The interpretation of twentieth-century African American inequality remains fraught with controversy. Have barriers to African American economic progress crumbled or remained stubbornly resistant to fundamental change? Has the story been similar for women and men? What mechanisms have fostered or retarded change? Those questions matter not only because they cut so close to the heart of twentieth-century American history but also because they bear on important public-policy choices in the present. In this article, we rely primarily on census data assembled in the University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to examine the controversial topic of black inequality. Our answer to the questions the data pose does not support either the optimistic or the pessimistic version of African American history. But it does not come down in an illusory middle, either . . .

Responding to a lack of neighborhood play space, in 1948 a group of parents got together to create the Community Tot Lot, a private playlot with membership open to all in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Although a seemingly isolated incident, across the nation thousands of play yards were being created. The existence of such spaces has been largely hidden from historians, much as they are tucked away from the general notice of passersby. In Chicago it is thanks to a contest run by the Chicago Motor Club that we can document their existence. In 1949 the Community Tot Lot was entered in a contest for the best private play yards. Between 1934 and 1958, the Motor Club held the contest, resulting in more than a hundred entrants over 17 years. The Motor Clubs logic was simple: alarming numbers of children were being killed each year playing in the street: 164 in Cook County in 1933. The solution, as the Motor Club saw it, was to find them better, safer places to play. The private initiative behind the play yards was effectively filling a public need, anticipating a public policy shift in urban park ideology.

The course of urban history in the United States has never run smoothly, and Chicago's path is no exception. As middle and upper income residents fled core city neighborhoods in favor of the suburbs, low-income residents remained behind to endure the deterioration resulting from a lack of capital to invest in neighborhood upkeep. The real estate and financial industries exacerbated the decline by refusing to provide loans to residents of these neighborhoods. Both economic and government forces historically have harmed these communities and their residents. Yet, even today when government policies forbid lenders to avoid these neighborhoods and the flow of capital is improving local assets, the very process of urban revitalization places low-income residents in vulnerable positions. Traditionally, homeownership was the most important asset, but it remains unclear whether it lessens the risk of displacement by these residents. The present study addresses the question of whether housing tenure plays a role in how well a household withstands pressure to move resulting from gentrification. Previous studies had either focused solely on the displacement of low-income renters or examined the situation of homeowners from a qualitative angle. This paper provides to these issues a quantitative examination largely absent from the existing body of literature. A series of ordered probit models employing a sample of low-income residents from the 77 community areas of Chicago estimates the interacted effects of housing tenure and gentrification on duration of residence, controlling for the socioeconomic factors that the literature indicates play a role in both decisions to rent or own and in how long to stay put. The results of these models indicate that low-income households facing high levels of gentrification are statistically significantly more likely to stay longer in their homes if they own rather rent. Renters are most likely, with a probability of 39 percent, to live in their homes between two and five years when faced with high levels of gentrification. Homeowners under similar conditions, in contrast, are most likely (24 percent) to reside in their homes between 11 and 20 years. The evidence of this analysis, therefore, supports the hypothesis that homeownership provides a protective effect even to low-income populations facing pressures to leave. Based on the result of this study, policymakers would do well to focus more energies and resources on promoting and sustaining homeownership among low-income populations, especially those residing in communities experiencing the onset or continuing changes associated with gentrification. Current government supports for low-income rental housing, such as housing tax credits and Section 8 vouchers, are unlikely to be effective for low-income households facing conditions of dramatic neighborhood change.

We use the Islamic holy month of Ramadan as a natural experiment in fasting and fetal health. In Michigan births 1989-2006, we find prenatal exposure to Ramadan among Arab mothers results in lower birthweight and reduced gestation length. Exposure to Ramadan in the first month of gestation is also associated with a sizable reduction in the number of male births. In Census data for Uganda, Iraq, and the US we find strong associations between in utero exposure to Ramadan and the likelihood of being disabled as an adult. Effects are particularly large for mental (or learning) disabilities. We also find significant effects on proxies for wealth, the sex composition of the adult population, and more suggestive evidence of effects on schooling and earnings. We find no evidence that negative selection in conceptions during Ramadan accounts for our findings, suggesting that avoiding Ramadan exposure during pregnancy is costly or the long-term effects of fasting unknown.

