This paper documents the presence of non-economic career motivations in the U.S. labor market, explores reasons why such motivations could arise, and provides an explanation for why they might have persisted across many generations. The analysis links ethnic (migrant) labor market networks in the American Midwest when it was first being settled, the local identity or attachment to place that emerged endogenously to maintain the integrity of these networks, and occupational choice today. While fractionalization may adversely affect the performance of secular institutions, ethnic competition in the labor market could at the same time have strengthened within-group loyalty and parochial institutions. These values and their complementary institutions, notably the church, could have mutually reinforced each other over many overlapping generations, long after the networks themselves had ceased to be salient. Counties with greater ethnic fractionalization in 1860 are indeed associated with steadily increasing participation in select religious denominations historically dominated by the migrants all the way through the twentieth century. Complementing this result, individuals born in high fractionalization counties are significantly less likely to select into geographically mobile professional occupations and, hence, to migrate out of their county of birth, despite the fact that these counties are indistinguishable from low fractionalization counties in terms of local public good provision and economic activity today.

To understand the future, it is often important to look at the recent past. One question that faces law schools is how affirmative action is working and how it might be improved. It is important, not just to have reasonably diverse student bodies, but to train minority lawyers who will be employable-and employed-for their professional careers. This short essay (published more in the style of a research note) explores the employment of African-American attorneys ages 31-65, as reported in U.S. Census data from 1960 through 2000.' In most law schools, there was very little affirmative action for African-Americans until the first-year classes that entered in the late 1960s and graduated . . .

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of increased federal and state minimum wages on the employment-based health insurance coverage of low-wage workers. I use March Current Population Surveys collected from IPUMS, for 1988 to 2005. Previous studies have found no significant evidence that increased minimum wages reduce fringe benefit receipt (Beeson Royalty 2000; Simon and Kaestner 2003). In contrast to these studies, I use a difference-in-difference approach and I define treatment groups as being individuals in the lowest 1 and 2 deciles of the hourly wage distribution. Little evidence was found for the federal minimum wage increase of 1990-91, but estimates of the effect of the 1996-97 increase suggest a small negative impact for younger workers and workers in smaller firms. At the state level, I find more suggestive results of a negative impact of the minimum wage increases. New Jersey (1992) and Massachusetts (2000-2001) exhibit negative effects of being in the treatment group on the probability of having employment-based health insurance for most of the specifications, while the results in Oregon (1991) and Connecticut (2000-2001) are more sensitive to the specification. The results suggest that being in the treatment group makes individuals 3 to 4 percentage points less likely to be policyholders of employment-based health insurance compared to the control group.

Contextualized microdata are one way to safely release geographic data without identifying the location of survey respondents. This study informs the design of such datafiles with its needle-in-haystack approach to disclosure and its discussion of associated methodological concerns. Drawing a sample of counties, tracts, and blockgroups, I illustrate how the reidentification of individuals is shaped by aggregating geographies into look-alike sets. I detail the complexity of reidentification patterns by assessing the likelihood that young adult white and black males would be pinpointed within reconstituted haystacks given: (1) the size of the total population of aggregated contexts; (2) the amount of error in population counts; and (3) differential search costs stemming from spatially dispersed contexts.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act provides a statutory framework for tribal gaming and stipulates that net gaming revenues must be used by tribes to foster economic development. After it was passed in 1988, tribal gaming revenues increased dramatically as did the number of tribal casinos. Using a difference-in-difference methodology with 1990 and 2000 Census data, I examine how the introductions of casinos impact the well-being of on reservation American Indians.In my first two chapters, I use aggregate reservation data. In Chapter 1, I use least squares. Casinos increase per capita income by about 8% and reduce family and child poverty rates by 4 to 5 percentage points. I find the largest casinos are associated with the largest increases in income and reductions in poverty. However, least squares will only be unbiased if the decision to open a casino is uncorrelated with unobservable heterogeneity in reservation per capita income or poverty. In Chapter 2, I control for this potential endogeneity of the casino choice variables by including instrumental variables and find income effects increase 2 to 4% but lose statistical significance. Poverty effects increase in magnitude to 11 to 14 percentage points for family poverty rates and 16 to 20 percentage points for child poverty rates. Hence, these results may mean tribes with fewer outside opportunities open casinos and least squares biases effects downwards. However, after dropping at least one instrument, there are problems with weak identification, income effects decline to almost zero, and poverty impacts are no longer significant but remain large in magnitude.In Chapter 3, I use 1990 and 2000 IPUMS-USA micro-data to examine impacts on household per capita total income, earned income, state and federal assistance income, and poverty according to head of household skill and market size. Casinos impacts are largest on low-skill heads but significance is dependent on the model used. If impacts vary by market size, income effects differ on the measure used and the sex of the head of household. On the other hand, with the exception of female headed families' near poverty rates, poverty rates decline more in larger markets.

