PURPOSE: Some previous studies found excess stroke rates among black subjects persisted after adjustment for socioeconomic status (SES), fueling speculation regarding racially patterned genetic predispositions to stroke. Previous research was hampered by incomplete SES assessments, without measures of childhood conditions or adult wealth. We assess the role of lifecourse SES in explaining stroke risk and stroke disparities. METHODS: Health and Retirement Study participants age 50+ (n = 20,661) were followed on average 9.9 years for self- or proxy-reported first stroke (2175 events). Childhood social conditions (southern state of birth, parental SES, self-reported fair/poor childhood health, and attained height), adult SES (education, income, wealth, and occupational status) and traditional cardiovascular risk factors were used to predict first stroke onset using Cox proportional hazards models. RESULTS: Black subjects had a 48% greater risk of first stroke incidence than whites (95% confidence interval, 1.33-1.65). Childhood conditions predicted stroke risk in both blacks and whites, independently of adult SES. Adjustment for both childhood social conditions and adult SES measures attenuated racial differences to marginal significance (hazard ratio, 1.13; 95% CI, 1.00-1.28). CONCLUSIONS: Childhood social conditions predict stroke risk in black and White American adults. Additional adjustment for adult SES, in particular wealth, nearly eliminated the disparity in stroke risk between black and white subjects.

This research investigates the effect of economic inequality on political participation. Differential rates of political participation are an important way in which citizens act politically. A large literature on democratization argues that inequality erodes the sense of commonality and mutual trust that underpins democratic self-governance, and there is some evidence that inequality lowers rates for political participation even in modern democratic societies. But these claims have recently been contradicted by other researches who claim that inequality fosters the sort of conflict and debate on which democracy thrives. I propose that these two opposing literatures can be reconciled by attending to the scale at which inequality exists. Inequality among close neighbors might lower participation by reducing interpersonal trust and the opportunities for political discussion, inequality among people in different neighborhoods might stead increase participation by heightening political conflict, and inequality among people in different counties might reduce participation rates by undermining the feeling of consensus and shared fate on which democratic governance rests. I attempt to unravel this complex dynamic with measures of economic segregation, created by decomposing total inequality into three portions: inequality across counties and within states; inequality across neighborhoods and within counties; and inequality across individuals within neighborhoods. I then link these measures to individual-level survey data from the American National Election Studies and the roper Social and Political Trends dataset. Contrary to my suppositions, inequality among close neighbors increase voter registration while decreasing participation in endeavors other than political campaigns. Furthermore, these effects are particularly strong among-low-income people, thus altering income differences in participation rates. Inequality across neighborhoods, in contrast, tends to exacerbate the tendency of rich citizens to vote more than poor citizens. And inequality across counties undermines participates in electoral campaigns, regardless of one's income. Although the mechanisms underlying these relationships are unclear from these analyses, it is evident that "inequality" has no univalent effect on political participation; rather, it depends on the scale at which inequality exists.

While workers in developed countries have become increasingly concerned about the impact of offshoring and immigration on domestic wages, the available evidence on the link between offshoring, immigration, and wages remains ambiguous. This paper presents a simple model that identifies the impact of offshoring and immigration on native wages and tests these predictions using U.S. state-industry level data. Highlighting the importance of the productivity effect identified in the model, the results show that offshoring increases and immigration decreases the wages of domestic workers. Decomposing offshoring and immigration according to the income level of the foreign country proves to be an important distinction with results indicating that offshoring to less developed countries and immigration from developed countries increases the wages of most native workers while offshoring to developed countries and immigration from less developed countries decreases the wages of most native workers.

