In 2004, Medicare provided health insurance coverage to over 42 million elderly and disabled Americans and accounted for $295 billion, representing almost one fifth of the $1.9 trillion spent on health care in the U.S. The new prescription drug benefit, passed as part of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), will add additional costs to the program – $724 billion between 2006 and 2015.1 Growth in health care costs, increasing numbers of older people, fewer workers to support the Medicare and Social Security programs, and an increasing federal deficit all point to ongoing reform of the Medicare program. And while these decisions will be made in the U.S. Congress, the incidence of these changes is felt more directly and more significantly at the state and local levels. Surprisingly, there is little information available that assesses these impacts at the state level, and there has been limited discussion about state impacts at the national level. In this report on the pilot State Medicare Impact Profile project, we present a unique contribution to discussions about Medicare reform policy from a state policy perspective. We provide comparative data across five states (Florida, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Washington) on key policy issues to assess the impact that Medicare policy has on each state. Given the comprehensive changes to the Medicare program included in the MMA, the growth in the numbers of Medicare beneficiaries, and increasing health care costs, the time is critical to better understand the state and local impact of these important national decisions. The State Medicare Impact Profile, which was prepared by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) for the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center, is the first systematic look at the impact of Medicare reform from a state policy and local market perspective. We assess four recent Medicare reform topics: 1) the transition of low‐income Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Medicaid to the new Medicare prescription drug program; 2) the introduction of high‐income means . . .

This paper employs a simple intertemporal model to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value, regardless of the overall supply elasticity. The existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity constraints is not Pareto improving, and may in fact be regressive. Historical evidence, which exploits the fact that a clearly identifiable group, war veterans, enjoyed the most favored access to mortgage credit after World War II, supports the model. The results suggest that more recent mortgage market innovations have served primarily to increase prices rather than home ownership rates, and that such innovations have the potential to exacerbate socioeconomic disparities in ownership rates.

Research in recent years has devoted increasing attention to the maintenance and shift of heritage languages among ethnic minorities in the United States, with Chicanos being no exception. The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors related to family, ethnic identity and education in relation to the maintenance or shift of the Spanish language over generations of Chicanos on the South Plains of Texas.This dissertation presents the findings of a mixed methodology study involving thirteen families in the South Plains area. The focus of the study was on the families of United States born adolescents of Mexican descent. Three generations within each of these families were studied in order to develop a greater understanding of the forces at work in their daily lives that have contributed to either the maintenance of Spanish or the shift to English over time. Each family member was interviewed, and was asked to take part in a Spanish language assessment, a cultural identity measure, and a questionnaire related to linguistic practices and language attitudes.The study utilized a heuristic phenomenological approach to investigate the three constructs of family, ethnic identity and education as they relate to the past and present language experiences of the research participants. Understanding the relationship of these three constructs to heritage language maintenance and shift will serve to further inform educators, parents, and community members about the effects of past and current policies and practices on the maintenance or shift of the Spanish language among Chicanos on the South Plains and in similar geographical areas, so that they may make informed decisions on language policy and socialization according to their long-term goals regarding the linguistic development of future generations. By helping to achieve a greater understanding of the forces at work in the daily lives of Chicanos that contribute to either the maintenance or shift of the Spanish language over generations, this research can add to the knowledge that has been acquired thus far regarding minority language patterns.

As women have continued to redefine themselves in a changing world. many barriers to their entry into sport have been lowered. and women's sports have flourished. This article is an ethnographic case Study of a women's professional basketball learn. the Midtown Wave. Analyses of this learn reveal patterns of domination ill a venture that might be viewed at first as a feminist Success story. with the potential to challenge dominant norms. This research adds to current literature on women in sports. emphasizing the confluence of gender, race, and social class in women's basketball. It shows the difficulties of capturing social worlds in static social categories and provides a fuller picture of how these categories are lived as dynamic layers of identity within local contexts. A focus on ground-level social processes illuminates difficulties of attaining social change within the growing world of women's sports.

