In 2006, concerns about an emerging “underclass” became a central point of debate in German welfare circles. Some commentators tried to explain this new social phenomenon in the context of a broader set of social realities — the diminishing prospects for advancement faced by a large share of the German labor force. For others, including the leader of the Social Democratic Party, the underclass represented a smaller but more deviant social element that had “come to terms” with its poverty and lacked ambition to improve its circumstances. The new debate posed a profound challenge to welfare policy analysts: should the “underclass” be seen as one part of a broader structural reality or as a smaller “deviant” part of the social order, isolated from broader social processes.

Existing studies have explored only one or, in some cases, two mechanisms by which human capitalexternalities percolate at the macrogeographic levels. This study, however, uses the 1990 Massachusettscensus data to test four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels, in the Boston metropolitan area labormarket. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in thesame local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor marketexternalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that alltypes of human capital externalities are significant across census blocks. Different types of externalitiesattenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidlybeyond three miles away from block centroids. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localizedwithin a microgeographic scope in cities that we call, Smart Caf Cities. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper examines the economic consequences of bilingualism. Specifically, we explore whether the ability to effectively communicate in English and Spanish is rewarded in labor markets. Using a sample of the Hispanic population drawn from U.S. census data for the year 2000 we find that controlling for education, gender, age, place of birth, sector and region of employment, bilingualism has a substantively small positive relation with higher income. However, our results also show that bilingualism is negatively correlated with wage-based income among different occupational categories and sectors, but particularly among managers and those employed in the public sector.

Using evidence for the United States during the nineteenth century, this paper measures the lifetime health and economic burdens resulting from malaria infections. In particular, the use of longitudinal data on the health of Union Army veterans along with data from U.S. federal census records on the socioeconomic characteristics of the general population makes it possible to examine the impact of malaria both on health conditions over various stages of the life span and on long-term individual economic productivity, which has rarely been estimated by previous studies. Using weather records and geographical information, I estimate the county-level risk of contracting malarial fevers in the period from 1850 to 1870. The paper provides evidence that exposure to malaria-ridden environments in early life substantially diminished the lifetime health of Union Army veterans through its negative effects on nutrition, the immune system, the development of chronic diseases, and longevity. The paper also demonstrates that adult males in malaria-endemic counties had much lower levels of labor force participation and real estate wealth in the 1850-1870 period. Unaware of the malaria parasite and of its transmission via mosquitoes, a large population migrated into malaria-endemic regions to take advantage of economic opportunities between 1850 and 1860. However, the subsequent exposure to risk of malaria infections significantly hindered their wealth accumulation.

Costs for utilities and fuels are high for Alaska households, particularly those in rural andremote places, and have increased significantly in recent years. The purpose of this studyis to quantify these costs and the effects of rising prices. The Public Use MicrodataSample from the 2000 U.S. census is used to analyze utility costs as a share of householdincome for each of four regions in Alaska, and a projection of these costs to 2006 is madebased on income and utility price panel data. We find that total costs for heat, electricityand water and sewer, as a median share of income, are nearly 50% higher now than in2000 for remote and rural places, compared to about 20% in Anchorage, the KenaiPeninsula and Matanuska-Susitna Boroughs, and about 30% in other large or road-systemcommunities. The lowest income quintile of households in remote communities pay amedian of about one third of their total income on these utilities, compared to thewealthiest quintile of households in Anchorage that pay only 2% of their total income onheat, electricity and water and sewer.

In the 1960s many American cities experienced violent, race-related civil disturbances. This article examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the riots' impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property. Both OLS and IV estimates indicate that the riots depressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound in the 1970s. Census tract data for a small number of cities suggest relative losses of population and property value in tracts that were directly affected by riots compared to other tracts in the same cities.

The Christina River Basin is a vital resource to nearly half a million people in three different states that is undergoing rapid growth. The goal of this study is to quantify the changes in land use and population and identify the potential impact on streamflows in the region. Land use and population data from four different time frames dating back to 1970 are analyzes using a GIS to measure the rate of increase in urbanization and population. Streamflow data from the USGS and precipitation data from NCDC were examined to look for trends that reflect the impact of urbanization on the Basin. Several variables, including runoff coefficient, maximum instantaneous peak flow and minimum 7-day low flow, the highest discharge and lowest 10 discharge events were all reviewed by water year. The results show that agriculture and forest land use in the Christina River Basin is being converted to residential and other urban land uses at a rate of approximately 5% every ten years. This is causing the impervious cover of the region to increase by 2-3% in the same time frame. At the current rate. impervious cover across the Basin will exceed the threshold of what a watershed can handle without significant impairment in quality and habitat within the next 15 to 20 years. Population is also increasing approximately 10-15% every ten years across the entire Basin and is reflective of the urban sprawl as residents spread out from the most urbanized areas. Seven stream gages were paired with nearby precipitation gages to measure trends in streamflow for the seven discharge areas. The analysis reflects that peak instantaneous discharges are increasing and minimum 7-day flows (baseflow) are decreasing. The highest 10 discharge events (floods) and lowest 10 streamflow events (droughts) are getting worse over time. Precipitation has not changes significantly over time and the changes do not closely corresponds with changes in streamflow, leading to the conclusion that floods and droughts are getting more severe due to urbanization.

