Summary: The authors investigate the occupational placement of immigrants in the U.S. labor market using census data. They find striking differences among highly educated immigrants from different countries, even after they control for individuals' age, experience, and level of education. With some exceptions, educated immigrants from Latin American and Eastern European countries are more likely to end up in unskilled jobs than immigrants from Asia and industrial countries. A large part of the variation can be explained by attributes of the country of origin that influence the quality of human capital, such as expenditure on tertiary education and the use of English as a medium of instruction. Performance is adversely affected by military conflict at home which may weaken institutions that create human capital and lower the threshold quality of immigrants. The selection effects of U.S. immigration policy also play an important role in explaining cross-country variation. The observed under-placement of educated migrants might be alleviated if home and host countries cooperate by sharing information on labor market conditions and work toward the recognition of qualifications.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to assess the status of diabetes medical care and self-management among adult Puerto Ricans in New York City. METHODS: A random-digit-dialing telephone survey with a dual-frame sampling design was employed to obtain a probability sample of adult Puerto Ricans with diagnosed diabetes (n = 606). Demographic characteristics, health status, and indicators of diabetes medical care and self-management were collected using the standard Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) questionnaire. A statewide sample of adults with diagnosed diabetes (n = 232) was obtained from the BRFSS for comparison. RESULTS: Compared to New York State adults, Puerto Ricans were significantly less likely to receive annual A1C testing (72.7% vs 84.9%), cholesterol testing (67.5% vs 87.2%), blood-pressure-lowering medication (82.4% vs 91.9%), and pneumococcal vaccination (19.3% vs 28.5%, among those aged 18 to 64 years). Puerto Ricans were also less likely to take aspirin every day or every other day to prevent cardiovascular complications (30.6% vs 40.7%). Puerto Ricans were younger and more likely to have lower educational attainment and lower income than New York State adults, but they were not significantly disadvantaged in access to health care indicated by rates of health insurance coverage, having a particular place for medical care, and frequencies of seeing a provider for diabetes. CONCLUSIONS: These findings support the need to introduce culturally sensitive and linguistically appropriate diabetes education programs for Puerto Ricans and continue system-based diabetes care quality improvement efforts in the areas of prevention and control of cardiovascular complications, adult immunization, and A1C testing.

Human capital is typically viewed as generating a number of desirable outcomes, including economic growth. Yet, in spite of its importance, few empirical studies have explored why some economies accumulate more human capital than others. This paper attempts to do so using a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas in the United States over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The results reveal two consistently significant correlates of human capital growth, defined as the change in a city's rate of college completion: population and the existing stock of college-educated labor. Given that population growth and human capital accumulation are both positively associated with education, these results suggest that the geographic distributions of population and human capital should have become more concentrated in recent decades. That is, larger, more educated metropolitan areas should have exhibited the fastest rates of increase in both population and education and thus 'pulled away' from smaller, less-educated metropolitan areas. The evidence largely supports this conclusion.

There has been a resurgence of immigration in the United States and in many other countries. The United Nations estimates that over 175 million people, or roughly 3 percent of the world’s population, now reside in a country where they were not born (United Nations 2002). Although most immigrants choose a “traditional” destination (such as the United States, Canada, or Australia), many other countries are also receiving relatively large immigrant flows. Nearly 11 percent of the population in France, 9 percent in Germany, 11 percent in Sweden, and 7 percent in the United Kingdom is foreign born. Not surprisingly, the impact of immigration on the host country’s labor market is now being heatedly debated in many countries. In the U.S. context, this concern has motivated a great deal of research that attempts to document how the U.S. labor market has adjusted to the largescale immigration in the past few decades. Three central questions have dominated much of the research: What is the contribution of immigration to the skill endowment of the workforce? How do the employment opportunities of native workers respond to immigration? And, who benefits and who loses? The policy significance of these questions is evident. For example, immigrants who have high levels of productivity and who adapt rapidly to conditions in the host country’s labor market can make a significant contribution to economic growth. Conversely, if immigrants lack the skills that employers demand and find it difficult to adapt, immigration may increase the size of the population that requires public . . .

