Migration and metropolitan opportunity structures: A demographic response to racial inequality

This paper examines the impact of racial inequality on black and white migration rates for a sample of metropolitan areas in the United States 1975–1980. A conceptual framework for migration that includes a measure of racial inequality is developed and evaluated. The results indicate that blacks are attracted to areas with lower levels of inequality, but contrary to our expectations, the rate of black out-migration is lower in Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas with higher levels of racial inequality. In addition, whites seem to be attracted to labor markets where whites have the greatest advantage as measured by occupational inequality, and they are more likely to leave areas where the competition with blacks for jobs is greater. Implications for theory and further research for the comparative study of black and white migration are outlined.     

Agricultural change and restructuring: recent evidence from a survey of agricultural households in England

Despite widespread speculation about the likely future extent of agricultural restructuring in the UK, researchers and policymakers are surprisingly ignorant of the nature and extent of farm household adjustment in the period since the mid 1990s. Meanwhile, claims that agriculture is in crisis and on the threshold of radical structural change continue to receive widespread media attention. Critics point out that because European policy debates are constructed in ways which emphasise the vulnerability of farmers and their businesses, there is a lack of attention to the true status and economic sustainability of agricultural households themselves. This paper reports results from a recent survey of agricultural business restructuring within six English study areas selected to span a range of agricultural settings and designed to identify the different trajectories of change to be found there. It concludes that while there is some evidence of disengagement from mainstream agriculture and an increasingly diverse set of relationships between the occupation and management of land, commitment to remaining in agriculture remains strong amongst farming families. A substantial proportion of agricultural and agri-environmental assets seem likely to remain in the same hands for the foreseeable future.     

Testing the equality of location parameters of exponential populations from censored samples

The modified Tiku test and the modified likelihood ratio test proposed by Tiku and Vaughan (1991) for k=2 exponential populations are extended to . k > 2 populations. These tests are shown to be more powerful than the test proposed by Kambo and Awad (1985). Unlike the Kambo-Awad test, the proposed tests are shown to have almost symmetric power functions. Further, these tests can be applied when there is both left or right censoring present, in contrast to the tests of Sukhatme (1937), Bain and Englehardt (1991) and Elewa et al. (1992), who assume that there is no left censoring.