During the period between the Great Fire of 1871 and the economic collapse of 1929, migrants from Indiana and the rural Midwest poured into Chicago. While scholars have paid attention to the economic and environmental linkages between Chicago and its hinterlands, historians have not paid enough attention to the intraregional migration that had wide ranging social and political effects. The effects of this migration were many, ranging from the creation of a local literary movement to changes in Chicago's ethnic communities and identities. Writers from Indiana and the rural Midwest dominated the Chicago Renaissance, making migration and the relationship between rural and urban one of the central themes of this literary movement. Furthermore, the sheer number of rural migrants altered the city's demographics and spatial patterns. Also, ethnic migrants encountered ethnic communities in Chicago that were different from the ones they had known in the countryside, and it seems likely that their migration effected changes in American forms of ethnicity. This project will be the first major study of Midwestern rural-to-urban migration, and it will be the first to investigate how the ethnicity of immigrant groups evolved as a result of internal migration.

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Ricos whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a surplus of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shiftingan expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

Age- and origin-destination-specific flows obtained from population samples often contain irregularities. The reason for this has mostly to do with the fact that migrations are relatively rare events. Biases in the analysis of migration flows can arise if these irregularities are not corrected for. Furthermore, accurate migration data are needed to understand population change and migration behavior. In this paper, we illustrate some typical examples of age-specific migration flows with irregular patterns, using the 2000-2005 American Community Survey (ACS) data. We then demonstrate how model migration schedules, log-linear models or a combination of both can be used to smooth the irregularities.

Forests provide non-market goods and services that people are implicitly willing to pay forthrough hedonic housing and labor markets. But it is unclear if compensating differentialsarise in these markets at the regional level. The answer to this empirical question is addressedin a study of the Southwest United States, composed of Arizona and New Mexico. Hedonicregressions of housing prices and wages using Census and geographic information systems datashow that U.S. Forest Service area carries a marginal implicit price of between $27 and $36per square mile annually. Surface water area is priced between $4 and $16 per square mileannually. The existence of significant compensating differentials at the regional level suggeststhat care must be taken when applying the travel cost method to value regionally-delineatedcharacteristics.

[Here] we listen to stories of individual settlers and . . . watch and interact with them as each community evolves through the decades. Ann M. Legreid, Department of Political Science and Geography, Central Missouri State UniversityAgainst the broad backdrop of the expanding western frontier, noted Norwegian American scholar Odd S. Lovoll explores the country town through the lens of ethnicity in this pioneering study. Benson, Madison, and Starbuck, all located on the western Minnesota prairie, were settled primarily by Norwegians and served as urban centersrailroad hubs, destinations for trade, and social nexusesfor the farming communities that surround them. Lovolls meticulous research into census data, careful reading of local newspapers, and extensive interviews with the descendants of Norwegian immigrants reveals strong ties to homeland that are visible today in each towns social, political, and religious character.

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration, there is no systematic empirical evidence on this issue. The paper starts by developing a stylized theoretical model in which migration policy is the result of the interaction between organized groups with conflicting interests towards labor laws. Ceteris paribus, in equilibrium, migration policy is more open the larger are the contributions paid by the pro-migration groups relative to the anti-migration ones. Next, the paper evaluates the key predictions of the model using a unique, U.S. industry-level dataset that combines information on the number of immigrants with data on the political activities of organized groups, both in favor and against an increase in migration. The main result is that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are higher in sectors where labor unions are more important, and lower in those sectors in which business lobbies are more active. The results are robust to the introduction, in the estimating equation, of a number of industry-level control variables and to addressing endogeneity issues with an IV estimation strategy.

Virtually all quantitative microdata used by social scientists derive from samples that incorporate clustering, stratification, and weighting adjustments (Kish 1992, 1965). Such data can yield standard error estimates that differ dramatically from a simple random sample of the same size. Researchers using historical U.S. census microdata, however, usually apply methods designed for simple random samples. The resulting p-values and confidence intervals could be inaccurate and could lead to erroneous research conclusions. Because U.S. census microdata samples are among the most widely-used sources for social science and policy research, the need for reliable standard error estimation is critical. We evaluate the historical microdata samples of the IPUMS project from 1850-1930 in order to determine (1) the impact of sample design on standard error estimates and (2) how to apply modern standard error estimation software to historical census samples. We exploit a unique new data source from the 1880 census to validate our methods for standard error estimation and then we apply this approach to the 1850-1870 and 1900-1930 decennial censuses. We conclude that Taylor series estimation can be used effectively with the historical decennial census microdata samples, and should be applied in research analyses that have the potential for substantial clustering effects.