The church is an integrating feature of the city, and both are important for each other. The withdrawal of white congregations from Detroits racially changing neighborhoods following W.W. II created a moral crisis. Detroits post WWI population growth had created new demands for housing and intensified the practice of racial discrimination against African Americans in the sale and purchase of housing. With open occupancy initially included with New Deal Housing Programs, opposition to public housing programs spawned attention to the extensive practice of racial discrimination and segregated housing. Having been silent against racial discrimination Detroits religious community and Detroits Commission of Community Relations joined together in hosting the Metropolitan Conference on Open Occupancy: A Challenge to Conscience in 1963 to address the issue of racial discrimination Without the Conference creating a joint program to continue attention and action, the Detroit Council of Churches combined the conference recommendations with their ongoing programs, and sought additional funding for additional staff and program support from its member denominations. Unable to secure additional funding or achieve an institutional ecumenical consensus, member denominations combined conference recommendations with their own and sought to make them operative within their member congregations. The net effect of the church and city engagement against racial discrimination was the assignation of continued action to denominational member congregations in their neighborhoods. The issue was to be addressed by congregation and neighborhood. A parish organized by and for Danish immigrant to serve the Danish immigrant population in Detroit, St. Peters was a city-wide parish with a scattered membership through-out metro Detroit. Failing in its attempt to reach out and engage the neighborhood surrounding its facility on Pembroke and Greenfield, congregational opposition to racial discrimination was channeled through the activities of the clergy with the approval of the congregation. The clerical and denominational emphasis on a prophetic ministry for social justice contrasted with the congregational priority for a pastoral and educational ministry to the widely scattered second and third generation membership. Neither was rejected, but in 1982 St. Peters left Detroit to merge with a Scandinavian parish in suburban Berkley.

Background: The association between schooling and old age cognitive outcomes such as memory disorders is well documented but, because of the threat of reverse causation, controversy persists over whether education affects old age cognition. Changes in state compulsory schooling laws (CSL) are treated as natural experiments (instruments) for estimating the effect of education on memory and mental status among the elderly. Changes in CSL predict changes in average years of schooling completed by children who are affected by the new laws. These educational differences are presumably independent of innate individual characteristics such as IQ. Methods: CSL-induced changes in education were used to obtain instrumental variable (IV) estimates of educations effect on memory (n = 10 694) and mental status(n = 9751) for white, non-Hispanic US-born Health and Retirement Survey participants born between 1900 and 1947 who did not attend college. Results: After adjustment for sex, birth year, state of birth and state characteristics, IV estimates of educations effect on memory were large and statistically significant. IV estimates for mental status had very wide confidence intervals, so it was not possible to draw meaningful conclusions about the effect of education on this outcome. Conclusions: Increases in mandatory schooling lead to improvements in performance on memory tests many decades after school completion. These analyses condition on individual states, so differences in memory outcomes associated with CSL changes cannot be attributed to differences between states. Although unmeasured state characteristics that changed contemporaneously with CSL might account for these results, unobserved genetic variation is unlikely to do so.

The increase in the nations present and projected multicultural aged population is both dramatic and well documented. One result of this growth is a sharpened focus on racial and ethnic disparities in health, health care access, and utilization of services that impact aging adults. This paper presents work conducted by a university-community collaborative project in gerontology. The thrust of the project is that cultural competency is a key ingredient for preparing social work students for work with ethnic minority elders and for potentially improving services to older minority populations. A brief description of the project is presented with highlights of the standards of cultural competencies that were developed for three specific populations: Japanese, Filipino, and Native Hawaiians. In general, standards organized around knowledge, values and skills consistently reflect the importance of the family system in caring for older adults.