In response to a need for more accessible, detailed, and complete housing information for the District of Columbia and its region, the Fannie Mae Foundation and the Urban Institute have produced the first edition of Housing in the Nation's Capital. The report provides the public, policy makers, and housing professionals with the most comprehensive data and analysis available on the dynamics of economic and demographic change in the Washington region.The ultimate goal of the project is to establish the report as a focal point for an ongoing dialogue on housing issues facing the city and its region. The report also furthers the Foundation's special commitment to its hometown of Washington, D.C., by providing an invaluable source of information to help guide its investments and those of its partners.The analysis in this report reaffirms findings from other recent studies, but it goes further in several respects: in particular by being the first to make extensive use of the 2000 census and by using new data files from the Internal Revenue Service to characterize inter- and intraregional migration flows. The report, which features vibrant maps and graphs, covers economic and demographic context, housing stock and production, the homeownership market, and the rental housing market. In addition, the report focuses on changes in the racial and ethnic diversity of city and suburban neighborhoods, using new data from the decennial census.The report shows that the Washington region's economic prosperity and growth have fueled a booming housing market and contributed to a resurgence of demand for housing in the District. And while the gap between minority and white homeownership has narrowed, the boom has intensified hardships for very low income households.

We use micro data on income and wealth to estimate the value of foregone home production by working married women. Our key …nding is that the costs of women's labor force participation are modest: for every dollar that a married woman earns in the market, she incurs an average cost of 30 cents in lost home production. This estimate implies that observed changes in women's wages are not enough to explain increased participation, and non-economic discrimination could have played a signi…cant role in keeping married women at home in the past. Using additional data on the allocation of time between market work and home production, we estimate the GDP bias associated with home production to be between 20 and 30 percent of measured GDP. Women's transition into the labor force decreases GDP bias associated with home production and causes a decline in the measured national saving rate. However, because the estimated decline is small, the explanation for the falling national saving rate must be elsewhere.

The average American household today comprises less than four people, compared to seven in 1850. This decline has occurred at all ages and for all birth cohorts. We investigate to what extent this decline can be explained by a rational response to changing economic conditions -- namely, the growth of income per person. We develop a simple theory of household size choice, in which people differ by age, birth cohort, and income. There is an age-specific cost of forming and maintaining a household of a certain size. The benefit from living with other people is a household-specific public good. By choosing the optimal mix of public to private goods, the economies of scale within a household are determined endogenously. We calibrate the model to fit data from the end of the 20th century to date. We use age-specific average household size from the 2000 U.S. Census to pin down the cost of household formation, and Consumer Expenditure Survey data for the 1980-2004 period to calibrate the elasticity of substitution between public and private goods. All things equal, we find that an exogenous increase in GDP per capita can account for 30 percent of the observed decrease in household size over the last 150 years.

Using the method suggested by Dagum and Slottje (2000), this study estimates the value of national and per capita human capital for six Central and Eastern European countries: Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Russia. The estimates are based on available household surveys for 1993, 1995, and 1997. The results indicate that the per capita human capital stock was much lower in Central and Eastern Europe than in the United States in 1982 as estimated by Dagum and Slottje. The article also shows that the human capital estimates by the DagumSottje method are subject to a sample selection bias, which can be corrected by the Heckman selection model.

An analysis of nearly two centuries of homicide data that stretch back to the Mexican period for the city and county of Los Angeles reveal a long history of violence in the region, one in which the homicide rate has consistently been higher than that of other major cities. Such factors as national culture, regional differences, demographics, economics, and political structure help to account for the persistence of this pattern. Does this traditional tolerance for violence and homicide in Los Angeles signify a local articulation of what is deemed normal, and could long-term efforts be devised to counter it?

Women, Work, and Poverty presents the latest information on women living at or below the poverty level and the changes that need to be made in public policy to allow them to rise above their economic hardships. Using a wide range of research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, small-scale surveys, and analysis of personnel records, the book explores different aspects of women's poverty since the passage of the 1986 welfare reform bill. Anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social workers examine marriage, divorce, children and child care, employment and work schedules, disabilities, mental health, and education, and look at income support programs, such as welfare and unemployment insurance. Women, Work, and Poverty illuminates the changes in the causes of women's poverty following welfare reform in the United States, using up-to-date research that's both qualitative and quantitative. Taking racial and ethnic diversity into account, the book's contributors examine new findings on the feminization of poverty, the role of children and the lack of child care as an obstacle to employment, labor market policies that can reduce poverty and improve gender wage equality, sex and race segregation in the labor market, and the low quality of jobs available to low income women.

Cross-sectional studies have found a positive relationship between a state's welfare benefit level and single motherhood. But is this evidence of a "welfare effect" or rather of cross state differences in social attitudes that influence both welfare policy and behavior? This study looks at the history of welfare programs over the twentieth century and examines the relationship between welfare benefits and family structure from 1910 and 1970. Cross-state variation in welfare policy was already present in the mothers' pensions programs enacted in the 1910s, but evidence of a welfare effect does not appear until 1960 or 1970.