Beginning in 1959 the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, wereclosed for 5 years in opposition to court-ordered integration. I combine datafrom numerous administrative sources to examine the effects of the schoolclosings on the educational attainment and economic outcomes of affected blackchildren. Although exposed students obtained an average of 1 fewer year ofschooling than peers in surrounding counties, they do not exhibit substantiallyworse material, health, and incarceration outcomes. These findings may resultfrom (1) the provision of substitute educational opportunities for many studentsand (2) flat returns at levels of educational attainment typical for southernVirginia blacks during this period.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the U.S. are attending community colleges. Such colleges are cheaper, closer to home-and much more varied in their offerings than ever before. At some, you can even get a bachelor's degree.

We propose and estimate a model in which changes in the demographic composition of the labor force may affect the returns to labor market experience. We consider workersas providing two distinct productive services physical effort, or labor, and services of the skill accumulated with labor market experience, or experience. The key element in the model is the aggregate production function that allows for complementarity between the appropriately measured aggregate stocks of labor and experience. The parameters of the aggregate technology are identified by estimating individual earnings equations that consistently aggregate. Both time-series and cross-sectional data confirm strong experience-labor complementarity. We find that the observed demographic changes that drive the aggregate experience to labor ratio account nearly perfectly for the substantial changes in the experience premium over time.

In this chapter, I provide a theoretical and empirical overview of the entrepreneurial experience of Latino/as in the United States. In the first section, I discuss the traditional approach to ethnic enterprise. Next, I provide an exploratory investigation of self-employment among diverse Latino/a-origin groups. Because many of these Latino/a groups are recent migrants to the United States and/or their populations are small, this analysis serves as a preliminary first look at self-employment across distinct Latin American national-origin groups. Finally, although ethnic entrepreneurship among the Latino/a population overall remains understudied (with the exception of Cuban immigrants and their descendants), I present research that has explored the entrepreneurial and self-employment practices of the more traditional and larger Latino/a population in the United States.

This paper examines the dynamic implications of social networks for the labor market out-comes of political refugees resettled in the U.S. Using a theoretical model of job informationtransmission within social networks, the paper shows that the relationship between the size of asocial network, the vintage of network members and labor market outcomes is non-monotonic.To test this prediction, I use an empirical strategy which exploits the fact that resettlementagencies distribute refugees across cities, precluding individuals from sorting into locations.The results indicate that an increase in the number of social network members resettled in thesame year or one year prior leads to a deterioration of labor market outcomes, while a greaternumber of long-tenured network members improves the probability of employment and raisesthe hourly wage for newly arrived refugees.

In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: the wage and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most of theoretical and empirical work ignores prices other than wages when studying labor supply. The question we address in this paper is whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as has generally been assumed. We describe a simple model to demonstrate that the effects of wage and non-labor income on labor supply will typically differ by location. We show, in particular, the derivative of the labor supply with respect to non-labor income will be independent of price only when 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.

We propose and estimate a model in which changes in the demographic compositionof the labor force may affect the returns to labor market experience. We consider workersas providing two distinct productive services physical effort, or labor, and services ofthe skill accumulated with labor market experience, or experience. The key element inthe model is the aggregate production function that allows for complementarity betweenthe appropriately measured aggregate stocks of labor and experience. The parametersof the aggregate technology are identified by estimating individual earnings equationsthat consistently aggregate. Both time-series and cross-sectional data confirm strongexperience-labor complementarity. We find that the observed demographic changes thatdrive the aggregate experience to labor ratio account nearly perfectly for the substantialchanges in the experience premium over time.

We consider a competitive equilibrium matching model where technologicalprogress is embodied in new jobs. Jobs are slowly created over time and in equilibriumthere is dispersion in job technologies. Workers can be employed in at mostone job. They decide on whether to participate in the labor market and on howmany hours to work when assigned to a job. This endogenously generates inequalityin wages and in labor supply. When the pace of technological progress acceleratesdifferences in job technologies widen. This increases wage inequality and workers decideto work less often but to supply longer hours once employed. The model canexplain the simultaneous fall in labor force participation and the increase in workinghours experienced by US male workers since the mid 70's. It can also explain thedifferential effects observed across skill groups.

Should the national government undertake policies aimed at strengthening the economies ofparticular localities or regions? Agglomeration economies and human capital spillovers suggestthat such policies could enhance welfare. However, the mere existence of agglomerationexternalities does not indicate which places should be subsidized. Without a better understandingof nonlinearities in these externalities, any government spatial policy is as likely to reduce as toincrease welfare. Transportation spending has historically done much to make or break particularplaces, but current transportation spending subsidizes low-income, low-density places whereagglomeration effects are likely to be weakest. Most large-scale place-oriented policies have hadlittle discernable impact. Some targeted policies such as Empowerment Zones seem to have aneffect but are expensive relative to their achievements. The greatest promise for a national place basedpolicy lies in impeding the tendency of highly productive areas to restrict their own growththrough restrictions on land use.