본 연구는 텍사스주에서의 주택소유율에 미치는 군집주거의 영향을 분석하는데 그 목적이 있다. 텍사스주는 다른 미국의 주들에 비해서 상당히 많은 히스패닉 인구를 갖고 있으며 그 인구들중 상당수가 규모가 큰 광역대도시권에 집중적으로 주거해왔다. 이러한 대도시권역에 거주하는 대부분의 히스패닉들은 기본적으로 모기지 융자 금융시장에서 차별적인 지위에 직면해 있을뿐더러 그들이 새로 유입되는 이민자의 신분에서 태생적으로 갖는 사회경제적 약자의 지위때문에 주택소유에서 불리한 면이 존재한다. 하지만 주거의 군집현상은 히스패닉의 군집주거 지역에서 그들의 친밀한 공동체 네트워크를 강화시키고 더 나아가 주택시장의 정보공유의 증대와 같은 부수적인 효과들이 기대되어서 개인들에 대한 주택소유에 긍정적인 작용을 기대할 수 있다. 본 연구는 2000년 미국 통계청의 공공이용 미시자료 표본(PUMS)의 자료를 통해서 텍사스주 주민들에 대한 주택소유의 결정요인들을 각 인종들의 주거군집의 효과를 중심으로 살펴본다. 이를 통해 본 연구는 다음의 사항들을 발견한다. 첫째, 사회경제적 요인들은 주택소유의 결정요인으로 여전히 중요하다. 둘째, 텍사스 히스패닉 인구의 주거군집은 주택소유에서의 사회경제적 불이익을 상쇄시킨다. 셋째, 하지만 이러한 상쇄효과는 개개의 인구들이 거주하는 주거지역의 지리적 특성과 그들의 이민상의 지위에 따라서 변화할 수 있다. [The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of community housing on the housing ownership rate in Texas. Texas has a considerable Hispanic population compared to other US states, and many of those populations have been intensively resident in large metropolitan areas. Most Hispanics living in these metropolitan areas are basically discriminatory in the mortgage financing market, and there is a disadvantage in home ownership because of their socioeconomic weakness inherent in the new immigrant status do. However, residential clusters can be expected to have a positive effect on home ownership of individuals by reinforcing their intimate community network in the Hispanic community housing area, and further anticipating additional effects such as increased information sharing in the housing market . This study examines the determinants of housing ownership for the Texas residents through the data from the Public Usage Micro Data (PUMS) of the US Department of Statistics in 2000, focusing on the effects of residential communities of each race. This study finds the following points. First, socioeconomic factors are still important determinants of home ownership. Second, the residential communities of the Texas Hispanic population offset socio-economic disadvantages in home ownership. Third, these cancellation effects can vary according to the geographical characteristics of the residential areas in which the individual populations reside and their immigration status.]

Few issues are as contentious as immigration and crime. Concern over the effects of immigration on crime is longstanding, and bans against criminal aliens constituted some of the earliest restrictions on immigration to the United States (Kanstroom, 2007). More recently, policies adopted in the mid-1990s greatly expanded the scope of acts for which noncitizens may be expelled from the United States. Even so, many calls to curtail immigration, particularly illegal immigration, appeal to public fears about immigrants’ involvement in criminal activities. Are such fears justified? On the one hand, immigration policy screens the foreign-born for criminal history and assigns extra penalties to noncitizens who commit crimes, suggesting that the foreign-born would be less likely than the U.S.-born to be involved in criminal enterprises. On the other hand, in California, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born to be young and male; they are also more likely to have low levels of education. These characteristics are typically related to criminal activity, providing some basis for concern that immigrants may be more criminally active than the U.S.-born. In this issue of California Counts, we examine the effects of immigration on public safety in California. In our assessments, we use measures of incarceration and institutionalization as proxies for criminal involvement. We find that the foreign-born, who make up about 35 percent of the adult population in California, constitute only about 17 percent of the adult prison . . .

According to U.S. Census and Current Population Survey (CPS) data, employed U.S. men are more likely to work more than 48 hours per week today than 25 years ago. Using 1979-2006 CPS data, we show that this increase was greatest in the 1980s, among highly educated, highly paid, and older men, and among workers paid on a salaried basis. We examine some possible explanations for these changes, including composition effects. Among salaried men, increases in long work hours were greatest in detailed occupations and industries with larger increases in residual wage inequality and slowly growing real compensation at "standard" (40) hours.

This paper estimates the effects of immigration on wages of native workers at the national U.S. level. Following Borjas (2003) we focus on national labor markets for workers of different skills and we enrich his methodology and refine previous estimates. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine workers of different skills in order to evaluate the competition as well as cross-skill complementary effects of immigrants on wages. We also emphasize the importance (and estimate the value) of the elasticity of substitution between workers with at most a high school degree and those without one. Since the two groups turn out to be close substitutes, this strongly dilutes the effects of competition between immigrants and workers with no degree. We then estimate the substitutability between natives and immigrants and we find a small but significant degree of imperfect substitution which further decreases the competitive effect of immigrants. Finally, we account for the short run and long run adjustment of capital in response to immigration. Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.

