In this paper, I examine temporal changes in U.S. adult mortality by chronic disease cause of death and by sex over a 40-year period in the second half of the twentieth century. I apply age-period-cohort (APC) analyses that combine conventional approaches and a new method of model estimation to simultaneously account for age, period, and cohort variations in mortality rates for four leading causes of deaths, including heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and breast cancer. The results show that large reductions in mortality since the late 1960s continued well into the late 1990s and that these reductions were predominately contributed by cohort effects. Cohort effects are found to differ by specific causes of death examined, but they generally show substantial survival improvements. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to demographic theories of mortality reductions, differential cohort accumulation of health capital and lifetime exposures to socioeconomic and behavioral risk factors, and period changes in diagnostic techniques and medical treatment.

Immigrant Policy - policies focusing on immigrants - has been vigorously debated in this country. Most of the debate focuses on legal status (citizenship) or fiscal status (fiscal costs to society). This paper presents a new perspective on immigrants - Immigrant Capital - which portrays immigrants as assets to the communities in which they live. A case study of the immigrant capital of people of Mexican origin in Minnesota illustrates this new perspective.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant provides Federal grants to States for a wide range of benefits and activities. It is best known as the major source of funding for cash welfare for needy families with children. However, Federal law allows TANF funds to be used for other benefits and services that provide economic help to low-income families with children and support the goals of reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and promoting two-parent families. At the Federal level, TANF is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. However, most TANF grants are to States who, with localities, nonprofit organizations, and private sector entities, deliver the benefits and services to families. TANF programs operate in all 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. American Samoa is eligible to operate a TANF program, but has not opted to do so. Additionally, TANF permits Indian tribes the authority to operate their own programs. As of January 2008, 269 tribes and Alaskan villages operated tribal TANF programs.

The advent of the U.S. Interstate Highway System provides an interesting experiment, which I use to identify the labor market effects of reduced trade barriers. This highway network was designed to connect cities and border crossings and to serve national defense, and as an unintended consequence it crossed many rural counties. I find that these counties experienced an increase in trade-related activities, such as trucking and retail sales. By increasing trade, the highways raised the relative demand for skilled manufacturing workers in skill-abundant counties and reduced it elsewhere, consistent with the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin model.

Standard pattern discovery techniques, such as association rules, suffer an extreme risk of finding very large numbers of spurious patterns for many knowledge discovery tasks. The direct-adjustment approach to controlling this risk applies a statistical test during the discovery process, using a critical value adjusted to take account of the size of the search space. However, a problem with the direct-adjustment strategy is that it may discard numerous true patterns. This paper investigates the assignment of different critical values to different areas of the search space as an approach to alleviating this problem, using a variant of a technique originally developed for other purposes. This approach is shown to be effective at increasing the number of discoveries while still maintaining strict control over the risk of false discoveries.

This technology needs assessment report of populations living in the Southeast Los Angeles(SELA) region addresses the root causes and dilemmas of the digital divide problem. This study addresses the central question: how can the Southeast Cities Technology Collaborative (SCTC)structure a regional intervention project that spearheads development in the productive use of information technology and benefits a low-income population with low educational attainment in Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) cities?The study first provides a regional survey of the fiscal, institutional, and technological challenges facing this demographic region. The SELA region is a sub-section of Los Angeles County and comprised of eight cities and one unincorporated district: Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Maywood, South Gate,Vernon, Walnut Park, and the Florence-Firestone area. The demographic survey identifies that the SELA region has strong indicators of digital divide inequality. The study further provides an assessment of existing digital divide intervention efforts in the SELA region: public access to computers and the internet at public schools, public libraries, nonprofit and community-based organization, city-initiated programs, and private for-profit services. The study takes account of community impressions and provides specific ecommendations for institutional changes than can better integrate the population into a positive development process. The study finds that investment in coordinating the integration of human capacity and technical infrastructure to network social service providers and users will support the social and economic advancement of the region. Investment in training school-age children, youth, and adults to harness the productive uses of information and telecommunications technology will yield the greatest benefits for future generations.

Suburbs in the United States, traditionally represented as a homogenous domain of white, middle-class residents, are in the midst of unprecedented demographic change due to immigration. Suburban immigrant populations now outnumber and are growing faster than their counterparts in central cities. Many suburbs across the country have responded unfavorably to these demographic changes, however, pushing in some cases for the implementation of ordinances and other local policies specifically designed to exclude undocumented immigrants from their communities. In this paper, I attempt to understand the political, urban, and demographic processes at play that are shaping the decisions of suburbs to implement local immigration policies. I examine how these policies are part of a broader trend of the devolution of immigration responsibilities to local scales, and I consider how idealized notions of suburban space guide local responses to immigration. Finally, using the Chicago metropolitan area as a case study, I employ spatial analysis techniques to analyze the relationships between settlement patterns of the foreign-born and local political attitudes toward immigration.

