"The Boston Renaissance is a tour de force. Drawing upon a rich array of new data, Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson provide an original and insightful analysis of Boston's remarkable triple revolution. This book is replete with information and should be read by scholars and policymakers alike."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Harvard University

"How an old and declining northeast city transformed itself into one of the most successful urban communities in American is a story the must be told, and it is told effectively in The Boston Renaissance."
-MICHAEL S. DUKAKIS, professor of political science and former governor of Massachusetts

"Dubbed an urban disaster case only twenty years ago, Boston today is a high-tech boom town, a marvel of tight labor markets and sky rocketing real estate. How did this transformation come about and who has reaped the bounty? We learn how different ethnic groups reshaped the social landscape of the metropolitan region and how the tracks of that upheaval shaped race relations. The Boston Renaissance is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and citizens concerned with urban change in the twenty-first century."
-KATHERINE S. NEWMAN, Kennedy School of Government

"As the authors point out, Boston was considered an economic basket case as recently as 1982. In terms of the poverty rate, violent crime, and other indexes of urban decline, Boston was at the bottom. Two decades later, employment has climbed to an all time high. The city's neighborhoods are making remarkable comebacks, and Boston's crime prevention strategy has become the model for cities across the nation. The Boston Renaissance is the story of how a struggling city grew into America's urban success story."
-THOMAS M. MENINO, Mayor of Boston

This volume documents metropolitan Boston's metamorphosis from a casualty of manufacturing decline in the 1970s to a paragon of the high-tech and service industries in the 1990s. The city's rebound has been part of a wider regional renaissance, as new commercial centers have sprung up outside the city limits. A stream of immigrants have flowed into the area, redrawing the map of ethnic relations in the city. While Boston's vaunted mind-based economy rewards the highly educated, many unskilled workers have also found opportunities servicing the city's growing health and education industries.

Boston's renaissance remains uneven, and the authors identify a variety of handicaps (low education, unstable employment, single parenthood) that still hold minorities back. Nonetheless this book presents Boston as a hopeful example of how America's older cities can reinvent themselves in the wake of suburbanization and deindustrialization.

BARRY BLUESTONE is the Russell B. and Andr`ee B. Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

MARY HUFF STEVENSON is associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and senior fellow at its McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

"A high-quality collection of articles that should be of interest to scholars concerned with gender issues and labor markets."
-Industrial and Labor Relations Review

"Valuable reading ... conveys a sophistication and sense of perspective that should be constructive for many policy and personal debates on the subject of women and the workplace."
-Journal of Economic Literature

"The book is a useful addition to the library of family and consumer economists. Educators and researchers will find thoughtful, comprehensive studies that include challenging theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses."
-Journal of Consumer Affairs

Today, as married women commonly pursue careers outside the home, concerns about their ability to achieve equal footing with men without sacrificing the needs of their families trouble policymakers and economists alike. In 1993 federal legislation was passed that required most firms to provide unpaid maternity leave for up to twelve weeks. Yet, as Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace reveals, motherhood remains a primary obstacle to women's economic success. This volume offers fascinating and provocative new analyses of women's status in the labor market, as it explores the debate surrounding parental leave: Do policies that mandate extended leave protect jobs and promote child welfare, or do they sidetrack women's careers and make them less desirable employees?

An examination of the disadvantages that women—particularly young mothers—face in today's workplace sets the stage for the debate. Claudia Goldin presents evidence that female college graduates are rarely able to balance motherhood with career track employment, and Jane Waldfogel demonstrates that having children results in substantially lower wages for women. The long hours demanded by managerial and other high powered professions further penalize women who in many cases still bear primary responsibility for their homes and children. Do parental leave policies improve the situation for women? Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace offers a variety of perspectives on this important question. Some propose that mandated leave improves women's wages by allowing them to preserve their job tenure. Other economists express concern that federal leave policies prevent firms and their workers from acting on their own particular needs and constraints, while others argue that because such policies improve the well-being of children they are necessary to society as a whole. Olivia Mitchell finds that although the availability of unpaid parental leave has sharply increased, only a tiny percentage of workers have access to paid leave or child care assistance. Others caution that the current design of family-friendly policies may promote gender inequality by reinforcing the traditional division of labor within families.

Parental leave policy is a complex issue embedded in a tangle of economic and social institutions. Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace offers an innovative and up-to-date investigation into women's chances for success and equality in the modern economy.

FRANCINE D. BLAU is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Cornell University, she is also research director of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, director of the Institute for Labor Market Policy, faculty associate of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, and affiliate of the Women's Studies Program.

RONALD G. EHRENBERG is Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. He is also research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is president-elect of the Society of Labor Economists.

