Cape Verdeans are a Portuguese speaking, mixed-race people with a legacy of slavery and colonialism. Their homeland is a small island group off the coast of Africa. Cape Verdean immigrants are a theoretically interesting population because most Americans would label them “Black”, while they traditionally describe themselves as “Mestiço”. In this paper, we explore the correlates of their identity and earnings, using data from the 2000 U.S. Census--the first to accept multiple responses to the “race question”. We use multivariate statistical techniques initially to distinguish among their answers to the “race question” and later to compare their earnings with those of immigrants from Portugal and the Azores, and with those of native born African Americans and Non-Hispanic Whites. The results of both analyses suggest that Cape Verdeans who identify as “White” on the census have stronger resources and better outcomes than those with other identities. In addition, gender affects earnings. Most Cape Verdean men earn less than any group in the study, but most Cape Verdean women earn as much as Native Born NonHispanic Whites.

Over the past 50 years, women roles have changed dramatically-a reality captured by substantial increases in employment and reductions infertility. Yet, the social organization of work and family life has not changed much, leading to pervasive work-family conflict. Observing these strains, some scholars wonder whether US. women high employment levels are sustainable. Women employment in professional and managerial occupations-the core of the analyses offered in this article-merits particular interest because of the material and symbolic implications for gender equality. In a cohort analysis of working-age women born between 1906 and 1975, I show that employment levels among college-educated women in professional and managerial occupations have increased across cohorts. Full-time, year-round employment rates continue to rise across cohorts, even among women in historically male professions and mothers of young children. Although labor force participation rates have stopped rising, they have stalled at a very high rate, with less than 8 percent Of professional women born since 1956 out of the labor force for a year or more during their prime childbearing years. Moreover the difference in employment rates between mothers and childless women-the "child penalty" -is shrinking across cohorts.

A substantial number of low-income individuals make use of services within the alternative financial sector (AFS), particularly pay-day lenders and check cashing outlets. Pay-day lending has grown over the past 20 years, as has the use of Refund Anticipation Loans (RALs). Although the number of households without a checking account has fallen, currently about 12 million households do not have a checking account, and must rely on check-cashing services. Fellowes and Mabanta (2008) indicate that non-bank establishments collected $8.5 billion in fees in a recent year. The high cost of these services has led many observers to seek policies that would reduce the use of informal financial services among lower income households.1 This paper briefly reviews the reasons why individuals utilize AFS outlets, then discusses the policy options that could affect these decisions.

The United States of America was formed (and still is) thanks to unceasing immigration. The most numerous group of immigrants in the U.S.A is the one of Latino-immigrants. Since there are so many Spanish-speaking people, their influence on the American culture is undeniable. “The new immigrants from Latin America never quite lose touch with their homelands; in fact, they are often actively engaged in transferring wealth to the families they have left behind.” is a statement of Ed Morales, a descendant of Latino-immigrants (Morales 2002: 20). However, if they want to live in the U.S.A., they are forced to assimilate (to use English, to obey American law etc.) This is the way how and the place where Spanglish comes . . .

This dissertation contains four essays that apply techniques of learning and implicit contracts to the analysis of macroeconomic problems. The first essay explores the roleof borrowers reputation concerns on the magnification of macroeconomic crises. The second essay investigates the importance of financial frictions in delaying the recovery of economies after crises. The third essay (coauthored with David Lagakos) develops an implicit contract model to understand the differences in wage smoothing across industries. The fourth essay studies the effects of different signalling technologies in the efficiency of organizations with career concerned managers.

Social networks play an important role in the labor market. Various surveys document that from 30 to 60 percent of jobs are found through friends or relatives. To better understand how networks operate in the labor market, I examine how networks that were formed involuntarily as a result of military drafts in the American Civil War and the First World War affect the postwar labor market outcomes of veterans in 1880, 1900, and 1930.

