The earliest years, from birth to age 3, are critical for young children’s healthy development. Experiences during the infant and toddler years shape the architecture of the brain— including cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional capacities—at a phenomenal rate and lay the foundation for future growth and learning.1 Nearly 5.8 million children under the age of 3 regularly spend some time in non-parental care.2 The quality of those earliest child care experiences is important for young children’s growth and . . .

Conventional economic literature has classified language as a complex good, witha dual nature of private good and public good. However, the tongue has certain characteristicsthat can be placed in another additional category of goods called meritgoods. These can be characterized as conditions for the possibility for an event tooccur.In the case of language, the presence of a common tongue can be considered as aprecondition for the appearance of commerce and the creation of efficient markets. Besides, language can have an influence on the social economic status of people. In thiscase, language becomes a condition to reach a plentiful life in a social structure.

Teachers are more likely to be found in rural communities and low-wage metropolitan areas than are college-educated workers in other occupations. This analysis explores the extent to which the geographic distribution of teachers explains the relatively low average wage found in other studies. The analysis suggests that excluding geographic indicators from the analysis downwardly biases estimates of relative teacher wages. One important implication of these findings is that researchers should pay attention to geographic wage variations when making earnings comparisons between teaching and other occupations.

This fact sheet presents a demographic profile of Arizonas Hispanic and foreign-born populations in 2006. It is based on the Pew Hispanic Centers analysis of the 2006 American Community Survey and the 2000 Decennial Census, both conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Recent literature suggests identifying house price hedonic regressions by using instrumental variables, spatial statistics, the borders approach, panel data, and other techniques. We present an empirical application of a mixed index model, first proposed by Bowden [Bowden, R.J., 1992. Competitive selection and market data: the mixed-index problem. The Review of Economic Studies 59(3):625633.] to identify hedonic price regressions. We compare the performance of the mixed index model to a traditional hedonic model and to a hedonic model that includes characteristics of the buyer of each house. We find the mixed index model outperforms the other models based on bootstrap distributions of predicted housing values, prediction variance, and predicted policy effects. The mixed index model distributions are less skewed and kurtotic than the other models, suggesting it more closely satisfies the classical linear regression assumption of normally distributed errors. Compared to the mixed index model, the traditional hedonic overstates the importance of lot size and school quality to house price and understates the importance of environmental quality.Keywords: House price hedonic; Identification; School quality; Environmental quality; Capitalization

Little is known about the relationship between school characteristics, such as teacher-student ratios, and the risk of incarceration in adulthood. Educational skeptics argue that investment in schools has little effect on outcomes, such as criminality or the risk of incarceration, because criminal propensities are fixed at an early age and organizational inefficiencies make public schools incapable of using resources effectively to alter students' outcomes. Some educational proponents contend that schools increasingly provide critical defining moments in the life course and that by improving economic opportunities and facilitating social control in schools, greater resources can directly reduce criminality and the risk of incarceration. This article uses previously unreleased U.S. census data to identify the increasing association between educational attainment and teacher-student ratios on individuals' risk of incarceration for five-year birth cohorts starting in 1910. On the basis of an elaborate fixed-effect control methodology, the authors find conditional support for the conclusion that educational resourcesmeasured as teacher-student ratiosare associated with the reduced risk of adult incarceration. They assess the robustness of this conclusion by replicating the analysis using school-level measures of teacher-student ratios and longitudinal indicators of individual-level incarceration from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth.

The children of immigrants raised in the USA (i.e. the second generation) have become a central focus in understanding immigrant adaptation. Groups' Americanization is assessed by their degree of commitment to the manifest elements of the nation-state, that is, to what extent groups adopt the dominant cultural norms of native-born whites and become involved in mainstream social institutions, networks and laws. Research on adaptation increasingly argues that groups selectively further their Americanization into these elements by keeping, rather than abandoning, their ethnic and even transnational ties. Missing in this framework is immigrants' relationship to the principles of the liberal nation-state, that is, the taken-for-granted ideals that shape how to express civil liberties. This study argues that second-generation Indian Americans convey local and transnational ethnic ties, often within religious and secular organizations. Doing so facilitates their selective commitment to not only the prevailing, manifest dimensions of the nation-state, as others have also found, but also to its broader principles through how informants defend and express their ethnicity. As a result, second-generation Indian Americans further their Americanization in overlooked ways and more deeply than expected.

