The existing literature on skill-biased technical change has not considered how the technological endowment itself plays a role in the returns to skill. This paper constructs a simple model of skill biased technical change which highlights the role that resource endowments play in the returns to education. The model predicts variation in returns to education with skill biased technological change if there is significant heterogeneity in resource endowments before the technological change. Using a variety of historical sources, we document the heterogeneous technology levels by region in the American past. We then estimate the returns to education of high school teachers in the early twentieth century using a new data source. a report from the U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1909. Overall, we find significant regional variation in the returns to education that match differences in resource endowments, with large (within-occupation) returns for the Midwest and Southwest (7%), but much lower returns in the South (3%) and West (0.5%). We also show that our results are generalizable to returns to education in the United States and that returns to education for teachers tracked quite closely with the overall returns to education from 1940 onward.

This article describes new public use data samples made from the first and second ordinary U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico and how and why these samples were created. The digital files were made by sampling and transcribing information from archival microfilms of the original census schedules. Textual information was transcribed verbatim. Procedures and coding conform to the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) standard for census samples. Versions of the files are currently available from IPUMS (http://www.ipums.umn. edu/usa/) and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Data Archive (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu).

Easier divorce has two effects on marriage rates and fertility. It dilutes the value of marriage, therefore reducing marriage rates and marital fertility and potentially increasing out of wedlock fertility. But easier divorce reduces also the commitment cost of marriage leading women to "try" marriage especially when in child bearing age or even already pregnant. We find that total fertility and out-of-wedlock fertility decline after the introduction of unilateral divorce. Women planning to have children marry more easily with an easier "exit option" from marriage. Thus, more children are born in the first years of marriage, while marital fertility does not change, probably as a result of an increase in divorce and marital instability. Therefore we find strong evidence consistent with the "commitment effect".

Despite significant increases in womens labor force attachment, occupational prestige and proportionate contribution to family income, the empirical evidence indicates that long-distance family migration continues to be motivated disproportionately by the employment dynamics of the male partner in married-couple families. Researchers have attributed this sex asymmetry to one of two influences: (1) individual-level human capital disparities between spouses or (2) familial gender role inequality. I test the human capital and gender-role explanations against Mincer's (1978) structural explanation. The structural perspective attributes sex asymmetry in family migration decision-making to sex inequality and segregation the labor market. This analysis uses individual- and family-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), occupation-level data from the 1970-1990 U.S. Decennial Censuses Integrated Public Use Micro Samples (IPUMS), and discrete-time event history models to estimate the influence of individual-, family- and occupational-level characteristics on family migration events.

Spurred in part by the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, considerable progress has been made over the past several decades in documenting the family behavior of Hispanics. Scholars increasingly recognize the importance of disaggregating the Hispanic population by national origin and generation, but the literature remains inconsistent in this regard. With an emphasis on demographic indicators of family behavior, this review summarizes trends in marriage, fertility, and family/household structure among the major Hispanic subgroups and identifies key issues in the literature that attempts to explain existing patterns. The role of generation is systematically addressed, as are the shortcomings of the standard practice of using cross-sectional data on generation to draw inferences about assimilation. We conclude that new research designs are needed to address the complexities of the migration process and their links to family patterns. In addition, future research should push toward greater integration of cultural and structural perspectives on how Hispanic families are shaped.

We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to estimate the effects of ability and family income on educational attainment in the early 1980s and early 2000s. The effects of family income on college attendance increase substantially over this period. Cognitive ability strongly affects schooling outcomes in both periods. We develop an educational choice model that incorporates both borrowing constraints and a “consumption value” of schooling. The model cannot explain the rising effects of family income on college attendance in response to rising costs and returns to college without appealing to borrowing constraints.

The gap in mortality between whites and African Americans throughout the 20th century stands as a grim testament to the divergent standards of living that race has delivered in American social life. In 1900 the life expectancy of African Americans was 12-16 years shorter that of whites, and although the gap declined by half over the century, it remained substantial in 2000. In this paper we examine two key questions about the consequences of the racial disparities in mortality. First, how many extra Blacks died over the course of the 20th century because of the enduring racial mortality gap? Second, what was the impact of those excess deaths on subsequent Black population growth throughout the century? To address these questions we use the component method of population projection to estimate the hypothetical rate of growth and size of the African American population under the counterfactual assumption of racial equality in mortality.

The college financial aid system imposes an implicit asset tax that is prevalent and substantial. Facing this tax, rational families should reduce their total assets and shelter assets in protected categories. I find that the tax induces a 7 to 12% reduction in total assets, a result in line with the literature. Furthermore, I find evidence that families reallocate assets into sheltered retirement accounts. The paper provides further evidence that the financial aid tax reduces asset accumulation and prompts a reconsideration of the simple "higher tax, lower assets" story. It provides the first evidence that families may be engaging in a rational reallocation of their asset portfolio.

