Thomas N. Maloney

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Economics

The extent of economic and political inequality, their change over time, and the forces shaping them have profound implications for the sustainability of a society and the well-being of its members. Here we review the evolution of economic and political inequality broadly, though with particular attention to Europe and the USA. We describe legal/in...

This paper investigates the relationship between teachers unions and students’ academic performance. We examine nationally representative data and use a more comprehensive measure of teacher unionization by identifying both districts with collective bargaining contracts and districts with meet-and-confer agreements. We find that teachers unions rai...

To understand differences in labor market outcomes between genders, economists must examine a complex array of potentially significant factors, such as institutional context, productivity differences, child-bearing and home production, and bargaining behavior. Many of these factors are not well captured by standard data sources. We use a new survey...

The timings of historical fertility transitions in different regions are well understood by demographers, but much less is known regarding their specific features and causes. In the study reported in this paper, we used longitudinal micro-level data for five local populations in Europe and North America to analyse the relationship between socio-eco...

Henry Ford's Plan for the American Suburb: Dearborn and Detroit. By Barrow Heather B. . Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 216. $38, cloth. - Volume 76 Issue 1 - Thomas N. Maloney

BACKGROUND Most of what we know about fertility decline in the United States comes from aggregate (often state or county level) data sources. It is difficult to identify variation in fertility change across socio-economic classes in such data, although understanding such variation would provide deeper insight into the history of the fertility trans...

We build on recent work examining the BMI patterns of immigrants in the US by distinguishing between legal and undocumented immigrants. We find that undocumented women have relative odds of obesity that are about 10 percentage points higher than for legal immigrant women, and their relative odds of being overweight are about 40 percentage points hi...

The prevalence rate of obesity in the United States has been persistently high in recent decades, and disparities in obesity risks are routinely observed. Both individual and contextual factors should be considered when addressing health disparities. This study examines how Latino-white spatial segregation is associated with the risk of obesity for...

ChenAnthony S.. The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States 1941–1972. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. xxii + 395 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13457, $65.00 (cloth); 978-0-691-13953-1, $24.95 (paper). - Volume 11 Issue 4 - Thomas N. Maloney

By the late 1960s, antidiscrimination policy aimed at labor markets in the United States consisted of two main branches. One branch, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was administered by an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) with very limited powers. The other, government contract compliance policy established under Lyndon John...

Paul Spickard's Almost All Aliens is about much more than immigration, as that topic is typically conceived. It is an attempt to integrate the study of immigration with the study of native peoples, slavery and emancipation, and race and ethnicity in general, from about 1600 to the present. Spickard does not maintain one analytical framework in carr...

In this book, Murray presents a thorough history of industrial-sickness funds and explains why these funds were able to persist in the face of efforts to replace them with publicly provided insurance. The programs that Murray examines were not comprehensive health-insurance plans. Rather, they were funds, sometimes firm-specific and sometimes union...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic history literature. Moreover, a number of core findings are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence remains limited. One such example is 19th century African-Americans in the...

Using a data source that allows us to directly observe the undocumented and to track them over time, we examine the change over time in the neighborhood conditions of the undocumented in Salt Lake County. While our results should be treated as preliminary, they suggest that the undocumented have gained ground on legal immigrants and natives in term...

Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. By Paul D. Moreno. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 12, 304. $49.95. - Volume 66 Issue 4 - THOMAS N. MALONEY

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This article examines how residence in racially segregated neighborhoods affected the job prospects of African American men in the late 1910s. The analysis focuses on one northern city—Cincinnati, Ohio. The evidence comes from a new longitudinal dataset containing information on individuals linked from the 1920 census to World War I selective servi...

This article examines how residence in racially segregated neighborhoods affected the job prospects of African American men in the late 1910s. The analysis focuses on one northern city—Cincinnati, Ohio.The evidence comes from a new longitudinal dataset containing information on individuals linked from the 1920 census to World War I selective servic...