In a recent paper, Ottaviano and Peri (2007a) report evidence that immigrant and native workers are not perfect substitutes within narrowly defined skill groups. The resulting complementarities have important policy implications because immigration may then raise the wage of many native-born workers. We examine the Ottaviano-Peri empirical exercise and show that their finding of imperfect substitution is fragile and depends on the way the sample of working persons is constructed. There is a great deal of heterogeneity in labor market attachment among workers and the finding of imperfect substitution disappears once the analysis adjusts for such heterogeneity. As an example, the finding of immigrant-native complementarity evaporates simply by removing high school students from the data (under the Ottaviano and Peri classification, currently enrolled high school juniors and seniors are included among high school dropouts, which substantially increases the counts of young low-skilled workers ). More generally, we cannot reject the hypothesis that comparably skilled immigrant and native workers are perfect substitutes once the empirical exercise uses standard methods to carefully construct the variables representing factor prices and factor supplies.

Rapid changes in living arrangements and marital status suggest the need for further consideration of the behavior of individuals in diverse households, especially those with individuals who are divorced or cohabiting. Using new data from the American Time Use Survey, we examined how gender, living arrangements, and marital status affect social relationships with kin and non-kin. This paper focuses in specifically on the differences between married and cohabiting individuals. Findings indicate that both women and men in cohabiting relationships have higher odds of spending time with non-kin and lower odds of spending time with kin than those who are married. However, when cohabiting partners were included as kin in the analyses, there were no significant differences between married and cohabiting individuals. Results suggest the importance of conceptualization of kin and non-kin groups. They also suggest that cohabiting and married couples may be more similar to one another than previously thought.

Recent studies that aim to estimate the causal link between the education of parents and their children provide evidence that is far from conclusive. This paper explores why. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that these studies rely on different data sources, gathered in different countries at different times. Another one is that these studies use different identification strategies. Three identification strategies that are currently in use rely on: identical twins; adoptees; and instrumental variables. In this paper we apply each of these three strategies to one particular Swedish data set. The purpose is threefold: (i) explain the disparate evidence in the recent literature; (ii) learn more about the quality of each identification procedure; and (iii) get at better perspective about intergenerational effects of education. We find that the three identification strategies all produce intergenerational schooling estimates that are lower than the corresponding OLS estimates, indicating the importance of accounting for ability bias. But interestingly, when applying the three methods to the same data set, we are able to fully replicate the discrepancies across methods found in the previous literature. Our findings therefore indicate that the estimated impact of parental education on that of their child in Sweden does depend on identification, which suggests that country and cohort differences do not lie behind the observed disparities. Finally, we conclude that income is a mechanism linking parent's and children's schooling, that can partly explain the diverging results across methods.

Objective: To describe and compare the epidemiology of thyroid cancer in the rapidly growing Middle Eastern (ME) population and the non-Hispanic, non-Middle Eastern White (NHNMW) residents of California. Population with ME heritage that is officially not recognized as a distinct ethnicity has rarely been studied in the past.Methods: ME cases in the California cancer registry files for 19882004 were identified by surname recognition. ME population was estimated by ancestry from census data.Results: Thyroid cancer in ME group, 869 cases and 56 deaths were compared with 19,182 cases and 1,327 deaths in the NHNMW population. Age-adjusted rate ratio (RR) for incidence was 1.5 (95% CI 1.31.7) in men and 1.5 (95% CI 1.41.7) in women. RR for mortality was 1.4 (95% CI 0.92.4) in men and 2.3 (95% CI 1.43.9) in women. Papillary tumors comprised over 80% of all cases and their pattern correlated with the rapid increase in thyroid cancer in recent years. Five-year observed survival in ME men was significantly higher than in NHNMW men, but similar in women.Conclusions: Eighty-five percent of ME cases identified in this study were born in the Middle East. The higher incidence of thyroid cancer in this immigrant population may largely reflect a combination of sequels of radiation treatment for fungal diseases of the scalp that was common in the area in early 1950s, benign proliferative thyroid disease that is common in the area due to dietary iodine imbalance, and possibly genetic predisposition.Keywords: Middle East - Thyroid cancer - Survival epidemiology - Ethnic name list - Salmon bias

In the United States, a majority of the drivers who receive a traffic ticket are male, and male drivers are more likely to receive a ticket after being stopped by the police. This paper develops and conducts an empirical test for the existence of police gender bias (taste-based discrimination) in traffic ticketing. The test is based on a model's prediction of how the gender composition of ticketed drivers should vary across groups of police officers who use unbiased, but potentially different ticketing standards. The test is useful for determining whether the gender disparity in traffic tickets results from gender bias or a higher tendency of male drivers to break traffic laws. In addition, the test may be applied in other contexts where an outcome is found to depend on the racial or gender group of the evaluators who determine the outcome. When applied to data on traffic tickets issued by male and female police officers in Boston, the test rejects the null hypothesis of unbiased ticketing.

