This paper examines the relation between health, individual income, and relative deprivation. Three alternative measures of relative deprivation are described, Yitzhaik relative deprivation, Deaton relative deprivation, and log income difference relative deprivation, with attention to problems in measuring permanent disadvantage when the underlying income distribution is changing over time. We used data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, a US-based longitudinal survey, to examine the associations between disadvantage, measured cross-sectionally and aggregated over the life course, and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). We reject the hypotheses that any of the economic measures, whether permanent/contemporaneous or individual/relative, have different associations with IUGR in terms of sign and significance. There was some evidence that permanent economic disadvantage was associated with greater risk of IUGR than those on the corresponding contemporaneous measures. The fitted values from logistic regressions on each measure of disadvantage were compared with the two-way plots of the observed IUGR-income pattern. Deaton relative deprivation and log income difference tracked the observed probability of IUGR as a function of income more closely than the other two measures of relative deprivation. Finally, we examined the determinants of each measure of disadvantage. Observed characteristics in childhood and adulthood explained more of the variance in log income difference and Deaton relative deprivation than in the other two measures of disadvantage. They also explained more of the variance in permanent disadvantage than in the contemporaneous counterpart.

This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, we establish that (a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics; (b) it has been declining over the past 40 years; (c) majority/minority graduation rate differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years; (d) the decline in high school graduation rates occurs among native populations and is not solely a consequence of increasing proportions of immigrants and minorities in American society; (e) the decline in high school graduation explains part of the recent slowdown in college attendance; and (f) the pattern of the decline of high school graduation rates by gender helps to explain the recent increase in male-female college attendance gaps.

In a new project commissioned by the Knight Foundation, MPI provides an overview of the characteristics of young children (under age 9) of immigrants living in 14 communities throughout the United States.

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms created by locals are bigger, operate with more capital-intensive technologies, and obtain greater financing per unit of capital invested, than firms created by nonlocals. This suggests that there are so many local entrepreneurs because locals can better exploit the financial opportunities available in the region where they were born. This helps to explain how local financial development causes persistent disparities in entrepreneurial activity, technology, and income.

This study develops a discrete choice locational equilibrium model to evaluate the benefits of the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area following the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). The discrete choice equilibrium approach accounts for the fact that air quality improvements brought about by the 1990 CAAA will change housing choices and prices. The study provides the first application of the discrete choice equilibrium framework (Anas, 1980, Bayer et al., 2005) to the valuation of large environmental changes. The study also provides new evidence for the distributional welfare impacts of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area. Households’ location choices are modeled according to the random utility framework of McFadden (1973) and the differentiated product specification of Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995). Findings suggest that the air quality improvements that occurred in the Los Angeles area between 1990 and 2000 provided an average equilibrium welfare benefit of $1,800 to households. In contrast, average benefits are $1,400 when equilibrium price effects are not accounted, demonstrating that ignoring equilibrium effects will likely underestimate the benefits of large environmental changes. In addition, we find that the equilibrium welfare impacts of the 1990 CAAA in the Los Angeles area varied significantly across income groups.

In the last 50 years, population and incomes have increased steadily throughout much of the Sunbelt. This paper assesses the relative contributions of rising productivity, rising demand for Southern amenities and increases in housing supply to the growth of warm areas, using data on income, housing price and population growth. Before 1980, economic productivity increased significantly in warmer areas and drove the population growth in those places. Since 1980, productivity growth has been more modest, but housing supply growth has been enormous. We infer that new construction in warm regions represents a growth in supply, rather than demand, from the fact that prices are generally falling relative to the rest of the country. The relatively slow pace of housing price growth in the Sunbelt, relative to the rest of the country and relative to income growth, also implies that there has been no increase in the willingness to pay for sun-related amenities. As such, it seems that the growth of the Sunbelt has little to do with the sun.

