COLLEGE-TO-WORK MIGRATION OF TECHNOLOGY GRADUATES AND HOLDERS OF DOCTORATES WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT.  This study estimates a series of random parameter logit models of the college-to-work migration decisions of technology graduates and holders of doctorates within the United States. We employ detailed information on the migration-relevant characteristics of individuals, as well as on their actual origins and destinations at the metropolitan scale. In addition to its obvious implications for "brain drain" policies in U.S. metropolitan areas, the study demonstrates the richness of the random parameters technique for behavioral-geographic analysis. We find that science and technology graduates migrate to better educated places, other things equal; that PhD graduates pay greater attention to amenity characteristics than other degree holders; and that foreign students from some immigrant groups migrate to places where those groups are concentrated.     

Constructing Poverty Trends in Uganda: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

In late 1999, apparently contradictory pictures of what was happening to poverty in Uganda emerged from the Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) and the household survey. This article analyses certain conceptual and methodological characteristics of the PPA and the pictures of poverty trends arising from it, with a view to dispelling confusion and to better understanding the relationship between these and the pictures emerging from survey data. It argues that the apparently contradictory visions, when explored carefully, are found to be compatible, and concludes that deeper and less oppositional understandings of the purpose of PPAs vis‐à‐vis surveys for poverty assessment are an important and timely contribution to current research and knowledge about poverty.     

At peace in the corn: Maya narratives and the dynamics of fieldwork in Guatemala

Between 1961 and 1996 civil war in Guatemala claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 people, over 80% of whom (according to a United Nations Truth Commission) were Maya Indians. The experience of one Maya family, whose story is narrated, raises questions pertaining to continued insecurity, lack of justice, and uninvestigated crimes, the combined effects of which still haunt and charge community life throughout the countryside. Telling about the experience of one family also raises issues concerning the vicissitudes of representation and how fieldwork can, on occasion, yield unanticipated but rewarding returns.