This dissertation contains a detailed picture of the employment-based health insurance coverage in the past twenty years, and it provides new estimates of the effects of increased federal and state minimum wages on the coverage of low-wage workers by this type of health insurance. I use March Current Population Surveys collected from IPUMS, for 1988 to 2005. Previous studies have found no significant evidence that increased minimum wages reduce fringe benefit receipt (Beeson Royalty 2000; Simon and Kaestner 2003). In contrast to these studies, I use a difference-in-difference approach and I define treatment groups as being individuals in the lowest 1 and 2 deciles of the hourly wage distribution.Little evidence was found for the federal minimum wage increase of 1990-91, but estimates of the effect of the 1996-97 increase suggest a small negative impact for younger workers and workers in smaller firms. At the state level, I find more suggestive results of a negative impact of the minimum wage increases. New Jersey (1992) and Massachusetts (2000-2001) exhibit negative effects of being in the treatment group on the probability of having employment-based health insurance for most of the specifications, while the results in Oregon (1991) and Connecticut (2000-2001) are more sensitive to the specification. The results suggest that being in the treatment group makes individuals 3 to 4 percentage points less likely to be policyholders of employment-based health insurance compared to the control group.

In this paper we estimate the effect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal effect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our empirical strategy exploits both time-series and cross-sectional variation in these two variables. To control for endogeneity, we instrument a married woman's ownership of an appliance by the average ownership rate for that appliance among single women living in the same U.S. state. Single women's labor force participation rates did not increase between 1960 and 1970. We find that the diffusion of home appliances accounts for about one-third of the observed increase in married women's labor force participation rates during the 1960's.

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the increased demand for female labour during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labour-force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the long-term implications of a one-time demand shock for female labour, such as the one experienced by American women during wartime mobilization. For the war generation, the shock leads to a persistent increase in female labour supply due to the accumulation of work experience. In contrast, younger women who turn adult after the war face increased labour-market competition, which impels them to exit the labour market and start having children earlier. In our calibrated model, this general-equilibrium effect generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust, as well as patterns for age-specific labour-force participation and fertility rates that are consistent with U.S data.

Marriage matching functions have been extensively used to study the behavior of themarriage market under a variety of restrictive assumptions. In this paper, we willoutline an alternative method of type-based preference estimation, and apply it to UScensus data from the years 1960 and 2000. This approach is based upon the Gale-Shapely "Deferred Acceptance" algorithm, and realized through the use of SimulatedAnnealing (a variant of Metropolis Monte Carlo). We estimate preferences based onincome and education, and explain our plans to further re ne our method, as well asdiscuss the trajectory of future work.

The generalized beta (GB) is considered as a model for the distribution of income. It is well known that its special cases include Dagums distribution along with the Singh-Maddala distribution. Related measures of inequality such as the Gini Coefficient, Pietra Index, or Theil Index are expressed in terms of the parameters of the generalized beta. This paper also explores the use of numerical integration techniques for calculating inequality indexes. Numerical integration may be useful since in some cases it may be computationally very difficult to evaluate the equations that have been derived or the equations are not available. We provide examples from the distribution of family income in the United States for the year 2000.