Race, Liberalism, and Economics. Edited by David Colander, Robert E. Prasch, and Falguni A. Sheth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. x, 334. $65. - - Volume 65 Issue 2 - THOMAS N. MALONEY

The economic history of African American workers since 1940 has been marked by alternating episodes of progress and stagnation. Sharp gains in relative incomes during the 1940s were followed by little change in this measure in the 1950s. Renewed progress from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was followed by a new period of stagnation and even decline...

The economic history of African American workers since 1940 has been marked by alternating episodes of progress and stagnation. Sharp gains in relative incomes during the 1940s were followed by little change in this measure in the 1950s. Renewed progress from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was followed by a new period of stagnation and even decline...

By the mid-1980s, the city of Detroit had become an icon in U.S. urban history. Many saw it as the most extreme example of what went wrong in Northern industrial cities in the late twentieth century. The sequence of events is well known: the rapid influx of African American migrants from the South, combative reaction from the white community, civil...

The years between 1910 and 1920 witnessed the first wave of the "Great Migration" of African Americans to the North. This article uses new census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series project to study self-selection patterns in African American migration during this important decade. The results indicate that, contrary to contemporar...

This book is ahead of its time. While the title suggests that Finding Jobs might be a study of the labor market impacts of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the editors and authors make clear that it is simply too early to study these effects directly. Rather, their purpose is to examine the characte...

This paper examines occupational mobility among African-American workers in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late 1910s. New longitudinal evidence on this issue is developed using census manuscripts, census public use samples, and World War I Selective Service registration records. While African Americans as a whole experienced less upward occupational mob...

Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans left the southern United States for the North between World War I and World War II. The willingness of employers in northern industries to experiment with this new labor pool depended on the training, turnover, and promotion policies that characterized their internal labor markets.

Personnel records of the A. M. Byers Company indicate that, during the 1910s and 1920s, black workers left this firm for health reasons much more frequently than white workers did. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether this racial gap in health-related turnover reflected the concentration of black workers in particularly hazardous jobs....

This article uses state and city level data to evaluate empirically Brinley Thomas's immigrant-as-deterrent view of the relationship between black emigration from the South and European immigration to the North. The article suggests a Todaro-like interpretation of the Great Migration, which emphasizes the importance of job availability to blacks in...

In 1940 the Ford Motor Company employed half of the black men in Detroit but only 14 percent of the whites. We find that black Detroiters were concentrated at Ford because they were excluded from working elsewhere. Those most affected were young married black men. A Ford job was virtually the only opportunity they had to earn a family wage; but to...

Recent major works on long-term racial inequality in the labor market revolve around competing hypotheses concerning the importance of human capital factors (Smith and Welch 1989) and government policy (Donohue and Heckman 1991) in promoting black advance. There is however, another line or thinking which emphasizes the importance of experimentation...

The gap between the mean wages of black men and white men in the United States narrowed substantially between 1940 and 1950. There was, however, almost no change in this wage gap between 1950 and 1960. Some of this discontinuity in the path of black progress can be explained by general changes in the wage structure wage compression in the 1940s and...

The study of racial inequality in the labor market, as it has been pursued by economic historians and labor economists, consists of two distinct but related projects: identifying the historical path of black workers' progress, and understanding what this historical path suggests about the role of race in the labor market. This dissertation contribu...

In 1940 the Ford Motor Company employed half of the black men in Detroit but only 14 percent of the whites. The authors postulate that black Detroiters were concentrated at Ford because they were excluded from working elsewhere. Those most affected were young married black men. A Ford job was virtually the only opportunity they had to earn a family...

Between 1910 and 1940, the black population of the northern United States nearly tripled, rising from just over I million to more than 2.7 million, signaling the start of the "Great Migration" of African-Americans out of the South. As black workers entered the North, they sought positions in new sectors of the economy. The share of northern black w...

Choose any two of these three topics: race, liberalism, and economics. Now trace the connections between the two that you have chosen over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, incorporating both fundamental philosophical concepts and policy implications. Doing this could easily produce a large, multivolume study. This book attempts...