The food stamp program, serving 24 million persons in 2004 at a cost of $27 billion, is one of themost important income support programs in the United States. Despite this prominence, it hasbeen relatively understudied as it has been difficult for researchers to isolate the causal impact ofthe Food Stamp Program on food spending, nutritional intake, labor supply and other outcomes.Because the program is national, there is not variation in program parameters (such as starkdifferences in state benefit levels or eligibility) that are typically exploited by researchers tomeasure program impacts. In this work, we leverage previously underutilized variation acrosscounties in the date they originally implemented their Food Stamp Program in the 1960s andearly 1970s. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the 1960, 1970 and 1980Decennial Census, we employ difference-in-difference methods to estimate the impact ofprogram availability on food spending, family income, labor supply, and health. Using thePSID, we find that that the introduction of food stamps leads to decreases in out of pocket foodexpenses, decreases in the propensity to eat out, and overall increases in food consumption. Theresults are consistent with theoretical predictions but are not precisely estimated. Results fromthe Census and PSID show no evidence of a significant work disincentive from introduction offood stamps.

...Focusing on the last half-century, this article examines overall patterns in total migration and migration by level of education in Tenth District states. The first section of the article shows that the net inflow of people from other states was consistently positive in only one state, Colorado, but gradually improved in most other states. The section also shows that immigration increased greatly in most district states but ended up more important than in the nation only in Colorado...

The aim of this research project is to analyse the relationship between migration to North America and other types of mobility, such as internal migration and short-distance migration across state boundaries, in the period 1850-1914. Migration from the Austrian Empire to North America will be examined within the context of long-standing patterns of migration, population development in the 19th century and the changing socio-economic structure of the Habsburg Monarchy.The focus of our investigation into migration patterns will be provided by the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria (in todays Austria), and Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). We have restricted the geographical scope of the project for a number of reasons. Firstly, this area formed the Monarchys geographical and economic core. Secondly, these regions were in quantitative terms at the centre of migrational activity. Thirdly, it is neither feasible nor worthwhile to include other provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Expansion of the area under examination would extend the projects time-scale, while simultaneously necessitating a greater range of language skills than is at our disposal. More importantly, a research group in Budapest under the direction of Tibor Frank and Julianna Pusks is at present already working on migration from Hungary to the U.S.A. at the start of the 20th century, using much the same kinds of source material shipping companies passenger lists that we plan to use ourselves (see 4.1.). We are in close contact with this group and we hope that the two projects will complement each other.

Federal taxes fall more heavily on workers in cities that offer above-average wages: cities with higher productivity, lower quality-of-life, or inefficient housing sectors. Estimated tax differentials across cities in the United States, controlling for worker characteristics, have a standard deviation of 2.7 percent of total income; these represent a horizontal transfer of over $200 billion from workers in high-wage cities to similarly-skilled workers in low-wage cities. Large coastal cities pay the highest taxes, while smaller communities, particularly in the South, pay the lowest. As indicated in the paper, federal taxes induce workers to leave high-wage areas, lowering long-run employment levels by 13 percent and land and housing prices by 21 and 4 percent, and bringing on opposite effects in low-wage areas. This leads to a welfare loss of about 0.23 percent of GDP a year, or $28 billion in 2005. Workers may locate efficiently if taxes are appropriately indexed to local wage-levels; indexing taxes to local costs induces too many workers to live in expensive, high quality-of-life cities. Deductions in the tax code for housing and property taxes index taxes partially to local costs, helping workers locate more efficiently, but creating larger losses by distorting consumption choices. Changes in relative wages and housing prices across cities over the 1980s and 90s are roughly consistent with federal tax changes over these periods.

This book is the result of a four-year, in-depth study using social science methodology of those refugees who came as children or youths from Central Europe to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, fleeing persecution from the National Socialist regime. This study examines their fates in their new country, their successes and tribulations.

Recent debates on immigration have led to speculation regarding the socioeconomic advancement of immigrants and their children with some prominent scholars arguing that recent immigrants are of low quality and will have difficulty matching the accomplishments of immigrants of the early twentieth century. Others have suggested that immigrant progress will be hindered in the Post-Civil Rights Era, but not by the immigrants own shortcomings. Rather, their opportunities will be limited by deindustrialization and racism. This study examines patterns of poverty across three generations of recent immigrants from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean using U.S. Census data from 1980 and 2000. The findings here contradict the expectation that recent immigrants would not experience significant upward mobility. There is a nearly universal intergenerational decline in poverty among immigrants groups from throughout the western hemisphereregardless of their racial or national origins. However, a significant Black disadvantage emerges in the new second and new third that leaves Black immigrants more likely than all others to experience poverty in the U.S. It is a disadvantage that cannot be explained by national origins, city of residence, age, education, employment, or marital status.All of this suggests that the success and failure of immigrants in the U.S. may have more to do with their placement in our most crude racial schemas than with their human capital.

