Research for this article indicates that changing contract terms for mortgages, mortgage refinancing, and mortgagee demographics jeopardize long-standing rules of thumb regarding the necessary level of retirement income. Financial planners should view the notion that retirees need 70 to 80 percent of pre-retirement income as suspect in today's mortgage environment. This article used U.S. Census Bureau data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 to investigate mortgage trends. One trend is that a significantly higher percentage of respondents in their fifties, sixties, and seventies-plus report carrying mortgages and second mortgages in 2000 than in 198O. The trend is highest among those with higher incomes. Low interest rates have encouraged mortgage refinancing, resulting in the extension of some mortgages into retirement Creative home financing, such as interest-only mortgages, is also allowing more homeowners to carry larger mortgages into retirement. Mortgages now consume a larger percentage of household income among all age groups, and the percentage is highest among those in their sixties, seventies, and older. Additional findings suggest that increased mortgage payments are occurring when the some individuals are retired and facing family educational responsibilities. The use of reverse mortgages could counter some of the other mortgage trends, making old rules of thumb still acceptable. But the number of reverse mortgages remains too small to play a significant role. In light of these results, the question is whether Americans will increase their life savings or reduce other consumption during retirement to compensate for continuing mortgage payments.

Human capital tends to have significant external effects within local markets, increasing the average income of individuals within the same metropolitan area. However, evidence on both human capital spillovers and peer effects in neighborhoods suggests that these effects may be confined to relatively small areas. Hence, the distribution of income gains from average levels of human capital should depend on how that human capital is distributed throughout a city. This paper explores this issue by documenting the extent to which college graduates are residentially segregated across more than 165000 block groups in 359 U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-2000. Using three different metrics, we find that the segregation of college graduates rose between 1980 and 2000. We also find that cities which experienced larger increases in their levels of segregation also experienced larger increases in income inequality, although our results suggest that inequality and segregation likely influence each other.

Most wage growth occurs via job changes rather than on-the-job wage growth. The Burdett-Mortensen (1998) model is an extreme version of this with no on-the-job wage growth. We estimate a version of this model using NLSY data. We simulate 10 years of data on wages, job spells, and unemployment spells and compare them to actual experience. The agreement is remarkably good in several respects, but fails to explain the amount of downward wage changes.

Objective: The objective of this study was to rank U.S. occupations by worker morbidity.Methods: From 1986 through 1994, morbidity information was collected on over 410,000 U.S. workers who participated in the National Health Interview Survey, an annual household survey representative of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population. A multivariate adjusted logistic regression morbidity summary score was created for each worker group based on seven indicators: days of restricted activity, bedrest, and missed work in the previous 2 weeks; doctor visits and hospitalizations in the previous 12 months; reported health conditions; and health status.Results: Worker groups reporting the greatest morbidity included social workers, inspectors, postal clerks, psychologists, and grinding machine operators; worker groups reporting the least morbidity included dentists, pilots, physicians, pharmacists, and dietitians.Conclusions: These findings aid in the identification of worker groups that require increased attention for morbidity research and prevention.

Based on empirical patterns of annual earnings and saving from new micro-data covering a large sample of American workers around a hundred years ago, we develop a model for simulating the cross-section distribution of wealth at the turn of the twentieth century. Our methodology allows for a direct comparison with the wealth distribution from a sample of families in a comparable part of the contemporary income distribution. Our primary finding is that patterns of wealth accumulation among American workers at the turn of the century bear a striking resemblance to contemporary profiles.

Theories of intersectionality encourage scholars to look at how “gender” experiences are forged through race, particularly in the labor market. This study uses data from the 2000 1-percent Public Use Microdata on 23,852 Filipina, Asian Indian, and non-Hispanic white women living in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to examine additive and interactional influences on earnings. A detailed analysis of interaction effects by race-ethnicity reveal several important differences across the three groups of women. The results of this study show that popular stereotypes about Asian-origin groups, such as “model minority,” mask significant barriers in achieving full equality in the labor market. The study also highlights the importance of immigration context and occupational race segregation in understanding earnings for non-white immigrant women.

Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery used to choose amongst the excess number of applicants. A unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration to be obtained by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate, but whose names were not drawn in the lottery, after allowing for the effect of non-compliance among some of those whose names were drawn. We also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery. Comparing this non-applicant group to the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non-experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration. We find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills. As a result, non-experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration, by 9 to 82 percent. A good instrumental variable works best, while difference-in-differences and bias-adjusted propensity-score matching also perform comparatively well.

Debates on immigration policy often discuss calibrating immigration levels to meet the labor needs of the nations economy. Indeed, it is clear that immigration strongly affects US labor markets over the past thirty years, foreign-born workers have grown to record numbers, and currently about one out of every seven US workers was born outside the country. Trends suggest that unless immigration laws are changed drastically, immigrants will form an increasing share of the workforce over the next thirty years. Foreign-born workers are well-represented in occupations predicted to grow most over the next decades, suggesting such workers will remain in demand. As a result, immigrants are expected to form about one third of the low-skilled labor force over coming decades, and up to 18 percent of college-educated workers. Immigrants are also expected to assist in addressing the needs of an aging population by providing services to the elderly, altering worker-to-retiree ratios, and providing tax revenues that support programs for the aged. While the future of the countrys economy is uncertain, it seems quite clear that immigrants will play a large role in the future workforce.

The weight of the average American adult male and female has increased by 16 and14 pounds respectively and obesity rates have doubled since the early 1960s. Recentstudies show these changes in weight can be attributed to the dramatic rise in theconsumption of food away from home. We investigate the role of taxes and the genderwage gap in accounting for the trends in the composition of food consumed by theaverage American adult. According to our general equilibrium analysis, the observedmovements in the personal income tax rate and in the gender wage gap explain theincrease in the caloric intake from the consumption of food away from home. Our theoryis also consistent with the patterns of time use on market activities, food preparation,and capital specific for cooking activities of Americans.

