This article presents a demographic portrait of young Hispanic children compared to young non-Hispanic Whites. New results from Census 2000 describe family and economic circumstances of children aged 08, as well as pre-K/nursery school and kindergarten enrollment for the United States, and for the 9 states with the largest number of young Hispanic children (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas). Most results in this article are presented in Tables 1 and 2, and these results along with many additional topics are available at, the website of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, State University of New York: www.albany.edu/CSDA/children. We are indebted to Jessica Singer for research assistance and Hui-Shien Tsao for computer assistance. We also wish to thank the National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for supporting research that provided a basis for t...

This paper draws a connection between ethnic labor market networks in the American Midwest when it was first being settled, the local identity or attachment to place that emerged endoge-nously to support these networks, and occupational mobility today. Individuals born in counties with greater ethnic fractionalization in 1860, which we expect to be associated with stronger local identity, are significantly less likely to hold professional jobs, which come with greater geographical mobility, in 2000. A further connection is made between local identity and a particular social institution the church-to explain the persistence of identity over multiple generations. We expect local identity to be positively correlated with the performance of the local church, which supports and is supported by this cultural trait, and as predicted counties with greater ethnic fractional-ization in 1860 are associated with greater religious participation over many years in the future.

Previous reviews of the literature have suggested that shared environmental effects may be underestimated in adoption studies because adopted individuals are exposed to a restricted range of family environments. A sample of 409 adoptive and 208 nonadoptive families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS) was used to identify the environmental dimensions on which adoptive families show greatest restriction and to determine the effect of this restriction on estimates of the adoptive sibling correlation. Relative to non-adoptive families, adoptive families experienced a 41% reduction of variance in parent disinhibitory psychopathology and an 18% reduction of variance in socioeconomic status (SES). There was limited evidence for range restriction in exposure to bad peer models, parent depression, or family climate. However, restriction in range in parent disinhibitory psychopathology and family SES had no effect on adoptive-sibling correlations for delinquency, drug use, and IQ. These data support the use of adoption studies to obtain direct estimates of the importance of shared environmental effects on psychological development.

This paper addresses five indicators of residential assimilation among three distinctive immigrant groups in the greater Los Angeles area, focusing on a single arrival cohort that came in 1970-79, and analyzing the pace and determinants of their assimilation between 1990 and 2000. Groups compared are Mexican, Korean and Chinese immigrants, along with a common reference group of native-born, non-Hispanic whites. We find that Mexicans?longitudinal changes in residential patterns resemble those expected by theories of residential assimilation while those for Chinese and Koreans do not. Koreans exhibit an unusually strong preference for remaining in Los Angeles city, often renting and living in districts with whites and Latinos. The Chinese are especially unusual, locating in the suburbs instead of the city, exhibiting very high homeownership soon after arrival, and moving into areas with increasingly higher concentrations of co-ethnics. In contrast to the two Asian groups, the Mexicans are more likely to reside in ethnic districts once they become homeowners. While findings provide limited support for residential assimilation, the dynamics of residential adjustment is more complex than previously revealed.

This paper analyzes newly created samples of the 1910 and 1920 censuses of Puerto Rico to describe the composition and distribution of the island's households. It suggests, among other things, that Puerto Rican households were unusually large and complex --more so, in fact, than in all other documented Latin American or Caribbean cases. Household types, of which we recognize six in two main categories, varied greatly according to the race and gender of persons the census identified as their heads. The spatial distribution of households with black or mulatto heads suggests, moreover, a strong association between blackness in the early twentieth century and distinct settlement patterns characteristic of various earlier phases of island history, when enslaved Africans were among the predominant settlers. The study demonstrates a sharp rise in the proportion of nuclear households during the 1910s and suggests possible explanations based on the economic changes taking place in these years. Finally, it proposes ways to connect long-term socio-historical processes, such as those strengthening communal solidarities among rural dwellers, with certain household patterns visible in the early twentieth century.

This paper proposes a theory of educational attainment di¤erences across U.S. metropolitan areas. The theory is motivated by the …nding that employment in business services predicts more than 70% of the observed cross-city variation in education. In the model, agglomeration economies in the production of business services, which are complementary with skilled labor, account for cross-city variation in education. The theory makes a number of testable predictions which …nd strong support in U.S. data.

