This paper proposes a strategy for measuring the market value of forgone home production associated with increases in female labor force hours. We formulate a life-cycle model in which women divide their time between home and market work. The model implies a link between household retirement wealth and the value of forgone home production. We use recently available panel micro data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate the model's parameters and adjust the growth rate of GDP to reflect recent reductions in non-market output. We find that the value of forgone home production is modest, about 25 percent of women's measured earnings. On aggregate, due to the large transition of women into the labor force, the value of forgone home production relative to GDP has increased by only 2.5 percentage points over the decades 1959-1999.

Today, residential segregation is associated with poor economic outcomes for African-Americans but, in the mid-twentieth century, the opposite was true. What changed? One explanation emphasizes the relative loss of jobs in the central city. We focus on black employment at the US Postal Service, which has remained centralized for largely exogenous reasons. If job access matters, we should see African-Americans substituting toward postal employment over time, particularly in cities whose black neighborhoods are clustered downtown. From 1960 onward, blacks in segregated cities have been more likely than whites to work for the postal service. This relationship did not exist in 1940 or 1950, when private sector jobs near black enclaves were plentiful. Furthermore, this pattern does not hold for mail carriers whose work is distributed throughout the metropolitan area. As blacks gained access to the suburbs, the magnitude of this relationship has declined. Black occupational choices suggest that spatial mismatch was potent in the 1950s and 1960s, when firms began to suburbanize but black households were unable to follow, but is less important today.

I use U.S. industrial data in order to study whether child labor laws (CLL) are responsible for the remarkable decline of child labor in the United States (1900-1920). If CLL effectively reduced child labor, industries with higher technological needs for child labor would have grownmore slowly in states that enacted child labor laws. Contrary to some previous research, I find that child labor laws explain part of the decline in child labor experienced by the United States between 1900 and 1920.

Previous studies have shown that military wives-women married to U.S. military service members-are more likely to be unemployed and earning less than their civilian counterparts. But these studies rely on information that is somewhat dated, and they have little to say about military husbands. This study revisits the gaps in employment and earnings between military and civilian wives using the 2000 census, and extends these analyses to include military husbands. Military spouses continue to be at a relative disadvantage in the labor market compared with civilian

There is a large econometric literature that examines the economic assimilation of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. On the whole immigrants are seen as atomistic individuals assimilating in a largely anonymous labour market, a view that runs counter to the spirit of the equally large literature on ethnic groups. Here we argue that immigrants assimilate as communities, not just as individuals. The longer the immigrant community has been established the better adjusted it is to the host society and the more the host society comes to accept that ethnic group. Thus economic outcomes for immigrants should depend not just on their own characteristics, but also on the legacy of past immigration from the same country. In this paper we test this hypothesis using data from a 5 percent sample of the 1980, 1990 and 2000 US censuses. We find that history matters in immigrant assimilation: the stronger is the tradition of immigration from a given source country, the better the economic outcomes for new immigrants from that source.

This dissertation primarily deals with the documentation of the progress and attainment Mexican descent youth experienced in high school between 1940 and 1980. Also, factors that increased the likelihood of an individual's enrollment and attainment were explored through a mixed method approach. A one percent sample of all households with high school aged teenagers residing in the Southwest was acquired through IPUMS for the census years 1940, 1960, and 1980. Descriptive analysis and binary logistic regression modeling were the principal methods used in the investigation. In addition, oral history methods were used to study the educational experiences of Mexican descent adults who attended high school between 1940 and 1980 in a Southern California community. The findings included: (1) Mexican descent youth trailed White and Black enrollment rates, although progress was made closing the attainment gap. (2) Mexican descent youth were educationally advantaged by living in California, rather than Texas in 1940 and 1960, but state differences disappeared by 1980. (3) Factors influencing Mexican descent youths' likelihood of proficient enrollment changed over time, to eventually follow similar patterns found by White youth, although distinct patterns were also found. (4) Teachers expectations were the salient theme effecting the educational experiences and outcomes of Mexican descent youth. Often acculturation compromises were needed to negotiate between one's ethnic identity and academic achievement. This paper contributed to the literature in several manners, first by demonstrating the influencing relationship between individual-, family-, and residential-level variables and enrollment for the Mexican descent population. As well as highlighting the influential role of teachers in students' lives who come from working-class families. The need for mentorship, guidance, and high expectations was clear. Lastly, this paper adds to the small, but emerging literature on the historic experiences of Mexican descent youth in school, as well as social and economic factors that influenced the attainment gap to close between 1940 and 1980.