The integration of women into formal labor markets was one of the most salient changes of the twentieth century. The female century, in the words of The Economist, witnessed an extraordinary transformation of women s opportunities and outcomes both in and outside the household. My dissertation explores both the causes and the consequences of women s move from home to market in the United States during three episodes of rapid change. It begins by documenting demand-side shifts during the 1940s that increased the earnings and occupational choices of African-American women; then demonstrates the impact of contraceptive technology on the extent and intensity of women s participation in the formal labor market after 1960; and, finally, estimates the consequences of shifts in women s labor supply for the growth of earnings inequality in the United States during the 1980s.

We are currently in the middle of the latest wave of recurring interest in graduation and dropping out (see Dorn, 1996, for historical patterns). Part of this interest has been stimulated by those concerned about the equity consequences of graduation rates (e.g., Orfield, 2004; Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004). Part has also been stimulated by No Child Left Behinds sole measure targeted specifically at high schoolsgraduation ratesand at moves since 2005 to reform high school (e.g., the National Governors Association summit in 2005 and a week-long series on the daytime Oprah Winfrey television show). And part has been the development of new measures. veral researchers have proposed different measures of graduation, using information from the Common Core of Data and Census Bureau estimates of state population changes (e.g., Greene & Winters, 2002, 2005; Haney et al., 2004; Seastrom, Hoffman, Chapman, & Stillwell, 2006; Swanson, 2004; Warren, 2005). At the same time, historical data has become more accessible with the development of online archives, most importantly IPUMS but also Bob Hausers rectangularization of October Current Population Survey microdata, which is available from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. Most of the social history on educational attainment in different countries relies on cross-sectional data from censuses and surveys. The problem with cross-sectional information is that can be misleading when underlying conditions are changing rapidly. Producing synthetic period measures can be feasibly done using indirect methods of estimation. Two tools in particularSchmertmanns (2002) method of estimating increments in population characteristics from cross-sectional data, and an application of Preston and Coales (1982) variable-rate model of populationscan allow one to create some important measures of educational experiences. This paper describes and applies those methods to U.S. data using decennial census microdata at the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample project (Minnesota Population Center, n.d.).

Whether the nation's most selective and resource-intensive colleges and universities are successful in serving as "engines of opportunity" rather than "bastions of privilege" depends on the extent to which they increase the educational attainment of students from the most economically disadvantaged backgrounds (Bowen, Kurzweil, and Tobin, 2005). Less than 11 percent of first-year students matriculating at 20 highly selective institutions were from the bottom income quartile of the income distribution, leading to significant concerns from higher education leaders and policy makers about the role of higher education in reducing intergenerational inequality, particularly in an era of high returns to education. Responding to what Lawrence Summers described as the "manifest inadequacy of higher education's current contribution to equality of opportunity in America," Harvard University and other public and private universities have introduced new initiatives designed to encourage the enrollment of students from low- and moderate-income families. One question addressed in this paper is whether the population of low-income students with high observed academic achievement is sufficiently large that aggressive institutional policies will be an effective tool in increasing the representation of low-income students at the most highly ranked colleges and universities. Using data on test-taking outcomes we also examine where students currently send scores (as a proxy for application) and then consider the extent to which differences in family income affect students' choice sets. While the problem of the underrepresentation of low-income students affects both public and private universities, the effect of outreach and financial aid policies on outcomes is likely to differ appreciably across institutions.

With the publication of A Fresh Map of Life, Peter Laslett (1996) introduced the concept of the Third Age to a wide audience consisting of academics as well as lay people. With it, he pointed to an important change in modern societies brought on by the spectacular increase in longevity and in the accompanying increase in disability-free longevity that occurred during the twentieth century. Laslett used the Third Age to describe a newly emerging phase of life, in which productive activities largely cease or at least change, but in which the majority of people remain healthy and active in many ways. In this volume, the Third Age is defined as consisting of the period between age 65 and 79...