Between 1940 and 2000 there has been a substantial increase of educational attainment in the United States. What caused this trend? We develop a model of schooling decisions in order to assess the quantitative contribution of technological progress in explaining the evolution of education. We use earnings across educational groups and growth in gross domestic product per worker to restrict technological progress. These restrictions imply substantial skill-biased technical change (SBTC). We find that changes in relative earnings through SBTC can explain the bulk of the increase in educational attainment. In particular, a calibrated version of the model generates an increase in average years of schooling of 48 percent compared to 27 percent in the data. This strong effect of changes in relative earnings on educational attainment is robust to relevant variations in the model and is consistent with empirical estimates of the long-run income elasticity of schooling. We also find that the substantial increase in life expectancy observed during the period contributes little to the change in educational attainment in the model.

The objective of this research is to assess the impact of future land cover changes on nutrient enrichment of streams. It applies cellular automata (CA) Markov chain model to simulate future land cover change and a GIS-based distributed cell-based model to predict non-point source nitrogen loadings to streams. The integration of the two models provides site-specific information on how the spatial location and extent of urban development can affect nitrogen pollution under dry, normal and wet conditions. Two scenarios of land cover change, in particular, were examined. The baseline scenario (Scenario 1) involved only minor protection of environmentally sensitive areas. The open space conservation network scenario (Scenario 2) incorporated the principles of "green" infrastructure as outlined by the relevant literature. Scenario 2 was based on protection of riparian areas, floodplains, wetlands, urban open space, and areas with exceedingly shallow depth to seasonally high water table and bedrock. Increased setbacks, where appropriate, were considered. The impact of the projected land cover change under different development scenarios was then examined in terms of nitrogen delivery ratios, total loads and contributing areas. A spatial hydrological model of the watershed was developed under dry, normal and wet conditions. A non-linear regression model was applied to estimate nitrogen trapping efficiencies and delivery ratios based on field characteristics such as slope, saturated hydraulic conductivity, soil mean particle diameter, Manning's roughness coefficient and length of flow. An attenuation factor taking into account cost distance to streams and decay constant was also incorporated into the model to account for transmission losses. Contributing areas of nitrogen delivery to streams were delineated based on the model . . .

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is a primary source of information on the changing health of the US population over the past 4 decades. The full potential of NHIS data for analyzing long-term change, however, has rarely been exploited. Time series analysis is complicated by several factors: large numbers of data files and voluminous documentation, complexity of file structures; and changing sample designs, questionnaires, and variable-coding schemes. We describe a major data integration project that will simplify cross-temporal analysis of population health data available in the NHIS. The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) is a Web-based system that provides an integrated set of data and documentation based on the NHIS public use files from 1969 to the present. The Integrated Health Interview Series enhances the value of NHIS data for researchers by allowing them to make consistent comparisons across 4 decades of dramatic changes in health status, health behavior, and healthcare.

Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract, these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work suggests that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depends critically on laws governing property division, I show that these results are not robust to alternative specifications and controls. I find, instead, that unilateral divorce led to an increase in both married and unmarried female labor force participation, regardless of the preexisting laws regarding property division.

Approximately 18 percent of Hispanic families, 13 percent of Asian families, 13 percent of black families, and 11 percent of white non-Hispanic families include a child under age 3. 4 In recent years, immigration has accelerated diversity among the infant/toddler population.5 One in four children under age 3 live in an immigrant family (i.e., one comprised of one or more foreign-born parents).6 Approximately 62 percent of immigrant families with children under 3 have origins in Latin America and the Caribbean, representing many countries and many distinct languages.7 Approximately one of seven babies and toddlers in the U.S. have a parent who speaks limited English,8 indicating that a language other than English is likely to be spoken in the home. The extent to which infants and toddlers in these households are exposed also to English—for example, through sibling interactions or in child care or other settings—varies considerably. . .

Surge-and-decline theory accounts for an enduring regularity in American politics: the predictable increase in voter turnout that accompanies on-year congressional elections and its equally predictable decrease at midterm. Despite the theory's wide historical applicability, antebellum American political history offers a strong challenge to its generalizability, with patterns of surge-and-decline nowhere evident in the period's aggregate electoral data. Why? The answer to this puzzle lies with the institutional design of antebellum elections. Today, presidential and on-year congressional elections are everywhere same-day events. By comparison, antebellum states scheduled their on-year congressional elections in one of three ways: before, after, or on the same day as the presidential election. The structure of antebellum elections offers a unique opportunity-akin to a natural experiment-to illuminate surge-and-decline dynamics in ways not possible by the study of contemporary congressional elections alone. Utilizing quantitative and qualitative materials, our analysis clarifies and partly resolves this lack of fit between theory and historical record. It also adds to our understanding of the effects of political institutions and electoral design on citizen engagement.