Standard search and matching models of equilibrium unemployment, once properly calibrated, can generate only a small amount of frictional wage dispersion, i.e., wage differentials among ex-ante similar workers induced purely by search frictions. We derive this result for a specific measure of wage dispersion -- the ratio between the average wage and the lowest (reservation) wage paid. We show that in a large class of search and matching models this statistic (the "mean-min ratio") can be obtained in closed form as a function of observable variables (i.e., the interest rate, the value of leisure, and statistics of labor market turnover). Various independent data sources suggest that actual residual wage dispersion (i.e., inequality among observationally similar workers) exceeds the model's prediction by a factor of 20. We discuss three extensions of the model (risk aversion, volatile wages during employment, and on-the-job search) and find that, in their simplest versions, they can improve its performance, but only modestly. We conclude that either frictions account for a tiny fraction of residual wage dispersion, or the standard model needs to be augmented to confront the data. In particular, the last generation of models with on-the-job search appears promising.

During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. The amounts distributed varied widely across the country and potentially contributed to population shifts. We estimate an aggregate discrete choice model, in which household heads choose among 466 economic subregions. The structural model allows us to decompose the effects of program spending on migration into three categories: the effect of spending on keeping households in their origin (retention), the effect of pulling non-migrants out of their origin (creation), and the effect of causing migrants to substitute away from an alternative destination (diversion). An additional dollar of public works and relief spending increased net migration into an area primarily by retaining the existing population and creating new migration into the county. Only a small share of the increase in net migration rate was caused by diversion of people who had already chosen to migrate. AAA spending contributed to net out migration, primarily by creating new out migrants and repelling potential in migrants. A counterfactual analysis suggests that the uneven distribution of New Deal spending explains about twelve percent of the internal migration flows in the United States between 1935 and 1940.

Response to a request for data from Michigan Congressman Wenke regarding the number of state residents employed in government or receiving government payments. Part of the W.E. Upjohn Institute's mission of support for public data.

Responsibility for establishing minimum parking requirements for new development largely falls on local governments. Unfortunately, many municipalities do not create parking standards that are appropriate to the various uses and locations that they regulate. Local parking standards are rarely derived from parking utilization studies, and are instead based on small, nationwide samples drawn from varying land use contexts offering varying transportation options. The standards applied to a particular development often do not depend on its physical environment.The present research takes an important step in improving parking regulation: it develops a method for computing context-sensitive residential parking standards. First, it reviews transportation analysis literature to discern the latest thinking on the relationship between vehicle ownershipthe main component of residential parking demandand environmental and demographic variables. Second, it translates these lessons into a form appropriate for land use regulation. Third, it proposes and validates a method for estimating household vehicle ownership using only regulation-appropriate variables.

Windbreaks are a valuable resource in conserving soils and providing crop protection in western Kansas and other Great Plains states. Currently, Kansas has neither an up-to-date inventory of windbreak locations nor an assessment of their condition. The objective of this study is to develop remote sensing and geographic information system methods that rapidly identify and assess the condition of windbreaks in Ford County, Kansas. Ford County serves as a pilot study area for method development with the intent of transferring those methods to other counties/regions in Kansas and the Great Plains. A remote sensing technique known as object-based classification was used to classify windbreaks using color aerial photography acquired through the 2008 National Agricultural Imagery Program. Object-based classification works by segmenting imagery where areas with similar spectral, shape, and textural properties are grouped into vectors (i.e., objects) that are later used as the basis for image classification. Using this technique, 355 windbreaks, totaling nearly 1,012 acres (410 hectares), were identified in Ford County. When compared to a spatial dataset of confirmed windbreak locations generated via a heads-up digitizing process, the location of windbreaks identified using object-based classification results agreed approximately 81% of the time. Mean textural and spectral values were then combined and used to place identified windbreaks into three condition categories (good, fair, and poor) using a manual classification approach. Analysis showed the area of windbreaks in good condition to be 170 hectares, with the remaining 171 hectares of windbreaks falling in the fair or poor classes. Methods detailed in this study proved successful at rapidly identifying windbreak location and for providing useful condition class results for windbreak renovation and restoration planning.

