This paper examines the developments and changes in the educational attainment of Chinese immigrants, and compares these developments and changes to those of American native workers throughout the second half of the twentieth century. I find that, on average, Chinese immigrants have more education than American native workers. Furthermore, using regression analysis, I find that if American native workers and Chinese immigrants have the same level of education attainment, then Chinese immigrants annual wages and salaries are lower than that of native workers. In other words, if American native workers and Chinese immigrants have the same salary, then Chinese immigrants have a higher educational attainment.

This report provides a detailed overview of children’s living arrangements in the United States in 2004. Data in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) that allow the identification of detailed relationships among all household members show a variety of living arrangements for children by their race and Hispanic origin, by the number of parents with whom they live, and other characteristics.

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.

Several studies have investigated whether unilateral divorce laws raised divorce rates, with mixed results. This paper asks whether unilateral, and no-fault, divorce laws influenced family formation. Besides their interest to policy makers, such effects may help theorists understand the mechanisms through which laws affect behavior. The results suggest that no-fault laws slightly reduced fertility, and unilateral divorce modestly increased divorce and legitimacy. However, the pattern of effects is not consistent with any of the hypotheses reviewed, and the estimated magnitudes suggest that changes in divorce law were not a major cause of changing family structure.

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of unilateral divorce on crime. First, using crime rates from the FBIs Uniform Crime Report program for the period 1965-1998 and differences in the timing in the introduction of the reform, we find that unilateral divorce has a positive impact on violent crime rates, with an 8% to 12% average increase for the period under consideration. Second, arrest data not only confirms the findings of a positive impact on violent crime but also shows that this impact is concentrated among those age groups (15 to 24) that are more likely to engage in these type of offenses. Specifically, for the age group 15-19, we observe an average impact over the period under analysis of 40% and 36% for murder and aggravated assault arrest rates, respectively. Disaggregating total arrest rates by race, we find that the effects are driven by the Black sub-sample. Third, using the age at the time of the divorce law reform as a second source of variation to analyze age-specific arrest rates we confirm the positive impact on the different types of violent crime as well as a positive impact for property crime rates, controlling for all confounding factors that may operate at the state-year, state age or age-year level. The results for murder arrests and for homicide rates (Supplemental Homicide Report) for the 15-24 age groups are robust with respect to specifications and specifically those that include year-state and year-age dummies. The magnitude goes from 15% to 40% depending on the specification and the age at the time of the reform.

Local housing markets throughout the United States are subject to a host of regulations that tend to increase the cost of housing. Minimum lotsize requirements, quality standards, density restrictions, and other such municipally imposed regulation tend to limit the overall stock of available housing, increase average as well as minimum quality, and shift the overall distribution of housing prices toward higher levels. For the lowest income households, such factors will increase the proportion of household resources that one would need to devote toward housing. For the poorest of the poor, excessive regulation may push the price of even the minimum-quality units beyond the level of household income. To the extent that homelessness is in part driven by local housing affordability, local regulatory practices may be an important contributor to homelessness in the United States.

This paper describes trends in average weekly hours of market work per person and per family in the United States between 1950 and 2005. We disaggregate married couple households by skill level to determine if there is a pattern in the hours of work by wives and husbands conditional on either husbands wages or husbands educational attainment. The wage measure of skill allows us to compare our findings to those of Juhn and Murphy (1997), who report on trends in family labor using a different data set. The educational measure of skill allows us to construct a longer time series. We find several interesting patterns. The married women with the largest increase in market hours are those with high-skilled husbands. When we compare households with different skill mixes, we also find dramatic differences in the time paths, with higher skill households having the largest increase in average hours over time.

