The distribution of household income in the United States is remarkably unequal. Stratification researchers predict levels ofincome in terms of individual characteristics and structural features of the economy and society. These researchers, however, oftenneglect the role of the state. Political sociologists have begun to examine the impact of the state on aggregate levels of inequalityacross nations. I build on this literature to explain household income in the United States. Utilizing 2000 IPUMS data, I clarify howhousehold income varies across the sub-national U.S. states according to policy configurations. I find that sub-national states withmore egalitarian policies help to buttress the relative incomes of groups vulnerable to low incomes, particularly service workers andsingle mother families. These results suggest that studies of income and income inequality should consider the role of policies.

The United States and the United Kingdom are both high-immigration nations. The foreign-born make up a significant group in both countries: one in eight in the US and one in ten in the UK. The numbers of children of immigrants are larger still, and is estimated at 24 percent of young children (age five and under) in the US, and 25 percent (using a different metric) in England and Wales.1 In some areas, such as Los Angeles, New York or London, the proportions are much higher. Individuals with an immigrant background, therefore, are set to form a significant proportion of US and UK populations for decades to come. This means that any strategy to promote social mobility needs to consider immigrants and their children. Social mobility is not a neatly defined concept, but it is one . . .

Recent studies provide conflicting evidence on the connection between ethnic or racial neighborhood segregation and outcomes. Some studies find that residence in an enclave is beneficial, some reach the opposite conclusion, and still others imply that any relationship is small. One hypothesis is that studies differ because the impact of segregation varies across groups, perhaps because its impact is more benign for better-educated groups. This paper presents new evidence on this hypothesis using data on first-generation immigrants in the United States. We confront the endogenous selection into residential enclaves and find that selection into enclave neighborhoods is on balance negative. Correcting for this selection produces positive mean effects of segregation, and a positive correlation between group average human capital and the impact of segregation.

Between 1898 and 1948, English was the language of instruction for most post-primary grades in Puerto Rican public schools. Since 1949, the language of instruction in all grades has been Spanish. We use these shifts in language of instruction policy to estimate the effect of English-intensive instruction on the English-language skills of Puerto Ricans. Although naive estimates suggest that English instruction increased English-speaking ability among Puerto Rican natives, estimates that allow for education-specific cohort trends show no effect. This result is surprising in light of the strong presumption by American policymakers at the time that instruction in English is the best way to raise English proficiency. This has implications for school language policies in former colonies as well as for U.S. education policy toward immigrant children.

Formulation of the problem This study focuses on the use of a geographic information system (GIS) with regard to access to map books. The goal of this study is the following: • To obtain insight into the various types of geographic information systems in which time is a factor; • To determine what role a GIS can play in the study of old maps in general; • To elaborate a conceptual and functional model for an information system for pre-cadastral material (property maps), making use of pre-cadastral maps, as an example of a historic GIS; • To obtain insight into the behaviour of historic researchers that use historic GIS, whereby the GIS for property maps serves as an example. Study method In order to be able to answer these questions, a GIS has been established for property maps. This GIS has been set up according to the calibration method: the GIS is comprised of phases, with a theoretical or practical study being set up in each phase, the results of which are placed in a new prototype for each phase. Conclusions This study has shown what steps must be taken in order to establish a historic GIS according to the calibration method. Within this method we used various study techniques. It can be established through a literature study what types of GIS can be differentiated for historic research, what spatial-temporal models exist, what role a GIS can play in various types of study, and what historic GIS applications have already been initiated. In addition to literature study, interviews were also used in order to obtain insight into the wishes and expectations of the users. Finally, a user study was undertaken in which the thinking out loud method was used in order to study the usage strategies of users. This, incidentally, was preceded by a theoretical examination of the possibilities for a user study. This theoretical examination does not belong to the calibration process, but it was vital when it came to setting up a user study. This combination of different techniques makes it possible to consider all aspects (theory, user wishes, actual use) in the study. The calibration method turns out to function well when it comes to making the possibilities and problems of a historic GIS clear.

In this paper, we describe a method for estimating hedonic models of consumer demand using a methods described in Bajari and Benkard (2005) and Bajari and Kahn (2005). We apply our methods to understanding suburbanization and the associated urban sprawl using a unique data set form Los Angeles in 2000-2003. Urban sprawl has both costs and benefits. One cost of sprawl is that commute times are increased since homes and places of work are more dispersed. A benefit is that sprawl allows consumers to purchase larger homes and lots. This paper uses a new data set on housing transactions in Los Angeles County to compare some costs (increased commuting) and benefits (larger homes) of sprawl. We use new methods in demand estimation to recover how heterogeneous home buyers tradeoff commuting versus larger homes at the margin. Finally, we evaluate the partial equilibrium welfare effects of two anti-sprawl policies.

