The early-1970s abortion legalization led to a significant drop in fertility. We investigate whether this decline represented a delay in births or a permanent reduction in fertility. We combine Census and Vital Statistics data to compare the lifetime fertility of women born in early-legalizing states, whose peak childbearing years occurred in the early 1970s, to that of women from other states and cohorts. We find that much of the reduction was permanent, in that women did not compensate by having more children later, and that it largely reflects an increased share of women remaining childless throughout their fertile years.

This research investigates the interregional migration of partnered gays and lesbians between 1995 and 2000 as the first attempt at understanding the determinants of gay and lesbian migration using data from the Public Use Microdata Sample of the 2000 U.S. Census. Briefly, the findings are as follows. Both partnered gays and lesbians are regionally distributed throughout the United States consistent with the geographical distribution of the entire U.S. population. However, the shifting location of the partnered gay and lesbian population between 1995 and 2000 demonstrates significant variability. The general conclusion to be reached from models of the net migration of the partnered gay and lesbian population in that period is as follows: Partnered gay migration is directed toward moderate-sized urban regions rich in natural amenities without regard for tolerance toward gay lifestyles or the absolute or relative size of the partnered gay community. Partnered lesbian migration is focused on less-populous regions with a large, existing, partnered lesbian population. The role of natural amenities, the tolerance for lesbian lifestyles, and population density are not significant in determining partnered lesbian migration. The only trait partnered gay and lesbian migrations have in common is in their move toward less populous regions.

Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a womans first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of divorce on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on womens mean household income. However, using a Quantile Treatment Effect methodology (Abadie et al. 2002) we find that divorce widens the income distribution: it increases the probability that a woman has very low or very high household income. It appears that some women successfully generate income through child support, welfare, combining households, and increased labor supply after divorce, while others are markedly unsuccessful. Thus, although divorce has little effect on mean income, it nonetheless increases poverty and inequality. These findings imply that divorce has important welfare consequences.

This paper studies marriages across black, white, and Asian racial lines. Marrying across racial lines is a rare event, even today. Interracial marriages account for approximately 1 percent of white marriages, 5 percent of black marriages, and 14 percent of Asian marriages. Following a brief history of the regulation of race and romance in America, I analyze interracial marriage using census data from 1880-2000, uncovering a rich set of cross-section and time-series patterns. I investigate the extent to which three different theories of interracial marriage can account for the patterns discovered. After also testing a social exchange theory and a search model, I find the data are most consistent with a Becker-style marriage market model in which objective criteria of a potential spouse, their race, and the social price of intermarriage are central.

This research employs United States census data from 1880 to 1970 to assess the influence of ethnicity and generation on the family structure of Mexican, Irish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and native white children. Using evidence for three generations, it tests two theories, linear assimilation and segmented assimilation. Assimilation theory makes no special claims for ethnic effects, but segmented assimilation proposes that ethnicity influences the incorporation of immigrant-origin children into American society. We find few consistent ethnic effects on the probability of family type. Our principal finding is that migration itself, common to all groups, has similar consequences for all; these are revealed in generational changes in family structure. The historical periods of open immigration do differ from the contemporary period, which implies that immigration policy affects family structure. The results disconfirm segmented assimilation theory's emphasis on ethnicity in family structure, and confirm aspects of linear assimilation theory. They point to the salience of structural factors resulting from the migration process and policy, rather than ethnicity, in the evolution of family form among immigrant-origin persons.

What does everyone on the following list have in common: musical greats Gene Autry, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Woody Guthrie, and Aretha Franklin; religious leaders Robert Shuler, Father Divine, C. L. Franklin, and J. Frank Norris; sports stars Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Joe Louis; entertainers Lily Tomlin, D. W. Griffith, and Will Rogers; writers Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Hellman, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier? According to James Gregory, these twenty-five famous figures are just a few of the twenty-eight million participants in a Southern Diaspora that reshaped American culture, religious life, race relations, and political alignments during the twentieth century. The Southern Diaspora is a provocative and pathbreaking book, the first scholarly effort to synthesize what Gregory calls the "two Great Migrations out of the South," meaning the parallel resettlement of southern-born black and white populations in the North and West (p. 5). Between 1900 and the mid-1970s, this Southern Diaspora included twenty million white southerners, eight million African Americans, and approximately one million Latinos as well. In Gregory's comparative analysis, "southern migrants of both races became agents of change who used the opportunities of geography to alter the cultural and political landscape of the nation and all its regions" (p. 7). The simultaneous Great Migrations of black and white southerners played a critical role in "collapsing what had been huge cultural differences" between the South and the rest of the nation while highlighting the centrality of race over region in the experiences of the migrants themselves (p. xii).