This report calculates and examines patterns of foreign-born internal migration in the United States, especially rates of inter-state migration, focusing on the foreign-born population ages 16-44. It makes use of a special file of the 5 percent Public Use Microfiles (PUMs) from the 2000 Census to which information has been attached about the immigration status of the members of the foreign born-population based on information from the Legalized Population Survey (LPS) and the application of new estimating procedures. Substantial evidence emerges of recent changes in the geographical movements of the foreign born. For example, in the cases of three of the six states where immigrants formerly tended to concentrate (California, New York, and Illinois), more foreign-born persons left the state than entered during the 1995-2000 time interval. This tendency was even more pronounced among Mexican-born immigrants (in three of the five traditional Mexican states of destination, net internal migration was negative). Thus, the dispersal of the foreign-born throughout the country during the 1990s substantially involved the spread of Mexican immigrants in general and Mexican unauthorized migrants in particular. We also find evidence of very high rates of inter-state migration among unauthorized Chinese and Indian migrants, groups known in general to have high levels of education. The results suggest the development of a new pattern of growing inter-state migration among unauthorized migrant groups at both the high and low ends of the skill distribution. This pattern may result from a process of hyper-labor migration, or one that involves mostly relatively young males coming (or staying) in the United States for purposes of working and then moving to areas of labor demand to a greater degree than has usually been the case among ordinary labor migrants.

Although the opportunity structure for African Americans has improved since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, African American female workers still predominantly occupy jobs offering low wages with no job security. This paper begins to examine the reasons for this stagnation by offering a comprehensive review of scholarship on the employment histories of African American women in the postindustrial era. Using Census data and other historical evidence, I argue that mainstream research on the structure of employment opportunities open to African American women is inadequate. Social-cultural sociologists have spent too much time blaming workers for their employment outcomes, while ignoring the historical and institutional factors that shape these outcomes. At the same time, structural approaches in this literature only hint at the important roles firms play in creating inequality and reducing mobility, and they stop short of exploring how these trends develop over time. In an attempt to shift the emphasis away from individual level and ahistorical structural approaches to understanding African American womens employment progress, I propose a workplace centered approach that incorporates a consideration of historical and political factors in explanations of blocked opportunity among these workers in the postindustrial era.

Several investigators have examined the influence of military service on mens life course trajectories, including health outcomes. Studies of late-life outcomes using samples of survivors, such as the HRS, must contend with a potentially serious initial-conditions problem: if military service changes mortality risks during the pre-HRS years, then the chances of surviving from the completion of military service until the HRS baseline will differ between veterans and non-veterans. We address this problem in two ways: we use estimates of pre-HRS survivorship based upon decennial Census data to adjust mortality models estimated using HRS data; and, we develop cohort mortality models that explicitly represent unmeasured heterogeneity, using the analytic machinery of fixed-frailty mortality dynamics. The HRS data fail to produce evidence of differential mortality by veteran status; in contrast, 1960 and 1990 Census data produce clear evidence that black veterans have lower death rates than black non-veterans.

Using multiple datasets from five different time periods, we document changes in time use by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2004. Full-time college students in 1961 appeared to allocate 40 hours per week toward class and studying, whereas in 2004 they invested 23 to 26 hours. Declines in academic time investment were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by changes in the composition of students or schools. Findings suggest that previous research may have underestimated recent increases in the rate of return to postsecondary education by as much as 80 to 90 percent.

Modern labor studies consider the relationship between wages and biological markers. A relevant historical question is the relationship between occupational status and biological markers. This study demonstrates that 19th century stature and BMIs were significant in Texas occupation selection; however, stature and BMIs were not significant in the decision to participate in the Southwests labor market. In the post-bellum south, labor markets were segregated, and white laborers were at a distinct occupational and social advantage relative to their black counterparts. It is documented here that the probability of being farmers and unskilled workers were comparable by race. However, whites had greater access to white-collar and skilled occupations.

The new Code misses an important occasion to state clearly that data for statistical research are not a major threat for personal privacy. They are instead a public good that stimulates research allowing for a better understanding of reality and for an easier identification of the instruments that are necessary to improve collective welfare. The goal of the code should have been to allow an easy access to data, punishing severely any violation of privacy. The preference has been instead to impose on individual researchers complicated bureaucratic requirements, which will probably have only costs without benefits. Moreover, the use of the concept of reasonable means to define the cases in which the data allow for the identification of protected subjects raises concern because of its vagueness. The real consequences of the Code will depend on how this concept will be concretely interpreted. This interpretation will in fact determine which data should be considered personal and which ones can instead be considered anonymous.

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic history. Moreover, a number of core findings in this literature are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence remains thin. One example is African-Americans in the US Northeast and Middle Atlantic states during the 1800s. Here, a new data is used from the Pennsylvania state prison to track black and white male heights incarcerated between 1829 to 1909. Throughout the century, and controlling for a number of characteristics, Pennsylvania black men in were shorter than white men. The well-known mid-century height decline is confirmed among white men, however, extended to blacks as well.

The American Community Survey (ACS), after a decade of testing, is a reality: the first set of ACS data products, released in August-November 2006, reports on the social, demographic, economic, and housing characteristics in 2005 of cities, counties, and other areas with 65,000 or more people. With the advent of the ACS, there will no longer be a long-form sample as part of the decennial census.The Census Bureau asked a panel of the Committee on National Statistics to assess the usability of ACS data. The report advises users on making the transition from the long-form sample to the ACS. It identifies areas for research and development by the Census Bureau so that the ACS can realize its full potential to improve the nations information on people and communities.