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A broad literature has made it clear that geographic units must be selected with care or they are likely to introduce error and uncertainty into results. Nevertheless, researchers often use data “off the shelf” with the implicit assumptions that their observations are consistent with the geographical concept relevant for their research question, and that they are of uniformly high quality in capturing this geographic identity. In this paper, we consider the geographical concept of “labor market” and offer a template for both clarifying its meaning for research and testing the suitability of extant labor-market delineations. We establish a set of metrics for comparing the quality of existing labor-market delineations with respect to the diverse meanings that researchers apply to the concept. Using the fit metrics established here, researchers can explore how delineations vary geographically, how they vary over time, and how this variation may shape research outcomes. Our assessment is that the quality of the extant delineations is relatively high overall. However, we find that different delineations vary significantly in the types of labor markets they represent, and that regional variations in fit within any given delineation may introduce noise or regional bias that merits consideration in any analysis conducted with these units. More broadly, the kinds of metrics we propose here have applicability for many other geographic entities where boundaries and scale can be only imperfectly defined.

Mycobacterial spindle cell pseudotumor (MSP) is a rare benign spindle cell lesion containing acid-fact mycobacteria. These lesions are most commonly identified in the lymph nodes, skin, spleen, or bone marrow of immunocompromised patients and only rarely involve the lungs. We report 3 cases of pulmonary MSP, which include 2 patients who are known to be HIV-positive. The histopathological diagnosis of MSP in the lung lends itself to many challenges due to its rare incidence and its spindled tumor-like appearance. The differential diagnosis is broad and includes both benign and malignant entities. We highlight the importance of the clinical context in which these lesions typically present and the morphologic spectrum of features seen, and we offer a practical approach to the workup of pulmonary mycobacterial pseudotumor. Appropriate recognition of this entity should lead to an accurate diagnosis of a treatable benign condition despite the clinical presentation often favoring malignancy.

Poverty rates are highest in the most urban and most rural areas of the United States and are higher in nonmetropolitan than metropolitan areas. Yet perhaps because only one-fifth of the nation's 35 million poor people live in nonmetro areas, rural poverty has received less attention than urban poverty from both policy makers and researchers. The authors provide a critical review of literature that examines the factors affecting poverty in rural areas. The authors focus on studies that explore whether there is a rural effect, that is, whether there is something about rural places above and beyond demographic characteristics and local economic context that makes poverty more likely in those places. The authors identify methodological concerns (such as endogenous membership and omitted variables) that may limit the validity of conclusions from existing studies that there is a rural effect. The authors conclude with suggestions for research that would address these concerns and explore the processes and institutions in urban and rural areas that determine poverty, outcomes, and policy impacts.

Rural racial and ethnic minorities are among the poorest of all Americans. This article situates their plight both theoretically and empirically in the context of employment hardship. Defined by access to employment and job quality, employment hardship is more prevalent among nonmetropolitan African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans than it is among either their central city counterparts or non-Hispanic whites. The strengths and limitations of both individual-level frameworks (e.g., human capital) and macro-level theories (e.g., uneven development) in explaining the economic double jeopardy faced by rural minorities are discussed. Policy recommendations designed to ameliorate employment hardship are presented.

We use the 1990 National Health Interview Survey supplement on Family Resources to examine the health care utilization patterns of immigrant and native-born adults in the United States. We modify a standard health care utilization framework by including duration of residence in the United States and measures of immigrant adaptation and family health context to model both the probability and number of physician contacts in the previous year. We find that duration of residence has a strong effect. Recently-arrived immigrants are much less likely to have had a contact in the previous year and had fewer contacts than either native-born or longer-term immigrant adults. Once the measures of adaptation--age at immigration and language of survey interview--are included, immigrants who have been in the United States for 10 years or more are not statistically different from the native-born. Family characteristics, including measures of exposure to the formal health care system, slightly reduce the size of the effects but do not alter the basic relationship between duration of residence and health care utilization. These results suggest that, net of socioeconomic characteristics, access to health insurance, and differences in morbidity, recent immigrants are much less likely than both the native-born and those immigrants of longer duration, to receive timely health care.

Since World War II the industrial shifts from agriculture to services have transformed the nature of employment opportunities in the US and generally resulted in occupational upgrading. This reorganization of occupations which continued into the 1970s has reduced the proportion of workers employed in the least skilled manual jobs. The most important result of this trend is that immigrant women--in fact women and men-- experienced both an improvement and deterioration in their occupational position. While the national pattern involved a decrease in relative employment of native workers as laborers and farm laborers immigrant women increased their share of these jobs. Immigrant men moved into 4 occupational categories largely being abandoned by native-born workers--jobs as operatives service workers laborers and farm laborers. The shift of immigrant women into laborer jobs was made possible through changes in the organization of work within industries rather than a change in the availability of the types of employers needing them. The well-advertised promise of employment in new growth industries such as electronics and the expansion of jobs requiring greater skills is not uniformly available to all groups of women. Thus jobs requiring few skills and offering few opportunities for advancement are usually filled by migrant ethnic workers particularly women who also lack leverage for demanding and securing higher status positions. The combination of the relative increase in the proportion of immigrant men and women in the least skilled manual jobs left behind by native-born workers and the apparent concentration of specific national origin groups in these jobs renders this important segment of the labor market clearly identifiable on political and ethnic ground. It also contributes to the understanding of the on-going debate as to whether immigrant workers displace or complement native work force.

Four hypotheses concerning the character and consequences of participation in an ethnic enclave economy are examined. The first concerns the justifiability of operationalizing enclave participation on the basis of place of residence, as done in recently published research. The second and third pertain to the effects of ethnic economy participation on entrepreneurs and workers, respectively. The fourth deals with determinants of self-employment among ethnic minorities. Two data sets are employed in this analysis: the 1980 Census individual sample for Cuban-born adult immigrants in South Florida and a 1983-86 longitudinal survey of Mariel entrants in the same area. These two independent data sets permit a more authoritative evaluation of the hypotheses. They also allow an assessment of the extent to which earlier findings about the pre-1980 Cuban-born population apply to the more recent entrants. Results consistently contradict depictions of ethnic enterprise as vehicles for exploitation and of enclaves as mere residential agglomerations. These structures are defined by physical proximity of firms, not dwellings. Ascriptive factors-primarily gender and marital status-play a decisive role in the emergence of enclave enterprise net of human capital endowments. Theoretical implications of these findings, in particular the relationship between intact nuclear families and the rise of an entrepreneurial minority, are discussed.