CONTRIBUTORS: Francine D. Blau, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Barbara R. Bergmann, Rebecca M. Blank, Ileen A. DeVault, Paula England, Marianne A. Ferber, Claudia Goldin, Jonathan Gruber, Marjorie Honig, Lawrence F. Katz, Jacob Alex Klerman, Renee M. Landers, Arleen Leibowitz, Janice Fanning Madden, Olivia S. Mitchell, H. Elizabeth Peters, Solomon W. Polachek, James B. Rebitzer, Cordelia W. Reimers, Donna S. Rothstein, Christopher J. Ruhm, Myra H. Strober, Lowell J. Taylor, Jackqueline L. Teague, Jane Waldfogel, and Michael Waldman.

"This book is full of interesting information on the long-run trends in women's work and family life, exploring the evidence behind key theories about why women's jobs have improved and why there are still large gender gaps in many areas. A major appeal is its multi-disciplinary approach, including economic, political, and organizational perspectives on gender and work. The Declining Significance of Gender? is a book that anyone interested in research on women in the labor market will want to read."
-REBECCA M. BLANK, University of Michigan

"An impressive list of sociologists and economists confront the evidence of women's progress and setbacks in work and beyond. Their authoritative treatments show how American women's common destiny of disadvantage gave way to a world in which some women have come a long way while others are being left behind."
-MICHAEL HOUT, University of California, Berkeley

"The Declining Significance of Gender? is an up-to-date collection of some of the best analyses of the causes and outcomes of gender differentiation in the paid labor force that one can find. WIth outstanding contributions by the top sociologically informed economists and economically informed sociologists working today on issues such as pay equity, glass ceilings, and culturally imposed social structures, the volume should be on the desk of scholars and policy makers, journalists, and activists alike. The work of the scholars brought together in Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, and David B. Grusky's carefully selected collection of essays brings a lucid and dispassionate perspective to a topic usually informed more by sentiment than by data."
-CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, Graduate Center, City University of New York

The last half-century has witnessed substantial change in the opportunities and rewards available to men and women in the workplace. While the gender pay gap narrowed and female labor force participation rose dramatically in recent decades, some dimensions of gender inequality—most notably the division of labor in the family—have been more resistant to change, or have changed more slowly in recent years than in the past. These trends suggest that one of two possible futures could lie ahead: an optimistic scenario in which gender inequalities continue to erode, or a pessimistic scenario where contemporary institutional arrangements persevere and the gender revolution stalls.

In The Declining Significance of Gender?, editors Francine Blau, Mary Brinton, and David Grusky bring together top gender scholars in sociology and economics to make sense of the recent changes in gender inequality, and to judge whether the optimistic or pessimistic view better depicts the prospects and bottlenecks that lie ahead. It examines the economic, organizational, political, and cultural forces that have changed the status of women and men in the labor market. The contributors examine the economic assumption that discrimination in hiring is economically inefficient and will be weeded out eventually by market competition. They explore the effect that family-family organizational policies have had in drawing women into the workplace and giving them even footing in the organizational hierarchy. Several chapters ask whether political interventions might reduce or increase gender inequality, and others discuss whether a social ethos favoring egalitarianism is working to overcome generations of discriminatory treatment against women.

Although there is much rhetoric about the future of gender inequality, The Declining Significance of Gender? provides a sustained attempt to consider analytically the forces that are shaping the gender revolution. Its wide-ranging analysis of contemporary gender disparities will stimulate readers to think more deeply and in new ways about the extent to which gender remains a major fault line of inequality.

FRANCINE D. BLAU is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University.

MARY C. BRINTON is Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

DAVID B. GRUSKY is professor of sociology at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, Paula England, Claudia Goldin, David B. Grusky, Heidi Hartmann, Robert Max Jackson, Lawrence M. Kahn, Vicky Lovell, Eva M. Meyersson Milgrom, Trond Petersen, Solomon W. Polachek, Cecilia L. Ridgeway, and Stephen J. Rose.

"This book goes beyond the rhetoric that characterizes most child care debates, and relies on data to describe the market for child care and on the results of serious evaluations to describe the effect of child care policies. David Blau has done more research on the economics of child care than anyone else and this book distills his findings. It is balanced and comprehensive. The Child Care Problem should be required reading for everyone who wants to understand what does and does not work in the market for child care."
-Rebecca M. Blank, University of Michigan

"Simply the best treatment of the economics of child care. Before blaming the 'system' (or politicians), see how market forces shape the nature and quality of contemporary child care. Only in that way is true reform possible."
-Douglas J. Besharov, American Enterprise Institute

The child care system in the United States is widely criticized, yet the underlying structural problems are difficult to pin down. In The Child Care Problem, David M. Blau sets aside the often emotional terms of the debate and applies a rigorous economic analysis to the state of the child care system in this country, arriving at a surprising diagnosis of the root of the problem.

