In 1942, all Japanese were evacuated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps. To investigate the long-run economic consequences of this historic episode, I exploit the fact that Hawaiian Japanese were not subject to mass internment. I find that the labor market withdrawal induced by the internment reduced the annual earnings of males by as much as nine to thirteen percent twenty-five years afterwards. This is consistent with the predictions of an economic model that equates the labor market withdrawal induced by the internment with a loss of civilian labor market experience or a loss of advantageous job matches.

The recent empirical literature finds negative effects of the inflowsof immigrants on the wages and employment of US-born workers especiallylow skilled and very small aggregate gains if we include the effecton capital. Our paper begins by revealing an empirical regularity apparentlyat odds with these findings: in a panel of city-level data over time(1970-2000) the inflows of immigrants has a robust positive associationwith average wages, employment and value of housing of US-born citizens.At the same time the negative relative effect of foreign-born onwages of U.S. born in the same skill group is confirmed by our analysis.We reconcile these two findings by showing that if foreign-born workersprovide skills (and produce services) that are not perfectly substitutablefor those provided by US-born workers, and with a distribution acrosseducation-experience groups "complementary" to that of U.S. born, thenmigration generates overall gains to U.S. born workers. There are, however,distributional effects that hurt, in relative terms, the group of lessskilled workers . We provide a simple model that quantifies the impactof immigrants on average wages of US-born workers. For an increase inforeign-born worker of 6% of the initial US employment (as experiencedby the US in the 1990-2000 decade) the average wages of US workers increaseby 2% of their levels. We then simulate a more complete model ofopen city-economies that, using structural parameter values, reproducesfairly well the response of average wages, price of housing and internal migration of US-born to the immigration shock of the 90s.

This essay analyzes the economic conditions associated with urban social disturbances in the United States in the 1960s. Using state-level data on the social disturbances in conjunction with census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the analysis tests the relationship between measures of wage inequality and measures of social disorder. In conjunction with accounts of the unrest, the findings support the rising expectations hypothesis, an aspect of the relative deprivation view of racial violence. In particular, overall wage inequality is a significant factor in the disturbances. Also, although the residual or discrimination component of wage inequality and the human capital component are related to the disturbances in the same way, this relationship is stronger for the human capital component of inequality.

Economists have long thought of technological progress as a primary determinant of rising living standards over time. One might think of technological progress as increasing the "effectiveness" of labor, thereby raising the amount of output that each unit of labor can produce. The purpose of this paper is to ask whether, as an empirical matter, technological progress increases the productivity of workers evenly, or whether it augments the effectiveness of young workers the most. As low birthrates and increases in longevity lead to an "aging" of the population, the productivity of older workers relative to younger workers is likely to become an ever more important issue.Analyzing data from the decennial Censuses and annual data from the Current Population Survey, this paper draws three tentative conclusions. First, we find that the "aging" of the U.S. work force seems more likely to increase aggregate productivity - by raising the proportion of laborers with sizable accumulations of human capital from experience - than to decrease it - by slowing the adoption rate for innovations. Our preliminary estimates imply that the latter effect is of modest magnitude. Second, since our preliminary estimates point to "general" rather than "specific" technological progress, each household faces a problem of having to predict the course of technological progress over its life span. This means that households face more risk than otherwise, and it complicates the specification of the life-cycle model that analysts should employ. Third, when we disaggregate across education groups, the groups show quite unequal benefits from technological progress after 1980, and this may lead to further challenges in modeling household behavior.

We show that incorporating consumption commitments into a standard model of precautionary saving can complicate the usual relationship between risk and consumption. In particular, the presence of plausible adjustment costs can cause a mean-preserving increase in unemployment risk to lead to increased consumption. The predictions of this model are consistent with empirical evidence from dual-earning couples. Couples who share an occupation face increased risk as their unemployment shocks are more highly correlated. Such couples spend more on owner-occupied housing than other couples, spend no more on rent, and are more likely to rent than own. This pattern is strongest when the household faces higher moving costs, or when unemployment insurance provides a less generous safety net.

The article structually estimates an on-the-job search model of job separations. Given each employer pays observably equivalent workers the same but wages are dispersed across employers, an employer's separation flow is the sum of an exogenous outflow unrelated to the wage and a job-to-job flow that decreases with the employer's wage. Using data from the Danish Integrated Database for Labour Market Research, the empirical results imply, as predicted by theory, that search effort declines with the wage. Furthermore, the estimates explain the employment effect, defined as the horizontal difference between the distribution of wages earned and the wage offer distribution.

This paper examines recent changes in child poverty and income inequality in the 1990s among Americas racial and immigrant minorities. The analyses are based on data from the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples of the U.S. decennial censuses. First, we document changes in child poverty rates between 1990 and 2000 for several different race and nativity groups. Our results indicate that increasing maternal employment during the 1990s rather than changing family structure accounted for a substantial share of the recent decline in child poverty rates. Changes in family structure played a minor role in reducing child poverty in the 1990s but accounted for a large part of observed poverty differences among children of different minority groups. Second, we evaluate childrens changing position in the family income distribution, i.e., whether there is a growing gap between rich and poor children in America and whether the income gap has been reinforced by growing racial diversity and immigration over the past decade. Our results show that income of the poorest children increased modestly in the 1990s (albeit not enough to shift them to the middle-class), and that income inequality among children unexpectedly slowed or even declined for some groups during the 1990s. These results indicate that analyses of poverty alone may misrepresent the changing circumstances of Americas disadvantaged children.

Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), this analysis examines the economic activity of black and white southern-born female migrants participating in the Great Migration. Labor force participation and occupational SEI scores are investigated with specific focus on racial differences within and between migrant groups. Black migrants had a higher probability of participating in the labor force, yet their employment was concentrated among the lower SEI occupations throughout the period. Racial differences also were observed among the influence of personal, household, and location characteristics on economic activity such that the positive associations were less pronounced, while the negative impacts were differentially felt among black migrant women; education was less beneficial, and the deterring effects of marital status were less pronounced for black migrants. Racial differences narrowed at the end of the Great Migration for the southern migrants, reflecting a pattern most similar to nonmigrant northerners and more advantageous than that observed for nonmigrant southern women.

Improving early prenatal and postnatal conditions account for at least 16 to 17 percent of the decline in ten year mortality rates of 60-79 year olds between 1900 and 1960-80. Historical trends in early prenatal and postnatal conditions imply that while the baby-boom cohort may be particularly long-lived compared to past cohorts, mortality rates may not fall as steeply for the cohorts born after 1955 as for earlier cohorts.

Between 1910 and 1970, millions of southern-born Americans migrated to the northern and western regions of the country in search of better opportunities. Some traveled only short distances, leaving Appalachia for nearby destinations in the southern Midwest. Others made the much longer trek to the West Coast. In this article, we use data from the 1920, 1940, and 1970 Public Use Microdata Samples to investigate the distances traveled by male participants in the Great Migration, with a special focus on differences by race, as well as on changes over time. We find that the average distance traveled increased substantially during the Great Migration for blacks and whites alike. However, throughout this time period, white migrants moved significantly farther than black migrants. The greater propensity for white migrants to move west, rather than north, accounts for a good deal of this overall racial variation. Although the difference in distance traveled between blacks and whites narrowed significantly over time, it remained substantial as the Great Migration came to a close. We conclude by highlighting the impact of these differential migration patterns on the composition and social conditions in northern cities.

According to the U.S. Census, the nations Hmong population grew sharply from 94,439 in 1990 to 169,428 (counting those who said their race was only Hmong) or 186,310 (counting those who said their race was Hmong or a combination of Hmong and another race) in 2000. But under closer examination, these figures raise a number of questions. Many Hmong-Americans and scholars have suggested that the Census significantly undercounted the Hmong. More fundamentally, it is difficult to determine where we should draw the line between the Hmong community and the rest of the population or, indeed, between any two ethnic communities. Our purpose here is to explore the boundaries of the Hmong community. After careful examination of detailed Census data, we have concluded that the usual criterion used to identify a person in the data as Hmong is too narrow, and that a broader, more inclusive definition more accurately delineates the Hmong ethnic group. In particular, we propose that anyone who reported in the Census that his or her race, ancestry, or language was Hmong should be included in the Hmong community. This broader definition implies that the Hmong population in 2000 might have been as large as 204,948. In this article we explain why identification of ethnic groups in the Census data can be ambiguous, review the possible sources of relevant Census evidence, and describe our methodology. Using our summary of the data, one can calculate the population estimates that would be implied by a range of alternative criteria. We believe that it would be more accurate to apply a broad definition of the Hmong community in statistical studies, but we provide the tools to make an independent judgment.

Over the last 130 years average hours worked in todays advanced industrialized countries decreased by 47 percent. Here, average hours worked refers to the total number of hours worked in the market sector relative to the population age 15 or older. The secular decline in average hours worked has two components: the main component, for all countries considered, is a strong decline in weekly hours worked per employed person, the workweek length. The other component, employed persons in the population age 15 or older, or the employment rate, displays no clear pattern. The paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the long run labor supply of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. A key feature of the model is a two activity technology. One of the activities uses managerial supervision and supplies supervisory services to the other technology. There are two main findings. Taxes account for a large part of the change in the employment rate, but dont account for the decline in the workweek length. However, technological progress in the supervisory activity accounts for 46 to 80 percent of the decline in the workweek length and for a significant part of the country-specific change in the employment rate.

The importance of occupational gender segregation is well established and needs no explanation. However, there remains considerable confusion on the precise meaning of the term, and how segregation should be measured. In the first place it is necessary to distinguish segregation from the related but logically distinct concepts of concentration and exposure. Then the actual measurement should not be contaminated by other aspects of the labour market or the occupational classification used. Finally, and most importantly from a theoretical perspective, we need to distinguish how far the segregation entails gender inequality and how far it is simply a matter of different but equal patterns of employment for women and men. In considering these issues we shall draw on data from economically developed countries, mainly but not exclusively located in Europe. These are countries which tend to have relatively high levels of gender segregation.