Beginning in 1979, certain states extended extra copyright protection, known as "moral rights" protection, to visual artists. Moral rights protection, which was incorporated into U.S. copyright law in 1990, ensures that works cannot be altered in a manner that would negatively impact the reputation of the artist. Using difference-in-differences regression strategies, we compare artists and non-artists in states with moral rights laws to those in states without these laws, before and after the laws are enacted. This enables us to test the impact of the laws on the behavior of artists, consumers, and policy makers. Our analysis reveals that artists’ incomes fall by over $4000 per year as a result of moral rights legislation, but we find no impact of the laws on artists’ choices of residence or on state-level public spending on the arts.

This paper investigates urban decline and renewal in the United States using three panels that follow neighborhoods on a geographically consistent basis over extended periods of time. Findings indicate that change in neighborhood economic status is common, averaging roughly 13 percent per decade; roughly two-thirds of neighborhoods studied in 1950 were of quite different economic status fifty years later. Panel unit root tests for 35 MSAs indicate that neighborhood economic status is a stationary process, consistent with long-running cycles of decline and renewal. In Philadelphia County, a complete cycle appears to last up to 100 years. Aging housing stocks and redevelopment contribute to these patterns, as do local externalities associated with social interactions. Lower-income neighborhoods appear to be especially sensitive to the presence of individuals that provide social capital. Many of the factors that drive change at the local level have large and policy relevant effects.

Given a dataset containing sensitive personal information, a statistical database answers aggregate queries in a manner that preserves individual privacy. We consider the problem of constructing a statistical database using output perturbation, which protects privacy by injecting a small noise into each query result. We show that the state-of-the-art approach, $-differential privacy, suffers from two severe deficiencies: it (i) incurs prohibitive computation overhead, and (ii) can answer only a limited number of queries, after which the statistical database has to be shut down. To remedy the problem, we develop a new technique that enforces $-different privacy with economical cost. Our technique also incorporates a query relaxationmechanism, which removes the restriction on the number of permissible queries. The effectiveness and efficiency of our solution are verified through experiments with real data.

This paper estimates the effects of immigration on wages of native workers at the national U.S. level. Following Borjas (2003) we focus on national labor markets for workers of different skills and we enrich his methodology and refine previous estimates. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine workers of different skills in order to evaluate the competition as well as cross-skill complementary effects of immigrants on wages. We also emphasize the importance (and estimate the value) of the elasticity of substitution between workers with at most a high school degree and those without one. Since the two groups turn out to be close substitutes, this strongly dilutes the effects of competition between immigrants and workers with no degree. We then estimate the substitutability between natives and immigrants and we find a small but significant degree of imperfect substitution which further decreases the competitive effect of immigrants. Finally, we account for the short run and long run adjustment of capital in response to immigration. Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on poverty transitions, with an emphasis on native-born AfricanAmericans and immigration. A probit model is estimated using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which evaluates the impact of EITC participation and immigration on transitions out of poverty. The EITC is found to be a useful tool in combating poverty and is effective for AfricanAmericans, though only for women. More importantly, the results show that the implementation of state-level EITCs can mitigate the adverse effects of immigration for native-born AfricanAmericans.Keywords Earned income tax credit - Immigration - Poverty - Race

After years of fiscal volatility, Washington, D.C. is financially stable. New population estimates suggest that the city has gained residents since the official Census 2000 count, following decades of population decline. This study reviews socio-demographic and economic changes among the Districts population since 2000 and examines population movement in and out of D.C.

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: wages and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most theoretical and empirical work in labor supply studies ignore prices other than wages. We address the question of whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as generally assumed. We describe a simple model to demonstrate that the effects of wage and nonlabor income on labor supply typically differ by location. In particular, we show that the derivative of the labor supply with respect to nonlabor income is independent of price only when the labor supply takes a form based on an implausible separability condition. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the effect of price on labor supply is not a simple “up-or-down shift” that would be required to meet the separability condition in our key proposition.