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the increased demand for female labor during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labor-force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the long-term implications of a one-time demand shock for female labor, such as the one experienced by American women during wartime mobilization. For the war generation, the shock leads to a persistent increase in female labor supply due to the accumulation of work experience. In contrast, younger women who turn adult after the war face increased labor-market competition , which impels them to exit the labor market and start having children earlier. In our calibrated model, this general-equilibrium effect generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust, as well as patterns for age-specific labor-force participation and fertility rates that are consistent with U.S data.

Who serves in the active-duty ranks of the U.S. all-volunteer military? Conventional wisdom holds that military service disproportionately attracts minorities and men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many believe that troops enlist because they have few options, not because they want to serve their country. Others believe that the war in Iraq has forced the military to lower its recruiting standards. Previous Heritage Foundation studies that examined the backgrounds of enlisted personnel refute this interpretation.1 This report expands on those studies by using an improved methodology to study the demographic characteristics of newly commissioned officers and personnel who enlisted in 2006 and 2007. Any discussion of troop quality must take place in context. A soldier’s demographic characteristics are of little importance in the military, which . . .

September 2008) The nature of work continues to change dramatically with the extension of work operations around the clock being one of the most striking alterations. Approximately two in every five workers in the United States work mostly during nonstandard times—evenings, nights, rotating shifts, or weekends.1 Jobs where employees typically work outside of the traditional work shift are among occupations with the largest projected growth in the next decade.2 This anticipated growth has raised concerns over problems faced by employees who work at nonstandard times, such as work hazards, family stability, and substance abuse.3

Taken together, all Alaska households, at all incomes levels, typically spend an estimated 4.7% of their income for home energy, compared with 2.8% in 2000. But the variation across regions and income levels is big. Anchorage households in general spend the lowest percentage of income for energy-but the share among the poorest households was up from 5.5% in 2000 to 8.7% in 2008. Among the wealthiest Anchorage households, the share rose from 1.4% to 2%. Natural gas generates electricity and provides home-heating fuel for most Anchorage households (as Figure 2 shows). Prices of natural gas have risen sharply in recent years, but on an energy-equivalent basis, natural gas is still much less expensive than diesel (also called fuel oil). Also, incomes in Anchorage tend to be higher than in most rural places, especially in the most remote areas. Households in other large and road-system communities typically spend-depending on their income level-anywhere from about 3% to 18% of income for home energy. That compares with about 2% to 9% in 2000. Households in some of these places have access to natural gas, but more than half rely on diesel. Many of those communities can get fuel delivered by road, which is generally less expensive than delivery by air or water. Remote rural households, which rely mainly on diesel and can get fuel only by water or air, spend by far the biggest share of income for home energy. A recent ISER study found that prices for diesel in rural areas vary by as much as 100%, depending on how far the fuel has to travel, how difficult it is to reach specific communities, the amount of local storage capacity, the condition of local moorage and unloading equipment, and other factors. 3 Remote households with the lowest incomes face the highest costs for home energy-an estimated 47% of their income, compared with about 16% in 2000. Remote households with higher incomes must spend an estimated 6% to 13% of their incomes for home energy. Keep in mind that incomes in some remote areas-especially southwestern Alaska-are much lower than the state average. In 2005, for example, per capita incomes in southwest Alaska were roughly one third to one half below the state average.

A surprising but robust characteristic of workers' migration patterns across locations (states and metropolitan areas) within the U.S. is the positive correlation between inflow and outflow rates. This pattern cannot be accounted for by standard equilibrium models of employment reallocation across geographic areas in which net and gross flows of workers coincide. Further, micro-level evidence shows that inflows and outflows of workers tend to simultaneously occur within narrowly defined demographic groups, suggesting that the positive inflow-outflow correlation is not the symptom of a changing demographic composition of employment across locations. This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model of gross and net migration flows to explain this pattern. Due to a selection effect, workers migrating into a location have a higher propensity to migrate again than workers already living there. Thus, U.S. states that absorb large numbers of internal migrants also tend to display relatively large outflow rates. The time-series pattern of inflow and outflow rates across states is consistent with this interpretation.