Most existing anonymization work has been done on static datasets, which have no update and need only one-time publication. Recent studies consider anonymizing dynamic datasets with external updates: the datasets are updated with record insertions and/or deletions. This paper addresses a new problem: anonymous re-publication of datasets with internal updates, where the attribute values of each record are dynamically updated. This is an important and challenging problem for attribute values of records are updating frequently in practice and existing methods are unable to deal with such a situation. We initiate a formal study of anonymous re-publication of dynamic datasets with internal updates, and show the invalidation of existing methods. We introduce theoretical definition and analysis of dynamic datasets, and present a general privacy disclosure framework that is applicable to all anonymous re-publication problems. We propose a new counterfeited generalization principle called m-Distinct to effectively anonymize datasets with both external updates and internal updates. We also develop an algorithm to generalize datasets to meet m-Distinct. The experiments conducted on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Focusing on the narrower concept of a knowledge-economy-based growth strategy, this paper explores whether a strong link between a college-educated population and a regions economic performance was an important ingredient in the growth experience of the Sunbelt during the 1990s. The issue is addressed through analysis of two different datasets. First, the education and income characteristics of the people moving to the Sunbelt region are examined using migration data from the 2000 census. Then we look at the link between the knowledge-economy metric of the share of college educated adults and economic growth in the Sunbelt in the 1990s using data for 116 Sunbelt MSAs. The results of our analysis provide little evidence that a college educated workforce was a major factor promoting economic growth in Sunbelt ci-ties during that period.

This paper exploits the rich variation in timing and outcomes of 140 employment discrimination lawsuits brought against US law enforcement agencies to estimate the cumulative employment effects of temporary, externally-imposed affirmative action (AA). Using confidential administrative data on 479 of the largest state and local agencies spanning a period of 33 years, we show that AA plans increase black employment for all ranks of police, averaging between 4.5 and 6.2 percentage points over and above any prevailing trends in the country. We find no erosion of black employment gains from AA in the decade and a half following AA termination. Nevertheless, in departments whose plans are terminated, we find a significant decrease in black employment growth relative to departments whose plans continue. In contrast to our findings for blacks, we find only marginal employment gains for women and none at higher ranks.

Hedonic estimates of quality of life across cities correspond to the cost-of-living in a city is relative to its local wage-level. Adjusting the standard hedonic model to account for federal taxes, non-housing costs, and non-labor income produces quality-of-life estimates different from the existing literature. The adjusted model produces city rankings positively correlated with those in the popular literature, and predicts how housing costs rise with wage levels, controlling for amenities. Mild seasons, sunshine, and coastal location account for most quality-of-life differences; once these amenities are accounted for, quality of life does not depend on city size, contrary to previous ndings.

OpropósitodesseartigoéanalisaradesigualdadesocialnoBrasil do século XIX utilizando as listas nominativas de habitantes produzidasduranteadécadade1830.Primeiramenteapresento e utilizo o sistema de codificação de ocupações denominado HISCO. Em seguida, exponho e aplico a HISCLASS, uma proposta de análise de classes sociais a partir da declaração de ocupações, como uma metodologia de análise da desigualdade social em sociedades pré-industriais não-européias. Para sociedades coloniais e pré-coloniais, é necessário considerar outras dimensões da vida social para que se consiga construir um sistema adequado de mensuração do status social e da mobilidadesocial.Paraocasolatino-americano,eemespecialnas áreas coloniais portuguesas, considero sobretudo as categorias censitárias de raça/etnia e de condição social dos indivíduos (livres, libertos ou escravos)como elementos importantespara esse tipo de análise.

One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data is scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain, and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time-series and geographic patterns of participation.