This paper studies the loss of human capital that emigration generates in the country of origin. To that end I estimate the human capital distribution of emigrants had they not migrated. Unlike previous studies, I take into account the selection of migrants in terms of unobserved characteristics that affect their productivity. Wages in Mexico of those migrants who come back home after being abroad for some time will be crucial to learn something about the selection of non-returning migrants in terms of unobserved productivity. To test whether returning migrants' wages contain any useful information, I follow two steps. First, I use the model of Borjas and Bratsberg (1986) to show that, regardless of the cause for coming back, the distribution of abilities of non-returning migrants is more similar to the distribution of temporary migrants than to that of non-migrants. Moreover, I test some implications of the model in the data. Second, I show that returning migrants' wages reflect their pre-emigration productivity and are not affected by possible human capital gains derived from the decision to emigrate. Taking into account all this evidence, I use returning migrants' wages in Mexico upon return to estimate the distribution of human capital of non-returning migrants had they not migrated. I show that emigrants come form the middle part of the distribution of human capital in the origin country. I find evidence that taking unobserved human capital factors into account is relevant for the dispersion of the estimated distribution as well as for each of its quantiles. Moreover, it does not greatly affect the aggregate mean of human capital.

One of the most robust findings emerging from studies of industrial agglomeration is the rise in productivity that tends to accompany it. What most studies have not addressed, however, is the potential role played by human capital externalities in driving this relationship. This paper seeks to do so using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census covering a collection of 77 (primarily) 3-digit manufacturing industries across a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas. The analysis generates two primary results. First, a variety of education- and experience-based measures of average human capital rise significantly as an industrys employment in a metropolitan area increases. Hence, clusters of industry do tend to be characterized by larger stocks of human capital. However, second, even after accounting for the level of human capital in a workers own industry, the overall size of the industry remains strongly associated with wages. Such results suggest that localization economies are largely not the product of knowledge spillovers.

Economists’ principal tool for studying household behavioral responses to changes in tax and other government policies, and the magnitude and determinants of private saving, is the life—cycle model. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to incorporate into that model one of the most conspicuous changes in the U.S. economy in the last 50 years, the rise in labor market participation for married women. The increased presence of married women in the labor force has obvious benefits: women now earn much more income than they did in the past. On the other hand, working women presumably spend less time doing housework and other types of home production, and the forgone value of time at home reduces the net benefit of their work in the market. Conventional accounts do not provide measurements of the costs of lost home production, but we attempt to use comparisons of household net worth at retirement to deduce valuations indirectly. This paper modifies a standard life—cycle model to include women’s labor supply decisions, estimates key parameters of the new specification, and attempts to assess the significance of rising female labor market participation for aggregate national saving in the U.S. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we find that the difference between measured labor market earnings for married women and earnings net of the value of lost home production seems moderately small – about 30 percent – and that the corresponding long—run effect on the overall rate of private saving is minor.

Even as southern Appalachian migrants began to actively assert a group identity in some northern cities in the late 1960s, it was an open question as to whether they ought to be considered a group at all. In the years since the 1960s, the fate of southern Appalachian migrants in the North and Midwest has continued to be the subject of much debate. A flurry of sociological work in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that southern Appalachian migrants to the North encountered extreme hardship that demanded special attention and services. That work both drew from and informed numerous local policy studies. More recent work focusing on southern white out-migration as a whole has sharply challenged the core findings of much of the scholarly work from the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that most southern white migrants moved with relative ease into the North's most coveted skilled blue-collar and white-collar occupations.

Several countries have made large investments in building historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) databases containing census and other quantitative statistics over long periods of time. Making good use of these databases requires approaches that explore spatial and temporal change. The authors use a variety of visualization and spatial analysis techniques to explore population change in Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Importantly, the techniques allow differences over space and time to be explored, thus stressing the diversity between places, rather than making all places appear the same, a common criticism of many statistical approaches. The authors demonstrate the potential of these techniques to explore geographical and temporal variations in large quantitative GIS datasets.

The surge in U.S. wage inequality over the past several decades is now commonly attributed to an increase in the returns paid to skill. Although theories differ with respect to why, specifically, this increase has come about, many agree that it is strongly tied to the increase in the relative supply of skilled (i.e. highly educated) workers in the U.S. labor market. A greater supply of skilled labor, for example, may have induced skill-biased technological change or generated greater stratification of workers by skill across firms or jobs. Given that metropolitan areas in the U.S. have long possessed more educated populations than non-metropolitan areas, these theories suggest that the rise in both the returns to skill and wage inequality should have been particularly pronounced in cities. Evidence from the U.S. Census over the period 1950 to 1990 supports both implications.,height