As of 2005, there were over 9.2 million refugees worldwide and hundreds of thousands asylum seekers. Resettlement of refugees to North America and Europe is the primary strategy used when repatriation and local integration into the country of first asylum are not possible or undesirable. An important aspect of the resettlement process is how to distribute refugees within the new host country, and essential to that question is the role of social networks in facilitating job information to new arrivals. This paper provides empirical evidence of information flows regarding job opportunities within social networks among refugees resettled in the U.S. An adapted version of the model developed by Calvo-Armengol and Jackson (2004) provides the intuition that competition can exist between network members for job referrals and investigates the dynamics between the size of a social network, the tenure of network members and labor market outcomes. This model is tested empirically using a sample of refugees resettled in the U.S. from 2001-2005. The size of the social network is measured by the number of individuals from the same place of birth who reside in the same metropolitan area. The econometric specification controls for individual characteristics at the time of arrival as well as metropolitan area and nationality group fixed effects. The empirical analysis is consistent with the predictions of the model: a larger number of network members who have arrived in the U.S. one year ago lowers the probability of employment and the wage while more tenured network members improve labor market outcomes for recently arrived refugees. This paper therefore provides empirical evidence of the theoretical work by Calvo-Armengol and Jackson and isolates both costs and benefits of participation in social networks.

What is a green city? What does it mean to say that San Francisco or Vancouver is more " green" than Houston or Beijing? When does urban growth lower environmental quality, and when does it yield environmental gains? How can cities deal with the environmental challenges posed by growth? These are the questions Matthew Kahn takes on in this smart and engaging book. Written in a lively, accessible style, Green Cities takes the reader on a tour of the extensive economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. Kahn starts with an exploration of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)the hypothesis that the relationship between environmental quality and per capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. He then analyzes several critiques of the EKC and discusses the implications of growth in urban population and surface area, as well as income. The concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend. As Kahn points out, although economics is known as the " dismal science, " economists are often quite optimistic about the relationship between urban development and the environment. In contrast, many ecologists and environmentalists remain wary of the environmental consequences of free-market growth. Rather than try to settle this dispute, this book conveys the excitement of an ongoing debate. Green Cities does not provide easy answers complex dilemmas. It does something more importantit provides the tools readers need to analyze these issues on their own.

Conventional population projections regard individuals, rather than households, as population units of reference. Such an approach has been questioned on both methodological and empirical grounds. Furthermore, in applications to smaller populations, conventional population projections have repeatedly yielded poor results. The simultaneous projection of population and households, on the other hand, regards households as population units of reference, but, in applications based on the notion of the household composition matrix, it has occasionally yielded analytically infeasible results. In the present study I examine the simultaneous projection of population and households in a metropolitan area, under feasibility constraints. A housing-market specification is expressed as a feasibility condition against multipliers of the household composition matrix, extracted here for the Cleveland Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), 1990. The feasibility condition is shown to function as a gateway to exogenous considerations regarding the transfer of headship in households, and is exemplified in a forecast of population and households for the Cleveland CMSA.

This paper uses a novel data set obtained from an online dating service to draw inferences on mate preferences and to investigate the role played by these preferences in determining match outcomes and sorting patterns. The empirical analysis is based on a detailed record of the site users attributes and their partner search, which allows us to estimate a rich preference specification that takes into account a large number of partner characteristics. Our revealed preference estimates complement many previousstudies that are based on survey methods. In addition, we provide evidence on mate preferences that people might not truthfully reveal in a survey, in particular regarding race preferences. In order to examine the quantitative importance of the estimated preferences in the formation of matches, we simulate match outcomes using the Gale-Shapley algorithm and examine the resulting correlations in mate attributes.The Gale-Shapley algorithm predicts the online sorting patterns well. Therefore, the match outcomes in this online dating market appear to be approximately efficient in theGale-Shapley sense. Using the Gale-Shapley algorithm, we also find that we can predict sorting patterns in actual marriages if we exclude the unobservable utility component in our preference specification when simulating match outcomes. One possible explanation for this finding suggests that search frictions play a role in the formation of marriages.