Across the NewWorld, the abolition of slavery was followed by a battery of laws restrictingthe labor market mobility of the newly emancipated. This paper models and estimates theimpact of labor mobility restricting laws on African-Americans in the post-bellum U.S. South.Laws restricting job-to-job transitions increased the fraction of African-Americans relative towhites living in the rural sector and working in agriculture across the South. Increases inthe nes charged employers for recruiting employed workers increased the duration of blacklabor contracts in a sample of Arkansas agricultural workers. Black agricultural workers wholived longer under labor control laws had a lower return to experience. These fi ndings are consistent with a two-sector model of on-the-job search with mobility costs.

Simple partial equilibrium models suggest that income increases at the high end of the distribution can raise prices paid by those at the low end of the income distribution. This prediction does not universally hold in a general equilibrium model, or in models where the rich and poor consume distinct products. We use Census microdata to evaluate these predictions empirically, using data on housing markets in American metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000. In markets with low-vacancy rates, increases in income at the high end of the distribution are associated with significantly higher rents per room and greater crowding among households headed by a high school dropout. Similar effects are not observed in markets with above-average vacancy rates.Keywords: Rent; Crowding; Low-incomeJEL classification codes: D63; R21; R31

A direct consequence of imposing a ceiling on the price of a good for which secondary markets do not exist, is that, when there is excess demand, the good will not be allocated to the buyers who value it the most. The resulting allocative cost has been discussed in the literature as a potentially important component of the total welfare loss from price ceilings, but its practical importance has yet to be established empirically. In this paper, we address this question using data for the U.S. residential market for natural gas which was subject to price ceilings during 1954-1989. This market is well suited for such an empirical analysis and natural gas price ceilings affected millions of households. Using a household-level, discrete-continuous model of natural gas demand, we estimate that the allocative cost in the U.S. residential market for natural gas averaged $4.6 billion annually since the 1950s, effectively tripling previous estimates of the net welfare loss to U.S. consumers. We quantify the evolution of this allocative cost and its geographical distribution during the post-war period, and we highlight implications of our analysis for the regulation of other markets.

This analysis, using Current Population Survey data, yields statistically compelling evidence that cyclical variations in gross flows of U.S. workers—that is, variations by business cycle phase in the number of workers transitioning from one labor market state to another each month—were substantially smaller in 1986–2005 than in 1968–86. The authors identify six types of workers who would be expected to contribute to cyclical variations in these flows. Counter-intuitively, one such group consists of individuals whose decisions to enter or exit the labor force are independent of labor market conditions. Estimates suggest that these “noncyclical movers” are an empirically important component of gross flows into the labor force. The authors contend that the presence of noncyclical movers precludes accurate measurement of the contributions of workers whose entry and exit decisions are consciously influenced by labor market conditions.

Race relations in the United States have changed dramatically since the 1960s. For African Americans, in particular, the transition has been momentous. Centuries of slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow and deep ghettoization, once confined blacks to a sharply delineated subordinate status. In the mid-twentieth century, however, insurgent political action ruptured the racial regime (McAdam 1982). Meaningful citizenship rights were extended to racial minorities through landmark victories such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Branch 1998; Quadagno 1994). In the decades that followed, levels of anti-black prejudice declined and Americans increasingly endorsed norms of racial equality and opportunity (Schuman et al. 1997). As de jure discrimination faded, African Americans entered dominant societal institutions in larger numbers and a substantial black middle class . . .

Federal housing policy in the US across the postwar period supported the construction of new houses more than public provision or renovation of older structures as a means of ensuring a sufficient supply of quality dwellings. Understanding trends in new housing in particular is thus crucial to understanding the housing regime. Following Myers (Housing demography: Linking demographic structure and housing markets. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; Housing Studies, 14, 473-490, 1999), this paper conceptualizes historical change in the housing stock within a demographic framework as the movement of cohorts of households through housing stock. Recent evidence suggests that a new cohort of houses arose in the 1980s and 1990s (larger with more amenities than past vintages), and that buyers of those new houses were increasingly affluent. In this paper, I link the succession to a new cohort of houses to household cohort succession and examine the increasing affluence of new house buyers by age and cohort, focusing especially on the entry of the Baby Boom generation exactly when the new cohort of houses arrived. I use US Census microdata for 1960-2000 to develop a cohort longitudinal dataset, and analyze historical change in stratification in new house ownership. I find significant shifts between cohorts in income inequality among new house buyers, with implications for the capacity of the housing regime to meet the future needs of an increasingly diverse population.