The Ku Klux Klan reached its heyday in the mid-1920s, claiming millions of members.In this paper, we analyze the 1920s Klan, those who joined it, and the social and political impact that it had. We utilize a wide range of newly discovered data sources including information from Klan membership roles, applications, robe-order forms, an internal audit of the Klan by Ernst and Ernst, and a census that the Klan conducted after an internal scandal. Combining these sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Censuses, we find that individuals who joined the Klan were better educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the typical American. Surprisingly, we find few tangible social or political impacts of the Klan. There is little evidencethat the Klan had an effect on black or foreign born residential mobility, or on lynching patterns. Historians have argued that the Klan was successful in getting candidates they favored elected. Statistical analysis, however, suggests that any direct impact of the Klan was likely to be small.Furthermore, those who were elected had little discernible effect on legislation passed. Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as a social organization built through a wildly successful pyramid scheme fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.

Spatial separation of racial groups may reduce the probability that mutuallyacceptable singles of dierent races meet each other in the marriage market, orit may have no eect if market participants segment themselves. I find thatpeople in more segregated cities are signi?cantly less likely to end up in a raciallymixed marriage. I control for reverse causality and endogenous migration usinginstruments based on characteristics of local government and topography, andresidence prior to observation. The decrease in segregation in the typical citybetween 1980 and 2000 can explain roughly 25 percent of the observed increasein black man-white woman marriages. Approximately one fifth of the effect ofsegregation on black-white intermarriage operates through segregation?s impacton black-white differences in labor market and educational outcomes. The restis attributable to spatial mismatch.

With the huge influx of immigrants into the United States in recent years, considerable efforts have been devoted to describing the extent and variation of labour market concentration across ethnic groups within or between regions. However, there is no consensus among social scientists on how to measure and identify ethnic labour market concentration patterns. The issues mainly include, firstly, how to define an employment sector—as an industrial or an occupational sector; secondly, how to break down employment categories; and thirdly the extent to which a job sector can be identified as an ethnic-concentrated sector, that is, what index and what threshold value should be used to define a ‘niche’ sector? Using the case of Chinese in the San Francisco Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, this paper demonstrates how different choices could encourage different evaluation and understanding of multi-ethnic urban labour market segmentation processes.

The Southern Diaspora, the second book from awardwinning author James N. Gregory, begins with a powerful quote that summarizes the current state of migration research. Gregory writes: “If historians have failed to adequately address the subject, social scientists have not done much better. Migration studies, once a cutting-edge enterprise for sociologists and economists, have been stuck for decades in dead-ends and stale formulations. Most of the work cannot get beyond the question of why migrations happen, the old push-pull conundrum” (9). He goes on to summarize the dominant theoretical perspectives on migration and concludes that “[a]ll of these perspectives see moving people as subject to history but not as its architects” (9). Scholars of migration should take this passage seriously. Perhaps we believe that we will gain information on the consequences of migration if we better understand the causes of migration. But Gregory is pushing us to move in a distinctly different direction, to one that shifts the focus from the individual consequences of migration toward the societal implications of large-scale population redistribution. The migrants, for Gregory, are not individuals per se but “architects” who collectively reshaped twentiethcentury America. The suggested shift in focus is a worthy objective and one that he expertly tackles.

Although many studies estimate the effects of welfare benefits on mothers’ living arrangements, housing subsidies and prices are rarely the focus. This article uses a new longitudinal birth cohort study, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, to examine the relationship between subsidized housing, housing prices, and the living arrangements of unmarried mothers three years after a nonmarital birth. Results suggest that the availability of subsidized housing is negatively associated with marriage relative to living alone. Eligibility criteria and means testing in subsidized housing may make marriage a costly choice. Housing prices are positively associated with marriage, cohabitation, and living with family members relative to living alone. Economies of scale may be particularly important for single‐earner households when housing prices increase. Failure to control for housing costs and subsidies leads to underestimates of the effects of welfare and unemployment rates on the living arrang...

PURPOSE: To assess rates of motor, sensory-communicative, and self-care functional limitations in school children and other family members living in United States (US) metropolitan regions. We used these activities as indicators of disability in functioning. We hypothesized that disability rates for other household members would be substantially higher in the city compared to suburbs, especially in households where there was a child with disability. METHODS: Using Y2000 Census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), we analyzed a 6% sample of the 18,456,982 children ages 5–17 years living in 17 US metropolitan regions. RESULTS: 34% of children lived in outer suburbs, 29% in inner suburbs, and 27% in central cities. Among children with disabilities who lived in cities, there were significantly higher rates (compared to their suburban peers) of not having access to a car or phone, limited adult education, unemployment, poverty, and inadequate housing. These children also were far more likely to live in a household with another disabled person. Table 1 documents the rates of child disability as well as rates of disability in other household members for children with and without disability living in the inner city compared to outer suburbs. In NY, LA, and Chicago, the data are highlighted for the areas with the most concentrated poverty. CONCLUSION: In US inner city metropolitan areas, children with disability disproportionately live in households with another family member with disability. This will require more resources to provide family-centered interventions that optimize participation.

