Easing immigration restrictions for the highly skilled in developed countries portend a future of increased human capital outflows from developing countries. The myriad consequences of these developments for developing countries include the direct loss of the fiscal contributions of these highly skilled individuals. This paper analyzes the fiscal impact of this loss of talent for a developing country by examining human capital flows from India to the U.S. The escalation of the emigration of highly skilled professionals from India to the U.S is examined by surveying evidence on the changing nature of the Indian-born in the U.S. during the 1990s. The loss of talent to India during the 1990s was dramatic and highly concentrated amongst the prime-age work force, the highly educated and high earners. In order to estimate the fiscal losses associated with these emigrants, this paper first estimates what these emigrants would have earned in India, and then integrates the resulting counterfactual distributions with details of the Indian fiscal system to estimate fiscal impacts. Two distinct methods to estimate the counterfactual earnings distributions are implemented: a translation of actual U.S. incomes in purchasing power parity terms and an income simulation based on a jointly estimated model of Indian earnings and participation in the workforce. The PPP methods indicate that the foregone income tax revenues associated with the Indian-born residents of the U.S. comprise one-third of current Indian individual income tax receipts. Depending on the method for estimating expenditures saved by the absence of these emigrants, the net fiscal loss associated with the U.S. Indian-born resident population ranges from 0.24% to 0.58% of Indian GDP in 2001.

This paper estimates the expected length of retirement for each labor market cohort between 1850 and 1990. Since 1850, the expected length of retirement has increased by more than six-fold and now represents up to 30% of male length of life after entry into the labor force. The rise of the duration of retirement during the twentieth century is analyzed according to the effects of mortality decline and of decreased age of retirement. Implications of the result for a number of economic issues, including the relative importance of life-cycle savings and the potential saving effect of Social Security, are discussed.

This paper examines the effects of socioeconomic factors and local disease environments on the medical experiences of Union army recruits while in service. The results suggest that prior exposure to unfavorable epidemiological environments reduced the chances of contracting and dying from disease while in service. Farmers and rural residents, who were healthier on average prior to enlistment owing to a greater extent of isolation from other people, were more likely to succumb to illness and to be killed by disease than nonfarmers and urban dwellers, respectively. Native recruits were subject to a greater risk of suffering illness than were foreigners who had more chances of exposure to infectious diseases in the course of immigration. More significantly, recruits from a county with a higher child death rate were less likely to contract disease than those from a low-mortality county. A closer examination of cause-specific mortality suggeststhat the most important link between the extent of prior exposure to disease and later health is the different degree of immunity against pathogens. An alternative explanation is that people who lived in an unhealthy environment were better aware of how to avoid contracting disease than those with little experience of disease. The relationship between the extent of exposure to disease prior to enlistment and health while in service was stronger for the regiments organized in the Midwest and Mid Atlantic and weaker for the regiments from New England and the South, presumably reflecting the regional differences in the severity of military missions, the extent of urbanization, and climate.

By the time Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 98 percent of non southern black (40 percent of all blacks) were already covered by state-level "fair employment" laws which prohibited labor and market discrimination. This paper assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers' income, unemployment, labor force participation, and occupational and industrial distributions relative to whites using a differences-in-differences-in-differences framework. In general, the fair employment laws appear to have had small or negligible effects on the labor market outcomes of black men but somewhat stronger positive effects on the labor market outcomes of black women.

Scholars have long sought to understand the causal relationships between economics and political participation. Of particular concern has been how economic experiences have affected individuals' decisions to participate in elections and cast votes for candidates of different political parties. Practically all of the studies on elections in the United States have focused on national aggregate economic conditions and national aggregate political outcomes, while only a handful of studies have focused on whether state and local economic conditions affect federal elections. The conclusion one would reach from these studies is that the adage \all politics is local" does not apply to economics and elections. In fact, despite the findings of some early studies (e.g. Tufte 1975), recent research would lead us to conclude that economic conditions have no direct effects on congressional elections (Erikson 1990; Alesina and Rosenthal 1995). According to these recent studies, the economy is related to congressional elections only indirectly through its effects on presidential elections. And even in presidential elections, a key economic indicator|unemployment|appears to have little to no effect on presidential elections.In this paper, we question the conclusions of previous studies by considering how the failure to correctly model vote shares at the local level could produce misleading results on the effects for economic conditions on elections in local analysis. We develop a model for local vote shares by adapting a model derived in the empirical literature on demand for differentiated products. Our model explicitly accounts for nonlinearity and aggregation in vote share functions and so avoids some of the problems of standard linear specifications of vote shares that are common in the literature. We estimate our model using data at the local level to assess the impact of economic conditions on presidential vote shares and turnout in the 1992 election. We find that local unemployment does affect presidential votes and these effects vary by demographic groups in interesting ways.The paper proceeds as follows. In the section 2 we review the relevant literature on economics and elections. Section 3 discusses the derivation of our model for vote shares and how it is particularly appropriate for studying local economic conditions. Section 4 reports the results of the estimation of this model. Section 5 concludes with a discussion of our results and extensions of the work in the paper.