This paper addresses the intergenerational mobility question by examining the role offamily structure in the transmission of educational attainment using the one percentIntegrated Public Use Microsample Series (IPUMS) of the decennial Census for thedecades 1970 and 1990. We rst introduce mobility indices and tests which examinethe proximity of the transition matrix to that which would pertain in the perfectlymobile state. Unlike existing transition matrix based mobility indices, these indicesand tests can be employed when the quantiles of the marginal states are unmatched,and when the transition matrix is between states that are de ned multivariately. Usingeducational attainment as a proxy for permanent income for children and both educa-tional attainment and income as proxies for parents, the tests indicate that mobilitysigni cantly increased for the population as a whole. Within the single parent groupthere was much less evidence for signi cant mobility change for children from widowedsingle parent families than for children from divorced and separated single parent fam-ilies. There is also some evidence of convergence between intact and, divorced andseparated parent families, suggesting that there is a trend towards equal opportunity.

In the United States, voter turnout rates have been declining for the last 4 decades; however, this pattern differs substantially by region. Southern states have actually seen a fairly dramatic increase in turnout since the 1950s and currently the South and non-South have almost identical rates of voter registration and turnout. Using a series of Heckman probit models, which examine voting as a two-step process of registering and casting a vote, we systematically investigate differences in rates of registering and voting across regions and test explanations for regional convergence over time. Using data from the American National Election Studies (19562000), we find that regional convergence in voter registration is primarily due to the removal of formal and informal barriers to registration and voting in the South and declining efforts to mobilize potential voters in the non-South. In addition, we find some fairly distinct differences in which predictors are important to each stage of the voting process; for example, race is a better predictor of registering to vote than voting. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is an annual cross-sectional household interview survey that provides national estimates on health indicators, health care access, and health-related behaviors for the U.S. civilian non-institutionalized population. In 1987, NHIS included its first supplement dealing with HIV/AIDS. In every subsequent year, the survey has questioned one adult per household about such topics as reasons for getting (or not getting) tested for HIV, circumstances of such testing, behavioral risk factors and self-assessed risk of HIV infections, sources of information about HIV/AIDS, knowledge about HIV transmission, and attitudes toward people with HIV/AIDS. These NHIS data are thus well-suited to time-series analyses of changing attitudes and practices related to HIV/AIDS in the U.S. general population. The NIH-funded Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) project, which codes NHIS data consistently over time and makes harmonized data and documentation available to researches for free over the internet, is currently working toward including all NHIS data related to HIV/AIDS in the IHIS database. By making it possible for researches to work with a single multi-year file containing consistently-coded variables supplemented with rich documentation addressing comparability issues, IHIS will facilitate further research into changing attitudes, knowledge, and practices related to HIV/AIDS in the United States. We illustrate some of the kinds of research facilitated by the IHIS coding of NHIS HIV?AIDS data by examining how the reasons for getting tested for HIV vary over time by race and ethnicity, age, and educational status.

I develop an equilibrium, two-sided search model of marriage with endogenouspopulation growth to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure ofthe population and the age at ?rst marriage of men and women.I show that, given an increase of the desired number of children, age at marriageis aected through two dierent channels. First, as population growth increases,the age structure of the population produces a "thicker market" for young people,inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from dierential fecundity: ifthe desired number of children is not feasible for older women, young women becomerelatively less choosy than young men. In equilibrium, women are more likely tomarry older men and single men outnumber single women.The results above have dynamic implications that are consistent with observedpatterns in the U.S. data. In the case of a temporary increase of desired fertility (a"baby boom"), population structure and the ratio of single men to single women actas persistence mechanisms, delaying the adjustment in marriage timing and in theage gap. First, the younger the structure of the population with respect to its steadystate composition, the higher the matching rate of young potential mates and thelower the age at marriage of men and women. Second, as the initial increase in theage gap produces an imbalance in the sex ratio, women face a higher matching ratethan men, and therefore the age gap persists even if the