As of 2004 California employed almost 30% of all foreign born workers in the U.S. and was the state with the largest percentage of immigrants in the labor force. It received a very large number of uneducated immigrants so that two thirds of workers with no schooling degree in California were foreign-born in 2004. If immigration harms the labor opportunities of natives, especially the least skilled ones, California was the place where these effects should have been particularly strong. But is it possible that immigrants raised the demand for California's native workers, rather than harming it? After all immigrants have different skills and tend to work in different occupations then natives and hence they may raise productivity and the demand for complementary production tasks and skills. We consider workers of different education and age as imperfectly substitutable in production and we exploit differences in immigration across these groups to infer their impact on US natives. In order to isolate the "supply-driven" variation of immigrants across skills and to identify the labor market responses of natives we use a novel instrumental variable strategy. Our estimates use migration by skill group to other U.S. states as instrument for migration to California. Migratory flows to other states, in fact, share the same "push" factors as those to California but clearly are not affected by the California-specific "pull" factors. We find that between 1960 and 2004 immigration did not produce a negative migratory response from natives. To the contrary, as immigrants were imperfect substitutes for natives with similar education and age we find that they stimulated, rather than harmed, the demand and wages of most U.S. native workers.

This article examines the short-and long-term influences of African American migration on the development and functioning of African American families and family relationships. Using existing research and the results from an ethnographic study of a large, African American, extended family, this article confirms the findings of previous studies and begins to examine the meaning and definition of contemporary types of migration. The study suggests that family members who have migrated with respect to socioeconomic status have many of the same issues as those who have migrated with respect to physical distance.

Although economists largely agree that residential segregation has been harmful to African-American employment and earnings in recent decades, there is much less consensus about why this relationship emerged. This paper examines the association between segregation and the relative employment of black workers at the U.S. Postal Service, a large scale employer with facilities in every city in the United States. Relative to whites, black employment at the post office is an increasing function of segregation, but only after 1970. Postal facilities have remained concentrated in downtown areas, near black enclaves, even as other firms suburbanized. We argue that this pattern is consistent with explanations of bad ghettos that emphasize physical isolation, or spatial mismatch, rather than social isolation.

Social science analysis relies on a limited number of data sources and the design of these surveysdetermines what questions can be answered with those data. Two forces have acted to preventadequate collection of data and subsequent understanding of the military: the definition ofsoldiers as an institutionalized population and the definition of military service as a genderedoccupation dominated by males. This has resulted in the exclusion of military personnel fromnational federal and academic surveys, male WWII veteran under enumeration in the census,women veterans being understudied for three-fourths of the century, Black male WWII veteranpost-service attainment not being well documented, and incomplete understanding of Blackincome, marriage rates and single-parent households relative to other races and ethnicities.Creating a more inclusive (from adding military members to studies) and thereby a morecomplete set of data provides a better lens to comprehending the complex sociological issues forgender, race and ethnic minorities.

Homeownership rates equal the number of households that own homes divided by the number of households in the population. Differences in the propensity to form a household, therefore, may contribute to changes in homeownership rates over time in addition to long-standing racial gaps in homeownership. We examine these issues on an age-specific basis using data from the 1970 to 2000 public use microsamples of the decennial census. Results indicate that lower headship rates tend to reduce homeownership rates. This pattern is most notable for individuals in their early and mid 20s. For these individuals, declining headship rates between 1970 and 2000 reduced homeownership rates by three to five percentage points. Moreover, 2000 African American headship rates narrow white-black gaps in homeownership by roughly three percentage points, whereas 2000 Hispanic headship rates widen white-Hispanic gaps in homeownership by two to three percentage points. Thus, controlling for differences in headship behavior, white-black homeownership gaps are somewhat more severe than previously recognized, but the reverse is true for white-Hispanic gaps.