We use a unique data set linking information about buyers and sellers to the completecensus of housing transactions in the San Francisco metropolitan area for a period of 15 yearsto examine the microfoundations of housing market dynamics. We develop a tractable modelof neighborhood choice in a dynamic setting along with a computationally straightforwardestimation approach. This approach allows the observed and unobserved features of eachneighborhood to evolve in a completely flexible way and uses information on neighborhoodchoice and the timing of moves to recover semi-parametrically: (i) preferences for housingand neighborhood attributes, (ii) preferences regarding the performance of the house as afinancial asset (e.g., expected appreciation, volatility), and (iii) moving costs. This model andestimation approach is potentially applicable to the study a wide set of dynamic phenomenain housing markets and cities.

We quantify agglomeration spillovers by estimating the impact of the opening of a large new manufacturing plant on the total factor productivity (TFP) of incumbent plants in the same county. Articles in the corporate real estate journal Site Selection reveal the county where the Million Dollar Plant ultimately chose to locate (the winning county), as well as the one or two runner-up counties (the losing counties). The incumbent plants in the losing counties are used as a counterfactual for the TFP of incumbent plants in winning counties in the absence of the plant opening. Incumbent plants in winning and losing counties have economically and statistically similar trends in TFP in the 7 years before the opening, which supports the validity of the identifying assumption. After the new plant opening, incumbent plants in winning counties experience a sharp relative increase in TFP. Five years after the opening, TFP of incumbent plants in winning counties is 12% higher than TFP of incumbent plants in losing counties. Consistent with some theories of agglomeration, this effect is larger for incumbent plants that share similar labor and technology pools with the new plant. We also find evidence of a relative increase in skill-adjusted labor costs in winning counties, indicating that the ultimate effect on profits is smaller than the direct increase in productivity.

This paper offers a simple explanation for differences in home price growth across metropolitan areas over the past three decades. Supply is least elastic, and price appreciation potentially greatest, in metropolitan areas where available land is in worse locations than existing housing. Across US metropolitan areas, home price appreciation between 1980 and 2008 is highly correlated with the within-metropolitan relationship between age of housing stock and land rents, as measured by either hotel room prices in 2008 or apartment rents in 1980. The relationship between this land rent gradient and home price appreciation is stronger where predicted employment growth based on1980 SIC code shares is greater.

How easily can Tracking Analyst animate NHGIS spatial-temporal data? This Capstone project identifies the steps needed to explore census data from a spatial-temporal perspective and identifies several recommendations to both ESRI and the Minnesota Population Center to assist users inexploring these spatial-temporal data.

This paper establishes the existence of a previously overlooked relationship between agglomeration and hours worked. Among nonprofessionals, hours worked decrease with the density of workers in the same occupation. Among professionals, the relationship is positive. This relationship is stronger for the young than for the middle-aged. Moreover, young professional hours worked are especially sensitive to the presence of rivals. The paper shows that these patterns are consistent with the selection of hard workers into cities and with the high productivity of agglomerated labor. The behavior of young professionals is also consistent with the presence of keen rivalry in larger markets, a kind of urban rat race.

Abundant research investigates the content of public discourse about social problems. Far less is known about the quantity of social problems discourse. This article employs original data to address this gap by examining the emergence of single-parent families as a social problem within U.S. popular magazines and social science journals. I trace the growth of discourse about single-parent families in magazines indexed by the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature(N= 3050) and social science journals indexed by JSTOR (N= 1376) between 1900 and 1998 and explore factors associated with this growth. The results indicate that contemporary issues functioned as rival social problems and depressed single-parent family discourse within magazines but not within journals. Increases in the prevalence of single-parent families were associated with increases in related discourse in both arenas, but discourse increased earlier in journals. Growing popular concern about single-parent family formation in the 1960s was associated with a reduction in the quantity of single-parent family discourse within journals but not within magazines.

This paper uses 2000 Census data to estimate the relationship of agglomeration and proximity to human capital to wages. The paper takes a geographic approach, and focuses on the attenuation of agglomeration and human capital effects. Differencing and instrumental variable methods are employed to address endogeneity in the wageagglomeration relationship and also to deal with measurement error in our agglomeration and human capital variables. Three key results are obtained. First, the spatial concentration of employment within five miles is positively related to wage. Second, the benefits of spatial concentration are driven by proximity to college educated workers, an instance of human capital spillovers. Third, these effects attenuate sharply with distance.

Abundant research investigates the content of public discourse about social problems. Far less is known about the quantity of social problems discourse. This article employs original data to address this gap by examining the emergence of single-parent families as a social problem within U.S. popular magazines and social science journals. I trace the growth of discourse about single-parent families in magazines indexed by the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (N = 3050) and social science journals indexed by JSTOR (N = 1376) between 1900 and 1998 and explore factors associated with this growth. The results indicate that contemporary issues functioned as rival social problems and depressed single-parent family discourse within magazines but not within journals. Increases in the prevalence of single-parent families were associated with increases in related discourse in both arenas, but discourse increased earlier in journals. Growing popular concern about single-parent family formation in the 1960s was associated with a reduction in the quantity of single-parent family discourse within journals but not within magazines.