An extensive literature debates the causes and consequences of the desegregation of American schools in the twentieth century. Despite the social importance of desegregation and the magnitude of the literature, we have lacked a comprehensive accounting of the basic facts of school desegregation. This paper uses newly assembled data to document when and how Southern school districts desegregated, as well as the extent of court involvement in the desegregation process over the two full decades after Brown. We also examine heterogeneity in the path to desegregation by district characteristics. The results suggest that the existing quantitative literature, which generally either begins in 1968 and focuses on the role of federal courts in larger urban districts or relies on highly aggregated data, often tells an incomplete story of desegregation. * We thank Bob Margo, Mark Tushnet, and session participants at the 2007 AEA meetings for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

The u.s.Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is pleased to present this national report on homelessness in America. The report was developed in response to Congressional directives that began in 2001 and charged the Department with assisting communities to implement local Homeless Management Information Systems or HMIS. J The primary goals in promoting local HMJS implementation are to improve the delivery of services to homeless clients and to increase understanding of their characteristics and needs at the local and national levels. According to Senate Report 109- I09, "The implementation of this new system would allow the Department to obtain meaningful data on the nation's homeless population and develop arulUal reports through an Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) .,,2 This first Annual Homeless Assessment Report is a culmination of several years of effort on the part of local communities and HUD to improve the collection of data on homeless persons. It is based on two local data sources. The first is HMIS data on sheltered homeless persons - that is, persons who used emergency and transitional housing - at any time during a three-month period, February to April 2005. The data were obtained from a nationally representative sample of communities. The second source is data on sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons provided by all Continuums ofCare (CoCs) as part of their 2005 HUD application for funding. The data are based on one-night counts of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons conducted in communities across the country in January 2005. An important advantage of the point-in-time count data is that it provides information for this report on unsheltered homeless persons - those who do not use shelters . . .

It is not uncommon (e.g. in the media) that specific groups are categorized as being racist. Based on an extensive dataset of intermarriage statistics our study questions the legitimacy of such characterizations. It suggests that, far from being group-dependent, segregation mechanisms are instead situation-dependent. More precisely, the degree of integration of a minority in terms of the frequency of intermarriage is seen to crucially depend upon the proportion p of the minority. Thus, a population may have a segregative behavior with respect to a high-p (p > 20%) minority A and at the same time a tolerant attitude toward a low-p (p < 2%) minority B. This remains true even when A and B represent the same minority; for instance Black-White intermarriage is much more frequent in Montana than it is in South Carolina. In short, the nature of minority groups is largely irrelevant, the key factor being their proportion in a given area.

Relying on panel data from the first-wave Disability Study, an adult community sample living in Miami-Dade County in 2004, this dissertation examines the influence of women's race, ethnicity, culture, and structure on their health care utilization, quality of care, an institutional barriers to that care. Few studies go beyond the black-white dichotomy in describing disparities in health care, and these analyses are unique in investigating differences between white, African American, Cuban, and non-Cuban Hispanic subpopulations.Part One describes how health care utilization patterns differ by race and ethnicity and explores the influence of culture and structure. Findings indicated that ethnicity is strongly associated with whether women saw a health care provider in the past year, with Hispanics less likely than whites to report having accessed care. Race and ethnicity both are associated with frequency of use, with minority women in general reporting lower rates of medical visits than white women. I examined the effects of five cultural factors (language, exercise, obesity, religiosity, and tobacco use) and four structural factors (neighborhood safety, discrimination, insurance status, and social isolation). Health care use was associated with having a preference for the English language and with being insured, religious, and obese. Higher utilization rates were typical for women who do not exercise regularly, use tobacco, live in unsafe neighborhoods, and report higher levels of daily discrimination.Part Two examines racial and ethnic, cultural, and structural variation in women's perceptions of the quality of their n on-routine health care and of institutional barriers to that care. Findings fail to suggest racial, ethnic, or language effects, but they do not indicate that women who are insured and those who report low levels of daily discrimination report higher quality of care.This dissertation makes a number of contributions with important implications. Results underscore the multidimensionality of health care uptake and quality, with the implication that comprehensive measures of these outcomes should be considered in racial ethnic disparity studies. Results also highlight the value of including cultural and structural explanatory factors in studies of health care.