Studies of geographical mobility are typically divided into studies of residential mobility, which are assumed to be motivated by family factors, and studies of migration, which are assumed to be motivated by the opportunities for realising economic gains as a result of the move. We use a life course approach and data from the 1999-2005 March Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey to investigate the age trajectories of both residential mobility and migration among American adults. We find that mobility trajectories and motivations for moves vary by economic status and family status; that quality of life motivations and family factors account for a substantial proportion of long-distance as well as short-distance moves; and that both residential mobility and migration are associated with an increased risk of economic instability and family and employment changes in the year following the move. Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Keywords: residential mobility; migration; life course; family life-cycle; United States

I analyze remittance behavior among new legal immigrants in the US using the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (NIS), a nationally representative survey of immigrants admitted to legal permanent residency in 2003. I use the NIS to address data limitations common to empirical remittance studies, such as low sample sizes, missing information on the donor or recipient and the absence of data which includes immigrants from many countries. Looking first at the distribution of remittances, I find that it is skewed to the right, with a small number of immigrants sending very large amounts. I then analyze the determinants of remittances among new immigrants and estimate remittance-income elasticities. From this analysis, I find evidence that the motivations to remit are not purely altruistic and may include the desire to invest in the home country. I then discuss how future work will re-examine this investment motivation and its relationship to return migration by incorporating later waves of the 2003 NIS to form panel data. Finally, I find that large country differentials in remittance behavior are only partially explained by observable characteristics of the donor, recipient and origin country.

Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as an instrumental variable in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on high school dropout of black and Hispanic children. We find that unobserved factors drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes, at least for children of women whose marriage decisions are affected by incarceration of men. For Hispanics we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.

Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern perform a neat bit of professional arbitrage with this book. Like political scientists or economists, they exploit the invaluable Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, but they address a broad and ultimately unanswerable historian's question: what was the experience of being American in the twentieth century? Using quantitative data, they are able to argue with precision why a synthetic view of modern U.S. history should emphasize diversity, inequality, and the effect of government on both. And throughout, they keep an eye on what their book might mean for the American present. Katz and Stern characterize the early twentieth century as a period influenced heavily by globalization—the operation of world markets in capital, labor, and goods—emphasizing principally immigration. Migration from Europe inspired western movement within the U.S., influenced the growth of the American economy, and contributed to . . .

Hmong refugees began arriving in significant numbers in the United States in the late 1970s. Compared to typical immigrants, Hmong-Americans came with few financial, labor market, or co-ethnic support factors in favor of their economic success in the United States. Focusing on homeownership as an indicator of economic assimilation, we show that indeed the overall Hmong-American homeownership rate was initially very low but had converged, by 2000, to a level typical for U.S. immigrants of equivalent time in country. Over the same period, however, wide regional gaps in Hmong-American homeownership emerged. By 2000, most of these gaps had also disappeared, except that Hmong-American homeownership rates in the metropolitan areas of the Central Valley of California remained very low. We present evidence that selective migration patterns related to state differences in public assistance policies were important in the emergence of regional homeownership differences in the 1980s, and that changes in these policies were among the factors that closed most of the gaps in the 1990s. Then, taking location in 2000 as given, we adapt the method of Coulson (2002) to statistically account for the gap between the Hmong-American homeownership rate in the Central Valley and elsewhere. Using probit regressions on data for individual Hmong-American household from the 2000 Public Use Microsample (PUMS) from the U.S. Census, we find that both personal traits of the household head (age, English ability, and residential locational stability) and household financial variables (total income, public assistance income, and the relative cost of owning versus renting) significantly affect the odds that a given Hmong household owns its residence. Nonetheless, we find that the Central Valleys persistent lag in Hmong-American homeownership is mostly accounted for by regional differences in the financial variables and hardly at all by regional differences in the Hmong-American personal traits we measure. A caveat to this conclusion is that one of our financial variables, public assistance income, may proxy for unmeasured regional differences in personal attributes.

States provide a variety of goods and services to their citizens, ranging from police protection to highway construction to education and health services. This study is concerned with how earnings inequality has affected such spending at the state level in the United States between 1977 and 2005. The results show that for every 1 percent increase in the 9050 percentile ratio of earnings, social spending on non-health and non-education goods and services increases by approximately 0.231 percent, or about $615 per person. A similar 1 percent increase in the 5010 percentile ratio of earnings is associated with a smaller 0.042 percent rise in spending, or $112 per person. A one percent increase in overall inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is associated with a rise in social spending of about 0.255 percent, or $680 per person. The model is robust to a variety of sensitivity tests and generally shows that increases in inequality in both the upper- and lower-tail of the earnings distribution serve to increase social spending.

Using NSFH data, we examine the determinants of close proximity between adult children and their mothers, and the manner in which proximity impacts transfers of time and money. We deviate from previous literature by focusing solely on proximity rather than co-residence and by analyzing separately partnered and un-partnered adult children. Regression results suggest that close proximity is more probable under circumstances where the adult children are likely to benefit-when they are young and when they have children. We do not find an increased likelihood of proximity when we would expect proximity to benefit mothers-i.e. when she is in poor health or over the age of 75. Time transfers between adult children and their mothers are strongly influenced by proximity. These transfers are economically important: the probability of work force participation and hours of work of partnered women are positively related to close proximity to their mother or mother-in-law. Money transfers are higher to children living in close proximity to their mother if they are the only sibling living near her.