Black economic progress in the 1940’s was remarkable not only in relation to subsequent decades, but even more so in relation to previous decades. Comparisons of relative economic standing before the 1940’s are somewhat difficult to make because comprehensive income measures are unavailable before the 1940 Census, but relative income estimates by James P. Smith (1984) suggest that the magnitude of change in the 1940’s marked a turning point in African-American economic history.1 The 1940’s seem all the more extraordinary in light of Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) famous appraisal and condemnation of America’s racial discrimination at the decade’s beginning.2 Although labor economists have devoted considerable attention to black economic progress in the post1964 period, it is surprising that the 1940’s, and the wartime experience in particular, have been neglected. This paper provides new evidence on how such remarkable progress was achieved in the face of the obstacles Myrdal chronicled. In . . .

This paper explores the political economy of anti-discrimination legislation during the ascendancy of the Civil Rights Movement. It traces the diffusion of state-level fair employment legislation and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in promoting such legislation. The empirics indicate that non-southern states with higher proportions of union members, Jews, Catholics, and NAACP members tended to adopt fair employment legislation earlier than other states. There is also some evidence that the likelihood of passage was higher in states with more competitive political systems and in states with neighbors which had already passed a law. Predicted times of fair employment policy adoption for the southern states underscore the importance of federal intervention.

By the time Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 98 percent of non-southern blacks (40 percent of all blacks) were already covered by state-level "fair employment" laws which prohibited labor market discrimination. This paper assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers' income, unemployment, labor force participation, and occupational and industrial distributions relative to whites using a difference-in-difference-in-difference framework. In general, the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s, and the laws had relatively small effects on the labor market outcomes of black men compared to those of black women.

We evaluate trends in social capital since 1952 and assess explanations for the observed declines. We examine both social capital centered in the community and in the home and argue that the decline in social capital has been over-stated. Controlling for education, there have been small declines in the probability of volunteering, larger declines in group membership, and still larger declines in the probability of entertaining since the 1970s. There have been no declines in the probability of spending frequent evenings with friends or relatives, but there have been decreases in daily visits with friends or relatives. Rising community heterogeneity (particularly income inequality) explains the fall in social capital produced outside the home whereas the rise in women's labor force participation rates explains the decline in social capital produced within the home.

Within migration research as a whole, the diverse fields of overseas, continental, and short distance migration were for a long time studied in isolation from one another.1 The study of emigration from the Austrian Empire to North America and other types of regional mobility, such as internal and short distance migration across state boundaries, in the period 18501914 should demonstrate that a comprehensive analysis of migrational behaviour can only be achieved by investigating the different, simultaneous, alternating, successive, and merging movements involved in the migrational process. Based on different kinds of data, on the one hand samples from the passenger lists of ships sailing to New York in 1910, on the other hand population statistics from the Austrian Empire and a sample of the US census of 1910, the results will be fed into a geographical information system. Although this article will only present preliminary impressions it can be maintained that Austrian overseas migration should not be reduced to only one form of transatlantic mass movement and models of migration that emphasize agrarian crisis and uprooting do not seem appropriate in this case.

Following World War II a mass movement of the cotton belt labor force occurred at the same time that farmers mechanized the cotton harvest. Newly reconstructed data allow us to determine whether cheaper mechanical cotton harvesters displaced workers or whether workers left due to better opportunities elsewhere. We show that mechanization, falling cotton prices and government farm programs (which decreased the demand for labor) were quantitatively more important than the lure of nonagricultural wages (which decreased the supply of labor) for the decline in hand harvest employment. Improved data and modeling allow a more complete understanding of the impact of technology and government policies on labor markets and the course of economic development. With the demand for labor falling faster than supply, there was no longer an incentive for southern elites to preserve, with the political power at their disposal, the system of social control. This "softening" of the southern agricultural labor market paradoxically may have paved the way for an episode of African-American economic progress.