These analyses were done for the following areas: Galveston, TX; Sugar Land, TX; Brazoria County, TX; League City, TX; and Pasadena, TX.

One possible explanation for current gender based wage differentials is ongoing discrimination in which women are paid less than their male counterparts for the same type of work. This study found that women are less likely to be paid at a level equal to their male colleagues, even controlling for other background variables.

We perform a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of the observed increase in the weight of the average American adult over the 1960-2005 period. Existing evidence suggests that this fifteen pound increase in weight can be attributed to the dramatic raise in the consumption of foods prepared away from home, which resulted in higher caloric intake. We evaluate the impact of the observed trends in taxes and in the gender wage gap on the caloric intake, food composition and time use of American adults, by gender and marital status. Surprisingly, we find that lower taxes and gender wage gap can account for more than two thirds of the changes in calories consumed and food composition observed in the data. Our general equilibrium analysis can also account for some of the observed movements in time devoted to market and food preparation activities, and reconciles the simultaneous increase in price and consumption of foods prepared away from home.

This dissertation contains three essays on the labor market impact of high-skill immigration in the U.S. The first essays treats immigrants and natives with different levels of education and of different gender as distinct factors of production and estimates the degree of substitutability and complementarity between pairs of inputs under the Translog production specification. Using data from the 1997 Economic Census and the 1980 and 2000 Censuses from IPUMS, I find that immigration has different effects on native workers, depending on the educational and gender compositions of both the immigrants and the natives. I also find that the impact of immigration differs across census regions with greater effects felt by native workers in the Northeast and the West. The second and third essays examine the labor market of information technology (IT) in the U.S., which has seen tremendous growth in the number of foreign skilled workers. The second essays assesses the impact of such large inflows of foreign skilled labor on U.S. native IT workers by comparing the native IT workers in the computer industry with the native managers and native secretaries/sales workers in the same industry. The latter two groups experience very little foreign labor inflow as compared with the IT occupation. Using data from the March CPS, I find that the inflow of foreign skilled labor adversely impacted the native IT workers' earnings, probability of employment, and work hours. The third essay is an extension of the second. It seeks to answer the question of whether local labor markets that receive larger amount of IT immigration also have lower average weekly earnings for their IT workers. Using data from the outgoing rotation groups in the Current Population Surveys, I find that native workers residing in areas with higher concentration of IT immigrants see larger reduction in weekly earnings.

The unprecedented movement of Hispanic immigrants to new growth areas raises important questions about the opportunity for immigrants to succeed in labor markets that have little history of incorporating immigrants. I analyze Census 2000 data to compare wages of male Hispanic immigrants across 28 metropolitan areas grouped into "immigrant gateway types" derived from Singer (2004). I examine the role of human capital factors and metropolitan area characteristics in shaping the wage profiles of male Hispanic immigrants. Workers in the sample earn higher wages and gain more from human capital investments in traditional gateway areas than in newer growth areas with more service sector jobs and less historical presence of Hispanics. Human capital and immigrant-specific characteristics explain much of the wage advantage for male Hispanic immigrants in the traditional gateway areas; however, metropolitan area characteristics benefit workers in newer growth areas, pointing to booms in new economy sectors in these areas.

The criteria for data gathering and accross cenusus varies over the course of time and space. This results in an arrangement in where the data is either missingor inconsistant from the point of view of a researcher who wants to compare and contrast census data accross censuses. As older census data is now being ported to databases it is now possible to address the problem of missing andinconsistent data with the help of data mining and machine learning tools. Thus the problem of missing data can be partially addressed if a reliable model forimputing missing values in the census data could be developed. In this paper we address the problem of imputation for the United States historical censusmicrodata for census years 1850 and 1860. The specific imputation problem that we address is that of imputating missing relation codes (relate codes) whichsignify the relationship between members in a family. We split the data into training set and test set, and then build a number of classification models forimputing missing values for the censusus where the relate codes are available. The models with perform sifficently high on the imputation task as judged by the evaluation metrices can then be used for imputing the missing values for the census years where the relate codes are not available.

The recent literature on local schooling externalities in the U.S. is rather mixed: positive external effects of average education levels are hardly to be found but, in contrast, positive externalities from the share of college graduates can often be identified. This paper proposes a simple model to reconcile this mixed evidence. The key idea is that advanced technologies are complementary to highly educated workers, as opposed to traditional technologies which are complementary to less educated workers. Our calibrated model predicts that workers with high school education or less are employed in the traditional sector, while more educated workers are employed in the advanced sector. As the advanced sector is associated with the production of differentiated goods and services this generates a positive pecuniary externality (positive TFP effect) of college educated workers. By contrast, as no externalities are associated with the traditional technology, high school education only increases private returns. The model predictions are tested using data on U.S. states. We use compulsory attendance and child labor laws, push-driven immigration of highly educated workers and the location of Land Grant colleges as instruments for schooling attainments of workers in different states. The empirical estimates confirm that an increase in college education, but not an increase in high school education, had significant positive production externalities in U.S. states during the period 1960-2000.

This article uses a combination of the age heaping method and anthropometric measures toexplore the pre- and early industrial inequality of numeracy. For France and the U.S., thedifferential numeracy between the upper and lower segments of a sample population of 27 and22 regions, respectively, is measured and the subsequent impact of inequality on welfaregrowth examined. For Ireland and England, 18th and 19th century evidence indicates thatIreland was a much more unequal society than England, whereas the northern U.S. had arelatively egalitarian distribution of numeracy before industrialisation took off on a largescale.