Blau approaches child care as a service that is bought and sold in markets, addressing such questions as: What kinds of child care are available? Is good care really hard to find? How do costs affect the services families choose? Why are child care workers underpaid relative to other professions? He finds that the child care market functions much better than is commonly believed. The supply of providers has kept pace with the number of mothers entering the workforce, and costs remain relatively modest. Yet most families place a relatively low value on high-quality child care, and are unwilling to pay more for better care. Blau sees this lack of demand—rather than the market's inadequate supply—as the cause of the nation's child care dilemma. The Child Care Problem also faults government welfare policies—which treat child care subsidies mainly as a means to increase employment of mothers, but set no standards regarding the quality of child care their subsidies can purchase.

Blau trains an economic lens on research by child psychologists, evaluating the evidence that the day care environment has a genuine impact on early development. The failure of families and government to place a priority on improving such critical conditions for their children provides a compelling reason to advocate change. The Child Care Problem concludes with a balanced proposal for reform. Blau outlines a systematic effort to provide families of all incomes with the information they need to make more prudent decisions. And he suggests specific revisions to welfare policy, including both an allowance to defray the expenses of families with children, and a child care voucher that is worth more when used for higher quality care.

The Child Care Problem provides a straightforward evaluation of the many contradictory claims about the problems with child care, and lays out a reasoned blueprint for reform which will help guide both social scientists and non-academics alike toward improving the quality of child care in this country.

DAVID M. BLAU is professor economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Winner of the 2002 Richard A. Lester Prize for Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations

"At Home and Abroad is an admirable work of analysis and exposition-a clear, highly informative, and solidly grounded study of how labor market institutions affect employment and relative wages."
-STEVEN DAVIS, University of Chicago

"Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have produced a thoughtful and compelling analysis of how market forces and institutions shape national differences in wage inequality, unemployment, and gender pay gaps. For those seeking to understand the benefits, as well as the costs, of the deregulated and flexible U.S. labor market, this is a must-read book."
-LAWRENCE KATZ, Harvard University

"Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have produced a masterful synthesis of available evidence on how labor market institutions affect wages and employment. As their review makes clear, the experiences of other countries contain important lessons for U.S. labor market policy. This book should be required reading for anyone with an interest in realistic options for improving the lot of American workers."
-KATHARINE G. ABRAHAM, University of Maryland

"The United States has led the industrialized world in rising income inequality and declining unemployment in the past two decades. Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn present the definitive analysis that sorts out the evidence on these and related phenomena, isolating the roles of institutions and macroeconomic forces. At Home and Abroad is must reading for macroeconomists, labor economists, and any non- specialist who is interested in these central economic and social outcomes."
-DANIEL S. HAMERMESH, University of Texas at Austin

Throughout the latter part of the 20th century, the U.S. labor market performed differently than the labor markets of the world's other advanced industrialized societies. In the early 1970s, the United States had higher unemployment rates than its Western European counterparts. But after two oil crises, rapid technological change, and globalization rocked the world's economies, unemployment fell in the United States, while increasing dramatically in other nations. At the same time, wage inequality widened more in the United States than in Europe. In At Home and Abroad, Cornell University economists Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn examine the reasons for these striking dissimilarities between the United States and its economic allies.

Comparing countries, the authors find that governments and unions play a far greater role in the labor market in Europe than they do in the United States. It is much more difficult to lay off workers in Europe than in the United States, unemployment insurance is more generous in Europe, and many fewer Americans than Europeans are covered by collective bargaining agreements. Interventionist labor market institutions in Europe compress wages, thus contributing to the lower levels of wage inequality in the European Union than in the United States.

Using a unique blend of microeconomic and microeconomic analyses, the authors assess how these differences affect wage and unemployment levels. In a lucid narrative, they present ample evidence that, as upheavals shook the global economy, the flexible U.S. market let wages adjust so that jobs could be maintained, while more rigid European economies maintained wages at the cost of losing jobs.

By helping readers understand the relationship between different economic responses and outcomes, At Home and Abroad makes an invaluable contribution to the continuing debate about the role institutions can and should play in creating jobs and maintaining living standards.

FRANCINE D. BLAU is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, and LAWRENCE M. KAHN is Professor of Labor Economics and Collective Bargaining, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.

"David Blau has chosen seven economists to write chapters that review the emerging economic literature on the supply of child care, parental demand for care, child care cost and quality, and to discuss the implications of these analyses for public policy. The book succeeds in presenting that research in understandable terms to policy makers and serves economists as a useful review of the child care literature....provides an excellent case study of the value of economic analysis of public policy issues." —Arleen Leibowitz, Journal of Economic Literature
 
"There is no doubt this is a timely book....The authors of this volume have succeeded in presenting the economic material in a nontechnical manner that makes this book an excellent introduction to the role of economics in public policy analysis, and specifically child care policy....the most comprehensive introduction currently available." —Cori Rattelman, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

DAVID M. BLAU is Norman Johnson Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and fellow of its Carolina Population Center.