The previous literature of privacy preserving data publication has focused on performing "one-time" releases. Specifically, none of the existing solutions supports re-publication of the microdata, after it has been updated with insertions and deletions. This is a serious drawback, because currently a publisher cannot provide researchers with the most recent dataset continuously. This paper remedies the drawback. First, we reveal the characteristics of the re-publication problem that invalidate the conventional approaches leveraging k-anonymity and l-diversity. Based on rigorous theoretical analysis, we develop a new generalization principle m-invariance that effectively limits the risk of privacy disclosure in re-publication. We accompany the principle with an algorithm, which computes privacy-guarded relations that permit retrieval of accurate aggregate information about the original mi-crodata. Our theoretical results are confirmed by extensive experiments with real data.

A significant body of work demonstrates the powerful role that race has played in the growth, scope, and character of the American welfare state. Yet this literature has focused almost exclusively on Black-White relations, ignoring the role that immigration has had on the formation and evolution of U.S. welfare policies. This dissertation examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the early American welfare state by comparing the extension of social citizenship to Mexicans, European immigrants and Blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from government reports, archives, congressional debates, public opinion polls, the U.S. census, and the writings of contemporaries, this dissertation demonstrates that Blacks, Mexicans and European immigrants were each treated quite differently by the social welfare programs of the Progressive Era through the New Deal. European immigrants were largely . . .

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the rise in female labor supply during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labor force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the impact of the war on female labor supply and fertility in the decades following the war. For the war generation of women, the high demand for female labor brought about by mobilization leads to an increase in labor supply that persists after the war. As a result, younger women who reach adulthood in the 1950s face increased labor market competition, which impels them to exit the labor market and start having children earlier. The effect is amplified by the rise in taxes necessary to pay down wartime government debt. In our calibrated model, the war generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust.

They Call it Marriage asks when and why stories of interracial marriage between black women and white men manifested symbolic power in the nineteenth century U.S. It examines how political and social struggles at local and national levels transformed and/or failed to transform the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.Many states that had not yet legally prohibited interracial marriage did so following the Civil War. In Louisiana, the opposite occurred: Reconstruction authorities repealed such laws, enabling interracial couples to retroactively legitimate private religious marriages. The acknowledgment and registration of these previously unlawful rituals exposed a concealed past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people undertook wedding rituals and laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law. They Call it Marriage highlights their perspective on the law, not as a fixed set of rules but as a terrain of struggle, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing jurisdictions. The terms black and white hardly capture Louisianas simultaneously Caribbean and Southern ethno-racial landscape. Yet the use of marriage laws to order the population into categories of blanc and noir dated back to its French colonial government. Structuring interracial sexual relations by mandating that children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these binary demarcations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families internal affairs. Black women and white men, whose relationships were thus at once outside the law and subjected to constant scrutiny, often went to great lengths to attain, preserve, and occasionally escape marriage-like conditions with each other.Reconstruction required articulating new theories of family relationships, particularly where such couples were concerned. Women of color were considered innocuous in the role of white mens servants and slaves. But when they claimed the status of wives, their relationships were deployed in political rhetoric and literature as metaphors for profligacy and misrule. They Call it Marriage outlines changes in these couples status over the course of the nineteenth century, foregrounding both the family unit and gendered institutional roles within it. Situating these struggles over legitimacy amidst questions over whether American society was to be organized along lines of status or contract, it explores the dialectic between marriage as a gendered form of bondage and as a symbol of the exercise of free will and individual autonomy.The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the states borders. Perceived as the center of American race mixing, the state served as a crucial staging ground for struggles over civil rights. They Call it Marriage connects these roles by focusing on the rhetoric of color blindness and racial indeterminacy in local antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark Louisiana segregation case. In a number of these cases, the defense invoked the plaintiffs interracial genealogy in order to call into question their status as colored, arguing that without a firmly established racial identity, they lacked legal standing to sue. State authorities ongoing promotion of racial ambiguity and fluidity complicates any efforts to locate the transition point at which Louisiana is supposed to have abandoned a Latin three-caste racial system. It thus offers a means of reconsidering long-held beliefs about the importance of racial binarism in Jim Crow segregation.