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The paper seeks to directly assess the relationship between immigration and the transformation of the urban service economy through a case study of immigrants in the hotel industry in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This comparative study of the hotel industry provides a particular good test case for both the restructuring and the replacement labor perspectives. Hotels in major U.S. cities have witnessed a major burst of capital investment in recent years. The industry's growth has been linked to the new sources of urban agglomeration and the pattern of growth has followed the trajectory of market segmentation predicted by the restructuring hypothesis. As hotels have also been a traditional employer of African-Americans focusing on this industry highlights the processes by which jobs are allocated to immigrants or native blacks. By comparing New York, still the quintessential immigrant city, with Philadelphia, a city with few immigrants, the paper assess whether the service sector/immigration interactions are indeed as important as the restructuring hypothesis asserts.

It is well recognized that the informal economy-unregulated economic activities that generate real or in-kind income-features prominently in the day-to-day lives of many in the developing world. Researchers have begun to explore the informal economy in developed countries but this work has focussed primarily on urban areas to the neglect of rural areas. In this paper the nature and correlates of informal work in nonmetropolitian Pennsylvania are described through an analysis of survey data on 505 families. Results indicate that participation in informal activities is widespread is not more typical of the poor does not contribute greatly to family income on average but those help many families whether difficult economic time is both economically and noneconomically motivated and net of other sociodemographic varaibles is positively related to rurality of residence and formal labor supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role that state government can play in addressing the critical issue of venture capital—specifically seed capital. Arranging debt financing mechanisms for small business is not new to governmental development finance agencies. What is new is state government involvement in arranging early stage equity financing. This state intervention entails striking a balance between private venture capital incentives and markets, and a desire to promote public economic development objectives. An overview of the problem and the venture capital industry provides a backdrop for discussion on states' roles and how one state, Pennsylvania, has designed state-sponsored seed venture capital programs.

The article examines how stock and custom trade cards, distributed by retailers throughout the United States for advertising purposes, became sought after items by the American public and contributed to the popularity of scrapbooking as a leisure activity in the late 19th century. The article traces the beginning of the movement to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where numerous exhibitors distributed these cards to attendees. Some of the contextual factors that contributed to the popularity of trade cards included the development of a national market due to advances in transportation, communication and mass production.

The relationship between community characteristics and the acquisition of federal grant funds is estimated for a sample of municipalities in Pennsylvania. A structure-conduct-performance framework is used to predict positive, independent effects of community structure and community conduct on per capita receipts of funds for community development and economic development. Regression findings indicate that structure and conduct influence acquisition of funds for community development but that only the structural variables affect acquisition of funds for economic development. A significant statistical interaction, however, indicates that communities with high levels of both activeness and need receive more community and economic development funds per capita than do other communities. The findings support the idea that both structural and conduct variables affect local participation in the federal grant system [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]