This article investigates the key determinants of entry into the teaching profession and the subsequent sorting of new teachers across urban, suburban, and rural schools. Of particular interest is the relative importance of teacher salaries, alternative labor market opportunities, and nonpecuniary job attributes or working conditions to this decision process. Results from a nested logit model applied to the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study show that working conditions play a relatively more important role in determining where new teachers end up choosing to teach, rather than differences in teacher salaries. This is especially true for women. Meanwhile, wages play a relatively more important role in the occupational entry decision. In addition, there is significant variation in teacher quality indicators across these school locations.

There are several theories that seek to link the decline in the aggregate skill level of the Southern African American population before the Great Migration to migration before World War I. Showing educational selection in migration is complicated since education and other features of human capital are highly correlated with one another. I use IPUMS and the Colored Troops Sample of the Union Army Data to estimate the effects of literacy and health (stock and flow) on the migration propensities of African Americans. I find that literacy and health flows were strong predictors of migration, and the effect of literacy on migration is reduced by one-quarter to one-third once health is controlled for. Additionally, the Colored Troops Sample allows us to measure migration in several ways, with migrations that would and would not be prone to educational selection. The results are robust to the measurement of migration and health.

The endogeneity of prices has long been recognized as the main identification problem in the estimation of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the characteristics of a given product. This issue is particularly important when estimating MWTP in the housing market, since a number of housing and neighborhood features are unobserved by the econometrician. This paper proposes the use of a well defined type of transaction costs moving costs generated by property tax laws - to deal with this type of omitted variable bias. Californias Proposition 13 property tax law is the source of variation in transaction costs used in the empirical analysis. Beyond its fiscal consequences, Proposition 13 created a lock-in effect on housing choice because of the implicit tax break enjoyed by homeowners living in the same house for a long time. First, I provide estimates of this lock-in effect using a natural experiment created by two subsequent amendments to Proposition 13 - Propositions 60 and 90. These amendments allow households headed by an individual over the age of 55 to transfer the implicit tax benefit to a new home. I show that mobility rates of 55-year old homeowners are approximately 25% higher than those of 54 year olds. Second, all these features of the tax law are then incorporated into a household sorting model. The key insight of this model is that because of the property tax law, different potential buyers have different user costs for the same house. The exogenous property tax component of this user cost then works as an instrument for prices. I find that MWTP estimates for housing characteristics are approximately 100% upward biased when the model does not account for the price endogeneity.

This paper documents the widely perceived but little investigated notion that teachers today are less qualified than they once were. Evidence of a marked decline in the quality of young women going into teaching between 1960 and 1990 is presented, using standardized test scores, undergraduate institution selectivity, and positive assortative mating characteristics as indicators of quality. In contrast, the quality of young women becoming professionals increased. The Roy model of self-selection highlights how occupational differences in the returns to skill determine teacher quality. Estimates suggest the significance of increasing professional opportunities for women in affecting the decline in teacher quality.

This study provides empirical evidence that trade increases on-the-job human capitalaccumulation by estimating the effect of home country openness on estimated returns tohome country experience of U.S. immigrants. The positive effect of trade on on-the-jobhuman capital accumulation remains significant when controlling for GDP, educationalattainment and institutional quality. It is not the result of self-selection, heterogeneity inreturns to experience, English speaking origin or cultural background. The effect persistswhen restricting the sample to non-OECD countries, thereby resolving the theoreticalambiguity whether trade increases or decreases learning-by-doing. The role of trade ingenerating economic growth is therefore likely to be more important than generallyconsidered.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature. Moreover, while much is known about 19th century black legal and material conditions, less is known about how 19th century institutional arrangements were related to black stature. Although modern blacks and whites reach similar terminal statures when brought to maturity under optimal biological conditions, 19th century African-American statures were consistently shorter than whites, indicating a uniquely 19th century phenomenon may have inhibited black stature growth. It is geography and insolation that present the most striking attribute for 19th century black stature, and greater insolation and higher slave prices are documented here to be associated with taller black statures.