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we test Costa and Kahns colocation hypothesis, which predicts that power couplescouples in which both spouses have college degreesare more likely to migrate to the largest cities than part-power couples or power singles. We find no support for this hypothesis. Instead, regression analyses suggest that only the education of the husband and not the joint education profile of the couple affects the propensity to migrate to large metropolitan areas. The observed location trends are better explained by higher rates of power couple formation inlarger metropolitan areas.

The desegregation of Southern schools following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision was perhaps the most important innovation in U.S. education policy in the 20th century. This paper assesses the effects of desegregation on its intended beneficiaries, black students. In Louisiana, substantial reductions in segregation between 1965 and 1970 were accompanied by large increases in per-pupil funding. This additional funding was used to "level up" school spending in integrated schools to the level previously experienced only in the white schools. The effects of desegregation on the educational experiences of black students differed substantially depending on the black share of enrollment in the district. For historical reasons, blacks in districts with higher black enrollment shares experienced larger increases in funding, compared to their counterparts in lower black enrollment share districts. On the other hand, blacks in high black enrollment share districts saw smaller increases in exposure to whites (who were higher-income). Blacks in high black enrollment share districts experienced larger improvements in educational attainment, suggesting that the increase in funding associated with desegregation was more important than the increased exposure to whites. A simple cost-benefit calculation suggests that the additional school spending was more than offset by higher earnings due to increased educational attainment. Using a different source of variation and methodology, the results of this paper are consistent with earlier work suggesting that desegregation improved educational attainment for blacks and sheds new light on the potential mechanism behind this improvement in Louisiana: increased funding for blacks' schools.

Life-cycle employment profiles of married women born between 1940 and 1960 shifted upwards and became flatter. We calibrate a dynamic life-cycle model of employment decisions of married women to assess the quantitative importance of three competing explanations of the change in employment profiles: the decrease and delay in fertility, the increase in relative wages of women to men, and the decline in child-care costs. We find that the decrease and delay in fertility and the decline in child-care cost affect employment very early in life, while increases in relative wages affect employment increasingly with age. Changes in relative wages, in particular returns to experience, account for the bulk (65 percent) of changes in life-cycle employment of married women.

During the Depression, long-time residents in many areas often claimed that migrants from the rest of the United States crowded the labor market and the relief rolls. Our estimates confirm these claims. Using aggregate data on internal migration flows matched to individual records from the 1940 Census, we find that residents of metropolitan areas that experienced high in-migration worked fewer weeks during the year, which lowered their annual earnings, and were less likely to secure a public relief job if out of work. To control for the likelihood that migrants were attracted to areas with high wages or plentiful work opportunities, we instrument for migration flows. The instrument predicts out-migration from local areas using extreme weather events and variations in the generosity of New Deal programs and assigns these flows to destinations based on geographic distance. As one example, our estimates suggest that the Dust Bowl, which sent around 37,000 male migrants to California, would have caused 24,000 Californians to leave the state, 8,000 to switch from full-year to part-year employment, and an additional 2,600 of those already unemployed to fail to secure a relief job. The local adjustment to this labor supply shock through queuing for relief jobs and reduced work opportunities is consistent with the history of job sharing and wage rigidity during the 1930s.

The classic, stereotypical U.S. immigrant destination is a large city in the North, Midwest, or far West. New York, Chicago, San Francisco are fixed in our imaginations as the great American immigrant settlements. Until recently, most people rarely considered the U.S. South when they thought of new arrivals from other countries. For much of American history the South had very few foreign-born people, and from 1850 to 1970, it was home to a smaller percentage of immigrants than any other region (see Figure 1). Even during the great period of migration from 1880 to 1920, a time when massive waves of newcomers arrived on American shores, only about 2.5 percent of the people in the southern states were foreign-born. After 1970, however, the proportion of southerners who were immigrants began to increase sharply. By 1990 the South had a greater percentage of immigrants than the Midwest, and although the West had become the primary immigrant destination by the end of the twentieth century, its rate of proportional increase had begun to level off somewhat by the early twenty-first century, while the immigrant portion of the South continued to grow. Even the gap between the South and the Northeast, the old immigrant center of the United States, had begun to narrow in the early 2000s. . .