While several studies examine the eect of marriage market conditions on post-maritallabor supply, few account for the eect that these conditions may have on pre-marital in-vestment decisions and mate selection. This paper investigates theoretically and empiricallyhow changes in marriage market conditions aect pre-marital investments. I ?rst show howa change in the sex ratio ?that is, the ratio of males to females ?can alter incentives forinvestments both in the context of a unitary model of the household and in a non-unitarysetting with post-match bargaining. I show that a rise in the sex ratio will lead men toincrease pre-matching investments and women to decrease them if agents are su ciently riskaverse. I test this prediction using exogenous variation in the marriage market sex ratio gen-erated by the preference of second generation Americans for endogamy and shocks broughtabout by immigration. I ?nd that a worsening of marriage market conditions spurs higherpre-marital investments, measured by years of education, literacy and occupational choice.Speci?cally, a change of the sex ratio from one to two leads men to increase their educationalinvestment by 0.5 years on average and women to decrease it by 0.05 years. In addition,the eect of the sex ratio on pre-marital investments appear to, in itself, signi?cantly alterpost-marital labor supply behavior suggesting that accounting for these eects when usingmarriage market conditions as proxies for ex-post bargaining power is important. Overall,these results suggest that there are substantial returns to education on the marriage mar-ket, and that both men and women take these returns into account when making educationdecisions.

We construct a quarterly time series of the rent-price ratio for the aggregate stock of owner-occupied housingin the United States, starting in 1960, by merging micro data from the last five Decennial Censuses of Housing surveys with price indexes for house prices and rents. We show that the rent-price ratio ranged between 5 and 5-1/2 percent between 1960 and 1995, but rapidly declined after 1995. By year-end 2006, the rent-price ratio reached an historic low of 3-1/2 percent. For the rent-price ratio to return to its historical average over, say, the next five years, house prices likely would have to fall considerably.

Using panel data from US states over the period 1941-2002, I measure the impact ofgubernatorial partisanship on a wide range of different policy settings and economicoutcomes. Across 32 measures, there are surprisingly few differences in policy settings,social outcomes and economic outcomes under Democrat and Republican Governors. Interms of policies, Democratic Governors tend to prefer slightly higher minimum wages.Under Republican Governors, incarceration rates are higher, while welfare caseloads arehigher under Democratic Governors. In terms of social and economic outcomes,Democratic Governors tend to preside over higher median post-tax income, lower posttaxinequality, and lower unemployment rates. However, for 26 of the 32 dependentvariables, gubernatorial partisanship does not have a statistically significant impact onpolicy outcomes and social welfare. I find no evidence of gubernatorial partisandifferences in tax rates, welfare generosity, the number of government employees or theirsalaries, state revenue, incarceration rates, execution rates, pre-tax incomes andinequality, crime rates, suicide rates, and test scores. These results are robust to the use ofregression discontinuity estimation, to take account of the possibility of reverse causality.Overall, it seems that Governors behave in a fairly non-ideological manner.

[Mary Hughes] and Millard Hughes married two years before a U.S. ruling overrode state interracial-marriage bans. Tribune photo by Candice C. Cusic [Kimberly Adami-Hasegawa] and her husband, [Naoto], spend a moment with their cat, Presley, in their Oak Park home. Tribune photo by Charles Cherney Millard and Mary Hughes married Jan. 30, 1965. When later invited to another wedding in Ohio, they made sure not to stop in Indiana, where their marriage was not legal. Color-blind romances The growing number of interracial marriages among whites, Hispanics and Asians is attributed to immigration. And the rise in black- white marriages is because of better race relations, according to a new report. MOST COMMON INTERRACIAL MARRIAGES IN U.S. In millions of couples: 2005: Hispanic and white: 1.75 million 2005: Asian and white or Hispanic: 755,000 2005: Black and white or Hispanic: 440,000 NOTE: Includes married persons of all ages and places of birth. Hispanic Ethnicity was first identified in the 1970 census. CENSUS BREAKDOWN OF U.S. POPULATION IN 2005* Whites: 215 million Hispanics: 41.9 million Blacks: 35.0 million Asians: 12.9 million *Does not equal total U.S. population Sources: Stanford University, American Community Survey, data from www.ipums.org Chicago Tribune - See microfilm for complete graphic.