US demography stands out among industrial nations due to its relatively high fertility and young population age distribution. The Total Fertility Rate has consistently been near 2.0 births per woman since the early 1980s, about a half birth higher than in the rest of the industrial world, and it has been relatively high throughout the past century, including during its striking baby boom when the TFR rose above 3.7. The generally high fertility has made the population relatively young, and the large baby boom, now on the verge of old age, has deeply shaped the population age distribution. Life expectancy in the US lags behind many industrial nations but has little effect on the population age distribution. While the US is home to many more immigrants than any other country, it is also a large population so the proportion of foreign born at 12%, although high, is not particularly striking in comparative context.

This paper develops new price indexes from a variety of sources to assess the hypothesis that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for rental shelter housing has been biased downward for its entire history since 1914. Rental shelter housing is the most important single category of the CPI, especially for those years when rent data have been used to impute price changes for owner-occupied housing. If valid, the implications of the hypothesis of downward bias would carry over to the deflator for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and, in the opposite direction, to historical measures of real PCE and real gross domestic product (GDP).

While theory suggests that public expenditures on education may affect intergenerational earnings mobility, the direction of the effect hinges on whether such outlays substitute for or complement private human capital investments. This paper empirically evaluates the question using census data in the Integrated Public Use Micro Sample from 1940-2000. The results show that state-cohorts with smaller class sizes generally enjoy less intergenerational mobility, indicating that class size reductions benefit children from high-income families more than those from low-income families. The size of the effect is substantial: the effect of moving from one standard deviation above to one standard deviation below the mean class size increases earnings persistence by more than 40%. These results are robust to controls for the average class size in the state in years the individual was not in school, a finding which rules out many endogeneity explanations.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is an important source of information on the health of the US population, including health status, health behaviors, acute and chronic conditions, healthcare access and utilization, and health insurance coverage. Fielded annually since 1957, it is the longest running national health survey in the US. Yet, the extraordinary potential of NHIS data for analysis of changing health status, behaviors, and healthcare use has rarely been exploited. A random sample of 100 empirical studies using NHIS data was reviewed revealing that 70% used a single year of data and fewer than 25% used data from before 1986. Comprehensive analyses with NHIS data are challenging with information scattered across years and data files; complexities of file structure, record linkage, and sampling weights; and changes in variables as well as sample designs over time. We report on the Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS), a harmonized set of data and documentation based on the NHIS public use files from 1969 to the present. This integrated data series will facilitate cross-time comparisons of these invaluable health survey data using composite coding schemes to recode variables across time. The IHIS will enhance the value of NHIS data and promote new population health and health services research by allowing researchers to make consistent comparisons across four decades of dramatic change in public health, and thus to study the health status of Americans as a dynamic process. We describe the motivation for integrating the NHIS data, the components of a data integration project, and the methods used to create a four decade, cross-sectional time-series of population health data.

Childhood lead exposure can lead to psychological traits that are strongly associated with aggressive and criminal behavior. In the late 1970s in the United States, lead was removed from gasoline under the Clean Air Act. I use the state-specific reductions in lead exposure that resulted from this removal to identify the effect of childhood lead exposure on crime rates. The elasticity of violent crime with respect to childhood lead exposure is estimated to be 0.8, and this result is robust to numerous sensitivity tests. Mixed evidence supports an effect of lead exposure on murder rates, and little evidence indicates an effect of lead on property crime. Overall, I find that the reduction in childhood lead exposure in the late 1970s and early 1980s was responsible for significant declines in violent crime in the 1990s and may cause further declines in the future. Moreover, the social value of the reductions in violent crime far exceeds the cost of the removal of lead from gasoline.

An article about the myths of Minnesotans, including a section called "Five Truths about Minnesota."

In database systems that support ne-grained access controls, eachuser has access rights that determine which tuples are accessible and whichare inaccessible. Queries are answered as if the inaccessible tuples are notpresent in the database. Thus, users with dierent access rights may getdierent answers to a given query. To process queries eciently in thepresence of ne-grained access controls, the database system needs accu-rate estimates of the number of tuples that are both accessible accordingto the access rights of the submitting user and relevant according to theselection predicates in the query. In this paper we present sampling-basedcardinality estimation techniques for use in the presence of ne-grainedaccess controls. These techniques exploit the fact that access rights arerelatively static and are common to all queries that are evaluated on behalfof a particular user. We show that the proposed techniques provide moreaccurate estimates than simpler techniques that do not exploit knowledgeof access rights. We quantify these improvements analytically and throughsimulations.

The U.S. business cycle that began with the recession of 2001 featured both a “jobless recovery” and substantial structural change, leading some to ponder the “Sectoral Shift Hypothesis,” whereby restructuring purportedly creates labor market inefficiencies. Previous studies have analyzed aggregate time series, but new data permit a cross-sectoral comparison between restructuring and increased labor market inefficiency (as measured from sector Beveridge curves). This paper develops an estimation method and quantifies substantial increases in inefficiency during this period. However, contrary to the hypothesis, the increased inefficiency bears little relationship to the extent of sectors' structural change.