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this question empirically, using exogenous geological variation in the location of subsurface oil in the Southern United States. I find that oil abundant counties are highly specialized: for many decades their mining sector was almost as large as their entire manufacturing sector. During the 1940s and 1950s, oil abundant counties enjoyed per capita income that was 20-30 percent higher than other nearby counties, and their workforce was better educated. But whereas in 1940 oil production crowded out agriculture, over the next 50 years it caused the oil abundant counties to develop a smaller manufacturing sector. This led to slower accumulation of human capital in the oil abundant counties, and to a narrowing of per capita income differentials to about 5 percentage points. Despite this caveat, the gains from specialization were large, and specialization had little impact on the fraction of total income spent by local government or on income inequality.

Describes the movement of African Americans from the South to the urban North and West in its social, economic, cultural, and political contexts. This work provides students and researchers with information about the key people, places, organisations, and events that defined the era of the migration, essentially from 1900 to the 1990s.

What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive (native fight). To instrument for the actual number of new immigrants, we deploy a geographic diffusion model that predicts the number of new immigrants in a neighborhood using lagged densities of the foreign-born in surrounding neighborhoods. Subject to the validity of our instruments, the evidence is consistent with a causal interpretation of an impact from growing immigration density to native fight and relatively slower housing price appreciation. Further evidence indicates that these results may be driven more by the demand for residential segregation based on race and education than by foreignness per se.

By the end of the Civil War 186,017 black men had served in the Union Army, roughly three-quarters of whom were former slaves. Because most black soldiers were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. Their wartime experience depended upon their peers, their commanding officers, and where their regiment toured and affected their later life outcomes. In the short run the combat units benefited from company homogeneity, which built social capital and minimized shirking, but in the long run men's human capital and acquisition of information was best improved by serving in heterogeneous companies.

The introduction of Medicare in 1965 was the single largest change in health insurance coverage in U.S. history. Many economists and commentators have conjectured that the introduction of Medicare may have also been an important impetus for the development of new drugs that are now commonly used by the elderly and have substantially extended their life expectancy. In this paper, we investigate whether Medicare induced pharmaceutical innovations directed towards the elderly. Medicare could have played such a role only if two conditions were met. First, Medicare would have to increase drug spending by the elderly. Second, the pharmaceutical companies would have to respond to the change in market size for drugs caused by Medicare by changing the direction of their research. Our empirical work finds no evidence of a "first-stage" effect of Medicare on prescription drug expenditure by the elderly. Correspondingly, we also find no evidence of a shift in pharmaceutical innovation towards therapeutic categories most used by the elderly. On the whole, therefore, our evidence does not provide support for the hypothesis that Medicare had a major effect on the direction of pharmaceutical innovation.

While too many scholars tend to assert that European immigrants have "melted" away in the West, that appears not to be the case among Norwegians and other Scandinavians in the Pacific Northwest. The Census data do show both an increasing dispersion of Norwegians from the traditional center in Ballard (northwest Seattle) and an increasing proportion of persons with mixed Norwegian and other ethnicities, indicating increasing intermarriage. However, a close study of the plethora of events readily shows that the Norwegian community retains a considerable degree of vibrancy and has by no means melted. And that includes the on-going strong attachments to Norway it self.

This article seeks to improve on previous estimates of the impact of immigration on native wages by using an occupational segmentation approach that directly controls for regional migration and other shifts in the native-born U.S. labor supply. The U.S. labor market is segmented by occupation in order to determine which, if any, native workers tend to be vulnerable to increased immigrant competition for jobs. The results suggest that native-born workers in the primary sector are the main beneficiaries of increased immigration, while native-born Hispanic females in the secondary sector are the most susceptible to downward wage pressures.