred to contrast groups, and the mean and distribution differences are referred to group differences. Because the datasets to be contrasted are only two samples obtained by limited applications or tests on A and B, the differences derived from the datasets are inevitably uncertain. This generates a need of measuring the uncertainty of differences. In this paper.. an efficient strategy is designed for identifying confidence intervals for measuring the uncertainty of the differences between two contrast groups. This approach is suitable for most of those applications for which we have no prior knowledge about the underlying distribution of the data. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach using the UCI, datasets against the bootstrap resampling method and the traditional method, and demonstrate that our method is efficient in measuring the structural differences between contrast groups.

Many young households rent their primary residence despite the lower user-cost of owning.Owning, however, requires the household make a down payment and is an illiquid and riskyinvestment. While young households typically have low wealth, they also have dierent familyand career concerns than older households and may not expect to stay in any residence long.In a Beweley-type model with endogenous mobility and home ownership, we assess the con-tribution of nancial constraints, family changes, and career concerns to home ownership overthe life cycle. We prove existence of a steady state with stochastic prices where the household'sproblem has a nite-dimensional state object. We nd that, while 5 percent of young house-holds are constrained from owning, the prole of earnings and desire for mobility are moreimportant determinants of the ownership rate. The presence of family size changes leads tohigher ownership for the very youngest households while middle-aged households are less likelyto own. Lowering the down payment required to purchase a home does not lead to a rise in house prices when choice set for housing does not change with ownership.

Changing social contexts contribute more to increasing U.S. disaster losses than changes in the physical characteristics of hazard events. Describing these social changes should therefore be an important part of disaster analysis. Social vulnerability approaches are useful for describing these social contexts, but little research has been done to characterize the temporal changes in spatial patterns of social vulnerability, particularly at local scales. This dissertation provides a spatial analysis of the temporal trends of social vulnerability. Using Charleston, South Carolina as a study area, two research questions were asked: first, what is the pattern of social vulnerability in Charleston, SC, and how has it changed from 1960 to 2000? Second, what are the likely future patterns of social vulnerability in Charleston, SC in 2010? To answer these questions, the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) was calculated for each decade from 1960 to 2000 at the census tract level for the Charleston-North Charleston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Plausible social vulnerability scenarios for 2010 were created using the bootstrapped upper and lower confidence interval bounds around predictions made for the SoVI constituent variables using linear regression approaches. Social vulnerability in Charleston was found to have a bulls-eye pattern, with low vulnerability in the historic urban core, surrounded by higher urban vulnerability, and then lower vulnerability in suburban areas. As urbanization expanded outwards, newer outer-ring suburban areas had lower social vulnerability, while the social vulnerability of older suburbs increased. These patterns relate well to the historical processes operating in the study area. Areas of low social vulnerability are likely to continue to expand from the historic district and along the coasts in 2010. Higher vulnerability is also likely to persist in the balance of the urban core, as well as in the older, working class suburbs to the northwest of the Charleston peninsula. While the methods used in this analysis provided representations of vulnerability consistent with an understanding of the social trends in the area, they were complex both to apply and analyze. Future research should assess means of simplifying and validating these approaches.

Subsistence theory predicts the distress sale of labor at very low wages, such that the income effect dominates not only at high wages (as is relatively established) but also below a subsistence wage. This theory has been developed and tested in the context of mainly agricultural economies, but more recent theoretical work has suggested its applicability in industrialized economies, where it has not yet been tested. Some previous studies of labor supply in the context of the United States have experimented with flexible functional forms, noting that the canonical model makes no a priori predictions as to its shape. However, little attention is given to the slope changes themselves, which are of prime importance in subsistence theory. Thispaper uses a unique method of pinpointing endogenous slope changes in the estimated labor supply response, finding the subsistence wage to be $6.60/hr ($8.39 in 2008 dollars) using 2000 Census data. This is not only inherently interesting but also important for minimum wage policy, because setting the minimum wage up to this level would not increase unemployment.