For the last fifty years, the American system of social stratification has known a great turn: after the equalisation and social interventionism of the prosperity 1950-1970, a reversion appears. Since 1970, a superclass has been concentrating the outcome of the growth, the middle class is shrinking and the lower strata are pauperised. Through the description of these macrosocial changes, we observe no 'New Age' social structure, but a cohort process of 'restratification' with a sharper hierarchy, simultaneously based on academic titles, income and wealth. These inequalities reveal a clear divergence between the continental European and the American social structures.

This paper is an assessment of the impact of educational and of labour market fluctuations on cohorts born between 1905 to 1975 in US and France. Even if the pace and the rhythm is not exactly the same, these two countries are characterised by huge cohort fluctuations of the probabilities of access to longer education ant to the highest positions of the social system (for example in terms of access rates to EGP class I or I II). Because these two factors do not fluctuate in parallel way, the 'absolute social value' of education (the probabilities of access to highest social classes for a given level of education) could know important variations.Non-linear expansions of educational opportunities occurred booth in France and in US: a first educational boom benefited most to the first cohorts of the baby-boom (birth: 1945-1950), later baby-boom cohorts (1950-1965) had been submitted to a relative (in France) or absolute (in US) educational decay, and baby-bust cohorts (1970-1975) have known a second wave of expansion.The labour market capacity of absorption of these cohorts during their transition from school to work principally depended on economic growth. First jobs and early labour experiences had a strategic role in the status attainment process of these cohorts, and for the subsequent steps of their trajectory in the social stratification system.We assess (1) educational changes, (2) social structure mutations, and (3) the link between education and social position of each cohort, with age-period-cohort models, and with a new modified age-period-cohort model including a 'catch-up effect' (effect of recovery of early handicaps). The data considered here are, for US, a 1960-2000 census extract (0.1%) and current populations surveys cumulative file (N=1.2 millions), and for France a compilation (1964-2000) of FQP and Labour force surveys (N=460 thousands).

In our previous work we used the various twentieth century Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) samples of federal population censuses (1900-20, 1940, 1960-90) to study the long-run evolution of racial differences in home ownership and housing values among adult male household heads (Ruggles and Sobek 1997). However, as noted above, the proportion of black households headed by females has increased relative to the proportion among whites. Consequently, to the extent that gender is a numerically significant correlate of home ownership and house value, focusing solely on male household heads may give a misleading portrait of racial change over time. Here, we extend our previous work by expanding the samples to include female household heads, to assess the exposure of children to home ownership, and to observe how the rise of female headship may relate to childrens exposure to ownership. We begin by comparing levels and trends in ownership rates and housing values across samples consisting of all household heads, and then separately by gender. In fact, since the all-household sample is simply a weighted average of the male and female samples, we can mechanically understand all the household trends by observing the male and female trends and changes in the implicit weight given to female heads in forming the all-household average. We find that in levels and in trends of ownership and value, the male and female samples are similar (within race categories) up to around 1940: that is, white (or black) female-headed households were about as likely to own homes as white (or black) male-headed households, and their homes were about 90 percent as valuable as male-owned homes. Sometime after 1940, however, the two types of samples began to diverge, and at the same time, female-heads were becoming a larger proportion of all household heads. By 1980, male-headed households had ownership rates about 20 points higher than female-headed households, and among owners, the property of female household heads had fallen to about 75 percent of the value of male-headed households. As the female samples diverged from the male samples, and as the number of female heads grew faster than the number of male heads, the influence of females on the movement of the overall racial gap in housing outcomes became stronger. For example, we find that racial convergence of ownership rates among male heads between 1960 and 1990 was not complemented by convergence among female heads (nor by convergence of females on males), plus the weight given to female heads among blacks increased by more than it did among whites, and through both channels, overall racial convergence in ownership was dampened...

The aim of this paper is to underline the impact of educational and of labour market fluctuations on (male) birth cohorts born between 1910 & 1970 in United-States and France. These different cohorts entered in the labour force and have been socialised during different periods characterised by dissimilar contexts: they have known different school opportunities, different collective life-chances on labour markets and the further trajectories have been affected by the historical pattern. There have been important non-linear variations of the access probabilities to longer education ant to the highest social positions (for example in terms of access rates to EGP class I or I + II). Because the speed of growth of educational expansion and of higher social strata could be different, we can observe important variations of the absolute or gross social value of education (the probabilities of access to highest social classes for a given level of education). For that purpose, age-period-cohort (APC) models are applied to show non linear trends by cohorts. Even if national specificity exists, age-period-cohort models show:- the specific impact of national policies of education on the new young cohorts;- the importance of market expansion or shortage for the transition after school of the different cohorts;- the changes in the social value of education (in terms of access-probabilities to the higher strata).