Sleep is a basic human need and takes up more time in a day than any other activity, but we know surprisingly little about how gender shapes sleep duration in the general population. Previous research shows that women sleep longer than men do, but also report lower sleep quality and greater fatigue. These seemingly contradictory findings from different disciplinary literatures can be unified by drawing on theoretical debates about gender and time use, and by placing sleep time in the context of social roles – worker, spouse or partner, and parent – and the gendered expectations for their fulfillment. Data from the nationally-representative 2003-2007American Time Use Surveys show that the overall gender gap in sleep duration favors women, but varies with work and family responsibilities, and because of this it changes over adulthood. Moreover, this study provides novel empirical evidence of women’s greater likelihood of sleep interruption for caregiving work, particularly among parents of young children. The female advantage in sleep time is negligible in many comparisons made in this study, and is tempered by the greater burden of interrupted sleep that women face during the childbearing years and the larger male advantage in leisure time throughout midlife.

Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect, on a host of background and achievement characteristics, mixed race adolescents fall in between whites and blacks. When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. We argue that these behavioral patterns are most consistent with the "marginal man" hypothesis, which we formalize as a two-sector Roy model. Mixed race adolescents -- not having a natural peer group -- need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted. All other models we considered can explain neither why mixed race adolescents are outliers on risky behaviors nor why these behaviors are not strongly influenced by the racial composition at their school.

In the context of certain dynamic models, 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 leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in prenegotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary. These estimates imply a labor supply elasticity of about 3.7, suggesting that school districts possess significant market power. The presence of monopsony power in this teacher labor market may be partially explained by its institutional features.

Visual and oral, video and audio evidence are brought to bear to examine the history of the U.S. census and the practice of social science history. The article explores how artists have appropriated and depicted census taking in America and how census takers used "artistic" forms of evidence to advertise and promote the census and explicate census results to the public. The article also suggests how social science historians have understood and used the new electronic environment of the Internet and the World Wide Web to present their data and findings.

Minority groups in the United States promoted affirmative action legislation in the 1960s during the civil rights movement to help ease the inequalities suffered in their economic history. Many labor economists have sought since this time to study the effects of race, gender, and the effect of income how it has changed and if the gap has closed. Existing literature uses many different econometric models to show how the effects of race, gender, age, occupation, educational attainment, and geographic location on an individual comparative basis. This paper will examine the effects of all of these variables jointly using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis.Does race effect income according to the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS)? The ACS is 1 in 100 national survey that encompasses over 1.1 million households and 2.878 million individuals (Steven et. al.). Using multivariable OLS regression of such data will yield results that will provide an overall snapshot of the state of the modern labor economy and identify what problems our society has to economically overcome if an income gap between white males and minority groups still exists. Many other researchers have answered a similar question, however, the link between these variables on broad current level has not been drawn.

The BLS Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses offers many advantages over the other data systems, and the BLS has been working on improvements to increase its accuracy and scope; nevertheless, there is a debate about whether the survey undercounts injuries and illnesses to any significant extent.

These rates of median household income growth add more evidence supporting the concept of a community undergoing change, although this does not mean that more affluent ‘migrants’ who may have moved into the district are replacing the community’s poorer inhabitants. The sharp yearly increase in household incomes among Non-Hispanic Whites, Asians, and to a lesser extent among Latinos suggests that families among these race/ethnic groups with higher incomes may indeed be moving into the district. At the same time the decline in the Non-Hispanic Black population seems to indicate that African-Americans have emphatically not been drawn to WH/IN and are in fact leaving the community. Yet, even if there has been an influx of wealthier families into the community this process has NOT altered the basic WH/IN racial/ethnic configurations between 1990 and 2005 in any significant way. Despite higher median household incomes, Non-Hispanic Whites DECLINED as a percentage of the total WH/IN population from 18% in 1990 to 13% in 2000 and maintained relative stability through 2005 at 14% of all residents. These data suggest that the stereotypical images of ‘gentrification’ which usually assert that more affluent whites take over communities in transition has not occurred in WH/IN, at least . . .