This study utilizes the i ntra-national ethnicity perspective, or examining different ancestral-origin ethnic groups found within a national origin, to examine the 1.5 and second generation Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese American experiences. This perspective is noticeably missing from existing literature on the second generation. As such, this study aims to fill this void.Data for this study was drawn from three data sources: quantitatively, from (1) the five-percent Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (5% IPUMS) and (2) merged data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles study and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (IIMMLA-CILS); and qualitatively, (3) from fifty in-depth and semi-structured interviews. The datasets address the demographic characteristics and preliminary directions of political, linguistic, and educational adaptation for both sub-ethnic groups. Whereas the interview data address the contextual factors that contribute (or not) to the institutionalization of these social constructed identities. Specifically, what are the factors that contribute to assimilation or dissimilation? And, how do these two sub-ethnic groups differ in their adaptation progress?On the descriptive-level, the two groups share demographic similarities and dissimilarities. As a collective, the Chinese-Vietnamese entered the U.S. earlier than the Vietnamese. They differ on their political voting patterns, religious preferences, rates of naturalization, and region of settlement. On the flip side, the main similarity they both share is linguistic assimilation pattern.In terms of context influences, this study finds that context matters for the ways that individuals choose to institutionalize their ethnic identity. Specifically, location (Orange vs. LA County), cultural resources (language and ethnic celebrations), and educational setting (participation in Asian American Studies or ethnic organizations) all play critical roles contributing to the social construction of an ethnic identity.Taking the intra-national perspective revealed differences between these two sub-groups that would have otherwise been lost under the umbrella ethnicity of Vietnamese or Chinese. While it appears that individuals from both sub-ethnic groups are engaging in preliminary stages of assimilation, their paths are still littered with detours influenced by their cultural and structural contexts

The local average treatment effect (LATE) may differ from the average treatment effect(ATE) when those influenced by the instrument are not representative of the overall population. Heterogeneity in treatment effects may imply that parameter estimates from 2SLS are uninformative regarding the average treatment effect, motivating a search for instruments that affect a larger share of the population. In this paper, I present and estimate a model of home production with heterogeneous costs and benefits to fertility. The results indicate that a sex preference instrument in Taiwan produces IV estimates closer to the estimated ATE than in the United States, where sex preference is weaker.

This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation: In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is the choice of a major field of study. Using data from two Texas universities, I predict students' choice of major from their high school qualifications and demographic characteristics. Because of Texas' implementation of a Ten Percent Law-which guarantees admission to the more elite school for those students in the top decile of their High School graduating class-I am able to implement a regression discontinuity design. I find that the more prestigious institution makes students 22% more likely to major in Business than in Education, Nursing, or Social work. Results are confirmed through multinomial logit analysis. In the second essay, I examine how increases in women's education affect marriage rates of men. I use State-Level Broad-Based Merit Aid Programs as an instrument to increase the education levels of cohorts of women. Because men often marry younger women, there are a number of men who are too old to have been exposed to the scholarship programs, but whose prospective spouses would have been. I find that men out of this group with college degrees who receive the treatment see reductions in marriage rates by as much as 4% when compared with similar men in control states. This gives evidence that the gains-from-trade effect on marital surplus that is caused by wage differential is of stronger magnitude than that of matching of traits. In the final essay, my co-author and I estimate the impact of the introduction of no fault divorce laws on divorce rates. In order to deal with the problems of law endogeneity and unobserved state heterogeneity, we employ a new method in which we use only data from counties that border adjacent states. We find no evidence of any long-term increase in divorce associated with the passage of these laws. This means that the Coase Theorem-predicting the ability of parties to compensate each other within contracts in response to law changes-holds in equilibrium.

This paper estimates a model of potential to enter self-employment based on individual, household and community-level factors. This paper focuses on the impact of segregation on the likelihood of black and white working-age adults to be self-employed workers rather than wage or salary workers. A multi-level analysis combined answers of over 400,000 respondents to the 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS) [Ruggles, S., Sobek, M., Alexander, T., Fitch, C., Goeken, R., Hall, P., King, M., Ronnander, C., 2004. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], Minneapolis, MN] with structural measures from 327 metropolitan areas from the U.S. Census Bureau''s Housing Patterns files [Iceland, J., Weinberg, D., Steinmetz, E., 2002. Racial and ethnic residential segregation in the United States, 19802000. Special Report Series, CENSR no.3, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC] to test the influence of each segregation process. The two residential segregation processes (relative clustering and exposure) were found to limit and enhance potential entry into self-employment, but in unique ways for each group. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]