This qualitative study examined the lived experiences of single parent African American mothers of delinquent youth in the context of several socio-cultural factors. Race, gender, class, single parenthood and juvenile justice/child maladjustment are all explored to ascertain how participants make meaning of these factors in their lives. African American women possess a unique history bounded by oppressive factors emerging in slavery and existent in the 21st century. A major purpose of this study was to explore lived experience for greater understanding of the lives of these mothers and how such experiences inform the parenting process relative to the rearing of sons who had been adjudicated in juvenile court. The study also gives voice to these mothers whose stories might otherwise go untold. A phenomenological methodology was used to derive lived experience. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is used as the interpretive lens in highlighting concepts of societal issues pertaining to race, class and gender. CRT also espouses the importance of intersectionality that conveys the necessity to view oppressive factors related to African American women in integrated ways. This investigation consisted of semi-structured interviews with three African American mothers. Data was gathered on audio and video tapes, and field notes. Data analysis was organized around general themes developed for each contextual factor and used to create textural and structural descriptions of experience. Core themes were extracted from the general themes to derive the essence of lived experience through a composite synthesis of the data. Core themes by contextual factor are: Race (Managing feelings of inferiority, Racisms spillover in Black families, Human equality); Gender (An independent sense of self, The desire and power of female voice, The inevitability of male dominance); Class (Cultural constructs, The influence of time, space and others, A conscious choice); Single parenting (Beyond overwhelming, Confronting the self of the mother) Juvenile justice/ Child maladjustment (A range of emotions, Emerging helplessness, Limited benefits, A search for causality). Participants have revealed significantly oppressive challenges, the essence of which has been captured through phenomenological investigation. Additionally, heightened levels of resiliency have been uncovered in their lifelong journey of managing their challenges.

The growth in the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has been an important issue on national, state, and local levels for the past decade. Reports and studies have been conducted by government organizations at all levels and by private sector and academic institutions. The U.S. Congress and the White House have engaged with the issue but have failed to take definitive action to confront it and have failed as well to develop an acceptable guest workers program. Meanwhile, border states have experienced both benefits and costs associated with the increased number of illegal immigrants. On the one hand, immigrant workers have contributed to growth in both U.S. and state economies. For example, the state of Texas reported in 2006 that the presence and work of illegal immigrants had added $17 billion to the state economy. On the other hand, the Border Counties Coalition reported that law enforcement costs for border counties in the U.S. have grown significantly and that local governments and taxpayers have had to bear most of these increased costs. Overall, illegal immigration appears . . .

In the mid-nineteenth century, almost 70 percent of persons aged 65 or older resided with their adult children; by the end of the twentieth century, less than 15 pecent did so. Recent theories have argued that the decline in intergenerational coresidence resulted primarily from an increase in income that enabled individuals to afford independent living. We propose a different theory: the shift of the economy from agriculture to services and the rise in the returns from education have reduced the role of the family and increased the role of the market in determining the outcomes of the young generation. We use IPUMS data over the period 1850-2000 to calibrate a model in which the future prospects of the young generation are determined by a combination of family capital, mainly social connections and network, and human capital. Coresidence is a way to build family capital but may interfere with the accumulation of human capital. We show that the rise in the returns to education induced a shift from family to human capital that can well account for the decline in intergenerational coresidence experienced in US over the last century. The crossectional implications of the model strongly differentiate our theory from previous ones and are well supported by the data.

Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. What can explain this? It is argued here that technological progress in the household sector has saved on the need for labor at home. This makes it more feasible for singles to maintain their own home, and for married women to work. To address this question, a search model of marriage and divorce is developed. Household production benefits from labor-saving technological progress.