There is a long tradition in development economics of collecting original data to test specific hypotheses. Over the last 10 years, this tradition has merged with an expertise in setting up randomized field experiments, resulting in an increasingly large number of studies where an original experiment has been set up to test economic theories and hypotheses. This paper extracts some substantive and methodological lessons from such studies in three domains: incentives, social learning, and time-inconsistent preferences. The paper argues that we need both to continue testing existing theories and to start thinking of how the theories may be adapted to make sense of the field experiment results, many of which are starting to challenge them. This new framework could then guide a new round of experiments.

The release of Enovid in 1960, the first birth control pill, afforded U. S. women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers. This paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women's labor-force participation. The results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22, increased the number of women in the paid labor force, and raised the number of annual hours worked.

Beginning around 1880, public health issues and engineering advances spurred the installation of city water and sewer systems. As part of this growth, many cities chose to use lead service pipes to connect residences to city water systems. This choice had negative consequences for child mortality, although the consequences were often hard to observe amid the overall falling death rates. This paper uses national data from the public use sample of the 1900 Census of Population and data on city use of lead pipes in 1897 to estimate the effect of lead pipes on child mortality. In 1900, 29 percent of the married women in the United States who had given birth to at least one child and were age forty-five or younger lived in locations where lead service pipes were used to deliver water. Because the effect of lead pipes depended on the acidity and hardness of the water, much of the negative effect was concentrated on the densely populated eastern seaboard. In the full sample, women who lived on the eastern seaboard in cities with lead pipes experienced increased child mortality of 9.3 percent relative to the sample average. These estimates suggest that the number of child deaths attributable to the use of lead pipes numbered in the tens of thousands. Many surviving children may have experienced substantial IQ impairment as a result of lead exposure. The tragedy is that lead problems were avoidable, particularly once data became available on the toxicity of lead. These findings have implications for current policy and events.

Neste artigo analisam-se os diferenciais nas taxas do grau mais alto de educação alcançado, no Brasil, por pessoas de 15 anos e mais, entre 1970 e 2000, segundo grupos de idade e sexo. Para os grupos de idades mais elevadas, o crescimento na educação formal parece ter redundado em aumento na proporção de pessoas com pelo menos uma série concluída do ensino fundamental, enquanto para os mais jovens teve maior significado o crescimento na proporção daquelas com pelo menos um ano concluído de ensino médio e superior. A análise por coorte mostrou uma maior expansão, ao longo do período, da proporção de pessoas nos ensinos médio e superior, para as coortes mais jovens e as mulheres. A estrutura etária mais envelhecida, em 2000, tem pouco efeito no crescimento da educação no país e atua no sentido de diminuir a diferença entre as taxas de prevalência de 1970 e 2000 para os graus: nenhuma educação formal, fundamental e médio. Já com relação ao nível superior, ela coopera com o aumento da diferença. A distribuição por educação dos imigrantes internacionais legais registrados pelos censos de 1991 e 2000 colabora para o aumento das taxas nos graus mais altos de educação.

Research on the shadow carceral state identifies new species of criminal-civil and civil-criminal legal hybrids embedded in state law. We bring into conversation disparate literatures on growing family complexity, monetary sanctions, justiciable problems, and child support enforcement to examine how contemporary American families experience a system of double and triple jeopardy-the compounding risks of exposure to both criminal and civil debts at the nexus of a legal hybrid, wherein monetary sanctions (criminal) and child support orders (civil) become co-constitutive (double jeopardy), thereby amplifying the risk that a parent will also experience (civil) child support arrearage (triple jeopardy). Using data from seven sources to construct a unique dataset, we evaluate the spatial and racial risk of double and triple jeopardy, as well as the state-level factors that explain them. Our analysis provides a valid description of, and critically establishes the sociolegal precarity wherein, currently incarcerated parents observe and experience their risks of double and triple jeopardy in the child support system via its orders, collections, and enforcement powers. We find that there are, indeed, racial and spatial disparities in the risk of double and triple jeopardy, and that specific state-level factors increment and decrement those risks.

The 1940s marked a turning point in the labor market outcomes of African-American women. They experienced large wage gains relative to white women, sharp declines in agricultural and domestic service work, and significant increases in formal sector employment. Using a semiparametric decomposition technique, we assess the influence of changes in productive and personal characteristics, in workers' distribution across occupations and locations, and in the wage structure on both black women's absolute wage gains and those relative to white women's. We argue that the pattern of changes is most consistent with increasing demand for their labor in the formal sector.